Sonoma Valley Unified School Board of Trusstees Study Session 07-18-23

001Is there a motion to approve today's agenda? I'll make a motion to approve the agenda. I'll second. All in favor? Aye. Okay, so this is public comment for things not on the agenda today. So the board recognizes the value of public comment on educational issues and provides this time for members of the audience to address the board on any school-related matter not currently on this agenda. And speakers are limited to three minutes. Is there anyone in the audience that would like to make public comment? That's fine. I just wanted to introduce myself. I'm Laura Hoban. I'm the incoming co-president of the Valley of the Moon Teachers Association. And so I just wanted to say I look forward to working with all of you to provide our students with the best education possible. Thank you. We

002have Mr. Hausman would like to make a public comment. Good morning school board and our superintendent. My name is Dennis Housen. I'm also the other co-president of our local VMTA and again I just want to welcome and looking forward to working with all of you and looking forward to again making our district the best district we can. Thank you. Thank you. All right and with that we're on item number six the regular agenda the governance team workshop. and at this point I will turn it over to the superintendent. There we go. There we go. Good morning, everyone. I wanted to introduce a panel of people who are here with us this morning to hold a governance team workshop. It's going to be a three-hour presentation for us to develop some protocols and some processes as

003we work together throughout the year. And so I'm going to hand it over to Dr. David Cash. very much it's really a pleasure to be here on David that's good I'll lean in hi I'm so I'm Ann Ching I'm a fairly new board member I've been on the board for two years but I've actually been involved in education for over 20 years attending board meetings starting back in 2004 I had two kids that went through the system And I think that I ran for the board because I care deeply about the schools. I care deeply about our students. And I feel like there's been a lot of missed opportunities. And our school district should be a lot better than how it's currently performing. It's going to happen all day long, guys. There's no way we

004can get around it. So good morning. I'm John Kelly. I'm a dad with three daughters. One's going into first grade, one's going into eighth grade, one's going into 10th grade. They've been in our schools the whole way. I've been on the board for seven years, coming up on my eighth year. It's our board. It's been a very interesting experience being on the school board. It's really about, of course, making sure for the students, right, that we have the best possible schools. And so that's why I ran for the board, and I think probably deep down inside that's why all of us run for the board. You know, my hope today is just in our continuing conversations we have as a board, it's another chance for us to hear sort of where we've gone and been

005the last year. what we've kind of learned from it as a board, and then what do we want to do with the next year to 18 months, because that's about how much longer this particular configuration of the board has before we potentially change it again. And so it's a shorter window than you might think. Education is a big ship with a small rudder, right? And so changes take a while to impact the system. But nonetheless, there are things that we can do in short order, like clear communication, balancing our budget, and getting reform started that can make a difference for all the kids. So that's what I want to see us, hopefully, building a consensus around today. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Mr. Knox. Good morning. My name is Troy Knox. I'm in my first term

006as a board trustee, third year. And I'm relatively new to Sonoma. I've lived here for nine years now. And I'm a school principal in Napa. And I'm going into my 26th year in education. And so when I moved to Sonoma, it was immediately apparent to me that the community really embraces its schools. And that was very appealing to me. And it was something I wanted to be more a part of. Being new to the community, of course, you want to establish roots. And so this opportunity presented itself. And I feel like I can contribute being on the ground level, so to speak, as a school site administrator. And so I'm happy to be a part of this team, happy to be a part of this community. Good morning. My name is Katarina. I have lived

007in this community my entire life. I am fourth generation Sonoma. My two children are 14 and 15. One is going to be a sophomore at Sonoma Valley High School and my son is going into his freshman year at Sonoma Valley High School. I chose to run for school board because I believe in our community. I believe that good things can happen for these students, and I have faith that we have some of the most incredible educators, many of which grew up in our community and have come back to serve our students. So I think that along the way, we've hit some bumps in the road, but I truly believe if we can be a student-focused school board, we can do really amazing things. So I'm here to be a voice for the students. So thank

008you. Thank you. Okay, I'm gonna try not to yank this off the table. So my name is Celeste Winders. I went to our Valley Schools growing up here in Sonoma Valley, and I am a parent of four children who have either gone through our schools or are currently students in our district. I am the parent of three students with IEPs. I'm a non-attorney education advocate, so I work throughout the country. advocating for students and their families in special education, Title VI and Title IX. And I have been attending school board meetings for over a decade. I've missed exactly two, one side the norovirus and one side the flu, but I watched online. And so I finally decided to run because it was something I was interested in for a while, but my youngest son is

009autistic, and so I needed to ensure that he was in a place in terms of having built enough skills that I would be able to commit to doing something like this, and he is, and here I am. believe that our district and our valley has some very serious equity issues students have not been appropriately served who belong to protected classes i've advocated from the outside of this table for a long time in that area and being provided the opportunity to sit on this side of the table and continue to advocate is something that was very appealing to me and something that I decided to do. I did this because I believe that we can. I wouldn't do this if I didn't believe that we could. And so I'm looking forward to us developing some processes,

010some procedures, some systems. that's my love language well give me a spreadsheet and it's on and so that we can appropriately serve our students and be a district that is in compliance and allows for some universal design and learning and access for all of our students so that we can increase our inclusion rates and we can increase our literacy and our math scores so that's the laundry list of why I'm here I tend to say things very directly because I believe that our children have really lost enough minutes and enough time in their educational career. So I'm ready to get to work and start doing some good things for our kids and building some progress for them. Thank you all. Why am I here in Sonoma? That's the question I've been asked by the community

011pretty much at every event that I go to. So the reason why I chose to come to Sonoma, well, you, I think, mentioned it at the beginning. It's a beautiful place to be. But besides the geographical beauty of the place, there's a lot of potential here in researching the district and really trying to figure out why do I want to be the superintendent in Sonoma. There's a lot of really good things going on that I was made aware of and then as I'm meeting people and I'm uncovering, there's just a lot of really great potential in terms of academics, in terms of building programs, you know, very much to what Celeste was talking about in terms of really serving our underserved students in the community. And so I'm just thrilled and excited to lead the

012work. I've met many wonderful people in the community and internally our staff, our teachers. I've only been here for three weeks, but I've had a lot of opportunity to talk to people. People are ready to roll up their sleeves and get some work done and they're committed. And everyone here talks about how much they love Sonoma. And I'm already starting to fall in love with this place. So I'm excited about our work together today. Great. Thank you very much. So a little bit about us. My name is David Cash. Okay. All right. I like that. So and prior to that, I was an attorney. I practiced law for 10 years in Oregon and Washington, was the managing partner of a small law firm of about 25 lawyers. We did mostly contract law. So I'm the

013proud husband of an elementary school principal in Redondo Beach and the proud father of my son, who's a doctor in the Navy, and our youngest daughter, who will be starting at USC in about a month. So Ms. Dodds. All right. Good morning. I'm Heidi Dodd. Is that good? Great. Well, like many of your stories, I'm the third generation of my family to graduate from Lake Elsinore Unified School District schools, and my kiddos were the fourth. I have four kids and one still in college, so I'm going to work forever. I work as a commercial designer. I'm a sales manager for a company, and I've done that for about 30 years. I grew up in Southern California and went to San Diego State. I was very active in my kids schools too. I was the district

014PTA president and ran the boosters and did lots of things in the school. So I was very, very involved in the schools. Before, my son's algebra teacher said, hey, people thought about running for school board. We had a school board member retiring. And I thought, well, I go to the meetings already. I was very aware of what was going on. And I said, me? And then I said, well, why not me? You know what? At the time, we didn't have a parent of a school, child on the board at the time. So it just made perfect sense. So that was almost 13 years ago. And I'm still loving almost every day of it. I was the president for, I've been the president for six times, six years and through 2020. So that was. That was

015a trial, but great time to lead and bring our district together. So been married for 30 years, just celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary, and really excited to be with you today and do some great work. Thank you. Ron, there we go. Well, good morning. It's nice to be with all of you. I'm going to tell you a little bit. Okay. There you go. My name is Ron Karup. I'm in my 16th year as a superintendent. I've served six years in the Eldorado Union High School District, 10 years in Whittier in Los Angeles County. Let's see. It is also my last year as a superintendent. I plan to retire at the end of this year, so I'm excited to be working with Dave and ELS as well as supporting superintendents and boards. Certainly, I think at

016this moment in time, it's the most challenging time to be a board member. 2020 and that time was very difficult, but we're dealing with the aftermath, which is in some ways even more complicated as a society today. I served prior to being a superintendent, served as an assistant superintendent for six years of a high school district. Also was a high school principal for six years and then an assistant principal for a number of years and a teacher of social studies and English at high school and middle school level. And so I'm just excited to work with all of you. My wife and I have five kids. All of them are out of school. We have now eight grandkids expecting a ninth. So that's kind of a very exciting transition in life, right? I mean, they're

017so beautiful and amazing. But it does remind me and ground me because just like you, I want our schools as a system to be as best as possible to meet the needs of all of our kids. And so it's just a pleasure being with all of you. Well are you guys ready to get started? All right so here we go. We really have some intended outcomes that we think are going to be important for us to talk about right off the bat and Go on to the next slide. Right there. Perfect. One of the things we're going to start with is having a conversation about what are the characteristics of an effective governance team. And the governance team is the five of you and your superintendent. So six members comprise the governance team. And as

018Mr. Kelly stated, any time there's even a single person that leaves or joins the governance team, there really should be an opportunity to revisit. what our purpose is how we work together what our protocols are what our vision for the district is because a single member and particularly i mean your newest single member is your superintendent who is your educational leader in the district that's a significant change but when an individual board member leaves and a new board member comes on to the board it's important to re-engage and have these conversations just key to do that we're also going to talk about and for an experienced board members this will be a review but for relatively new board members this will be new information what your role is as an individual board member because that's

019important to understand that and we will talk about your role as a board as a whole What the five of you do, what your responsibility is, what you're charged with, what you can and what you can't do, what does the research say that's best for effective governance for you as a board to engage in. We'll talk about the role of the superintendent, what her job is in the district, what her role is. We hope that we'll be able to develop some protocols for both the board. and for the superintendent we provided you with some drafts of some potential protocols on how you would re work together and how what the superintendent's role will be as a part of the governance team and we think that that's going to be those protocols are helpful at the

020end of the day what we hope we'll be able to do if we have got to a point where you're comfortable with the protocols is we would ask that they be put placed on an upcoming board meeting for approval and complete transparency to the public and then post it on your district's webpage so that your entire community understands that this is what the governance team has agreed how we're going to work together. These are how we're going to hold ourselves accountable for how we treat each other, how we talk to each other, how we work together as a governance team. A consistent theme I heard from everyone is that you're in it for kids. And I think that's important. And a constant reminder of that is always good. If you could move to the next

021slide. So this is going to be my last slide for a while so you get to hear some other voices, which I think is important. Some of the characteristics of an effective governance team, there's a lot. But really one of the most important things is that we are one team. And the reason for that is that your community is going to be able to sense very quickly if you're not one team. And one team, the research is, I was telling our team, ELS's team, is overwhelming in one direction. When a governing board and a governing team is working together as one team, the impact on student achievement is significant. When the governance team is not working as one team, unfortunately the research indicates that student achievement suffers. And part of that has to do with

022the fact that when there is some issues that are creating... block toward being a one team what ends up happening is that people in the district employees in particular essentially close their doors and kind of hide out because they're a little nervous about what's happening at the governance team level and so really it is about staying focused on what I heard you all say we're here for students we're here for student achievement We want what's best for our students and our schools. That means that despite individual disagreements or issues that arise, that ultimately there's an agreement that we're here as one team. The other second element of an effective governance team is collegiality. And that I equate with professionalism, how you treat each other, how you communicate with each other, how you not just at

023the board table and in board meetings, but out in the community. That collegiality is important. it's important that the community has an understanding that you recognize that each of you as an individual board member or as the superintendent are here in order to meet the best interests of the students in our community and that while there will be differences that will arise in board meetings based on issues that get presented to you, that ultimately there is a sense of collegiality and professionalism that exists amongst all the members of the governance team. Again, the one focus, really important, and it was very clear from you that that one focus is going to be students and student achievement, and I think that's key. And that's kind of should be the mantra that is in the back of

024your head as kind of a running tape that when you find yourself at odds with something that's happening is maybe ask yourself or maybe even out loud, how is this helping us stay focused on doing what's best for children in our district? because it's possible you know I mean Heidi's been a board member for 13 years. She started when she was 18. Ron's in his 16th year as a superintendent. I did 15 years as a superintendent. So a lot of experience at the table here. There will be times in which you will have issues come up that will want to swing you away from your one focus on meeting the needs of all the students in your district. And so it's good to remind each other. and more importantly just to remind yourself that we're

025here for kids. Accountability, another one. And accountability is really a multi-level accountability. There shouldn't be a focus on what I would call external accountability, like you're counting on the superintendent to hold the governance team accountable. What you want is a more professional accountability, that you're going to agree today. hopefully on a set of protocols on how you're going to work together and you will hold yourselves accountable each as individuals and as a board as a whole in meeting those protocols and ensuring that as you're deliberating, as you're speaking, as you're acting as individual board members and as board members as a whole that you're still in compliance with the protocols that you agreed on how you'd act with that one focus student achievement. on all kids and then the last one is to always i

026always put this on here this isn't this is not from the research sorry this is the dave cash thing um i always like to remind people but remind board members and uh and and um and the public what's the purpose of a board meeting So the purpose you know I'm a old history teacher just like Ron and the purpose of a board meeting is for the board to conduct its business in the public. That's it. It's not an opportunity for there to be anything other than that. It's a transparency issue so that the community can see, oh, the board is doing this, the board is doing that. It's not an opportunity to engage in conversations outside of the school board's business. It's simply an opportunity to be transparent to your community. This is how we

027conduct our business. This is what we do. So with that, I'll turn it over to Heidi. Yeah, fire away. So I just completed Masters in Governance, and so a lot of this is things that I've just learned. And something that stood out to me, though, in Masters in Governance, which I've been struggling to sort of get an answer to, and I'm hoping this is something that you can help us with, is... Our board meetings are for the purpose that you just described, right? Because it is the only way that we, the five of us can have discussion, can sit together and do this work is through public meetings. But how do, and one of the things we get requests from the community on is how can they engage with all of us in a community

028discussion to dive deep deeper into some of the specific topics like special education, like our English language learner families have a lot of questions, concerns, discussion that they'd like to have around reclassification. Those types of very like topic specific. How can they do that with all five of us if in a board meeting our meetings aren't designed through the Brown Act to allow for that. And so what I've been trying to understand is how can the five of us, along with Dr. Rodriguez-Chin, how can we give the community what they're asking for and provide an opportunity for them to engage with all of us, but staying in alignment with the Brown Act, doing our business as the board, but allowing for a more interactive conversation. communication in giving them because we have a lot of

029really specific needs and one of the things that I think we have as a community that's a huge benefit is we have very very active parents in this district at all levels our English language learner parents amazing leadership a lot of interaction our special ed parents I mean it's it goes across the board so that's what I'm kind of looking to you is to help us develop a way to provide that to the community while staying in alignment with the Brown Act and while completing our business as a board Well, I can just say how we have approached that a few different ways we have Like the fentanyl issue was a big issue in our in our area and something that we want the community wanted to talk about and they wanted to talk to

030board members, so we Attended a workshop that wasn't put on by us. It was the local Sheriff's Department came, but all of us were there to hear and we heard what the community was asking about, what their concerns were. So they weren't actually addressing the questions to us, but it was for the purpose for us to hear what the community was concerned about and what they wanted in the schools. we our superintendent said we're going to get back to you with those answers and we did a presentation at a board meeting that was specifically to kind of answer those specific concerns so that was just one way we've done it um we've also done it where you know two board members go with someone to have coffee and you you're talking about that um i

