001ready i called to order the regular board meeting for gcc may the 24th 2022 a little past 1 30 p.m and i apologize to everyone for the delay um as usual having trouble so i will do old call at this point mr mark anderson here mr harry block yeah mr bruce mandrake absent this meeting mr jack turner and lily campbell present for board members present and now we will approve the sb 361 board resolution which is a kind of common thing for at this time and it's simply stated we're following the brown act as we have our meetings virtually so i will entertain a motion for approval sb 361 board resolution oh my god okay thank you mr anderson move second by mr turner that we approve the board resolution roll call mark anderson yes
002harry black yes jack turner yes lily campbell absent bruce mandrake and now we will move to item three public comments do we have public comments for today mr sampler thank you very much and now we will move to the superintendent's update and again let me thank all of you for being here uh all of those who are with us for the school reports we are anxiously looking forward to that and to those of you who are watching us virtually thank you for being with us today and the board members and captains who are here with us so with that we will move to the superintendent's update dr peterson uh thank you madam president so the superintendent's update for today there's a lot going on we are in the last calendar week for students and it
003is all hands on deck all the time this week so we have had numerous kindergarten promotions already and uh we have some eighth grade promotions that have occurred and there'll be more of that all the way up until friday so it's a great day to celebrate great week to celebrate all kinds of amazing things happening a lot of people happy to be able to celebrate in person once again last week on friday we gathered with over 600 of our staff members for the first time for our end-of-year event in two years i really want to thank the board for your uh video for giving some thoughtful comments to and they were well received by all of staff so we also want to inform you that on friday flip flip and gave us a call and
004let us know that we are now a national showcase district for the third time so yeah quite an honor only 11 districts in all of the united states are national showcase districts last week was classified employee recognition week which you know was preceded two weeks prior with the certificated employee recognition week but last week we celebrated and honored all of our amazing classified staff members and had a great uh event here in the central office as well earlier this week we had our epic annual site visit with our office authorizer yolo county we were quite honored to have the county superintendent garth was out with us as well as um micah studer and others and so we had a great visit very positive and uh really want to give a shout out to dr jerry
005caution staff for doing a great job with that also this last week i was able to have my annual visit to the slavic radio program and talk to our slavic community particularly of interest was some discussion around how we can partner to serve our ukrainian immigrant population so more updates on that will follow i'm sure as you may be aware if you're reading the news or listening to anything we have quite an uptick in positive covet in the counties we are not at any new safety protocols or any new changes in that status but certainly everybody is watching the increase in covet case uh very carefully to see how that's going to impact our world i want to also say that i continue to as others in the cabinet do take part in such things
006as our axa meetings and superintendents council meetings and member council meetings and county updates many of these things have to do with cobin 19 and some have to do with the governor's budget governors may revise uh governor has released his uh thoughts on the may revise as many of you know that does not mean that that's our budget that's his thoughts on the may revise that's his proposal and so i have been attending cabinet members have been attending we have attended csdc's may revised presentation school services sacramento county office of ada hosted one and a few others in between to just kind of get a sense as many of you may have been hearing our economy is in a positive space uh it is just there's a lot of uncertainty due to inflation rate supply
007chain issues and some other very volatile things so we are continuing to monitor we want to tell you that we got a lot of good response to the board's approval of the additional one percent on the salary schedule and want to affirm the board for proactively uh taking that step with us we will continue to monitor and update you when the trailer bill language becomes available and the final budget is approved uh we we don't believe that it will be a matter of huge changes honestly what they're arguing over now is where to spend the money that is uh in excess of what they thought they had in january i also want to remind you that last week we had a wonderful celebration with axo region 3 administrator of the year awards and we want
008to once again give a shout out to laura berrigan who was honored as the region's hr administrator of the year summer ash and ashley madden were also honored as administrators of the year for cte and educational options and it was wonderful to be together with those of you that were able to come and recognize their many accomplishments this last week we also had our final session of crucial conversations that um uh was the second cohort of this year the 25th or 26th i have no idea it's somewhere in there and i want to give a congratulations to adrian pierre ali wilson vicente levano sean dean chelsea newman and danny williams who all survived all 10 weeks of crucial conversations and uh vicente is here today so he is obviously still standing so um a lot
009of great things going on in the in the gcc and uh every day uh these wonderful administrators you see on the screen are making you proud board so it's an honor to be uh representing them today thank you very much board members any comments any questions for our superintendent seeing none hearing none uh thank you so much for your hard work um i express my regrets all the time that we are not able to be there with you and to enjoy the many things that are going on and to see all of the good stuff that's happening but we do appreciate you we want you to know that the board members we know that without you none of this could be possible the things that our superintendent has talked about today and what's going on
010with gcc so for that we are very grateful to you and very thankful so thank each of you and so hearing no other comments from board members we will continue on with our study session in our first study session i want to welcome the higher learning academy hla and the staff that's here for that and we are so proud to see you dr marston and all of the rest of you thank you for being here so with that i will turn it over yes and i will also add um it is a great honor and pleasure today to uh while you may be experiencing it as an hla and a futures presentation dr marston is going to make clear to you that really you're getting a rancho del paso update today because we're re-branding our
