001all right good evening we are opening our um calling the meeting to order the nbusd board of education is holding a regular virtual board meeting tonight that all can participate in remotely you can join via zoom specific directions on how to participate are located on the board of education webpage on the district's website nbusd.org board the open session part of the meeting agenda begins at 7 pm public comment and closed session items before going into closed session the board is available for public comment on closed session agenda items is there any public comment on closed session items mr ruiz there are no public comments present godzilla's matters thank you mr reese seeing that there are none the navajo unified school district will now adjourn into close session see you all at 7 pm thank you
002meaning to open sessions yes yes you ready to go mr reese yes president exhaust modus all right you mres yes good evening my name is edward gonzalez mares and this is the napa valley unified school district board of education the nvusd board of education is holding a regular board meeting tonight that all can participate in remotely you can join via zoom buenas a [Music] this part is in english interpretation in spanish is available for tonight's virtual board meeting the to access interpretation from a computer click on the interpretation icon on the bottom of your screen from within the zoom application on a mobile device click on the more button on the bottom of your screen and choose language interpretation from within the zoom application this is a separate channel that will allow you to hear
003english to spanish translation concurrently please note interpretation services are not available when you join our meeting by calling in our interpreters for tonight's meetings are francisco mesa and i'm gail romero francisco please translate these directions on our english channel so our spanish-speaking families can hear the instructions thank you thank you the interpretation in espanol is [Music] thank you specific instructions on how to participate in the meeting are located on the board of education webpage on the district's website nvusd.org board can we please start with an attendance roll call from vera morales executive assistant yes student board member magana president trustee gonzalez present trustee jankowicz present trustee gracia present trustee reiser present trustee water trusty dooley present quorum present thank you thank you vera thank you for joining us tonight for our napa valley unified school
004district board meeting public participation remains virtual online only due to kova 19 shelter in place order we continue in unchartered territory and we deal with the covet 19 as we deal with the kova 19 pandemic as trustees we have returned to the boardroom in solidarity with our staff given that our school campuses are now reopened for our students however in order to ensure access to our meetings without any limitations during the persisting pandemic we are continuing with online remote access via zoom for the public and guests i would like to thank our employees our families and the entire nbusd community for how you have supported each other and come together during these unprecedented times this meeting tonight is in accordance with the open meeting rules in the state of california for the governor's order i'm
005going to start tonight with some basic instructions on how we are going to be using zoom and involve the members of the community all board of trustees are on video throughout the entire board meeting from here in the boardroom due to special circumstances the superintendent will be present by video only other staff members are present but by audio only members of the community will not be on video and will be muted except during public comment during public comment any member of the community that wishes to speak must raise their hand during the raised hand feature in zoom you will be unmuted and will be provided three minutes to speak there are two ways to make public comment within the time allotted for public comment on an eligible agenda item to comment by video conference click
006the raise your hand button to request to speak when public comment is being taken on the eligible agenda item when it is your turn to speak your name will be called out you will then be unmuted during your turn and allowed to make public comments after the allotted time you will then be remuted instructions on how to raise your hand are available on the district's website at nvusd.org board to comment by phone you will be prompted to raise your hand by pressing star 9 to request to speak when public comment is being taken on the eligible agenda item when it is your turn to speak the last four digits of your phone number will be called out you will then be unmuted during your turn and allowed to make public comment after the allotted time
007you will then be re-muted instructions on how to raise your hand by phone are available on the district website at nvusd.org board in addition community members were allowed to submit comments via email at public comment at nbusd.org up until 8 a.m this morning public comment received after 8 a.m the day of the scheduled meeting will not be read into the record however the public comment will be announced as received after the deadline and will become part of the meeting archive as long as it is received before the meeting is officially called to order for every agenda item i will prompt the meeting participants who have joined us via zoom for public comment please follow the instructions just provided when you would like to comment on an item we have been called to order and conducted
008our attendance roll call we will go forward with our agenda i will now ask trustee gracia to report on closed session items yes there is nothing to report from closed session all right thank you trustee gracia i will now um we're going now to our flag salute i will ask also tristi gracia to lead us on our flag salute certainly if you could please stand and join me in saying the pledge of allegiance 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 okay thank you trustee graciam we'll now go to our announcement that this meeting is recorded for live streaming and archiving on the district youtube channel for a detailed review of any
009meeting agenda item the archive video can be referenced located on the district webpage at nbusd.org the public can join the virtual board meeting remotely via zoom participation instruction and the process for public comment can be found on the district web page we will now move on to item e4 for approval or agenda but prior to doing so we need to pull item k to b so i'll move to approve the agenda pulling item k2b all second okay our first by trustee gracia a second by trustee dooley all those in favor aye aye student board rep aye anybody oppose abstain okay emotion passes thank you and now um dr masseni do we have any recognition of visitors and employee organizations tonight we do um but before that um president gonzales approval of minutes there were minutes
010attached to the agenda for the march 11th before we go i guess recognition you are right um dr massena skipped that one thank you for noting that approval of minutes and these are our 3 11 21 minutes move to approve second that's a first by trustee gracia in a second by trustee water all those um in favor hi hi student board rep aye ready to pose or abstain okay great thank you okay now we're on to that item dr masetti thank you recognition of visitors and employee organizations yes thank you president gonzalez i would like to invite miss gail young president at mba mvea to unmute her might and she's here this evening hi i'm gail young i'm from napa valley educators association representing counselors nurses and teachers within the napa valley unified school district
011really looking forward to this being um ending ending this covered year on to something else and uh i'm really looking forward to being able to do these kind of meetings back in in person thanks thank you miss young we also have attending tonight uh miss leslie walder the president of naps miss walter if you could raise your hand and unmute your mic good evening this is leslie walder i'm the president of naps the napa association of pupil services good evening president gonzalez um dr musetti members of the board of trustees um as ms young already shared we are looking forward to ending this school year in a positive way and i'm grateful for the hard work that is being done by the members of the board the members of our district administration and by um
012our middle school redesigned task force thank you welcome miss walder and i don't think i see him um mr hector gallegos president of csea don't think i see him i think that's it for now raise your hand hector if you're here long list of attendees i don't think he's here so uh welcome ms walder and miss young thank you for joining us this evening thank you dr mercedes and uh definitely welcome to our meeting um okay we are now um moving forward with our recognition of students of the month um tonight we have valley oak high school in napa high school and we'll start with principal maria susanatos from valley oak high school i am muted i just realized that so good evening um president gosala smares dr masati in um board of trustees and
013everyone that's here on zoom it's a pleasure to be here as always i'm coming to you from my home after a great workout earlier today the sun is out and it's sunny outside and spring is in full swing and i can see it on campus already so um but it's so nice to um to be here with all of you today i am going to present both students together this this evening both are january february as you can see we have amelia williams um she is a senior at valley oak high school and she is 2.25 credits away from graduation um this last two trimester she earned her 4.0 um and that's a treat a tribute to to this young lady we've always known that she's a brilliant young mind and she has really demonstrated
014that in the world of zoom teachers constantly share how she's one of the few students that will turn on her camera and engage in the learning ask a lot of questions answer questions even when teacher computers go down she's one student that her english teacher reached out to to help uh with the class and help lead the class or the discussion and so um she is being a little shy tonight so she is not um able to speak but on behalf of amelia she wants to thank the board for this wonderful recognition and opportunity and um she knows uh this means the world to her she was very excited when i spoke to her about it and um you know she didn't see um she didn't see this coming she didn't realize that this would
015be something that we will recognize her for over the last two trimester she's completed 51 credits she's worked very very hard with her teachers to make sure that she earns the optimal credit in addition to extra credit with the goal of graduating on april 30th of this year so with that amelia williams uh congratulations and i know her mom sarah is also here there with her um and so i just want to congratulate both of them and and really recognize amelia's merits and in her grit and determination uh to complete her her her um high school experience and um academics at valley oak high school well congratulations to her [Applause] and like i said she will not be speaking so i don't know if a board member i will if i can't recall if a
016board member says something and presenting the plaque in the virtual format we just proceed um okay so you can go to your next student mrs meadows great then i have jesus garcia guerrero he's also i was not able to join us today this young man came to us actually on october 9th as a senior needing about 60 credits he decided that he i i spoke to his mom and she mentioned that he was determined to finish school as quickly as he could um took advantage of all the cyber high um uh classes uh took advantage of all the extra credit that was offered within his classes asked you know hundreds of questions just like amelia wanted to make sure he understood what he was um being asked to to to do not just to do
017the work but to really understand it at a higher level and um according to mom he is ready and motivated uh to move on and continue with with education something that she didn't think he wanted to do um but observing and watching him really you know take his time and do his work every single day at home uh to her that indicated that for him he he found a way back into into the learning and wanting to do more i have to tell you he's our first graduate that has never put a foot on the valley of campus uh he has been doing his studies virtually since october 9. so with that um on behalf of of jesus and his family again thank you to to the board for this wonderful recognition and i'm sorry
018they were not were not able to be with us tonight and speak but i know they're just as excited for this wonderful recognition thank you principal cisneros and now we have from napa high principal ready good evening president alba gonzalez mara's napa valley unified school district board of trustees and dr mussetti tonight i have the opportunity to present to you two students that inspire napa the napa high school community and me as an educator every day the support of these two students to represent napa high school as board student of the month is overwhelming and yet not surprising their daily words and actions bring out the best in their peers in the classroom on the field and in the dance room starting us off tonight is luisa ortega diaz academically luisa is engaged in the
019most rigorous courses offered at napa high school and excels as a learner her resume of involvement and activities in our arts is enormous yet it is louise's humble gracious and thoughtful care for others and passion for service that stands out in a time when we face when we long for connection and find a need to tend to the mental health and well-being of those around us luisa is filling the gap as a student leader her leadership of the bring change to mind chapter at napa high school extends beyond the club meetings where students find a space to discuss mental health she has grown that to include outreach to our entire school community through weekly social media mental health tips and messages in the napa high newsletter for this work she was recognized just last week
020by the napa community her coach mrs johnson shared luisa is an incredible person of the highest character work ethic and positive spirit she's one of the kindest most caring students i have had the privilege of teaching and coaching in my 29 years with that i present to you luisa ortegas of diaz good evening everyone first of all i want to thank the superintendent the board mrs reddy my parents and every teacher who has guided and helped me towards where i am today it is a huge honor to even be considered for this award and to be in the presence of all of you last december i reached the same age my dad was when he immigrated to this country he was only 17. and as i think about what he must have felt like to
021leave home so young i realized that it's in our human nature to grow and march on my very first steps in my educational journey were made in what felt like a completely different world before i started kindergarten due to the worsening condition of my grandfather's cancer my mom sister and i moved to mexico i saw firsthand the lack of resources in a place where having a decent education is a privilege being there made me aware of the wideness of the world and really the ranges of human experience it set me up to understand what the world is really like by the time i was six after a year and after my grandfather's passing we moved back to napa i went to mvla and later to harvest middle school i struggled a lot with finding a
022balance between who i am and who everyone expected me to be i am a woman a first-gen latina and a daughter of immigrant parents since middle school i'd find myself being one of three people of color in my advanced classes or the only latina in my youth orchestra realizing that the way the world sees me doesn't have to be the way i see myself took time but it allowed me to find strength in my identity push past barriers and grow now as a junior in napa high i'm lucky to be in positions of leadership as a dance captain for the spur leading team as a co-president of our bring change to mind club and a member of a teen advisory board for a national mental health organization these positions allow me to be a voice
023for people like me and start important conversations to smooth the cracks of broken systems my generation has been raised in a world at crisis and this problem-solving mentality has been forced upon us i've grown up playing the cello and the guitar making art and now dancing for me it goes beyond playing or creating or moving but using the skills that i have and the things i know to help others and as i'm asked what the next step will be for me and what i want to do in all honesty i'm not really sure but what i do know is that no matter where i go i will always work to leave it a better place than it was before thank you congratulations luisa next up we have robert perry robert perry's energy and enthusiasm for
024all aspects of life are infectious when he is in the classroom on the field or walking around campus his light draws others to him behind that incredible personality is a young man of character who embodies perseverance resilience strong work ethic and passion these traits and more are all common themes that were shared by robert's teachers when they nominated him specifically mrs kelly stated robert arrives on time engaged camera on ready to learn every day he is friendly and kind to others works very hard on all his assignments and asks great questions he is a student athlete for who learning has not always come easily and he still does all he can to be his best every day i am very lucky to be his teacher i couldn't agree more i am blessed to be his
025principal and learn from him as he grows through each and every success and challenge that he faces robert rises up with humility gratitude and grace with that i present to you robert perry all right i'm gonna raise my hand do i all right thank you for the opportunity of giving me student of the month thank you for the teachers and everyone that believes in me thank you to my grandma who helped me get transferred to napa thank you to the lex family thank you to god being there through the hard times and through my depression thank you to my coaches and thanks to my great nasty too all right hello all right growing up i had a lot of depression when i was young and act out a lot because i was living in an
026unhealthy situation of a whale i've been living with my grandma since 2012. 2015 i became a pre-diabetic i was really depressed and overweight 2016 a lot changed started dying and boxing around that time my stepdad passed away around 2017 i had my first surgery on my gallbladder 2017 my grandma was done nice i'm diagnosed with lung cancer to add the difficult we barely had cars to get around to our appointments the school helped out with blessing me for me blessing me to and from school because of all our financial struggles throughout my life i've had to live in four different households which i'm extremely grateful for it's welcoming me and supporting me through everything i feel as though each person in my life has been a blessing i'm grateful for everything that i have i'm
027thankful i think for everything i have and i feel so many people are in worse situations people are out there fighting for their lives or not having a roof over their heads i feel like i feel like my life experience has made me humble where i tried to bless others around me everyone deserve love and try and i try to be generous in any situation i'm in like when i have extra money i try to get to the homeless since it will make their day and help them out i will i will always feel like i mean i'll i always feel like positive actions can influence people to possibly try to turn their lives around in the way that i have every kid i have been around with throughout my life they always seem to
028have other opportunities which i didn't feel like i had i really struggled with my reading when i was younger even up until i was in the seventh grade my teacher my teacher hernandez really helped me out worked through things and never gave up on me she would tell me how she knew what i'm truly capable of i began going in every day at every break and once to work on my reading with her that was a big turning point for me as well where i felt like i could actually begin reading and understanding my homework to get it done during freshman year in valeo i was living with my cousin and his family i was ready to drop out of school because i had been pushed into all gen ed classes without getting any real
029support [Music] okay she would tell me no no no no no no freshman year i was living with my my cousin family i wasn't ready to drop out because i've been pushed on i'm messing up i'm gonna skip that you're part great you're doing great robert i at the time my cousin was playing as quarterback at napa high school football team and when i saw how he will was doing and what here about how the teachers were really helping their students and the research they were able here they wasn't so much in valeo i really wanted to transfer once i turned for eileen i easily made friends and already knew a lot of kids from playing pot warner football in napa since coming to napa high school i've been able to play on the football
030team while continuing to get better with my schoolwork since i was young sports have always helped me keep me alway i mean away from gangs drugs and violence which has been around my life so i feel like oh my i mean i owe a lot to my coaches not high school and everyone i mean i have a high school and everyone and it has accepted me as a family where i could just be myself i'm so i'm so grateful for the opportunity to be here i'm sorry i'm so grateful for the opportunity to be here because it it has truly changed my life and now i have the following goals they become a set to become successful in life have a job that i actually like and become either a therapist or a coach or
031a teacher with each pad i would i will be able to help people through their homie hard times and help guide them guide them and to better opportunities in life just those around have helped me in my life thank you thank you congratulations thank you to the students of the month for at valley oak high school and napa high school thank you for sharing your stories with us tonight we will now go to item g of our agenda this is the public comments on non-agenda items members of the audience may address the board on any school-related matter that is not on the agenda the board will not take action on any issue raised during this section of the agenda and as much as board action is limited to posted agenda items speakers are requested to
032limit their comments to a maximum of three minutes i will ask trustee graciat if there were any uh public comments submitted via email yes public comment was received from the following people gentle tacione mcgahee letter of support for river received on twenty one gail chase bien river school closure received three twenty one twenty one josh mccall reverse school closure received three twenty two twenty one tony peris river middle school parent club member keep river program alive receive 320 421 liam why to keep river received 325 21 lauren daly public comment for 325 school board meeting received 325-21 bonnie broxton middle school closure financial crisis received 3 25 21 bonnie broxton number corrections received 3 25 21. deirdre c wheeler resident and in the usd parent the public statement regarding nvusd middle school redesign plan which
033was received 325.25 uh deirdre c wheeler the revised statement which was also received 325-25 t beller co-founder and first director of river middle school letter to nvusd regarding river school received 325 25 and jackie shikowitz parent of four nbusd students letter for board meeting tonight 3 25 25. these public comments received via electronic written format have been forwarded and reviewed by the nvusd board of education trustees prior to tonight's meeting that ends public comment thank you trustee gracian so we will now move um to public comments via our um individuals participating via zoom so mr ruiz do we have public comment tonight president gonzalez miles yes we have uh several public comments uh we'll start with maria martinez go ahead and unmute your mic mariah yes martinez uh mr ruiz can we have uh the
034translator on this and so our trustees can um yes thank you martinez the translators are now in the uh the main channel president gonzalez yes we're right here on the channel okay thank you mr francisco okay senora martinez because we had some information that it was regarding the school mississippi and this affects me uh directly because they still have not left uh uh primary school or elementary school so i would like for my children to go to river so we hope that that's the best decision and it's best for everyone next speaker mr ruiz yes let's go with uh derek moore i am the president of the harvest middle school parent and the parent of a seventh grade harvest student and soon to be sixth grader i am here tonight to ask the board to
