001we are now in session for the Sequoia Union High School District Schoolboard meeting for May 8th 2024 I'm calling the meeting to order um and want to see if there are any public comments right now before we go into Clos session there are no public comments okay thank you we're jour to close session thank you um and while we're getting started I'm going to turn on my um my zoom so people can see me electronic um on Zoom virtually and then we'll get ready recording in progress sry all right we are here and ready all right thank you all we are calling the meeting to order for Sequoia Union High School Districts board meeting for Believe It or Not May 8th 2024 for those who are seniors you are down to the wire so we're
002excited to be at this point in our meeting so I'm going to report out from our close session item six okay item six here it is do the explanation of the public protocol and then roll call okay members of the public who wish to remotely provide comment during the meeting use the raise your hand feature speakers must raise their hand during item 8 81 sorry the public comment portion of the meeting in order for the comment on topics not included on the approved agenda to speak about an item on the agenda in person please fill out a speaker card and indicate um agenda item and hand it over to Laura um at the day and when the requested agenda item comes forward the board um before the board the speaker will be called forward so
003now we're going to do the roll call student trustee yv here student trustee Aral absent justy gin here justy du here justy C here vice president Nory here president Stevenson here aquarum is present all right um so now we're gonna do Laura I'm sorry I have to do the close oh never mind I'm following that I'm I'm I'm back on land um so we're going to do the approval of the agenda are there any public comments I have no comment cards in person I'm just checking Zoom we do not have any public okay any comments on the agenda any of our board members okay so what I'd like to do is um to make a motion to approve the agenda I move to approve the agenda I'll second all in favor hi hi okay so
004now I'm going to do a report out of our closed session and I'm going to read something the California Cotto a requires the final action of the board on exposion must occur in Open session is there a motion for agenda item 2.1 consideration of a student discipline exposion case number 2023 20241 so moved a second all in favor I I that's approval of the expulsion okay five in favor zero nice thank you okay thank you so now we will move on to special recognition superintendent yes thank you um so tonight we do have two uh recognitions or two groups of recognitions um the first group we definitely planned our attire our color matching today they are wearing orange I am also wearing orange Karen just for you um so first up is Woodside High School's
005robotics team uh 100 wild hats I'd like to welcome principal Karen Van putton to the podium to tell us a little bit more about their team and mentors I must say last year um we were at an event and the Woodside robotics team got me my robotics driver's license which I still carry in my wallet in case of need if you need a backup driver we're going to test that certification tonight good evening president Stevenson and members of the board uh here we are at um on May 8th and a lot is going on at Woodside High School but one of our most brilliant and most colorful um group of student leaders are our team 100 wild hats they are the Woodside High School robotics team they are about 31 students plus or minus strong
006um from grades nine through 12 we will be graduating a few of our seniors who are our our seniors Catherine oh Katherine front row um okay so these young people have been so active postco and they've really revived um the energy and the Dynamics at our school and sometimes they may be self-deprecating and they may say oh no we're you know we're the robot robot Geeks but they're not they really are what I consider a very sexy group of students on our team on our campus and when I say that um when they perform before a full audience whether it's out on Bradley Field or in an assembly in a packed um gym our entire school student body and staff are you know Jaws open waiting to see will the robot make it to the
007last and the highest rung we are in support of them we cheer them on and it's just really a pleasure to recognize them tonight because I don't think they realize what they have done to bring the energy to our school so they are not only mechanical engineers they are not only coders and computer scientists um they are Builders they are Tinkers some of them do love math and science but some of them actually have no interest in math and science and really love to take photographs they like to post social media posts um and some of them are amazing PR people and that's what the robotics program does it's really a diverse group of students um so we're going to have them all come forward and uh be recognized I want to as you guys
008come on up I just want to give a little bit more praise so come on forward including all of our coaches and mentors chip our staff adviser Phil Hopkins Scott is not here we got Joel we've got oh no Joel's not here Dave Rell all right so as they stand I want to just add a couple things um last year we were really proud of them and they were super geeked out about the fact that they earned eligibility to compete at the world championships in Houston Texas that was one year and a half out of covid so that was phenomenal um that was the same weekend that uh Taylor Swift was in town in Houston but the verdict is out as to which actually drew the more the bigger audience robotics or Taylor Swift um
009so they they came back off that high and then we were went right into Cal games and um Woodside High School has had the tradition of Hosting for the bay area but we finally came back and hosted in October and we hosted 42 teams from the greater Bay Bay Area out through the Central Valley it was a wild battle super competitive super exciting and if you've never been to one of these you must come because it's looking like we will be hosting again in the fall while they did not um get the invitation to be eligible to go to Worlds this past um couple weeks ago um our coaches and our staff adviser Mr Hopkins did share that they have grown you've grown so tremendously as a team in all of your skills in your
010science in your coding in your designing and all of your technical skills so you not only jelled um as a team and you may not have made it to Worlds but in our eyes you guys grew tremendously so big Applause congratulations I think one of our I think the kids may have brought one or two trophies they also received um an autonomous award at the montere Bay Regional um for what we call the autonomous competition that's when the students code it and basically the robot goes on their own without any student maneuvering in addition because I'm a little competitive I did ask our adviser how did we do against our other District teams well we earned eighth place and third place at our regionals which was the highest ranking above our teammates and our competitive
011friends at Ma and Carlmont but while I say that we also love this thing called um an alliance and once in a while during these Regional competitions they get to become an alliance and sometimes they'll choose each other to be um uh a team so once in a while you'll see these engineers in Orange join with the ma and the maroon or with the blue and white of the Scots so it's a really wonderful beautiful crazy time at these robotic competitions and I think no matter what they do in their major and Beyond High School this experience is just going to make you such a well-rounded and risk-taking um human being so congrats that e e okay okay we will cue the [Music] video you know I'm back like I never left I never left
012another Sprint another step another another day another breath another breath been chasing dreams but I never slept I never slept I got a new attitude and least on life it's a piece of Mind seek and a find I can sleep when I die want a piece of the pock the keys of the ride and I'm straight I'm on my way I'm on my way get out my way I'm running late what can I say I heard you die twice once when they bury you in the grave and the second time is the last time that somebody mentions your name so when I leave here on this Earth did I I take more than I G did I look out for the people or did I do it all for fame Legend is exing US searching
013for you for you juding through the mud find the present no ignoring I got 20,000 deep off in the street like we some Warriors my mama told me never bow your head I feel glorious glorious got a chance to start again I was Bor for this Bor for this who I am I couldn't forget I made it through the darkness for the night and now I'll see the sunrise now I feel glorious glorious I feel glorious glorious I'm feeling glorious the crib looking Victorious oh yes it is you know that we've been going it going it since we hopped out that DeLorean DeLorean yeah we went on God things are just things they don't make you who you are can't pack up for you hul and take it with you when you're gone we post
014it on the porch my family's glasses to the Stars my grandma smiling down on me like that boy got bars okay okay yes I do I said amen and Hallelujah let me testify to another morning I'm morning won let self get in my way I got my breath I got my faith and I remember why I came glorious glorious got a chance to startop again I was b b this who I am that was awesome thank you okay on to our second recognition uh for tonight um I would like to invite Dr Shone uh to the podium to recognize a very very talented marvelous crew who won a very special award trusty D I was going to mention trusty du first I wanted to mention that I am not competing but yes that is a
015difficult presentation to compete with um seeing um all the students here so congratulations to all of you that's super exciting um but also secondary to that are the things that we do in service of students so I wanted to mention a very special team here tonight um and I am super excited and I know that trusty DUIs is may be excited about this too so good evening board president Stevenson vice president Nori board trustees uh superintendent leech cabinet members of the community and audience this evening Today We Gather not just to celebrate an achievement but to honor the dedication passion and tireless efforts of a remarkable group of individuals it is with immense pride and gratitude that I stand before you to recognize the outstanding team behind our District's Triumph in winning the California model
016sarb award this prestigious Accolade is not just a reflection of our District's Excellence but a testament to the unwavering commitment of each person who contributed to this remarkable success from teachers counselors support staff parents to administrators Community Partners Community Liaisons and every member of our district family who played a vital vital role in this achievement first and foremost I want to express my heartfelt appreciation to our classified and certificated Educators your Relentless dedication to nurturing the minds and hearts of our students is the Cornerstone of our success you go above and beyond every single day inspiring guiding and empowering our students to reach their full potential your passion for Education lights the path to a brighter future for every student in our district to our administrators and board members thank you for your Visionary leadership