011campus as a k-12 experience not two separate schools and i really want to affirm all of the people that you have on today who are going to talk to you dr marston of course for her incredible leadership at the helm as director but also all four of our other administrators that you see on on your cameras today uh who have stepped up to the challenge uh and are continuing to provide excellent service for our um students so with that i'm gonna turn it over to dr marston thank you very much and i want to make sure it is vocalized that dr peterson got the actual women leader of the of the year award and we are so proud of her and i just want to applaud her if you know that either thank you for
012sharing that with us she is so humble um so i just want to make sure that we award and recognize her for all of her work and she is definitely one of my multipliers so thank you very much thank you for sharing that absolutely and we wish we could be here with you all in person we love you all so much and want to thank you for everything that you do for our school sites it really truly is your leadership and the work that you do that helps us do our job so well and we want to thank you and affirm you for believing in us for the work that we do so we have mr coonan who is now our campus principal and mr munch who is the vice principal of higher learning academy
013and we're very excited for their leadership and then we have um over at the futures uh mr levano i've learned you do not pronounce it lovano it's luivano so mr luivano and i was kind of i kind of said it right well he'll correct me and i'm still working on it and crystal buddha as the vice principal so we're really excited for their leadership they've been doing wonderful work um loved by all staff students families so with that i'm actually going to turn the mic over to mr coonan and mr munch to take it away for higher learning academy all right thank you so much dr marston thank you dr peterson and gcc cabinet president campbell very excited to see you and present to you today mr turner mr anderson mr block so good to
014see you all as well it's an honor to be here and and be able to talk to you today all right so let's talk about what's been going on at higher learning academy we are going to follow this format today this agenda which is probably familiar to you at this point following some of our ckh norms and starting with good things going into student achievement curriculum equity inclusion diversity parent community sel impact and of course we'll talk about what's next as well alright so we've got to start with good things what is good here at hla so many good things going on here at hla our enrollment is going to be growing as you know this was our first year with three first grade classrooms next year we will be ext expanding to have three
015second grade classrooms as well as a tk class on top of our already existing three kindergarten classes so very excited to continue to grow into our rancho del paso campus here we are a ckh national showcase school as was already you know mentioned at the district level but of course we're very proud to have that honor here at the school level for the third time in a row and then uh our collaboration as far as becoming one unified rancho del paso campus here we are so excited for the um the opportunity to collaborate with futures more than we ever have in the past you can see pictures here of some of our staff members passing out food boxes we've been partnering with a food bank nearby here and been giving out fresh food to our
016families every friday and that lower picture is our um our book fair which raises a lot of money and of course the kids get super excited about every year okay so here's our focus i think again you're familiar with this board members from the work of michael fullen we're going to be talking about academics sel and equity and where those things meet to create the greatest impact for our students all right so starting with student achievement we're going to look at some i ready data we are very pleased with our full implementation of iready this year it's been a great tool for us to measure student learning and growth you can see going from the lower bar of diagnostic one that's beginning of the year to diagnostic two above you can see in every grade
017band here we're moving in the right direction so there's definitely um you know no doubt that we've got a long road ahead of us in terms of making up for the learning loss suffered during coven but already just in the first few months on campus this year we saw a really significant growth so you know those lower levels shrinking and those higher achieving levels growing throughout the year that is our reading achievement in iready there and this is our math achievement again a similar pattern here where we are have a long ways to go but we are definitely moving in the right direction looking beyond i ready i also want to just mention that we were able to reclassify six english learners this year as english proficient so we are making sure to um that
018we're serving all of our our subgroups all of our populations here at hla with excellence all right and from there we're going to move on to curriculum and coherence and i'm going to pass it to our vice principal mr munch all right thank you and hi president campbell uh the rest of the board and everybody else it's nice to see your one square inch faces uh hopefully next year we get to do this in person and thank you for having us let's jump right into a curriculum so this here can you give me a switch please uh this year we piloted two science curriculums inspire and amplify uh we had i believe seven teachers run a solid unit of each after which we pulled both the teachers and the students to see you know what
019was the most enjoyable unit what did you feel you mo you learned the most what pushed you the most um and just a week ago we finally decided we are going with amplify so we are going to have a full ngss inquiry-based super fun i think science curriculum for our k through 5. we're going to be adopting amplify which means we're going to get a whole bunch of boxes of science stuff to do experiments with and i am stoked uh and with that i'm going to pass it back to mr gooner thank you and we want to affirm ashley cao at the gcc for all of her support with curriculum curriculum adoption williams act compliance all those things that go along with with curriculum in the background all right so here you can see our
020uh our instructional framework we actually started a lot of this work during the pandemic completely remotely but this is something that still drives our work this was co-created with our entire staff and is a good encapsulation of what we what we do here at hla we want to affirm lyle and wendy lyle kurtman and wendy york for their guidance with a lot of this work that we do and i also wanted to mention dr gold when talking about ireti she has been really a great support for our assessments and our academics all around i also wanted to kind of point to the lower left here we we had this this tiered graphic here on our instructional framework from the get-go but with the gcc wide grant for mtss work or i guess what we're calling
