042122 Regular Meeting Board of Education

001[Music] the four seasons is [Music] welcome to the burbank unified school district board of education regular meeting of thursday april 21st 2022 is that better um reporting out on a closed session are we doing the pledge [Applause] you know what yeah it's not i don't know that's number four oh yes i just skipped over thank you mr ferguson for the help mrs abasto are you still here will you lead us in the pledge this after this evening please please put your hand over your heart ready begin i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you thank you uh number five reporting on closed session items were for discussion only no action

002was taken i'm sorry the land acknowledgement sure that's going to be read by dr weisberg i don't know where it is it's not on number four oh it sure is okay we acknowledge the traditional ancestral unseated territory of the chumash tango fernandinho tatavaim and first nations on which we are learning educating and living thank you so much dr weisberg and again number five reporting on closed session items were for discussion only no action was taken moving to number six adjustments to the agenda do any of my board members have adjustments madam president yes mr ferguson my understanding that we have a number of speakers potentially on a non-agenda item so i would ask that we move uh the non-agenda item public comment up towards the beginning of the meeting after immediately after [Music] i'm working

003right now so uh that we would move it immediately after item 10a on the agenda so we would hear public communications on agenda items followed by public communications on non-agenda items if that's okay with staff but it's okay okay yeah we need a second a second okay we have a motion to move the second public communications on non-agenda items to right after 10 a uh on request to address the board and we have a second by dr weisberg uh all in favor aye aye aye okay motion carries so we will be moving that up so that those of you who wish to speak don't have to stay till the bitter end so yes um moving on to any other adjustments great you know why i i apologize i pulled my agenda out and not the

004one you gave me thank you you're welcome um [Music] so actually we have to go back up you need to take the roll vice president ferguson president and president tabit here thank you unfortunately we have to share the passing of two long-time educators first the passing of sid colpis the superintendent's office has been informed of the sad news of the passing of long-time educator dr sydney colpis sydney's teaching career spanned over 40 years beginning at the burbank unified school district and continuing as a full professor teaching at glendale community college at busd sid taught at luther burbank junior high school from 1970 to 1980 before moving to john burroughs high school where he taught math and computer science from 1980 to 1994. also sharing the news of the passing of debbie catello and sorry and

005we must also share the news of the passing of longtime district teacher debbie cotello who recently lost her battle with cancer debbie began working for busd at washington elementary school as a dhh teacher in 1993 and continued there until moving to john muir middle school in 1996 where she taught as a dhh teacher from 1996 to 2000 and as a general ed math teacher from 2000 to 2018. debbie was an active supporter of the bta rally for sorry relay for life team our thoughts and prayers are with sid and debbie's friends and family at this difficult time and tonight's meeting will be adjourned in both their memories present yes sir i could just say a few words on on these two um uh first to uh mr copeland's family i happened to serve as a

006student trustee uh at glendale community college when uh he was a professor there always a strong academic and for him to have roots in burbank let me just tell you this was a man who contributed and was a true academic leader a true instructional leader and somebody who served our community and many of our students and and our graduates extremely well um he was loved and revered by colleagues and respected by students who struggled and who always knew that they could go to him for help and he epitomizes i think for me um somebody who was willing to engage on the tougher subjects and so my deepest condolences to his family uh miss catello was my eighth grade teacher um and a phenomenal personality anybody who knew debbie um she was a fighter through and

007through uh called it like it is i can't tell you how many times i was told to straighten up in class um and you know what um she could connect you with the subject and she could connect you with materials and knew how to love people in that kind of very direct way and always always encouraged you to push further not just that she had a way of bringing together the dhh program and general ed students and bring them together to learn a very difficult subject while you have an interpreter in the room uh distracting at times um but nevertheless um it was always a real privilege to be able to see you know her not only teach math but to herself sign while doing so um she has always been a passionate advocate for

008cancer research and despite her battle showed up year after year after year for the relay for life her legacy i think will continue on obviously as we all continue in her set but um these are two phenomenal phenomenal educators that are so indicative of the quality of educator that we have here but we will forever be a step behind with their loss so my deepest condolences uh and thank you thank you mr ferguson moving on number six adjustments to the agenda anyone have any adjustments oh we did that you're right i'm not on the same page items for future agendas which was where i really should have been mr ferguson did you have that i have a few so thank you uh so first if we can um in the near future get an update

009on the status of sb 830 as it works its way through the committee process of the legislature sb 830 for those of you who aren't memorizing every bill going through the legislature is a bill that would change how school funding is done right now we've heard kind of broad coalition support for it but uh most recently we've heard that there's some significant opposition in sacramento to this bill um i think uh it's certainly worthwhile to have the conversation here about how we want to change up potential organizing strategies to discuss why this is important to our bottom line so if we could get that back sooner rather than later not meaning to to put pepper on it but uh just timeline wise and budget wise it's important that we get that back probably by next

010meeting um so that's the first uh the second uh is just an update on our open access policy uh where that's at uh in the process um i'd also if we can get an item on the eco council and where it's going uh generally uh what's the focus what's the scope of work uh i know the superintendent has appointed a committee but where's it going what's it doing uh and i i want to make sure that it's more than just a political escape pod that we're actually um that we're looking at it and that if we're going to enter into this kind of discussion um that there's direction from the policy makers here as to where we're going um i'd also like an agenda item to come back to discuss converting the board of education

011from an at-large board to districted seats i'd like that there have been recent changes in state law to ensure equity in our elections and a part of that includes the elimination of at-large seats as board members so i'd like to have initial discussions about uh the drawing of district lines potentially for district board members to represent and then last but not least i would like to see an agenda item come back addressing potential conflicts of interest of board members running businesses on school sites and that would prohibit any board run or board member run small business from operating on school sites thank you president yes uh i have two things one i'd like to get a report back on the number of seniors we have who aren't going to be able to walk due to

012attendance issues just have a conversation about uh who they are the numbers why that is what intervention has been put into place to make sure that we can hopefully remedy the situation um i'd also like to agendize the conversation and i appreciate dr neiman talking about this with me earlier to re-examine the concept of a district calendar i know there are far too many things to put on it on each individual site but perhaps creating something that has the major events so that people can make a decision about where to go when things when there's a conflict between a couple of different uh events on any given night that's all i got anyone else thank you okay uh presentation recognitions number eight a recognition of the 2021-2022 national merit scholar final finalist dr paramo good

013evening president tabit it's my pleasure to introduce the proud principal of burbank high school dr thomas crother who is going to recognize some students from burbank high school good evening president tabit and members of the board good evening dr hill and members of cabinet as dr promise said i'm tom crowther proud principal at burbank high school and tonight um i get to once again recognize several students who are finalists for national merit scholarship consideration from burbank high school i'm actually going to have them come up individually and share a little bit about themselves i think you're familiar how prestigious this is roughly uh you have to be the top one percent of your state and top one percent nationally on the psat in your junior year and um roughly about 15 000 students make the

014semifinals and then half gone as finalists and are eligible for some well-earned scholarship dollars so with that i'd like to introduce our first student uh brandon choi come on up please [Applause] hello hello okay uh good evening members of the board um thank you for inviting myself and the other uh national merit final uh winners uh today um my name is brandon choi and i'm a senior at burbank high school i'm currently aspiring to pursue a major in computer science um at either usc or uc santa barbara it's a decision i still have to make um i also love playing the violin whether it's playing um classical concertos or themes from movies and films in my free time i enjoy hanging out with friends napping and building mechanical keyboards [Laughter] um i'd like to give

015a special things to my parents because it's uh the time and effort that they gave that allowed me to have this opportunity to like um win the national mirror all right thank you [Applause] our next bulldog is mark lynn [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hello everyone thank you so much for having me today it's my honor to be here and to represent bourbon kai in the national merit uh semi or finalist standing uh i'm a senior at burping high school and i love playing on the bourbon highs tennis team i just came from a tennis game actually and um this year i am one of the varsity captains uh i also love running my business slimy honey and i have developed a passion for entrepreneurship that i hope to pursue in college at either ucla or uc

016berkeley in my free time i enjoy playing the piano hanging out with my friends and listening to music and i too would love to thank my parents and my friends and everyone who supported me for allowing me to win this award thank you [Applause] and then last but not least uh we have vhs student suzy matanyan who come on come on up please susie [Applause] oh okay uh hi everyone thanks for having all of us thanks for giving this chance for recognition for our achievements in the national merit run um i'm susie matenyan and i've attended burbank high school from freshman to senior year hereby excelled in all my ap classes and i've been lucky to take such rigorous and demanding courses i'm currently in the instrumental music program i'm the president and i've played

017the flute for about eight years throughout all my busd experience and i have a love for reading especially books from the romantic era and i'm currently just trying to make the most out of my senior year before i start as a biochemistry major in the fall at ucla thank you [Applause] president tabit i would like to also recognize a student from john burroughs high school he was not able to make it tonight his name is ronan park but i will make sure that he gets his certificate and he's recognized at his school as well thank you did you like the ticket sure okay is so many places to live oh [Applause] oh okay those are the fun parts of being a board member getting to meet those kids and congratulate them and be proud of

018them representing burbank and how how much work they put into what they do just to be a student so thank you for that okay now moving on to number ten up number nine student representatives we'll start with uh burbank high school shoshanna tripperdosian welcome it's nice to see all three of you here tonight good evening board president tabbett members of the board superintendent hill and senior staff our prom tickets are now on sale there will be horse carriage rides headed tattoos flip books and many other fun activities so make sure to have a prom contract while purchasing your ticket and following this yesterday and today seniors got to vote for prom court through a google classroom last week we just concluded our elections and voting was done via google classroom in their grade level classrooms

019and thank you for everyone that voted for class representation and for your study body student body representatives on april 1st burroughs and burbank collaborated for april fool's day where bhs was a bear for a day it was super fun and our school really enjoyed it and on april 14th we held another blood drive in collaboration with ucla and got a confirmed 60 bags of blood in and out gift cards and amc movie tickets were given out to all donors so thank you again to all those who donated just a reminder that on april 30th bourbon kai's junior class will be holding a car show there will be a wide array of cars from exotics to classics and different boots offering merchandise drinks and food to sign someone card up it will be a 20 fee

020and the link can be found on our instagram vhs bulldog asb today burbank and burroughs winter guard and percussion held a special performance at our gym it was a great way to end the school year to not only see burbank's talents but burroughs our dance teams are presenting a spring dance concert in our feelings featuring unleashed advanced dances 3 2 and 1 and guest performance on april 29th and 30th we hope to see support from our community for these great teams tomorrow april 22nd is the day of silence where students take a vow of silence and participate in the silent campus rallies and demonstrations it is a day to spread awareness about the forced silence bullying and harassment of lgbtq plus students and community tomorrow students are going to perform a day-long vow silence to

021protest against the silencing and bullying of queer members next week is our spirit week and rally of the school year monday is america monday tuesday is plaid pj day wednesday is neutral day thursday is denim day and friday's rally day which the theme is wild west bhs so dress up as cowgirls and cowboys april 24th marks armenian genocide remembrance day on our morning announcements a video was shown explaining the armenian genocide and the sustained systematic destruction of the armenian people and idea and identity in the ottoman empire during world war one alongside spreading awareness and information about the genocide many clubs such as care for armenia and krantz for kids will be holding fundraiser drives in support of armenia that's all for my announcement is there any questions i can answer i did have one

022can you tell us where your prom is because you're doing carriage rides that's so so it's at the santa anita serona terrace you can find all the information and the exact address on our instagram very cool it won't be weird if we show up no no thank you okay let's move on to jewel reader from john burroughs julie you look a little different from the last time i saw you really no you don't remember where i saw you last friday oh wait oh presents yes so jewel completed her six years as an ncl and the last time i saw her she was i mean you're beautiful every time i see you but dressed to the nines and putting your best foot forward so i was very proud of you thank you very much okay um

023good evening everyone i hope you're all doing well um to begin my report for tonight i would like to speak on events from the past month link crew hosted their first ever morph where freshmen got their very own school dance on april 1st also on april 1st we had our first ever school-wide april fool's prank we collaborated with burbank high to have the school switch spirit gear for the day boroughs were burbank here and burbank war burroughs gear we also collaborated with our broadcast journalism class to have burbank high read our morning announcements and vice versa at burbank burbank and burroughs joined forces at a workday a few days prior to create posters we filled our front walkway with burbank posters connecting jbhs and bhas in this fun way was super well received by the

024student body and we hope asb continued continues this event through the future this month is armenian genocide remembrance week and we are so lucky to have such an amazing armenian club on campus this club created a whole week of events to educate students on armenian culture tradition and the importance of remembering the genocide and they dedicated this week to involve the whole school on monday they sold purple flower pins in the quad on tuesday they collaborated with eco club to create sustainable forget-me-not flowers on wednesday they had school a school-wide virtual assembly and had an opportunity for students to ask the speaker questions at lunch on thursday they taught and performed the dance of survival in the quad and on friday they're going to encourage students to wear red blue and orange in support this

025week was so special educational and necessary another amazing event held by an amazing club was the vigil in honor of the 23rd anniversary of the columbine shooting hosted by march for our lives yesterday they had local government officials speak led a minute of silence and gave amazing amazing speeches themselves this vigil was so beautiful and such a special moment that was held on our campus in sports news congrats to varsity boys golf for going 20 to 0 in the pacific league and to our powerhouse and sound sensation choirs for sweeping nationals in new york city also varsity boys volleyball became undefeated in league champs in in league champs once again this is their 12th consecutive pacific league title and we are so proud of the work they have put into the program next here are

026some upcoming events we are super excited for next week is our music festival spirit week all week we're having music themed dress-up days and lunchtime activities on thursday we have our spring rally as well where we are recognizing spring and winter athletes along with clubs on campus each class was assigned a different music festival freshman stage coach sophomore lollapalooza junior coachella and senior camp flogna we are super excited to have some fun before the year ends with entire student body also upcoming in asb is our third and final blood drive of the year next week we are super excited to collaborate with ucla to give our students the opportunity to give back to their community we are also very excited for the black student union assembly the first week of may they have been working

027super hard on this presentation and the student body is very excited our friendly fruit club is hosting a fruit drive from april april 20 22-29 they're accepting any of your back yard fruit to three locations across burbank they will be sorting through fruit and redistributing to people in the community in need of this nutrition nutritious food opportunity the 15th annual poetry slam is coming up on april 28th in the library where students can enter their poetry into this competition today and tomorrow the jbhs dance program is hosting y2k today a dance show featuring all dance classes and teams this saturday april 23rd our environmental club cleanup club will be hosting a beach cleanup in santa monica in honor of earth day this club hosts these events weekly and does such an amazing job giving back

028to our community and involving students in positive environmental change tomorrow april 22nd at lunch the jbhs sexual and gender alliance club will be hosting a moment of silence at lunch in honor of voices that have been silenced due to hate to the lgbtq plus community we are looking forward to all these upcoming events and in jbhs senior news prom is next saturday april 30th from 7 to 11 pm and will be hosted under the endeavor at the california science center the day before prom all seniors will attend an arrival live assembly that warns and educates students on distracted driving on monday may 16th we will be hosting the senior awards and on wednesday may 18th we will be hosting a senior brunch where seniors will be excused from morning classes to join us for breakfast

029the senior slideshow and yearbook distribution grad night is friday may 20th at california adventure and of course graduation is on may 26th thank you and i will be happy to answer any questions if you have them now i have a question yes um as someone with a giant lemon tree in her backyard uh when is the you said april 22-29 how do i get more information okay you can go on to the borough's website okay and or yeah the borough's website and if you scroll down on like the home page it's gonna have a flyer for it and there are three locations i think it's like people's houses that are near bhs jbhs and muir perfect thank you anything else thank you so much i'm followed by our gentleman from monterey high school evan and

030i owen there was evan first wasn't it and now we replaced by owen thank you owen vavato which is right here in front of me good evening board president tabit distinguished members of the board superintendent hill district staff in our audience we recently started our quarter here in monterey about five weeks ago with tons of school spirit monitor asb is getting ready for graduation and the end of the school year this month we are making sure that students or the cap and gowns and know about prom tickets to the other home schools we had another spirit spirit week and we sold spring grams that week very successful and a while ago we also had a volleyball tournament i am also very pleased to report that my team won we beat mr guyer's team so that's

031an even better win mrs weaver's team unfortunately came in with last place but she is determined to have a redo and reclaim her title s back testing will be beginning the week of the 25th which is next week and miss weaver is also working with counselors at each school site to help facilitate our transfers we have a lot of students who made up their missing credits and would like to go back to their home school we also need to make sure that we have enough time to transfer more students to monterey if they do unfortunately fail to the start of next school year thank you does anybody have any questions i'm happy to answer of course thank you now we can move to 10 requests to address the board an individual or group representative present

032this evening may address the board of education on any agenda item by completing a white request card and turning to miss clark speakers are requested to state their name prior to speaking to the board not more than five minutes may be allotted to each speaker except by unanimous consent of the board of education the superintendent may refer the matter to the proper department for review the district is providing alternatives to in-person attendance for view viewing and participating any individual or group representative may address the board of education on any agenda item or subject within its jurisdiction during one of the three public comments sections and it's my understanding that this evening we have no virtual speakers so i'll not read that part um and just move right on to calling some names and hearing from