031know i saw that you have office hours do you all do you all do that still do you find that valuable does the public come and and is that how you find out most about the community concerns No? Sometimes people? I wouldn't say the most. It is very valuable. I really appreciate the office hours because it's allowed for a deeper discussion sort of one-on-one or two-on-one or three-on-one. But I think what I – in our valley, there has been a history with our school district and our school board with a lack of transparency, and the community has been left feeling unheard, left out. And there's a request from the community that they do want to engage directly with the five of us, that they do want. And so part of it is I think the

032public as a whole doesn't understand the Brown Act and why would they and why should they. I mean. It's not a thing that we're all taught, right? And so I think sometimes there's a perception of they don't want to answer my question, they don't want to listen to me, I showed up at the board meeting, and sort of that lack of understanding. And what I'm wondering is how can we as a board, would it be through a town hall process, but how could we provide them the opportunity to feel heard, to be able to ask questions and get them answered? in a way that keeps us in alignment with the Brown Act and stays on the agenda. I've tried to do a lot of educating around the Brown Act and helping people understand that it's

033not that we don't want to answer your questions, but that when you ask a question, it opens the opportunity for us to diverge off of the agenda and try to explain that to people. But I think that as a whole, I'm trying to understand how can we have an opportunity. through something like a town hall style meeting where they could get their questions answered. So just to be clear, cause so we've set some of those up and so that, and then in terms of sort of the community understanding why we can't directly answer their questions, what are you saying that that's something I think that we could moving forward maybe help educate the community on the Brown Act and the restrictions. So I'm really thinking about, I hate to say this cause I'm a very

034like, process business minded logical person but feelings get in the way and so I think that we're sort of stuck in this quagmire as a community where feelings have very much gotten in the way of being able to do business and I want us to be able to do business for kids but I don't want to dismiss people's feelings so would sort of providing some education around the Brown Act and helping people understand the structure of the meetings and why they exist the way they do could help diminish some of that through using study sessions as well. I think another good tool and I'm sorry Mr. Kelly is your superintendent as you know you're all one employee as the superintendent is having her out in the community fact-finding And as a new superintendent, she's in

035a perfect position to conduct the listening tour and get out there and at your direction. I mean, you might say, you need to go to this part of our community. These are the people that need to be invited and learn. And then have her report back to the board what she has learned. in those fact finding. I think one of the issues that I hear kind of implicit in what you're saying is that it's really important and we would all agree that it's extraordinarily important that you all hear from your community regularly. If the superintendent understands your community and the issues that your community is facing. One of the things that can happen is you could end up getting, as an individual board member, you could end up kind of getting trapped in a situation

036like that. And as we go through what the roles and responsibilities are for individual board members, you would want to make sure your community understood that an individual board member essentially has no power or authority to do anything. And so that's the only issue in relationship to that. But if Ron hadn't mentioned it, I was going to say I did study sessions like that in the first year of my superintendencies everywhere I went. They were just important to learn. And it's interesting because I do believe that if Jeanette asked you, there would probably be some consensus around three or four big issue topics that you would. want to hear more from your community about or that your community has shared with you that you would like to know more about. And so that's a good

037process to go. John had his hand up and then Ann. This is great. Did you guys literally set the microphones up for us to have to collaborate to move them back and forth to speak? If you did that, that was brilliant. I just want to recognize that. Sonoma Valley looks so beautiful when you drive in. It really does. The water is not fluoridated. I tell people that when they come, experts from the outside, and they look at us and they're like, what? You guys are still fighting about fluoride? The 1950s would like its hot button issue back, right? We don't. We know fluoridation is one of the single most effective, fair, equitable things you can do to help your entire population not get cavities. The science has been there for decades. We still don't do

038it. So that is, in a nutshell, I pick that one because it's such a great example for the issue that this school district and this school board faces. Sometimes we're talking about stuff that's on par with fluoridation, and it is controversial in our community. So that I always want that as the starting point like it's we cannot presume that ideas that are widely recognized That there is a consensus around around the world will necessarily be accepted by our community Okay, so first point second point all the technocracy in the world won't do you any good unless it's backed up by raw political muscle willingness to make change occur and We have had that problem as a district for a very long time It's beyond the scope of our meeting today to talk about the political

039gerrymandering and other issues that took place around the electoral legitimacy of this board. We've addressed them, and it's been a very painful process. Collegial, boy, I wish it had been collegial when we did it, right? But we did it. We took the work on. It was hard. There were a lot of courageous conversations. We as a board have to engage more with the public. And I think Trustee Winders is perfectly on point when she talks about the frustration that our community has in just getting answers to their questions. It really feels like the school district is like a Rube Goldberg machine, you know, where a shoe has to swing around and kick a bowling ball. It's going to roll down a track. It's going to ring a bell. And then all of a sudden the

040answer will pop out, right? And so when we hold our public meetings, which we need to do. We oftentimes find, though, that they can affect the perception of engagement by our community, but they oftentimes also have a negative side effect, which can be posturing. That happens whenever we engage the public. But the second thing is that a lot of times a person doesn't want to come to a four-hour public meeting to get an answer to their question. What they want to do is they want to deal with the most basic, boring detail all of us have in our modern life, which is email. They want to send us an email, and they want to get an answer, right? That is the thing. And in many respects, the district has always treated that like it's, oh,

041God, I have to go open my email. Like, I mean, it's literally the trustees recoil when we do it, right? And, of course, we know what's in there, right? I mean, people are coming in hot. They are upset. And many times what we get back from the public is just, why didn't anybody even bother to answer me? Why doesn't somebody just send me a message? Why don't they communicate? And in many respects, we as trustees feel like we're locked in place, like we can't communicate back to our constituents about what's going on. We want to, of course, direct it to staff when it's a policy question, as we always should, right? We don't want the trustees answering these questions, right? But what we want to get, I think, is like that basic fluoridation element. that

042basic ability to process the communications coming in from the public and communicate back the public will put up with an answer from us that says we can't do that right now this is the obstacle but they do expect us to at least answer them right and they want to know that they're heard and we as a board are having a tremendous problem with it so i i want to agree with trustee winders on how can we do a town hall can we engage but i think and i think that affects the perception of our ability to communicate with our community but i think it's that basic boring stuff that we're falling down on right now in terms of communication. Thanks guys. That was what I wanted to say. So I just had a follow up

043with Ron about the notion of having these special study sessions like for example just using Trustee Winder's example of reclassification of English language learners. I just want to be clear that in a study session though while we may address the topic and try to guess what you know the public is really sort of interested in learning we can't engage with them still even in a study session right so I just want that to be clear that while we can do that, it doesn't change this one-on-one, or not one-on-one, but five-on-one engagement issue. And so what I wanted to ask was, I was also, I completed a master's in governance, and one of the school districts that was participating in my group, I think it was Visalia. They actually, interestingly enough, each board member was committed

044to doing two town halls on their own. They have seven board members, I think, on their own every year, which I applaud them. They just started this as a new. sort of approach to communication in their district. That is a situation where you can have the dialogue between the entire public and the board member. Is that correct? That is correct. Okay. I just want to be clear on that. And I think where you want to, when it comes to English learner strategies and performance and questions, you really want those directed to your superintendent and your professional staff. Right. And then the board can demonstrate its kind of observations and questions and activity for the community. But you're right. At that point in time, your public comments can really be directed towards staff. But you are

045still limited because it is a study session and all five or the quorum is there. But it is definitely true through a community forum. You could do, for example, that although those are. Those are tricky because you don't want to put yourself in a situation where you violate the greater trust of the team and thus being on point with your superintendent of what are the highlight things. Right. I would also highly recommend working with your superintendent. those having that person present and then the board member supporting them i mean i just i i just want to comment on this whole english language uh learner reclassification issue which was an issue at the primary school where my children went to um i would feel uncomfortable as a board member being the point person addressing those issues

046while i'm pretty familiar with them I think that having the study sessions where the principals at each school are sort of explaining to parents how this works, and I know that it's very proactive in the elementary school where my children go to. It's like when you enter kindergarten, there's a whole sort of... Here's what you need to know about English language learner reclassification. So anyway, I think we'd have to pick the topics very carefully so that we're not stepping on staff and appearing as though we're the educational professionals. That's my only comment. And this, I think, would be more for Dr. Tin. If we were to do... Not if, when we do our study sessions because we're doing them. Is it feasible for us to have a period of time prior to this study session

047that we could send out to the community, the community could submit their concerns, questions, and that could help shape our presentation or help shape our agenda? And in that way, we're still addressing, the community is feeling heard, they feel like they're participating in it at a certain level, but we're staying within the confines of the Brown Act. Is that something that we would have the capacity to do? Yeah, we can find ways to send out surveys. And I appreciate you had said something, Dr. Cash, earlier about my role as a superintendent and creating a structure to hear the community as well. One of the things I have planned is to meet on a quarterly basis with our community via a coffee chat so that we have conversations about what's... coming to their mind in terms

048of concerns, not just at the beginning of the year, because that happens often when a superintendent comes into a district. I think that's a typical process as we go out and we listen and we do the listening tour. But I would really like to do that throughout the year because things change over time. But yeah, there's ways for us to gather information and input before we put together our study session so that we're addressing the issues that the community is concerned about. yeah that's a great idea in my I always hesitate to say this because you will all immediately have an impression my last superintendency was in Santa Barbara very poor community parts of it in the school district very poor yeah and I had heard before I took the job that disproportionality and discipline

049was a huge issue. Most of our students of color were being disciplined disproportionately in relationship to our white students. And so I, as the brand-new superintendent, messaged the community and said, I'm going to be at this elementary school on this night to hear you tell me about the issues that you as parents in the community have. I had 600 people show up, and I went, well, this is a big issue. and we recorded it heard everything transcribed it because a lot of the comments were in Spanish and then I summarized it to the board and we created a study session on discipline practices and procedures in our district which included having every principal report as to what they were doing. Teachers share their concerns about discipline from the classroom perspective, what they were seeing work

050that didn't work. Ended up with a completely, over a period of about a year and a half, a completely different approach to discipline. So Jeanette's idea about finding out the information first is a good one. So Heidi, you're up. I was just going to make one more comment about the listening tour because I'm on my third superintendent in 13 years. And so most recently our new superintendent did a listening tour. And it was so wonderfully helpful. It was one in every one of our trustee areas. And so two trustees in neighboring areas, we went together to that listening tour, did a little introduction at the beginning of the meeting, and then we broke up into... groups depending on the attendees what they were interested in so they could go over here and talk about special

051education or English learners or, you know, we had different groups and people could break out. And in each one of the groups, we had a district employee who took notes about what were the concerns, what were the questions, what were the topics, what were we bringing up. We brainstormed ideas together in each one of these groups. And then we, as board members, we kind of just went around to every single group so we could really hear the concerns and have some kind of one-on-one discussions with the community that way. And it was so well received. and then all of those minutes or all the information from all of those groups were brought back to our board and that's how we determined our future study sessions and topics that we brought up at the board meeting

052so this is a great time to do those listening tours and to really have your community feel like they're being heard okay back to the presentation And this is going to be very interactive. I'm going to ask you lots of questions and things so we can kind of learn about these things together. But in order for us to do great work, we really have to have a clear understanding of our roles and how wonderful that you've been going through the Masters in Governance. I found that so helpful to me when I was a new board member. And even now that I'm a veteran board member, to revisit those ideas and make sure that as you have new board members, in my 13 years, I've been with 14 different board members. through that time of retirement,

053people in, people out. So you want to make sure that everybody has a really good understanding of the basics, right? So we all know why we're here. And as long as we understand what those are and we can agree upon them, then we can do great work together. And something that I found super helpful was having an employee handbook, employee handbook, governance handbook. I also work and do my employee handbook. So having that set kind of book protocols that you've all agreed upon that this is how we're going to do business. This is how we're going to do the great work for our district is really important. And I believe you have one, but it's been a while since you've revisited it or worked on it. It's not really operational. I mean, I personally, this

054was developed maybe even before your time. I'm not sure. Anyway. OK. OK. A document that's going to set clear direction for your team so that you all know this is what we're here for. And these are the things that, obviously, how we are setting direction for our school district. We can all agree the reason we're all here, student learning, right? Number one on the list. Making sure that we're setting direction for our district to focus on what needs to be done. And then receive and review needs assessment baseline data. Of course, we need to know where we've been and where we want to go. And then generate, review, or revise our direction setting documents. I like on your website how you have your mission, vision, what do we call it? Mission, vision, and core beliefs.

055Is that something that this group together has come together to create? Was that before your time? Who was involved in doing that? Yes, and it's, again, one of those things that's due for revision. So we had a governance meeting. Was it back in? No, we did it. It was right after I was sworn in, so it was like January. I think we did. We had a meeting, and one of the things that came up for us in that meeting was that it's time for that to be updated, that it no longer really encompasses. It's missing the word equity, which is a big driving force in the work that we're doing now. So we are due for that to be revised. I think it's just we felt that that was a whole study session and meeting

056in and of itself and a whole process in and of itself. Absolutely. Okay. Were you going to add? No? OK. And we're going to dive a little bit deeper into these topics, but just the reviewing so we all agree what we're doing to set direction. Of course, rejecting our personal agendas as a driving force for the district and relying on those direction setting documents. If we can agree upon what our mission and vision is, then it's a little bit easier to say, OK, know that. If you get off topic, that's a personal agenda or that's something specific to one board member and not as a group what we've decided what we're here to do, rely on that mission. Transparency and inclusivity. As we just talked about, we need to be mindful that the community believes

057this is transparent, what we're doing here, and that they have an opportunity to be heard, and that we're making decisions that are in the best interest of all of our kids, all the kids. yeah so on when we under setting direction for the school district and focus on starting student learning so one of the things that we obviously talked about a lot in masters and governance is you know serving each and every child and that CSBA very intentionally changed that language from serving all kids to each and every so that we're being very mindful of those individualized needs within our student population but one of the things that they talked about was the actual agenda our board meeting agendas themselves and that at least 65 percent of that agenda should be focused on student learning

058and achievement and so as I look towards this upcoming school year in our agendas I went back when I was in the masters and governments I went back and I pulled about three years worth of old agendas in our district and sort of did some calculating and found that we were quite below that 65% threshold that there was a lot of agenda items that weren't focused on that they were still doing the business of the district that needed to be done but they weren't keeping that 65% target and so as we move forward in this school year that's something that I as a trustee would like to see happen in our agendas is that we can start targeting that 65% and meeting that in each of our agendas so that we can be a highly

059effective board and staying focused. So that's more of a request to move forward in the school year. Okay, next slide. So some more characteristics of an effective governance team, establishing an effective and efficient structure for the school district. Of course, employing the superintendent and evaluating the superintendent. I know some of you are new. Can you share with me how you've done it in the past, how you've evaluated your superintendent? With our previous superintendent, the board did a group evaluation, and we also did an individual evaluation. I'm not mistaken and we use the CSBA evaluation tool that we you know we established and set the goals so we have we have a template for moving forward and how did you feel that that that worked for you John our last superintendent stopped showing up for work

060three months after we completed the superintendent evaluation and and who was it Troy and John you were So was the three of us. Oh, the three of you. Okay, that's right. President Ching, Trustee Kelly, and myself. And we as the former governance, or no, the former board, because it was without the superintendent, we had developed the evaluation tool with the previous consultant. And so we agreed upon it. We completed it together. And it was at the time the former president was to communicate feedback back to, you know, it was our first time out because it hadn't been done consistently. So I think that's something that we want to ensure happens. Great. So have you set, like, we do it in June? Yeah, we have a calendar. Okay. what you would consider like the nuts and

061bolts of the procedure is in place. So that's good, right? But the process of evaluating the superintendent has been fraught for, and I mean the board didn't even do evaluations for about seven years in that period, six years in that period. Yeah, nothing was done. So even getting the process of the superintendent evaluation started was a very significant political fight. And then the first couple times through it were horrible. And ironically, you know, sometimes the fact that the process is really hard isn't of itself a sign that we are engaging with the difficult questions that the district faces. So there were different opinions about how the superintendent should be evaluated. fights over the criteria, and then factionalism on the board really started becoming the driving force in the evaluation. Were you happy with the superintendent?