021uh sos we're going to have more experience and more knowledge and expertise over a multi-tiered system of support than ever so we're really looking forward to growing into that area all right and of course as you know we are an ib school first and foremost so we have made some great strides in our ib work this year we just recently about three weeks ago had our consultants visit us virtually she is actually as you know the ib is a very international organization she's actually based in toronto so she per regulations she wasn't able to uh to come and visit us in person but she did visit us virtually spoke with all of our teachers got to see at the excuse me at the pyp level so all of our elementary teachers got to talk to
022all of our teacher teams got to talk with some of our parents got to talk with a lot of our students and she left with glowing reviews and also some good next steps for us to get ready for our authorization visit next school year and i want to really affirm uh in terms of that ib work uh capricor our curriculum coach and pyp coordinator she is out on maternity leave currently she had a healthy baby boy just about six weeks ago so we're very happy for her and then of course joy to coy director of ib at the gcc level her guidance and expertise has been invaluable for us here at hla so we want to thank her as well all right i'm going to pass it back to mr munch all right thank you
023so uh most of us have been with hla for a while we know that diversity equity and inclusion are big cornerstones big heavy hitters that we want to do very well here at hla and this year we had two primary goals that we wanted to work on the first was a focus on our suspension we wanted to continue to get our suspension numbers lower and lower and lower keeping kids in the class showing them all the love and support that they need to thrive and be successful um especially across some of kind of our targeted you know please thank you some of our targeted subgroups that you see here i'm so super thrilled to say that we we've met all of our goals across the board you see on this the very right uh 0.2.6.8
024very very low suspension numbers um not only meeting our goal also being lower than national average and for a title one school i i'm proud of all the work that every single person on this campus has done because showing kids love and support takes a village and it takes everybody there doing it um our next goal however was much more of a barrier due to covid we were trying to get our absentee rate um and our our absentee rate down and our attendance up covid proved to be quite a barrier in this over everything else we prioritize student health and safety especially in the midst of covid if you had a stuffy nose a runny nose a cough we wanted you to go home do distance learning be safe and be able to come back
025the next day so we took that as a priority over everything else and it definitely shows in us not meeting these goals but this is going to be a huge target for next year working on this attendance rate making sure that kids are healthy in class and ready to learn as often as we can uh thank you i do want to affirm uh our nurses and our central office staff who uh jason sample i believe you were very much involved in this who had to go to all the meetings all the updates figure out every covid decision tree that seemed to change every five minutes i just got the tertiary information and it made my head hurt um so everyone who was involved in this dr chris you as well thank you for doing all
026of that work it i mean it was for the safety of our scholars so i really really appreciate it one of the ways this segues nicely that we are going to combat that absenteeism is by continuing to build a stronger parent and community relationship so we have a few pictures here of some of the things that we're doing one of the things that i'm very proud of is we are finally getting a really good social media presence and it's a huge affirmation to miss julie the rightmost picture she is the woman sitting on the chair smiling at the camera um she is running all of our social medias um so if you have not seen her face or name yet like subscribe do whatever it is you do on the socials um we have some
027of our instagram posts uh some other things we're doing is bi-weekly we have family yoga night family yoga and mindfulness you see in the picture in the middle we have parents we have kids we have grandparents coming out doing yoga getting some mindfulness kind of learning skills to deal with all of the woes of this world and in addition to that we feed everyone so that's always a super nice thing uh and then our last thing danny or mr cooney kind of mentioned this at the beginning we have food boxes every friday we get this huge pallet from the sacramento food bank and we get to be like oprah and just start passing out free food it is super fun uh parents are always very happy about it um so again i want to affirm
028the central office for really helping kind of set up and continue this maisha brit being one of the people who helped us coordinate all this it is a huge help to the community and some of the families who get it are are just ecstatic and over the moon moving right along into social emotional learning one thing that hla wants to do is ensure that social emotional learning isn't just something that we do oh we do sel over here we want to embed our social emotional learning into everything that we do we want it to be a kind of a lens through which we see education and how we love our kids so a few things that we do for sel that mindfulness that i mentioned earlier with the families every week every class gets mindfulness
029you see here on the bottom left i'm doing some frog jumps uh the person on the left who does not look like a child is mr christian i want to give him a shout out for being a wonderful mindfulness coach to the kids as well as teachers and kind of some coaches across gcc some other things we are doing in the top we have a stomp type hip-hop dance routine we asked for some student voice they told us they wanted dance so we reached out to studio t uh and we got hip hop stomp dance happening in our cafeteria it is super fun to watch the kids love it and they have a blast with it and then on the top right we have our wonderful hla staff next year that's going to be an
030even bigger rdp staff i'm so excited we're going to have to back up the cameras but with our restrictions lowering we really want to bring back that human connection piece that we missed so dearly when we were in covid and so we're getting to see people hug people handshakes and we're really rebuilding the connections and i'm going to pass it back to mr coonan all right so when we can combine academic excellence sel and equity and integrate those things together we know that's when we get the biggest impact for our students and we see that happening here at hla so we i really want to highlight here in the uh the student in front of the eagle one of the things that we've really tried to focus on is student voice and choice or what
031we call student agency uh in in the ib this student actually won a contest you decorate this wall she designed this this mural here which we had professionally done so her name is of sarah teen she is a wonderful fifth grader here at hla so we're very proud of her it's just been great to get back to some regular school events right so you can see a middle school dance there on the right hand side and up top that's our pfo supporting with snacks at our at our middle school dances coming up we've got a summer school which i'm going to talk about a little bit more but we are so excited to be thinking outside the box for summer school and serving more students than we have ever served before with summer school all