033folks the first speaker this evening is polly steinberg stenberg followed by melissa walden good evening everyone i am paulie stenberg and my pronouns are she her good evening to members of the board superintendent dr hill wherever you are administrators classified staff teachers parents caregivers and extended family who make up our community i am speaking tonight both personally and on behalf of the destiny education project board personally i want to extend first a heartfelt thank you to dr aguikanyan for speaking at my children's elementary school in honor of armenian history month both of my children ages seven and nine were deeply impacted by your visit your visit and discussion of armenian history prompted incredibly meaningful conversations in our home that evening thank you so much for sharing with them and our school community in that way

034i want to extend another heartfelt thank you to dr weisberg for attending the second pilot run of the destiny education project's peer-to-peer reading program at providencia elementary it really means a lot to students to see that school board members are interested in and invested in them thank you so much we hope to have the opportunity to include each school board member in future programs of reading with the destiny education project moving on i would like to express our organizational support for the adoption of resolutions 33-30 and 39 on the agenda tonight regarding the various days and weeks of recognition the destiny education project has spent several months organizing specific ways to express appreciation to district staff and all of the cse job families in addition to the jobs being acknowledged by the boards by the

035board at tonight's meeting we are excited to spend the week of may 16 to 20 in recognition of all csea members working in accounting clerical and technology instructional assistants and yard supervisors library coordinators food service staff grounds and building trades custodians and all other auxiliary support staff we are very present to the interconnected web of these jobs in relationship to our school community and we are so grateful and humbled by destiny's call to action for greater levels of acknowledgement of of all district staff especially near and dear to destiny who could not be here tonight is custodian appreciation day which we will be celebrating on may 20th destiny is encouraging the entire school community to reach out to their respective schools and facilities and offer notes of thanks and gestures of kindness to this incredible

036group of people who have been working overtime to keep our shared spaces clean in my capacity as board member of the destiny education project i'm also here to share about our advocacy and support for senator portentino's bill sb 830. in our organizational letter of support to the state senate standing committee on education we stated our support for the language as written in busd board resolution 29 in support of sba 30. following yesterday's committee hearing the destiny education project board met to consider the potential fiscal impact of the added 5.8 million to burbank unified having attended this year's lcap meetings and the board study session on foundations the destiny education project has been keenly interested in how the district can secure a steady stream of state funding for dei work as the destiny education project grows

037we are balancing between developing internal programs as well as advocating for and supporting district programs it has become clear to our board that the scale of financial resources that the district needs to realize its dei goals must be built into an ongoing funding infrastructure for the district given that the district would be required to use at least 50 percent of its supplemental educational funding if sp30 passes to supplement existing local agency expenditures to address chronic absenteeism and habitual truancy it is significant from our perspective that these expenditures be considered within a dei framework of engagement as outlined in board policy zero four one five regarding equity the nine measures identified in bp 0415 as strategies designed to promote equity and district programs and activities may be used to understand and inform the underlying causes and

038negative outcomes of chronic absenteeism and habitual truancy as is called for in sb 830. to that end a strong case could be made for using 2.9 million 50 of sba 30 funding for the continuation of existing dei contracts and the creation of a permanent dei department with a team of trained personnel to help implement these measures at each school site additional and specifically trained dei personnel would be able to work with the existing academic growth and support team to consider chronic absenteeism interventions through a dei lens in response to the forthcoming dei survey data and in response to the forthcoming report shared from the academic growth and support team in may in bp0415 the board and district commit to quote eliminating inequitable practices and cultivating the unique gifts talents and interests of every child to

039end the predictive value of social or cultural factors such as race race ethnicity class sexual identity sexual orientation or gender on student success we have an opportunity with funding from sb 830 to support all of our existing programs from mental health resources two sentences left family services academic interventions food services and more with a dei team well versed and trained in each of these areas as a non-profit board the destiny education project would like to express our enormous grouted gratitude to all members of the board for your commitment to equity in bp 0415 and to superintendent dr hill and dei consultant stephanie mccoy for their special roles in this work to date thank you that was thank you melissa walden followed by darla gerhardter i'm super nervous so i'm going to do my absolute best

040don't be nervous good evening thank you good evening my name is melissa walden i am an rsp teacher at john muir middle school i've been working for burbank unified for the past six years at my site i've been involved in working with students who have a wide range of learning cognitive and emotional disabilities my role as a special education teacher involves wearing many hats to help students access the curriculum as well as fulfilling other duties of my position as a case manager which is required by the district in my position i'm not only a teacher planning lessons and curriculum for students i also fulfill several designated duties most of which are completed outside of my contract contracted hours i am an ongoing case manager who is scheduling writing holding ieps sometimes holding multiple ieps for

041one student collecting data to write ieps making and dispersing copies and completing signed ieps i'm sorry completed and signed iaps to the district office filing them in the queue sending it home for to the parent as well as disbursing it to the whole team communicating with parents providing support for collab teachers collaborating with teachers regarding my students on my caseload sending out ieps at a glance and sending new ones accessing assessing students for triannual reviews or initials to see if they qualify for special education writing academic reports lesson planning and accommodating assignments for students individual needs and differentiated instruction collaboration with related service providers goal tracking with legitimate data charting data progress reports and i know i'm missing something but you get the point it is really a lot of responsibilities that we have the

042special education program at mira helps students not only access the curriculum but also promotes confidence ingenuity critical thought and the desire to learn due to the severe time constraint i have as a special education teacher most of the paperwork i do is between three to seven pm on weekdays and at least one weekend day four to five hours depending on what's going on we as special education teachers are so passionate about what we do that we really haven't stopped to think about how burned out we really are until right now we absolutely need more time to do our jobs with fidelity since we have many different positions in one certain areas falter and errors are made if we spend our valuable time planning and differentiating amazing lessons for our students to access to access and

043learn from the paperwork side does not get completed and deadlines are not met since we are so dedicated to our students we make sure to devote our time to ensuring that they are accessing the curriculum and receiving the various supports that they need in turn we can't cast our paperwork aside so instead we work after hours and on weekends like i said but how do we solve this catch-22 of being tugged so many different directions well it seems simple enough give special education teachers more time to fulfill the three positions that they were required to fit into just one position more time would help us provide more differentiated lessons more support and guidance for our students as they struggle to bridge the gap between our academic gap between themselves and general education students more time

044would also help special education teachers complete the long laundry list that we have regarding the other two roles we have as case managers and secretaries giving us more time will also help with our work-life balance and overall positively affect our morale in turn this will allow us to make less mistakes and communicate more with parents making them feel more confident with the services that we're being that we're providing other areas that need to be addressed are smaller caseloads for speech pathologists so that they can do their job with fidelity as well also a cap on special education classes with no more than 15 students as most of the time especially i teach english so most of the time my students need one-on-one support so having any more than 15 it gets a little crazy and

045then they lose out on on what we need to give them a smaller student teacher ratio is beneficial because students again have better access to the support to help promote understanding and master of material now i'm going to gush about how amazing my students are just before spring break and state testing i am proud to tell you that my students made a huge milestone in their lives they got up this is my eighth graders they got up in front of class and delivered speeches about what they tru are truly passionate about in life this might seem like not a big deal for some but for my students that came to me at the beginning of the year um thinking they were not capable am i done oh oh sorry thinking they were not capable of

046uh being able to uh do that because of their disability um sorry this is huge despite feeling shy and vulnerable they knew they were in a safe place in my classroom and at john muir and honestly i was nervous to come here but that i thought about how amazing they were i was like i gotta get up there you know so they pushed through their feelings and shined all of them beaming with pride as they conquered with a challenge of not only writing a speech but presenting it in front of class it's milestones like this that remind me of why i teach and why i push through the extra time i put in after hours sorry to make sure that i don't let the ball drop as they are the most important part of all

047my roles as a special education teacher please recognize the need for additional resources for special education students so that they can continue to help them grow or we can continue to help them grow and succeed as they make their journey out of school into the ever-changing world thank you so much thank you melissa darla gerhardt followed by crystal moran good evening president tabit members of the board dr hill busd staff fellow teachers and all others in attendance my name is darla gerharder i started working for busd in 1999 and have spent most of my career as an elementary resource specialist teacher so rsp in the elementary i'm in my first year as a second and third grade special day class teacher at providencia i love my new position in school so why am i here

048several years ago i participated in this bed master plan committee and many requests and concerns were brought up such as weighted caseloads planning time and curriculum these same concerns exist today i'm here tonight to campaign for positive changes to ensure equity for our special education teachers speech pathologists special education staff and students please support and recommend approval of bta's proposal on article 31. your support means special education teachers will have manageable class sizes sdc teachers or special day class second grade and up will have just two grade levels instead of three or even four grade levels sdc and rsp teachers will have at least one instructional assistant this means every teacher and student has the opportunity for an equitable learning experience without an instructional assistant it is often impossible to appropriately differentiate instruction to our

049diverse population of students teachers are often forced to group students to meet instructional minutes rather than instructional needs with an instructional assistant smaller groups can be formed during the same period allowing for more appropriate groupings itinerant and half-time teachers have some of the most challenging obstacles they are often the teachers without an instructional assistant this impacts their ability to differentiate instruction and be efficient in their jobs with the limited time they have on campus having an instructional assistant will reduce some of these barriers this is a win-win for both students and teachers guaranteed planning time is also essential special education teachers should have at a minimum the same planning time as general education teachers as an rsp teacher i wasn't given the pe planning time that the fourth and fifth grade teachers had in fact

050i lost my planning time for every iep held at 8am 2 30 3 o'clock or during the school day planning time during our working hours helps teachers maintain balanced lives this keeps us fresh and ready to meet our students needs every day as an elementary rsp teacher i had a legal caseload of 28 and often more students beyond my caseload i simultaneously taught sixth grade levels k through five if you're at a school with the tk that means seven grade levels this would be impossible without a full-time instructional assistant having an assistant allows me the ability to support multiple grade levels in the same period while providing appropriate differentiated instruction to meet our students needs having an instructional assistant also allows for continued student support while attending many of the ieps staff meetings and assessment

051assessment sessions held during instructional hours reduction and adherence to a smaller caseload will result in better outcome for our students tk through third general education teachers have a maximum class size of 24. i'm teaching special ed and i have more than they do more conferences more reports all of that why should an rrsp teacher have a caseload of 28 or more the ever-increasing demand to meet legal requirements deal with litigious cases and still meet the needs of our diverse students is overwhelming appropriate class sizes manageable case loads guaranteed planning time and full-time instructional assistance will help make jobs manageable and allow teachers to do what we do best provide the best differentiated instruction to meet our students needs please support special education teachers and speech pathologists and of course our students by supporting bta's contract

052proposal thank you darla our next speaker is crystal myron did i am i pronouncing miran thank you followed by amelia hernandez good evening members of the board dr hill my name is crystal meedon and i teach the tk and kindergarten students in the stepping stones program at stevenson elementary by the way i've been teaching there for six years and i love it love it so stepping stones is the only special education program serving children tk to fifth grade with moderate to severe disabilities in the burbank unified school district common diagnosis of our students in our program include autism spectrum disorder down syndrome and intellectual disabilities but we have a very diverse population and serve children with a wide variety of qualifying conditions some of you have had the opportunity to visit our classrooms recently and

053see our amazing students playing learning just like any other students do you would all have also seen that in order to provide our students with the same kind of opportunities as their general education peers many resources are required creating these therapeutic spaces and educational opportunities isn't just something we are passionate about it is also mandated by federal law some of the resources required for these classrooms include sensory equipment assistive technology alternative curriculum specialized training and of course our staff it would not be possible to appropriately appropriately serve our students without adequate staffing our students need support for emotional regulation social skills practice communication management of aggressive and self-injurious behaviors and toileting i'm going to say that again and this is not a comprehensive list by any means when we are understaffed it is impossible to

054teach when we are understaffed we are dedicated entirely to making our making sure our students are safe and clean and when we are understaffed as teachers we typically give up our breaks and our lunches to maintain a foundational level of functioning students miss out on their learning and teachers get burnt out this year we have been understaffed consistently and when our staff members must be absent from the classroom we almost never get subs for them recently we reached out to our union the burbank teachers unit association and to as many district members as we could to find to find and amplify our message that we need help in response we have received some more help and we are grateful we are still short staffed most days but we are heartened to see the effort to

055help us get the support we need while these short-term efforts are appreciated by the entire program some persistent issues still need to be addressed number one the stepping stones program needs to be supported by the district staff agency staff is expensive and they cannot help with important needs such as toileting we need number two we need subs for dtts and health aides there should never be a scenario in which an aid is absent and there is no coverage for them in the best of scenarios this means that the access to learning is limited for one or more students in the worst case scenario students cannot even come to school because we're not providing the required support please understand when one to one support is written into a student's iep which is a legal document it

056is not optional they must have their one-to-one support number three our class must be limited to a reasonable number of students currently the district has an understanding that no more than 12 students will be placed in each stepping stones classroom but this number is unreasonable even if we increase the number of support staff in the room to manage that many kids it is the responsibility of the teacher to case manage all of those students and to design implement and track their academic programs an appropriate number of students per classroom in a program such as stepping stones is eight number four we as an entire vertical track of mod to severe programs from tk through facts deserve to have someone at the district office who has a deep understanding of our needs we need someone who

057can answer our unique questions and support us on every level there used to be a program special program specialist position that was loosely serving that purpose but that position is now eliminated we are still here we still need support and we need this program specialist to be there at the district office dedicated to us and to the most involved students in the district stepping stones is special in the district and not just because of our amazing students we have worked hard to create a safe supportive developmentally appropriate and academically stimulating program for the district's most unique learners our aim is to create a model elementary mod to severe program one upon which other districts may look when they endeavor to improve their own such programs please consider our needs as you think about bta negotiations

058for special education as a whole we are a program that the district can be proud of and we need your help to continue our work thank you amelia hernandez followed by cassidy gavin it's amalia amalia thank you um good evening members of the board and district um administration my name is dr amalia hernandez i've been a speech language pathologist for busd for the past two years at bret hart elementary i'm speaking tonight on behalf of myself and one of my colleagues shannon arnell i've spoken a lot recently about the needs to create manageable and sustainable workloads for our slps specifically those that work with our most impacted populations students at leap stepping stones and bridges you've heard the data about caseload numbers hours of work beyond beyond our contract hours and overall difficulty recruiting and

059retaining qualified slps shannon shared with me um the following statement i became a speech-language pathologist because i love children and i want to help as many as i could to find their voice i choose the schools because i believe in public education and i wanted to give quality therapy to families who may not be able to afford private therapists i also chose it because of the hours it's important to have a job that allows me to get off at the same time as my children so i can give them the time and attention they deserve as a mother of two beautiful daughters sadly there are many days i have to stay after work for ieps and triannuals between january and march of this year i had 26 after-school meetings the time spent after contract hours

060affects our entire home schedule i have to pay for child care even though i do not get compensated for the hours i spend at work i will always be proud to be an employee of this district i just ask that the time slps spend past our work hours away from our families can be considered by this board i myself would also like to share tonight why why is it so critical that the district invests in our programs i've worked as a speech language pathologist for the past 10 years and in education for the past 18 years i've been on different staffs at multiple sites in different roles i have never worked with a sped team as dedicated and cohesive as the one at bret hart starting with martha walter our principal to our sped teachers

061cassidy's here um the related service providers and classroom staff our team is amazing exclamation point we're also stretched too thin we have lost members of our team because the workload is too much it's not fair that such talented and compassionate educators should have to choose between the students and families they love working with and their own health and well-being because the district is not willing to support our students and staff at the level they require it's not enough for the district to say that they do not have money to fund our sped programs and students this is not negotiable these services are legally required if we took a proactive stance and worked together to think creatively about services and programs we could be great i love working with my leap students and families this is

062why i am a speech pathologist i shouldn't have to consider switching schools or leaving my kids just because the workload is unmanageable the district has a history of being reactionary instead of proactive for example we have been far over caseload numbers across various sites since the beginning of the year the district solution has consistently been to provide mpa folks to cover the overflow usually starting in april or may i got help last friday this is unacceptable it's just not good practice we should be hiring now for district slps to start in fall so we can hire the cream of the crop not patching up caseloads with npa staff we should be looking at the needs of our students at our sites and start the year with extra support knowing that caseload numbers will grow we

063should be systematically monitoring workloads for slps and adjusting as needed along the way we should be looking at creative and innovative ways to provide services that might be more out of the box but really do address student needs board members and district administrators i challenge you to become a district of true equity and excellence for all our students let's be proactive to create a special education program that is exemplary we need to do more for our sped population and our staff that support their education as the supreme court case andrew versus douglas county school district stated the minimum is not enough thank you for your [Applause] time thank you dr hernandez cassidy gavin followed by nicole derbecki hello um my name is cassidy gavin and i'm actually speaking on behalf of another slp at a