035suspend consideration of closing the middle school to give the napa community the opportunity to explore alternatives and so that the public can have more faith in the process it's almost become a matter of faith that we have to close the school despite no real opportunity to think differently about the subject the first we heard of the plan to close harvest was in a friday night message to parents during the darkest days of the pandemic no warning no input it was presented as a done deal while we appreciate the reprieve it still doesn't feel like district leadership is seriously interested in anything other than closing a school and in particular harvest and what a travesty that would be harvest is at the gateway to our city easily accessible from highway 29 on immensely valuable property adjacent
036to the amazing playground fantastico harvest should be the crown jewel in the whole of the nbusd kingdom prior to the pandemic a county education official floated the idea of the culinary institute of america partnering with harvest for cooking classes would the cia be interested in investing in a satellite campus in southwest napa what about school to career partnerships around technology the trades or arts and entertainment would a community health care provider jump at the opportunity to use some of the space to serve patients in the neighborhood where they live or how about a college opening a satellite campus for students who are interested in becoming dual immersion teachers talk about on-the-job training the point is to my knowledge we have not explored any possibilities other than closure which let's face it would represent a total
037failure of imagination some equate closure with equity i view it as further dividing our community along racial and economic lines and so i request that we pause the closure process in favor of a more holistic approach to the challenges we face we should involve community partners across a range of interests including government education and health care and we should wait until summer when hopefully we are in a better position to actually see one another this revised approach would accomplish at least two things one it acknowledges the singular struggle of our latin next community during this pandemic and provides them a real opportunity to be engaged in the process and two it offers the community as a whole to be part of the conversation our schools are not islands and if it's true more closures are
038being considered we must acknowledge that early and with the appropriate amount of public feedback please hit the pause button we need you to see and hear us thank you for listening thank you mr moore next comment mr ruiz yes leslie walder good evening i'm actually didn't intend to have my hand raised so i'm not speaking at this time thank you yes thank you mr walter um next comment mr ruiz yes tracy moskowitz hi this is tracy moskowite thank you for your attention today i i wanted to speak as a community member about the middle school redesign task force one of my concerns is the way that we are currently pulling this tap this task force in small groups it has come to my intention after talking to many of my co-workers as i work at
039nusd as well as talking to other parents as i'm also a parent of an nvusd student that these small groups seem to be very geared towards one option and it also doesn't seem that the task force itself has gotten to put in a lot of input on what these options are i am eager to ask that every person in that task force gets pulled individually versus asking each small group to come up with one answer and then looking at them from small groups combined i ask this so that everybody can have a a fair opinion as this task force was carefully chosen to try to make sure that it meets all of our needs i strongly urge that you ask each person and then look at it as a whole versus looking at it from
040small groups thank you very much for your attention thank you for your comment um next well next person mr reese yes maureen thunderson hello can you hear me yes hi thank you thank you for the time um sorry i'm going to flip over to my notes my name is maureen tieneson i would like to review the history of the decision to invest in two charter schools nvla and river 20 plus years ago mvla was designed to address the need for spanish bilingual education that helps english language learners succeed river was designed for students who don't fit in are bullied in other schools are considered other and who do not feel safe enough to go to school every day the irony is not lost that one is celebrated and one has been devalued charter schools have
041always been portrayed as the bad guy of school budgets but there has been no recognition that our charter school pioneered project-based learning first district an innovation that was adopted to support 21st century job skills in years prior napa had local cases of student suicides and there were school shooter instance incidents nationwide parents push for mental health services and supports for kids at the middle school level river was held up as a highly successful model to help solve this problem river is the only comprehensive school program that addresses social and emotional learning and this assertion is supported by several academic research studies the decision was made to allow the space constrained school to have a chance to serve a larger population also there had not been a new middle school built in napa since the 1950s
042for 10 of the measure h bond money napa would repurpose a vacant campus and give more opportunities to every district student who needed this type of school culture river was and has always been a lottery admission school open to every student in the district river is diverse 51 white 49 latino asian and multi-racial ethnicities it also serves children with learning issues it helps kids who don't work well in groups who are shy or have other emotional needs it has changed and saved the lives of thousands of middle school kids this school co-existed on harvest campus for many years and deserves to be a part of the future at its current site or another site so i ask what is the plan destroy a 26-year community investment how is this fiscally responsible if lottery based enrollment
043is not equitable could you please share how it could be made more so the school has had exactly one year in the middle of a pandemic to make the case for its value arguably the worst year yet for mental health i have seen no case made that there is a superior program at one of our other campuses if the board chooses to end rivers alternative education for middle school you are sending a very clear message to the community the nvusd has ceased to care about this vulnerable population you serve thank you for your comment mr ruiz next speaker yes jolene yi great thank you there might be two jolene's on here because my daughter is also on here so thank you for allowing the napa community to present our varying viewpoints about this crucial and
044emotional topic my name is jolie knee i have a seventh grader at river and a fourth grader who until recently was at browns valley i'm a lawyer and an educator and i come from a family of teachers this process is being pushed through at an extremely rapid pace the long-term health of our educational community is at risk and we have focused a great deal of time on financial aspects but we also need to discuss educational quality if families perceive that the quality of education is diminishing then it's a foregone conclusion that you will see an acceleration in the exodus of families that the district has already experienced this will cause significant damage to the long-term health of the district and our community since you've asked for alternative proposals and since it's my sincere desire to
045save as many successful school programs as possible let me offer a different perspective you've already heard from many others about the benefits of the river approach so i won't go into that again but i have some experience in graduate school curriculum design and i believe we should take a more holistic approach if our goal is to provide world-class education to our diverse population in an equitable fashion and if we want to attract and maintain as many families as possible with diverse backgrounds we cannot limit our offering to one size fits all giant institutions we must offer educational tracks that appropriately address the diversity of needs goals and learning styles of our community otherwise families who want anything other than the most traditional education will leave the district my proposal is to close the one campus
046that makes the most sense taking into consideration all the relevant factors walkability geography community program excellence capital requirements etc then to keep campus size reasonable allow one or two elementary schools to pilot k-38 expansion giving families who desire a much smaller medical middle school experience that option reducing matriculation into the three remaining middle schools then structure our middle schools like universities like universities have colleges our middle schools could have different tracks one campus might offer dli traditional and vocational options and another would offer river traditional and a stem focused program a creative option like this is attractive to our diverse community and will help stem the natural attrition created by the demographic changes outlined by your experts but it takes time to evaluate properly last i would be remiss if i didn't comment on what
047i perceive as extremely negative rhetoric around race as others have mentioned dr mussetti's words last week misrepresented river's diverse population but more so her tone criticizing river as a school serving mostly white students brings an unnecessary tenor to this discussion the lack of empathy for what we are losing is shocking we need to change the conversation from one focus to cutting to one of creating we can turn the set of circumstances into an opportunity for improvement if we take the time thank you for your comment next speaker mr ruiz yes ginger young fisher hello can you hear me yes yes good evening and thank you for the chance to speak tonight my name is ginger young fisher and i'm a parent of two nvusd students i'm speaking tonight because the closing of any of our
048napa middle schools in this way and at this time would be a tragedy but the possible closing of two of our middle schools one of the big three napa middle schools and river school would be a massive mistake for this district and unfairly puts the brunt of our financial shortfalls on our already vulnerable middle schoolers even if we managed to save the dual language immersion program you would be asking the parents of the many non-dli elementary schoolers in town to send their sixth graders to one of two huge remaining campuses with no other options i understand the dual language immersion program is great for many but you can't switch into it as a sixth grader our eleven-year-olds who were not already enrolled in dli in early elementary would only have the option to attend one
049of two large middle schools with identical programs compare this to our napa elementary schools where we still have magnet schools dual language immersion and 13 campuses spread into the different neighborhoods and to our high schoolers who still have four options in napa high new tech vintage and the international spanish academy at napa high it would be a huge leap for elementary families to transition from a dozen or so elementary schools to two large middle school campuses and many parents who are able to will look for other options keeping educational alternatives available in our public schools prevents further segregation between napa's haves and have-nots by allowing kids of all financial backgrounds to have choices in their education the river model provides a public alternative for those kids who desire a more measured transition into middle school
050and a different format for their education rivers model also provides a middle school option for students from american canyon who choose to travel up here to attend river school there are many possibilities that allow the successful river program model to continue with increased access and diversity give river opportunities to do more outreach into napa's underrepresented populations or turn river into a neighborhood school with an open enrollment option or move river to another school's campus or move dli to rivers campus to be incorporated with the riverways or take whatever other steps you deem necessary to ensure that rivers population consists of whoever you think would most benefit from it in nvusd but let the program and those teachers continue to work their magic together here in napa with whatever group of kids would most benefit from
051the option of a river style education many adults will tell you that middle school was one of the most brutal times in their lives why would we give our middle schoolers the shortest shrift and fewest options of any kids in our nvusd education system it's not right thank you for your comment next speaker mr ruiz yes betsy witt hello friends my name is betsy witt and i teach at redwood middle school i began my career at redwood in 1990 under the leadership of harold miller redwood has always been a big school of close to a thousand students interdisciplinary teams were an effective and necessary way for us to get a small school feel on a big campus teams became our culture and we have held onto it dearly with the support of our staff and
052our principal marianne christopherson in the team model i share 165 students with four other teachers all of our students are redwood warriors but most of them identify with their team first i teach on the hornet team through the team structure we celebrate academic growth we handle discipline issues we support intervention we plan fun activities like field days assemblies and field trips the core team teachers meet regularly to strategize how to best help students grow academically socially and emotionally our teams all have a program called catch a falling star that we use to seek whenever we feel a student needs to grow teaming has created a strong sense of community at redwood substitute teachers parents and new students all comment on how friendly our staff and students are i believe this flows from the team culture
053that connects each child to a smaller learning community our students are friendly and respectful because they feel safe and connected through our teams redwood has other great programs including a full elective program where students can grow in band streams and choir under mr uren's guidance we also offer yearbook student leadership in avid the avid program helps to prepare our students for high school and academic success our aids program provides after school supervision sports homework help and other enrichment activities closing in middle school is a very difficult decision and i want families to know that you and your children will be very welcome at redwood middle school and we do have a lot to offer you thank you for your comment next speaker mr ruiz it's teresa sylvagni good evening my name is teresa silvani i
054am the teacher at redwood middle school and the parent of two nvusd elementary school students listening to the middle school redesign meetings and the community town hall has stirred a desire in me to speak in defense of redwood middle school comments made about redwood have ranged from uninformed to offensive yes redwood middle school is a large comprehensive middle school that doesn't currently house any special charters or programs but redwood middle school is a wonderful school with its own culture and a valuable educational experience i never worked anywhere else with such a compassionate staff that always keeps the question of what's best for our students at the forefront of their minds i believe part of the staff's willingness to cooperate when it comes to solving problems stems from redwood's use of the team structure as i've
055worked for at redwood for the past eight years field trips parent-teacher conferences flex grouping classes and social emotional homeroom classes are all things that have been organized using teams while some may believe that smaller middle schools are always better for students in my experience this isn't uniformly true a large diverse supply of students with different interests and personalities means that there are friends there for everyone i personally have seen many students who after transferring because they didn't fit in at a smaller private or charter school end up blossoming at redwood because they were able to find a group of friends that accepted them for who they are our students are wonderful and such hard workers redwood redwood is a neighborhood school that students walk to from all four directions while there have been many claims
056that closing harvest could be inequitable to its socioeconomically disadvantaged student group redwood currently houses a similar but larger number of students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds redwood's 449 students to harvest is 435. redwood middle school currently boasts the highest enrollment of the four middle schools being considered for closure it simply does not seem logical to me to close down a school with better facilities and a higher enrollment than others as someone who grew up in napa i know that there is no middle school napa can lose without great sadness in our community i want to acknowledge the great love people have for their schools without saying anyone should stay open or anyone should be shut down but what i have learned in this process is that at least part of the district's current financial issues came
057from the district's willingness to cave to the interests of a few elite and vocal schools that don't represent our entire community i am asking the task force and the board to make a database decision not about what will keep people happy but what will be the most equitable and the best decision for all of the students in our district thank you for your comment next speaker mr rhys and michelle m thank you napa valley unified school district board for allowing me to speak tonight i am michelle mcmaster i would like to start by congratulating all the students of the month recognized this evening as well as acknowledging all napa valley unified school students who have showed their resilience this year while it seems clear that a large middle school needs to be closed the public's
058does not currently have access to the data that is needed to determine which option causes the least harm so far the district has shown that they don't trust in the task force process by creating the silos of options providing minimal and at times unsubstantiated data restricting the time for the discussion at meetings and pushing them one particular pair of solutions given the opportunity and facts the task force and members of the community can be trusted to make the proper decision that will cause the least harm within our district further it is even less clear what should be done after the decision to close one to four different schools has been made two versions of one proposal has been presented but neither with clear details there is no data about the students would occupy riverside if
059the school culture and program is eliminated there is also no rationale for closing a program which is historically and continues to draw students to the district with a waiting list keeping this school open is money in the bank for the district if we are going to make these decisions it is important that we actually take the time to analyze all the data the district has and public has access to rather than making a top-down decision without any community buy-in our student population and staff have been working under uncertain conditions for over a year now due to the worldwide pandemic nationally represented mental health professionals have clearly stated that healing from the covid classroom will take years under the most reliable of settings the added stress of uncertainty of whether a school will be open in
060a year is exponentially compounding this concern rushing the closure of one or more schools especially when the next steps have not been clearly discussed and defined will certainly have an impact on students who are already struggling with their mental health i respectfully ask that the napa valley unified school district administration suspend these discussions until all accurate and necessary data community input and the social and emotional health of our students can be reviewed and considered thank you thank you for your comment next speaker mr ruiz yeah mike mike wilmore good evening my name is mike wilmarth and like several other tonight i'd like to share a few thoughts on my school redwood middle school as they relate to the work of the middle school redesign task force this what i'm going to say is not aimed
061negatively at any of the other middle schools all the schools work hard for their students but i think it's important to know some things about redwood during the town hall meeting and during task force meetings speakers emphasized the importance of teaming for middle-grade students what wasn't mentioned at that point is that redwood has a long-term commitment to teaming a commitment which reshaped our school in 1982 and has been part of our dna for nearly 40 years we know the middle grade years can be challenging for students academically emotionally and socially we also know it can be a time of great discovery if the adults create the right environment part of the environment is giving students a sense of group at redwood students and teachers are placed in interdisciplinary teams our teams group approximately 165 students
062together with a shared language arts teacher a math teacher a science teacher and a social studies teacher as was mentioned earlier these teachers meet frequent frequently to discuss their shared group of students and they're able to create support systems that work to make sure that students don't fall through the cracks even though they are students at a large comprehensive middle school the teams at 165 students create those small learning environments at redwood these small communities of diverse learners create the sense of belonging that is so important to the academic social and emotional health of middle grade students another very important part of a successful and enriching middle school environment is giving students the opportunity to work with classmates from a variety of ethnic and economic backgrounds while some have stressed the importance of schools to
063a given neighborhood middle schools unlike elementary schools were never designed to be neighborhood schools and this is one of their strengths by bringing together students from a variety of neighborhoods comprehensive middle schools like redwood give students the opportunity to learn and play alongside teammates from different parts of napa i frequently run into former students who talk about the lasting friendships they made with friends they first met at redwood thank you for the opportunity to share my thoughts like many i appreciate the hard and difficult work of the task force and the equally hard decision the board will need to make once you receive the task force recommendation thank you for your time this evening thank you for your comment next speaker mr ruiz hi my name is eliza i am here to represent middle river
064middle school as well as some other people may be here to do my mom has been trying so hard to say this school and i thought i would step in to help river is a school unlike any other it has a unique curriculum campus and has unique people here as well it is not a non-diverse school and has no reason to be called as such but i'll tell you what it is it's a place where kids come to thrive as a student it's its own little diverse community full of wonderful people including the staff everyone here supports each other no matter what culture they are from or what kind of person they are i myself am a multicultural and biracial person and so are many other students who go there this district has already taken
065away some of my favorite teachers from the school as well as some other schools and i'm sure other people's favorite teachers as well i did not lose these amazing teachers just to have my school taken away from me and it's not just me it's all the current and potential sixth graders who might lose an amazing school like my little brother so please keep river middle school thank you thank you for your comment next speaker mr ruiz yes tammy mcmurdy yes can you hear me yes okay good evening my name is tammy mcmurdy and i'm a teacher at the river middle school i began teaching sixth grade at river in september of 2020. ten days after i was hired my house was destroyed in the glass fire there was such an outpouring of love and support
066emotionally and financially from the students and from the staff it was overwhelming my students are some of the sweetest kindest most respectful and studious students that i have ever worked with and i have taught for over 20 years in different states in different schools parochial private public in the public sectors i have found this culture and community of river school very welcoming and very supportive as have all the students who attend there they focus on the education of the whole whole student the whole child and that's their primary focus we have a thriving community and a waiting list of 21 even during this pandemic our school is thriving i believe we will continue to thrive and be a financial asset to the district so please strongly consider keeping this thriving school community as a part