062Well, then you gave him a good evaluation. Were you unhappy with the superintendent? Thumbs down on everything. So if I was going to draw the venom from the problem, which is what we all really want, we would like this to be, and close to objective, It will always have a political element to it, especially in a small community. But if we could get to that objective evaluation, I think we would really be happy. So I'll leave it at that. So was the, I'm just going to ask a couple questions about the evaluation. Was it like based on your core beliefs, the things that you've said? Is that how you based the actual evaluation? Drew it back to this what you decided so the mission vision all you saw it was integrated when we did that

063about four years ago it was it was nicely you know it was done with a Several set of workshops agreement on the objectives of the board we did the visioning you know we made the statement in this room here So it was as a process perspective. It would have all the steps that I think you would expect us to have in doing that. However, that, again, political element just sort of swallowed. You know, how we talk about how culture eats systems for lunch. That was what happened. Can I add to that? So I have a different recollection, at least for the last, the first evaluation that I participated in. And that was, I didn't feel like the three main goals that were part of the evaluation necessarily aligned with the vision and mission because I

064don't think there was consensus. There was a prior governance team that had defined the mission and vision. So these were kind of standalone. And there may be some tenuous connection, but we had kind of some pressing issues that we created like sort of these three priorities and we are going to evaluate the superintendent around achieving these three priorities. So that was my recollection. I'd like to see a better connection. uh to our vision and mission but i think part of it is like we need to do the hard work which is we i i feel a little rudderless in terms of i don't necessarily share the mission and vision that's currently it's they're pretty innocuous they don't really sort of reflect the what's really happening in our schools or our school system i mean they

065they could they could be they're pretty generic you could you could pretty much use them in any school district and i feel that that's why they don't really sort of grab me personally and i find as a board member when i'm out in the community you know i want to be able to say and here it is you know like i should be able to recite my elevator speech right you should be able to do it and i think that's why it's so important that new boards agree upon that you know you're so it means something to you personally and you know the the um the trip it took to get there, right? The journey that you went through together and the discussions that you had to develop it. I always think when I think

066about our school board, the concept of collective responsibility, that we together are responsible to the community, not individually. And because of that, at any time that we try to factionalize or single out, we are defeating our own objectives to advance the interests of the students in the community. And this has happened to our board over and over again, the failure to recognize collective responsibility for the board. The second... and related issue to that, and you guys will know this because you've seen this, dysfunctional boards have this issue. There's a lack of acceptance in board members coming onto the board of decisions made prior to the time that that trustee was on the board. Collective responsibility is not just lateral, it's also vertical in time. And so to the extent that any trustee comes on and

067joins us and says, well, I totally reject. everything that last board did they were wrong they were the problem you have done the exact same damage because of course the next trustee that comes on to your board is going to look at everything you did and say oh well it was that trustee that was wrong and now we going forward will so we've not had an institutional sense of ourselves as a board that we are a organization continuing through time and we have to i think that's the next that's the leap that we have to make to recognize no matter which way we went on any individual decision at any time that is a decision that we have collective responsibility for one way to ensure that is in the processes and procedures that you utilize

068to evaluate your superintendent because if that that's your through line from board to board to board that this is how we are hiring, supporting, and evaluating our chief educational officer, our superintendent. That's if there's consistency there. that's really important and the last thing that I'll say and I know Ron has a comment in relationship to this is a facilitated evaluation for a new superintendent is often the best way to go because that takes out what I've heard you say openly and what I kind of I think I'm hearing you talk about a little bit and it's just people You get to where you need to go the purpose of an evaluation hopefully is to improve performance I have not read her contract, but I'm assuming that her contract includes your opportunity to evaluate her with

069the idea that at post-evaluation, there's an opportunity for your one employee to do things better than they had done the previous year or change things based upon the feedback that she would receive from the five of you. I think the only thing that I would add is just simply when you coalesce the direction and the specific goals that you want to move in, then you want to work with Jeanette to create an instrument that measures those key areas and focus it on it, right? One of the difficulties is there are just so many demands that come your direction, the superintendent's direction. What you really want are the key areas that you agree on to see the progress that's being made. In a sense, your trustees looking at the work to ensure that those key areas

070are being addressed by your professional staff. So I've never had a problem with our board in terms of working through the process of what are those priorities. creating a instrument, an evaluation instrument based on that, getting all the board, the superintendents by end and then using that instrument and that's worked well over my time. It's like the ropes course right? Trust exercise with the mic. And so when I'm looking one of the things that comes up with the superintendent evaluation I'm sort of like reflecting on the last one in which I was not a trustee I was a parent and it was a member of the community that attended every board meeting for a decade. It felt like the evaluation wasn't in alignment with what and with what staff were experiencing. And so I'm wondering

071in, I love the idea of using, considering a facilitated evaluation. I love that. I think that that would actually, you know, we learn by doing and having somebody. teach us through the process and ensuring that the process is fair and that it is clear and transparent. All the pieces that come with it, I think, would make us better moving forward. But that being said, ensuring that... that piece that what the staff experience through their the superintendent through that school year what families experience with the superintendent through that school year is included somehow in that evaluation process so that what our outcome is on that evaluation is in alignment with each experience that sort of at the section right so what we experience with the superintendent as a board is a different experience than what staff

072at a site experience or what families experience and and families that belong to different you know protected classes families you know demographics it it's a different experience and so how do we pull those pieces together so that's something that I'd like to see us through a facilitated facilitated evaluation help us achieve so that we can be better moving forward and build a really strong system that we can utilize from from your year the other piece to to go to trustee Kelly's point is I think what he is talking about is is really really important in in terms of us being a highly effective board and it's that unified versus uniform right that that we are a unified board that even when we have a split vote, we still uphold that vote and we do the

073work necessary moving forward and we don't get caught in those pieces. And to his point, get caught in, well, that was the board before me. So I've watched Doug this school year, school board for a decade and various incarnations of the board, but it's always been the board. And now I am a trustee, and even though I've personally, as a parent, disagreed over the last decade with various things, I am responsible for everything that came before me, and I don't get to say, oh, well, I didn't support that. That was them. I don't get to do that. That's not my role. That's not my job. And my job is to move forward with everything, all the work that's been done here before me, and to uphold that. I think that if we as a board

074can really get clear on the unified versus uniform and that we still have our individual votes, we still have our individual perspectives and breadth of knowledge that we bring to the table. However. We are a unified board, and I think that that's sort of like one of those missing pieces that is a board historically. And I say the board. I'm not necessarily talking about just the five of us sitting here. Every incarnation of the five of us sitting here that's been before for the last 10 or 15 years. This unified versus uniform piece has been that missing link for a decade and a half, and I'd like to see us put that piece together this year. protocols will go a long way. Great. And just to your point that when I was president and when

075we've done evaluations many different ways for our superintendent, I would ask each board member to make sure that you're talking to people in schools, you're talking to parents in the, you know, pickup lines, PTA meetings. part of the evaluation is what your community, I'm my community's voice in the boardroom and I have to remember that. It's not just my voice or what I think about the superintendent, it's what my community thinks and if you're not having those discussions, if you're not listening to what they're saying, then the evaluation doesn't mean anything. It's just your take on your interactions. So that's a very important part of the puzzle. Okay, get back real quick. So adoption of board policies, and I know that you're new with your superintendent, but do you feel that the way you're adopting

076your policies is working well? How do you do that? Do you just read about it and that they're coming up in the agenda and then you vote on it, or maybe you talk about it at agenda prep? Well I can tell you that President Ching and another former trustee went through all of the board policies that were in existence and really updated it was a lot of work. Wow yeah all of them? It was actually the board bylaws so we started with that first and then We started with that first because there are so many board policies and then we had an ongoing list of the board policies that were related to education and students. Those were the ones we were going to tackle because the universe of all of the board policies, a lot

077of them were outdated. we weren't gonna be able to tackle just two people on a subcommittee. May I? Yes, you may. I think your question that was a little broader than what we meant by the technical term of board policies because you're You're not asking us about our board bylaws. You're asking us about policies. Policies. When they're brought up because that's one of your duties is to review those board policies every month. You're looking at the things that you're talking about, how they pertain to your district, and then when you're doing the approvals in the board meeting. So I think every trustee learns that over time, and you guys have seen this too, there's a rhythm to the year, and we sort of deal with certain issues at certain times in a regular fashion, and

078things come back up. And so, you know, after you've seen it for a few years, that cycle, you know what to expect next time. And then the second point I'd make is, big ship. small rudder, right? So I think that when you know that that issue is going to recur at sort of this time of year, as you become an experienced trustee, you're kind of ready, you know, a month or two out when you know that issue is going to come up, right? And you've got your questions in to staff ahead of time that you're going to want them, you know, 60 days out to make sure that their written materials address. Now, what happens to us is we typically used to get our packets. Friday evening and we would have a Tuesday meeting and

079so everyone would have to try to cram over the weekend about what was in this 798 page packet and then Monday the superintendent has 14 emails of questions right it's no surprise that the meetings were going to like 2 a.m. right I mean because it was just a joke right now I I've always thought a really good board meeting is about four hours long. If you've gone past four hours, the quality of the decision making just declines. It falls off a cliff, right? And we were spending about the first hour and a half of our board meetings doing a student of the month from every elementary school where we had speeches from their parents. And then we were doing a bunch of recognitions. And we were getting to like hour two before we even engaged

080the consent calendar or the consent agenda. So we had kind of a crufty. process of getting it policy, which meant the questions were just never getting answered, which was fine with some members of our community. They liked the way things were. They didn't really want to see much change. And the board was clearly not a change agent in any way at that time. So we've spent a lot of time changing that. Now we don't do our board meetings like that anymore. We don't have to hold them on that day because we do them here at our district office instead of the police station, right? We install the cameras. We can hold them when we want to. We get our board agendas much more in advance. We actually have some time during the week to review

081them. The community has time. We have meetings where we have office hours with our executive staff where we can come in and actually ask questions in person. rather than have to do this sort of one-day cram. So I think it's like a four-part answer, I'd say. Knowing the yearly calendar, when the issues are going to recur that you're interested in, getting those questions in, you know, 60 days in advance so the written materials will reflect them, the opportunity to make sure that in that time period between agenda posting and the meeting itself, that with email and in-person, you can... get the questions answered and then finally in the room hopefully it all comes together where the trustees questions have been answered in advance you know we take the public comment on it but we don't

082engage it we hear what they have to say but hopefully the policy is ready to go when it comes into the room and it's not a trustee opening the board packet right there looking at the materials for the first time and chaos ensuing And sort of to that point, some systems that have gone into place that have been really helpful are, you know, we moved our meetings to Thursdays. We're getting our agenda packets Friday, Monday at the latest, and that really is giving us that preparation time to get those questions to staff in advance that sort of eliminates some of the time sucking that can happen in a board meeting. makes it go on to the end of time. So I really appreciate that piece. I'm a preparer and like the queen of post-it notes.

083So like my binder is kind of famous. But that being said, like it really does help eliminate that. And it also prevents us from putting staff on the spot in a meeting and asking them a question that they haven't had the time to go get the answer to, right? And we'd rather have the answer than have somebody feel like they've been put on the spot. So, you know, that piece. But one of the things, though, that we did do in the past that I'd love to see us find a happy medal to is we went from one extreme of having 45 minutes of... presentation from a school with like a student of the month and and the meeting going on very long and we've gone to the other extreme we're going to my previous point

084where I don't think we're at that 65% threshold of a highly effective board that's focusing on students and student achievement and is instead focusing on other things like policies policies are important but I want us to get back to it so what I'd like to see us do is and and dr. dr. Chen we had mentioned this bringing our students back into the room to start the meeting so that we they are in front of us and they are not only reminding us as a board but reminding our community of what we're here for but finding it in the happy middle from a 45 minute presentation on student of the month. Like we have to make it time efficient so that we're not here until midnight, but at the same time starting our meeting off

085and staying student focused and reminding all of us of why we're here. So I'd like to see us be able, I don't think it's an either or, I think it's finding that sort of sweet spot in the middle. And again, keeping us at that 65% target. Okay and we're going to touch a little deeper on some of these topics but establishing your budget priorities and adopting the budget. Oh I'm sorry I skipped. Set a direction for and then adopt district curriculum for students. Do you feel that the procedure that you have now is working for you or? No. Celeste. No. So on the area for setting direction for and then adopting the district curriculum for students. I think that this is a really big one where I'd like to see the board provided more opportunity

086prior to the adoption of a curriculum to help trustees understand the curriculum, be able to ask more questions, and have more of a learning opportunity. Curriculum is a complicated thing, especially if it's not your wheelhouse. And sometimes it's complicated if it is your wheelhouse. So it happens to be my wheelhouse and I can get caught in the weeds. But it's also incredibly important because we're coming out of a period of time in education regarding literacy where we're having to undo the damage done by whole word reading and blended reading. And we need to now undo that through the science of reading. And so curriculum adoption becomes really critical, especially when we're looking at our literacy and our math scores, which aren't great right now. And coming out of... to your point the after effects of

087the pandemic i think are much more severe than when we were in the pandemic itself and and sort of this perception that it's all better now because it's over and it's not like we're really untangling you know it's going to take us a decade to undo what happened in in the course of two years so i i don't i feel like the setting for direction for in the adopting of curriculum i feel like historically having watched the board for many years and this been being something that's really important to me what I saw was a lot of auto piloting of the board of like oh they said we should do it so let's do this shiny new it felt I used to call it the shiny new thing oh we're doing a shiny new thing

088but nobody really understood the shiny new thing and why they were saying yes to it or asking the questions to maybe not say yes to it, but not putting staff on the spot in front of everybody and being able to have those opportunities of preparation prior. So I just would like us to have the opportunity to not autopilot, to have the opportunity to understand what we're being asked to approve and to be able to ask those questions and to find out is that really the curriculum that we want to adopt or do we want to have... discussion about looking at other things and what are the other things that we could look at i'd like to see that happen and i don't feel like that's something that can happen between friday of a board packet

089going out and thursday of a board meeting that particular item is something that i think the board needs at least a month to two months of of front loading when we're talking about adopting curriculum yeah catch you I was just looking ahead at the next couple of items on this list and I think in terms of policies, curriculum, budget, facilities, one thing that this district doesn't have is a strategic plan. So we're like a car with no wheels, right? And so I think really ultimately it's my opinion that I believe that if we came together as a board with the help of our superintendent and opinion of our staff and our community to really determine what... we want for our students, what are the needs of our students, and then develop a strategic plan that

090would then help guide us in creating policies and a budget and curriculum that actually reach the students. And so it's been brought up in multiple meetings and it's just something that's never happened and I think that that would also help, at least I think from me personally, that surprise element that we have been, you know, it would provide some front load because we'd be following this you know, these goals and these guidelines that we've set forth and agreed upon. So I just in, you know, moving forward and reading what you have coming, I think that that's ultimately something that we could benefit from and that we could follow as our, like, guiding force. And I think it could go from the district office to the school board into the classrooms and even home with our

091families. A lot of districts since the adoption of the LCFF and LCAP have taken the opportunity to use the LCAP as the district's strategic plan to do exactly what you're talking about, and that is, and I've seen on many board agendas, every agenda item attached to or a specific reference to an item in that LCAP slash strategic plan. We're talking about this because it is directly related to this, whatever the goal is. Clarity, transparency, you get to your 65%, probably higher than that when you're doing that because the LCAP, your strategic plan, most likely is 90%, 99% about kids. So that's a really good and important direction-setting tool. I had a question about that. The LCAP really only covers a very small proportion of the overall budget and of students. So that has always been