032right so let's talk about what's next what's coming up in the hla that we are excited about um the summer success sessions are going to be just so much fun we really under dr marston's guidance we really went outside of the box with our summer school planning rather than just doing kind of wrote catch-up on academics we really want to make it engaging and just a special experience for students so we've got things like drama dance board games creative writing percussion all kinds of different things different experiences that students wouldn't normally get the the chance to participate in um for the first time ever we are doing a welcome to kindergarten camp very excited about that mentioned it earlier we're adding that uh trans that tk that transitional kindergarten class and another second grade class
033so we are growing and we are so excited about collaborating more than ever with futures high school and of course our ib progress hoping for authorization with a visit next year for pyp at the elementary level and then as was always the plan nyp is kind of staggered behind them so they will be coming up for a consultant visit next year so we're staying busy with that and continuing to move forward with that just want to say thank you so much to to our board thank you for listening thank you for everything you do for us and we'd be happy to answer any questions that you might have thank you one and all from hla and board members i'm opening for your discussion questions comments anything from any of our board members at this point
034yes mark ms anderson did i see marzan guess not sorry jack really yes who do i see now jack okay jack yes mr turner yes i i want to thank you for your report and particularly on your emphasis on recovering the learning loss due to the covet pandemic and also the trying to turn around the absence of statistics i wasn't quite clear on that on your statistics on the absences on the final goal i was at the like 25 reduction or a i are just it wasn't clear but again just really a great report and to your staff also and also your your cooperation and working with futures high school i think that collaboration is really really important and i look forward to seeing those students uh you know going from the higher learning academy
035on to futures high school so anyway congratulations yeah if you look at that chart i think i can't quite see that side of it but i think the futures goal was yeah 20 currently it's 20 is that the i couldn't quite is that the current absence rate for those groups yes so that 20 is uh what percentage of the population is hitting that chronic absenteeism so more than i believe 92 percent are less than 92 attendance rates you know i think that's really a goal that you you certainly are focused on and i highly support that thank you and thank you for the kind words i appreciate that and i had one that i wanted to i wrote suspension rate great um that has been a focus throughout california and all over because the suspension
036rate was really high particularly around groups of students and i see you have decreased yours greatly so any words of how you did it um i think getting everybody on campus to be to have that kind of same mission and vision of if our kids are not on campus in that classroom they're not going to thrive they're not going to survive so we need to do everything we can to keep them in their seats keep them learning keep pushing them to be their best and when everybody on campus believes that you find a way to deal with things without having to send a student home very impressive thank you thank you any other comments from board members staff i want to thank you personally for your work for the presentation really appreciate all the hard
037work and i know it has been even more difficult with the pandemic and all of the things that you've gone through but progress is being made and i see the focus also is on the academic improvement and so we will continue to watch that next year as you move through the year and we hopefully will get better with meeting in person so thank you any other comments madam superintendent you know i do want to just affirm um as i as i started out with it is not normal our normal run of business to have a change in the middle of a school year and that in the middle of a school year post pandemic if you will or mid pandemic and and i just really want to say that you couldn't ask for a more
038positive solution-oriented student-focused group than the three presenters you just heard and really want to give them an affirmation for their continued focus on success for our students so thank you again thank you the ground of applause for all of you big round of applause thank you you got it all right and now we're moving to futures high school annual school report and dr morrison i think that's you bringing us back in again so with that yes ma'am thank you so much um so uh we are going to introduce you i'm sure you've met both mr luedeno and miss buddha before but again mr levano is uh our campus principal and miss buddha is the vice principal and they have been working so hard and i am so proud of all the work that they've done
039and um they're going to show all of that off to you right now great thank you you dr martin uh first off just want to say thank you dr peterson and the rest of the cabinet for being here as well as uh president campbell and the board thank you guys for having us we're looking forward to our presentation and showing you what we've been doing at futures and how things are going uh so again you know you are familiar what we are doing here today but i wanted to start it off with good things at the top of my list of good things is just our dream team that was formed at rancho del paso it's been an awesome opportunity to work with dr martin and the admin at hla also with crystal we couldn't
040be more excited for what we're doing being able to hire a vice principal and curriculum coach now has been a tremendous addition to the team i think it's something that future is needed and we want to thank you for allowing that to happen our math team has been doing amazing work over the course of the year which crystal will talk about here in a minute but being able to map out our math department getting everything in order to our student participation our maker faire our maker faire is something that we take pride in we have a lot of things going on in the science department and in our math department that allows our students who focus on different projects that they're interested in and we were able to showcase that a lot this year um
041excuse me the um what you see in the pictures here are was our second rally of the year we try to cram everything in but uh what you see there is camilla she's a student in the bar she's a colombian student of ours who takes very pride in her culture and heritage but and she was able to sing a latin song she did tremendous the crowd was so enthused they were so into it um and it was really awesome to see just the different cultures being showcased at our school and then on the picture on the right there you see one of our first of many field trips that we were able to fit in to uc davis um it was a great opportunity kids were excited about field trips everybody's trying to jump on