067of the district as well as a multi-diverse culture i'm so grateful to be a part of the napa unified school district and the river middle school community thank you so much for the opportunity to share my thoughts thank you for your comments next speaker from stories is jessica d gregorio hi good evening can you hear me yes great thank you good evening um as presented during the middle school redesign um task force harvest middle school has the highest percentage of english language learners of all the schools in the district composed mostly of students whose home language is spanish as it is nestled in the heart of the largest latino community in napa it is to the advantage of the school district to maintain uh the only middle school dli program within the middle school with
068the hard the highest percentage of els um as it provides an opportunity for reals to partake in the dia program's offerings such as high levels of academic spanish and or social science class taught entirely in spanish extensive research on second language learning has shown that the most effective model for building english proficiency proficiency for our els is dli programming where eos are able to continue building academic language in their home language that will in turn create the building blocks to mastering academic language in english harvest has beautifully accommodated accommodated its el population in particular those who are considered newcomers by often strategically placing designated students within the dli programming uh within the classes which provides an enriching experience both for the students who are in the dli program as well for the el students placed
069in the in the higher level spanish classes as i mentioned during the town hall meeting a few weeks back the issue of location is a necessary piece of data that needs to be included in the discussion of possible school closures shuttering a school in a neighborhood with the highest concentration of latino families can cause detrimental effects to our community and gives a very negative message to the community as a whole finally i'd like to request that the slides of the information available both to the public and to the task force members during the facilities upgrades presentation in session two be revised during the presentation on the cost of potential capital improvement budget for each of the middle schools to keep the schools warm safe and dry it was noted by several community and task force
070members that the inclusion of extra items for the harvest budget seemed ill-fitting such as a performing arts stage and upgrades to the harvest administration office which totaled uh to almost 17 million in extra costs and did not seem to fit into the category of keeping a campus worm safe and dry it was acknowledged by dr mussetti in session for that taking the taking those items out all three of the larger middle schools were comparable in facilities upgrade costs as the task force community and board members weigh in their decision by reviewing this important piece of information i request that this revision be made and i added this piece as i was listening in i just want to add that i'm tired this whole process has not only been completely emotionally exhausting but i want to
071acknowledge that this has been detrimental to the mental health and well-being of so many of us and i worry for my colleagues across campuses for our students for our families i've never seen such a divide in our school communities as i have now and it really saddens me i ask that the district and the board take this into consideration in their work moving forward thank you thank you for your comment next speaker stories yes maria martinez you have to unmute your mic maria senora martinez is the mike unmutant mr race it is not president gaza spiders i'm not sure why sh um she's allowed to unmute it but she it's not she's not a meeting okay mrs martinez senora martinez do you want to watch it oh yeah okay okay martinez let me can i
072pull in the interpreters okay senora martinez yes good evening do i need to speak again yes did you hear her comment so far let's start again martinez okay next speaker mr ruiz yes amy hi yeah can you hear me yes great so i've got two middle schoolers at nvusd and i felt compelled to comment on the proposal of closing or modifying the river school program to support the district's needs to balance budget which has been claimed to be out of balance due to the declining enrollment several points seem to have been made throughout the presentation material that are false or misrepresenting the truth that should be considered there's limited or mass communication to parents making them aware of what's truly being discussed and considered we get a lot of communication from parent square and the
073communication that we're getting says middle school redesign task force this does in no way imply or allude to the possibility that there's a school being eliminated let alone two this is a general title mixed in with various repeated communication that we get and this could be perceived as shadowing the true intention of said task force by not clearly stating middle school consolidation or closure as the objective on the communication it could be viewed as a conscious effort to limit the engagement of our community participants that may likely disagree with what appears to be a long-standing objective of bait and switch experience that river school has been through to expand on that bait and switch experience the perception at river had been that they were offered a new campus previously part of the harvest campus as
074part of the benefit they would get by giving up their charter and joining nbusd messaging at time became part of the district and we'll be sure to provide you with a new campus and ensure that your unique program not only remains intact but is supported by the district only to be followed by dr missetti stating that the district welcomes river and that we'll be working to align with this district and all the other middle schools that we have within the district while supporting their mission and vision for the current program i don't understand how less than two years later this successful model program has become so in value that is now considered one of your number one schools to close that doesn't make sense the enrollment numbers say quite a bit and this isn't really
075being talked about as much if you look at the capacity of the schools in our district you'll see that river school is at 85 capacity right now the rest of the schools are at 52 68 and 67 and if you look at the projected capacity from the district over the next two years in the 2023-25 school year river's actually projected to be at 93 capacity they're the only school that is showing an enrollment increase over that time period there's been a lot of misinformation stated around how many students are allowed to attend this school currently there's a waiting list and they're the only school with an increased enrollment plan the district seems to be prioritizing students have access to high quality educational experiences regardless of their gender race or ethnicity for a school that does
076their lottery as an open enrollment where we literally had to pick names out of a glass bowl to decide what students attend to me that's not an inequity that's probably the least inequitable session that we have in our entire district [Music] unless are you do you have you can have a few more seconds to finish um yeah can you still hear me i can still hear you just perfect i'm almost done i promise um i just i thought that you know everybody is really working towards our students education and the one thing that no one seems to be talking about is how we're going to improve the quality of the education that we get these kids regardless of what school we end up taking them to i feel like that is sort of a lost
077point and agree with so many of the other statements which is please let's slow down and let's do the right thing for these students and all the families in this district because ultimately i think that is the goal here okay thank you for your comment next speaker mr ruiz yes kara yes hello yes okay my name is cara and um i used to be an envy usd parent but my son is growing up now and i just heard this um and i was very um moved by it i don't um what i want to say was that the school system is meant to serve first and only the welfare of the child and children now staff are special yet we must uphold the intention which is to do no harm and keep the welfare intact
078for the children of the school system first and only then instead of thinking of staff first think of the child first instead of a second from hearing tonight from others that that there's there needs to be some more input in a task force to gather more uh from others because it doesn't seem they've been enough of that in order to do the correct decision as well whenever there is cutbacks and you know how there's been mishandling of some funding on the larger budget in napa um it's fair to say that they must do an audit of budget use that's what i have to say thank you for your comment next speaker mr ruiz yes valentin arango valentin uh you're running an older version of the zoom app so i can't i can't um allow you
079to speak you'll have to update your app and they can also call in correct mr ruiz that's correct president goes out smartest lauren daley hi my name is brenicky daly i'm in sixth grade at river although i have only been going to river for about a year now i can already tell river is special river has a great faculty and an even greater community closing river would destroy part of that community and kids would have to go to new schools the private schools would fill up too fast which could separate some kids from their friends although i don't want river to close harvest should not either it shouldn't close either most schools are special on the first day of school i was so anxious i thought i would be way in over my head or
080my teachers wouldn't like me it ended up being awesome i have some of the best teachers for me and i have amazing classmates river also allowed me to make many new friends and closing river could separate us on my first day of in-person school i could not sleep i was too anxious and i threw up a couple times when i got to school everyone was waving at me and all of my anxiety was washed away river has also encouraged me to do extra things it has encouraged me to study psychology spanish cook and cooking i really like studying psychology and i'm excited to keep studying it in the future the teachers are caring and helpful the community is caring and kind the students are smart and happy river is amazing please don't close your river
081thank you for your comment next speaker mysteries yes sarah schmitz good evening my name is sarah cavito schmitz and i have had the privilege of teaching at harvest middle school for 18 years i'm also a proud parent of an ndla 5th grader a member of the middle school redesign task force and a lifelong napa resident i wanted to speak tonight about my concerns regarding the potential closing of harvest middle school or any napa valley unified middle school at this time during the task force meetings i have heard district leaders refer to the building of the new river school campus with measure h money as a questionable decision or even referred to as a mistake it has been said that this would not have been a decision made by the current district leadership team current school
082board trustees have stated that they wish that more of the bond money had been spent on harvest but those decisions were made before their tenure i speak tonight to ask this what will you do now that it is on your watch will you write the inequities of the past leaders decisions is closing the school that was starved of measure h funding only doubling down on the inequity of those short-sighted decisions i believe the middle school task force has been rushed to be able to properly vet the scenarios proposed to be able to consider and mitigate any potential consequence or issue we'd need more time i am worried that the scenario that is brought forth from the task force for the school board to vote on could be something that the future school board members and
083future district leaders could later say was short-sighted they might say was not a decision that they would have made or even refer to it as a mistake i ask that you that you please take the time needed to make an informed decision that is thoroughly thought out that is not rushed not short-sighted that will not adversely affect our latinx community and neighborhoods that will not negatively impact the trajectory of our latinx students i also ask that you consider the stress this is putting on all middle school teachers administrators staff members parents and students during a pandemic finally i ask all of the school board trustees to please be certain that whatever decisions you have the responsibility to make during your tenure will be ones that you make with confidence and if there are decisions that
084give you pause that you take the time needed to fully investigate before you act thank you for your time thank you for your comment next speaker mysteries maria martin she's already spoken very much yadira hi can you hear me yes hi my name is elira chavez i am a product of dual immersion program um at the time in in the 90s when i was available at other schools here in napa um since then i have transferred to i transferred to uc davis majored in environmental toxicology and chicken and chicano studies and i am here in favor of saving harvest middle school mvla and pablo vista i am extremely disappointed in the way this was presented at a time where it was the middle of the pandemic and it was announced the harvest was closing without
085the input of the community i want you to take a pause i want the board to really take a pause and look back and see what is happening here all the scenarios that are proposed all the plans um are focusing on harvest nvla and pueblo vista and i really want you to think about what that's saying to the rest of the napa community i'm also really saddened that this has really caused a divide it's not about the divide it's about these programs and the enrichment of these programs and because i come from dual immersion i can say that that was really the foundation that led me to continue to to my higher education and now working at a local non-profit and giving back to my community harvest is at the heart of napa and disrupting
086that will be very detrimental to the rest of the community so i'm asking you to not rush this to take a pause and look at other options thank you for your comment next speaker mr reese christine mettler good evening thank you for this opportunity to speak this evening my name is christine mettler and i am an employee of envyusd a parent of a river school graduate and a parent to three dual immersion students i would like to take a moment to share with you my concerns regarding the scenarios c and g that have been presented to the middle school redesign task force i ask that you allow more time to gather more data before considering all scenarios but today i would like to speak specifically to scenarios c and g the data given by the
087task force supports closing one big middle school to save the district 2.2 million dollars annually however there is not enough data to show that the next steps in scenario c and g will be in the best interest of dual immersion program or that it will fill the seats of the salvador avenue campus there is data missing in two main areas first we need data showing that there is buy-in from the dual immersion stakeholders to have their program at the salvador avenue location if there is too little buy-in from the stakeholders of the 8 dual immersion community these two scenarios will not be successful second we need data to show that the next steps in scenario c and g proposed proposal will succeed there are currently 291 students in illinois middle school which leaves 339 open
088seats scenarios c and g do not provide data driven solutions for filling the salvador campus to full capacity when we close one large middle school with over six to 800 students several hundred of those students will be added to each of the two remaining middle schools that are already large for this reason we want to fill all 630 seats at the salvador camp avenue campus with middle school students to reduce the caseload number of students at the two remaining large middle schools let's make compassionate data-driven decisions on how we want to redesign our district's middle school community please consider keeping river middle school community at the salvador avenue campus because there ha because they have a 26-year history of maintaining a stable and resilient school culture with data illustrated growth each year in addition the
089river school community would like to welcome the dual immersion program if that is what is best for the dual immersion program or river school is happy to become a neighborhood school the river school community is committed to working with the district to fill up the salvador campus in a way that is best for all nvusd students let's work together listen to each other and be data driven to arrive at a decision that's best for the entire middle school community thank you for your comment next speaker mr ruiz yes tony good evening i would like i was my understanding that my public comment letter was going to be read aloud tonight and since it was not i would like to be able to read that uh excuse me while i switch over i apologize as i
090probably won't be as eloquent as some of the previous speakers i'm speaking more from an emotional standpoint we are angry my sixth grade river middle school daughter is beyond frustrated at this unprecedented experience and intrusion into her education i ask how can dr masetti the redesign committee and the school board trustees pretend that closing a middle school for fiscal necessity and closing an educational program like river middle school are equitable i repeat equitable solutions to a problem river school provides an enlightened small group learning environment that should be emulated throughout the district rather than shuttered the close-knit teacher student interactions at river have significantly enhanced my child's respect responsibility responsiveness and resourcefulness these are all pillars in building future leaders in our community it's about my student i'm being selfish we implore you to keep
091the politics out of this decision and pay closer attention to the students if and i repeat if closing a physical school is a necessity protect all of the district's unique educational programming while doing so dual language small group learning etc the district leadership has stacked the deck against the student-focused learning program at river and inaccurately cried equitably foul river middle schools program is highly valued by the parents of our community throughout the district and closing it will drive many of us out of district schools thank you for allowing me to speak tonight thank you for your comment next speaker mr reese valentin orongo near community of napa my name is valentina rango and i am the asb president at redwood middle school i am here today to talk to you all about the wonderful experience
092and time i have had here at redwood redwood has always made me feel welcome ever since the first day of school they held a great orientation for us when i was in sixth grade and that made me feel happy and not nervous on the first day of school the teachers at redwood are also great because they really care about you and want to help you succeed in school and in life redwood has every kind of support that everyone needs and you can always count on the staff there for help the great thing about redwood being a big school is that there is always a new opportunity to make new friends every day if it wouldn't have been for redwood i would not be great friends with everyone i know today and i don't know how
093i would have done in school because my friends and i are always there to help each other out with everything it is also great that we are all together as one big school community because all of these because of all these three years i have been at redwood i have not experienced bullying nor seen any anyone being bullied which i am very thankful for i am also happy to have a principal like mrs christopherson here because her team and her keep the school running smoothly and they keep everything in order without them here the school would probably be a mess and we would have a big problem with kids behaving i am also glad to attend redwood middle school because most kids don't like school and don't want to attend it but the staff members
094here are so amazing that they make kids want to go to school without feeling obligated to because they make because they make school a fun and a fun place and environment to learn redwood is like a second home to me because i spend a lot of time there and everyone there makes me feel welcome redwood is not a place i have to go to it is a place that i want to go to and i know that a lot of kids there would agree with me i have been offered many opportunities there to join different clubs and sports and they are all fun being on a team at redwood or in a club is great because you get to do something you are passionate about and you get to socialize with others and make new
095friends and you are all united as one the fun learning environment that runs through the school is makes it hard for you not to pass a class especially if you just pay attention and follow directions without this amazing school with great staff members i do not know how how i would be doing today so because of my great experience here at redwood just like many other kids have experienced i think the school should not be shut down and i want to thank all of the staff members there for everything they have done for me and for everyone and for everyone there thank you all for the for your time and have a great evening thank you for your comment next speaker mr reese that concludes our public comments president gonzalez actually i'm sorry there's one
096more sorry julia palaez pelayus [Music] hi can you hear me yes hi thank you um yes good evening my name is julia pelayes um thank you for this opportunity i have two kids my daughter yadida who will be graduating this year from fifth grade at shear my son robert attends redwood middle school in the seventh grade i'm a parent volunteer as well as as well as the president of elac at redwood middle school i am here today in support of redwood middle school as a parent when choosing a school for our children we look for options and to have freedom of choice if redwood closes i feel as if it's as if this right is being taken away not only for me my children but for many families redwood has been my son's community for
097two years and hopefully will also be my daughter's community in the fall redwood has also been a community for our teachers our teachers and staff who have been employed for several years my son is not one more student at redwood he is one of the many who has been thriving his self-esteem has changed tremendously he has built great relationships with all his teachers and his friends i honestly can't imagine him continuing school somewhere else other than redwood his teachers have supported him from day one and continued doing so even after so many challenges due to covet redwood offers supports to students utilizing a team model not only among teachers but within students students are supported with a strong behavior management system administrators teachers and staff respond to student and parent questions in a timely manner
098involvement opportunities for students and parents are presented throughout the school year these are many of the resources and benefits that students receive by attending redwood redwood holds the highest enrollment overall but also the highest enrollment of students with an iep over 150 students with an iep will need consideration for coordination i can only imagine what this would entail there are over 80 plus families who will become part of our community in the fall with incoming sixth graders with my daughter being one of them our enrollments continue to grow this goes to show the interest that families have for redwood i ask that you please pause just like other families have asked and please consider all possibilities as i mentioned in the beginning options are important for families i advocate for each and every child in
099the district not only for mine but for all and for all the families i ask that you consider again all possibilities and determine what is the best to the interest of the student thank you for your comment is there another speaker mr ruiz no that concludes our comments okay thank you mr actually hold on there's a natalia ortiz sorry you there natalia you have to unmute your mic she's not a mute in her mic i don't know if we want to move forward or yeah um mrs ortiz okay i think that that might be it mysteries yes okay so this does conclude our public comment on non-agenda items thank you everybody for participating okay we are now moving on to our next item of the agenda this is item h under reports h1 board of