092when I first joined the board there was a lot of resistance for really kind of rolling up our sleeves and doing any strategic planning because it was said well we have the LCAP. That's really sort of driving. this the direction of the district I I felt like it was really hard for anyone to recite to me like what were the main priorities in the LCAP because it was like everything in the kitchen sink and there's the monitoring of it is very For me, it's very haphazard. You stick with whatever the original five goals are at the beginning of the LCAP planning period, the three-year planning period, and then you're not allowed to pivot at all when you discover, like, well, that wasn't working for the first year. So that's just a follow-up comment with respect

093to that. I don't know how I'm not I'm not I'm not the biggest fan of the LCAP because I sat on the first LCAP committee of this district back in 2014 but I just wanted to piggyback on to something that Trustee Winders said which I struggle with and I agree with her in terms of I In terms of adopting curriculum for students, I feel like my responsibility as a board member is to make sure there's a good framework for adopting the policy, but not for, I don't know that I'm like the expert in picking and choosing it. And I've watched over the years that there's been an inconsistent process and it's turned into this cursory exercise. that there is supposedly a body called the Curriculum Advisory Committee and they used to do presentations to the

094board and you knew who was on it. I couldn't name a single person on that committee anymore. And so usually what comes to us is the Curriculum Advisory Committee is recommending adoption of blah, blah, blah, and we just have to take it as fact. I would like to have clarity about what is my role. I mean, I'm not the expert in curriculum. I have my own individual opinions about curriculum because I happen to spend a lot of time thinking about math curriculum because that's kind of an area that I really care about. So it would be good to have some clarity around that. I also don't think that the framework for adopting the curriculum, the way it's currently operating. always leads to the best curriculum outcomes and I can speak to that specifically around the

095math adoption that happened, you know, I think it was back in 2017. So I just want to say that. I'd love to thank you President Chang because I've been to a few curriculum committees myself and I found that process very cumbersome not helpful and in many ways has led our district to some decisions that I would consider disastrous. I mean, so like it allowed Lucy Culkin's units of study to infiltrate our district and we're going to be cleaning that up for a really long time. As our many, many, many districts throughout the United States. And so, but, you know, these are things that, you know, go through these committees and then they're handed to the board and the board has sort of, again, autopiloted. It was recommended. We accept the recommendation, approved, move forward. And

096then we get into a situation that I think we're in now, which is we're having to clean it up. And so I would like to do the work of the board incarnations of the board that come after me. I don't want the incarnations of trustees who come after me. to go, ugh, I have to clean this thing up that the board in 2023 did, right? I want us to make good decisions, but I think curriculum is one of those things that for many people feels very intimidating. It feels very confusing, and it leaves trustees not just here, but I'm thinking, and I've talked to trustees across California who've said, I always wondered did I make the right decision because I felt like I didn't know enough. But it was recommended, and I didn't want to

097not accept the recommendation. And so I think to trust you, Cheng's point, we have a lot of work to do for our students. And that is one of those areas that I think we need a lot of support in. I'll kind of comment a little bit this in my section. But you have just such an extraordinary opportunity with a new superintendent to be able to able to look at these key areas. I think at this moment in time, curriculum is under more scrutiny than it's ever been because of our political dynamics, changing research. The great thing, though, is when you have professional staff and you provide professional development for them, they're really current on their research. So I think the board's position is really you want to ensure that you have a very strong process,

098right? Where you're listening to your professional staff, they're really grappling with where that research is and ultimately working through your superintendent to bring a recommendation. And in the process of that, if the board has questions, just ensure that they're looking at new research with, let's say, reading. My kind of personal experience is... as you look at the whole language debate versus phonics debate is that sometimes we get wrapped into these exclusionary sort of approaches whereas your teachers in the classroom they're so practical they know what works for kids and what doesn't it may modify to ensure that those kids move forward because we have intelligent people there the key is harnessing a process, creating a process to harness the strength of that professional staff and working with your superintendent to create a process that you

099feel confident that the recommendation coming forward has been battle tested, if you will, to ensure that it's the best that you can offer for the performance of students. But work through your superintendent and your really talented people to bring those recommendations. Yeah, I'd make sure that you have all curriculum materials. available for board members to review with staff prior than months in advance I mean even attending the publishers meetings with staff is not a bad idea not as an entire board but as maybe an individual board member I mean that way you really get to see the bell I'm sorry trustee Winders you had a great phrase for it the bells and whistles are shiny new package you get to see what's in the shiny new package yourself and then I agree with Ron I

100think the most valuable resource in curriculum decisions are your classroom teachers who are the most important deliverers of whatever is going to happen in the classroom to begin with so I'm sorry Mr. Kelly Oh no that's fine I always am happy to listen before I talk, right? Everybody's comments always inform what I'm going to say, and then the part I love is that I start crossing things off because somebody said it already, right? So Trustee Ching actually got in a couple of points I wanted to bring up right away about the LCAP, and I really appreciated that, and I want to just note the point she made about that. As a basic aid district, how much of our budget does not get affected by our LCAP, and that therefore that... which Dr. Cash, you pointed

101out, many districts have used the LCAP process as the stand-in for the strategic plan, has not for us necessarily been as ready a tool to do that. But both of those comments... come back to a point that trustee Landry made which is the thing I really want to follow on but before I do that I want to say two things one I want to say I think superintendent we might want to put a screen door on that door over there because that fly I mean are you guys all watching that yeah I can't take my eyes off it so I'm glad I'm not the only one screen door suffering from that right basic um the second point I'd make is I think We're about halfway through this section of the presentation, so maybe we want

102to take a little five-minute break for everybody here. But I want to get this point out there before we do that. So on the issue of the strategic plan, which I think is entirely appropriate to bring up today, right, because the strategic plan hopefully is going to give us sort of that top-level one that we can work down from. And, you know, you can't do anything without a plan. This is education, right? So a great point to have brought up. In our district, our strategic planning process, and I'm going to do it again, turns into a fight a lot of times over fluoridation. So we have community members that come in who would like to revolutionize the entire way we run education in Sonoma Valley. They are very powerful. They've got a lot of money

103behind them, and they literally want to take us on on basic building block elements of how you run a school district. And usually what it comes down to is they would like to go into the classrooms and start telling the teachers. how to do their jobs. And that is not the function of a strategic planning process. And so that has, the last two processes have often been used as an opportunity to try to tell the teachers what to do. And that's just not why we have a strategic planning process. Trustee Knox has brought this point up previously. We had about, oh, it must have been now, almost two years ago, about a year and eight months ago, suggested that we start a facilities master plan and a strategic planning process at the same time. And

104we had a really strong level of disagreement between some trustees at that point about what we were going to do in that strategic planning process, and we were just about to do a changeover of the board, too. And so I advocated against starting the strategic planning process at that time. hoping we got a new board seated and it might be more useful but what i did want us to do was start our facilities master planning process which we didn't have in place either and the problem we have as a district is we spend a lot of money ineffectively and while we don't have an agreement about fluoridation we can sometimes have an agreement about where we want to have our buildings right we can actually get consensus on that sometimes and so we have been

105backdooring the strategic planning process through our facilities master planning process because inevitably those questions come up, right? But it was almost an idea of can we steer this with a more concrete set of points? And then I'm going to get to my final point, which is my metaphor that I am using to think about this. I love this slide right here because it's got so much on it distilled, and that's what we want from you guys today, right? Really give it to us in this, you know. straightforward, direct, and concise a fashion as we can get it. But I'm a lawyer, right? We always want organized metaphors. That's how we do everything. So when I think about our district, I think about it like a park. And I mean not a playground park, like a

106small one with swing sets. I think about it as like a national park or a state park, one that really has all the attributes of maybe not Yosemite, but maybe Sugarloaf, right? Okay. And you've got to have two, there's a lot of things you have to do to make a park work, but you have to have two things. You have to have a park ranger, your public interface, who's concerned with the health of the park and is concerned with the public coming through. And I think of the park rangers as our teachers and our staff. They really are the people that are interfacing, you know, with the people coming in to enjoy the environment, right? Our job is a little different. We're not park rangers, right? We're not talking to the public about implementing how

107the park runs. We are more like foresters. We're concerned with the health of the park's natural environment overall. Our job is to make sure that that forest is doing well. And I have one story I'm going to add to this, and then I'm going to stop. Years and years ago when I was a kid, there was this camp I used to go to up on the coast near Cruise Road at Denton State Preserve. Beautiful redwoods up there. And the camp itself is about 600 acres. It's been passed and kept in sort of this natural environment for years. It's a farm camp. And I remember I visited it, I went there four or five times, but there was one period where I came and left and then came back the next summer. And there was a

108particular grove that was very different the second time I came back. And they had removed a series of very large redwood trees from the grove, which is an anathema. How can you cut down a redwood tree in a grove of trees? It's critical for the health of the forest that they removed some of those trees because, of course, the problem was over time the growth had gotten so thick, sunlight could not penetrate the canopy to the forest floor to allow new trees to start to grow. And so they thinned it. And they did it very carefully. They removed it appropriately. They picked and chose the trees that they removed to allow that light to come through. And of course that grove is far healthier now. It'll be far healthier in the future. It's actually reduced

109the fire risk as well. There's a host of reasons you want to do that. But that's a tough decision to remove a tree, right? That's our job. As the board. We are the foresters. We have to make those decisions sometimes that, yes, that tree is going to come out so that the new trees can grow, so that we can have that environment of continual development. And every single item I see up there is we have to be seeing the forest for the trees, right? That's our job. So I really appreciate you putting that up there. I think it's right on point. It's succinct. And as a forester, right, I'm always thinking about that. But I would love it if we could take a break. But I'm happy to hand it to another trustee. Did you

110want to make a comment? I'll make it really quick just as a point of insight for you. One thing we, going back to curriculum, one thing that we've heard from some of our teachers within the district who have come to board meetings, there's been this topic of training. And as curriculum is evolving and certain things that we have implemented are changing, there's adjustments, there's additions, that the training seems to be lacking. And so I think, you know, someone said to me recently that I really appreciated. We teach students not curriculum. Curriculum is the tool and I think that that really turned the light bulb in my head as to how I'm going to participate as a board member in supporting curriculum. We need to support our teachers so that our students can access curriculum, right?

111And so figuring out a way that our teachers can collaborate and get all the resources that they need so that they understand and can also access their toolbox so that our students are receiving a high quality of education and that is something that we hear and I just wanted you to know that. you know our teachers have been coming to that podium and saying that we have certain individuals who have gone to trainings and done amazing work but their time is also being taken out of the classroom with their students to do those things so i i'm i'm open to learning new ways and i'm hoping that we as a board can discover ways and learn from others on how it's working in other school districts so that we can provide those opportunities because i

112think that that is a component that could really help blossom our curriculum and really help support our students and our staff. Before we take this little recess I would like to open it up to public comment which is what we do during our study sessions. So I just want to check in. Turn on your mic. Thanks. I'm totally flexible. Trustee Winders make your comment and then I'll call recess and then take public comment. So we're gonna, thank you, Trustee Kelly. So one of the things though that I think in this curriculum conversation though that we haven't put out on the floor that I think is really important, because I think it's important to have courageous conversations, is the fact that I can tell you that I have been on sitting front row seat to what

113happens when students. aren't able to access and when students aren't able to make meaningful progress, especially in the area of literacy. And so what happens is, is we have students who don't want to live. I have worked with students who have been in massive mental health crisis because they can't read, because they're in middle school and in high school and they read at a kindergarten and first grade level and they are desperate for their friends to not find out that they can't read. I live with one of those students. I have a profoundly dyslexic son. I have two dyslexic sons, but I have one that's profoundly dyslexic. who read at a first grade level in eighth grade and didn't want to live because of it. I have sat with students in this district as an

114advocate before I was a trustee who were self-harming, who did not want to be alive because they were so afraid they were going to get called on or paired up with another student and that people would find out that they couldn't read. And so this is why curriculum and the science of reading and to the point with math, we have students who can't access math because they can't read the word problem. It becomes very, very serious and it becomes a really important decision that we as a board make and that we have really courageous conversations not only about the curriculum that we choose but the professional development that occurs in the implementation of that curriculum. And are those curriculums fully accessible as quality first instruction to all of our students when what we know is

115that almost 15% of our population is dyslexic? So that's a lot of students in a classroom that may not be able to access the curriculum. And I take that as a parent. I take that as a trustee. I take that as an advocate. Incredibly serious because the repercussions of making the wrong decision about curriculum can result in a child not wanting to live. And so that... Again, coming back to our 65% and staying focused on the kids in the room, we have to ensure, and I want to make sure that as a board, we are provided the opportunities and the front-loading to be able to make those curriculum instructions in a way, because I think to that end, we are tasked as a board with ensuring that all of our students are successful. and that

116they feel good about themselves and their ability to access and their ability to achieve. And so I just wanted to put that out there before we go to public comment and before we break because I think it's a really important conversation and a really important thing that we often don't talk about because it's very uncomfortable, but it's also really important because it's very real and it's happening and it's happening here. Thank you. Is everyone okay if we just do a five-minute break or do people want to do a longer break? Okay, I just want to, I want to. Four and be back in five. I want, because I want to at least give the public a chance to know that we're going to come back in about, so we're going to say in seven minutes.

117So for people who are in the public and people who are on Zoom, we're going to take a seven minute recess so that you can make public comment. If you want to put your hand up now on Zoom, that'll give me a cue also to make sure I call on you. Okay, thank you. I'll make a comment. Since it just came up in our last meeting, I think collectively, I don't want to speak for anyone, but we collectively decided, or there was... everybody seemed to agree that we as a board would like a little bit of a deeper dive into our budget. And so that was something that we discussed moving forward that we might do a study session on. I know I personally would like a lot more information. And so I believe Dr.