064different school site her name is christine rogg and she writes good evening my name is christine rogg and i am a speech and language pathologist at stevenson elementary i've been in the district specifically at stevenson for nine years not to mention that i'm also a product of busd roosevelt luther and jbhs at my site i have been involved in the stepping stone program which services students who are moderately to severely delayed across a variety of domains including cognition motor and speech and language these students have a varying degree of speech and language needs ranging from non-verbal low verbal to verbal at this time there are 17 out of 33 students who are using augmented alternative communication or an aac device or materials to access their curriculum and make their daily needs known to adults for

065these students to advance in their education these aac resources are vital it's part of my training and continued education to assess each student for their specific needs obtain the device program the device and then train teachers staff and parents on how to use the device implementing the use of these devices takes a lot of time and effort the staff in these classrooms have most likely never seen programs like these and need sport need support with the classroom day to help the students learn how to use their communication device it is imperative that slps that are at sites where aac device use is high that their caseloads be reduced to support the student and class more effectively dr weissberg you saw you got to see firsthand the use of aac device in the classroom and i

066hope you saw the value that it brings to each student who has been provided with the treatment time to learn how to use the device effectively the hours spent training the teachers and the classroom and staff in the classroom the bta's proposals will have a positive impact more time for iep and assessments including aac assessments and implementation lower speech and language pathologist caseload especially at sites with seed with specialized programs like seed leap stepping stones bridges dhh planning time equivalent to the general education teacher i have countless stories on the positive impact that the use of aac has created in the classroom and at home for these students i have the opportunity to give a student a student a voice in their word one time a student spelled i love you at the end of

067a speech session and smiled at me this is priceless a student was able to use who cannot use his physical voice was able to express himself now the look on the student's face when they requested for their favorite item with a picture or voice output device and received it is priceless please support additional resources for sped students they deserve it thank you cassidy so nicole drovecchi followed by heather good uh good evening board president members of the board district and staff my name is nicole gerbecki i am a pe teacher at dolores huerta but i am not speaking for myself tonight i'm speaking for my colleague rachel silverstein moran she's a special ed teacher at dolores huerta good evening my name is rachel moran i am a 27 27-year employee at the burbank unified school

068district i have spent my entire career as a special education teacher at dolores huerta formerly jordan over the course of my teaching career the workload of special education teachers has tripled each case manager at our at our site averages the legal limit of 28 students all of which require extensive time writing ieps behavior plans addendums and having a variety of associate meetings with parents psychologists administrators teachers and students most parents require between one and two ieps or conferences per year some as in a high profile case manager can be responsible for five or more meetings for that one individual student at dhms we have many such students i have three students who require multiple meetings with parents to facilitate an iep that can be agreed upon by all parties each iep can take upwards of

069five hours to complete that includes collecting documentation writing the reports creating the iep document speaking to parents before meeting for input chasing down teachers to get documentation for the iep and actually holding the meeting which is done during our conference period if a student is having a tri-annual review a separate multi-discipline disciplinary report needs to be created with the input from other service providers including speech ot adapted pe and school psychologists if the student has an outside service provider the case manager is often responsible for contacting that person as well for input each case manager is also responsible for a tri-annual iep to test the student using several testing protocols this could be the woodcock johnson 4 which is 13 subsets given which can take two to three conference periods to administer depending upon the

070accuracy of the student's answers the tests of oral written language which is also called a towl4 on average takes a full conference period to administer even though the test itself is 20 minutes due to instruction set up in directions and possibly the kauffman test of educational achievement ktea which is given for a student who is failing into a gray area which may no longer qualify for services this is a double check test although some schools give it as a first test in the towl not all case managers assign to their own caseload of students but as new transfer students transfer in they are often required a transfer iep which requires all the above steps including meeting the parents and conducting the meeting then the student is placed on the case manager's caseload and is now

071the responsibility several times during the year a general education teacher or parent will ask a student to be tested for a a learning challenge this occurs once the current sped teachers are required to do all the above including all the testing and writing of reports then they need to meet with parents as part of the team and to determine if the student qualifies for services we deal with lawyers and advocates and parents all during our conference period many of my colleagues take work home to complete since we have access to the sped program at home we are each responsible for meeting the special education assistants on a rotating basis also during our conference period to confer with them about the students we did not see in our classes but are on our caseload we go

072into classes of general education teachers and collect observational data on students as well as track progress on grades we we complete both regular grade report cards and set a second set of report cards that are goal related to the iep these are generated four times a year while the general education teachers complete their report cards eight times per year we must generate an additional four goal specific iep progress reports this requires talking to teachers during our conferences to see that our students are meeting the goals and objectives during this time of the year we also complete the transitional ieps for incoming fifth graders in outgoing 8th graders this requires us to spend several days in meetings with teachers from our school sites so we can properly program our new students we need additional prep time

073a larger stipend and the respect we deserve of educators and most needy students thank you for your time thank you nicole [Applause] we have heather good who's also here on behalf of someone else yes and then we'll follow by with um barbara perry did i yes hi i'm heather good i work at the independent learning academy um i'm well she'll tell you in a second esteem board of education members i apologize for not being able to be present this evening and want to thank my fellow union members for speaking on my behalf you're welcome my name is aaron barish and i have had i had to make sure i said that correctly aaron barish and i have had the honor of serving our district as a mod severe special education teacher at john burroughs high

074school in the independent living skills program for over 21 years i understand that our moderate severe special education students do not make up a sizable percentage of the overall student population despite this my students deserve the best education that we can provide and we can only do that if we are able to provide them with the best practices in education available one of the absolute best ways that we can better serve our students is through maintaining small class sizes based on best practices in special education cited by the california teachers association moderate severe special education classes should be capped with a maximum of six to eight students we have been lucky in recent years to have smaller class sizes but with numbers increasing in the next couple of years with student matriculation our program size

075will be on the rise our program is expected to grow from current numbers by 38 percent next year 46 percent the year after that and 62 percent three years from now i believe that firm caps on special education classes especially moderate severe special education classes is the most important piece of the special education article that the bta bargaining committee is bringing forward please take this into consideration when making decisions regarding the special education article in the new contract thank you heather barbara perry by kate bailey hi there this is take two for me i was here at six o'clock so i'm here happy to be here at seven and hi thank you for all supporting me [Applause] and i'm here as a team member with the district office as well with the district and the

076board members and also my special education district office members because they've been highly supportive paulette and leslie and adriana as well as the whole team so i'm not here to this special education district i'm here to support us as a district office team and as a site team and as a board team so hi my name is barbara perry and i teach algebra 1 a and b and earth space science at the basic level at burbank high school in the special education class and i've been working with burbank for four years now and i'm enjoying being part of the special education master plan meeting with dr coss and i'm optimistic about our opportunities as a site department and district i'm speaking here tonight to the board and the district as a team to agree to

077the proposals in front of you for all of our special education teachers in burbank your special education teachers in burbank unified school districts our district are consistently and diligently working extremely hard we as the district need to retain the staff we have to build strong special education to build a strong special education department and team for the future we have five to six new special education teachers at burbank high and i'm excited about team building i'm excited about the camaraderie and assisting our students together to grow to really serve our students well to practice best practices and to really work together effectively at the site and with our district and board teams first i'd like to invite each of you to my classroom at burbank high school you're more than welcome to come anytime unannounced

078i'm in room 2207 and join my class second periods best with my ninth graders and currently in my second period class algebra 1a a special education academic instruction setting a special education class which is supposed to be a smaller academic setting this is what the iep basically says i would love for you all to come be a part of our class even though the class size is large you're always welcome you can buddy up with a student for a day recently i had a colleague let me know that there was not a cap to special education classes and we'll see what happens next year i responded with no you're right there's not a cap that is right but what is best practice i teach 22 students with a range of unique learning styles in a

079collaborative collaborative setting with our three students who are deaf and hard of hearing so a total of 25 students with a with my dhh teaching colleague and dhh professional rapidly working with their three students interpreting vocabulary and concepts in algebra also a different language the students know spanish asl or spanish sign language so they're working hard on the side currently i don't have a teaching assistant a paraprofessional assigned to me this brings me to my first point my period two class size is too large 22 25 students in a special education class algebra at that is too large i provided a solution for the 22-23 school year i've emailed two class lists to our department two lists of our students two classes that are leveled to the student's needs these classes next year will be

080algebra one b and they need to be created into two classes for the 22 23 school years which is 12 in one class and 13 in another with the space for flexibility for three to four additional students to join the class throughout the year i'm really hoping i'm heard also from the center of harvard education research as from the east coast to the west coast to ucla's educational studies and informational programs there are studies that support the benefits to our students for smaller class sizes this is important to our students our parents our team as a district we need to benefit our students that are our students that are most impacted by learning disabilities and different disabilities so there's a lot of research out there for our students i can provide that to you as

081well my second point is planning time enough time on the job during the school day to do our job currently i have 25 students in this algebra 1a class no excuse me currently i have 25 students to case manage that means to hold their annuals get input for general ed teachers do try testing develop their triangles initials and progress reports four times a year and if you just yield to me a couple minutes if that's my timer buzzer i'm almost done we had a speaker go over by about a minute so i would say that that's the limit that i would be going to thank you no worries to the speaker that went over a minute just saying thank you so i have to do progress reports four times a year on top of this

082year covid and all the transitions there and all that comes with covid changes in placement to ila different settings require additional planning coordinating schedules and another amendment also there are transition testing post secondary planning for the students career goals and the need that need to be conducted we also to make sure their accommodations in six classes uh are working for them and it is a lot if we do not work late in the evening on the weekends we will be behind burbank unified school district uh special education teachers don't have enough time in their school day during the job to get the job done we need one planning period for curriculum planning because yes we are teaching and planning a scope of sequence of instruction for my three different prep periods i have three different

083classes i started with five prep periods as well we need a planning a period for our iep caseloads all the tasks assigned to us and more time it takes more time than people realize although thank you i'm sorry i gave you yeah oh man okay well um the final point that i'd like to make is that there's 25 kids on my caseload thank you so thank you very much and thanks for teaming up with me to pass the proposals we will see you kate bailey followed by tracy sorensen okay good evening members of the board dr hill and okay i'm hiding behind the signs over there members of the decision staff my esteemed colleagues and all the other members of people that are attending today my name is kate bailey and i'm a fourth grade

084teacher at providencia elementary school i am celebrating my 25th year at burbank unified this year um i would like to speak tonight about the lack of pe teachers for fourth and fifth grade students i realized that the district has been working with the committee to find solutions for the planning time that has been taken away from us by removing our pe teachers planning time is obviously you've been listening to everyone it's extremely important to all of us for many reasons planning everything i don't think there's a teacher who ever has worked from eight to three um or whatever their contract hours are but and i welcome and appreciate any attempts to restore that to us however i mostly want to speak about the need for pe teachers for our students not only is physical education

085mandated by the state it is vital to our students mental and physical health we all have heard about the need for physical wellness but mental health and social emotional health is just as important especially considering what we've just been surviving for the last couple years and pe supports both i can be a pe teacher learn the standards and teach the standards what i am not is an athlete or an expert in this field in fact anyone that knows me will tell you that i am an absolute klutz i i can't even tell you i i and the divots on the i fall all the time so i i literally trip and fall all the time walk into things i'm just not i'm not a professional sportster our students need trained educated specialists to teach pe

086to them well it would not make sense for me to teach violin to students when i don't know how to play a violin i can learn the standards i understand the concept but i don't know how to play a violin so i'm not going to be a very good model me tripping on the field it's not working i've been relegated to timing them for running i have to stand in one place that's my job at pe so um i i think that it's just really important that the same goes for pe students need experts professional trained people to teach them teach them expertly if we really want to foster their social emotional and physical well-being and i appreciate your time and i know that you're making efforts to try and redeem this but we really

087need our pe teachers back for our kids and their health thank you thank you kate tracy sorensen followed by shannon arnold ladies and gentlemen i'm tracy sorenson i teach second grade at jefferson but today i'm here to speak for deana beale and she says ladies and gentlemen of the board thank you for your time tonight for the for the first 14 years of my career as a general education teacher i taught all levels of science from animal care classes with students with disabilities on ieps and ap biology and chemistry also with students with disabilities on ieps as a general education teacher working with students on ieps i was always in contact with the special education teachers managing their cases i inquired about accommodations goals and i also sat on numerous iep meetings as the general

088education teacher over those 14 years i thought i had a clear understanding about this spectrum of students who were on ieps and when a special education teacher does i now know as a first year special education teacher that i had no idea all the work of a special education teacher and the little amount of time that they have to do it all in when i decided to get my masters in special education i thought he had a clear understanding of what special education teachers do i admired the special education teachers i worked with i loved watching them work with students on ieps and enjoyed learning from them this year my 15th year as an educator my first year as a new special education teacher it has been clear to me more than ever that i

089did not understand fully all the duties and responsibilities of a special education teacher this has been the hardest year of my career because i have no time to do all the things i'm expected to do as a special education teacher and a classroom teacher i have had many tiers to and from work long calls with my amazing teacher mentor and countless phone calls with our special education coordinator about how to juggle all the things overall special education teachers do the job of two teachers but not but are not compensated as as such we should be paid for a point a 0.2 as a compensation for our extra hours we put in after contract hours or we should have more time during the day to complete all the things that we are expected to do when

090people ask me how i like my new position i often compare it to having a baby for the first time this might seem like an odd thing to compare being a special education teacher to but people think that they understand what it's like to be a new mom before they become one but we really do not we do not fully grasp all the things new parents go through we with sleepless nights the phases doctor appointments and the fatigue we feel we but we still love our new role as the new mom this is like being a sped teacher others think they understand everything sped teacher does and the meetings and the paperwork and the communication and all the other clerical duties of sped teacher does but unless you are you are in it like being

091a new mom or being a it is like being a sped teacher i'm not sure that right sorry you do not fully understand the responsibilities of being a special education teacher but we do love the job as a special education teacher i do not have enough time to do all my classroom teacher responsibilities plus all of my special education responsibilities most general education teachers don't have enough time to do all the duties with one planning period per day now add an extra duty that has endless amounts of paperwork communication with teachers parents administrators school psychs outside agencies and anyone else that is part of a federal iep process we must test students during our planning time and we must present our ieps during our plan time we must write our ieps during our planning time

092we also must plan for our multiple reps preps we are expected to teach and the experts at it i am not compensated enough for all of the things i do between being a special education teacher and a classroom teacher with four different classes nor do i have enough time to fully do all of my duties of what is expected of me naturally something suffers some weeks it might be my mental health my actual health my classroom responsibilities or an iep that is has to needs to be written special education teachers are not compensated enough in burbank nor given enough time to fulfill our duties with fidelity please start helping us do our jobs better by giving us the time we need to fulfill both the positions we are expected to do thank you for your

093time and consideration deana beal [Applause] thank you dina and tracy thank you shannon erinnell followed brah i think she may have left because another speaker spoke on her behalf oh no i'm speaking on somebody else's behalf i just wrote that to him yeah it's okay but i was asked when i arrived like can you speak and i'm like i don't want to but i did um so a dearborn no no worries sorry one second the speaker after you will be brian zimmerman okay i couldn't hear you over my heart no um my name is shannon arenal i'm a speech language pathologist for burbank and i'm with the seed program the preschool special needs i want to let you know that this we do three team assessments per week and we are they're all qualifying like

094this is my 11th year and it's incredible so we are they're moving to our district because our special educators are so incredible i believe and our district is awesome so i'm reading this for julie levi our rsp teacher at stevenson who cannot be here today as a resource teacher my position is a little different from the self-contained classroom special education teachers but i wanted to give insight into what elementary special ed teachers do as an elementary rsp teacher we support student success in general education with both pushing in and pulling out students in our classroom for short durations we pull them for services to address their disability we do so with an eye towards grade level expectations and standards we work with the general education teachers to provide accommodations and remediation for students sometimes we

095work with almost every teacher in the school from kindergarten to fifth grade when we need to be familiar with all of the grade level standards from k to fifth we work with the school psychologist to administer initial and triannial assessments and prepare the reports to share with parents at stevenson we can assess approximately 30 students per year and the process is done individually for each student it takes many hours to complete as we all know in addition to our 28 listed on our caseload we also assess for these initial evaluations rsp teachers work with parents some with whom are struggling with understanding their children's learning disability which we are we're also like therapists really as special educators um in our role as case manager we write ieps we recommend goals services accommodations for students rsp

096teachers work with classroom teachers administrators and parents to provide special education support services for the students on our caseload at my site i support our curriculum specialist by the s back testing by using my room for proctoring all students with separate setting accommodations it also includes my 504 student plans and i love being part of this and really enjoy providing support to my students and to my colleagues however i can this is julie um i mentioned this all because uh people who don't work with elementary school students are unaware of the role an elementary arts teacher has we work really hard and wear hot hats not typically worn by other teachers the best part of my job is also the most challenging customizing the support services to reach each student where they are at at

097that moment in time with an eye towards academic and social emotional growth this is why we need your support uh as article 31 with a special ed article that's it thank you i talk with my hands a lot thank you shannon next is brian zimmerman followed by patricia gadoy am i going to be a left turn from what you've heard so far tonight so let me start off by saying god bless our educators i appreciate everything that you do your passing your dedication god bless you all so with that good evening my name is brian zimmerman and um i appreciate the opportunity to speak tonight i appreciate even more that you moved up to time so we can do this sooner rather than later this is generally my bedtime we're up at four in the