017and unwavering support your guidance and strategic Direction have paved the way for Innovative approaches to Student Success Through Your steadfast commitments to Excellence you've created an environment where every student feels valued supported and empowered to thrive I also want to extend my deepest gratitude to our counselors and site and District support staff your dedication to the holistic well-being of our students ensures that they receive the personalized attention and support they need to overcome challenges and achieve their goals your compassion empathy and tireless efforts make a profound difference in the lives of our students each day let us not forget the invaluable contribution of our parents and Community Partners as always your collaboration advocacy and involvement are essential to our districts to ensure Student Success together we work hand inand to create a nurturing and inclusive
018environment where every student can succeed out of all of these crucial stakeholders that I've mentioned this evening I want to lift up and extend my most special thank you to my student services attendance team including our administrators mental health experts and our community liaison your role as Bridges between our schools and The Wider Community is invaluable your efforts in fostering positive relationships promoting understanding and facilitating communication have strengthened the bonds between our district and the communities we serve as we celebrate this momentous achievement let us reaffirm our commitment to continue Improvement and Excellence let us remain steadfast in our dedication to empowering every student to reach their full potential and become the leaders of tomorrow in closing I want to express my deepest gratitude to the following individuals your hard work passion and dedication are
019the driving force behind our district success together we've proven that when we come together as a United Team there's no limit to what we can achieve thank you for your unwavering commitment to Excellence and congratulations once again on this well-deserved honor here's to many more achievements and success in the future thank you to Jared dly our student services director Alvaro Calderone I guess we'll hold the Applause till the end there's a few people Alvaro Calderon our student welfare and attendance coordinator Shaina Kashima our mtss coordinator Marisol aneles our district office and Tide Community liaison Isabel angano our Carlmont Community leaon hero Moreno our seoa community liaison Pedro Andrade our community liaison at Redwood Jessica Metta ernandez our community leison at Woodside she is actually she's not yes she's having a baby thank you Alexis mag
020our community leis on at Ma and two individuals who are also in addition to yessica not with us this evening um our Mental Health Services case worker Mariel Orosco and our manager and Social Services uh manager of Social Services over at ephs Marco cedon and if the board would like to join for for for spe we're just letting folks clear out all right thank you all so much any other special recognitions okay we're just going to wait till the noise goes down just a little bit um I'm going to turn it over to Board of Trustees correspondents there isn't any and now um we're going to go into oh I forgot something let me do public comments I apologize um so here's the procedure for board comment um as we go into our um agenda
021the board does not act upon any matters for um non- agendized items uh upon any matter that has not been agendized except under limited circumstances permitted by law it is the policy of the board to refer matters raised in a form to staff or investigation and or action where appropriate board policy ordinarily limits the time to devote it to any single item agenda topic to 10 minutes and AG individual speakers are Court ordinarily limited to three minutes if the board decides to expand the amount of time to be allocated to particular agenda item because many speakers wish to address that item the board May reduce the time allocated to individual speakers to 2 minutes or to one minute as appropriate in order to permit more speakers to comment the board will announce that amount of
022time to be allocated to each speaker before public comment on each of the particular agenda items um begins we ask that all speakers to keep to the time limit so do we have any um speaker cards un agendized items we do not have any in person no okay and no on Zoom we might want to give a minute I if there's anyone on Zoom who would like to do a public comment on on non- agendized items please raise your hand now there's one there's one so we're gonna give them three minutes okay all right we have one public comment on Zoom where did she go okay three minutes Diana Bloom Anna un item Diana hello can you hear me yes we can hear you now okay sorry about that I'm just calling in today as
023a concerned mom of two children in our district um I feel that our leadership in this district is completely in and I'm just stating on record my efforts going back to 2021 trying to educate this District on the harms of uh replacing education with indoctrination Force feeding a curriculum that basically puts kids in groups based on immutable characteristics and then tries to Peg groups against each other instead of actually teaching history the The Good the Bad the Ugly all of the history but teach the history teach math teach English teach teach please teach this is the next Generation there is no accountability in this District I cannot cannot send my child here I am counting the days until graduation and yes I'm privileged I can send my kid to private school and that's not why
024I've been speaking up I've been speaking up because I was that poor immigrant I relate to the kids that you claim you're talking about or for you're not you're disempowering them they need an education don't steal that from them thank you thank you for your comment any more comments there then okay thank you so much we are going to move to um Board of trustee correspondence there hasn't been any and then Board of trustee superintendent comments and committee reports so we'll start with any board member that has any comments right now yes trusty D I have a couple things um yesterday um trusty gin and I um because we're co-chairs of rivy together we helped um rapael with his agenda and I just want to say how impressed I was with trusty gin and his
025MBA mind and how good he is with finance and budget and how much he helped that nonprofit that we care a lot about you are so darn impressive so I wanted to say that publicly uh the second thing um I went to um visit Redwood for their Awards night at open house and I had a very unique experience um sometimes there as a board member I feel there are opportunities where you just have such authentic access with kids and with staff and as I was in my car I saw that Shelley Bustamante who is the mental health counselor at Cara was also there and she as she entered the school I said why are you here and she said because my kids are here and so I was right next to her as former carmont
026kids went up to shy gave her a hug and shared with her how they are doing and it was just amazing I also got to see the wood shop um um projects that are going up on right now when I first came to this district there wasn't a wood shop uh program at Redwood they're building um a greenhouse with an enormous Dome that is very difficult to build um so I'm just so proud of that school um today I had the opportunity to um interview the Emily Garfield Award winner who will be recognized this Friday at the Sano County uh school boards um Association Kent award I have been running that program for 14 years and as I was talking to the winner her name is um uh Melissa Ambrose um she was a teacher
027but and she was helping kids and then she decided that she wanted to help kids um in even more so she went back and got masters in social work and as she was telling me her story I thought about truste Stevenson because I need to hand off the award to someone else so I didn't ask your permission but I sent a I'm gonna do it publicly so she can't say no I really care about this award because it it recognizes an outstanding educator um in Sano County who is focused on um mental health wellness and um I really want this award to keep going and so I wrote to all the leaders of sale County School boards Association I said I only want uh Shaun e to take this over so I will train you
028if you say yes I know I didn't tell you you have to take it over um but anyway look forward to seeing all of you Friday night for the Kent Awards um and I think oh and I just also want to say I am so excited about uh the sarb award thank you guys uh the attention to attendance is is so critical and I can't believe all the robust uh programs we have in place now and the amazing people we have in place to do home visits to make phone calls to go and pick up our kids and bring them to school and I hear about these stories it's amazing so I'm very grateful to our district thanks okay anyone else thank you yes Amy um speaking of Mental Health and Wellness May is a
029mental health month but it's also the aapi heritage month it's interesting that both are in the same month um so while we celebrate the achievements and contributions of aapis in our country uh we should also keep in mind that mental health issues do impact aapis but sometimes they're under reported or not seen as clearly um so a the API school board members Association is putting together a workshop that will dive into some of that data and hopefully the proposal will be accepted by the csba conference uh if not we'll we'll probably just do something on our own anyways because we think it's important um so last month I had a chance to go to the school Force celebrate the music festival uh I had a chance to co-c with Noelia Coro and Ray Mueller who
030are both County Supervisors uh they were very very impressed by the Carlmont music groups they just said wow that's completely amazing and I shared with them that the money raised by by that Festival actually goes to brssd the feeder District it's not the high school district but the high school um music groups perform there because without a strong music education starting in fourth grade you wouldn't have those Stellar performances in high school um and and that really applies to all subjects and all extracurriculars As kind of the foundation that's set by the feeder districts that carries on into the high school um so they were they were very impressed and I was also very impressed I was like dang these These are these are award-winning groups it's amazing um and then the following day I
031went to the uh brssd state of the district event um and also our uh Pio and our principal at Carlmont uh principal buckin were also there um and I I really enjoyed it they did a good job they had artwork from uh middle school students on the walls um they invited representatives from all the um like the community organizations City councils and there's two different cities right so there's a lot of people there uh parks and wreck Library folks so um the thing I remember most was a facilities update so that's note to self were working on facilities people really love that especially all the taxpayers um and then they had this student panel so it's students from Sandpiper Middle School who are just sharing their experience in a small middle school and that was