100education and student board representative yes all right good evening everyone um since next week is spring break i just wanted to give a little update on where vintage is at and the rest of the high schools got some pretty fun stuff lined up for the rest of the year um students i think are really excited for the like season number two of sports happening with soccer badminton lacrosse etc um and that should be starting i think the first couple weeks of april which is pretty cool um the three high schools or three of the high schools uh napa high vintage and american canyon uh have either started or are in the midst of their homecoming courts uh and students are feeling excited and hopeful that that's happening along with football games and all that um
101kind of social activities that are outside of school um and last uh there's 12 about 12 weeks away from graduation which is pretty exciting so i think students are ready to uh move on from this year and hope hopefully have a better year next year but so far everything's looking hopeful so that's all from me tonight thank you carla for that reality check of 12 weeks away you know [Laughter] and it starts to set in huh and i imagine more for you as our senior here and um our our class of 2021 but who's counting who's counting all right so um now with our board of education so i'm sure you'd like to start trista garcia on the 16th of march i attended the facilities and technology meeting on the 18th i went to pope
102valley school board meeting on the 19th i and 20th i attended the masters in governance class 5 and graduated and then on the 24th i attended the nbsd governance workshop i too attended the facilities and technology meeting i would like to acknowledge the statement put out by the district and the importance of standing in solidarity solidarity with our asian american and pacific islander communities i attended the middle school redesigned task force meeting i continue did we have one is that the right maybe i think that was the week before sorry i continued to enjoy the author series and i too um attended the csba governance workshop trustee reiser um on march 12th i listened in on the professional development sessions for the uh live teach well lead well be well day put on by the
103district including sessions on suicide prevention on the toolbox learning project that the district is adopting and most impressive to me was a student-led panel about making classrooms safe spaces for lgbtq students i really was proud of those students for stepping up and sharing their experience and educating their broader learning community about how to be more inclusive on march 15th i attended the special education community advisory committee meeting on march 16th i had a site visit at the river school so thank you very much to principal kathy adams and her wonderful staff for their hospitality um march 19th and march 20th i participated in the masters in governance sessions um the course two so i'm not ready to graduate like trustee gracia but i'm making my way there um attending sessions on student learning and achievement
104and policy and judicial review uh march 23rd uh i was unable to attend the author event because i participated instead in the american canyon middle school african-american coalition town hall um it's a was well attended meeting by community members and staff members and also two council members city council members from american canyon um so many thanks to principal dr carlisa bataler and the meeting was facilitated by the vice principal bobby ruth who also happens to be a member of the diversity equity and inclusion steering committee for the district and he gave a nice presentation about that unfolding work that the district has commenced there were presentations also by two staff members and english teacher anne grant and the assistant principal dr amy warrell spoke about their presentations that they attended and also one that ms
105grant conducted about teaching toward equity um assistant superintendent pat andrew jennings gave a presentation oh no i'm sorry that was the other meeting but the council did ask for input on their vision mission core values and goals statement um and i wanted to highlight something that i thought was really impressive vice principal ruth is conducting community interviews um and then editing them down to short videos that he shares with his staff at the staff meetings and two of the women that were interviewed uh and had had videos made kind of shared about that experience and just seemed like a really innovative and excellent way to amplify community voices and solidify and solidify relationships and forge new connections and just make that connection between the staff and the community stronger on march 24th i attended also
106the governance workshop with my fellow trustees put on facilitated by the school board association and that concludes my report hi there i think mine was um pretty much the same as board member jankowitz's um so i think trustee jankowicz is so that's that um [Music] i did enjoy i did enjoy m uh mig 5 and i did enjoy graduating um it was fun to meet my colleagues from other school boards and there some of them are struggling with the same issues we are and i'm putting my community relations um expertise to work answering an awful lot of emails and i forgot your mexican marigold for the school garden but i'll bring it by your house on sunday okay so and that's it for me um that's it hi um so i kind of lumped my
107report together in different categories i continued my school visits finished off all of the middle schools i really want to say that all of the middle schools really exhibited the wonderful characteristics that we've been listening about from all the parents and faculty that have spoken either at public common here or at the town hall or through the task force so in addition to river on the 8th which i reported last time that i visited with principal adams i visited harvest middle school on the 15th with principal franco the 16th at silverado middle school with principal cole the 18th at redwood middle school with principal christopherson and on the 22nd this monday i visited our my i guess my middle school of residence the american canyon middle school with the new principal battalion and i i
108just want to say it is i i really felt the um the love for all of the schools from the principles and i i think all of us will have a very difficult time really with any any decisions on this redesigned task force um but uh today i got to visit an elementary school for a change um phillips elementary school with principal jones where i saw these fourth graders that really did a wonderful we're super excited about being in the classroom and they i i know that a lot of parents probably seeing their kids do gamified quizzes that the teachers have been using um something like kahoot well i got shown a different game today i can't i for the life of me i can't not remember what it was but the kids wanted to
109do that during their break so they were learning during the break um thank goodness for technology during this time um but of course the downside of technology is sometimes things don't work so today the teacher had problems getting that game up for the kids and guess what one of the students did it um he was able to get it up on his on his chromebook and he was hosting the game and he was very gracious and saying you know what everybody else play the game i will be the host so i know that we talk about um learning loss for a lot of our kids but look at what they've gained they knew how to problem solve they knew how to help the adults so i i i want to share with you some of
110you know i always bring stories either of my kids or when i go to these sciences i love stories coming out of them so i wanted to share that that positive story um from one of my site visits um so i also attended the staff professional development day which was fabulous um i know i've heard in the last year uh when the first one came out um a lot of my teacher friends have said oh it was great they finally were able to go to a professional development day so i started and probably learned everything and everything that i wanted to know and what i didn't really need to know about star assessments because i went to see what that was about we had just talked about it in board meeting um not too long
111ago but also a really interesting session on teaching for transfer which was how do you challenge students in the classrooms on the challenge to translate the what they were learning outside of the project that they were working on and so i felt like oh you know what phillips elementary students demonstrated that they knew to problem-solve that this is one of the things that we want to teach so you know teachers are doing it um it's awesome i love seeing seeing that work play out um in terms of our own uh governance team development um i also started on the path of the masters in governance now i'm on i finished course two with my other new trustee partners here and also attended the government the governance workshop yesterday and uh the last thing i i
112wanted to touch upon was um i went to an event that was uh unfortunate that we had to have on the 20th um three groups um based in napa rainbow action network napa valley mom's demand action and people's collective for change held a chalk for justice stop aapi hate in american canyon i i was really um i was really touched by by that demonstration of solidarity for my community you know this happened right after the atlanta shootings which was not really the only thing that that made i think these groups come together um you know hate crimes are just not okay and i i know that we are in solidarity and in unity and saying that in our school district for sure um on our social media to parents to our community um and um
113but we also need to take action i feel like this is something that's very very important because yes the the aap i hate is right now that we're experiencing but you know what last summer it was the black lives movement matter um before that it was lgbt i mean there was there's so many of these targeted groups that i feel like it's just not okay so um in in particular for this of course it hits home for me because i am asian and i am female so that that shooting in atlanta was really huge for me um so in response to that um congressman mike thompson has invited me to be on the round table for his anti-asian violence roundtable talk tomorrow at 1pm i think he usually broadcasts that on his facebook page i
114think you can also email his office for a zoom link but we're going to be discussing what congress is doing to address this issue of anti-asian violence as well as some of the discussions what we can do locally to provide a safer community so hopefully we'll we'll get good attendance from that thank you that's good i'll tune in so i guess i'm i'm last again um no i'm kidding uh i so i too attended the facilities and technology committee on the 16th and also with my fellow trustee new trustees attended the second course in the the masters in governments program it was it was kind of funny and one of the the sessions trustee chu and i were randomly selected to be in a breakout group where we were supposed to share our elevator pitches
115for our respective districts so we actually worked constructively to make one elevator pitch i think it was better than than most um but we weren't selected to share out so um actually trustee ricer was was selected to share out on her elevator pitch so um uh but these these workshops and and and courses are are are great at kind of highlighting both the difficulties of our role here you know as as leadership of a large organization um with such a an important charge uh to to to kind of guide the workings of of a school district but also to um kind of reinforce and and encourage us along the way so i think csba does a great a great job at at that um i attended the author series with uh marina budos uh discussing
116her recent book the long ride about um a novel based on uh uh bussing uh from different from community out of communities into during desegregation of schools um it was a great event to i i liked hearing that the questions from the students there were a lot of uh you know i believe sixth and seventh grade students who were asking her about her writing process what her favorite books were what her and it was a it was a good interaction with someone who who had some insight in the writing process um and then i attended the the governance workshop yesterday um and then i also have some site visits planned i'm excited to get those started beginning with redwood middle school and river middle school this week and then i hope to schedule more after
117spring break i that's my report thank you trustee dooley um you know i i go a lot of what was shared already um i think i'll end with just a general thought that just crossed my mind right now and just the past week we spent a lot of time together and and i know you all spent a lot of time um not only reading the materials for the board meeting but in preparation for your courses in preparation for your school visits and preparation for attending other um events that the school district offers and i'm just um just thank you you know i think as president of the board i think one of my responsibilities is also to look at all of you and just thank you for your dedication and your time that you have
118put towards the really difficult work that we are doing and um and i'm just really really grateful to be sitting among all of you because i think um what i've come to learn is that we do make a really great team um we have lots of various backgrounds in here with experience and expertise and i think that um balances well with also the team that we get to uh work with with dr macedy in the cabinet so just uh that's my my sense right now just feeling really thankful for all of your hard work um including our student board representative carla um and with that being said part of our most recent exercise was to also take care of a little bit of our health and um we are going to exercise a five-minute break
119almost look at it as a seventh inning stretch kind of thing so um stretch a little bit and um and we'll be back in five minutes um dr mercedes mystery so we'll cameras will be on but we will be back in five minutes it's 904 so at 909 sounds good president gonzalez mattis okay thank you all okay good evening again thank you we just are recommending back from our break um we are now under items of h2 board representatives reports so we'll start with h2a curriculum and student support committee we have not yet met nothing to report facilities and technology committee we did meet uh technology had little to report other than they are nearing completion on several projects and we'll have further updates when those projects finish facilities we uh reviewed an update on
120the monitor modernization program plan or mpp for short the district is attempting to establish some baseline data around all of our school campuses the non-new campuses were all walked by mno's staff in order to investigate and get a proper breakdown of building and site capacities and conditions part of this work is also to put future upgrades into one of three categories level one is warm safe and dry level two portable replacement and level three is campus equalization and modernization the first step in establishing the baseline data was done without principal input once completed the next step will be to review the data with the principles at each site in order to confirm numbers adjustments may be made based on principal feedback feedback was requested by staff about the presentation of the slides trustees provided feedback
121around how the forms looked and the very tiny size of the slides for display it was noted that while mr pearson might enjoy size four font the rest of us like much bigger font sizes mr pearson was encouraged to make two slides from his single page report he was crushed to learn that we had doubled the size of the paper required additional information was also requested on which buildings were being consolidated or eliminated the forms as updated will make clear how we can cut down on the number of portables that we use at each site we have some inefficiencies that we can capture at each of the sites and thereby eliminate the need for old portables eliminating the use of old portables has two benefits first it decreases the operational costs of maintaining these old
122buildings and second it allows us to eventually replace fewer portables when the money eventually becomes available to do so making such an undertaking more cost efficient and that is all for facilities and technology okay thank you trustee gracias now onto finance committee yeah we have not met we met um the day before our last board meeting so correct yes okay um now policy committee will be meeting next month okay thank you special education community advisory committee uh yes we met on march 15th um and this was the meeting where assistant superintendent andrew jennings gave a presentation on the lcap um which is the local control accountability plan um as part of her uh seeking feedback from the community stakeholders um in this needs assessment phase of developing our next plan um so she asked the
123parents and other stakeholders that were present what was working well during hybrid learning um and how we can better support the students who are struggling um so the parent feedback i'll just give a little taste of it was pretty wide-ranging some parents said that the hybrid model was actually working really well for their children um because of there being fewer classes you know three periods instead of six in a day um fewer distractions um the ability to mute themselves so that they didn't pose a distraction to to their class um that was echoed a couple of times um there was a a comment from one of the parents saying that um in particular some special ed parents are feeling pretty overwhelmed right now and that we shouldn't take uh not hearing from them as a
124sign that everything is smooth sailing that no news isn't necessarily good news um and i you know i think uh managing the the uh hybrid learning and virtual learning for uh the special education learners um must pose a particular particular extra layer of challenge for those parents um so they did ask for strengthening some channels of communication for special ed parents um to help them feel more connected um and i think that that you know we're all struggling with feeling disconnected during this this pandemic conditions and um lack of in-person interactions and um chances to have sort of easy access and communicate and conversations uh they shared uh uh oh one parent shared really uh saying that students were missing out on socializing with the typically developing general ed peers and talked about how as
125public health conditions allow they're hoping to find ways to bring back bring that back in small group settings that the special education students really benefit from those you know buddy activities and small group interactions um and one parent raised the concern about uh returning to in-person learning uh due to in particular the increased likelihood of a of covid being fatal for those individuals with down syndrome terri lynn rossetti our selfless director gave a report she praised napa county office of education [Music] staff member stephanie solberg for her work on what she called the transition river which is her work focusing on the older special education students who are transitioning out of high school um she said that that uh ms solberg's work is considered among the best in the state and um that she really
126does an amazing job helping parents and transitioning students access benefits like ssi benefits um and also mention that she's working on a partnership with a special program at uc davis uh she said 60 of special day class students have returned to in-person learning and that because of the parameters and requirements of their program that they're in person four days a week for four hours and 40 minutes a day and that they're in the process of reaching out by phone polling parents about their return to in-person learning next year heard a director's report from the director in saint helena school district and they are also working on transitioning transition programs for their 18 to 22 year old students and looking at developing summer programs um and also mentioned partnering with the with other uh districts in
127the county i think there's a really good strong um inter-ca intra county uh partnerships among the um those groups uh the napa county office of education representative lucy edwards talked about working with district leadership and uh tracking the data as we as general eds responsible uh administrators are doing looking at how students are progressing looking for areas of learning loss and also how to connect parents of special education students with legal services and support if they need it jenny maywald is our selpa director uh she reminded us that we are one of the highest selpas in the state highest funded selpas in the state due to their hard work in applying for grants both one-time monies and continuing funding sources she's working on professional development opportunities and looking for input on professional development needs from
128educators within uh the county selpa area and um in particular she mentioned that she is putting on a legal symposium for parents as special education learners again to advocate for to help them know how to advocate for their own for their students and and advocate to avail themselves of resources that are um open to them and then lastly there was an update on the inclusion awards which is an annual um an annual award contest an annual contest it used to be a poster contest but they decided to broaden it to a creativity challenge and to include more kinds of expression and they saw a real increase in number of submissions there were 34 submissions and there's a subcommittee that's going to review those entries and then put together a video showcase of the winners that
129they will be shared at a board meeting i think in may and that's concludes my report great thank you city of american canyon liaison representatives we have now met city of napa liaison representatives i have not met town of youngville liaison representatives well we haven't met the relationship between the district and the town of yachtville seems to have fractured once again we are finding more receptive partners in our negotiations on other properties and have decided to prioritize those negotiations at this time thank you tristan gracia all right we are now moving forward with superintendent and executive staff dr masetti uh thank you president gonzalez good evening nbusd community at community and board of trustees i want to just start out by giving a tremendous shout out to the instructional division of this evening since our
130last board meeting on march 11th the next day on march 12th assistant superintendent and pat andrew jennings and her entire team did an incredible job of designing a professional learning day for all of our um staff in nvusd our teachers our some of our instructional support staff and i want to thank them for creating a high quality professional learning experience for our educators during really really challenging times a lot of districts have had to suspend things like their professional learning day because they haven't been able to open their schools and they're still sort of trying to figure out how to get campuses open and so they've had to put these sorts of critical events aside and i'm really really grateful for the leadership of assistant superintendent pat andrew jennings and her team that we were
131despite these conditions we were able to provide professional learning for all of our teachers and i'm glad that some of the trustees were able to observe that in action and see our teachers and staff be learners but also to see them be professional experts because one of the sources of pride for us in the design of these days is that many of our own nvusd educators uh serve as the staff developers and so that's something to be really really proud of i also wanted to share with the board and the community that today dr nemco county superintendent and myself were part of a statewide webinar with state superintendent tony thurman hosted by the california department of education we were serving as an exemplar for the reopening of schools during the pandemic and we were panelists
132today sharing our experience with hundreds of educators across the state district leaders site leaders school board members who are trying to learn lessons from the field where there has been experience and implementation around reopening schools we know that right now there's an incentive for a lot of school districts who haven't been able to open the doors to their campuses there's an incentive for them to open through some of the in-person instructional grant dollars in the napa valley unified school district got all that work done in advance six months prior it was really amazing today when i told the story of nvusd opening that our teachers our site administrators and our support staff have kept um our 28 schools open for what's now almost six months um during the school year uh we've been open since