118Chen heard that and she has some things in the work. So it's definitely not a done deal. There's definitely some work to be done there, but I think we all agree that, you know. with some information and some training we could help have a better understanding moving forward because it is it was it's a huge document for me personally especially only having six months serving on this board. I mean, it's a huge responsibility and it's a lot of information and you always trust that the work has been done as it's been presented but I would like a better understanding. I mean, it is our responsibility to pass it and we do wanna make sure that our students and our programs and everything that we're serving are being acknowledged within our budget and so that's just

119my little piece of our budget. I think that's fantastic. And you do have your professional staff. That's their job and role. But ironically, you're in Sonoma, and I would say at least. Not just the state but probably a national expert a gentleman by the name of John Gray He has a connection to Sonoma his daughter went to Sonoma State So but I mean, I don't know if you've communicated with John but he would be a fantastic person to come in and and take a very complicated process and make it meaningful and Understandable not just for you as a board but for your community as well. He's really an incredible tool And he has a connection to your community. Yeah, and going to the budget piece, it actually has been a big... big conversation and a

120big discussion recently in our district because our budget as it was presented to us wasn't actually reflective of what it is and ends up being in the first interim report and it has historically, that's been the case and we had a very large discussion in our last board meeting about that and then the other piece of it too is our reserve. There's a lot of, our reserve isn't, not isn't, in my opinion, as I'm not sure if it's as healthy as it's historically been because the budget as it was presented to us wasn't necessarily in the version of it that is vastly different than what would come to us in the first interim report. And so it left a lot of questions about our reserve. And while the state minimum is 3%, 3%, 3.5%. that's

121not enough of a reserve and we're at what was presented to us as five, but I don't know that we're really at five because I feel like there's still a lot of questions about that. So that budget piece has become a big piece for us in Sonoma where we need a lot more clarity because it has not been as clear it's been a bit opaque and then it creates situations with our labor partners and how much money do we really have as a district when we start talking about negotiations and and are we being really clear transparent and honest with our labor partners and what does our budget actually really look like and so i think that we as a district need to get very very clear this year um on that piece and and

122have budgets that are presented to us that reflect more of what we can expect coming in a first interim and second interim report. The other piece too is as the state of California, the funding is, we're going through a lot of potential changes. And so now we're looking at potentially their legislation going through to have a 50% increase by 2030 for educational staff, both certificated and classified staff. And that apparently, supposedly, that will increase the LCFF funding. And so if that goes through, there's going to be a lot of questions for us as trustees about what that's going to look like with a target date of 2030. and how are we going to achieve that and what kind of contribution will we actually be getting from the state and all of those pieces that go

123through that and so i think that there's a lot we've had our one-time funding through covid and there's a lot of shifts and changes that are happening in terms of our budget and we've had What I feel as a trustee, I felt a lot of lack of clarity in what's been presented to us as a board. And so I'm looking forward to this year getting a more clear picture so that we can have a more robust discussion and have a budget that... Can make our labor partners feel like it's accurate has us a trustees feeling accurate and and that the public feels is an accurate reflection of our current financials I have two quick comments just to say I think John Gray would be excellent both for the superintendent as well as the board to

124come in and just do an analysis of your fiscal position when I came in in my current position there was distrust between the association and management on the budget and so we brought in John a third party to be able to lay that out and it created a foundation and a dialogue for a lot of trust he also lives in our district and his kids went through our schools so it helped But I think that that is really a constructive thing. The other thing I would say, too, is with school district budgets, be patient with yourself because they're so complex. I mean, they're superintendents. They're three years into the job that fundamentally don't even understand their budget. It's so complex in California. So just be patient with yourself. And those are good opportunities to bring

125in those outside experts to kind of keep building your understanding of that budget over a period of time. Yeah, John's a great resource. I mean, we're trustees. We should have to do trust exercises. So our budget is difficult. It's not the spending side. It's the revenue side. We are consistently underestimating revenues, and it has grown from where, oh, about 15 years ago, we would underestimate by about 5% every year, which is okay. That's within the range of acceptability, I think. That's just conservative. Now we're at about 19% underestimating. So we're massively, it's been years where it's pushing like $10 million. And then you get in a room trying to negotiate with your partners, your labor partners, and they're like, your documents are ridiculous. And you can't have a discussion. And so we have these protracted

126labor negotiations where the teachers are literally looking at us saying, well, when you actually recognize your revenue, we can talk. And then nothing gets done until May or something. or all this toxicity builds up and conflict and it's totally unnecessary if we just accurately represent how much money we have. It's like a parent that always tells their kids, we don't have money for this or money for that. Well, we do. Okay. So that is the first issue. The second issue is... As a board, we've kind of failed here. And what I mean by that is we have a board bylaw, 3100, that concerns this exact subject. We haven't touched it since 2018. I remember when we touched it in 2018. It's technical. It's the requirements you have to have under California law. It does not

127actually establish priorities in any way. And so that bylaw is where we kind of need to start. And we're going to have to... to change it one of the things we'd like to do is we would like our staff to present us with a balanced budget we we know we can balance the budget we are showing deficits every single year when we have massively increasing revenues and we never actually do end the year with a deficit our reserves have been increasing year on year so we have to we as a board have to communicate our priorities to the community through our budget document that's really what a budget should do The idea that in advance you can predict how you'll spend money in a school district is something of a convenient fantasy, which anyone familiar

128with government finance knows. It's a communications document, not necessarily one like you do for a family or a private business. But we have to be clear that it needs to be balanced. Our community expects it. We look irresponsible. Sometimes we even are irresponsible, but we need to communicate to the public that we are matching revenues with our expenditures, that we are prudently managing their money, and that if the money's not there, we know the cuts that we're going to make. So I mean on that particular front in establishing budget priorities, I think the balance of that budget is critical. I actually want us to put in place a board bylaw that requires a four-fifths vote to pass a budget that has deficit spending in it. Whether we're able to do that or not, we'll see,

129right? That's a future discussion that we can hopefully have in a collegial fashion, right? But we're just, we're not doing it right now. So I really do feel like the moment we get to a budget hearing, it's too late. the staff were very clear with us by the time we get to a budget hearing it's too late some of these points though have been being made you know year after year now um so i mean i think the way we just have to do it now is we have to establish the policy and and if we don't it's on us I just want to make a quick comment and then I want to go to public comment for somebody who was on that didn't see that we had entertained public comment. So one of the

130things that has struck me about the budget, and I've been looking at the budget since 2004, is that I'm really surprised. First of all, the budget. it should be a policy document it should reflect as as trustee kelly said it should reflect the priorities of a school district and the trustees but it's very hard to take the sax report and figure out like does it actually reflect our priorities it's one thing to have a reporting document but you know in a and i and i work in the private sector so um and i also work in finance it's another thing to have other analyses where you represent the budget in a way that's not your accounting system, right? So that you can look at, well, what am I spending by department? Where's the biggest growth?

131What are the cost centers? We don't have another format. I have looked at other districts and maybe you have some ideas of... who does the the best analysis in the state of california i thought that clovis had a very interesting way of presenting not just the sax report but saying reflecting this is you know how we are spending um money in categories that make sense in terms of how we look at our our priorities so right now we don't really have a have a budget or a a friendly format for the public even to discern like are we spending money on the right things? I mean you really do have to kind of go into the weeds and then and I think it's not fair to brand new board members who aren't familiar with the

132SACS report know exactly what page you need to flip to you know to get to the answer that you're looking for so we need to figure out different way of presenting the budget and I you know it seems like it should be possible I've worked for very complicated you know organizations and it's I think it's possible we only have a 70 million dollar budget you know so anyway that's just a comment John Gray will be very helpful in that exactly I I used his predecessor when I was a superintendent in Clovis Ron Bennett to develop the document that you're commenting on So I think that Mr. Hausman, you have the floor. Hi there. Dennis Hausman, resident teacher and Valley of the Moon co-president. I'm sorry to interrupt your flow here, but it is kind of

133actually timely. Again, I want to thank the school board and our superintendent for having this meeting. I'm hoping when the board is speaking, they can be more succinct and get to the point so we can get to the information from these highly, highly, highly, highly trained, hired consultants so they can give information to you to help you and us, our students, as our students deserve the best. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Hausman. I'm sorry, I'm not on. To see if you've had an opportunity to see your plan for improvements, your facilities plan. Do you feel like you're on? Oh, go ahead. I'm not sure how much you guys know prior to coming here about what is going on with our facilities and who we've been working with over the last six months in terms of

134a consolidation. And so I don't know if you want to touch on that a little bit just to make it concise. But we've been... What's the name of the firm now? Perkins Eastman is a firm that was hired to come in and do an evaluation of our facilities to help us proceed forward with information so that we can look at. each individual facility as a whole and then look at our school district as a whole. And so we have had many board meetings and study sessions where we are looking at facilities and I believe we have a committee that's going to be formed here in the future to bring information back to the board. So that's just in a nutshell. So you feel confident that the process is... Uh-oh, no. Okay. I feel that the

135information has been extremely helpful. I will say that. I'm very appreciative for the work of Perkins Eastman. I feel like it shed light on a lot of areas and I look forward. It's not that I don't feel confident. I just, you know, we're, we. Dunbar Elementary School was one of our elementary schools that closed in June and we have one of our charter schools that is going to be moved from their facility out to Dunbar. So that's a transition that's happening for us. I feel very confident in that. As far as what we have coming, I feel confident that we'll do good work for our students and our staff and our community. Of course. So we as a district decided on a 3-1-1 model, which was three elementaries, one middle school, one high school. Seeing

136as we have five elementary schools plus two charter schools, two middle schools, and a high school, that involves realignment and really consolidation. And that is. just like the hardest single question for our community. We did a lot of work before the community really became aware of what the district was doing. And then when the community did become aware, people let us know in very clear terms what they thought, oftentimes disagreeing very strongly with the professional staff recommendations about what we should do. So again, one of those places where collegiality would have been awesome. But instead, what we ended up with was a lot of conflict that we're still in. Now, the committees we're talking about are really 7-11 committees. We're talking about repurposing facilities. We're talking about closing schools. And we're going to be, in

137the next six months, spending a lot of time on that. It is critical work. I mean, I didn't choose that forest thinning example without reason. That is the issue, is making sure we're getting the light down to the forest floor. It's not just old redwoods blocking the ability of new growth. So, I mean, we have to. recognize that it will not be fun, that there will be big feelings in the room, right? And it is absolutely critical that we do it as a board because that's our job. You know, getting in classrooms and telling teachers what to do is not our job, but making sure that we have the right match of facilities to the community that we're serving is. So, and we're doing the work. It's not fun. It really sucks. So, there we

138go. And to that end, Our community as a valley, we are a community that is in a housing crisis. We have a significant decline in enrollment. We had projected decline in enrollment. However, the decline happened at a more rapid rate than what was projected due to the housing crisis increased in terms of crisis quickly. That being said we had a bond measure for warm safe and dry that resulted in a lot of construction projects at different school sites those decisions and that funding came at a time when we as a district were working off the projections that demographic projections that we had at that time which are pretty significantly different than what we're faced with now. In all fairness that the production projections at that time did not include having a global pandemic right and

139so you know who saw that coming right and so that also impacted so now here we are now we've had some site improvement construction that has happened at various school sites that now we're faced with having to make decisions about closing and so there's those pieces and then Through the Perkins Eastman process, which I really appreciate, I felt very informed through that process. I felt very confident in the reports that they provided us and felt very informed. They were very detailed. We learned that we also had some seismic issues at one of the middle schools that we were not aware of having existed prior to going through the process with Perkins Eastman. And so we're waiting on the report. We don't have the information yet because we're now waiting on a seismic report that's going

140to help. inform our facilities realignment in terms of the going from a two middle school to a one middle school. So we've received a lot of information but it through the receipt of that information has created new questions that we are sort of in this holding pattern to receive answers on so that we can make informed decisions moving forward about this really hard thing that we have to do as a community that's much bigger than us as a school district. It's something that as a valley we're facing through our housing crisis and meeting the needs of our community. So in a nutshell, there you have our facilities. Okay. Well, you understand that that's your job. It's a hard job, but that's one of the main things that we have to do to provide structure. So

141it sounds like you're working hard. And lastly, providing direction for bargaining agreements. Currently, do you feel that you're kept up to date on those kind of, I know this is a new dynamic, but in those discussions, you're having opportunity for input. Do you feel like you're well informed? So it's like, I mean, the process has sucked so hard. I mean. the trustees have oftentimes just been in the dark, not aware of what's going on in the room when our negotiations are taking place. Then when we do find out what's going on, we find out that there are issues going on in the negotiations that are wildly disconnected from the trustees' priorities, you know, individual people. We see it on only our side of the negotiation, so I can only speak to that. I have no

142idea what goes on on the FAR side, but on the district side, there's people involved in the district negotiation process that are advancing personal agendas for how the negotiations should go, and they're trying to achieve non-educational objectives by doing so. And the board has been just, I mean, incredibly frustrated by the... way the process has run because we end up with this toxicity in the community where our teachers are, you know, we're impasse, and we're, you know, they're talking about going out on strike, and we're like, what the hell is going on? We have the money. What's, why are we fighting? And, I mean, that's literally what just happened in our district last year on this. Thankfully, we got a two-year agreement. We got some change in leadership. And, you know, we're starting to try

143to rebuild this. And we just have to let our... Our units know all the money we get is basically going to them. I mean, that's where it's going to, when it gets there and how it gets there, it's going there. If it comes in benefits, if it comes in pay, but that's our interest. We're here to make sure that they get treated, our staff and our teachers, like the elite that they are. We've got fantastic quality there. We have very high expectations of them. If we're going to have those high of expectations, we've got to compensate them accordingly. And I think this board is committed to doing that. And so I just I think in the last year, the board has gotten a much better handle on what's going on in that process. It's less

144of a black box. But I think that that's I think I'm trying to articulate what I feel like the generalized sense in the room is on that. I think every trustee would. come at that problem differently, but I think we would all agree that the way that played out where our teachers felt like they had to go on strike to be heard for a reasonable request that was totally doable was absolutely not what we want to see happen again. Okay, so we are going to, as we've talked about, it's been great. We've had some great conversations. So I'm just going to kind of go over a few of these. You need to move one slide more. There we go. Oh, there we are. So the characteristics of an effective governance team. Providing support for district

145initiatives and goals through individual and collective behavior and actions. This is important for all of us. Make sure that we're acting with a professional demeanor that models the district's vision and mission. Making decisions and provide resources that support agreed upon priorities and goals. That's the work that we're doing today and that we're gonna be able to go over the protocols where we'll spend the bulk of our time next to talking about. We've talked about upholding district policies and protocols, ensuring a positive working climate exists. That's important for all of us. And be knowledgeable about district efforts in attaining our mission and vision. Next slide, number eight. And again, we've touched on a lot of these. So we've got the superintendent. We've talked about, we didn't talk about self-evaluation. Is that something that you do as

146a board? We have done. We did it last year. We haven't scheduled it for this year and we have had change in leadership but it seems like it would be a worthwhile exercise for us to do and I encourage us to schedule something for this year. Do you have a tool that you use already? We were using, yes, and I want to say it was also we decided to adopt the CSBA questionnaire. I can't remember what it's called exactly, but I have it on my laptop. So three of you have done this before? Correct. I did it in Masters in Governance. Oh, okay. So I did a self-evaluation through the Masters in Governance process. So I did it in that course, but I didn't do it in the capacity of this room. So, I mean,

147the board self-evaluation has been a struggle, and there's a lot of reasons why that's the case. Again, that desire for objectivity, I think we all have it. the inevitable politicization of the process happens. But the problem that we're facing now as a board is that our inability to accept collective responsibility for what we're doing is causing an awful lot of exterior criticism of us, and it has been for a long time. And so whatever we do next, our board evaluation needs to be an evaluation of us as a board, not individual board members trying to pick each other off. And that has been the problem with our board evaluation process. So have you guys been doing in the past, has the board done self evaluations or evaluations of other board members? I'm only asking because

148I don't know. Troy, you want to answer this one? So this was only just last year where we completed the self evaluation. First time, only time that I've been a part of it. And it was just a good reflection exercise. And I think, I mean, I would join Troy's comment there. I mean, self-evaluation is one of the most powerful educational interventions you can do. It really does get effectively at it. So if we can really engage that, I think it's a very positive step for us. But I would just say it was just done by myself. There was no discussion. It didn't go anywhere. I don't recall. I believe there was a summary that we looked at in aggregate how we scored ourselves on certain topics and areas and I'm happy to pull that up

149for. So may I suggest a board self-evaluation, I believe, is a two-step process. It's the self-evaluation that you take as an individual board member, and then you evaluate the board as a whole on the same protocols. Here's how I evaluate myself in relationship to that. Here's how I evaluate the board as a whole in relationship to that. And then... some kind of facilitated conversation with the entire board about the deltas between individual board evaluation of yourself and the evaluation of the board as a whole is really important because that allows the board to have a conversation about the disconnect. Wow, well, somebody thought we were really great here and others thought we really were not doing so well, so let's have a conversation about what that means. and particularly as a board as a whole.