032very enlightening um to just hear what makes uh Sandpiper unique from some of the other Middle School options um from the children's perspective and I thought the the best thing coming out of that was they said you know the final question was asking if you could give advice to fifth graders what would you say to them and it's just figure out what's important to you when you're trying to decide which middle school to go to and don't let other people influence you too much whether that's peers or teachers I mean ultimately you have to be happy with your own decision I was like Wow and these are like sixth seventh and eighth graders making that kind of recommendation to kind of the their future selves so I thought that was very very important and and
033really heartwarming uh and that's it thank you trusty anyone else if I and I have something okay um let me bring it back up so um been out of town for like a week and a half since our last meeting so not a lot to share but um I wanted to share with our community had gotten an email hope I'm not for sure if you all have received it from youth Community Services um it's one of our partners they're actually in paloalto but they work across Santa CLA and San Mato County and they help students with community service and actually partners with Ma and they partner deeply with East paloalto Academy and six of their students have received the president Bon award for 250 hours plus Community Services um um and with honored at the
034city of East paloalto last night I was not able to go um but they sent us some information it even one of the council members got a little Tey because they were like oh my God they're leaders um and one person who's a city council person is a teacher so one of her um former Elementary St students is actually won a couple and they actually acknowledge um epaa and all the support that they've received there um to really do commun service and um and have committed to that so I just wanted to acknowledge that um I did ask more to reach out to you um because I do think it's well deserved to to hear about this um and ycs will be at Redwood tomorrow for their aapi um celebration there um I also want
035to take the moment to acknowledge administrative support day um lur we we didn't forget we just was delayed um for you as morala and so many other the administr of support celebr it every we celebrate it every day but we needed to say it verbally um so just wanted to acknowledge um all your hard work and supporting five different bosses um and different six six six I think it's easier to get used to us than five of us but like because we're all so different and and expect many different things and not because you know we're just different people so just wanted to say thank you for that um and I have a fond place for administrative support particularly in high school just because of my own high school experience of my administrative support who
036supported me going to college so it it was actually my administrative support so just wanted to say thank you um but also it's Educators week do I have the chocolates out uh yeah we have chocolates over there for anybody's a educator work in schools um you actually get a discount at C candy if you say you're an educator anyhow so yes I learned that I didn't have to show an ID and so we have some candy over there just to express how wonderful each and every person wherever you stand you're a leader um you're an influencer um you know not everybody gets called to this work and not everybody can do it it is not for the faint I tell you that much so thank you all for sticking in there um doing the hard
037work the heart work so I wanted to make sure I said that and then then um thinking about mental health month um May 18th there's several walk aons happening Barry Community Health advisory council is doing Soul stroll star Vista is doing their mental health walk and safe Space is having a conference for youth called breaking the barriers building bonds the power of peer-to-peer um and so um those uh three organizations are having something going on this week if you want to learn more about what students in our area are doing um and I want to do a special shout out to Bonnie and sending me pictures of um the community event at Ravenswood School District it looked like a lot of fun I stayed in the bed that day so so thank you so much
038for bringing your daughter who probably was a good critique um L glad she loved the bus ride and all kinds of stuff so that's that's good information um and hopefully next year we can have a table there because I I believe um they're on the move up um they're not stuck in the past I tell you that much so I think there is some collaboration um and just to let other folks know I still am going around to the middle schools um just to kind of see what certain middle schools look like and I believe that there's some deep partnership there people people like our district and they are wanting to work closer with us um and they're doing things also to to strengthen their education models and approaches and so I'm excited about that
039I think that our communication and relationship with our feeder schools which I actually call our partner schools is really important so thank you all anything else um superintendent a couple things um so honor of Education staff appreciation week I do want to express my gratitude to all of our teachers administrators and support staff for their invaluable contributions to our schools and to our communities um we have amazing Educators here uh the dedication of both um our staff inside and outside the classroom um is is constant it it often feels um that it goes on 247 as you uh earlier witnessed um our attendance liaison who have just been so impactful um the stories that they have in the bonds that they've created with um our students that need a little extra uh motivation sometimes to
040get to school so I just want to thank you all um for the vital role that you play uh for the future of our students so thank you so much superintendent now we're going to move on to student truste comments um don't have that many today um really it's just school school is ending and um you know um a a as a senior uh you know we're making it through the end and uh in the vein of um staff and administration appreciation it's also AP season and especially at Carlmont I see how our Administration is very active in making sure that during these times where you know some students may not be getting that much sleep everyone is you know has a lot of mental health support um and you know has just a lot
041of General support from teachers staff and administration and also uh since it's AP season it's also very clear almost every day how how much like how how how an insane amount of work goes into organizing all of this and um APS are just like one of the few things that as a student we kind of see the organization happening it just makes me think of how much other stuff is happening behind the scenes aside from ap's just normal day-to-day operations of the school site um that just needs so much managing and um so much work and um so I can say that Zahara and I uh along with the rest of the student body are extremely thankful for uh teacher staff and administrators thank you so much I love how you said we're coming to
042the end that was like a drop the M mic moment so thank you for that um and good luck with this last stretch of school I know it's it could be kind of hard um especially when you're ready to get it over and done with um so I also want to create space for seoa district teacher Association for any comments that you may have right Jacob it's coming to an end for you but for the rest of us we keep coming back I'd like to Stand Here in My 45th year of school um I started first grade rather young um yesterday was national teacher appreciation day and today is California day of the teacher as is uh typical of national and state legislations they could not get it together to have one to be in
043agreement about teachers but I did want to specify California day of the teacher was created it is celebrated the second Wednesday of May and it arose out of legislation co-sponsored by CTA and the association of Mexican American Educators and and California has patterned its celebration after Maestro festivities observed in Mexico and other Latin American countries so we thank them for that today is also school nurse appreciation day and in 10 days it will be speech and language pathologist appreciation day uh last month we had school librarian Appreciation Day on April 4th in February school council week um in November school psychologist week April 3D was per professional Appreciation Day May 1st the International Day of the worker and substitute appreciation day I think those go very well together I don't understand why it's also School
044principal appreciation day but I'm sure there's logic there somewhere assistant principles interestingly get a whole week School principles just one day and I looked up superintendent appreciation day and I couldn't find anything but the board gets a whole freaking month in January I don't understand that so but um also we want to point out School employee uh appreciation we coming up uh in two weeks the 19th through 25th of May and I don't believe we have a board meeting during that time so I want to make sure I said that what is interesting also is that in addition to being um aapi heritage month and Mental Health Awareness Month May is also Jewish American heritage month and labor history month so a lot is packed into may we think we could have probably shared it
045a little with April April is also Arab American History Month which I don't think we recognized so I wanted to make sure that we did that as well thank you thank you so much that was a lot of days um thank you for that um now as the American Federation of state county and Municipal Employees I don't believe anyone's in the room nor online okay so now we will move to the approval of the consent agenda um the board action to approve the following items take simultaneously with one motion with which is not debatable requires unanimous roll call for passage the action indicated on each items deemed to have been considered considered in full action taken as worded therein only members of the board and the superintendent May remove an item from consent agenda members
046of the public May provide public comment at the start start a consent agenda item which may convince a board member or superintendent to remove an item for further discussion any public comments I have none in person I will check zoom and there are no hands up okay are there any board member wish to remove anything from the agenda okay so let's have a motion I move to approve the consent agenda and I'll second all in favor roll call oh roll call juste yuv yes CH G yes CH de yes juste C yes vice president Nori yes president Stevenson yes motion passed 5 Z you now we're gonna jump down to make sure I'm in the right place 14 which is information items 14.1 which is the hatching results presentation before you get started is there
047any public comment I have none in person are there any public comments in Zoom please raise your hand now I see none okay thank you thank you Dr shakon you gonna start us off yes good evening once again I am excited to be up here tonight I know over the last months of board meetings we have been prevent presenting to you slices of our multiple tiers of support we've done a presentation on attendance we've done a presentation on our mental health model coming up at the beginning of June we'll do a presentation on our disproportionality AKA or cace and tonight we are doing a presentation on the parts of our multi- multiple tiers of support that our counselors are working on and so I am lucky to present two Powerhouse teams in one night this