098morning so i appreciate it and i appreciate your service as well so uh we live across the street from r.l stevenson and we've had two kids attend the school wonderful facility and we continue to volunteer and donate to the school long after our kids have left we watch over the school we've thwarted would-be trespassers and break-ins at the school i mentioned all of this to demonstrate the kind of neighbors that we are and that we want to be with the school the partnership that we have and that we value the relationship that we have with stevenson however unfortunately one of busd's vendors does not share this philosophy that's driftwood dairy over the past four years we have suffered late night deliveries 50 feet from our bedroom window prior to 2018 we didn't have this problem

099i'm not sure why it started then but we started communicating with the busd the director of food services at that time was kathy sessinghaus and so we started making phone calls and and trying to get the uh the time moved back from you know nine ten o'clock at night and for a short time it worked but then driftwood started their late night deliveries again so we started documenting uh to busd this issue um i'm gonna read a little bit a few excerpts i won't take up too much time in the response so in october of 2019 we said we're very upset that once again one of your vendors driftwood feels it necessary to make deliveries at 10 pm at r l stevenson on oak street on a more consistent basis the response from director assessing

100house was uh i have contacted the dispatch supervisor at driftwood dairy and have asked him to correct this issue i have also requested that all deliveries are completed by 8 pm that was certainly acceptable to us and that again was from the director of food services so this this resolved things for a short time but again in august of 21 we started seeing these deliveries start late night again so we again wrote to the director and said it's apparent the contractor dismissed earlier grievances and reneged on the agreement to have all deliveries completed by 8 pm at 10 15 pm on friday august 27th we are woken by the sound of banging and crashing the orchestra of banging gates and crates truck lifts doors air brakes and hand trucks not to mention the arrival and

101departure of the truck which has a tendency to run idle during the delivery is a disruptive and unwanted disturbance the interruption to our sleep impacts our health the response sorry to hear this continue to occur i will be contacting the dairy regarding late deliveries i know how disruptive this is and i apologize for that most recently april of 2022 on which i believe i copied all of you uh last night we were disturbed by the truck air brakes metal doors gates containers and hand carts at nine pm uh the response was thank you for your email again burbank usd apologizes for the disturbance of your evening piece they have updated their procedure and provided clear information for any driver assigned to the roots i'm not sure how many times we can hear that but i

102will say after over four years that's that's a lot of time to hear the same thing so i think we've been both patient and more than reasonable and trying to get driftwood dairy to adhere with the busd request to have any and all deliveries completed by 8 pm we request support of the board in holding driftwood accountable to this arrangement because that's what good neighbors do thank you very much thank you mr zimmerman i i read these out of order our next speaker is edward james davis followed by patricia gadoy uh thank you so much uh miss tabit dr hill members of the board good evening my name is edward james davis my wife and i live right here in burbank and just five weeks ago we welcomed a baby boy so we're now parents

103for the first time thank you guys so much and so um in addition to not getting much sleep at night uh we've been paying extra close attention to the schools and on tuesday we read with great interest a guest essay in the new york times by one of your own students uh sung ju yoon and i wanted to just pay uh tribute first off to to your student for publishing in the new york times it is a major achievement for anyone to publish in the new york times and it is especially a major achievement to do that as a junior in high school and i know that doesn't happen without outstanding teachers all the way through so kudos to all of you and all the teachers here um for starters and i did want to

104just take a moment to highlight the subject of his essay as you all know about a year and a half ago the school district took to kill a mockingbird and four other classic books and took them off of the core novel list so teachers here in burbank could no longer assign these books to all of the students in their class your student wrote in the new york times about how much these books meant to him how they shaped him and the question that i had for the board was have you had a chance to read this guest essay and are you willing to go back revisit this decision and see if there's a way to get these books back into the classroom while at the same time adding new more diverse voices to the reading

105list as well thank you so much thank you mr david and i have some copies of this if anyone's interested thank you sure our last speaker the last card i have so far is patricia godoy i just can't read the writing i apologize no worries thank you for having me here tonight i'm very humbled to be here because i've lived in burbank for 25 years and this is the first time i've come here i have four daughters that have gone through burbank usd um but tonight i'm not here to speak on behalf of my family i'm actually here to speak on behalf of my colleagues i have been a nurse for over 30 years i have done emergency medicine i have done intensive care unit medical surgical and i currently work as a nursing director

106for the men's central jail in valley county but i also work part-time as a burbank usd nurse um i've been doing this for four years and i know that they try to try to get me to work full-time for burbank usd but i tell nora i can't afford to work here full time because that's that's the thing that just humbles me is that these nurses that work for burbank usd have such a huge heart and i have to tell you every day that i come to work i work once a week i work on on like mondays that i work here i get humble when i wear this and this is my jacket that i got last year during covet because we did a lot of stuff and i get humble because not only um

107do i get to interact with my little patients i've been a pediatric nurse for 15 years so working in the jails those are big patients and you know i don't it's i tell them it's like the school system but you never really they don't go home they stay there so a lot of the things that we do in the school um i always try to think you know how can we do it in the jails but anyways um but uh the mondays that i come to work i earn every single penny because i have as a nurse i see anywhere from 40 to 60 students i call about 10 15 families a day i have to deal with all this other stuff and i go home i don't take a break sometimes i don't go

108to the bathroom yes nurses have big bladders i know that um but it i get home and i take a deep breath and i get humbled by the nurses that do this on a daily basis i i just i take my hat every time and i say wow for you guys to be able to do this and um i definitely would love to do it it's just um and i feel so bad sometimes because the money that they make is is not comparable to they're the lowest paid nurses and they work the hardest and i have to tell you because i when i go to work on my regular job on tuesday i sit there and i'm like i can go to the bathroom any time i can do whatever i want because where i

109work right now i boss people around basically right so i can do what i want to do but so for me and especially during this last year i just want to let you guys know that it has been really really challenging i told you all the areas that i worked at the er at children's hospital traumas all the time and i've never felt so overwhelmed like i did at the beginning of this last school year when i sat in my car before going to work mondays i would have to take 10 minutes and i would say tell myself i don't want to go to work i don't want to go to i don't want to go to school i don't want to school and i felt like i was that five or six year old

110not wanting to go to school because it was extremely challenging i wanted to cry every single minute things would come our way that it was so impossible i want to thank whoever proof for registry to come and help us it was incredibly worth it i was a breath of fresh air i was able to do things but i literally three weeks into the school new the i wanted to quit and i just because i i owe it to i had the contract i was like i cannot leave lenora you know like this so i stuck it through but um i i just want to make sure that i wanted to share this with you because i think me having a a different environment outside school i can appreciate all the work that they do and

111critically think assess everything and and that's why i'm here today it's just to anything that you guys can do to support our nurses they're so so so um needed in our environment um i tell you that when i i feel like a superhero every time i'm like i'm the superhero of a burbank uh when i go to the school sites because i feel like that way it just feels everybody is depending on you you know and um but i'm very humble and and thank you for you know listening and and thank you for giving me a job as a school nurse here in burba i'm very proud to be a school nurse here so thank you guys [Applause] okay thank you to all the speakers i don't have any more cards oh see one more

112thank you i i didn't even need to read it i'm sorry i don't know why i was like diana besta please go ahead good evening um president tabit members of the board um superintendent hill is not here but oh oh you're here oh there you are in a little square um nice to see you dr hill members of the district first of all i just want to thank you so much for what you've done tonight in changing the agenda that that means everything to me because these are my colleagues you can see their grading papers some of them had to run out and pick up somebody to bring back so i really i'm not even going to say everything that i want to say i'll wait until afterwards i'll fill out a blue card but

113um you know it just strikes me here we have our resolutions today for speech pathologists nurses and and teachers you know and and there just has to be more than just us passing resolutions not that i don't appreciate the sentiment but i i think we're at now we're at a very in my 40 years of teaching i have never seen the what it is today and i am so so afraid and i talked to dr neiman about this about losing people i i care i want people to go into teaching highly qualified educators in particular our special ed they have to be at the top and we are not going to continue i'm telling you i've never seen so many teachers retire we have the most in the the years that i've been here we're

114adding them all up and this is not a good thing because many of my colleagues were not going to go but they just don't see that hope right now so um again just i wanted to bring that up the importance of doing more than just listening and i know that certainly some of you have even made those visits with me we were fortunate enough to go to washington providencia and stevenson and i know that you also went to um to bret hart so thank you um i will come back afterwards so that you can also do some of the things that you need to do thank you [Applause] thank you mrs zabasta so we can now move on to staff responses thank you board president tabit can you all hear me okay all right i

115apologize i couldn't be there this evening but i do want to thank all the speakers uh for coming out tonight and those at home greatly appreciate your comments and your stories especially all of our bsd employees this evening first of all i want to thank ms stemberg and the destiny education project thank you for your advocacy and sharing all the items and actions that you're doing with the district to raise the efforts of diversity equity inclusion in the district so thank you for coming down tonight and sharing that uh the rest of most of the uh there's a couple other speakers and i'll address that as well but i do i'll do that first and come back to our special education employees and colleagues i want to thank and apologize again to mr zimmerman i've

116been receiving the emails i know miss cutter and miss magdanovich have been working with driftwood as you highlighted we've had issues when they have replacement drivers but we are going to hold them accountable and we're going to continue to escalate that to make sure that they are being good neighbors and respecting the the conditions that we put in around deliveries so we will continue to be diligent and follow up with them but i do apologize for the inconvenience that has caused you and your neighbors mr davis congrats to you and your wife on the new baby thank you for coming down this evening i did have an opportunity to read the op-ed and um we had a big lengthy debate and we're happy to follow up offline about the conversation about diversifying our curriculum i

117just want to be clear because sometimes the word ban is used what we're doing is what are the core novels and curriculum that we have in our schools we are going to continue to diversify the novels as you said but then we're going to make sure that the other novels are available in classroom libraries or in the libraries or optional assignments for students so those books are still available for students but we do want to diversify our curriculum and we have a longer process so i'm happy to follow up or you can go and see some updates on our upcoming board meetings when we talk about that process uh ms gadoli thank you for highlighting the work that you do as a nurse and for all of our nurses it's been a challenging couple years

118and i appreciate you um doing the shout out to ms aguilera as well she has been a head nurse leading us through this difficult time uh and but i do i applaud all of our nurses and thank you for sharing what you do and the challenges of being a nurse which leads me to the special education team as well or teachers or slps or support staff i greatly appreciate you all coming down here and sharing the work that you do for our students and how challenging that can be with limited resources and restrictions and compliance and it i we know you work above hours long hours very grateful for the district team and bta and all of us working together i like how ms perry talks about we are a team trying to solve these

119challenges with the resources we have we're continuing to work through that we've had very good productive meetings we're going out to school sites to hear the challenges to make adjustments when we can dr koss is going to be giving an update at our may 19th meeting about the conclusion of the master plan so i encourage everyone to continue to give input to the master plan raise your concerns work with us on addressing that so those are immediate actions that we want to take for special education at the negotiations table they're continuing to have these conversations as well and we've been making good progress of understanding what we can and can't do but we understand that we need to do something so i really appreciate the bta side as well as the district side from having

120very productive conversations uh to see what we negotiate but it's not just about what's in the contract we also want to make sure we're addressing individual school site needs and then finally i just want to thank ms abasta for calling a meeting with senator portino i invited that dr nieman president tabit myself ms dixon ms direcchi was there as well where we highlighted to senator portentino the need for funding so that we could continue to expand our services and supports for special education as well as to ms bailey's comes around pe teachers at the elementary level i thought that was a productive conversation he got to hear and see a collaborative effort trying to address these concerns so i know my words tonight aren't going to resolve your frustration your concerns but i just want

121to make sure it's very clear that we are going to continue to work together to try to resolve these issues thank you all and that concludes my response thank you dr hill moving on to board members responses dr agukhanian thank you madam president um i also want to thank uh all of our teachers and voc employees who came out to speak tonight as dr hill mentioned earlier you know this is something that we're going to be talking about but also you know the may revise is coming around and there seems to be some good news in terms of the state funding so um we'll keep you updated on that um i also want to thank our friends from destiny's project thank you for the acknowledgment all the hard work you're doing um i did speak

122at providencia and i want to thank dr culberson and team and you know it's amazing when you talk to students or kiddos at elementary school and talk about different cultures and but at the end it's also amazing when we find similarities so much you know and i just want to thank all of our students that were nice polite they asked very good questions and and they actually raise their hand at the end saying they're going to study hard and listen to their parents you know so thank you for the invitation and anytime any other schools they want me to come and talk to them about my journey and what i've been through i'm more than happy to do that um i did want to also give you an update about several it's been a busy

123month uh i did attend the burbank coordinating council pancake breakfast it was amazing um any of you who've never been to one of these please do it's a it's fun it's a lot of food but also it's supporting a good cause i also had the honor and the privilege to speak at the mirror's english language development six to eight great class thank you mark norberg for inviting me some of you may know i came to this country when i was almost 18 didn't speak english i was an esl student they used to call it esl back then and english bring my at that point fourth language well i was while i was learning and you know the funny thing is that the first thing they told me was uh stop speaking your mother uh tongue

124and don't speak any other language so you can get better at english and what i discovered in that classroom was how not only talented these students are but the fact they actually speak another language now gives them an advantage in the world today right as thomas friedman said you're going into the world market today it's like entering the olympics but you're entering every sports speaking a second third language now it's nothing to be shamed about it's actually an advantage to our students so i call them advanced language learners instead of english language development students and thank you for the invitation and i will be going back talking to the students again just to make sure that they continue not only studying hard but also learn other languages i'm learning other languages as we speak i'm

125hopefully to hit number five or six soon um i also had you know some of our students that were honored earlier they talked about classical music suzy i do also play the flute i had the honor to speak at the burbank philharmonic inaugural gala if any of you have never been to one of these you should go it's a free program and it's amazing and i had the honor of meeting catherine perkins who did strauss's observance aria which is a very difficult aria if you were into opera and charlotte marks who did bronze violin concerto number and d major open 77 and you ever know that's a very difficult piece these are 20 year old 19 year old students who were picked um support the program it's a wonderful program and it's free you can

126go and attend and bring your family also i am also very very proud to announce that one of our own teachers is shaquet jackie balian from borough high school was honored at the anca western region education by the anca western region that's armenia national committee of america western region educational committee as the 2020 winner of the armenian genocide education armenian heritage award so congratulations to ms balian from borough high school and the event just happened it was fantastic and i was very proud to see one of our own be the winner of this distinguished award and last but not least some of you know april is also the earth month and there's an event happening next week on april 29th it's called the trashion pop show you've seen the posters in all of our schools

127if any of you would like to go this was created by the burbank echo council and the burbank cultural arts commission it's going to happen on the 29th right here in burbank and you can go there this is during the magnolia park night out alongside with the local artisan exhibit exhibits of arts crafts students will have a chance to wear their trash on outfits some of you are aware one of the biggest sources of trash now is clothes very difficult to recycle and so this is a wonderful show and i want to thank staff and the district for allowing these posters to go up but if you're there on that night go and check out the show and there's going to be a red carpet and there will be photos taken there will be a

128school board member dj and live music from a local music school so there will be also a few demo stations and how to you know do a greener with proper sorting so if any of you want to learn about what we're doing in a district uh when it comes to ecosys and and saving our environment you should come and talk to some of these folks we've been very very working very very hard to not only educate our students in the community about you know how to recycle but also ways and means to also save our planet earth thank you very much thank you dr agrikanyan dr weisberg thank you thanks to everybody for speaking i did just want to say and i'm trying to remind myself to say this every time if you see me

129typing during the meeting in your comments it's not because i'm doing something else it's because i have to write it down or i'm not going to remember all the amazing things you said but i do want to let people know because you don't know what i'm writing up here but taking notes and i just wanted to let everybody know that um so i had uh the honor so i think everybody here knows i also am a teacher seventh in eighth grade and so i don't get an opportunity often to visit classrooms because i'm in my classroom but i did want to thank first of all miss abasta you're blocked by that very weird thing by the podium i wanted to thank you for helping make the visit to stevenson happen um i had a bunch

130of amazing visits and i just wanted to thank everyone i think everybody in this room knows no matter how you do it somebody stepping into your classroom to visit is weird and it just never feels normal and you're always like hello i am a teacher so so i i want to acknowledge that it does disrupt your day um so thank you to a lot of people but to mr guy or miss weaver for letting me visit monterey owen said something uh that struck me we talked about you know you come to monterey if you fail and i just i don't if you haven't had a chance to visit monterey that place feels like nothing but success the moment you step on campus from the moment you're there to the moment you leave there's nothing that