150That would just be a suggestion moving forward. Thank you. So one of the things that has sort of stood out to me as somebody who's new to being a trustee but not new to board meetings and has seen various incarnations of the board is there seems to be sort of a lack of an expectation as a board for what trustee training looks like, should look like, and the expectations and standards that we hold to that. Currently, at this point, there's none. So you can come on as a trustee and you can have no training, or you can come on as a trustee and you can have lots of training. But it's up to you as an individual trustee to make a choice about which you're going to do. But there's not a standard that we

151as a board hold in terms of an expectation of what trustees should be doing once they're sworn in. And so when I was in Masters in Governance, there was several districts. who had multiple trustees from their district in the MIG course because it was their expectation as a board that within a specific period of time that those trustees engaged in the CSBA training so that they were fully informed in what their role is and how to execute that role. And so I feel like as our board, we have no expectation. um of of what a trustee does and and that's not a new thing having having sat as a participant in this district for over a decade i've i've watched trustees go through an entire election cycle still trying to learn the basics of how

152to do this job. And I can say as a parent in the district, that was very frustrating for me. And so I would imagine for the public, because I experienced that frustration, I don't want to subject anybody else to that. So I think that we as a board need to come to some agreements about what our expectations are moving forward, not just for us as individuals sitting here, but for the trustees who sit in our seats 10 years from now. and get really clear on what that looks like. Because I think it also helps our meetings move more efficiently as well when sort of we all are coming to the table with the same basis of foundational knowledge. So that's been one thing that I would like to see us as a governance team come

153to some agreements about what that would look like and then how we can support trustees and what time frame that would. And then the other piece to, I think through that training, I learned a lot about the ensuring a positive working climate. That we can have disagreements on a specific agenda item. We can even have a split vote. But that we are treating each other with courtesy. And we are treating each other as professionals. Even and especially when we disagree. Historically in Sonoma Valley Unified School District that has not been the case. And it has created a situation where people get caught up more in the feelings. To the point where we can't get any work done. And so in order to prevent that from happening, I would like to see us come to an

154agreement as a board on what that training through CSBA, the expectations of that would look like so that we are all coming to the table with the ability to do that. So that even and especially when we disagree on an item, we are moving forward with one another as a unified board and that we are treating one another with courtesy and professionalism and respect. especially when we disagree and I don't think that we have that expectation of one another yet in terms of the training piece great and I'm sure you've seen from the preliminary ideas for protocols that that we sent earlier is that that's exactly where they're gonna go right you're gonna agree upon these are the protocols these are this is what we want our board to look like and to do so

155that you can do the great work together So just to, we've already talked about revising the policies or reviewing the policies, monitoring student achievement. I think we can agree that's all why we're here, right? And student achievement looks different. It's not just test scores and teacher-driven data. It's what we see in our schools. It's what we see in band performances and on the football field and in the art shows. It's student achievement looks. looks different and it's wonderful in lots of different arenas. Do you feel that you're kept up to date? How are you presented that sort of information on student achievement, all types of student achievement? Are you feeling it's a good process? The process, sometimes. The methodology of how the data is collected has been a struggle in terms of With student achievement,

156I don't know that we're necessarily getting data that's actually reflective of what our student achievement progress monitoring really is. So I'd like us to... have a better methodology that is consistent and uniform across sites. We have sort of some sites collect data through using this tool and utilizing that tool this way or that way and then another site will do it differently and then all that data comes together and it's not necessarily reflective because people aren't collecting it the same way or they're not using the same tool or they're not collecting it at the same intervals. So I would like to receive progress monitoring in a way that's consistent and is uniform throughout the district. So we just had that come up through our LCAP with the star. they were using STAR as the tool

157except the tool wasn't being used the same way from classroom to classroom, site to site. And so the data that we were given the methodology can skew the result, right? So I would just like to receive student achievement through progress monitoring where we have a really solid baseline that's uniform across sites and that as we build from that baseline, our progress monitoring is using the appropriate methodology so that we are actually getting true data because I don't feel that the data that I've been given is necessarily as accurate as it could be. All right. Mr. Kelly. On that point, so we had a district that got very PR oriented for about a decade. And it was convinced that it was doing a great job. It just needed to get its message out. And the problem

158then we started getting was all of these board presentations which became sort of like staged events for the press to go and write a story about how great we were doing. And then the technical data, we would put it in our LCAP, right? The literal metrics. were different and the divide just kept getting bigger every year and this idea that we just needed to like have the press say we were good and then we would be good it literally was the tail wagging the dog in this district so we started getting a lot of almost competing presentations about what's going on and we've got schizophrenic responses. If we're doing such a great job, let's sail to victory and pat ourselves on the back. And meanwhile, we're looking at a performance of our English language learners,

159we're looking at reclassification, we're looking at our special education, and they're all just getting worse every single year. So I mean, it would be helpful if we could decide that. We're not going to be fighting a PR battle every time we do a presentation on academic performance. Just put the numbers out there, be clear, and move on. I mean, they are what they are. And we have enormous distrust of our finances because our budgets have always understated for so long. Nobody trusts them. And the minute you've lost trust on your finances, how are you going to get trust in your academic performance indicators? It's okay to admit that it's not working. It's okay if our numbers are bad. We just need to be clear about what they are and have a plan. So that's where

160I feel like we are on that issue. No more presentations designed for the press. John Gray, if you bring in John Gray on the budget, he will make it very clear. Very clear. Ron, you're up. All right. I think what I'd like to do is work through the bullets that are there and then open it up for any conversation on that particular page. I think already by the conversation, there are a couple themes. Number one, the great opportunity with the new superintendent and also the complexity of the work. It's kind of an overwhelming challenge to be a board member. You can imagine being a new superintendent coming in as well as running the day-to-day operations of the schools with staff. It's a very complex world that we're all trying to work through. And so these

161next set of slides are kind of about that idea of how we begin to create focus. Because... On the other side of this, we have a whole staff that is working every day in those classrooms to support kids. And so they're looking for steadiness at the top. they're looking for clarity of what the board and the superintendent want to focus on for a period of time not just that next year but steadily really make a significant profound change to support kids the key is we can't do it all so it becomes this issue of focus what do we determine to focus on And so as I think about this, this first part of community leadership of the board superintendent is speak with a common voice about district policies, goals, and issues. What do you really

162want to accomplish? And I think part of that is your superintendent working with her staff and your teachers to be able to identify the critical areas that they see that they need help and support in that are the most important for making a difference for students. And at the same time is layering in with what are your interests and where do you want to see the district move to be able to focus on. And then... working with your superintendent to bring up the dialogue from your staff as well as layering with your work to create areas of focus. What I hear so far is that there are a lot of things out there. but the need is to begin to prioritize, right? Three or four key things you're asking your superintendent to work on. Three

163or four new processes, whether it's budget, whether it's facilities, whether it's negotiations, that you need her to work with her team to fine-tune to be able to bring back to you. She can't do it all in a year. She can't do it all in two years. You need steadiness of leadership to be able to address those challenges and to be able to also send the message to your staff that you're in the position to focus, right? Focus and identify on what is the most important thing and then determine budget-wise how you support to have them have that happen. Engaging and involving the community and the district in schools and activities. I think you've hit a lot of that. This idea of how do you coalesce their ability to ask questions and also understand what the

164district's trying to do. I'm sure separate from that there are a multitude of issues of meetings in the community and events that give you that opportunity to share with people the great things that are happening in the schools here. This question about how you clearly communicate policies, programs, and the fiscal condition of the district. That idea of how do you again create steadiness and clarity. When Sacramento's spinning, politically we're spinning, educationally there are new ideas coming out every day. Poor teachers are being asked to do the impossible in the classroom. How do we create steadiness from your perspective? support the superintendent in creating that steadiness and communicate that to the staff and the community in the midst of all of this truly, how would you say, just a crazy state that we're in. I don't

165think we've ever seen change happen so rapidly as what we're all facing and we need that sense of stability and focus. educate the community about issues facing students in the district, and then also advocate for children and district programs to the general public and key community members, as well as our elected officials that we can communicate. how their policies are impacting us, in particular is basic aid. There are some real issues that are basic aid school district issues that could be communicated up your legislative piece. So on all of those fronts, any observations, thoughts about how you're working, how you would like to work? So I'm just going to echo what Trustee Winders has mentioned about speaking, coming together and working collaboratively. So, again, this is my third year on the board, and the first

166instance where I really felt we came together as a board was in the interview for our current superintendent. We were in a room. about this size of this table and we were in there for how many hours? 14 and a half hours. 14 and a half hours in a room, the five of us, and it was really powerful in the sense that we had some really, you know, real... stark differences. Yes, we had to really work through a lot of issues. And we went up and we went down and we went all different directions. But through that, there was a through line and that there was genuine respect for everyone in that room. And I wish that we can bottle that and continue to have that in all of our meetings moving forward. Because I

167think it would give, it gave me a sense of, I think it would give the community, students and our sense of comfort. piggyback on Troy there, it was unfortunate that that meeting was a closed session. I wish that the public could have seen us thinking out loud, right? So for those of us watching right now, a study session is literally us thinking out loud. The only way the board can have a discussion is in a public meeting. So what you are seeing right now is the five of us. with guidance from you and with the leadership of Dr. Chin, thinking out loud and thinking about what steps do we want to take, why do we want to take them moving forward. And that process in that 13 and a half hours together in a room

168with cookies, we went through, he did a DoorDash, Trustee Kelly DoorDash does cookies. Yes, but it really was, we were problem solving. We had our different perspectives and we were pulling them together for a common response and a common outcome. And we did that successfully with five very different people. And we did it in the benefit of the children in our district. Again, coming back to the center, the children of our district, even though all five of us had a different perspective, all five of us were centered on the children in our district. and we worked through that process so to your point trustee knox i too would like us to bottle up that 13 and a half hours together and move carry that forward because we did really hard work that day we did

169it really successfully and um it demonstrated i think to us that we we can do this work and that we can do it very successfully and we may need cookies but we can so i i think that was a really nice vignette. So it was behind closed doors. You can do things behind closed doors you can't do in public. Things are said, feelings expressed, evaluations, candid evaluations made that we would, there's two types of meetings we have and I agree with the idea that when we have a public meeting it's sort of different than our closed sessions but There's a lot of meetings we have where we have like our VMTA reps are with us, like they are today, our bargaining units, but the public is not engaged, and they don't know what we're up

170to. And a lot of times it's much more straightforward for us to form that consensus when we don't have... You know what those meetings look like, you know, the ones where the whole room's full and people are standing and they're out the door and we've got to put an overflow room. Those ones are the different meetings. And while we may be able to forge consensus narrowly, it's the ability to maintain consensus in the face of... that community pressure that this board, and when I say this board, I mean it in terms of vertical collective responsibility, has not been able to pull off. We will form a consensus that's narrow when we're working in the room together in a study session, and then 150 people show up, and all of a sudden it's just a different

171dynamic, and the politics take over. And we have to be able to do it when they're all coming at us, because they're going to tell us, and I'm sorry, I'm going to beat the... They're going to tell us that fluoride is killing the kids and you can't have fluoride in the water. And we're going to be like, we're fighting for fluoride today, guys. We're not breaking on this one. And we haven't been able to do it. It's just been really hard. So I want to thank you. That was a great vignette to illustrate it with. Can we do it when they're coming at us? No, please, please, please, Anne, please. No, I think those are excellent comments. It is truly difficult to be in your positions and also be in that position of leadership in

172a time that is being externally challenged. And when you're looking at reconfiguration of schools, when you're looking at student achievement. those are really complex things there's never been a happy school districts that's going through reconfiguration there's nobody more miserable than board members or a superintendent in that process it's very very difficult but the key is you're right is the is the level of respect and I think where that becomes critical is the ability to focus It's identify those priorities, identify the processes that you want to see modified over the course of the year and work with your superintendent to be able to bring change in those. Knowing that steadiness is the key to being able to have long-term impact. It's keeping your superintendent, making sure that you are on the same page together. And you're

173right, you are going to have diverse opinions and thoughts on issues, but being resolute on those key ones as much as is possible is so, so critical. Because I do believe that the dialogue that happens at the board impacts the dialogue that happens throughout the entire district. It's Everyone watches your demeanor and how you behave in public is going to be emulated by how work is done at a school level. So we are in those positions of leadership where our responsibility is to ensure that we are modeling the same kind of engagement that we want to see at our very best and supporting the superintendent to do that work. But we only do that by communicating clear priorities of what we want to accomplish, making those doable, and knowing that some that we want to

174get to, we can't get there till next year or the following year. but we need to be steady and resolute in agreement on what we're trying to accomplish. Now this next page. Well, before Ron gets started, I'm going to do a time check because it's 10 minutes to 12. And I believe, you know, we're sitting on this side of the table, that the conversation has been good. It feels like you've been engaged in the conversation, all of you. I was a little worried. Didn't hear a lot from you, but then we did, and I was very happy. Cool. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm happy. I could see that you were listening and engaging. I always like to hear people's voices. But we're not going to get to where we had hoped

175we were going to be able to get today, which is understandable. That just happens. I'm looking directly at you, Madam President, because I know that you have an agenda item after we leave today. And so what I want to do is go to kind of what I would say is call an audible. And that is we'd really like to have, we'll schedule a date for us to come back. We really were planning on being here two more times and that's still our plan. But what we'd like you to do between now and the next time we come is review both the board, two sets of the board protocols and the one set of the superintendent protocols and forward your edits, suggestions, comments. outrage whatever word you want to yeah whatever yeah additions like what trustee

176Winders talked about as far as expectations related to training and forward those to your superintendent Dr. Rodriguez Chen who will then forward them to me, we'll go through them, try to do a filtering process, and then replicate back to you as soon as possible what we read and heard from you so that we have maybe a sped up process the next time we come when we will just fully engage on the protocols. I'm a timeline person do you have a target date I should actually ask you Dr. Tim what would you like those by I was going to give them to you one week from today yep because if it's two weeks it'll be two months yes yeah correct Go through them and read each one. If it's something that you believe should be part

177of the way that you're going to conduct yourselves as board members, then don't touch it. If you have some, the language is unclear, or you have a question about it, or you... You don't believe it should be. It's not necessary. Put a line through it. If you have questions about the document as a whole or how come this isn't on here, this really should be something else, or I'd like to say this differently, put that on there. I would say for each board member to spend anywhere from 25 to 50 minutes on each one would be enough. That would give you opportunity to read it, kind of think about it as an individual, and then comment. And a comment doesn't have to be a positive, you know, I'm doing something. It can be I'm just

178leaving it alone. I'm fine with it. No problem. I mean, I feel like we need something like this where you have to, like, spin the microphone around. So that's the person that gets to talk. I mean, I just – there's this great rough consensus. Rough consensus is more than a majority of the board agrees on something, but not necessarily everyone, and that all arguments or all points or concerns are addressed even if there's no agreement. Some of these things are going to be rough consensus items. In other words, I already know. I just know because I have been through enough of these sessions now that I know kind of like the rough model we use for how boards and superintendents interact. And this board is a bit different. Every board is. So I think one

179of the great things about this is just the surfacing of how some people on the board are going to expect it to work differently than others. And I don't expect all of us to agree on this. And I think we all need to be prepared for the fact that whatever comes out of this will probably not be, on each point, universal agreement. But I think what you're asking us to do is to get to surface those concerns. Yep. and then form the rough consensus around it even where there's disagreement. Absolutely. Because it's a living document. Remember this. Our advice and counsel to you as a governance team is that this is not a one and done. This is something that you're going to need to revisit periodically at least once a year. And at any

180time there's a change in the governance team, you would want to look at it as soon as practicable. That's what we would hope that you could get to us between now and then. And then we would like to go through some of the other slides as well because there's some really good practical applications, conversations to talk about. But we really want to get to the protocols. And then in our third workshop, and we would introduce this at the next workshop, we'll give you, while you do have a governance handbook and I've read it, we'll... give you a kind of a mock-up of another type of governance handbook that you might consider along with your current one which you might only want to modify but those two things would be the subject of our last workshop

181and then what i would advocate is about six to eight months from now are from that that third workshop is that you invite one or all of us back to have a conversation about how you're doing. It wouldn't be your formal self-evaluation or board evaluation unless you requested that. It would be more about how are you doing in relationship to your protocols and how are you doing are the questions about your governance handbook. Are we doing what we said we'd do or we thought we would do? If we're not, why aren't we? Are there questions about it, et cetera? If I may. So that sounds great. I want to put a couple of ideas in your guys' heads. I like everything you suggested. The only concerns I have about are the when. So if we