048being the second of the evening these especially during staff appreciation week uh this group of counselors is just incredible um I don't want to take too much time introducing them they will speak themselves about all the amazing work they've done but we do have with us this evening Glenda ores Galan who is our District counselor on special assignment who overseas and facilitates and puts in tons of effort both in the student services side and the ed services side in making sure everything is running smoothly with our counselors and that we are building those tiers of support for our students we have Sylvia Tores Gara who is the head counselor at Menlo Atherton and has been the head counselor there for many years so comes with a wealth of experience we have hooky Casta who is
049a co-head counselor at seoa high school so welcome this evening to present with with us and last but certainly not least we have Eli Thorton who is our school counselor at Woodside High School so again a Powerhouse of a team who will be presenting alongside our hatching result Consultants with whom we have been working for a few years now and are just one of the team um and we hope and love and will continue to work with them um that is Whitney triplet and Jos goz um and then on their team joining us tonight is also Dr Lauren d and one thing to add is that they have all been here um since very early in the morning uh Mimi was here at I don't know what time setting up a beautiful Buffet of food
050because they have all been working together all day long on tier 2 supports and you may hear a little bit about that tonight but I imagine they are tired but this Powerhouse team is still on their feet and ready to present to you all tonight about the work they've done this year so with no further Ado I will pass it off to them good evening so I'm going to talk a little bit about the journey that we've had so far with the hatching results organization uh we started this partnership in 20221 um during the Spring virtual and in the the past two years our um professional development has been in person and um our school counselors and our educational Partners have def benefited tremendously from this professional development through consultative support for district leaders including
051myself and the shared leadership opportunity that um that I really appreciate that allows the head counselors that represent the school sites to participate you in the strategic planning for professional development so all of these days that you see here um on this slide are the the actual days that we receive that professional development that was planned with again head counselors our our amazing team at hatching adults and also with me and also Dr jaon has also been um instrumental in helping us plan these professional development days so it really has been a tremendous Journey um and we can't really ask for anything better the hatching organization I will say is truly a five star PD opportunity um and our school counselors have reported um very positive um things about hatching results uh through the professional
052learning school counselors have the tools strategies and ideas to improve their practice and with any profession we we have to we must stay on top of our ever evolving profession and the PD has given us the opportunity to improve in in many many different areas the professional learning always meets its objectives and its goals as you can see from these very high percentages uh one of our goals in advocating to partner with the hatching results organization is to ensure that regardless of um regardless of the school that sorry regardless of the student right whatever whatever School the student attends we um we want to ensure that they receive a similar School counseling experience so if you attend ma or seoa or red whatever that may be um we again want to ensure that they receive
053a very similar School counseling experience and we're definitely accomplishing this through our the work that we've been doing developing together to create this comprehensive School counseling program so we're very proud of this work and so I'll talk a little bit about what we've been developing together so again we've you know this been mostly three years of amazing professional development work and we started with uh our tier one right our tier one School counseling instruction that is innovative high quality evaluated and delivered with Fidelity to all students in all SSD schools so I'm very proud to to report that that we continue to um provide this curriculum to all students in quion high school district so we spent a significant amount of time creating our tier one curriculum and um this year in particular we have
054created plc's and so School counsels are meeting we've met three times a year and we're constantly um reviewing our our data um and also making revisions to our to our lesson plans and we will always continue to do that because we always definitely want to improve our curriculum and so once um we felt that we had um really built or created a solid tier one curriculum we um moved on to tier 2 um through our mtss and um and this is what we at school counselors had been uh requesting right with the need for us to have a menu of options of tier 2 interventions and so we again are at a place now where we are working on and creating those tier 2 interventions and um uh tier two interventions that are provided to
055students based off of predetermined data metrics so the interventions that we create on behalf of students is all based off of data and our tier 2 interventions are evaluated for impact and improve for future implementation so I also wanted to add that um uh as the district is as we're working on a a lcap and um there's a goal in particular goal number three that um is around College and Career Readiness and so we are absolutely going to um you know the groups have been identified who will receive intervention and so we will incorporate these interventions within our tier one curriculum and our tier two curriculum so that's that's definitely coming and we'll be working on that um this spring and this fall on ensuring that we meet the needs of students that are identified
056in that LC cap um my colleagues will from the school sites will delve a bit deeper into how they implemented the tier 2 interventions um so now I'll go ahead and um turn it over to our amazing Partners Whitney triplet and Josh ginz thank you Glenda thank you trustees we're really excited to be here with you all today we appreciate the opportunity to share some of this journey with you what I'm really excited about are these counselors who are going to present their results to you and just a minute because what they're presenting is the very first time they've ever tried this it's a pilot um and most of the schools had really positive results which we don't usually expect from a pilot program um and so we just decided let's just go for it
057let's present to you all what we've been working on because they've really been successful with this so we want to give you a little bit of context about this project in general and these are five of the big learnings driving our work that the counselors have been learning about this year um and I do definitely want to Echo what Dr Chone said earlier that you all have an amazing group of school counselors in this District they're really doing fabulous work and they've been trying really hard to even further improve their practice doing things that are tough like looking at what we're doing that's not working or looking at our dirty data the things we don't want to look at really um and they're diving into that head first and order to better support students so
058I'm just really proud of the effort that they've put in this year and all of their work e around this so the five big learnings from this year and this came out of their professional learning um that we delivered to them but we've really been coming back to this uh every single time we meet with them this year so the first thing is that supports are in tiers not students so there's a misconception that there's two tier three students or tier two students and it's just not accurate because we want counselors to look at and they do look at students holistically multifaced so a student might need tier 2 support or tier three support in a specific content area or in Behavior or in attendance but tier one is perfectly sufficient in all other areas
059so saying things like tier 2 students or tier three students is really just not meaningful so the words we use are important and we want to use uh words intentionally in order to empower students not disempower them and to choose those words intentionally in order to model that to school staff as well and so that's our first learning the second one is that being data driven at tier 2 does not mean waiting passively for Teacher referrals this is outdated practice from guidance counseling many many years ago guidance counseling has actually not existed since 1990 we've been talking about the difference between guidance counseling and School counseling and the fact that school counselors use data and they proactively go after data to identify the students that need support rather than waiting on someone else to notice
060a problem and then refer them to counselors so it's a much more proactive and responsive approach so we're not getting rid of referrals we've got to have a good referral system but it's not the primary way that school counselors are now identifying students for targeted support um and then they're choosing data metrics based on what the district has determined our high priority metrics so they're pulling those metrics straight out of the LC cap we're trying to really align this program to what you all have identified as the district priorities number three is that there's three buckets of tier 2 student needs and so a lot of times Educators we get stuck in this cycle of just looking at deficiency data we look at students who are not attending not behaving appropriately or not achieving at
061expected standards um and we do need to look at those types of data but we also can't be confined to that we also have to look at students that are missing opportunity because just because students are eligible for something doesn't mean that they're going to seek it out necessarily for lots of different reasons and so this in includes like families that haven't logged into student grade portals to check and see how their kids are doing um students that do qualify to go to a four-year University but aren't applying so missed opportunities is a really big bucket for Equity work we also are um really practicing this year school counselors with disaggregating data meaning we're looking at student groups so when we look at overall rates of data we have to break that data down because
062we know that some student groups show up disproportionately in that data for example our um students in transitional living situations mcken homeless students looking at um our foster youth uh and other types of student groups that exist in our buildings that are disproportionately showing up in that data so the third learning here is to not just look at deficiencies but look at missed opportunities in student groups our fourth learning is that whenever we are determining what intervention to connect students with we have to ground that in root cause because for example we know that students miss school for a plethora of reasons we can't just lump all the students who are missing school into a small group and intervene and expect it's going to make a difference we have to drill down and figure out