133you know late october and have stayed open during the roller coaster of the pandemic and so i know that that has been very very exhausting i want to really thank or you know our teachers who've been doing an extraordinary job of really navigating two modalities of supporting our students in person while still offering a distance learning option for our families that is no easy task and it couldn't be done with the without the extraordinary dedication of the nvusd staff and i also just want to dovetail a trustee risers uh report um and and really recognize um director terry lynn rossetti and the extraordinary work that she's done with the special education programming during this time although all of our students who wanted to opt in to in person started in late october um director terry
134lynn rossetti even in advance of that a pilot piloted many of our operational procedures by getting access to our special education students first before we even opened up for the general population of our students on october 26th and i came to realize today in the webinar as i was looking at questions of the chat that there are still even districts trying to figure out how to get access to their special education students and her department has done an extraordinary job of creating uh that access for our our students with learning differences and and special needs so thank you so much for her work i also just want to let the nvusd community know that we are still awaiting um some guidance from the state we have been told by napa county public health that there's
135going to be specific guidance around graduations uh for the you know our big end of the year activity that we love to celebrate and do here last year we did the drive-bys for the class of 2020 and we are very anxious to communicate to our families what the graduation formats are going to be i know they want to plan and prepare for that and stay tuned we are just awaiting the specific guidance that is anticipated to come from the state um on or shortly thereafter april 1st so as soon as that guidance gets here we will quickly start interpreting it collaborating with napa county public health and quickly communicate to our families of our graduates and those that are promoting at the transitional years what our plan and format will be for graduation for the
136class of 2021 and i know um our student board trustee uh magana who's doing the countdown of 12 weeks is probably really curious around what that format's going to be so stay tuned that should be coming soon soon we're just waiting for the state and then lastly i just want to thank everyone who came and gave public comment tonight all of those who have submitted public comment in written format the individuals that have been submitting input to the middle school redesign an email address for review by the task force participants and my staff i want to honor and recognize that it is true it has been a very exhausting year in nbusd and i'm just completely impressed while we have to make this difficult decision and navigate this very stressful process that our middle school
137staff just continues to show up and be present for our kids and they are so amazing and i really you know want to demonstrate and communicate tremendous empathy for how difficult it is to just be working as an educator right now at this point in time during the pandemic but to also have this process paralleling that is very very challenging and i just want to thank our staff at the middle school level for for continuing to show up there's been a lot of um discussions around you know where's the vision around program in all of this as the district has to continue to make tough financial and facilities decisions and you know i just really want to communicate the idea that um you know we're going to have a demographic report and unfortunate unfortunately um
138fortunately we have it's still about 50 percent of the people that joined us at the onset of the meeting um have remained uh unfortunately 50 percent have fallen off um because we have a demographic report tonight that has been prepared by our demographer partner and who's been doing work in nvusd for a really long time around our projections and in listening to this report tonight the community will i hope gain an understanding of really what's going on the external forces that are i'm causing this declining enrollment in the valley and um and come to sort of an understanding around why we find ourselves in the circumstances that we we do around having to operate less schools in response to an intense declining enrollment trajectory and although that is difficult we've heard a lot of advocacy
139for the great work happening at all of our middle schools lots of stellar programming lots of amazing structures to support students and our goal in operating less is that we're able to provide high quality programs at all the levels but you know i'm going to focus on middle school given that the you know the work that we're doing at that level the goal in operating less schools is that we'll be able to provide more high quality academic programming at the schools that remain um programs that are sustainable uh that they're scalable so that there's equitable access to them across the district this is not only academic programs but this is also support services for students it's also uh being able to look at socio-emotional learning and how that can be incorporated more consistently at all
140the grade grade levels at the schools that remain looking at you know the vapa pathways what are our opportunities for steam um courses and classes at the middle school looking at things like advanced mathematics and and all of the programming the enriching programming that we know um closes the opportunity gap for kids and creates a rich educational opportunity for them and as long as we continue to operate too many schools and not respond to the declining enrollment it becomes very very difficult to put the best quality programming in all of our schools for all of the students at the middle school level and really at high school and elementary too so it's difficult work it's challenging work i want to i want to thank everybody for their patience and their understanding as we navigate it
141and we continue to listen and learn to the input and what's really really clear um in the nvusd community is that we've people value education and education matters and that's a that's a really great challenge for a superintendent for for a superintendent and her team and it's a great challenge for the school board as we make these difficult decisions to really figure out how we can advance high quality programming for all our kids at all levels so thank you for your input with that i'm going to toss to my assistant superintendents tonight um and we're going to start with um mr rob manguala the assistant superintendent of business services thank you very much dr one mercedes uh good evening thank you for the opportunity to update the board in the community during the presentation portion
142of tonight's meeting rob murray our demographer from king and associates will present his enrollment projections this presentation is very detailed and will outline the data used such as student generation from from housing and birth rates on the assessment front we're excited that the state board of education unanimously voted to apply for a federal waiver to allow districts to choose the most viable assessment option in their local context for nbusd this means that we'd be able to use star assessments and administered in the spring instead of casp we are excited about this opportunity we would still be required to report participation rates and results to families the state and our other stakeholders and to disaggregate the data by subgroups we would most likely use parent square to send out these score reports there's also a proposal
143to extend the lpac testing window through july 30th and to waive the cast entirely we're happy cde finally recognized that giving standardized assessments during a pandemic is not a good idea while also recognizing the need to measure and address learning loss we're also happy that we're able to utilize assessments that we've already adopted district wide this concludes my report thank you mr manguala if we can have assistant superintendent dana page who oversees the over at the human resources division good evening president gonzalez morris board of trustees student board representative and dr messetti after the vaccination clinic that we held yesterday at napa valley college our current verified count of vaccinated employees is over twelve hundred at this point we are confident that every employee who wants a vaccine has had ample opportunity so this uh
144reaching this milestone with along with the governor's announcement that he they've broadened eligibility to all people 16 and up as of april 15th means that after we orchestrate the second dose clinic on april 21st we will then be able to step back from the vaccination business knowing that we have made huge strides in bolstering our employees ability to stay safe while doing their essential work supporting students in schools i am collaborating with nvea leadership to plan the annual interest-based problem solving training on monday april 5th nvusd is committed to ensuring staff are equipped to work through complex challenges together utilizing an open cooperative approach to reaching the best resolution possible annual interest-based problem-solving training is a foundational component of this commitment the staff spotlight in our latest newsletter is on gloria aguirre gloria is currently
145the energetic leader as the head of the operations department but she has worked for nwsc for nearly 20 years she's exhibited tremendous commitment teamwork and leadership especially this year as cleaning and disinfecting has taken center stage during the pandemic i love gloria's motto in life when life gets heavy lift it little known fact about gloria she is a power lifter so not only does she live her motto figuratively but she can literally lift over 400 pounds the gloria is a true enemy usd superhero also i hope you saw that we featured two dream teams in our last newsletter our custodians and our food service department we realized that we needed to highlight the great work of these teams and other teams like them so this is the start of an ongoing feature honoring the work
146and accomplishments of teams both formal like in departments and school sites and also ad hoc teams across divisions and sites who come together for a particular project we look forward to recognizing the work of teams and sharing their accomplishments district-wide because none of us can really do this alone thank you and this concludes our report thank you miss page next assistant superintendent pat andrew jennings who oversees the instructional services division thank you dr masetti good evening president gonzalez morris aboard trustees dr masetti and student representative magana the instructional service division has been incredibly busy over the last few weeks as we work to finish strong prepare for summer programs and plan for next school year on the agenda for approval tonight is a contract for scholar systems in december we held focus groups with students
147and in vintage high schools race and social justice class to listen and learn from them what works to support them based on the information we received we begin to search for a partner to assist us during the past two months the instructional services division met with dr victor rios and his team from scholar systems to discuss how nvusd can build a sustainable program that supports our at promise students in achieving academic success at all of our high school sites the scholar system specializes in training students and staff in educational engagement and best practices in academic and social emotional support they are a culturally sensitive bilingual and data driven organization they have collaborated with large school districts non-profit organizations in college and universities across the country to promote academic success a growth mindset and a growth
148mindset in parents and students who have been affected by the opportunity gap in education dr victor rios scholar system president has worked with local school districts as well to develop programs and interventions for marginalized students aimed at promoting personal transformation and civic engagement these programs have been implemented in los angeles juvenile detention facilities and alternative high schools he has authored six books and has been featured in the chronicles of higher education ted talks the oprah winfrey network work primer primera impacto and national public radio his ted talk help for kids the educational system ignores has garnered over 1.4 million views he is also the subject of the documentary film the push outs the contract before you includes three program components dr rios and his team will work directly with our at promise students this summer
149following that work a student advisory council will be created and dr rios and his team will work directly with these students on leadership and facilitation skills as we co-construct support programs to address all students but especially our at promise students and in the last component dr rios and his team will work with secondary staff over the course of the year to learn ways to engage and support our at promise students we are very excited to launch this work with dr rios and his team another contract up for approval is a contract with adventure moore also known as edmo founded in 2004 edmo is a national educational education nonprofit that cultivates curious courageous and kind humans edmull provides high-quality stem and sel summer programs throughout the greater bay area and we are excited to bring this
150program to napa valley at no cost to parents their programs are hands-on interactive and fun as they work to engage kids minds bodies and hearts one district administrator that has contracted with them in previous years stated that edmo was very responsive and flexible and the camp experience they delivered was highly engaging they stated that there were great that they had great instructors in a good mix of social emotional learning and stem they also noted that the parent evaluations were very positive the contract with edmo uh represents one component of our summer school program and you'll hear more about that in the coming weeks um dr masetti also mentioned our professional learning day on march 12th we had over a thousand of our certificated and classified instructional staff engage in a day focus on learning and
151wellness at the be well t12 lead well professional learning day in the afternoon schools carved out time to engage in important collaborative processing of the morning's learning and to determine next steps most of the sessions from the day were recorded and are now available to give staff easy access just just this week over 50 staff members have revisited the professional learning day webpage to access the content all registered attendees have ongoing access to these recordings and any other linked resources such as slide presentations i would like to thank the trustees for your support and engagement in this transformative day and appreciate your thoughtful feedback i also want to give a shout out to our amazing teachers and staff who presented and to our instructional services division and data services team members who made it all
152possible the instructional services team looks forward to continuing to provide high quality well-rounded professional development in the future in this year of upheaval with the need to focus on student wellness our staff has responded with a multi-prong and layered approach that includes universal screening integrated tier 1 sel curriculum for all students progress monitoring of students and families needing strategic and more intensive support and a diverse array of wellness-focused professional learning our amazing counseling team has led the charge for an sel everyday approach in our schools and in their level alike groups they have worked hard to develop comprehensive plans for integrated sel that can be infused in any content area or learning environment in addition we have partnered with partnered with napa valley education foundation to provide extended professional learning in seo for staff who
153attended sessions by mina svervan cervansa from transfer transformative educational leadership at our professional learning day we collaborated with napa valley education foundation to provide free ongoing sel professional development to up to 50 interested staff members mina had by far the largest number of overall attendees um at the professional learning day and the wellness focused sessions in general were very popular this increased interest illustrates the need for us to continue to integrate sel into the current academic content content and with an essential focus on self-care and wellness and finally we have officially launched our advanced learners program pilot using the renzuli program renzuli is an online strength based personalized learning platform that allows students to explore topics of interest to them and work on projects that reflect their areas of interest and strengths our first virtual
154classes begin began on monday with over 4th and 5th grade students signed up to participate students are divided among five teachers who are leading the weekly classes students begin the program by completing the renzuli profile profiler to learn about their strengths interests and learning styles they will be able to explore the site in all of the learning pathways during spring break before meeting with their teacher teachers and cohorts again after the spring break thank you that concludes my report thank you miss andrew jennings uh we're going to skip over mr pearson just momentarily and see if he could fix his audio issues with that um president gonzalez if we i'm going to move to the um the bond facilities update if that's okay with miss kelly jergensen yes dr mercedes that's okay thank you i'm
155miss jorgensen hello there thank you uh president gonzalez marez dr masetti and trustees um tonight we're going to be doing a quick review of the campus modernization projects as always we will be operating under goal 4 tactical proactive and efficient asset management even more so than normal for campus modernization as we're really focused on improving and keeping up with the assets of our school facilities we're going to give a quick quick overview of upcoming sites and the scopes of work that'll be happening there uh this is just a reminder for the community and the trustees that the campus modernization projects that we've been conducting at the different campuses and the ones that we're planning for involve replacement of roofing replacement of hvac equipment repainting the site and doing site work which includes um paving concrete
156work and accessibility on the campuses and you can see some examples in these pictures of the work that we did at northwood last summer so we have another busy summer planned for the campus modernization scopes of work um our lease lease that contractor will be right construction and those of you may recall that this was also the contractor that did last summer's work they did such a fantastic job and we were very impressed with their proposals per the scoring that the board approved last meeting and they have been selected to do further work with the district um the sites that we will be working on will be silverado middle school's small gymnasium napa high school's gym vintage high schools practice gym and campus wide at alta heights and donaldson way and you'll note in each
157of these you can see when the board approved that contract just for a little historical knowledge alta heights was part of a package that the board approved last year but the construction will be happening this summer some of the updating things updates that will be moving forward schedule wise are state approval of the design our design teams are hard at work at each one of these sites um addressing the comments that the state has given us on design and we'll be looking to get approval shortly for the projects we will be working with our lease leaseback firm right construction to finalize the pricing with all of their subcontractor trades which will lead us to come back to the board for final approval of the pricing as we have done in past projects and we are
158already working under the pre-construction agreement that the board approved to prepare for these projects planning mobilization and how things are going to work during the summer and reaching out to our site principles to start talking about the planning for this work and then of course we will be busy all summer of 2021 working hard on getting this construction implemented and the scopes of work complete at the different schools so that's just a brief update on what we have planned this summer and open to questions if there are any we seem to have no questions thank you okay let me just do one last check mr pearson's having some audio issues let me see if we can hear him mr pierson are you there okay it looks like he was not able to fix it so
159um president gonzalez he's gonna log in and log out maybe uh when we do additional comments at the end um maybe he'll be able to give his report that he prepared for the board sorry my mic was um muted thank you all uh for your reports and we will move forward dr misseni thank you so we will now go to approval of consent agenda background information on these items is provided to the board prior to the meeting a common motion takes action without discussion and roll call vote unless discussion of item or items is requested by the board members move to approve i second a first by trustee gracia and the second by trustee dankelix uh ms vera if you could take roll call please yes student board member magana aye trustee gonzalez aye rusty
160jingle wins hi gracia aye christy reiser aye trustee water aye trustee chu aye dusty dooley aye thank you thank you we will now go to item j of our agenda presentations and discussion items j1 business services j1a presentation on demographic data uh mr ruiz if you could please uh bring up the presentation uh thank you very much i'm gonna just provide a quick uh um introduction and then i will pass the presentation to rob murray so the the presentation tonight is a presentation of our demographic analysis of our enrollment for the napa valley unified school district rob murray has a long history of working for the district in terms of analyzing our data in terms of enrollment trends and with that i'll pass the presentation to rob thank you well thank you rob and thank
161you dr masetti and the esteemed board i certainly value everyone's time and we have a lot of ground to cover and if you don't mind i'm just going to get into uh the presentation so if i could i somebody just need to request for the next slide perfect thank you and so again this is an overview tonight of the key takeaways that are in the district's full demographic analysis and facility capacity study and so we're really just going to be focusing on four key areas tonight which are the district and community demographics that are the backdrop for a lot of the enrollment trends that you've already been seeing as a district and not just spoil the ending but that we expect to continue for the foreseeable future uh the residential development that we've identified and
162the student generation rates so that we anticipate how many students are coming out of those developments that are built into the projections some spatial analysis that feeds into a lot of the topics that appear to be actively discussed in your district right now and then of course the projections of enrollment so next slide please okay and again so first off these community demographics we're gonna start with the enrollment history and when you look at the total enrollment as you will see it on calpad of the enrollment that correlates with the funding for the napa valley unified school district you see increasing enrollment uh during a period when a lot of places in the state did not experience this uh up through 2014-15 it's the peak enrollment and then some decreasing enrollment and then the last
163couple of years these increases but those are directly because of river and nvla switching into nvusd enrollment reports so if you go to the next slide if we look at it normalizing that and including those river and nvla students in all past years as well then you see uh since that peak in 2014-15 a steady year by year decrease in enrollment uh now enrollment now below 17 000 total students so next slide please i want to look at breaking this down by grade configuration because this is going to tell you a lot of what has been happening because if you look at that bottom part of the upper graph the blue this is the elementary students and you see that the peak elementary enrollment actually occurred in 1314 and then has been decreasing steadily since
164then aside from the inclusion of those nvla students in the current year every other year has been a decrease at the middle school level you see the peak enrollment actually comes a little later because you had earlier larger cohorts that were still moving through the system they were just getting into middle school and you didn't have the more recent smaller cohorts getting into middle school and to start bringing that total number down until 2018-19 and then the inclusion of the river students again brought that total up and then you see the high school has not begun to experience that trend yet and so that's important to note uh one of the key things that's going on here is that your earlier cohorts were larger and as they move through your system grade by grade especially