131even remotely makes you think of the word fail so it is a phenomenal place i was honored to be there um to to talk with the leadership and also the students and so i wish owen i'm glad owen went home but i i wish he was here to hear me say that that monterey is nothing but success and energy and enthusiasm and possibility and optimism so it was truly an honor to be there at the stepping stones program at stevenson phenomenal i'm so thankful to everybody that was there for like three hours so that's a long time to have somebody in your business so thank you for that um i definitely got to see so many things and learn so much i'll be back to learn even more because we all know one visit isn't

132enough ever it was wonderful to go to providencia and see the peer-to-peer reading program and see destiny read a book to kids who were completely motionless taking in every word which is hard to do no matter how old the students are a big thank you to mr osman for giving me the grand tour at roosevelt it was fantastic and to ms collins who's here for always being such a gracious host when i stopped by washington i'm not there enough but i love it every time i go and also for really educating me everyone in this room but i think miss collins was really the first educator to sit down and help me understand autism uh acceptance month in a different way and to really change the way i thought about it moving from awareness to

133acceptance awareness isn't enough acceptance is the next step so i'm deeply appreciative to you for that um also a big thank you to mr v eduerta for meeting with me and and talking to me about all things um and the pancake breakfast was quite delicious it was fun to be there um before i get into the rest of so thank you to everybody i will be back please know that every day off that i have i spend it on site um it's one of the great pleasures that i have and i think it's really part of what our job is we should be there so i'm glad i get a chance to do it um ms denberg thank you for your advocacy on sb your continued advocacy i don't know what that thing is but

134i can sort of see you now um and your advocacy in all things in your in your really dedicated support of the district and our and our authentic pursuit of diversity equity and inclusion so i'm going to jump very quickly to mr davis in relationship to authentic diversity equity and inclusion and just say that many of us read the op-ed dr aguikanian sent it to me it was fantastic i don't know how much attention you've paid to the district in the last couple of years but i do want to steer your attention towards the unending work everybody has been doing our teachers dr paramo miss couseo you name it in really grappling with how we create a space for all of our students to feel heard to feel included i know there are teachers here

135tonight we've had really healthy debates about it but i do i mean we've talked about this a lot but i do want to reiterate because you brought it up that i'm glad that those books shaped the author of the op-ed that's important but we also have many many students for whom the books and the the reading of these books was deeply traumatizing and we as a district made a decision to hit pause because we recognized we could be doing a better job a better job of diversifying our literature a better job of providing our teachers with the support that they need i say this a lot but we expect our teachers to be able to dive in and grapple with complicated complex material that we don't even want to talk about as like regular adults

136outside of a classroom we hit pause and we said we need to provide more support the intention is not to silence voices of color but to amplify them to include more voices of color to include more diversified uh content and over the past couple of years you know i've had the honor of the past year sitting on multiple uh diversity equity inclusion subcommittees and listened to the hours and hours and hours of work our teachers are pouring into acknowledging the feedback we've gotten and working to deepen and change our school environment holistically not just in the books that we read but from the moment our students and our teachers enter the classroom and that's not just when we talk about dei that's not just issues of race it's also neurodiversity it's also i mean you

137name it we're looking to attack it so i think it's it's easy to come up and sort of say let's get these books back without the sort of institutional memory that you need to understand this process and this process is going to continue in perpetuity so we're looking for ways to reintroduce complex topics we're looking for ways to reintroduce it and not because our students aren't capable and not because we don't want to deal with hard hard topics but because we want to deal with hard topics in a way that supports our students supports that challenge and also allows students to see themselves in the content that we explore so i encourage you to reach out to miss cuseo to dr paramo to dr hill to any number of people to miss bowers who have

138been doing this work and engage in a conversation with them if you're really committed to better understanding the diversification of our of what we read and how we read it i strongly encourage you to reach out to them i think it's wonderful that we have students who feel the sense of agency and and can pen such powerful opinion pieces especially in something like the new york times but i think it's important every time we have this conversation to reframe and remind ourselves that we are doing this not because we're trying to silence but because we're trying to elevate um i want to address some of the really powerful comments made by all the teachers i wanted to start by saying that um i made a request of dr coss i think a week or so

139ago to provide um a report back to the board not just on the master plan but also on the work being done to address the specific needs that you have all raised via email phone call on-site visits so um i will be on a plane back with my eighth graders from washington dc so i won't be at that meeting which is a huge bummer but i do want to let you know that we we hear you and and that's something i think i said uh to barbara after you spoke earlier which is it's important so that you know not that you need reassurance but that when you come to us and you tell us you talk about these issues what we hear or what i hear i'll just speak for myself um are people who

140are passionate about advocating for their students and for themselves i don't hear people come up here being hyper-negative and complaining i hear people advocating because you want what's best for your kiddos and you want what's best for yourself because that makes for better classrooms so i think it's just really important to reiterate that i don't think anybody up here is like oh complaining again i don't hear that i appreciate it i appreciate that you take time out of your day to then schlep over here in the middle of a thursday night and talk to us so please know that we do hear you and we i deeply appreciate it um i'm gonna go through bear with me for a second um i continue to make a list of all of the specifics that you have

141each brought up not just here but we've gotten many emails and i appreciate that um i can't i think dr hernandez said this but if i'm wrong yell at me but i really appreciated your focus on responsive versus reactive and talking about how can we plan in the summer so that we're not scrambling and look we all know that the issue of being short staffed the issue of teacher retention is something that we're facing across the country but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be more proactive in how we're addressing it here in busd so i i was i really appreciated um that it gave me a lot to think about um miss perry again though i will definitely come visit but it will not be unannounced that's mean i will email you um huh i

142know um miss sorenson you read deena beale's comment i believe and i thought something else that she said about she didn't really understand the responsibilities of a sped teacher and i feel like that every day so i teach a general ed class and it is at seventh and eighth grade and it is an exhausting uh wonderful fulfilling draining experience and i leave every day without enough time to do anything and what i have learned over the past couple of years is that multiply that by 500 and i come close to what our sped teachers our and our speech pathologists are dealing with on a daily basis um i really it really resonated talking about that sense of like you have to give up one thing right that you're either all for your kids and then

143the paperwork doesn't get done or you focus on the paperwork and you can't pay the attention that you need to so you end up feeling or i'm maybe i'm projecting i end up feeling like i'm not doing a great job at anything because i'm trying to do so many things at once none of us want that we want to find ways to support you we want to find ways to provide you the resources that you absolutely deserve smaller caseloads more planning periods a cap on the classes all of these things that i'm taking notes about look my words are not gonna be enough right like i can't do anything right now but what i can do is i say this a lot i can start to ask the right questions often i don't feel like

144i don't have the knowledge to ask the right questions but this gives me so much to sit down and ask i know that everybody up here is committed to supporting you and finding a way to support both you and your students i don't have any genius ideas but i can tell you that i am committed to assisting in every way that i can um i'm excited to talk about ways of being proactive both in staffing in every other area that people have brought up tonight um i'm not sure how to do that yet but i'm excited to have conversations and hear your thoughts and then hear the thoughts of our amazing professionals here who who work with you i'm excited to hear the report back from dr cost to see the work that's being done

145and i just want to encourage everybody to continue reaching out email us call us whatever you need to do i again i'll speak for myself but i think i speak for everyone when i say we really do want to hear what you're what's going on day to day because so often we're not i mean we're not there right but we want to be so let us know and let us know what we can do and i give you my word that we're going to continue this dialogue and we'll continue to look for ways to support you in any way that we can thank you mr ferguson thank you uh i'm gonna go to in an odd order but nevertheless try and get to everybody so first things first uh it's mr davis congratulations and thank

146you for contributing to the enrollment we're excited to have and more than anything to serve your family second to dr weisberg um i i think this is a process painful at times but one that i think staff has put a lot of effort into and i think our community has put a lot of effort into um does it fit into a national narrative you bet but is it our unique journey i believe so i think each community has to have these conversations and this is our version of it having said that i'm really proud as a former chairman of the burbank youth board that a chairman of the burbank youth board is in the new york times um and um this is the level we should be aiming for so congratulations uh uh to sung

147joo yoon uh who got this in uh and i think for a lifetime can uh talk about this experience so thank you for highlighting um i will ask that when things like this happen that district staff forward this to the whole board mr zimmerman thank you so much for being a partner to our schools and for your commitment above and beyond your own child to ensure that our institutions remain solid safe and healthy on a mul on multiple fronts um it sounds like dr hill says that they're going to look into this i believe that um having said that if we aren't getting compliance then i will ask that their contract be brought before the board and that be added as a condition moving forward um plain and simple um we have an obligation to

148be good neighbors um having said that uh these schools were there oftentimes long before folks moved in and so we have a really healthy balance that we need to strike and i think this is an example of one where we can do better to work with the vendor to make sure that this is uh this is happening and that neighborhood is respected i live two blocks down uh from stevenson so um if it happens again feel free to send me an email i'll i'll sit outside to watch the next milk delivery uh myself um see you there neighbor um but thank you uh for bringing it up and and again to district staff if it's an issue bring it back as contract language um and if it's too late to do it in contract language

149then moving forward i think we should include delivery schedules in our contract language so we can enforce that and maintain good neighbor policies um so thank you again um i'm gonna talk to ms godoy i'm not sure if she's still here she may so first of all thank you for your service as a nurse um nursing in this whole world i think we all can understand the value of i think we can all share 15 different stories where we saw nurses go above and beyond the past two years and that's not to quickly summarize it to get out of the way it is really because we saw a lot of people acting heroically but i want to specifically focus on kind of what she said about sitting in her car and having to gather herself

150before heading in i don't think that's a experience that's unique to our nurses i see a lot of sped teachers doing the same thing speech language pathologists doing the same thing and everybody i do it before board meetings right this is this is challenging um beyond what our human potential often allows for us right and we have to kind of get centered in the mission take our deep breath and go and be beyond what we ever thought we were capable of that's fair for a point and then it just becomes unsustainable and demoralizing to people who are so committed to the job and who are using that commitment every single day to keep themselves going um i see that when i visit school sites saw it when i visited schools earlier this year before uh

151you all were here um and we'll continue to visit to understand these problems better so we can bring them up i think a lot of the requests that are being made through negotiations are very reasonable having said that we are as always facing resources and limitations on that but i think there's a few things we need to do in terms of board of education that i think helps inform our perspective and one is to go through the iep process as a presentation so we can see what an iep looks like i think we talk about it but we don't often really see how challenging these documents can be not only to measure effectiveness but really how many hands are involved in each of these documents to ensure that a student is successful we have heard

152and again years ago we heard from slps we're taxed we're overburdened help us we negotiated some benefits we hoped that would help we're back we've now heard from principals who also said that the model is not working that it's overwhelming that they do not have enough especially elementary principles enough admin to preside over all the ieps and to effectively be in each of them and now everybody else is visiting us and telling us it simply is not working reactive yes entirely more so when we know this problem is coming to the board we know when you're coming uh the word gets out i think it's really important that we communicate our openness not by just closing laptops and paying attention but by making sure staff is here and available in the future when there are

153sped issues i would like to see staff here and present um i think that's important um and if they need to participate remotely that's fine um but let's keep the camera on so people know that they're they're addressing staff who are in the room that's important i know our leadership is focused on listening but i think that's how we model it and i think that's how we demonstrate it in these meetings in these moments when so many people are coming to us as a really as a last resort um because folks are exhausted um i'm very interested to see where this is going in terms of negotiations but again i have to remark that every part of the ecosystem is crying out for help and simple negotiations i don't think necessarily answer this the other

154thing is is that if we continue to look at this and not really think about restructuring in some way to support this long term it's a problem and when that is met with eight resolutions on a single agenda as mr basta pointed out this audience and this this platform and this this kind of place of last resort gets trivialized in our ability to respond to these problems because there aren't agenda items that are on the agenda that are helping to tell the story so we can get to those problems and address them more accurately so i agree that we need to work as a team to address these issues but i also think that we need to demonstrate leadership up here i think we need to demonstrate commitment and we do with our visits but

155awareness and demonstrating a long-term plan to solve these issues so that way you know that this problem won't be back in a year or two when that seems to be the case um is a challenge for me that i think we're missing the bark and i think we need to do better by you um having said that this is negotiation so we will leave it to the negotiations team and and i will give my individual direction as other board members do um but i do want to say from the bottom of my heart thank you for all you have done to keep these kids on track where you can lots of overwhelmed parents right that are kind of match and pitch with you in terms of overwhelmed right and you all have pushed through in

156different ways and so again um i know it's mostly uh we're looking for more solid answers and again wherever i can i will maneuver to push to do that but in the meantime thank you thanks for taking care of our kids we have a lot of work to do next year to catch a lot of them up um but i think that starts with board education getting humble saying what we don't know and really understanding just how far our kids have to go to catch up because of the past two years in particular this population um we're all going to be partners in moving that forward but again hold us accountable because these kids deserve it and you know how precious they are uh and you know that they need advocates and mediocrity is not

157acceptable so i want to say thank you for that uh and again i look forward to working with you all in real partnership uh not just lip service to take care of these kiddos and to take care of the staff that supports them lastly um you know this is a time where we also do our announcements if you can tell i was really excited to have the ed walk come back so after about five years or three four year hiatus uh was able to conduct our first ed walk in april again parents coming out saying very similar stories about areas that they're struggling in and it was a great opportunity to connect and so just want to invite everybody out to our next ed walk where dr weisberg will be joining me and my hope

158is is that at that point other board members can do ed walks if they so choose uh nobody did it so i brought it back um so uh and the next sidewalk is on may 7th that's the first saturday in every month but may 7th at 9 00 a.m on the corner of mariposa and chandler um if you have a story to tell we're there um and we're very human so uh looking forward to connecting and to all those who came out tonight on top of your daily workload thank you [Applause] thank you to my colleagues for your comments and to the speakers who brought them to us well they're very you know they they bring forth a lot of issues they mean a lot um no one just speaks to be speaking they're speaking

159from their heart because they really care about our employees about the students in your classrooms and that's also what i heard from many of you who came up to speak tonight that the um the amount of items on your plate that you have to get through in a day take away from why you started this job in the first place because you care about kids and you love kids and you want to make sure this world is a better place for those kids and if your plates are so full that you're struggling to carry them it really makes it difficult for you to put those kids first and give them what they really need which is you i i mean as much of you as you can give them and we know from research that

160that's when a kid thrives right in a classroom when they feel that their their teachers the people that are in there especially our special ed students care about them and have time to spend with them to make sure that they're getting their needs met and it puts you in a really difficult position i think melissa you said it or it was dr hernandez one of you that said if i if i work on this plate then this one suffers and if i work on this one then this one suffers and that's not in a place we want to be because at the end of the day it's not good for you and it's not good for those kids in your classroom so i really hope that the words my colleagues have said tonight what i'm

161saying to you what hopefully our administrative folks at the district office are able to hear the the the groups doing the negotiations know how much this isn't this these changes these needs need to be met because they're good for kids and and that should be our focus point you uh i'm a mom aside from many things and my daughter was a special ed an rsp student at muir with dr moose or mr moose who just made a real um change in her life and when you brought up the the and she's very successful today by the way but because of the teachers she had that taught her that um she may name it may not be able to read this page the first time but that's okay go through it again and go through it

162again and again and so she does it she has to read a lot in the work she does now and it came from you know her i really give mr moose a lot of credit for her but when you were talked about the speech writing when she was in eighth grade they had a speech competition for graduation and she came home so excited because she and her went and competed and they were some of the first according to my daughter i could be wrong but some of the first rsp students who got chosen to read a graduation piece at eighth grade and i mean she's still she's 30 years old and still talking about it to this day so thank you all of you for making the difference in that kind of in that child

163who will carry what you do for them with them for the rest of their lives because you do make a difference you make a difference every day and it shows and it's one of my favorite stories that she comes back with no one ever made her feel different that made her feel like she was just as important as every kid in an ap class or an honors english class and and they they mattered so thank you for all that you do um and hopefully hopefully we can do some things that will make life a little easier and then we can work towards things that will make life a lot better uh so i'm really hoping we we can get there um mr zimmerman zimmerman mr mr ferguson does indeed live a couple blocks away as

164do i so uh be happy any time it gets they're back there at nine o'clock to to pop on over if we need to and i think that mr ferguson's idea of looking at their contract again it was a great idea and hopefully that will resolve some things because i bet you you're not the only one you're just the only one speaking up so thank you for doing that and you probably speak for many others and hopefully we can get to the bottom of this sooner rather than later which i say far too often um [Music] who else did i want to um again thank you for everyone coming out it's not easy your time is valuable um we did uh i joined dr weissman at the pancake breakfast and weisberg i do that all

165the time don't i i am so sorry doctor oh that's cute i can do that dr weisberg uh and dr agar khanian joined later and we had a nice time talking to the community members uh at the pancake breakfast we didn't have to do much work but it was a it was a good time uh getting to know some community members there and congratulations mr ferguson i'm bringing back that ed walk great plan great idea and i hope many of you join him and dr weisberg uh at their next one and just being a little um and and share your thoughts and ideas it's a great opportunity to meet with uh board members and um what else did i want to bring up but uh well that's it for now i'm sure there's opportunities oh