063what are the reasons for the missing uh for missing school and then lump students with like root causes together with the aim of connecting them with an intervention or putting them with an intervention that's likely to dissolve the root so so much of what we try and education is banding symptoms like mo low motivation for example low motivation is often term a root cause when in reality it's a symptom there's always something underlying low motivation like mental health issues things going on at home in the family and other types of things social issues of school and so what counselors are doing here is increasing intentionality to match interventions with root cause looking at what's evidence-based to work for those root causes so for the pilot um project that they're going to present to you in
064a second that's what they were doing and then the fifth uh big learning here is following an Evidence based process for in for intervening with students and not skipping steps it is so easy to skip steps um that really eat away at implementation Fidelity because educators are overwhelmed there's not enough of us to go around there's not enough of the resources and we have to make hard decisions about priorities and so we really wanted counselors during these pilot uh Cycles especially to really go through each of these steps with Fidelity we called this the plan doe study act you you might have heard of that before it's Nationwide um teachers are getting trained on that administrators are as well and so we took the American School counsel Association model for intervening with students aligned it
065to mtss in terms of plan do study act and that's what they implemented uh this semester they did two pilot studies and they're going to talk a little bit about the very first pilot study that they did so those are the five five big learnings that uh they have been really practicing around hard this year and with that I'm going to turn it over to gz and he's going to talk a little bit more about how they selected their smart goals thank you and good evening uh up the board what you have are these smart goals selected by each of the schools and again just to reiterate all of the teams looked at District strategic goals they looked at school site goals and then they looked at their data because we want to be proactive
066looking at the data to make sure that when we're designing our smart goals we are designing smart goals that will meet all of the metrics in order to drive achievement whether it be academic whether it be College and Career or whether it be social emotional and mental health and so what you see up there is that there is a common goal among many of the schools because being that it was a pilot program a lot of the school cohorts decided let's move together so that we can share best practices and we can try different intervention strategies because the uh most important part is is as you're identifying the root cause you've got to make sure that you are uh creating interventions with intentionality in order to address the root cause as Whitney said and so
067the teams spent a lot of time individually and working together across School sites to really look at what are the root causes of students with two or more FS or students not completing the FAFSA or the kada and so what uh I will do is I'm going to turn it over to the School sites to actually talk about the process and you have here linked on this slide for you the psda the um plan study due act cycles for each of the high schools when we were done with the pilot program these are the four questions that We examined each of the high schools sat around and talked uh in their cohorts and then collectively about for which students did the intervention achieve the attended results and for which did it not work because we
068want to make sure through the uh cycle of inquiry that we're using that we're figuring out what we can do better next time what we can try for those students because we don't stop we continue to work to meet the needs of all of our students and then what went well what what do we want to adopt adapt or abandon did did something not work and it's okay right a cycle of inquiry is going to be trial and error and that's how we find the ahas through the process and then did we reach our lcap align smart goal through the intervention again collectively it is all of us and there are so many lenses that put those goals together we know that we as school counselors have to do our part all Sites participated in
069the pilot and all but one met their smart goal which is huge it's not something that we normally see when our districts work to do their initial pilot so that speaks volumes to the talent of your school counselors and without further Ado let me turn it over to Sylvia from Menlo Aon to talk more about their pdsa cycle wake up sorry I'm really short I got to put this down and I'm wearing my heels today all right um let me open up my computer because I have my notes there uh good evening board thank you for having us here this evening um I'm not as as proficient as some of my my previous presenters so bear with me although I've been in the district for 20 years this is my 15th year as head counselor
070I don't get to present in front of all of you too often so please bear with me um I think uh you've heard a lot about how counselors decided to let see if I can go back how we decided to pick and so I want to focus on on the buckets right and as Atma um some of our goals are often obviously obviously want to support all of our students but we continuously have gaps and we continuously have student groups that aren't being as successful as we wanted to so as counselors and again some of us have been there 15 20 years and so we're just like great we have a new new tools let's try it so our intervention really focused on um students uh bip students in particular um Hispanic uh African-American and
071Pacific island students and the data that we collected although it is a deficiency uh we also looked at their grades right so we looked at the First Progress grades in the fall and looked at students who had two to three FS um and then we looked at and again sadly again those were the students who had the biggest numbers and so we decided to do our intervention again it was our pilot it was a smaller group so we said we're going to work with these students and so that that's what our focus our intervention was um so again here's our smart goal um so looking at the fs from uh the progress grade there was 106 um and we had hoped to drop it by 20% Which would have me 85 and that's a total
072of all the students who were there um and again we looked focused on bipox students who are in general education ninth graders again with two to three apps um we did it in a two-part um a part of what uh Whitney was talking about is we had a to find out what is the root cause why are these students getting two to three apps um so then when one of our counselors we all worked on a survey that was something else that we got to do uh through hatchings is learning how to do surveys I'm not sure that we're we're super at it but we're working we're trying um and then some of the things that came up from the students was just needing support academically like again we're looking at grades when they're in
073high school for six weeks right that's what we took that from so how do we navigate this big school how do we get the help that we want to um and so we said let's do an intervention that really focuses on helping students get connected and re reiterating the services that we have on campus again all of our students had already heard it but then we were going to be very intentional with this group of students who maybe weren't accessing um the supports that are on campus um so part one was serving the students again we had one counselor do it and we did all the data um one of the great things that has come for hatchings intentionally and organically I don't know but at mway we've also started our own tier intervention collaboration
074team and so that includes all the school counselors and many of the leison Alexis who was here earlier being recognized our parent lison our brt our librarian our stb coordinator and at Ma we have collaboration like twice a month and this is what we do so we were all really excited and we all kind of came up with the plan together together um but what we ended up doing was a bear to Bear to Bear Services um in collaboration with our librarian so we called in all these students one day and it was every period we did small groups um and it was great we thought this is where you need to come get the services so it was in the library um between the counselors and the librarian we did the presentation we told
075them how to look how to schedule time of flex time with a tutor after school um The Librarian was able to do Flex appointment ments for all of the students for the remainder of the semester and connect them with tutors on campus so that they knew when they showed up for Flex time who that tutor was going to be this is this is one of the great benefits of that um so going back to some of the questions right um sorry 46 students were identified 35 of those students completed the root CA survey and then participated in the bear to- bear Services intervention um of those 106 by January we had dropped to a total of 74 student 40 74 FS so again a 30% decrease yes we met our goal um let me see
076I want to see how some of the things like oh um so like again what worked and what didn't um overall I think it worked we were really excited and and presently surprised um right we when we did there's a how much time do I have okay um the so the students who did the survey actually did better like we we don't have that in here um but it was interesting the students who did the survey about I asking the root cause um the questions were a little bit more reflective and I think just doing the survey was enough for those students to say I had to do something differently uh and then when we did the intervention again I think then knowing that they had connections U knowing where to go when they got
077to the library um I want to give us the little props too like there was a lot of different factors uh before the grades right about when we did the presentation we had also done the tier one intervention for all ninth graders um so all these things kind of happen in quick motion and we think and I'll be planning that for next year that we do that again intentionally hear the tier one intervention look at the grades do the root cause survey and then do the inter tier 2 intervention um and hopefully we'll have the same um response for those students some of the challenges or some of the things that that may have not worked we still have work to do for some of our students right not everybody was successful I didn't it's
078not broken down by individual students but we have that data and sadly the students who didn't show Improvement um that's their attendance right if you're not coming to school you can't learn most of the time um so we have to make a a different intervention now say Okay address that um and then some of the students who did participate but are also identified as our sap students our English Learners our long-term English Learners um some of them identified as Title One students as well so knowing that we still have our work head out to do more intentional uh interventions for those groups of students um I'm trying to think of some other benefits again working with um our own uh tiered intervention team um yeah I think I think that was all so thank you