042board i don't know how many requests i've got for field trips but it seemed like everybody had a great idea for a field trip but we wanted to focus on something local something that's going to be career pathwise and a lot of the visits to the colleges were right up the alley um i wanted to take it take a second though and um president campbell i'm not sure if you remember you and i had a conversation at a craft one of the last craft things we had but the conversation was awesome because it allowed me to just talk to you but then you actually gave me some feedback letting me know hey you should be in administration you should go into and to start talking about taking the classes and taking the coursework and the
043day after i had a conversation with dr panislik and i said about what you had said to me and then think just the wheels started getting in motion so i remember i remember the conversation i remember with the words that you said and now i just got enrolled and got accepted into the scholarly administration classes so i'll be doing those here coming in the fall and a lot of it is just because of what you said and so i just want to say thank you and i'm very appreciative thank you you're welcome and then now i'm going to pass it over to crystal who it will be talking about um our focus all right thank you mr lovano um and i just want to echo what mr levano was saying um about uh thanking the
044board um this is my 15th year with gcc and i appreciate all the support that you've given throughout the years i'm really happy to be here today all right we're going to start by talking about some student achievement which is part of the academic excellence of our school and as mr coonan mentioned one of our primary tools for measuring growth is the new i ready program that we're using this year and here you're looking at a chart that shows the growth of our students from the beginning of the year until the middle of the year and the the numbers on the x-axis represent the number of grade levels of growth of the students from the beginning until the middle of the year so since we didn't have the spring we don't have the spring numbers
045fully tabulated yet our goal here would be to have 0.5 growth or half a year's growth with within half a school year and as you can see over 100 students are between 0 and one and we have a lot of students that actually hit that one plus target halfway through the school year so our our students are making progress in math and they're poised to make even more progress moving right along to reading we can see a similar trend of our our students um that they have shown between zero and 1 levels grade levels of growth and i'd like to take a moment to thank heather and ashley for their help with iready implementation and just their continued support in so many different avenues of academic excellence they are a huge support to our team
046and also the data department who is helping us tabulate all of our results as you can see with our student here we are we have a thumbs up we are doing some great things with academic excellence of course student achievement is not just reading and math um so i'd like to take a moment to highlight a few other areas first off our students are incredibly creative and we're really uh fortunate and um and we're so happy to have their creative spirits on our campus we had of the students who took the ap art exam which is a portfolio we had 100 of their portfolios accepted and that they passed and will now get college credit for their work uh in art we've also had growth with the state seal of bi-literacy our project with the
047way engineering pathway completion we have some growth with that and i want to thank director elliot and dr mccormick for their help with our cte pathways um they've really um you know gotten in the weeds with us to help us to um make some positive changes for the growth of our cte and project lead the way and we have 52 students that are active in our college college and career prep avid program and you will hear a lot more about avid as we go through this presentation okay so one of the things that helps with the academic excellence is the professional development and so i'd like to speak a little bit about the coherence professional development that we did this year our whole staff focus was around rigor and really asking those depth of knowledge
048questions to spur on students thinking but rigor is nothing if it's not paired with support so we also focus on support particularly for english learners um as we have at different points had between 44 and 49 english learners so we did some pd work around deconstructing i'm sorry was there a question okay um and avid critical reading strategies okay and these uh avid strategies and our pd focuses are part of our coherent instructional framework as you can see we have three focuses at our school which are also our lcap focuses academics college and career and climate and culture and they all of these help work together to drive us towards student success and to ensure student success and on the second page of our instructional framework we go into more detail according to these three
049areas also i would like to especially from our math team and wendy york davood for all of her help with coherence this year we had a huge undertaking with the alignment of our standards wendy guided us through multiple sessions where we looked at the math standards from a variety of perspectives you can see with the picture in the upper right hand corner that we have all sorts of textbooks and frameworks and um you know s back blueprints out and we went through and aligned the standards for our classes from integrated map one all the way through pre-calculus so that we can ensure that we have a coherent and complete pathway for students our math teachers also did quite a bit of professional learning with co-plan and co-teach cycles and lesson study all right now i'm
050going to hand it back over to mr luvano to talk about diversity and equity so as we keep talking about avid avid's are our new program that we've been able to establish this year and moving forward what we've done is we've created a recruitment plan that would allow us to kind of give everybody at our so at our school an opportunity to join avid uh we're moving forward with avid as fast as we can which we'll talk more about again as crystal said but our avid is is our program that we're very happy that our the two teachers that we're going to have they're going to be a part of that are amazing teachers they have great uh student engagement they have great relationships with students so they're two of the best that we can
051go about of having the classes with and then also having to be able to do two inquiry cycles for our el supports so uh parenting community um well what i can tell you is that futures has we have a great foundation for how we get the word out we are able to use our russian radio where we have our parent liaison that goes and and speaks once a month um on the radio and she invites myself and other staff members to kind of talk about futures talk about what we're doing getting out to the slavic community um our social media is continuously updating ms janna she controls our facebook and twitter feeds updating as as often as she can every time we do something awesome uh miss pro who's our leadership teacher who controls our