166i did forget earlier for if we could bring this in an upcoming agenda we need to take a look at our arts for all plan again it was originally it is 10 years old um and it's time to take a look at that so if we could bring that back at a future agenda sometime that would be great um it it's important to many folks that we keep that current and ongoing yes sorry i just wanted to clarify so it expires in december so we start talking about it taking a look at it it'll have to go through we'll have to have a did you have something do you want to add to it i was just offering we have a special meeting on goals coming up and so maybe within the context of annual

167goals where then staff could do planning um we could take it up there just a suggestion good plan so all right moving back thank you um we have a public hearing that was supposed to be around 7 30. do we need to go to that now and then we can jump back into the agenda i'm looking for yeah yeah for some guidance here and do we need to do the report first and then go to the public hearing that was that was work for that so we are going to uh 11b yes sure go ahead we're taking a five minute break good evening president tabit board members staff community we're here tonight with a public hearing on developer fees and prior to that we'd like to give the report on the fee study that we

168have the state allocation board requires that school districts do a study every two years in advance of increasing it and we have with us tonight doug floyd who is with kaplan gruber and he's going to go through his report that he's prepared thank you miss kuka good evening president tabit board members dr hill district staff um again my name is doug floyd i'm with koppel and grouper public finance and i just want to highlight that this presentation is to cover a public hearing that follows but also an action item that is slated later on in the agenda this item specifically relates to level one fees that school districts charge against new residential and commercial construction and these fee amounts are intended to provide funding for the district to provide for school facilities um i think

169there's a presentation okay okay perfect uh the fee amounts are capped and those feet caps are subject to inflationary adjustment in even numbered years the state allocation board last adjusted the fee caps in february of this year from four dollars and eight cents per square foot to 4.79 cents per square foot per square foot for new residential construction and from 66 cents to 78 cents per square foot for new commercial and industrial construction the district currently charges level one fees but in order for the district to increase uh the fees amounts that are charged to the new rates the district must go through this process of preparing the fee justification study and it confirms that the district meets the nexus requirements and confirms justification of the fees the nexus requirements are highlighted here and these

170are from the statutes so the district has to identify the purpose and the use of the fee which is essentially to provide for the construction or reconstruction of school facilities the district must determine that there's a relationship between the fees use and the development upon which the fee is imposed so from our findings new housing will generate is generating new students and there's a cost for providing facilities for those students and then the next item is determine the relationship between the fee and the cost attributable to the new development so what that means is the district can't charge a fee that is in excess of the cost of providing students from those facilities and the majority of the study is is crafted in an effort to to meet that requirement and then lastly the district

171must provide an accounting of the developer fees and the the district each year brings to the board an accounting report that's typically done at the november or december time frame that reports on what fees have been collected and how those are being utilized so while the the state law provides substantial flexibility and the methodologies employed for school districts to justify the fees at minimum the fee study must include a projection of the number of students from new housing and an estimate of the reasonable cost to provide facilities for those students the school fees school fees can include the cost to refurbish existing facilities to maintain an existing level of service and or to achieve an adopted level of service that is consistent with the school district's plans and that could include educational plans or facilities

172plans so this diagram just generally highlights our methodology which is to make a projection of the students from new housing that's based on housing projections from the city as well as average yield rates per household so we look at all the student the student population and divide that by the number of household inventory in the district and that gives us a number of students per household and we're able to use that to make a projection of students over the time frame of our study and then we use recent cost construction costs from the district as well as state averages to estimate the cost assigned to those students and then we distill that down to a cost impact per square foot for new housing and as long as that cost impact per square foot is greater

173than the fee cap which is now 4.79 then the district is justified in levying the full fee amount and so this shows our projected numbers so our student enrollment projections utilize the city's housing growth goals and those are estimated through the year 2035 so based on those housing growth goals it could potentially generate up to 2 700 students and then if we assign costs to not only house those students and new construction our findings did reveal that there's a possibility that school sites may need to be expanded at the elementary school level but also to implement capital improvement projects modernization projects to provide for the long-term uh use of the district's facilities and so that cost estimate is around 56 million dollars if we then divide that by the projected housing and the projected square

174footage okay the the cost impact is 5.22 cents which justifies the full fee for the district at 479. and then for commercial fees the the state law provides guidance regarding how a district can justify commercial fees and it the districts must evaluate the cost based on different commercial industrial categories those are in the state law and effectively it follows that new employment centers will create job opportunities the employment generation from those facilities or projects will create a propensity for those employees to reside within the district creating housing needs and then there's a student generation from those new homes we also look at inner district transfers so there's a propensity of employees who are commuting to jobs within the school district boundaries to enroll their children on an inter-district basis so we look at inner district

175[Music] in our district what are the permits and then once we have that overall impact we deduct that by the residential impact because households will be paying their own share of the developer fees and what the whatever that net result is that becomes the cost impact for the commercial industrial categories and you can see based on our findings on these are the commercial industrial categories that the state law prescribes and then the left-hand side shows the actual cost impacts and then based on the maximum fee amounts that are limited by the state on the right hand side you can see what can be charged on each of those categories there's a few categories where we couldn't justify the full amount of the fees so they're limited on to they're limited to being charged the fees

176based on those respective impacts so for example hospitality lodging would be charged at 61 cents per square foot rather than the 78 cents per square foot and then very briefly because there's a lot of redevelopment projects within the school district we just want to highlight that only the additional square footage for redevelopment projects would be charged case law states that if there's an existing project and that gets demolished and then rebuilt to a larger project that existing project would be credited the fee amount for the pre-existing square footage so we just wanted to highlight that and then as far as the adoption process this is a legal procedure so we the district actually had to provide a notice of public hearing several times in the local newspaper saying that a public hearing would occur tonight

177the the fee study itself has been available for public review since april 8th and then following a public hearing tonight if the board so chooses to adopt the new fees those will become effective 60 days later which is on june 20th so with that i'll open it up to any questions uh i just first of all thank you again um i had a question regarding and this is i'm gonna beg plead ignorance a little bit so hypothetically we approve it 60 days it just goes into effect there's no way anyone can push back if they have not come to the public hearing so essentially like once we say okay game on yes the the fuse would become effective and the district could impose those fees starting on june 20th perfect thank you i just wanted

178to get clarification on the process thank you uh first of all just thank you for a very thorough report in explaining this um it is it is challenging uh telling the story of how revenues come to the district uh it is also challenging telling the story of how those revenues are constrained at times for specific uses um i do want to remind the public you know um we get audited and they make sure that these dollars are going uh where they say they're going uh so when we consider fee increases we consider them very seriously um because we don't want to pass that on we don't want to make that extra addition to your house so unaffordable that you can't afford uh to do it so things like that matter and so just thank you

179with that and i'm comfortable with moving forward to the item and making the motion if that is uh okay with my colleagues yes i second it dr kanye and you're good yes okay oh we do have to open the public hearing okay then i will wait for public testimony on that before i decide thank you so i had one question no sorry can you hear me now yes so i'm just out of curiosity in terms of you know when it comes to square and you know the space and then limited space to build in certain areas burbank being one of them when it comes to the fee and how it's determined does it matter uh how up building goes or or is it just about the property itself yeah it's the square footage of the

180property so it doesn't because people are comparing us to a neighboring city with spending a lot of apartment complexes saying well they must be getting a lot of money from development but it has nothing to do with going up right yeah it's it's based on several factors so we look at the student generation rates from different types of housing we evaluate it on single family detached homes versus your higher density projects and effectively it comes down to a student generation rate per square foot so if if you're building a lot of high density projects that have a lot of students and it's a smaller footprint you know smaller size units than say a single family dwelling unit then you see the cost impacts um that are a little higher in those cases so thank you

181and one last flag if we could share this report with the city council um so that they could see i and i think most specifically the the commentary around density and how density is calculated when you possibly raise a property down to zero and rebuild that you really only get credit for the additional square footage not what you're replacing i think that that as they are making development decisions need to understand that okay great just because we're replacing square footage with equal square footage that doesn't mean schools get covered in that um yeah so i mean miss tabits working with a number of the council members on different projects i just think it's an important way that we can again help educate our colleagues as they make choices so um you know we can work

182better together like that we can add that to the agenda at our joint town hall if that's something we want to talk about we might whatever you and the superintendent want [Music] okay thank you thank you thank you so moving to our public hearing um i think call to open the public hearing on the attempt to raise school facilities developer anybody wish to address the board speak up okay see no one uh the public hearing is now closed president tabbett mr ferguson i will move that we proceed to item 13h and that we move the board of education adopt resolution 40 for the increase of school facility developer fees uh per senate bill 50 out of 1998 education section 17620 and government code section 6595 and the authority to sign the agreement be exercise pursuant

183to resolution ar3314 is presented second thank you for the motion and the second dr weisberg and uh any further comments all right call for the vote all in favor say hi all right all opposed okay motion carries 4-0 thank you okay now we can go to reports to the board 11a report to the board on busd youth and transition and foster youth thank you miss cashman yeah thank you president tabbett members of the board district staff superintendent hill sorry i know you're watching um in our burbank community i'm here tonight to present on our bosd youth in transition and foster youth data thank you i just wanted to go over our overriding principles and mission we try to approach this work with trauma-informed practices continuity of education which is a huge overriding goal of our

184work with these populations of students and families compassion equal access communication and assistance navigating the school and educational setting addressing dei for vern sorry vulnerable populations providing dedicated at promise counselors and providing mental health support our next slide shows you sort of a drop in the number of families that are in transition by year there are a lot of different factors going into that i think part of it was the pandemic and a lot of movement and changes in job situations and steady housing but we also had some really good news with 25 of our families finding permanent housing so even though the numbers went down there was a really positive piece behind that so i thought that was really good news our next slide talks about our youth in transition by grade levels so

185you see it's um you know it's pretty uh even although we have more high school students currently um eight of our students in special education and six are in our el program as well do you know what that relates to his number of families um yeah so that so each of those numbers is a student with a a family oh as far as there's siblings i have to look we have quite a few families with several multiple siblings yeah and some of them are we're placing high school middle school and elementary and we place our families we really try to look at transportation and housing and make it as easy as possible they get priority placement and enrollment all of that so we're really working with our families to see what suits them the most

186all right the next slide is an ethnicity you'll see it's just spread across it mostly matches i think our district demographic um the next slide is on attendance and i'm kind of going quickly so if you have questions feel free to stop me i'm pretty proud of our attendance which typically it's very low for our families in transition due to changes in housing and just struggles from employment transportation all of that very disruptive so i'm really proud of our attendance date on our youth in transition our discipline data also shows some um good news so even although some of it's because we were obviously not in person but um still our our statistics are pretty good for our suspensions and discipline with our students in transition um the next slide is on our academics we

187still have work to do one thing i was really excited about is to look at our graduation rate which was very high for our seniors and i think part of it too is our our students in transition are moving around so that goes back to that continuity of education trying to get them placed correctly trying to make sure that um transcripts and records are all documented and that they're they're placed quickly but also placed appropriately um so that is quite a big um task yeah could you talk a little bit about the change i mean i understand like a3g completion in 2020 2021 is coveted times but it's interesting that it fell so much and our graduation rate climbed can you talk about i'd have to look deeper but our we're talking about maybe a

188couple students because we only have 61 students sure right so i'd have to look into that deeper okay two on that thank you all right our next slide is funding um the money that pays for our um our homeless or families in transition and foster liaison comes from restricted funding so it's either state or fed and so some of that goes a lot of it goes to centralized services which is the position we have in student services melinda drexler is our homeless and foster liaison at this point and she is doing an amazing job so that position we finally have a dedicated position to support these students and families and it allows her to really case manage every family and student so that's been just a human just tremendous difference yes and really it's because

189of a complete lack of understanding i'm just not quite so a youth in transition has the option to go to any school district i'm just wondering the need for transportation like a tap card or metrolink yeah so basically when a student don't know is in your district it becomes a district of origin and then a lot of times they move around and so to give continuity what we have is a bid which is a best interest determination meeting with the other school district and a lot of times the ed rights holder family whoever's involved with those decisions and we decide which school district is the best placement for that student to give them that continuity and sometimes that means transporting students and sometimes it can be done through public transportation or family it just kind

190of depends on their situation so it does sometimes create extra costs and sometimes it's temporary depending on their housing situation so if a family is in a hotel temporarily we have a newcomer family right now they might need some transportation help for a little bit until they get a more permanent housing situation we also try to help out with child care on occasion when that's required or needed we have lots of backpacks and school supplies and stuff for families but typically they they're already getting that from a lot of the great partnerships in burbank so we we work with them a lot of what miss drexler's position is doing right now is connecting people with our resources in burbank and we have btac we have fsa we have i'm not going to name them all

191i listed them dental clinic there's just so many great family promise so many great organizations that we can partner our families with yeah for the child care is that something that we use um like the amazing child care at monterey or horace mann how do we where do we go to provide the child care um it depends on what the family needs and the ages of the kids so sometimes it's helping them with fees associated with boys and girls club or another partner organization that's usually the case if it's after school where they need that support where parents are working okay i can get you a breakdown too yeah i think in general you know especially with the listing of our of our partners too i think it'd be really helpful to have a clear

192understanding of what those partnerships look like um just so that we have a sense like there's so much good work being done it's hard to get a sense of i know we have partnerships with these places be really wonderful to be able to see how they sort of manifest so like be great to know where the child care is coming from or when we're providing housing or stipend things like that because we do have these strong partnerships be nice to have a clear sense of what those look like yeah so we don't provide housing but we can refer to right housing so but that's a great example if it's not them it's um home again or whatever it's just it's i think it's nice for us to know because as we try to strengthen our

193partnerships it's good to know what they look like right now and what they could look like later thank you and and i think as i go on you'll get a little bit more deeper look into that case management piece as well um so going through that uh our students in transition receive immediate enrollment free and reduced lunch equal access to district sponsored curricular and extra curricular programs some of our fees are restricted on what we can spend money on and so what we do is work with the school sites and a lot of times they have other funds that they can use to pay for prom tickets or yearbooks or that kind of thing to make sure students have access to those opportunities if our liaison also really tries to work with the family to

194find out what their living situation is if it's a lot of our most of our families are doubled up so they're living with other families but sometimes they are in temporary housing so or a shelter it just depends we also get releases of information so that our our department our school sites can work with those organizations often other agencies to support families we get tap cards tutoring counseling after school programs and school supplies just to name a few wi-fi hotspots um yeah absolutely chromebooks hot spots all of that yeah um we make sure there's no fee for proficiency exams they're going to get help with fafsa we try to really support them as much as we can to make that education you know accessible and equitable in every way um we also our miss dreschler's

195really doing a great job of going out to site so she'll go to iep she'll go to 504 she'll meet with families where they're living she'll go to metrolink to get the transportation and take it to them so there's a lot of that kind of work that's going on behind the scenes and also looking at their academic progress their attendance keeping you know working with the sites constantly to monitor that and make sure that things don't change suddenly or they need more support she's uh working with laco quite a bit um works on all the compliance reports documentation uh so and then you'll see a list of community partners that we are working with at the bottom that include many of the ones we've already mentioned so any questions about the case management piece i

196have so many things i know you love it or you don't but either way no it's great i'll do my best if not i'll circle back with you yeah you and shane can have a support group for the amount of questions wow ouch um okay moving on um is it um i think so i i still have questions about all of these amazing things that we offer our kiddos which are phenomenal i still wonder about how we partner with these organizations to get some of it right and it's not me like trying to be like i oversee but i love to know like what are the amazing things we're getting from btac or what are the amazing ways that the y or fsa are supporting the kiddos i mean even if it's just a simple

197like way for us to know so we thank them when we interact with them i think it's would be and i know a lot of it is like case by case but i also know that you must be tracking it so it would be really helpful just to have a sense of the type of services they're offering and i also had a question about you know the tracking of academic progress attendance and student achievement so it's great here i see it is it possible to be able to see it more often so that we can have a sense of you know how our students are progressing the type of intervention if necessary i think it'd be wonderful because this is so helpful to see like i've learned so much and also thank you to you

198and melinda for sitting down with me it's fantastic but like it's so helpful to have this is it possible to twice a year three times a year absolutely i think and i wanted to give a shout out to mr zumudio and mr garcia who did all as much as they could with all this amazing along with their 30 other jobs so they were handling this for years and then we finally have a dedicated person and so we can definitely bring you more information and i think the it will grow and the the case management will just get better and better but she's um already i'm just seeing a level of service we've been unable to provide in the past that's really life-changing and i think that's what i'm excited to see because it's not about

199it's not about being critical it's about being enthusiastic and really because it's clear she's doing phenomenal work right and so part of being able to share that as a board share all the positive things that um we're doing i don't often have the information i need to do that so it's just about saying well did you see the report you know look at it from september to april look at all the growth i think it'd just be wonderful to have that that meat to sort of absolutely thank you all right just for one second i just wanted to your question was really great and that discrepancy between the a through g pass rate and the graduation yeah so what my thoughts are and and miss casio can jump in she might can you speak into