165when a larger cohort leaves a grade configuration for example leaves elementary school and goes to middle school and the incoming cohort is significantly smaller that's where you start seeing big year to year drops and you're even going to start seeing this in high school beginning next year and then just looking at the lower graph this is just about your kindergarten enrollments and you just see looking back a decade uh consistently above 1200 and now uh you had your first year below a thousand uh of just kindergarten not looking at the tk students who don't move into first grade the next year and then again the inclusion of 94 students from river in the current year brought the total above a thousand again but the trend is definitely one of smaller and smaller cohorts coming in
166and again just hammering this point home because it really is the biggest driving factor is that every time one of those small cohorts comes in and replaces a larger one total enrollment will ratchet down every single year that happens so next slide please so the backdrop of why are we seeing these smaller cohorts so if you look at just total population you see i mean american canyon didn't have the same kind of enormous growth that it had between 2000 and 2010 but the population there has still increased and in napa you also see total population increasing and uh even between 2010 and the most recent 2019 census data in yachtville a small population increase but what doesn't show up in just total numbers is the age composition of who is moving in and out because
167this good this growth is really net gains of people and when you have younger people particularly younger families with those younger school age children or children who aren't even school age yet moving out and a slightly more older people who do not have school age children moving in that is one of the big factors that has been happening you see the total population by age again you see that in uh particularly yanville but in napa uh these communities are overall aging american canyon is not as much of an issue but still compared to recent years getting to become a parent there as well next slide please one of the most useful stats that you can pull up from the census data is the percent of all households who have anyone who lives in the house
168who is under the age of 18. so you see an american canyon there it's still been fairly stable about half of households in american canyon have someone under the age of 18 residing in the house or in the household in napa uh that since 2010 to current best data available uh slightly more than a third of households used to have someone under the age of 18 now just slightly more than a quarter do from almost 35 percent down to 27 percent and in yachtville also seeing just a steady decrease and an average household size however staying about the same and so this again it just supports that uh and i'll get to the reasons that are driving this but that what you're seeing here are symptoms of an aging population so next slide please so
169we just look at residential development and student generation rates so we'll talk about the student generation rates first next slide please thank you and so what we're talking about to quickly define this term with student generation rates are how many students we think will be produced by new residential development and so we look at this by breaking it down into four categories of housing single family detached which are hounds that are typically for sale when they are constructed and that i do not share a wall with any other kind of housing typically have yards and are in neighborhoods with similar type of housing single-family attached housing could be any kind of condominiums town homes but typically smaller or maybe no yards sharing walls but also still for sale at the time of construction multifamily tends
170to be rental housing usually apartment buildings but then any kind of affordable or below market rate housing we look at separately because those student generation rates tend to be much higher we also look at this separately for the napa yachtville area and the american canyon area because again we see very different trends and whenever it's practical we like to get that extra degree of detail by looking at these two planning areas separately so broad trends what we see student generation rates are much higher in american canyon particularly with that single-family detached housing as is elaborated on in the report one reason you see that is that uh really and as you saw from the population growth overall there has not been a huge amount of single-family detached housing that's been built in american canyon in
171several years so part of this is the effect of surveying even the most recently constructed units are a little older and we're not as expensive at the time they were constructed so we're keeping a very close eye on this as more new housing is on the verge of occurring uh compared to the previous year when we constructed the newest available housing that still provided a large enough sample student generation rates are down uh entirely throughout napa yanville and down for all types of housing but the single-family detached in american canyon you will note there has not been enough single-family attached housing constructed anytime in american canyon to do an adequate survey so going forward to plan for how many students we expect to see from newly constructed housing of that type we're assuming a ratio
172similar to what you see with the single family attached in multifamily in napa so it's a little in the weeds but just wanting to make sure that we address that because you will see on the next slide that there is some single family or i'm probably in a couple of slides but you'll see that there is some single-family attached housing on the way i do want to mention here we've been doing this study for nvusd for a number of years so we have the advantage of looking at resale housing as well so not just newly constructed units but any existing home that is sold when those homes sell what kind of student generation do we see in this case we have more data that comes along with that and what i really want to focus
173on here is the broad trend that as the price of housing has increased the number of students you get out of any given home is decreasing proportionally maybe not always constantly but definitely a very solidly developed trend that is continuing uh with just the first few months of 2020. i've included those here i mean obviously it was not a typical market in the first few months of 2020 and i expect those numbers will especially in american canyon by the end of the year have returned closer to what they had been the previous year but you still even in there in american canyon see that student generation rates from those resold units have already been decreasing in napa you really see the effect of the increase in housing prices leading to fewer and fewer students and
174this is really the backdrop of what's driving a lot of the other data you've been seeing is a lot of those younger families with school-age children are increasingly when especially if they're looking to purchase a home deciding to move somewhere else to do that so next slide please however there is residential development that is occurring within the district in american canyon there is are the largest projects so watson ranch we know is definitely getting ready to start some active work very soon here we have units that the city of american canyon has indicated will be part of the early phases of the broadway district specific plan and then there are some other developments that we are tracking and that we have built into our enrollment projections and anticipate building students and i'll talk about those
175in just a moment when we show a couple of charts on that in the next slide please in napa there are you have napa pipe as the one very large project and then a number of other mid-size and smaller projects we again work with the city work with the planners in the city to keep track of a lot of the units that we expect over the next few years have a chance of generating new students for the district so next slide please we'll summarize what we're looking at from that and one thing that people see a large number of units being constructed and a lot a lot of people's head you want to say well 1700 units that's gonna be you know about a kid out of every home but even in american canyon even
176with the single family detached you don't have that kind of one-for-one correlation and then as you have more of those units being single-family attached or multi-family units you just don't get as many students coming from those housing types and so that's just important to keep in mind and then the other thing is that these totals are over the entire build out of a project so something like watson ranch that is going to be built out over several years we still have units coming in all the way through 2030 in this projection period then you're not going to get all of in this case the projected 461 students and one lump input into the district but just as 98 homes are built this year and then 100 single family attached homes are built the next year
177and then that apartment complex goes in you're going to see just over the years a steady uh input of these students as these homes are constructed so we are accounting for this we are always looking very closely at the student generation and it is certainly something that helps to offset the demographic declines that we're seeing but it is not nearly enough even with all these students that were being added to the projection to reverse what we're seeing again with smaller cohorts coming in larger cohorts going out in that year over year this constant demographic downward trend that is far and away the bigger factor than what you're seeing with the influx of some students from new development so next slide please so just a couple of points on spatial analysis there's a lot of good
178information in the report on this but next slide please one tool that you'll see there that i just always like to include in this presentation for those who have not seen it before are these what we call a spatial analysis matrix and really what you have here is the wrote the columns going up and down the table so as you read from left to right across the top are the residents so what boundary students live in and then if you go across those rows you see where those students are actually attending school and so those bold numbers where they intersect or the students who live in the boundary and attend that school but you just see how much movement and choice there is going on in the district and that's always important to keep in
179mind when looking at any kind of enrollment figures is that you're not necessarily talking about just the students who live within that boundary so next slide please so this map for the elementary students shows what we call net migration all these numbers sum out to zero this is just for these uh between all these different elementary boundaries which boundaries see more students who live in the boundary going out and which ones bring in more students who don't live in the boundary compared to the outflow and so you just see the patterns of the schools that are either more positive or negative by that metric so next slide please and then one last one that we see in the facial analysis is we also see the students that live outside of the napa valley unified school
180district boundary and are coming into the district to attend the nvusd schools and this is something that is driven by district policy in large part of being you know certainly willing to allow students to transfer in who are interested in coming to the district and what's significant here is you can imagine you've seen what the actual enrollment numbers have been over the last few years that is in spite of this uh consistent increase in the number particularly at the high school level of non-resident students that are enrolling in the district so next slide please and now the enrollment projections i'm just going to go to a couple of the big influencing factors so first off births uh we've been talking about this this is one thing that we see as there are fewer younger people
181living in the area which by the way this is not unique to napa or napa valley unified really throughout a lot of the greater bay area not everywhere but a lot of it you are seeing very similar trends to this but the number of births as reported by the california department of public health unfortunately we are still only up through 2018 with the data all the staff who normally compile and release this data were reassigned to coven 19 related work this year so we do not have those 2019 numbers yet but what you do see with the data that we have is that particularly in napa but even in american canyon births are lower than they were several years ago and really for the most two recent years of birth data that are available 2017
182and 2018 which will correlate roughly with the kindergarten cohorts that will come into the district in 2022 and 2023 you really see that there are just fewer school-aged children fewer births and then a few years later fewer school-aged children for the district to have available this isn't a matter of attracting students this is just a matter of the students existing to enroll in the district schools and you see uh just uh that line correlating the births with the five years later kindergarten and tk enrollment so you see starting in the 2007 births of the 2012 kindergarten when tk was introduced you start then getting a little bit above the number of births until the last couple of years when you're back to being pretty close to what it was and again with the number of
183births going down those incoming kindergarten cohorts are very likely to go down proportionally next slide please and then once you have those students in the system uh you have those new kindergarten students that we anticipate based on births the next part is looking at how those cohorts as once they enter envy usd as kindergartners year by year they start as kindergartners the next year that cohort broadly goes to first grade and then second how does that cohort size change because you have students who move out of the district and you have students moving into the district every year and what we're really looking for is the net outcome of that and so the lighter color which you can really barely see for the napa yachtville area shows that it's usually within plus or minus half
184percent the last couple of years closer to half percent decrease in size but you've had some years of slight growth but basically once a cohort enters in napa yachtville you know who you've got basically some of them on net some students are moving out some are moving in but your those cohorts are not going to change size very significantly from one year to the next when you're looking at all the k-11 students one year and all the way into all the first through 12th graders the next year i.e the students that you would expect to come back from one year to the next in american canyon you do tend to have cohort growth from year to year so that is something that's built into those enrollment projections so next slide please so when we prepare
185the enrollment projections we completely separate the american canyon planning area which is the american canyon high school or middle school attendance boundary and the rest of the district which we call the not the yachtville planning area completely separate enrollment projections which are then combined to give the district-wide total projection we also to account for the ranges of recent input factors we like to show a low a moderate and a high projection for each area and over the last several years in the usd and we have found that combining the low projection for napa and yanville with the moderate projection for american canyon uh is a very accurate combination that we use for official planning purposes so that's what i'm going to be showing you in just a moment so next slide please and so lots
186of numbers i'm not going to go through them all but you can just at a glance see a few things uh so you will notice that uh you still have kindergarten uh cohorts that are above a thousand right now and for one more year but you are a member of those next three years of birth that we saw how you really started seeing a lower number uh for those 2022 and 2023 cohorts and you see them coming into the district and that whole upper right corner is mostly cohorts below a thousand students the state department of finance who whose data we use to project uh future birth rates and therefore future kindergarten cohorts does see that being the low point and then things beginning to trend up again but at that point the cohorts are
187still even as they're trending up smaller than the cohorts that you're enrolling right now which is already in a period where you've been declining for several years and then if you go to the next slide please i want to use this as a great illustration of how you track those cohorts in a chart like this so your current third grade cohort which if you go back uh to review this presentation at some point and look at that slide with the kindergarten cohort you see this was kind of your last oh sorry we don't need to actually go back my apologies but we can stay on that slide uh but for those who want to just look uh when this is available later uh at that you'll see that that was kind of your last big
188kindergarten cohort before they really started getting noticeably smaller so in the next school year those will be fourth graders and then they'll be fifth graders in 2022 and then they move into middle school and you see fifth graders move into middle school in and you have 912 kindergarten students replacing them so even with some of the positive migration that you see uh that is insurmountable you are going to see that big drop in your total elementary age student population just when you have that many students leaving a grade configuration and being replaced by a much much smaller cohort and then you'll see that that same thing will happen uh that big cohort will leave middle school and be replaced by a smaller cohort and then at some point will completely graduate from the district and
189none of the cohorts coming behind them into high school are going to be anywhere close to the same size and again there's nothing that we're seeing in the birth data there is nothing that we are seeing in terms of big changes in grade-to-grade migration data and again a lot of the positive changes that we have seen you have to remember the trends in the non-resident students that are driving some of that uh so there is uh a lot of these factors that all combine to show that traject or rather the continuation of that trajectory that we've been seeing you've seen it in your elementary cohorts to date and now you've begun to see it in your middle school cohorts and really starting next year you're going to start seeing decreases in your high school population
190as well so next slide please this is the last thing we want to show is that we have looked at the projections that we just showed you and we have compared them to what we have uh pre-enrolled in this case as of march 1st there might be some newer numbers by now but when i put this together this is what we wanted to look at and at most grades the projections are very very close again especially for those grades where you anticipate that the students that you had this year ideally are the ones who are coming back and enrolling next year are very close uh to what we projected those intake grades tk and k into a lesser extent ninth grade uh we still expect there to be some fresh enrollment coming in throughout the
191rest of the spring and summer leading up to uh again we're projecting towards that official california department of education census date in october but as of now we're certainly not seeing anything that indicates that there is any major shift going on in the trends that we've explored tonight so that is the end of the prepared presentation i know it is a lot of information and i am happy to answer any questions that anyone has at this time so i don't have so much as questions as maybe comments um i felt like there was a lot of information to take in in this presentation uh slide 16 i felt had some very important data in it one of the things you can clearly see from this slide is how popular the dli pathway is in our
192district just looking at the nvla numbers they only have 255 students that reside in their resident area nearly 100 of those students don't attend nvla so only about 150 students in the resident area go to nvla and yet at the end of the day we have 650 students who attend this school meaning that 500 students open enroll to this program clearly the demand for the dli pathway is very high another piece that stood out to me is that we have poorly drawn the alta heights and phillips boundary as a significant portion of people in the phillips boundary think of themselves as being in the alta heights area and transfer to alta heights third i can't help but notice that three schools with large numbers of resident students have very few who attend their home schools
193snow shear and mcpherson have nearly half of their resident students transfer out of their home school area i think it would be worth investigating to see why so many resident students believe it is in their best interest to transfer out of these schools i then must reach slide 23 which i find to be the most alarming of all in that for the next seven years straight we are expected to have declining enrollment and that we are only going to have approximately 14 000 students by the time the 27 28 school year arrives which is a significant decline from the 17 000 that we've had recently this is unfortunately a continuation of a trend that has been happening for the last 10 years and appears to not be getting any better well my points were very
194similar so i will not be overly competitive repetitive um i also looked at slide 23 averaging a yearly decline of 329 students over those that seven year period that equates to a loss of about 3.3 million per year and it does the declining enrollment data does support the um middle school closure process um i agree slide 16 was packed with a great deal of data and yes mbla and pv illustrate the demand for the dli pathway it's currently our only k-12 pathway that we offer i looked at that at it just because i love the percentages the 77.23 of mbla attending students are out of boundary 82.05 percent of uh pv students are out of boundary which to david's point support the um dli dli demand um and the boundary issue as well that clearly
195certain neighborhoods identify with different school boundaries and that's something that we should look at and that there seems to be there is a correlation over the last 20 years when we look back on a lot of the demographic data a correlation of between 96 and 103 percent between maternity ward at a queen and k5 you know entry level so it'll be really interesting to see what the 2020 numbers look like because there's been a high accuracy rate so i'm looking forward to that data i just wanted to echo that um these numbers are are tell a difficult story but they tell the true story about the challenge that we're facing as a district and um just to respond to the sort of overall sense from some of the commenters of please don't close a school
196and we can't it's it's you know heartless and it'll be such a negative impact and the reality is these numbers don't lie and we don't have the students to fill the classrooms and um i was really struck i mean by the same slides that my fellow trustees have already pointed out but in but also um the slide 11 that that just said such a clear picture about what has happened to the cost of housing here um i mean the jump over 10 years of the average cost of a house in napa and american canyon both is um pretty devastating to look at and and the demographics about the number of households that have children who are our customers is you know in a serious decline and we we have to face that it's the only
197responsible thing to do so it's it's difficult to face but thank you for this really clear presentation um and i i it's very clear to me that uh what it spells what it spells out for us in terms of our future planning christy water yep the um [Music] i'm looking at slide seven community demographics and um the one with yacht villas especially striking even even factoring out the fact that it's um half of the population is the veteran's home still that's a lot of um older people in the community uh the average age i believe is my age i'm officially old now so uh it's it's really intriguing and certainly anecdotally um i see it in my neighborhood i've lived there for 30 years the my block was full of kids who we're all approximately
198the same age and now we're just a bunch of people who are aging in place and there's a rental on the corner that has the only children so [Music] that's that and um yeah the housing prices are really eye watering and um how few house how few students you know children are produced by development is also really interesting and i've had people write letters and they have very rosy projections but what's happening is anything that's built is going to produce younger younger students but they're just going to be sort of replacing the people who age out of the system it's not like it's not like our students are captured in amber are just going to stay there you know they're leaving so um and again the house prices you cannot read a newspaper every week