052instagram for our instagram account for leadership letting the students know what's going on site and also obviously our parents that are being able to follow that as well one of the big things i am excited about though is one of the first site council meetings i was attending was that we had a member of the pfo and pfo's original plan at the very beginning was to be able to incorporate hla and futures to work together and create a big pfos for the site for rancho del paso which we can start calling rancho del paso now because they are 100 on board in providing support for our futures and hla and then combining our parents together because we have some overlapped parents but we don't also but we also have some at futures who don't overlap
053but we want to bridge that gap together so that we do have a lot more parent engagement and involvement with our site um and then lastly our parent newsletter uh john has been able to create a parent newsletter that she sends out that we've been able to showcase a teacher once a month letting everybody know that hey we got some amazing teachers and here's why here's a little about them here's what they're into here's their message to their students here's what they teach um because we don't get this opportunity to do as much aside from back to school night um and opening house so we're able to do that in a small version hopefully we'll do more now obviously that everything is lifted and be able to create more uh community events for ranch with
054el paso and um and our parents all right i'm going to talk a little bit about our social emotional learning and i loved what uh mr munch mentioned about integrating sel into our practices and starting with the picture in the upper left-hand corner mr luvano mentioned that we have two avid classes specifically but one of the things i'm really proud about at our school is that we're taking the lessons and and the skills from those classes and we're using them school-wide so every friday we have avid lessons in every single classroom and in the fall we focused on organization organization of time and resources and this really helps our students with their self-awareness and self-management which can also help them make responsible decisions i'd like to affirm christian and his team for his continued help
055with our mindfulness program and he was out at our him or his uh or his team they were out at our school site twice a week to help with a variety of different mindfulness activities and then lastly we had our very own dr palmer do some training with us around embodied cognition which really focuses on the importance of movement in the classroom and also helping students self-advocate for what they need so as you can see in the upper right-hand corner ms mccoy is demonstrating weight lifting and one of the things we talked with students about is how do you learn best do you need to be standing right now do you need to take a break and lift some weights or how can you be aware of your own needs and to advocate for yourself
056for the best learning environment all right um and uh as doctor as mr coonan and mr munch mentioned our biggest impact is when we have sel equity and academic excellence coming all together and i i hope you're not tired of hearing about avid because this is something we're very excited about and we see the impact with this that we have um academic skills that we're helping the students with we have sel through collaboration and organization and it is all wrapped up in equity and helping our students to reach their fullest potential all right i'm going to hand it back to mr luvano to talk about some of the things we're excited about for the future okay uh so what's next well i like i like to tell crystal and the rest of our staff futures
057is uh can be could be stars a blank canvas we have a lot of things that we can do sky's the limit any opportunity that we're able to give to our students and to our staff and to our community we're going to try to incorporate but just a few things to talk about as our rdp rancho del paso collaboration i think moving forward i think we're going to do tremendous work as a site i think that's been the dream for everybody here so we're going to continue to keep working towards that our newcomer building a newcomer orientation and support plan we know that we are would know what's going on in the world we know that we are um bringing in a lot of students that are coming from slavic countries russia ukraine um and
058you know anywhere in between but we want to be able to bring them in with open arms create a program for them that will help them kind of get their foot in the door get their feet wet with school and here in the us and be able to support in any way that we can uh they're rebuilding a project lead the way our project lead the way uh program has been tremendously amazing with the guidance of kiara brannigan but kiara has now moved into our curriculum coach role which we are also very excited about but moving forward and thank you to maury here for helping support our teaching us about our cte pathways and how we can transition project lead the way in that direction but also to incorporate and make it something more wild
059for our kids and more more engaging for them as well um and then what i'm also very proud about is what the students have been talking about is more diverse options in our master schedule uh different electives uh the avid expansion be able to provide ap classes i mean kids our students they want harder classes they want challenges so we want to give it to them i mean who wouldn't want to do that and then our new electives our new electives acquire our guitars getting a lot of excitement a lot of talk and pex in addition i am a pe teacher at heart i love sports i'm sure a lot of you also love sports but bringing wrestling bringing golf and then bringing cross country back we've had it but we're going to bring it
060back in the fall and we're very excited about all that but so at this time again i just want to thank dr peterson dr mccormick jason uh omyra also shout out to dr eric crawford with the support that he was doing at futures during transition times and then you know we're here we're going to work hard for you guys thank you for everything thank you for the opportunities and we're very excited about what's next at this time there's any questions we're here we'll start off board members who have comments or questions or any comments at this point board members do i see any hands okay well um okay let's walk yes um that was a great report and i enjoyed it and i'm glad to see that you're doing some extra sports activities let me
061know what i can do to help you with the golf i put your name down for that we already got you yes when he said god i wrote mr block he's got to respond to that thank you everyone um you just thank you guys so and it's so great to see you and so great to hear the good things that are going on and just it does my heart good and i know it does all of the other board members too and the thing that i am most impressed with is the collaboration between hla and futures working together a seamless from k-12 k-12 a seamless transition and i know that our students will benefit greatly from the collaboration our parents students and everyone so just thank you all for the hard work that you're doing