182as a board could get this part done, the three days, before the end of November, and then if you guys can come back in following July. Yeah. between December and the end of May is when this board really does all of its work. And that's when all of these protocols are either going to work or they're not, and they're going to get tested in that time period. Yeah, we're happy to do it. It's going to be your superintendent working with the five of you on getting those dates open. And I won't speak for my colleagues because they have their own schedules, but we would plan on trying to do it before. Yeah, we want to see you in November. Well, we'd want to be here once before November, twice before November. Yeah, but you want

183to come like end of August, start of September, right? Whenever it works. Yeah, that would be great. I think it would fit the contours of it. We want to try to do five study sessions in the next sort of year, right? I suggested each trustee get to kind of pick the topic of one, but we're going to need to basically add another one for this now. So that's going to be the November meeting, I would think, that we would. that we would assign to this one. But that would be great. I would really, I think that would be very effective. Should we, since we're all here together, should we look at our calendars to schedule the next two meetings that you were going to suggest? And if I understand, if I remember the original communication,

184the idea is to have a follow-up meeting like five to six weeks or a month after this meeting, and then I don't remember the time period after that. Well, we're ad-libbing a little bit because of where we got to today. So our next meeting would be focused on the protocols and the protocol adoption and the introduction of the governance handbook. The third meeting would be a review of the governance handbook and an approval of the governance handbook, which would include the protocols. And then the follow-up meeting, which I think June, July, August is a good one, would be a review with the board on how you're doing in relationship to the governance handbook and the protocols. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, I'm just writing this down. No, no, no. So this is

185week 29. of this year and you guys want to come back like week 34 week 35. well let's see so that's going to be week 34 is the week starting on the 20th of august that's the sunday and then week 35 is the one starting on the 27th of august so i mean how are you guys those two weeks better question is how are you guys it's a study session so we'd hopefully do it on a saturday morning i'm good on i think just depends on what saturday it is so maybe the 26th can't do it then How about the 19th? It's a little sooner than we wanted but starting at 9 a.m. going to 1. Is anyone amenable to doing it like rotating the times from weekends to weekday evenings? No, I don't want

186to do that. I think we already have too many meetings and too much irregularity. I think people are prepared for Thursday and Saturday so we should stick to it. Yeah, I wouldn't have picked this one but it happened. You prefer weekend? Okay. I would say I prefer study sessions during the school year. I prefer the Saturday just because those evening meetings are, we already have evening meetings and every month I just, it would be a struggle I think during the school year. Not just for us, but I think for the public and their ability to watch and participate. People are doing their evening. I have a conflict at 9 a.m. Is it possible to start a little later? Like between 9 and 10, I have a conflict. Yeah, 10 o'clock is great, or 10.30, yeah.

187Okay. You good with that, Heidi? Ron? That works for me. Okay. And then the next one would be, what was that again? So like the 25th of November, that would be week 47, Saturday. Is that Thanksgiving, guys? Are we screwing up Thanksgiving? You want to go one week before? 18th? 18th? I can't. Do you want to move it up one more week, guys? December? No. The 11th of November? But that's the Veterans Day weekend if people are – I'm willing to work on the Veterans Day weekend, guys. Or the previous Saturday, which is the 4th of November. We're getting kind of close to the, you know, we're only doing three months then, and it was five days. So is there any magic to the exact timing? No, there is not. No. No, we could come

188back in October. I mean, I like them closer spaced. I mean, if we could, well, I don't care. Yeah. We have other study sessions, though, that we want to get to, guys, so we can't. Have we scheduled all of the dates for those yet? No, we haven't. But if we're willing to dedicate November study session to this, which I think we should, which one of these Saturdays is the least bad, guys? Fourth? Yeah, okay, so the fourth. How's everybody on the fourth? Yeah, me too. Okay, guys, you guys good? They will have to come without me. I have a family engagement, which is fine. Oh, come on. We've got to have you. No, you don't. i mean the 11th is the one where i understand people want to travel on that one but i got

189to tell you it's a holiday falling on a weekend i mean it's three day but it's november and thanksgiving's right after so if you guys are able to be here that day what's our what's our board meeting what's our thursday board meeting uh that month guys the ninth um would people be willing to meet um on the uh 16th would you guys be able to come on a weekday that's perfect for me November 16th. I'm willing to do like a Thursday, guys. I think I can make that work. I can. I try not to. Thursdays and Saturdays are all we try to screw up for everybody, right? Four to eight? eight on six he'd just pick a really well seasoned sixth grader to take over as principal are you a k-5 or a k-5 shouldn't

190be any problems with that yeah but call it call kid put him in charge my wife's my wife's an elementary school principal she's got some fifth graders that are going to be in charge of the world i'm sure you do as well thank you it's a joy to be with you all it was a joy to be with you all today really appreciate it you're the only one to say that we appreciate it thank you I find this process really helpful and especially as we look towards our other study sessions and then our regular board meetings that we're moving forward with I think that while some could view this process as tedious it's actually not this is going to help us build the infrastructure to streamline our work later to make our work more efficient

191and create a better product. So we're going to have to sort of dig in and it's going to be longer here in the beginning in these sessions with a lot of conversation, but I think it's going to inform and help streamline our work moving forward. So thank you. I appreciate what you're providing us. Thank you. Great job, President Ching. Thank you. Thank you. We'll look forward to... We know you have other items. We'll see you in... It was a pleasure meeting all of you. Nice to meet you as well. Thank you. I can see if anyone would like to, if there are any other public comments at this point, at this juncture, we're wrapping up our governance training workshop. Is there anyone, nobody in the audience here in person? Anyone online would like to make

192a public comment? I don't see any hands. So we're going to recess for a few minutes. I think we're going to have lunch. And actually, I have a hard stop at 1. I actually have to go. And I know I don't. OK. Just want to say that. Thank you. It was a sheet that was in your packet. Oh, there we go. Thank you. Again, the way that I've seen strategic planning processes happen in the many districts that I've supported in both San Diego and Santa Clara, The process really should begin with district priorities that you ought, in terms of trustees, establish. I think you heard Dr. Cash talk about it being maybe four or five broad areas or priorities that can be sustained over time. I'll give you an example. Things like equity, things like

193innovation, safety, budgets, those kind of broad. priorities that are again we can focus on specifically year after year in terms of the details but that can also be sustained over a three-year period or a five-year period of time and so having that as the initial I think conversation where you all come together and determine those four or five priorities can then really help build that strategic planning process and everything that we do after that aligns to that. One of the things that I would also like you to consider is this idea of developing a portrait of a graduate. I know this isn't the first time that you've done one in the district and it isn't the first time that you've had a recent conversation. I believe Dr. Kaufman and her team have brought this forward

194as well. As part of, I belong to a group with ASA. American Association of Superintendents. This is also a best practice that they consider for all districts in terms of building a portrait of a graduate. And really it's. The portrait of a graduate is to determine outcomes for our students by the time they leave our system. So what are the things in terms of skills, knowledge, and dispositions that we want our kids to have by the time they leave our system that we're really clear about what those outcomes are so that we can backwards plan that from the time they graduate down to preschool and TK. I think having this portrait of a graduate piece right after the district priorities are established is important because it goes back to the conversation that we were having

195earlier about centering students at the middle of all of our conversations and our planning. So having, I think, the portrait developed and having really clarity around what it is that we want for our students will then guide the actions that we put into our strategic plan. I put down here below the LCAP, the SPSAs, and any initiatives or programs that we decide that we wanna implement, those should be grounded and aligned and have coherence with that strategic plan. Because it sounds like based on this conversation that we had earlier and just based on the conversations that I've had with staff and with community, that a lot of these things are in place. And so we have these things. You know for lack of a better word we've checked off the box that we've done some

196of these things But I don't know that necessarily they're aligned and that there's cohesion around all of them They're kind of isolated right now And so I think this is a really great opportunity for us to look at how do we build that coherence? And this is probably the optimal time for us to start moving in that direction I think it will also help us communicate to the community that we are starting a strategic planning process and all of these are pieces of that process. So it's not just the product of a strategic plan. It's really all of these pieces that are part of that overall strategic planning process. So anyway, I wanted to bring this forward to all of you so that you have an understanding of kind of what I'm thinking in terms

197of. how we engage in this strategic planning process so that when we get together at our next following board meetings that we can start adding some of these pieces into our board agendas. Again, the district priorities is gonna be the initial step if you all agree to that. And again, it'll take a lot of conversations, but I think we all have a pretty good idea of what those four or five. priorities should be and it's just a matter of bringing them forth and getting some agreement around them. So, I mean it's an informational item right now. We can put it on the next board agenda so that you have some time to go away and think about them. You know, I know having conversations with your constituents and your stakeholders in your trustee areas. is

198also important to you so you know having those conversations and having opportunity to think about it and then come back maybe at our august board meeting and and kind of land on four or five priorities might might be the way to go Dr. Chen, do you think you could just describe the timeline and process for developing a portrait of a graduate? I've not been involved in such a process here in this district. Sure. So let me also add to this portrait of a graduate, not just the actual process, but the products. The way that many districts go about developing a portrait of a graduate is they develop a portrait for the students. What, you know, having again worked at the county supporting many districts, what I'm finding is that there's two additional pieces to the

199portrait of a graduate work that I think we should engage in are important. So once the portrait of a graduate is completed, and again, that's, you know, determining what we want for our students, part of that is also developing a portrait of an educator. So that if we say, for example, we want our students to be critical thinkers, creative, good communicators, then the educator portrait establishes what is it that our teachers and our staff members and our district administrators need to do in order to make that happen. So it could be things like, you know, we want to have innovative learning spaces for our students. It might be we want some, you know, opportunities for our kids to engage in ed tech. And, you know, we want to be, we want to have more professional

200development around, you know, how to be facilitators of learning. So whatever it is that the, and I'll talk about the process in just a minute, but that would be the portrait of an educator. And then there's also a portrait of a system. And so the system that, the portrait of a system then says, if the educators are saying these are the things that they need in order to make this happen for our students, the system then needs to do something to make that happen for our educators, right? So that means creating structures for collaboration. It might mean professional learning. It might mean looking at bringing in innovative programs. So all of those. those portraits align to what it is that we want for our students so it's not and i think it's a misnomer the

201way the way it's typically described as a portrait of a graduate it's really three different portraits that are developed for the system so the process takes a long time and not years but it does take a while it would depend on you know how we schedule this out but um what we really truly want is community engagement We want people from our community to give us input in terms of what it is that they want to see our students leave Sonoma with in terms of skills and knowledge, right? We also want to engage our students and ask them, and we definitely want to engage our teachers and staff. So that process, when we bring people together and have those conversations in focus groups, community forums. they take time, right? Because they're scheduling logistics that we

202have to consider. And there's, you know, like, do we do this after school? Do we do it virtually? So there's a lot of those logistical pieces. But in order for us to truly have, I think, a very inclusive engagement process, that's going to take us some time. And again, with a variety of different stakeholders. Just one other follow-up. In your experience working with other districts, is this like a six-month process? Is this a year process? Just so I can benchmark all the other competing things that we want to accomplish since this would drive our strategic thinking. Yeah, so in the past, I mean, we've worked with several districts. It can go anywhere from like... Typically six months to a year depending on how we can get logistically set up. So like nine months, like pick

203the middle point. So April? So... You come to us in April with the portrait of a graduate? It's ambitious. There's a lot we're asking you to do before April. Yeah, honestly, I would say probably between April and May just because we have Christmas in between and those holidays in between. I know. It's just that April always seems like it gets – April and May get so crushed. Like the calendar gets so congested. It's the – I mean, if we want to – I mean, the problem is that – and this is going to go back to what Kat was – what Trustee Landry was getting at is – We don't have a strategic plan in place. It's stale. The one we have is really stale. And this means we wouldn't even be getting started on

204it until next fall. I don't think it's something we should rush. I mean, if we're giving it the attention that it needs, then I think just like we have done in other processes that we've been involved in, we've given it the time that it takes, and we've had some pretty fantastic outcomes. So I have faith that if we keep transparency within our community and we just put our heads down and keep working, that I think... If this is something that we are creating so that we can use, you know, it's the longevity, right? So that we can use forever or for as long as it's needed until adjustments need to be made. I think it's necessary to take the time that it takes. I don't know that rushing, I mean, if you're not feeling 100%

205confident about April, I wouldn't push it. No, I think we need to go longer. I think we've got to go farther out. I think we've got to say second meeting in June is when we would hope you would bring us the portrait of a graduate. Next June. We can sketch the whole thing down. You both can have your own. We get our own now. So because I think two things can also at a certain point begin to run parallel together, right? I think that if around April we're looking at having a pretty solid draft that we can then begin to build on. align as we align the the decisions that we need to make in other areas that connect to portrait of a grad that we could at a certain point and I would guess

206that certain point could be around April we could begin to run to run to win things parallel well I mean so may I Sorry to interrupt. I think that's great, but what I think is that in terms of running them parallel, sort of in the first half of next year, we would be looking at contractors that we'd be working with for the strategic planning process with the idea that maybe we would start that at a study session in July. And so the handoff would be between Portrait of a Graduate to strategic plan would be between June, July of next year. But the first half of the year, we could find who we want to have do the work. Any comments? So I'm just thinking not specifically about like nuts and bolts more just about the

207diagram and I see that the portrait of the graduate is in front of or ahead of the strategic plan and is it my sense that This portrait of the graduate will inform the strategic plan. Yes. Okay, so we will be kind of doing some front-loading work. I it seems like So that's just an observation and it's clear. I wanted to clarify that yeah the portrait of a grad again is in front of the strategic plan because That's that's what we're working towards right our meeting the outcomes that we intend for our kids over time So our strategic plan, we're going to put in actions for, you know, let's say if whatever, if we decided to be a three-year strategic plan or a five-year strategic plan, whatever that looks like. But everything should be grounded on

208what is it that we want our students to leave this system with. So again... setting that foundation in the center and putting kids in the center and those outcomes in the center will build that coherence in terms of all our plans whether it be the strategic plan or whether it be the school plan or the outcap or any other plan that the state decides to throw at us so that that's why it's centered there if i can just one more follow-up um i fully support that this and i would love to go start out of the gate with this Because I feel like it creates a mindset like we are here for the kids and this is what we want every student. We this is we want this to be aspirational correct. And I think

209this would be just a good you know starting point. So I also support Trustee Knox in this. I think this is like critical work. My only concern is this should be dry. I mean the strategic plan. the portrait of the graduate should be driving our work with respect to consolidation of our schools. And I mean, it's pretty ambitious of what needs to happen before April 15th next year. That's my only concern. Like, how do we prioritize this? Because we have a lot of other moving parts. Trustee Landry? I definitely agree which is why I feel like everything I mean you know I've been a supporter of this and I know it's not unanimous but I do think that everything needs to have a thoughtful process and everything is moving too fast so I 100% agree

210with you and I think that also giving this the time that it takes and being thoughtful on everything that we do and we say this You have a second mic. I was just pointing it out. Oh, right. Okay, well, we're sharing. It's okay to share. I mean, you guys want to be like little twinsies over there. No problem. I'm happy to share. I just, I do. I think just slowing things down and being thoughtful in how we do things for... the long run of the students and the families and this community and this entire school district. It's really important work. We've all said that. And so I agree with you, but I also agree that we can slow everything down a bit and just really start to get data. I mean, we just closed down