079okay so next up we have Woodside all right good evening my name is Eli Thorton I'm one of the school counselors at Woodside High School um I've been in a district for seven years um in different roles but mainly the school counselor um but I wanted to go over our results uh we did two different interventions we did one intervention for uh attendance and then we also did another one for executive functioning pretty much just trying to help students plan out the future uh the our two smart goals that we had for uh the first intervention was just our attendance intervention was to try to decrease the total number of periods missed by at least 25% um for our executive functioning intervention we had uh two different goals the first was try to just to
080decrease the total number of zeros in those core classes by at least 10% and then the other secondary goal was to try to decrease the number of students with two or more Fs in those core classes by at least 48.5 % um the students who received the intervention were basically nth and 10th grade students who had two or more fs and then we met with each student individually and try to do a a root cause analysis to try to figure out what was the reason why these students were struggling um and we found that there was really just two buckets that we really wanted to try to focus on and those were the two that we had the interventions for the attendance and the intervention uh and the executive functioning intervention um I added the
081the links to those so if you did want to look at the slide deck that we had our attendance intervention was four weeks and our executive functioning uh intervention was 3 weeks there was 50 total students that we interviewed um but only 25 students actually actually attended two or more sessions um for our attendance intervention we saw great success uh the only downside is it was our attendance intervention so we only had about three students of the maybe 10 that we initially uh were targeting uh but we did see great results with those three students um with those three stud students the 3 weeks prior uh to the intervention amongst those three students there was about 40 periods that were missed amongst those three and then we did our four-week intervention and then after that
0823-week period uh we saw 7 87% decrease so only about six uh periods total so about two on average each student uh missed so that was that was really great and even though there was small amount of students iel like the data was really important to just share because we would love to be able to expand that even more um our executive functioning intervention uh one Focus was just the total number of zeros that we found it was a little bit tedious each counselor had to go through and count each number of zeros pre and post but we did see some some decreases there we would love to see a bigger decrease but we did see 11% decrease prior to the intervention to the post uh intervention and I think the one that we were
083most proud of was our uh total number of students that had uh two or more FS we initially had about 22 students and then that decreased all the way down to 11 students uh by the time the end of the semester uh ended so it was a 50% decrease um so we did see some great things and then one thing I did want to mention before I headed out is um I I felt like this was very very effective and we can really expand this to other other students that really need it but we just are so spread so thin as school counselors that we want to try to figure out ways to be able to implement this more and be able to expand it and be able to really um take all the school
084counseling that we've done and all the things that we've done at the Woodside uh and really try to implement that as much as we can to other students that really need these interventions and other interventions that we can think of too but just thank you for your time appreciate it all right last but definitely not least Sequoya High School right um similar to Sylvia I am also short and I also have heels um so it is a pleasure to be here with you all tonight this is my first time um speaking speak to you all um here at the board so I'm really excited I'm also very nervous um but I am here to discuss essentially the amazing work that we have been doing at seoa right and so one of the things that I
085really want to highlight as mentioned is our pdsa cycle in Fall so we also focused our ninth nth grade students so the ninth grade students that we targeted were 38 students with two or more FS and of those students we really wanted to focus on showing Improvement by 33% so this all was our hard work all the way up until the semester we wanted to see is this going to work um of the one of the highlights that I wanted highlight was the collaboration that we had with the community members the team our staff so that is definitely the Highlight we collaborated with mental Health Specialists intervention counselor family coordinators Community lays down and it was a team effort and it was really nice that it wasn't just the counselors it was a collaboration as
086also you heard with Sylvia so we provided our very first intervention was essentially a root cost survey because it was a check-in it was a one-onone with the trusted adult sometimes it was the first time we we met with these students so so that was essentially our very first intervention as you can see on the left you can the root cost responses that I'm going to go in a little bit um but we created four interventions from our root cost survey our first one which was a check-in the second was a academic Workshop the third one was a wellness Workshop we also created a parent evening Workshop so we try to catch students um multiple times so these study students were definitely students we were trying to get as many of my colleagues also mentioned
087attendance was a big one that came out of that root cause survey so we identified at least 14 students who were truant um and our work didn't stop there right that's when the our community lays on was somebody who we referred to who then um would then move on to either home visits or charts and that's created a whole other interventions for tier one tier two so that was essentially what we've you know the collaboration we did so our data kind of or just even from the very beginning right like that rot cause survey was very amazing to just to see from the very beginning as Sylvia mentioned before sometimes all these students needed was just the quick check-in right just somebody a trusted adult and so we can see here highlighted in yellow are
088the goals that we that we saw um that these students identified right wanting to graduate from seoa wanting to make their parents proud which I could contest to that right as a first generation my student myself that was my goal right and so but we also see challenges and barriers um some you know mental health challenges that prohibited students from coming um some even U mentioned that they had to stay home while parents had to work right and others just felt like they didn't have a trusted adult and so we really honed in on that trusted adult ad so by the time that they got to that fourth Intervention which was that Wellness intervention we really wanted to have students um feel like they have one adult at seoa and so that is one of
089the datas you actually see there is the amount like the increase in students feeling comfortable to come to a trusted adult which was huge for us right because by that time like four by the fourth intervention we've easily seen these students once or four times um so it was really nice to see that 41 students actually attended three of the four interventions hosted by a team effort overall we did see a 42% increase um or improvement from quarter 1 to semester 1 and that was definitely something that we're proud of at AOA thank you the cool stuff right really really exciting and this was literally the first time they've ever tried this from start to finish now counselors have been intervening with students in this district for a long time right the difference here is
090that they are measuring the impact of what they're doing and they're getting rid of stuff that doesn't work with students in favor of things that are more evidence-based so measuring what they're doing and then intentionality with the interventions connecting intervention to root cause so there's more likely to be an impact across the board counselors want to do more of this work like they were really excited there were actually there were light bulb moments during this where like it's actually working because you know in education it can be hard sometimes you don't see the result of what you're doing that you work really hard to do um this is something that is really helping with self-efficacy among the school counseling staff too because they can clearly see what they're doing is working and so they want
091to do more of this um you heard uh Eli mentioned too earlier that there's a lot on counselor's plates right so we know that all Educators have a lot on their plates they're wearing lots of hats this is not just specific to school counseling School counseling has a lot on their plates as well we're doing time studies to really see are their processes and procedures and systems they can tighten up to gain more time because it's just not a matter of just hiring more staff or changing uh non-counseling duties to someone else yes those are fixes as well but there are other things counselors can do too to tighten up their time so we're trying to look across the board what are ways we can gain time back so we can get counselors directly with
092students more because we're seeing even from the first time they tried this that it's working and May just imagine like what it'll look like in a couple of years once they' practiced this over and over again so we're really excited um and and hopefully our partnership continues for the next couple of years if that um is approved by this board and these are some of the things that we really want to focus on there's lots more work to do so we want to continue integrating plan do study act we had a PD all day today uh we talked about creating our annual calendars for the school year and going ahead and scheduling out our pdsa cycles and prioritizing them so they don't get pushed because there's so many priorities it's easy to push things to
093the back burner this is something we really want to prioritize because we're seeing that it's helping kids we also need to engage more with site administrators because we just can't push ahead um anymore unless administrators are fully apprised of what's going on and they they know what's going on for sure but we also want to increase that partnership the working partnership between administrators and the counseling staff so that the goals they are choosing the smart goals they're choosing are super aligned with the school Improvement plan we want to develop a districtwide menu of tier 2 supports it's not just as simple as saying where's an evidence-based curriculum for tier 2 let's purchase that and then do it we know that that generally doesn't work we have to tailor things we have to make sure we're
094matching the root cause so even if we do purchase curriculum there's still work to tailor that to make sure that it works for kids so we're building out that menu of tier 2 counseling interventions um we already talked about making changes to systems to free up time but I will mention today we talked a little bit about the registration and course selection ction process which is incredibly important and counselors have got to be involved in that process at some schools it's taking longer than others depending on case loads and Staffing and systems that we have and so today we presented multiple models for registration processes and teams got some time to start dreaming about what could change for next year so that they can again recapture some of that time we're going to continue L