062and that was what i really wanted to highlight working together building on from one great level to the next and seeing how much we can accomplish working together so thank each of you for your hard work and your dedication and can i say that again as we said for hla it's so exciting to see us growing our own leaders from within yes and um you know i remember very well miss buddha when she was a teacher for us i got to sit with her when she was honored at scoe as teacher of the year one of the few charter school teachers who was named as teacher of the year and so now seeing her move from that to curriculum coach to vice principal it's very exciting to watch the journey the same with mr levano
063and of course with mr coonan and mr munch as well and i know that they are going to greatly be served by being mentored by dr marston who is an incredible leader there but it's just um it is the great joy of leadership to watch other leaders grow and become [Music] and reach their potential within our organizations i just want to affirm that and every chance i have when i talk to other groups of lost group or other entities coming in i talk about how gcc grows his own and that program started with our superintendent and how we really appreciate the structure within the organization that goes on so my applause to all of you for your first for your wanting to do this and your commitment to doing it and looking at what you
064can do for students and parents so thank you again so anything else board members seeing no hands or hearing none okay um again we want to thank you for being here with us this evening uh it's not evening it is midday isn't it not evening time i'm thinking we're still at our regular time but uh are we going to give them permission uh madam superintendent they can drop off um certainly if they if they are um have something else to do which a week full of promotions and graduations i would say all of them have something else to do so we appreciate their great service and yeah let's let them go do what must be done so thank you guys thank you again for being with us your great work your great presentations for everything
065back to you dr marston thank you guys great job great job today guys and so with that we have another study session um gcc board of directors self-evaluation board members you should have gotten your packet so while you some time ago uh two or three weeks ago i would think so you had a chance to look at your packet to go through it and see if there were any concerns so before i uh mention a couple um first i want to thank you each of the board members all will numbers filled out the survey and got it back in so i'll ask you now if there are comments that you would like to make about the board evaluation before we kind of look at a couple of areas anyone anyone is mark still with us
066anyway i am with you lily and unfortunately my video is all messed up here so i don't know what's going on with my zoom i can't get it to reverse so i apologize i followed all the presentations i'm listening but i can't take the video to work okay any comments um mr turner mr block um standard on the board evaluation jack no i have no comments mr block nothing well the evaluation proved about the same as it was last time um a couple of comments stated that we're very pleased with what we as a board of doing um we had some fives and there were a couple of areas that were a little lower than than the others and one particularly is the board communications the goals and expectations for the board and organization with
067the community question number 15 and um that got a 4.6 60. most of the areas between 4 4.80 and 4.60 in 5.0 and [Music] i'm still waiting to see if there were any comments at all anything that we need to improve upon as you looked through the survey no comments nothing all right um this was the area that was lowest 4.20 the board structure provides adequate and appropriate contact sorry with administration and staff and we had one person that made it a three two people that made it four and two people that rated a five any comments from anyone on that area the board structure provides adequate and appropriate contact with administration and staff anything on that one no would you might be quiet okay well here is one um staff supports before doing it
068after board meeting is effective we had a one on that and a three a one on a four and a three and a five and that was a four point 4.40 any comments on that one well i guess we're all satisfied so i can't get any comments so i guess we will assume that we are okay with what we're doing yes mr bloch none of us is perfect so that's why you say none of us are perfect none of the board members yes none of us is perfect so that's why we don't we don't have anything else to say you know we can all have some flaws sometimes okay we are all mixed little things so that's what i see all right well if you do have comments or if you have questions and you
069want to talk privately to uh cabinet or to me please let me know and we will continue with it but as a whole uh the board feels really good about what we're doing rating between a four point eighty and a five so and there were a couple of comments i would like to share those with you and the first one is i think the board serves the community well another one is an excellent board that supports an outstanding charter organization and the last one is it is a pleasure to be a member of this board the members come to meetings prepared and ready to take care of business it is a strong organization so those were the uh recommendation comments that were given um so i think we're doing okay yes jack yes i think
070i i want a second what harry said i think if we pat ourselves too much on the back we we may be in trouble i i agree with the comments it's it's an excellent board and we have just uh these reports the ones last week on the end of the year updates demonstrate really how strong uh gateway community charters has become and uh so lily i know you you think you probably need more discussion on this but i think i think really it's we're doing a fine job and your leadership i let me say that i don't know there wasn't close on there but i think you have played a significant role in leading the board and certainly uh the role as the board president for the gateway community charters thank you jack i appreciate
071that and i can say it is my pleasure i've said it before and i continue to say it to work with each of you uh you come prepared and ready to do the job that we're supposed to do and you have heard it tonight uh the staff saying thank you if we're not for the board we would not they would not be able to do the job that they're doing so again um it is a volunteer job and you give your service and your time so i really appreciate it thank you very much and lily i concur with what both jack and harry said and thank you very much for doing an outstanding job as a leader of the board thank you mark thank you all right so if there's nothing else on that we