211a school. Let's look at. what that looks like, right? We've done some moving, we've done some things. It's time to start looking at what some of our decisions are and have done and be thoughtful about those and how we move forward. So I'm just agreeing with you and just adding a bit to it. May I? Thank you. Okay. I don't, so I'm not sure that what I had just heard and what you just heard were the same, but... We cannot slow down. This has been going on way too long. We have so many kids that are just in terrible shape, and we are underpaying teachers. We are losing good staff. We do not have time to waste. Slowing things down is exactly the opposite of what I think we're all saying right now. We have

212to be able to do multiple things at the same time. is what I'm hearing. And so, I mean, I'm coming at it passionately and I apologize for that. It's not meant to, you know, make anyone defensive. And sometimes when I get really passionate, that does occur. So I'm going to just call that out and recognize it. But no, I mean, I look at this and I'm like, we have to speed up. We have been taking too long to do basic stuff. And I mean, the kids can't wait. Like we, we had, the urgency has got to be there. This board has at most, at most. 18 months to get something done and well I know no one wants to look at it this way. The first 18 months of a superintendency is when the superintendent

213is going to be able to set in place, to set in motion a program that will have any effectual change on long-term outcomes. And you can look at the literature over and over again. That's when you've got to do it. So we're going to have to do the consolidation conversations in the fall and early next year. We know it's 3-1-1. I mean, if there's dispute on 3-1-1. Okay, that's fine, but it's rough consensus. And we heard it from our educational professionals, and I don't think anything's changed in the last six months. So we know where we're going. Where we're going to do it is complicated. It's political, it's emotional, it sucks. The sooner we do it, the better it's gonna be for the kids. So I don't think the strategic plan in this particular setup

214is gonna be in any way driving consolidation. They're just, they're differential, they're different questions, I think. I'll hand it off to the. Trustee Winders. Thank you. So this is kind of what I was talking about when I was saying that there's going to be some things that are going to need to run parallel with one another. I'm always looking at the decisions that we make from the context of children's educational minutes, right? Their kids have this little window. We have this little tiny window of time when we're a child, and we have this huge window when we're an adult, right? And so that clock is always ticking. in the back of my mind when we're talking about kids and their minutes. The consolidation process becomes really important because as we consolidate, it also consolidates. funding

215in a way that allows us to utilize that funding in the classrooms to support the programs that we develop that support our portrait of a graduate as we work backwards to tk and so i'm looking at the the consolidation process and this process as something that's going to run almost parallel with one another with the portrait of a graduate getting a little out the gate so that we can use it to inform as we run parallel these two things when I the one thing that stands out too with the portrait of the graduate is a lot of the work that we're going to do in that that that happens in that process is going to front load the work for the strategic plan so that as we build the strategic plan, some of that work's

216gonna already be done because we did it in the portrait of the graduate. Where we serve our graduates, and by I say our graduates, our little TKs, all the way through, where we serve them. in a sense, doesn't matter when we've decided how we're going to serve them and when we determine through the portrait of our graduate what it is that they need, right? So like we do this in IEPs, right? In an IEP, it's not what a district has, it's what a child needs. And if we don't have it, we gotta go get it because the child needs that. It's really the same thing in this. We're going to determine who are our students as a whole and what is it that they need. And then we take that and we get it for

217them. And so whether we do it in building A or we do it in building B, we're still going to do it. And so that's why I'm seeing these two things run along. My only request in the portrait of the graduate is if when this comes back to us, I really feel very, very strongly that it's going to be really important in this process that we bring in a DEI consultant to help with this process because that's an area where as a district we have a lot of growth. that needs to happen and when we're developing the portrait of a graduate and what that graduate looks like so that we can work backwards not just in an equitable manner but in a manner that also implements justice because equity work is nothing without justice work

218We need that DEI piece so that we're getting a very clear picture of who our graduate is and how we can do our work to best serve them, all of them. Trustee Kelly? Okay, and then I want to add something to all of this, which is probably in October, we're going to get a report that's going to tell us there are seven buildings at Altamira. which we need to knock. And replacing each one of them is probably going to be a $20 million building. And by the time inflation costs and construction times are in, they're each going to be a $30 million building. So it's going to be a $200 million project to rebuild Altamira. And when that comes out... and the community becomes aware that we have a facility where there is earthquake retrofit

219necessary, and it's essentially a quarter of a billion dollar problem to fix it, all of these decisions are going to get real fast. And we have to recognize that. I mean, that facility was built 70 years ago. It's got huge issues with it. We've got to do something about it. We can't let the status quo continue. Safe, warm, and dry is even above. strategic plan it's at the core of everything we've said to our community for years and that's going to start driving stuff in a way that we are not used to and do not know necessarily how to deal with as a group and we have to be ready for that and when that happens then it's going to affect the entire consolidation process i mean sure maybe perkins eastman will come back and

220say it's five million dollars and you guys can pay with this you know with some reserve funds i don't think so guys i really don't um so i mean we have to get to recognize that we're going to probably close a middle school or build a new middle school. And that alone is a massive objective. I mean, the community consensus we would need to do a quarter billion dollar bond raise, I mean, that's a huge lift, right, that we would all have to be behind and get the entire community behind if we're going to do that. Alternatively, if we're not going to do that, now we've got some really gut-wrenching decisions to make. But I don't think we can wait. I just don't think we can wait. And I completely agree with the diversity, equity,

221and inclusion point that Trustee Winders just made right there. It's essential. I mean, the Attorney General of the state has been very clear with us about what we need to be thinking about in consolidation. And it is not historical patterns. It is not the way people think the community is. It's got to be advantaging our students that are least advantaged. Like, that's the law. I mean, the state is telling us this. And so, I mean, to get in compliance with the law is a basic level thing that, again, transcends the strategic plan or the portrait of a graduate. And we have so many of these basic points that we as a district are not addressing right now. So I'm, again, just trying to invest it with that urgency. So I'm going to finish up my

222comments by pulling back what I feel like is the call of this question today. And I could be wrong, so I apologize if I didn't. But what I sensed was you want us to come back at a future meeting to discuss district priorities. I mean, I came in with a sense of what I want to do on that, so I want to get it out there so you guys will hear it from me, and then you guys can come back and we can thrash it out. So clear communication. It's the first thing that we have to be doing in the future as a district priority. Right now we are producing a morass. Our public is uninformed, confused. They are distrustful and we are not able to effectively implement our programs because people just don't believe

223us when we tell them stuff. Clear communication has to be our first district priority. I think equity, if it's not the first one, then it's the second one, right? It's right there. And if we don't put equity in our district priorities, we're not doing this right. And that means really that every student is going to have an equal shot to get to that portrait of a graduate. And they don't have that right now because they're starting from different start lines. The third one has just absolutely got to be reform because the system is not working right now. and we have to just basically accept that the school district that we inherited does not serve the interests of our students and if we can do that and we just get to that basic level point that

224says this isn't working we are throwing more dollars every year for worse performance it's got to stop it's insanity if we don't change it that's got to be and then the final one is is that balance and i don't just mean that in terms of like how we approach problems but i mean it financially We've got to be a balanced budget district. We always every year have to match our revenues and our expenses. The district is depending upon us to meet that baseline point. because they know that there can be arguments about academic performance, but there is no argument about the money. And if we can get that district priority out there that we're doing that, I think we're somewhere. So those are my four. And when I want to say the school reform one,

225just revisiting that third one before I cede the floor, I really do think that that actually is just, in terms of the next 18 months, getting the footprint right. That's the essence of it. The portrait of a graduate, the strategic plan, they're a longer-term effort, but just... mean let's even get Blount right sizing the district for the size of the student body we have and where our students are located let's start bringing the school to the students instead of taking students to the schools that's what we got to do so that was my that's my rough cut and you know you guys all know it's when we come back you know you can all disagree with me very effectively Go ahead, Trustee Landry. Two things I wrote down. One is I just want to bring

226this to the table. I think that we just closed Dunbar Elementary School and now we have Woodland Star that's going to be on that campus and we are all looking for data and we have an ability to take a look at what does that look like? Have we saved money? If so, how much? Where is that going? What is it doing? What have we actually done that is... beneficial to this district by closing Dunbar. We did it, so now we need to look at the data because that is important in moving forward, I believe, in closing other schools we need to see. Is this actually the solution for the problem that we're talking about? The other thing in terms of equity, this is something I've really struggled with the whole time is that when I

227look at our test scores and we all see that our students are some of our students, many of our students are struggling in areas. closing schools and then putting these students in larger class sizes, I just don't know that that's the right step to do. I feel like if we were to take a step back, look at the portrait of a graduate, talk about our strategic plan. within that strategic plan is going to be programs and curriculum to help support these students, we can decide if then that can be done in these larger class sizes. And if it cannot be done and we don't believe that that best serves students, then we aren't working backwards to reopen schools. I mean, I think that logically this is something, if we're serving students and we're actually going

228to be utilizing the work that we're doing for students, this is the way I believe it should be done, which is why I'm not necessarily saying down the process just because I don't want to do the work. I'm saying there's a lot of work to be done so that we can ensure the process in which we proceed forward with serves our students. Trustee Winders? However, we do have the data. So we have our demographic data. We have our numbers. We know what our class size cap is. We know on the average where we're at in terms of reaching that cap and how much wiggle room we have in our classrooms between where our classrooms are at now and what our cap is and how many students are coming out of. whichever school is being proposed

229to consolidate to another. So I don't necessarily see that we have to see how Dunbar plays out. We have those numbers and we know. We know what the absorption rate will be in the classrooms and how much room we have to absorb. So I think that that's information that we have ahead of us and not information that we're going to collect backwards. It's information that's already in front of us as we make those decisions. So I'm hearing there's two separate kind of items that are on the table right now. One is a consolidation conversation and one is the portrait and strategic planning conversation. In terms of the consolidation process, I understand that you have some data based on the decisions that you've made in the past to close the school. I do have to say,

230and I believe it was Trustee Knox who had asked a question about when are we putting a committee together to look at this work. So we do have to put a committee together fairly soon. In that committee work, what I would recommend for... for all of us to consider is to think about not just the data that we use to close the school but there are some things that are bubbling up that are an after effect of closing Dunbar. So before Joshua Braff left, we asked him for a cost analysis to determine how much money we actually saved and that money, I think what was estimated and what we actually saved is not in alignment. There are some unintended consequences that are also coming up in terms of how we're placing our staff at Woodland.

231and having some custodial staff there, possibly increasing FTEs that we were not anticipating. So there's some things that are bubbling up in terms of the closure of the school that I think we need to. collect that information and then bring it to the board so that at the very least if we do decide you know we are going to close the school at the end of the year or next year or whenever that is that we're proactive about planning for those things that were unintended because things are bubbling up and so I think it's a matter of figuring that out the other thing is school hasn't started yet and so we don't know that there might be some other issues out there that we have to consider based on how kids are showing up to

232the school, whether we lose kids. So we have to look at all of those pieces so that, again, when we're planning further consolidation, we're ready for that. So I think those are, again, just a separate conversation from this piece. So anyway, that's what I wanted to share because I think looking at that data is going to be important. I'd like to make a comment. And we have about eight minutes left. So just two observations. We have a lot that we want to accomplish. I just want to be pragmatic about this. I mean, I know this is not going to be very popular, but what I'm hearing from the amount of work that we need to get done, it really suggests two board meetings a month. I mean, it suggests a regular meeting and study sessions.

233Anyway, I'm just going to throw that out there. I'm not saying that I'm in support of it. But the other thing is, since Trustee Kelly kind of threw out what his priorities are. I have a few priorities, but I don't know, like, mine are more sort of ground level, and so I don't know how we're going to tease these out. Like, we should maybe just have, like, a brainstorming session, but the things that have come to my mind are, you know, how do we improve first? good first instruction right at the whatever our MTSS framework is in the context of school consolidation like I feel like that's a priority we're not delivering that sort of tier one instruction like that to me seems like it's got to be a priority regardless of what the buildings

234look like you know we still have to do that whether they're in classrooms or not if they're outdoors and then you know we've got to improve school climate and you know it's different for different levels we need to be it needs to be a place where students feel that they can flourish you know they have opportunity to reach their potential and then the other thing I would say is we need to create exemplary schools so that we can re-attract people to retain kids and attract new kids from the outside. So they're kind of different ends of the spectrum and I don't know how we get to it but I wanted just to throw those out and I'm happy to have follow up. Yes to all. I mean, like I said, I'm going to go back

235to Trustee Kelly. I do feel urgency. I do feel this is your time. This is why we hired you, Dr. Rodriguez-Chen, to make these difficult, challenging, you know, we're a district in crisis, I would say. And I think it's time that we put our collective thought and expertise and... dedication to our community to make some serious changes. So I love this. Like I said, I'm going to say that. Let's go. But yes, there are some other big issues that need to be addressed too. So I'm just going to say yes to President Ching and yes to Trustee Kelly and let's get to work. May I, guys? Okay. So the curriculum questions are critically important. and consolidation is critically important. And always knowing sort of which kind of... thing we're heading towards with our questions is

236critical too. So when we're talking about like portrait of a graduate, we're talking about a lot of things like curriculum. We're talking about the sort of daily lived experience, the micro, if you will, of what our school district looks like. There's nothing more micro than a portrait of a graduate. We're always concerned with individual students. Consolidation is just different. The two questions, the only thing that curriculum and consolidation have in common is they start with the letter C. Consolidation is at the core of implementing our existing program. So right now, we have multi-tiered systems of support. Elizabeth worked on implementing those for years. And every time we started talking about consolidation, we've had community members, I can see Melanie blanking my mind, I doing it, saying, well, we don't even know how we're implementing any

237of our educational programs, so we can't talk about consolidation until we've basically sorted out how we're teaching in the classroom. And Elizabeth's reaction saying, No, we know exactly how we're doing that. We have a program in place where we're educating people. We know what that is. The consolidation question is different. We can dispute about when the cost savings of consolidation will show up. That they will show up is not in serious doubt. There will always be the lived reality where cash flows look a certain way. But there is no question that if we can get a smaller footprint, it's in the long-term interests of our staff, of our students, of everyone. And that's where we need to focus on that one. It's a short-term process. It happens in the next six months. And we just

238got to stay focused on it. If we don't, we're going to end up exactly in the same situation we've been in forever, an underperforming school district that doesn't meet the requirements of the community, that's teaching to a student body that is long in our rearview mirror, that doesn't represent the students that we have today. And so I just, I want to emphasize again, the questions surrounding how we operate in the classroom are separate from the consolidation questions. And if we weave the two together, it's a recipe for sclerosis. So. Would anyone, any further comment? Dr. Chen? Yeah, I think I just want to leave us with a couple things. One is, you know, in hearing the conversation from this morning, I hear and I believe and I agree with all of you that listening to

239our community is vital, right? And so I think the sense of urgency, because I agree with you, kids need and deserve to have great programs that are going to get them ready for whatever they decide to do, whether it be college or a career, right? I think it's a matter of balancing how do we engage the community, hear their voice, listen to what they want, and at the same time figure out how do we continue to implement programs that are effective for kids without, and the complexity comes in without, you know. having unclear outcomes for kids and unclear processes and structures and ways of doing things for teachers because what I'm hearing is from the staff there's a lack of clarity that they need and so the clarity is important, the engagement is important and

240I'm hearing there's a lot of work to be done so if you would give me the opportunity to kind of tackle the timeline and figure out like now I have a much bigger a better sense of the bigger picture and say like here are all the different things that we need to tackle. Let me look at the calendar, bring something to you that says, here are all the things that we want to accomplish. Here's a skeleton of what it could look like in terms of timing and then bring it forth so that you can respond to that. Would that be helpful? I think that's all we can ask, right guys? That sounds great. Thank you. And I'd also like to open it up to public comment. If anyone, if you'd like to comment, is anyone

241on Zoom? Would like to comment, please raise your hand. And I don't see anyone running to the microphone. So with that, I'd like to adjourn this meeting at 12, it looks like 1259. Finished.