095Capital Line work specifically around goal number three which Glenda talked about earlier we are not forgetting tier one so even though we haven't talked about tier one today that is still working so or still moving along so today we got together to kind of plan our May 22nd working day where the teams are going to get together they're going to divide and conquer look at their pre-post results from students feedback from students about what worked from these lessons and then make improvements to their lessons uh development of a district-wide handbook or set of expectations basically for comprehensive School counseling services in this district there really is a continu from guidance counseling to school counseling to comprehensive School counseling all along the way we want to move towards comprehensive School counseling because we know that that
096has the greatest impact on student achievement um vision and mission statements for each school's uh uh counseling program and then ask a national model and ramp recognition training because quite frankly several of your schools are going to be able to apply for National recognition with the results that they're getting and we want to make sure that they are able to get that within the next couple of years we want to train them on how they can go through that process so in general over here on the right hand side of the screen you see our three domains just remember that school counselors or are holistic Educators in the building they are there to coordinate and and uh coordinate support services for students within the academic domain social emotional and College and Career they're doing all
097three concurrently um and by extension Glenda as the kosa is helping support them around the coordination of these three different domains of school counsel and they're doing really fabulous beautiful work I don't get to say this often but this I get to work with districts all across the nation this is one of my faves y'all you have great school counselors and really good leadership and I'm just so excited and so proud of all that they have done this year so I believe that that is it for our presentation but we would love to entertain any questions you might have okay I know we probably have a number of questions but I see trusty Dua is the first one out so I'm gon to let her go because like jumping out of my seat I am
098so excited about this I want to First say if I have my history right thank you to the superintendent so this happened during Co just for those of you that don't know the story um I heard from one of our school counselors who she was the only one I talked to I'm sure there were more who found hatchings I think from a conference or something and she told me about it um and then school counselors do I have my history right went to our superintendent and they said this is what we need this is what we want we've never had targeted professional development in a powerful way uh our superintendent said yes I remember that board meeting right so exciting um so thank you for your work you guys touch every kid in our district
099um and to have results like this I mean data that resonates with me I mean just so I don't have questions I just oh I also want to say an example of syncing up with an organization right that is aligned with our staff in such a powerful way also I always look at the audience see when I see the all the heads nod this has got to be a good thing so um I just want to share my excitement thank you anyone else Rich the two comments aren't so much questions but I I appreciate hearing that you guys are targeting to have similar experiences each of the school sites I think that's something said that the council are trying to have a similar approach to each School site and I think one of the things
100I like to say it shouldn't be a lottery for students which school they go to is which experience they get and so I appreciate that you're unifying between the different sites and you also talked about the importance of choosing words and I agree with you on that so thank you for bringing that up one question um is there a behavior domain because I think there's the mtss and then there's this hatching and it seems like maybe are the domains exactly the same or are they different depending on on uh depending on model for you know across the board if we're talking about mtss in general or school counselors social workers psychologist other type of support staff the terminology terminology changes slightly so when we talk about California mtss behavior is its own separate domain from
101social emotional learning in the school counseling profession generally School C uh social emotional learning is the umbrella over things like Behavior mental health wellness and all of that so some sometimes we use those words interchangeably but in the context of this counselors are looking at behavior and it falls under the social emotional learning uh kind of domain but for the purposes of the pilot study here um counselors in general weren't looking as much at Behavior they were aligning the you pick specific smarty goals I was mainly commenting on the graphic that had the three yep pillars and we've had presentations recently on mtss that also had three pillars but I don't think they're the same three pillars because they didn't include College and Career and you guys don't include Behavior so I don't know whether
102it's intentional that there's these two different sets of tiers or if no that's a great question and and they work interchangeably right because if we have a student who's got anger management issues for example the school counselor's role is to teach them deescalation techniques so it falls under that social emotional umbrella where we're teaching them positive coping strategies communication strategies so in our world and in our language just social emotional but what we're addressing is behavior so it works interchangeably with the mtss model and that's one thing that we celebrate as we move forward in California is that the role of the school counselor finally all of our educational Partners whether it be a teacher an administrator a school counselor we all operate in the mtss model we all live in the mtss model and
103how we work together can be explained by the mtss model yeah the other thing about mtss is and it's implied that the end goal of mtss is college andc readiness so it's implied it doesn't have to be its own separate domain when we're talking about mtss the issue for school counselors is that they're actually providing tiered support around college incre readiness others usually don't do that as much we have some college exess Partners in our schools that are providing tiered support but General it's the counselors they're actually doing tier one college Inc Readiness lessons and other supports for students like four-year planning individual learning plans and the like they're doing tier two for uh marginalized groups that are deserving of additional support around college and for Readiness and they do tier three like when a
104student accidentally messes up and on social media an emissions officer you know catches wind of that and their admission is revoked that's a tier three college andc readiness situation being flagged for verification on the fact so the reason why we use College and Career specifically as the domain in School counseling work is because they are practitioners providing tiered supports on it mtss is saying we're doing all these things such that students are college in quer ready but there's not as much of that tiered support if that makes sense it is confusing though thank you sopic did you yeah I can go next so um I kind of had a couple questions mainly about some of the survey results so what I'd be curious is like at any one of the schools like what do you
105think was the main difference between the students who the intervention worked on and those who it didn't because it seemed that most of the schools there was still a chunk of students who didn't get below two FS or whatever the goal was um so again it it you know um Whitney was talking about how there could be different interventions for students right so yes they all got two to three fs and yes they all had different things as to why it didn't work right and so one thing I neglected to say and I'm glad that that seoa that oxy mentioned it right that the kids who mention mental health again working with our mtma our Mental Health Specialists it was not she's like we've already seen half these kids right so she took those the
106attendance person right but again our intervention was we invited all of the students regardless what the root cause was but like I mentioned a lot of them if attendance is an issue they didn't show up for the intervention um and then again for some of the other students I was thinking you know again looking at the data just um the last couple days um several of the students now have IEPs right because then we found the child fine right so then it was a learning issue so that was a focused intervention but there are a lot of other things that are already happen with happening with some of these students um right so could be learning differences that that's why they can't improve their grades again the attendance English is not their native language so
107they're still acquiring language skills um and so those are some of the other the the rule cause like again we can go on it it's you can keep going but but why and that's you but why but why why and we just don't have the time to say okay all of you who said you know school is hard do another survey okay and then you'll get more results and do another another survey and that's where we get stuck we're like we don't have the bandwith that'd be great but at the same time we still are doing things that we've always done right and so we're just trying to to figure out those things but yes again it was our pilot so yes some of the students didn't necessarily need the in the intervention we provided
108right and now we learn like yeah that was a great intervention for the kids that that was appropriate but there are other needs and now we need to find another intervention for that group of students and that's where we find that time constraints are really it's difficult any want I answer okay one of the things I also wanted to really highlight is what Winnie had said in the very beginning of our um meeting them is trust the process go slow to go fast right and so it is a pilot and so it is something that we're still trying to iron out the kiks and you know to Sylvia's point we're probably never going to get to 100% although that's a great goal to get to because things just kind of come up all the time
109but that one saying of go slow to go fast I think hopefully by the end of the five year 10 year who knows right we want to get to that 100% I just wanted to say that one comment um okay go ahead and I can speak for w side like the 50% students that didn't improve we didn't ignore those students we they're they're on our list now that we know exactly what we need to try to do we're going to try different types of interventions and I think probably one of the better things of the entire pdsa Cycles was that we GA gathered data from these students actually input from them we did a pre and a post with these students and actually got feedback on what are their issues what are reasons why things