200the mic yeah what what might be the [Music] reason for that is that's the year we were in virtual learning and there was a there was the opportunity for kids to earn their diploma through ab1 130. and that was a different standard for meeting graduation requirements so it makes sense to me that the graduation rate would have gone up but the a through g percentage might not have been where it normally is that helps that helps a lot thank you ab104 yeah like i got the number one ab104 all right any other questions yeah just more more to prep um so first of all it's ms dressler thank you um one you know we had a model where we kind of outsourced this and then now we've kind of brought it in i think it

201was wise to bring it in so i think this is good i think there's more direct tracking i think it allows us to be more nimble when addressing kind of the individualized needs of this population having said that i i want i it's going to be something that i introduce as a board goal or attempt to uh to get this population back to whole um and so when i look at these a through g rates things like that getting back to the 50 that i would like to be a goal um and and not just um and so what i would hope is from that goal we get a kind of a plan of how we're going to get there long-term and kind of operationalize that so i just kind of want to kind of

202front load that because i think this is really good data but i want you know there are going to be populations that i think we're clearly identifying that are impacted this is one of them um but it seems that we're serving a rather consistent size population of about 80 to 100. and that's the challenge because some of our families are moving in and out right so that's the challenge with this work right so sometimes we'll have students for a while and we can really have an impact and do see some growth and then sometimes people are moving in and out absolutely and so we get them for a couple months and then they're moving on right so that's the real difficulty with the data and tracking too yeah is that it's in and out quite

203a bit without a doubt and i think that this is going to be one of the hardest stories to tell because each case is so unique so absolutely giving that credit and credence i think though understanding that it is a population that we know we're going to have issues with what are the things that we can do to bolster what are the strategies based off of melinda's experience really managing this um moving forward that i that i'd love to just frankly hear either her feedback or just how we do that or how we think about that um and again not needing a whole big report but again what's the game plan right um and how do we get from how do we get to a proactive place so absolutely all right the next part of

204the report is on our foster youth by year um again you'll see a decrease and some of it was movement i think and um just decline in enrollment um a lot of our foster youth are um a doc close to getting adopted or they're very inconsistent situations but we do have students that are removed from the home and those situations are much more traumatic and difficult and they usually require a lot more support um you'll see our grade levels of foster youth pretty even ethnicity um the seven students in a special ed in the one student yell do we know what grade grades those are i can find that out for you i think i don't know it off the top what thank you yeah and then average attendance again very high very proud of

205that with our foster youth discipline nothing in 2021 surprising i'm kidding um and then our our academics again i think i think this is an area of growth for us we've been very focused on shelter food kind of the basics and housing and i'm excited as we grow with this position to really spend more time in that area and the case management is similar although there are some differences one of the big differences is there's an eps system and uh late go started with foster and hopefully they're gonna expand it to our family yes yeah so it's educational passport system and with these groups uh the records are very difficult to have a whole picture of and sometimes they're lost or you don't get them right away because of some of our students have been

206in five six eight different schools and so this eps system we upload data we upload records and then that way we get a much fuller picture when the students come to us so that's another thing mr drexler does is she keeps that updated she goes in to look for the records so it's a great system and i hope it gets expanded to our families in transition and that's a laco tool that we use um and and a lot of work with our ed rights holders uh and social services with students who in foster care who are removed from the home big difference between students sort of on the adoption track who are placed and with a steady family versus students who've been removed from everything and they have pretty traumatic story so they need a

207lot of support um and again she coordinates with you know fed rights holders we do the best interest determination to see which district is the most appropriate um we we really try to make sure enrollment's expedited all of those different pieces so any questions about that yeah so we facilitate the basics for survival here um housing food all of that you also mentioned testing we covered that cost how do we cover the overachiever in that is a part of this population how do we how are we taking care of the full range of student and we actually have some students in transition that are we have a senior who's a straight a student um unbelievable right and and so we we work with the school to try to give them all the opportunities to work

208with them about college plans and universities enrollment we look at yeah yeah with with that speci i i think that's lovely and i think that's wonderful and and just i want to see especially with that population if we can connect them with dual enrollment things like that that again give them an advantage faster right get through school faster and whether you know all the community colleges i'm sure dr khanian can weigh in uh but they get funded differently obviously for the student population as well so again you know almost the handoff also what's what do we do to hand off um all food for thought but um i i think you know it's pretty clear we're getting pretty good at covering the basics what's next you know so and she's melinda's been doing a really

209good job too of making sure they're getting the extras as far as the extracurricular and school life and and i think that's really critical as well so um i'm i'm really proud of what she's done since she started the position and i'm really excited to see where it goes because it's just going to get better and better so excellent all right any other questions thank you okay moving on to 11c report on facilities and technology projects welcome back ms ketka my assistant is getting it ready so i'm here tonight to talk about there we have three items that are on the content agenda that are paid for from bond funds so if we can get the powerpoint we have uh an additive change order number six which is uh with walt disney elementary which is

210our big construction of our two-story modular building the contractor is santa clarita concrete and the contract amount is not to exceed an amount of five hundred and twenty eight thousand twenty two dollars the increased amount is for the placement of concrete under the stairs instead of the asphalt so that was an additive change order that is item 14 a b on on the agenda we have an approval of additive change order number four i go too far noticeable completion um which is again walt disney and it is for electrical and low voltage on the two-story building with hns electric ink in a contract amount not to exceed 305 nine sixty three the increased amount of seven thousand two hundred and sixty six dollars was due to a request by the district to install a sump

211pump 20 amp wp breaker and all the accessories the last item isn't sorry john the last item is a notice of completion again with walt disney and this is on the carpeting uh floor the reliable floor covering that went into the building and the 10 classrooms and that is an amount not to exceed 68 thousand one thirty four so that is uh notice of completion any questions great thank you thank you okay moving on now to 13 new and un and or unfinished business 13a adoption of resolution 33 proclaiming april 24 2022 is the burbank unified school district's day of commemoration of the armenian genocide of 1915-1923 president tabit would you like to okay go ahead uh i will move that the board of education uh adopt resolution 33 proclaiming april 24th 2022 is the

212burbank unified school district's day of commemoration of the armenian genocide of 1915-1923 as presented thank you for the motion and the second dr ogakanian um any discussion if not let's call for the vote uh all in favor say aye aye opposed great motion carries 4-0 and mr ferguson please read thank you resolution 33 uh proclaiming april 24th 2022 as burbank unified school district's day of commemoration of the armenian genocide of 1915-1923 whereas the armenian genocide of 1915-1923 is widely recognized by historians and genocide scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century and since 1919 april 24th has been designated as a day of remembrance and commemoration of the inhumane atrocities committed by the ottoman turks in carrying out the systemic annihilation of more than 1.5 million armenian women children and men during world war

213one and whereas many countries including argentina austria belgium bolivia brazil canada chile cyprus the czech republic denmark france germany greece italy lebanon lithuania luxembourg netherlands paraguay poland russia slovakia sweden switzerland uruguay vatican city venezuela and 49 of the 50 united states of america including california recognize the atrocities perpetrated by the ottoman empire during the years of 1915 to 1923 as genocide and whereas the state of california has been on the forefront of encouraging and promoting a curriculum relating to human rights and genocide in order to empower future generations to prevent the recurrence of genocide and whereas the burbank unified school district has a significant armenian student population many of whom have family members who experience firsthand the horror and the evil of the armenian genocide as well as the avoidance of recognition or outright denial

214by many countries of the armenian genocide and whereas the burbank unified school district continues to provide teacher training workshops and educational resources about all historic genocides including the armenian genocide to all its high school social studies teachers and students now therefore be it resolved the burbank unified school district board of education hereby designates april 24 2022 as a burbank unified school district's day of commemoration of the armenian genocide of 1915 and 1923 and in doing so will ensure that the armenian genocide is properly taught to its faculty student body and the community at large i will say this has been a long project to get this day recognized i remember a time when this was not a unanimous vote on this board to get this done and now similar to the pride resolution it's not

215just the community that moves it it's the allies that carry it forward and i will say ukraine has taught us a great deal about standing up to injustices when it occurs and we know that many armenians continue to suffer as azeri and other aggressions happen in azerbaijan and in the nation of artsok without commentary without news coverage and without feedback this is a population we are proud to serve in this district and a proud population that we get to serve and i want to thank members of the armenian community including my colleague who over the years have taught me so much about this community about what generational trauma looks like and how it manifests today in learning this step allows students to come to class and feel seen but more than anything it states as

216a community that we stand behind you uh through and through and that we see you so to the those who lost my sincerest sincerest condolences um and know that these leaders in this community are and will continue to be ones that work towards a more equitable and a more fair and a kinder world thank you madam president thank you vice president uh ferguson we've come a long way but we still have a lot of work ahead amen thank you thank you moving on to 13b adoption of resolution 34 proclaiming april 24th through may 1st 2022 as burbank unified school district's day of holocaust remembrance madam president yes dr weiss i move that we adopt resolution 34 proclaiming april 21st through may 1st 2022 as burbank unified school district's days of holocaust remembrance thank you and

217thank you for the second dr khanian um all in favor of adopting please say yes and opposed great motion carries 4-0 and please read whereas the holocaust was the state-sponsored systematic persecution and annihilation of european jewry by nazi germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945 6 million were murdered including roma people with disabilities and polls were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial ethnic or national reasons and millions more including lgbtq people jehovah's witnesses soviet prisoners of war and political dissidence also suffered grievous oppression and death under nazi tyranny and whereas the history of the holocaust offers an opportunity to reflect on the moral responsibilities of individuals societies and governments and whereas burbank students should understand and remember the terrible events of the holocaust and remain vigilant against hatred persecution and tyranny and

218whereas burbank unified school district should actively rededicate ourselves to the principles of individual freedom in a just society and whereas the days of remembrance have been set aside to remember the victims of the holocaust as well as to reflect on the need for respect of all peoples and whereas pursuant to an act of congress the united states holocaust memorial council designates the days of remembrance of the victims of the holocaust to be sunday april 24th through sunday may 1st 2022 including the day of remembrance known as yom hashoah april 28 2022 and observances and remembrance activities will occur nationwide between sunday april 24th and sunday may 1st 2022 now therefore be it resolved that the burbank unified school district board of education does hereby proclaim the week of sunday april 24th through sunday may 1st

2192022 as days of remembrance and to hold a moment of silence on thursday april 28 2022 in memory of the victims of the holocaust and in honor of the survivors as well as the rescuers and liberators and further proclaims that we the burbank unified school district community should work to promote human dignity and confront hate wherever and whenever it occurs can i ask a quick thing if possible um gypsies is a derogatory um word used to describe the roma i think it would be important to remove that from this uh of this resolution it's not something that that community finds uh appropriate so if we could have that removed as amended yeah as amended um i would also ask that we change lb lgbtq to lgbtq ia plus please just to also further represent that

220community so as amended if that's possible i would be appreciative you're the maker of the motion and annual second so you got it thanks all in favor with uh the amended changes please say aye aye and oppose so forth carried four zero with the amendments made thank you for doing that sure madam president also before uh we move to the next item i do we want to remember uh remind our uh community members who i'm sure are up still watching us um but uh there is a genocide remembrance event this saturday um right here at the steps of the city hall so i hope what time is that it's at one o'clock this saturday and uh hopefully i will see some of you there this saturday thank you thank you okay moving on to 13c

221adoption of resolution 35 proclaiming may 18 2022 as speech pathologist day president tabit yes sir i'll move the board of education adopt resolution 35 proclaiming may 18 2022 as speech pathologist day as presented thank you for the motion and the second dr ogakanian all those in favor please say aye aye aye opposed say no motion carried for zero and please read resolution 35 proclaiming may 18 2022 as the day of the speech language pathologist whereas may 18th is national speech pathologist day which celebrates the contributions speech language pathologists make to the community and whereas may may is better hearing and speech month established to provide an opportunity to raise awareness about communication disorders and the role of american speech language hearing association members in providing lifelong life-altering treatment and whereas speech language pathologists are experts

222in communication and are we saw some tonight and are in a highly specialized field focused on the assessment diagnosis and treatment of communication disorders and whereas there are over 188 000 certified speech-language pathologists in the united states and over half of those work in educational settings and whereas in california for individuals who receive special education services approximately 165 000 students are designated as having speech or language impairment sli and in the burbank unified school district approximately a thousand students are designated as having speech or language impairment whereas 22 speech language pathologists and four speech language pathology assistants provide services in the burbank unified school district to students ranging from 3 to 22 years of age in all grades from preschool to transition age and whereas speech language pathologists provide therapy to students with delays and

223disorders in the areas of semantics syntax morphology pragmatics pragmatics voice fluency stuttering articulation and phenological processing in order to help them effectively communicate and access the curriculum in the educational setting and whereas speech language pathologists carry out duties including evaluating communication skills determining communication delays and disorders writing comprehensive assessment reports identifying service and support options creating and carrying out individualized education programs plans that'll be edited to say plans acting as case managers providing direct therapy services collecting progress data completing progress reports participating as members of student success teams ssts assisting with transition planning consulting with school staff families in interdisciplinary teams and supervising student speech language pathologists in training and top of all that whereas california speech language pathologists are among the best educated with high qualification standards and ongoing continuing education requirements and hold

224undergraduate and graduate degrees specific to the field of communicative disorders and are credentialed by the state of california commonly commonly hold a certificate of clinical competence in speaking language pathology and generally maintain a california state licensure and whereas speech language pathologists demonstrate a commitment to making a difference in people's lives and are dedicated to continuous learning and empowering others and whereas the board of education and leadership of the burbank unified school district recognized the vital role of speech language pathologists and express strong support and gratitude to past and present speech language pathologists and speech language pathologists assist pathology assistants for their commitment and dedication to the students and staff of the burbank unified school district now therefore be it resolved to the board of education recognizes may 18th as the day of the speech language

225pathologist in the birmingham unified school district thank you very much okay moving on to 13d adoption of resolution 36 proclaiming may 11 2022 as school nurse day yes sir i moved at the board of education at the resolution 36 proclaiming may 11 2022 as a school nurse day as presented second thank you for the motion and the second uh all those in favor please say aye aye oppose hearing none motion carries 4-0 and maker of the motion please read it resolution 36 proclaiming may 11 2022 as school nurse day whereas national nurses uh week in may 16 to 12 each year and draws attention to and celebrates the contributions that nurses and nursing make to the community the full week of recognition can eliminate accommodating i'm sorry my glasses are on florence nightingale's birthday may

22612th and whereas there are approximately 60 000 registered nurses in the united states public school system who care for more than 52 million students whereas school nursing is a specialized practice of professional nursing that advances the well-being academic success and the lifelong achievement of students facilitates positive students responses to the normal development promotes health and safety intervenes with the actual and potential health problems provides case management services and builds student and family capacity for adoption self-management self-advocacy and learning to the collaboration with professionals in other disciplines and whereas the school nurse assists students in achieving optimal wellness to enhance readiness to learn improve school attendance rates ensure that students entering schools are free of communicable disease and provide interventions that promote the well-being of students and whereas giving generously of their time and talent for

227multitude of projects school nurses assist in the maintenance of healthy and safe school environments for your district and whereas the board of education of the burbank universe school district expresses strong support and deep gratitude to the past and present school nurses for their commitment and dedication to students and staff of the burbank united's united states foreign unified school districts and now therefore be it resolved that may 11 2022 be recognized as the school nurse state in the burbank unified school district thank you very much and there is a lot to read don't you know we're not all perfect we can make mistakes here and there it's all good um i oh i just happened to look at you when i was speaking i wasn't referring to you sorry i'm looking at you not towards you

228i'll just only look forward i didn't mean that to anybody specifically we're all little fumbles [Music] let's see moving on to 13e oh did we yeah i will move that the board of education adopt resolution 37 proclaiming the week of may 2nd through 2022 through may 6 2022 as substitute teacher appreciation week as presented second thank you for the motion and the second uh all those in favor please say aye aye aye and oppose say no motion carried 4-0 gotcha please resolution 37 proclaiming may 2nd through 6 2022 as substitute teacher appreciation week whereas education is the most vital activity we as a society undertake to to ensure the well-being of the nation and whereas substitute teachers are an essential part to the education of our children and where substitute teachers provide continuity in the

229learning process as well as a safe and healthy learning environment for students and whereas substitute teachers work tirelessly to serve our children and community with care and professionalism and whereas substitute teachers are a source of caring concern counseling empathy warmth and inspiration and whereas the role of substitute teachers may be different from that of a regular teacher in some aspects but it's equally demanding equally essential and equally professional and whereas the board of education and the leadership of the burbank unified school district recognized the truly vital role of substitute teachers in realizing the mission for the for public education now therefore be it resolved that the burbank unified school district extends its sincere appreciation to the substitute teachers of the burbank unified school district and encourages the community to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of

230the district's substitute teaching staff and hereby proclaims may 2nd through 6 as substitute teacher appreciation week and just in wrapping this this year and last year in particular our subs came in and in big ways delivered for this district and allowed us to keep doors open um and these subs come from all walks of life including people who watch this meeting who answered the call and who stood up and helped i cannot thank you enough individually but i know us as a board generally cannot thank this community enough for stepping up and for being there for our kids um to keep these schools open and in such a critical time um our subs stepped up in big ways we wish we could compensate you more we wish we could do all the things that that