199it seems like there's a newspaper with um you know some shockingly high price even the cheapest house in town is double what i paid for my house so it's it's really uh and it's it's sad it's like it's a it's a war on young people and um and then i i am entertained by the pipe included in here because it isn't built yet and um although i know costco is coming soon and um you know i think we know i think we know um why uh people in in certain neighborhoods don't attend certain schools it's um those schools are perceived as having high poverty students we know that that's that's what it is i mean one of them is um to is a block from my house so uh i'm uh this is this is
200daunting um it however for anybody who follows the real estate news and has their eyes open it shouldn't be an incredible surprise trustee dooley so i'm i'm largely struck by all of the things in this presentation that we can't control um it talks about birth rates we have no control over that of course we it talks about housing generation that's a policy matter that you know other jurisdictions uh have influence over we you know ours is not direct um it talks about you know flight from the area of young families that's not really something we can control what it does do obviously is give us information about how we can respond to to this it gives us planning tools or it's i guess it's a tool for planning um but it the the things in
201here i think that we we can control and and you know some of my fellow trustees have addressed that are how can we position our campuses to to um to be to serve the students that are here um how can we um attract uh the students that the families that um would fill the houses that are here how can we be part of that that attraction um and how can we respond to the the facts of declining enrollment i think um you know we want to be able to develop the educational programs we want to be able to focus on addressing students academic and social needs and not have to be constantly responding to year by year by year declining enrollment that's underlying the the middle school process that that's why we're doing it um
202because you know those programmatic changes that we want to focus on are what will bring those families to to our schools you know it may not change these projections it may be just what we need to ensure that these projections come true which that's that's a sobering thought as well so i think you know what what in general i just think we we just need to focus on what we can control in in this study so yeah christy chu yeah so i will say that coming from american canyon demographics was a huge thing because we just not too long ago lived through not building our second middle school so um i i think back then we already knew that these numbers were pretty similar to what was presented today and i'm very grateful for having
203true numbers that basically are two years ago to today it really hasn't changed too much so um i do i do want to ask though because american canyon is is you look at the numbers and we definitely have the number of people per household we have the higher percentage of our children of school age that would attend mbusd and a lot of our kids attend nvusd because the entire city is within our boundaries so one of the and i moved there in 2008 in the middle of the building uh built out of vintage ranch where i live um and one of the things that i kept on hearing about at that time was you know canyon oaks was built in response to having vintage ranch and um the large development before that which was via
204bellagio and a lot of parents said oh it's so hard to get into that school they did not make that school large enough and so i i just wanted to ask and and to have a clarification around how that happened and what are we doing to prevent that from happening again and i i think it was i mean it's a valid um it's a it's a i don't know if it's a perception or if it's based on numbers or how that that works and i'm hoping that the district has some numbers to or or some sort of stories to share with us on on how that happened uh rob uh i did uh send that question to you ahead of time if you could respond to that yeah i can certainly speak to that again
205this situation that you're describing uh i think my understanding is that was accurate but that predates uh our involvement and actually that situation where the district in-house was really working with the developers to assess the student impact of those larger projects and really relied on the developers data for that and what that impact would be and as was very apparent in the aftermath i really underestimated how many students would come out of those and again my understanding though i was not involved at the time is that that whole situation is one of the reasons why nvusd began using professional demographic services to keep an eye on these enrollment trends and on the students coming out of housing and to really be tracking that so that that kind of situation is not repeated i appreciate that
206work because i i felt really badly that a lot of the students couldn't attend their resident schools um i think that's all i had thank you for including some of my questions within your presentation that clarified a lot any other questions or comments um at trusty water before we start it is 10 30. so i will ask the board if we can extend our meeting motion to extend to midnight second midnight [Music] trusty grass is planning ahead so we don't stop our conversation mid point or something so that was the first by trustee gracia did i hear a second second okay a second by trustee riser i'm going to go with that this time oh student board rep hi all those in favor you want that on the record okay all eyes then all right
207so um we have a motion um that has passed for us to go through midnight but for the sake of us and the staff we will get through this okay trusty water okay um yes i have i have a question for the demographer does he have any um projections about um a baby bust um in the future uh i have read some predictions that much fewer children will be born beca um because of the pandemic no that is a great question and at this point uh that certainly seems plausible and uh but for those projections of future births i'm really leaning on the california department of finance's specialized demographers who produce reports on that and um just voting their demographic analysis into what i'm doing as far as once you get out of the actual
208recorded births and into projected births okay dog thank you okay all right thank you for the presentation for answering our questions and now we are going to move on to item j2 a with presentation on student attendance and chronic absenteeism okay good evening um you know the last time i presented attendance uh we had a very late meeting so i'm gonna try not to be self-conscious of that uh and take recent no take any responsibility uh good evening my name is drew herron and i'm the coordinator for student welfare and attendance for our school district and presenting with me tonight is sonia ortega who is one of our school district social workers uh and we're here tonight just to give you an update about attendance and some of the things that uh some of the
209data we're seeing and also some of the things that we're doing to help promote student uh next slide so uh i know we have some new school board members i thought we'd just give a little little quick overview about how things are different this year with attendance and and what we are measuring is engagement versus the actual physical tendency in the virtual classes so the state of california or the california department of education they determine that we're going to have these two new fancy words called synchronous and asynchronous learning i think i've used those words maybe a handful of times prior to the school year and uh so they gave us some guidelines about how we're gonna measure engagement engagement is attending a zoom or in person that's on their school campus it's also completing
210an assignment on the scheduled day of class so if a student does not come to school that day but completes the assignment they will be considered uh they were engaged and that would be our synchronous or asynchronous learning and then also um contacting teachers or staff at the school to let them know that they would not be attending or they'd be late or something that effect next slide so looking at our our data for this school year this is our chronic absenteeism data and and we're just looking at months three five seven and eight and this is a typical bell curve that we are typical curve that we have um throughout the year month three is that end of september beginning of october time month five is the end of november beginning of december and
211then month seven is uh january feb beginning of february and monday is end of february and march and so this is very typical um for you know what we see throughout the year um but what is impressive is that we look at our current rate uh is 7.2 percent and i actually looked at it today just to get a absolute up-to-date number and we're we've even dropped a little bit more we're at seven percent uh chronically absent this year um the threshold obviously is a little easier to be considered that you are engaged and present at school um and and when we look at it compared to the 2018-19 rate and and we use that rate because that's the last full year of school that we have we don't have a chronic absenteeism rate from
212the state um uh because of last year not you know with uh schools shutting down um but you know that threshold is a lot easier to to meet but what really is telling to me uh next slide please is that when we look at our state data and comparing ourselves to what um the state averages for unified school districts were you know in december nine and a half percent lower and and to me um that that's very telling because of some of the things that we have done to try to really make sure that our students have everything they need to engage in school next slide please so uh so what can we attribute this to um well first and foremost was our chromebook distribution um starting last spring we had to pivot and make
213sure all our students had devices um doing that we learned quickly that not everybody has wi-fi at home and so we had started distributing hotspots to all of our families just to give them that opportunity to hopefully be able to log into their classes and then we looked at how many families were not engaging during that springtime and there was about approximately 700 families and we used our parent liaisons before the school year began to start contacting these families and find out what are their barriers what were the things what are the things that they're worried about what are the things that aren't helping them be able to uh their kids to log in uh you know predominantly it was technology um but the reason there are apparently liaisons you know we're helping families get
214connected with our technology department and making sure that they had everything they needed uh to be able to start school and ready to go um and then we had our opening school protocol and that first two weeks we our attendance clerks were running lists daily and we were the sites had people on the phone calling parents just really trying to reduce that that barrier about what it is that was keeping them from engaging and and so that's the oh that was in the opening of the school year and that really made a difference because our our chronic absenteeism rate uh was was actually pretty good uh next slide and so what can we attribute to our improvement during distance learning one of those things has been home visits we've been doing several home visits it's
215really been a school team effort um between our counselors administrators social workers and parent liaisons and the next thing is the lc ssp grant which is a partnership with ncoe we have juliana who works with us and she's working at four sites that are being targeted um by this grant which is mcpherson phillips snow and valley oak and she really provides case management as well as uh just supporting these families with whatever they may need and once you know students and families are successful those we are adding more um students and families to her caseload and so we've seen rates drop at each of the school sites mcpherson had a 4.4 drop phillips had a 1.5 snow a 3.9 and valley oak of 4.3 we also have social work interns who are supporting the work
216and increasing the size of of our capacity to help students and and their families another big piece of this is our community resources and partners um so ace boys and girls club cool school um boys and girls club open a new space downtown to provide more um space for students counselors and social workers are promoting this with families at our elementary and middle school sites we've also been referring students to americorps for mentoring and tutoring as well as providing parent education that's been provided by social workers and child welfare and attendance office next slide uh and so how were you addressing our students attendance engagement from the beginning of the school year so start ongoing this whole school year any student you go back thank you any student that misses three or more days the
217previous week school sites are contacting those families and finding out what those reasons may be and creating a re-engagement plan it could be as simple as you know the student was that they missed and we're just trying to connect making sure they reconnect with their teachers to get the missing work or something has happened you know there there could be you know a whole host of reasons and uh we start plugging the resources that they need to make sure that they are supported uh we provide chronic absenteeism lists for all every site monthly through my office so those those sites are mainly or those lists are used at the site level with the mtss teams and they are use utilizing these to identify new students and check on student progress um they they are also
218the mts teams are intentionally looking at attendance data to effectively and efficiently provide supports in in looking at trends that they see happening with our families and then we're also tracking those chronic absolute absenteeism rates monthly for each site and that is ongoing throughout the school year so sites see how they're progressing so if they see they've gone up um you know it helps them really look at their students and make some strategic plans or if they see him going down uh like we've seen with uh the schools mentioned tonight um they they're making real concerted efforts and they they're seeing the benefit of that and they just keep doing what they're doing um and in the these chronic absenteeism rates we have been doing this now for uh the three previous years and um
219and i think it's it's really helped sites have a good idea about where they stand um and how they are progressing the next slide other things that are helping with addressing engagement is um child welfare and attendance meeting weekly with attendance clerks to calibrate understanding of you know new new processes um also utilizing parent square to send letters electronically um using sarb team as a community resource for our families um something that we've been doing a lot of is our home visits and so we've seen an increase in home visits this school year compared to last school year and there's been encouragement to school sites to be doing home visits it's been a positive experience we do have a covet protocol in place and some of these home visits are scheduled with families and some
220of them have been unscheduled when we're unable to make contact we are also having start meetings occurring at school sites and supporting our foster and mckinney-vento students which is coordinating transportation with our transportation department when that is needed um social workers are meeting with parents and teachers to close the gap of disengagement a lot of our families have been affected financially and so we're spending a lot of time connecting them with food housing child care and many other resources extra support has been given to our english language learners as well as newcomer students mental health support has been provided which is providing parenting support groups student support groups social workers doing one-on-one counseling with students as well as connecting families to one-on-one counseling and providing many risk assessments as well um during the school year
221to help with the mental health of our students well i just wanted to highlight one thing about the um about the home visits and and i think that number is very striking because typically uh a lot you know we look at last year it was something we were promoting but um you know it was really happening mostly through my office and the social workers some sites were you know there's a few that were doing it and and i just kind of you know i'm really proud of that number because sites have really embraced that they they've realized that you know that the families aren't coming to them so what are we gonna do we're gonna go meet them where they're at and uh just and they they've they they respond the kids respond i just
222wanna tell a quick little story about um one home visit i did with alejandra uribe who's the principal at mvla and we went over to see these two kids and um we had books and i think we had a chromebook for them and we go there and i walk in front and i knock on the door you can't tell by looking at me on the screen but i'm six feet three inches tall and i try to be soft and gentle and approachable as much as i can uh and i knock on the door and we can hear them rustling around in there i can imagine they see me through the peephole and like yeah right we're gonna open the door for this guy that we don't recognize and look at alejandra and we switch spots
223and she says hello it's me uh you know mrs uribe and the door comes flying open the kids were excited to see her and uh it was just a real powerful moment and it just really stuck with me because uh you know prior years we we didn't do that we we weren't bringing those site people out of the school to go meet these families where they at when they're you know they're not returning our phone calls they're not engaging with us through email and uh it's just a powerful thing so you know a lot of our that number really speaks to how our sites are embracing this as a strong intervention to try to get our kids to be engaged okay next slide okay so uh since october we we are continuing to do um
224sarb hearings um and what a star of hearing is you may ask is the school attendance review board and that's run through my office and we uh it's basically that kind of you know the school's exhausted all their all their um options they need that next level of help and so we bring the families together with with my the people in my office uh social workers counselor administrators from the school you have special ed people there we only have also some community partners that like parents can um sometimes probation comes and also the napa police department's youth services bureau who is uh their one person department of tony mcintosh who and and we and really the main focus of this is to find you know continue to find out what are those barriers what can
225we do to break down those barriers and get the students to engage what resources they need and it's a very it's a very supportive uh process uh and it's a very supportive meeting um which you know i think a lot of people expect it to be a little more punitive but um you know when you look at what state sarb who kind of oversees all this and gives us a lot of guidance it is to try to help families engage it is to be helpful can it get to be that pin of a thing it sure it can there are things in place where we can go to truancy court um but really that's the last resort we try really hard to try to make sure that we can get the families to engage break
226down whatever those barriers are and meet them where they're at so that they will start coming to school um and then we are sending an attendance notifications home um uh you know just especially for families just as we know one the initial one just the reminder about you know making sure they're aware about how much school they've missed um and also we we include some uh some some statistics in the in the in that letter just as a reminder about how why coming to school is so important um it's really powerful when you look at just that especially in those early years that k12 coming to school makes such a difference in reading scores uh coming to school their their ninth grade year is a better indicator for graduation than eighth grade test scores so
227just coming to school is such an important thing so so we that in those letters we give them reminders um and one just that they they are they are aware that how much their student has missed but also why it is also important okay um next slide and that is it for us so are there any questions so i want to say that the rates going down is impressive and it certainly appreciated all the work that you're putting in to make sure that those rates do go down and so i appreciate what has been done but i worry as we return to in-person instruction that these improvements may not be sustainable we need to make sure not to take our eyes off the ball as the challenge will become much more difficult when we move
228from engagement to actual attendance engagement is pretty easy if somebody sends an email that day that they're supposed to be in school that counts if they show up it counts if they you know complete an assignment it counts it's it's way easier to get engagement than attendance so i'm just concerned whether or not these these improvements will be sustainable but i see that there are many programs that we have in the district that we're now utilizing to improve attendance and i think that they will be successful even in the return to actual attendance instead of engagement so i'm i'm encouraged by those by those programs to that end though i'm thinking that perhaps uh our absentee rates could be a regular information item like attendance is sort of at the end of our board agenda
229each month so that we can sort of track how this is going so yeah so uh so what what one day i agree with um what you're saying about it's a you know next year is uh is definitely a wonder as we move forward so what we are doing right now is preparing for next year we know we're coming back in person and uh and so we are strategizing about how we gonna make sure our kids are engaging what kind of campaigns are we gonna run to to help remind parents about you know why attendance is important and you know kind of try to create some excitement around it too that you know we get to hopefully be backed in some normalcy and i and hopefully that'll also be enough to uh excite people to
230to come to school and then for uh as far as the attendance rates um you know i i i do create a monthly report for um the school sites already and so that would be easy information to be able to share with the board on a regular basis trustee water um mr heron and mr aribe i just want to thank you for this presentation and i am sure the home visits are a very powerful inducement sometimes you just have to show up and look like you're taking an interest to make a big difference so thank you i know it's very time consuming thank you best teach you so i also want to echo trustee waters i i've been visiting a lot of the schools and i've asked them how do you get the kids engaged
231for those who are at risk for um delinquency or whatever it is the indicators um and they've all said home visits are are one of the things that really really is very helpful in the situation and i have to say kudos to all of you that do home visits during a pandemic um that takes a lot of courage and guts to do so thank you for doing that hard work i think one of the things that i was able to sell to the school sites i i related it to uh going shopping at the grocery store and it's actually safer because we're all outside we're all six feet apart we're not touching anything you know and and so where it's safer to do a home visit than to go grocery shopping but um it's it
232it is a powerful thing and i in in you know i like to say they're all great and positive is that um sonya can attest that sometimes the parents aren't exactly thrilled that we we come there um sometimes we're scheduled and sometimes they're not but i will say they don't want you coming back so they they will sometimes start showing some improvement christie i just wanted to echo my fellow trustees and and thanking you so much for your dedication um that number increase of your home visits from last year to this year is really compelling and it speaks to your dedication to our students um and it communicates so strongly not only that we think that education matters but that we think they matter individually um and i can only imagine how powerful that message