072will get ready to move into our consent agenda items and we have several and for the sake of those who don't have a i will read them consent agenda adoption of the gcc board retreat meeting minutes 510 2022 personnel consent agenda purchases over thirty thousand overnight field trip futures high school and that's leadership uh summer leadership camp cada and also the revised job description for speech and language pathologists and number six acceptance of community school program csp grants those are the um six consent agenda items and i will first entertain a motion mr turner i move approval all right may i have a second i'll second it mr block i believe second or was in mark that was me it's mark okay second all right any discussion any discussion on any of the items hearing
073none seeing none uh roll call mr anderson mark yes aaron block yes jack turner yes lily campbell yes absent bruce mandrake so the consent agenda items pass unanimously and now we are down to facilities charter school facilities program application um superintendent staff recommend the board approve the submission of the charter school facilities program application for applications would someone like to speak to that before a motion is made mr sample can address this okay mr sample okay good uh afternoon uh madam president there was the board this is an application for the charter school facilities grant program uh we are no stranger to this uh program and that we also apply for these funds some years back for futures high school and higher learning and so we now have the opportunity to apply for the funds
074for the district's facility in which community outreach academy middle school is on so we'll be submitting uh four applications one for uh two for new construction and two for rehabilitation or modernization and this is just one of the steps um of the application process and we'll continue to keep the board updated as we go along the process okay and this is a resolution uh i'll entertain a motion first and then we'll go into discussions yes mr turner remove approval move approval mr turner may i have a second circle all right it's removed uh approval in a second by mr block now is there other discussions yes jack jason the question it took literally years to get the funding from the state for rancho del paso what's the timeline likely to be on this particular purchase
075so uh mr turner at this time we don't have a definite timeline we know that the application process uh closes early june and we anticipate hearing more from uh opsc as we continue to move to the financial soundness uh part of it and we definitely will be updating the board along the way as we get uh closer to that it is definitely dr peterson's and my hope that this is not a 13-year journey uh and we don't anticipate that yes jack i i guess related to that is i think then the properties that we're looking at purchasing they probably want to move those the sale of those properties sooner than later i i certainly think as soon as you find out what the timeline likely is and and maybe we could even get a chance
076i have not visited one of the sites i think we're looking at purchasing i certainly know the the coa middle school site but i don't know the other side very well but anyway uh no i support it and i think it's just a matter of if the funding comes in from the state and then also looking at the facilities to make sure we do our due diligence on what has to be done in those facilities and make them appropriate for our students to attend or to continue to attend with coa and and i would just say to underscore what you've said by approving this today we are not saying that we are going into the agreement to purchase at this time we're saying that we are you are approving us to go forward to apply
077for the funding and before we make any final decisions jack we will be doing exactly what you suggested in terms of due diligence okay no other comments or questions i will call for the vote and this is a resolution so it is a voice vote mr mark anderson yes mr harry block yes uh bruce magic absence to jack turner yes and lily campbell yes so the resolution has been passed on facilities item number 10. all right and now we are down my fellow board members to board comments oh yes jack really appreciated the presentations uh by the futures and and uh higher learning academy and uh just really reminds me of how how strong our programs are and really how excellent the staff is and uh again i hope if some of them remained on
078this on the zoom presentation i just want to say thanks again and i know that it's really hard in a short presentation to talk about all the hard work you've done over the year in relation to uh certainly the challenges with uh coveted 19. thank you jack for those comments i really appreciate it right um lilly yes yeah i also wanted to express uh the synergism that is seen between those two schools working together it's just amazing a lot of good collaboration a lot of huge successes and so i also want to applaud the entire staff for for doing the great yeoman's work that they've done thank you mark and i want to okay harry then i'll make my phone oh okay uh i'm gonna say yes i agree i'm glad to see hla and
079future working together the way they the way this is going it's been great and i want to also want to say i was by the office there last week i did another video i went to the doctor got a big elbow and i fell and everything and i just happened to stop in and meet some of the new staff and that was great to see people that i you know we've been you know admiring everyone else that was there and so it was great and come some we have some stuff in common with some of them we know some of the same people great and i wanted uh especially to uh director maurice elliott who is still here but murray on the uh report i heard several times and murray helped us to understand ct
080you know so thank you for your support thank you for your work as director in helping the schools understand and do path works and pathways and whatever so i really want to give my affirmation to you and to thank you for your hard work and so glad you are director maurice elliott so thank you thank you president campbell i appreciate it along with everyone else it um has been an interesting year for most of us to say the least and we're missing a lot of the activities in person but we hope next year will be a better year that we will be able to visit with you and to share in person so we do want to thank cabinet we want to thank staff yes jackie uh harry had something else yeah i was gonna
081say the coffee shop is doing well over at the firehouse too i forgot i go by there about everything i see the kids out there working hard so and we haven't even seen it so we'll get a chance we'll get a chance mr meyer thank you for being with us today and all of you and the announcement of the next board meeting will be june the 7th at 4 45 and we do have another special one coming up i think i'm not sure but the next board meeting will be june 7 2022 at 4 45. is there anything else uh cabinet staff good for the good of the organization sierra none seeing none then i guess i will entertain emotions with jeremy mr turner i move we adjourn and lily it's nice to have you
082back it's good to be back and i hope it wasn't too disjointed today with me uh i'll share all of this one of these days anyway second it has been moved in second all in favor aye