231really recognize uh the hard work that it takes to do this role um but in the meantime to recognize their role in this moment in history is critical thank you who are you hearing thank you what's that he said here you hear me oh sorry thank you yes indeed okay 13 f yes ma'am uh imovie we adopt resolution 38 proclaiming may 11 2022 as day of the teacher and may 2nd 2022 through may 6 2022 is burbank unified school district teacher appreciation week second thank you for the motion in a second i apologize for the yarn in between um uh all those in favor please say aye aye aye opposed say no motion carried four zero um it's it's all you whereas education is the most vital activity we as a society undertake to ensure

232the well-being of the nation and whereas an educated citizenry serves as the foundation of our democracy and whereas education is in large measure the result of the talent and commitment of teachers and whereas today's teachers mold the minds and train the workforce force of the future and whereas good teaching grows in value and pays dividends far beyond the classroom and whereas teachers are a source of caring concern counseling empathy warmth and inspiration and whereas california's teachers are among the best educated highly qualified and hardest working educators in the country and whereas teachers in the burbank unified school district exemplify these qualities and whereas the board of education and leadership of the burbank unified school district recognized the truly vital role of teachers in realizing the mission for public education now therefore be it resolved that

233the board of education extends its sincere appreciation to the teachers of the burbank unified school district and encourages the community to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of the district's teaching staff and hereby proclaims may 11th as day of the teacher and may 2nd 2022-6 2022 as burbank unified school district teacher appreciation week thank you very much uh and and also too thank you to all the groups outside that make that week so special for our teachers that go out of their way that's really appreciated thank you 13 g adoption of resolution 39 proclaiming may 6 2022 as school lunch hero day president yes perfect present yeah uh i will move uh resolution 39 proclaiming may 6 as school lunch hero day second thank you for the motion and the second all those in favor please

234say aye aye aye opposed say no motion carried for zero and resolution thank you resolution 39 proclaiming may 6 2022 as school lunch hero day whereas the efforts of of the food service classified staff members of the burbank unified school district are essential to the successful operation of the district's programs and whereas nutritious school meals are an essential part of the school day and whereas food and nutrition professionals are committed to providing healthful nutritious meals to the district's children so they are ready to learn and whereas the women and men include yeah sorry gender pronouns here are off um the the women and men and others who prepare and serve school meals help nurture our our children throughout their daily interaction and support and whereas food and nutrition professionals demonstrate on a consistent basis their

235concern through patience and kindness towards our students and whereas their efforts and commitment to children and their contributions are extremely important to the overall operation of our schools and whereas the full force of our food and nutrition professionals are on the front lines during coven 19 and ensuring our students do not our children do not go without nutritious meals and now therefore be it resolved that the board of education its sincere appreciation to the food and nutrition professionals professional employees of the burbank unified school district and encourages the community to recognize and honor their contributions to a quality education and to celebrate their accomplishments and hereby proclaim may 6 2022 as school lunch hero day again an aside dr weisberg and i um and i i know other board members as well have visited school

236sites keeping these cafeterias open uh and keeping these meals moving was a real chore as well and the adaptability of our classified staff moving from site to site at will on call and rising to the moment to ensure kids aid was heroic indeed we will spend the rest of our lives and i said this before and i will say it again telling the story of everybody who delivered for kids in this time in history and these school lunch professionals did that uh in the heat in the cold they were there they did it early and they did it for the most part really without complaint um so again to all those who kept our lunches rolling who kept those kids fed god's work thank you madam madam president i also want to add a kind

237of following of what my colleague said you know food scarcity is becoming a really big issue and for a lot of our students you know these lunch this this lunch heroes are really the heroes because that's the time they get meals you know and and i think we talk about homelessness but often for we forget about food scarcity especially now with the cost of you know foods and groceries rising you know it's becoming a really big challenge so thank you you know for this lunch heroes because for some of these students they are the hero where they get at least a meal during the day thank you a lot of effort a lot of work thank you so much okay skipping 13 8 because we've already done that we moved to 13i adoption of the

238proposed 2022 2023 instructional calendar president yes sir mr ferguson i will move uh the adoption of the proposed 2022-2023 instructional calendar as amended second thank you for the motion thank you for the second uh any discussion okay all in favor please say aye aye aye those opposed say no motion carried 4-0 13 j reappointment of members to the school facilities oversight committee sfoc madam chair uh president i moved at the board of education reappoints members raymond juarez justin worsham and brandon mullins to serve two years terms on the school facilities oversight committee effective june 1 2022 and expiring may 31 2024 as presented thank you for the motion do i have a second second second thank you um any discussion did we advertise a point or did we just move to reappoint i believe we

239just moved to rio okay i i think that that's that's okay in this moment because i don't think we but i would always similar to boards and commissions i would like to see if we advertise um positions purely because there could be people who want to come off who you know are just kind of uh holding on because they've been involved and that happens but you know i think it's an opportunity to tell the story but other than that i just wanted to that small piece of feedback and they're only allowed so many terms i i well i understand that if it's a bond committee it will transition kind of out of a bond oversight committee uh at some point as the bond dollars are extinguished and at that point those term limits don't apply

240in the same way so that's just where i think like moving forward if we could advertise it that that's all even if even if it's a staff recommendation to reappoint um that's fine i think but again i think giving people opportunities to get involved that's the i also know have they confirmed that they're okay with the reappointment yes good to know and good to flag and just thank you to these three members you know it really isn't my commentary is not anti-you it is really just about in we're a public institution and and people should be able to get involved uh at all levels especially in oversight bodies for sure okay thank you 13k approved oh my apologies all in favor please say aye aye opposed say no motion carried 4-0 now moving on 13k

241approval of designation of high school representatives um madame president yes i move that we approve the designation of principals thomas crowther and matt chambers is the representatives of burbank high school and john burroughs high school and assistant principals brian james and victoria caseyo serving as the designated alternative representative from burbank high school and john burroughs high school respectively to the california interscholastic federation cif southern section pacific league 2022-2023 school year and to require such representatives to immediately notify the superintendent of any proposed or pending actions that fiscally impact the burbank unified school district as presented second thank you for the motion and the second uh discussion so this is our annual requirement to uh re-establish our representatives on cif uh they have specific deadlines for that and uh we have in the past and we

242can continue to amend when we need to amend right thank you that would just be a report back to the board within a minute right okay okay and we've in the past we've always done the principles and the vice principles of athletics and activities correct uh yes that is correct vice principles first person serving in that thing yes it is amen yes i get it no yes all right okay okay thank you uh all in favor please say aye aye aye aye opposed great motion carries four zero uh 13 l approval of agreement for professional service services actuarial study from the general fund president taven yes sir i will move the board of education to proven agreement between the burbank unified school district and total compensation systems inc to perform an actuarial study not to

243exceed six thousand dollars out of the designated account string uh effective april 22 2022 through june 30th 2023 and that the authority to sign the agreement be exercised pursuant to busd ar3314 is presented second thank you and thank you for the second uh any discussion okay pretty routine uh-huh all in favor please say aye aye aye aye and it's gotten to that point yeah he's excited about this one actuarial studies you know those [Music] please say no if anyone she laughs now but you know that's fine okay all those in favor please say aye aye and those opposed say no thank you motion carried uh 4-0 and actuarials will now commence 13am approval of the second amendment to the lease agreement with ang llc president yes sir i'll move the board of education approved the

244second amendment to the agreement between the burbank unified school district and ang llc for the waste of 104 parking spaces effective april 22 2022 through september 14 2049 out of the designated account strings and that the authority to sign the agreement be exercised pursuant to busd ar 3314 is presented thank you for the motion and the uh second any discussion [Music] questions great long-term deals long-term leases so great job all those in favor please say aye aye opposed motion carries 4-0 13 n approval of extension of agreement for professional services with ams president yes sir i'll move the board of education approve and extension uh to the agreement with ams.net for professional services not to exceed 30 000 out of the designated uh special use funds account string and the authority to sign the agreement

245be exercise pursuant to usdar 3314 is presented second thank you for the motion in the second to any discussion all in favor please say aye aye opposed say no motion carries four zero uh 13-0 acceptance of gifts yes sorry i moved the board of education take formal action accepting following enthusiastically accepting the following gifts to the district and the board of boards president convey enthusiastically appreciation to the donors as presented thank you for the motion and the second you'll work on all those in favor please say aye aye aye all those opposed okay motion carries 5-0 4-0 yes when with great appreciation and um i i happily or thank you want to thank these uh organizations for the donations uh we'd like to thank charities aid foundation america cyber grants who wishes to donate to

246the district 360 dollars to be used for materials and supplies at thomas edison elementary school i'd like to thank logix federal credit union who wishes to donate to the district a thousand dollars to be used as needed at luther burbank middle school wish to thank stefan dumanis who wishes to donate to the district 1 500 to be used as needed at luther burbank middle school we'd like to thank burbank youth vocal arts foundation who wishes to donate to the district a thousand dollars to be used to pay choir coaches at burbank high school i'd like to thank the home depot who wishes to donate to the district 921.56 to be used for materials and supplies at joaquin miller elementary school i wish to thank john muir middle school ptsa who wishes to donate to the

247district four thousand dollars to be used for the 2022 muir empowered program at john muir middle school thank you all for making our schools a little better place every day um consent agenda present habit yes i'll move it i'll move consent calendar items 14a through 14ad except which items board members wish to pull thank you for the motion in the second does anyone have i'd like to go over 14m we don't have to necessarily vote on it separately but an explanation of it for a question yeah might uh be suffice so you're talking specifically about the consultant agreement with ms jones yeah okay so as you recall the board approved two contracts with cde to um one sponsor an event here in burbank that's a statewide event for arts media and entertainment and the other

248to help develop a student organization for arts media and entertainment as well for the state so ms jones was involved in the development of those contracts over it took about a year for us to negotiate and going back and forth and so she knows those contracts intimately and also it requires a lot of not just clerical work but expertise in cte and all of that entails and it requires work during the regular workday so that would be hard for other employees to be able to step in and do that work because it's during their their regular work hours so some of that includes for example attending all of the advisory meetings that are surrounding this grant and also supporting the event that will happen in june which will be you know registration support and other

249event support thanks mr thank you yes thank you um we already served a lot and gave a lot to this district so thanks for coming back and helping out yes that was amazing yes yeah that was great thank you so and thank you for explaining quite well okay so i'm i'm good um have a motion to for consent agenda all those in favor of approving say yes are those who say no no who oppose it is late uh please say no thank you motion carried 4-0 consent agenda is approved um yes so request to address the board i yes i she she had said earlier that she would be back and here you are mrs abasta please yes thank you um again i i don't always get to come up here and talk about happy

250stuff and so today i do want to talk about that well but first i i do want to um regarding the um remembrance of holocaust just at burbank high um the social studies department doug grimshaw actually provided opportunities for us to see um virtual holocausts um survivor speakers and you know it it just tells you just the impact i mean our our students um i i i was just we were just you know it was just amazing inspirational and in so many ways just the students still need that education you know a lot of the things that we had in play like it was a given you did diary of anne frank and and when our students came they knew and they were prepared and so sometimes when things like this sort of get taken

251away i don't think we always realize the impact that it has so that was wonderful and then um in remembrance of armenian genocide what we did is we bought a book for each of our elementaries called under the light of the moon by laura michael um illustrated by aram gabutian and um it's a little chapter book and so i spoke to um dr navigan and ms gosaya to ask if we could not pilot it but ask a fourth or fifth grade teacher if they'd be willing to do it all of our schools except for one right away said yes so we have teachers doing that we also provided a teaching guide and um there are uh armenian genocide research and upstanders so it's just a really great um uh and so we're gonna see if

252this is something that works well um maybe we might want to you know look into this but we just thought let's give everybody an opportunity um uh to do this and so i just wanted to um share that with you i know they've seen it but i just would want you just to take a quick look at it to see what you think [Music] the bta read here there and everywhere has just continued to be something that i just really value so at providencia last week former mayor uh marcia ramos uh came to uh catherine colvin marvin's fifth grade class because she also sits on the metropolitan you know water board so she spoke to the students about water conservations what an impressive group of fifth graders you know they were talking about water usage

253in burbank desalination plants i mean it was amazing and so from there we walked outside to read the book called the water lady um uh which you know they are sometimes called marsha ramos the the water lady and so it's actually based on you know on a true story of a woman who brought water into the reservation and being from new mexico as marcia ramos is so it was just one of those it just fit perfectly um next week um dale gorman from the kids community dental clinic is going to be uh coming to emerson and the book there is called creature of habit and it's about a creature whose routine suddenly gets disrupted by unexpected arrival of a new friend but realizing the importance of um friendship and also good habits so she's going

254to speak to our kids i think it's a first grade class about good teeth caring and good habits um uh just to also let you know that not only do do my colleagues do everything in the classroom they also do so much for the community so uh last month they um gathered i don't know how many hundreds of they create these toiletry kits that we donated to btac um we also are involved in the care walk that's something that we do um every year we pay for the registration fee and create a team um this year they're honoring halle fleshman which is wonderful and um just to end uh remembering debbie acatello and her work for relay bta we started we were one of the first to start this years and years ago there have

255been so many many things um good things and so she really helped with that and so that is something that when we walk this year we will always uh remember um debbie and then two last things one is um just as we get ready to prepare the budget you know how we adopt the budget i think i think we we need to really look at how we do budget and so we've been having that conversation for some time but i think it's now after years and years of probably hearing me at this mic and seeing that it can be done uh it can be done different and the last thing then this is just me saying this i'm not as the bta president but it's diana vasta a teacher of 40 years an english teacher

256of literature which is my passion and i would invite you because this is what i had asked for before to do the training through facing history with to kill a mockingbird so it's 20 hours we've been trained for this and i am asking that we reconsider bringing this back as supplemental there comes a time where we have to get away from the trauma we it has to be from a place of healing and i can only tell you that the teachers who we've gone through this training and we've done this for years the good that has come out of it is something that i i think we're we're not doing our students a service and so i'm just asking you try reading the book participating in those 20 hours to see how it is done

257because um i think that you're going to begin to see other people in the community who are still wondering why so that's just all um i i wanted to to say that i want to get away from trauma induced and get into healing and changes and continuing to add diverse books thank you thank you um is our superintendent with us or sharon jenny i'm i'm still here but i just want to thank ms abasta for her comments this evening and sharing the the great work that's happening in the schools thank you thank you uh remember i i know i'm coming board member comments go ahead uh thank you mr bosta for sharing all of the amazing i'm gonna i'm gonna come over here for a minute and just talk to you um so one of

258the exciting things i got to do when i worked with facing history was help develop to kill mockingbird study guide um and then facilitate those workshops so i can you know it's i can speak to the power of those workshops i we can continue the conversation offline for sure i just think it's important to note that i do think most people know why these books have been paused it would be great to have a conversation about whether all of the teachers who might be teaching this book have gone through the facing history training because it is as you state it's so in-depth and it is quite a time of commitment and then just talking about the sort of what needs to happen to your really beautiful point to move from trauma to healing what those

259steps are both for our teachers and our students i think it's a really important conversation that you brought up and i hope we can have it together um so i'm just gonna take full credit for the study guide because just kidding i won't um but i but it is a wonderful resource and it is interesting in my no longer with them obviously but to have conversations with other people who helped really write and develop it and talk about the sort of um evolving relationship with that text so i look forward to future conversations with you about it just quickly if i could circle up with you on that um i i don't i'm not on the committee so i don't have as much background on it and it would just be helpful in uh conversations

260to have context so i will reach out separately but thank you for that i'm going to turn off my son mr basta thank you and thank you for sharing that book um you know i uh i still look forward to seeing the books on the fence when we're going down chandler i i really i this is something i brought up a while ago but i wanted to come back to the whole idea of not only making sure that our kids are reading because you know they're not as much as we like them to but also to i love to see those the books continue on defenses year-round because you'll be surprised like my kid was asking oh what happened to the books you know so so i think we need to also start this conversation

261about diversifying our libraries different languages you know as first-hand experience when i spoke to our english learner students or advanced english learner students and you know you want to talk about healing and we want to you want to talk about really bringing the community together i think sharing common stories will bring us together and that commonality is what unites us as a community as a whole but i do appreciate you and the teachers bringing this book forward it's a wonderful book and you know if you ever need to see if there's need to get supporters to get more of them maybe we can you know i think it's something that we can talk about but i think that idea of diversifying the books not only in languages but in ideas approaching these traumas in different

262ways through literature i think will help us thank you thank you anyone else all right well um first we have some retiring retirees to announce we have some certificated personnel deborah vermillion uh eileen peavy house john whitener and linda lindley and yeah um and then and then from the classified personnel uh helga gregorian we thank you for your years of service to the district i know um linda's been around a long time mr whitener miss bb house this pv house who made me run i hope you enjoy your retirement because you were fantastic um but no no no no she gave me the opportunity to make it up when i couldn't do it uh so um but seriously somebody who taught me how to keep got it so uh enjoy your retirement thank you um

263and then we will also adjourn tonight's meeting in memory of sid kolpas and debbie costello catello sorry katella thank you you