233can be received and how seeing those kids that might be the ones that tend to fall through the cracks what an important and powerful experience that would be to feel that someone cares enough to come out and make sure that they have what they need to get to get themselves to school and to echo what trustee chu said in my school visits i've been really impressed to hear administrators and teachers talking about doing those home visits also and even there was one crossover where i was at donaldson way and speaking with the principal montgomery there and she said oh there's one family and there's three kids at three different schools different ages and we're concerned and then the next day or that same day i was in american canyon middle school and uh vice prince
234assistant principal ruth said there's this one family and with the three kids and we're really trying we're visiting and we're doing what we can and they're having transportation issues and i didn't have a way to verify if it was the same family but i just had a feeling it was and it gave me it made me feel really proud of our staff that level of dedication and attention and care so thank you so much thank you trustee dooley thank you um i what i really appreciate about this is the complexity of the the issue especially during the pandemic the um you know ranging from technology making sure that people had access to the internet um and the the devices to to reach that um as well as you know transportation once we started going in
235person and um it's it's kind of an incredible feat especially looking at the slide comparing uh our the district's data to the state data it's it's um you know i think we we've certainly done really well um i i i was interested in hearing some of the um kind of the barriers that we we are ex running into with the the other 6.6 that uh that are still remain chronically absent and and i appreciate that that some of that was included in the presentation um you know it it further highlights the complexity of the issue and when you get into issues about mental health and supervision issues with parents being out of the home and and you know i i it's you know it's an incredibly complex issue and it's really helpful to see all
236of the work that staff is putting in to to address all of these these barriers so thank you all right i think that concludes our questions thank you mr reese do we have any public comment on this item there are no public comments for this item president smiles great thank you mr ruiz president martin can i just say one thing before we say good night to uh mr heron and mr ortega who really hung in there with us tonight um i i just um you know there are some silver linings we're going to find that out when we return to full school hopefully in the fall um and when all of these support services you know when we go back to normal school potentially in the fall and the pandemic is sort of behind us
237um you know so many practices right i i know that i've talked with a lot of the support staff the parent liaison some of the social workers being able to be more accessible to parents because now we a virtual meeting is like an option right for a lot of our working parents who before maybe couldn't make it to a meeting because driving there and getting there on time wasn't um viable for them um the inc the idea of home visits getting really sort of um you know instigated by the current conditions that we're persisting through we've learned a lot of things that we can do differently and better because of the pandemic and we talk about so much of the challenge but we want to take these silver linings and these new learnings and make
238sure that when the pandemic is in the rearview mirror we've taken some of these improved practices so that we can continue to impact the educational lives of our children so um i want to thank drew and sonya the team of social workers the counselors the parent liaisons that are all doing this work to make sure our kids stay connected to school thank you dr masetti and once again thank you for our presenters for sticking with us at this hour have a good night okay um we will now um and we have no public comment so we will go to items k those are actually these are our action items um so business service we start with k1a 1920 annual district and measure h bond audit reports so i'll move to approve but i want to
239have some discussion as well so also first and the second by trustee dooling okay christy gracia so i'm concerned by the district audit report um it looks like our opeb liabilities are really getting out of hand and are becoming a real problem for our future budgets it feels like we may not ever be able to get our budget fully healthy if we don't start to get these unfunded liabilities under control so this is a concern that i i have but obviously that would not stop me from um approving the audit would you like me to respond to that trustee garcia that'd be great yeah well thank you very much for for pointing out our our open liability yes like all school districts we we do have a substantial opeb uh liability we are working on
240trying to limit that in terms of negotiating with our unions and looking at ways to to limit the um liability going forward um some of the other things that we're looking at doing is establishing a regular payment to a trust account which can help reduce it at a faster rate so yes this is something that is a concern for us and and all school districts um future life open liability is an issue thank you okay thank you rob are there other questions or comments okay we have a first and a second student board rep hi all those in favor aye aye aye aye opposed verb stay great motion passes thank you now go to item k1b king consulting contract it's all moved second first by trustee gracias second by trustee dooley oh before we um
241we could go back to audit and just make sure we don't have any public comment on that item mysteries i'm sorry i don't know public wait there is one public comment okay thank you and this is for the audit this is for measure h am i appropriate to comment on this item if you are correct please go ahead measure h investment in napa schools reveals a long record of betrayal and should serve as a warning to this board as you consider closing schools my son was a pioneer student in pueblo vista's dual immersion program and from the start my wife and i committed to being involved in his education which meant supporting the school financially and with the investment of our time in 2015 principal helen roca asked me to draft a letter to include
242with the school's application for a national magnet school award i was happy to oblige and thrilled when the school earned the designation after measure h passed with the narrow majority of voters pueblo vista parents marveled at renderings of a new multi-purpose room posted on the windows of our existing rundown mpr the facility was never built of greater concern to many parents was the condition of a crosswalk on linda vista avenue where daily children and parents made perilous crossings from the school to a church parking lot across the street as a member of pv's parent faculty club i reached out to the city of napa's engineer to ask him what it would take to install a lighted crosswalk on linda vista to enhance safety for our children he said between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand dollars
243the pfc board signaled its support for spending parent money to pay for the crosswalk upgrades however at the 11th hour principal rocket informed us measure h funds would be used to cover the cost that was in 2018 three years later my daughter who was in the fifth grade at pb and other children still face a perilous journey crossing that busy road at harvest where my son is now a seventh grader and i am president of the pfc we were told repeatedly that measure age funds would flow to us once river moved onto its new campus even as projects like upgrading our quad or making critical earthquake safety improvements were delayed we held out faith district leadership would follow through on its promises and of course those upgrades never happened either district leadership now uses the
244condition of our facilities as a pretext to shut our school down they gain the data by throwing in outrageous expenses for things like a 14 million dollar performing arts stage under the guise of equity and using those allegedly required expenditures to argue why it's too expensive to keep harvest open starve the patient now blame it for its death it's sickening is the board aware how much public faith you have lost and how much more you stand to lose through this rushed school closure process i suspect if you don't now know you will when you go back to the public had in hand seeking support for another bond measure thank you again for listening thank you for your comment do we have any other comments mysteries that concludes our comments at this time president rozelle's modest
245okay thank you mr reece and thank you everybody for bearing with me here we were in item k1b with king consulting contract actually there was a first by trustee gracia and the second by trustee dooley student boardroom hi um and do i have any public comment on this item mysteries there's no public comment pressing results thank you all those in favor aye all right what do you pose or abstain motion passes thank you k1c business consulting contract with dr business services consulting 2020 2021 so moved moved by trustee julie second second by trustee riser do i have any public comment under uh on this item mr reese there's no public comment president gonzalez most student board rep aye all those in favor aye ready oppose or abstain okay motion passes thank you now on to
246item k2a this is the california mexico and spain visiting teachers program 2021-2022 so moved second moved by trustee gracias second by trustee dooling do i have any public comment on the side of mysteries there's no public comment president rozelle's minus okay thank you student board rep aye all those in favor aye okay ready pose or abstain motion passes thank you we pulled this next item so we now are an item k3 k3a grade six uh k through six supplementary instructional program adoption the toolbox project move to approve but i'd like some discussion second so first by trustee gracia the second by trustee dooley i have a question about what measurable outcomes we will be able to look to in order to determine that this program is successful miss andrew jennings i'm here hold on just
247a second so um [Music] i want to um so for this particular item the measurable outcomes for toolboxes one we're going to start the implementation next year with the goal of the measurable outcomes of on our sdq our strengths difficulty questionnaire that we will see an improvement in the number of students who are um showing either difficulty and that's one of the measurable outcomes um i want to invite sarah knox actually i don't believe she's still here to also uh weigh in on that but she's not here so um that is one thing we're looking at is just improvement in the strengths difficulty questionnaire and students social emotional um skills as they as we implement the toolbox curriculum thank you ms andrew jennings does that answer some answered questions it helps okay are there other
248trustee gracie i can provide you with some additional um um measurable outcomes for that particular project thank you are there other questions or comments on this item i just want to quickly say that um i've seen this program um in action in an oakland school that i worked with and it's really powerful and then i i attended the training or i observed the the session that was about this this program and it was presented by the founder and it it's so it really gives some remarkable life skills and the the thing that stuck with me from the presentation was he had interviews with uh former students that were now young adults and i think it was in willets but i'm not sure what town somewhere north coast sonoma county mendocino county somewhere up there and
249there were young adults saying i still use these tools i don't know what i would do if i didn't have my tools there were two um young men sitting together and they said if it wasn't for toolbox i'd probably be in the penitentiary so i i have a lot of faith in the power of this program and i'm really excited about it being brought to nbusd students yeah thank you for sharing that christie riser okay so we had a first and a second do i have any public comment on this item stories there are no public comments president goodell smarters great thank you student board rep hi all those in favor pose or abstain okay motion passes thank you we're not item k3b elementary school supplementary instructional program adoption the hegerty program move to a
250proof first by trustee gracia a second by trustee jankowicz do i have any public comment on this item there are no public comments for the sign of president gonzalez minus any questions or comments okay student board rep aye all those in favor aye aye anybody oppose or abstain great motion passes thank you item k3c school plan for student achievement addendum approval so moved second first by trustee gracias second by trustee dooley do i have any public comment on the side of mysteries there are no public comment president exhaust modus thank you student board rep hi all those in favor aye aye ready oppose or abstain motion passes thank you item k3d memorandum of understanding with adventure more so moved second okay jesse riser was going to be to add it to a cd first by
251trustee gracia second by trustee dooley do you have any public comment on the sign of mysteries i have a comment or i have a question actually okay um so i i asked this earlier so i i i know the answer but i think it's worthwhile for the public to know um on which campuses will the program be offered and is this the same as the camp mvusd that we got in parent square thank you trustee chu um yes it's the same camp in usd this will be our part of our elementary summer school program offerings and um we have identified uh several campuses typical snow shear phillips mcpherson uh willow pueblo vista and nbla as the the campuses that will be um hosting the summer programs or various components of the summer program that's great
252because i think it's really needed for our students um oh i'm sorry in um canyon oaks sorry yeah we have to represent um you know it would be great um to have one in american canyon because american candy usually is kind of a desert of summer programs except for the what we have in the city but you know i i think those are towards uh more sports oriented kids which are not my kids um the my other question is will there be a targeted effort to enroll students who need uh the summer program um so that they can they can help you can help mitigate some of the learning loss during this school year um yes director manning has worked on a tiered approach to offer summer programming students who need um who have been
253the least engaged or have not been successful in the current hybrid model will be the ones who will be heavily recruited and will be offered additional time in the summer sessions to to support their academic growth and for fun and engagement and all those other wonderful things that we want students to experience during the summer yeah i was about to say edmo sounds fun but learning at the same time so i'm glad uh we're making that effort thank you very much you're welcome okay uh do i have any public comment on this item mr reese there are no public comments president gonzalez okay thank you all right we had a first and a second student board rep aye all those in favor aye are you opposed or abstain right motion passes thank you item k
254k3e facilities agreement between calisterle joint unified school district and nbusd napa valley adult education for ask 12 parent technology workshops move to approve the first by trustee gracias second by trustee riser um do i have any public comment on this item mysteries there are no public comments present results minus thank you any questions or not okay student board rep hi all those in favor aye are you opposed or abstain motion passes thank you uh item k3f scholar serious proposal so moved second a first by trustee gracia and the second by trustee water do i have any public comment on this item mr reese there are no public comments present godzilla smiles any questions or i think i'm just really excited about this looking forward to it looks like we got some rock stars here i
255really recommend checking out the um ted talk it was really impressive and powerful no this will be a good thing excited about that okay um the excitement i lost track of it there was a first and a second no public comment um student board rep aye all those in favor hi hi are you a pose abstain okay all right thank you item k4 school planning and construction so this is k4a spc number 26.124-17 request for payment for dsa for final invoice at river school it's all moved second first by trustee gracias second by trustee dooley do i have any public comment on this item mr reese there are no public comments present results matters right thank you any questions or okay student board rep hi all those in favor aye aye anybody oppose or abstain
256motion passes thank you item k4b spc number 7.2 7.2-21 request for design services for portable relocation by ca essay studios from stonebridge current to new site at mount george so moved second first by trustee gracia second by trustee dooley do i have any public comment on this item there are no public comments president gonzalez any questions student board rep aye all those in favor aye aye aye anybody oppose or abstain we shouldn't pass this thank you item k4c spc number 7.1-21 request for design services reportable relocation of restroom building to vichy by casa studios it's almost second first by trustee gracias second by trustee dooley do i have any public comment on this item there are no public comments president gonzalez thank you mr reese any questions all right all those um student board rep
257aye all those in favor aye anybody oppose or abstain motion passes thank you now on to almost there everybody uh we're now into informational um items under the section do not require board action so this is the instructional services item l1a stonebridge charter council minutes february 2020 to january 2021. trustee water well i just remember um last year i complained because i thought the minutes were very sparse they aren't now [Laughter] they showed me [Laughter] and i did read them i also have a question um i don't know what the protocol is for charter schools it's my first time on the board so i noticed that there are attachments uh mentioned in the minutes are those supposed to be also attached to the document and i mean it feels like there's a lot of missing
258information i can't really understand some of that discussion without some of those attachments so i don't know what the protocol is for reviewing charter minutes good question dr masseni would you like to uh respond yeah trustee typically the practice has been they've they've submitted just the minutes um you know i could follow up with uh principal um uh martinez uh at stonebridge but typically they they've just submitted minutes um that's been past practice um just for review of content but i could see where it could make it a challenge to understand the full context if you don't have any of the addendums and um dr masetti we can in the future attach make sure the attachments are included in what goes to the school board okay so if you can follow up miss andrew jennings
259with uh stonebridge we would murder council that'd be great with that in mind then could we possibly get them um in smaller digestible bites maybe not all at once but yeah we really yeah we typically bring them in the past we've brought so stone bridge is our last charter school um in the district and we typically would bring them quarterly those of you that were on the board before i think this was just you know with covid and just there's kind of the anomaly circumstances but yes um the idea would be to bring it to you bring them to you quarterly okay thank you so now we're on to item m additional suggestions and comments from board members and superintendent i did want to ask um president gonzalez manas if mr pearson can give his
260report he had audio issues earlier um as part of final comments from executive staff absolutely thank you mr pearson good evening president gonzalez mars mvsd board of education trustees and dr masetti student board representative magana and members of the mvsd community thank you for the opportunity to provide you with an update on operational services i apologize that i was having audio difficulty earlier uh tonight tonight my comments will focus on food service and facilities this past monday which was march 22nd food service handed out 1 225 boxes of food to serve nbst families for two weeks which is in preparation for spring break the total number of meals handed out on monday at the curbside locations which were just central kitchen and american canyon high school totaled 17 150 meals i also want to thank
261the cert team out of city of american canyon who was helped to assist us at the american canyon high school once again they have been extremely helpful and speaking of the food service staff i want to commend the mvsd for service employees for their continued support to provide mbst students and families with nutritious meals mbst food service employees are unsung heroes in the school district right now providing a basic need for many of our students and our families and i appreciate them receiving the team award from human services on facilities this past march 19th high school football was played at american canyon high school and memorial stadium for the first time in over a year i want to con commend the mbsd custodial and maintenance staff for ensuring each venue was thoroughly cleaned and ready
262to support all covet 19 protocols to keep athletes coaches and spectators safe at all times and finally from the operational services the directors who comprise the operational services team gloria aguirre albert d'souza kristen t kill and terry guzman are gearing up for the remainder of the 2021 school year events along with the activities associated with the upcoming summer time and in addition food service and transportation are busy planning for the 22 school year this concludes my report for tonight thank you thank you mr pearson okay all right we are now um any other we were checking if there's other comments i think we're good uh item n future agenda items so i would like to suggest that maybe as an informational item only we have uh the reports monthly on the chronic absenteeism rate and
263how we're how we're doing just so that we can keep up to date on how things are going there thank you trustee gracie i will work with assistant superintendent pat andrew jennings to bring that forth as monthly informationals for the school board yep just for the record there's lots of nods over here so um thank you christy gracia i have a future agenda item too it's come up a couple times uh thanks to first to trustee riser's report on the uh special education community action committee um i'd like to know a little bit more about how our the special education needs of students that are being met especially during the hybrid and distance learning process this year i know we were able to to come back a lot earlier than a lot of districts um
264and that's been helpful for a lot of people a lot of students with special needs but there there's a variety of needs that that um you know may not have been met directly with that and so i'm interested in in kind of um the extent that or i guess the the the ways that we've addressed um certain types of of special needs um the um like how do we how do we address the or measure student achievement and and the extent of learning loss among special education students how do we address uh integration needs and socialization when uh we're not all on campus um and and then how do we approach identification uh and diagnosis of students um with special needs that may not be physically on campus or may may be harder to observe
265in the in the distance learning setting um trustee dooley i've noted that future agenda item request and we will prepare that item thank you um not a future agenda item so you may have been more of a comment but april is child abuse prevention month and um one of the sessions that i was in it was just noted how the rate of reported cases has decreased tremendously and not for good reasons mainly because the children are not in classrooms and teachers are not there to to see the kid so just something to think about and i think it goes back to um trusty dooley's request and and also trustee you know gracias report of chronic absenteeism i'm just trying to figure out ways where we can um support our families and um just something to
266keep in mind just because next month is just that awareness and it kind of hits a spot when we realize that many of our kiddos are not at school and our teachers don't have the opportunity to see them every day like they used to all right um see there's no future other future agenda items we're down to item um zero oh move to adjourn so moved okay and second by trustee uh first by trustee gracious second by trustee dooley student board rep aye all those in favor aye anybody pose or abstain you're adjourned with one minute one minute yes round three have a good night everybody it's still thursday thank you good job okay