110are working or maybe not working so I feel like us having a little bit more time to dive into that data I feel like we'll be able to find some more interventions but I think just the the great thing about it was that we actually have the students a group of students that were trying different interventions whether we give that to our our mental health resource specialist or whether it's an attendance and we get our s uh people involved we have a wide range of resources now but I feel like that was one of the things I wanted to highlight to thank you I have a couple you have questions go ahead Amy yeah I I think this was uh great because the the plan do study act model is is a continuous Improvement um
111process and that just warms my heart because I'm crazy with operations like that but it also aligns with our uh strategic plan and all the work we're doing because that has bubbled up to the top a lot in terms of doing things more efficiently and more effectively to free up time so I almost see this as not just a pilot for the counseling department but a pilot for the entire District so it really excites me um I I think it it is going to be interesting how to make everything that you're piloting uh sustainable at larger scale um but definitely want to keep up to date with all the different things going on and see how we could actually apply this more broadly thanks all right thank you I have a couple of comments first
112of all thank you for the information as a social worker I know that no one ever has enough time and I always remember when I first started social work they say you want to be a social worker and they have the little person sitting here in the mouths of paperwork up here and you just never get to see the the person on the on the other end and we know that the intervention is the person it is not the paperwork so any way that we can reduce the paperwork and I'll keep saying that we give time back to social workers and counselors and all that to do the work because they are the intervention so thank you um so I just wanted to get on my Soap Box about that so I'm Advocate advocate for
113that um um I wanted to talk a little bit about Ma you had talked about the root causes and the library can you tell me a little bit more about the library and the flex time because that's like unique thank you um again based on our our in our internal tiered systems of support I don't know what we call ourselves but um it was like well do they know like we tell them go to the library you sign up for Flex time you can get a tutor okay you know what we're going to take you to where all the magic happens and Miss BT was great she was there um and another thing right so going back to how do you keep she um wrote all those students names down followed up with them still
114follows up with them we have this big spreadsheet that everybody has access she's still putting down still hunting them down no show came three times so again it was how let's and she I don't know if you've been into Ma's library and you've seen she's got pictures of all the tutors and everything they do so it was to be for them to feel familiar with the environment to feel safe that this is a place that you can come um to get help right so again it was introducing them this is our school library how many of you been here how many of you right and so it was really about don't come to my office let's take you where the people who can help you get that tutoring and then where her lovely smiling face
115is always welcoming as well um and so she's kind of taken that group of kids as well and so that that's the big again the the the organic thing that's happened right is that again these students are now on everyone's radar right and so that that's it was just something that we're like where do we meet with them again take them to the library where they can get all their access and all the support that they need that's lovely thank you so much I just wanted to I was like why the library okay it's kind of like the Central Hub everybody knows where the library is gotcha um the next thing is Woodside Elijah um what is executive functioning um intervention what does that look like great question so um we did a couple different
116things first thing we did is we did something called the power of zero um Miss lock one of our school counselors did a great job of putting that together and pretty much what we did is is through canvas students can actually let's say they have a zero for an assignment they can input let's just say they get half credit for an assignment so we went through and said okay if you just got half credit for all of your zeros what would your grade go to and they were surprised that just by getting 50% on all those zeros even if they don't turn in it's a 100% complete their grade went from an F to a d or it went from an F to a c minus or sometimes even higher than that so that was
117one intervention that we did we also had each student follow up with an email and copy us or a trusted adult could be a family member could be a counselor could be another teacher just reaching out to a teacher to find out okay I'm struggling right now in this class what can I do to try to raise my grade so those are some things that we did we also did um a habit tracker I'm a I'm a big reader and one of my favorite books is atomic habit so we actually brought a habit tracker and said okay what's one habit that you feel like could maybe try to help you out and it was like okay try to wake up at 7 o'clock every day or not use my phone for the last hour of
118the day or whatever it might have been so we did different things like that um so those are kind of some of the interventions that we tried and the school counseling team did an amazing job of collaborating and trying to be a little bit creative with those things so those are probably three examples that we tried thank you that's what I was like let me see what that looks like I think the other piece that I thought was really interesting executive functioning is not always um for freshman's not part of their middle school it typically is more the emotional piece not the execu functioning and we also have kids coming in with ADHD and if trauma is part of that maybe they're um their immigrant story or their home life home status or whatever the
119case may be if you have a lot of distractions if you have ad undiagnosed add or ADHD like your mind is just boggling in your head and so that executive functioning isn't always there you have to build that capacity so um that to me is great information to give to Partners as well is that executive functioning and not everybody knows that they can get support around they may not even know right because they have so many reminders in middle school and high school is less reminders and then in college there's none right so that transition could be hard for a freshman especially if they're trying to learn the our campuses are huge they're like colleges for some kids going from these really really small physical campus to these large campus so it's just easy to
120not remember all these other things so I'm happy to see that there was something that you said around relationship is important um and it goes back to the emphasis um early on I know that relationship is intervention intervention is the relationship if a student doesn't know someone on campus or their friendship group is changing because developmentally it they change um then they feel lost and so not having they need an adult outside of the family um who act as a mentor or a touch point those kinds of things so the more that we can build that connection and that's what um the 40 developmental asset said if you have that adult relationship the intervention piece of go to the library because they trust you they will do it right and so I I just want
121to emphasize the importance of having adults available um thank you so much I think the last thing I wanted to ask first of all I love the time study hopefully it accounts that we can automatize something or something like that so we can give you guys more time back um but uh all behavior is communication I was um thinking about truste rich and he said you know what about Behavior behavior is communication and so um that means that whatever Behavior they're doing they're communicating something which means indicate the inter intervention um and so most times people want to just address the behavior when in actuality we're addressing what the behavior is communicating um and so I think having that time to do the rapid response is really important and most times in schools it feels
122like a snail that we get things done um no disrespect to education but it's it it really is slow so I'm just like I like this rapid response if we could do some of that especially for some of our students that we just we need to make an impact quick so that they don't get off track later on um and I think that that's important the last thing and this might be for the hatching results how do you assess the Community Partners as part of the intervention so I'm thinking like [Music] um I want to say acknowledge Alliance but that is not right is that right is that right acknowledge Alliance For example right or um live in peace that does some of their wraparound work in partnership with the sites or the boys and
123girls program the Futures program I'm trying to think about the young man um that received a um the Redwood City site Youth of the year and he talked about you know he wasn't that great in school and no one believed him and you know went off to um Juvenile Justice Center and they went and got him and they were part of the process and of course the school took over the other pieces that they could not so I'm just trying to figure out how do we assess that so that we make sure that our partners are on the same page because there's so much work that goes on outside of school that those Partners link up with the family that that's a great question it is something that we've been kind of struggling through I
124I want to toss it over to you in a second um there so there's a couple things we talk about with counselors uh meaning uh we just do my best to kind of explain this so there is Locust of control that they have there's also sphere of influence so there's some things that they can't control when we're working with external uh Community agencies who are also serving students in general um we talk about counselors being the counselors are the full-time people at the building who are holistically addressing students needs they see students the most they know their history they're looking at academic social emotional College and Career so it positions them really well to be a coordinator of services and I was going to connect this back to the new standards if you can talk
125about that in a second because that's a new standard part there's a new set of standards in California that just rolled out um and the coordination of services part is really important because we want there needs to be at least somebody in the building who has a handle on who are all the service providers in the building which kids are getting which Services is their duplication happening do we have like three or four entities serving the same 10% of kids or are we spreading the wealth and really trying to do this more intentionally where all the kids who have demonstrated need are getting served um I don't have a good answer for where we are with that right now I'll accept that we are struggling through what that looks like um and trying to stay
126within our Lo what is in our locus of control what's in our sphere of influence what do administrators do what is Glenda doing as part of this and her kosa work at the district office like a lot of this takes a higher level of coordination at the district office where it's not on School staff to be the coordinators of all the people that are coming in and out of the building because some of this is managed by the district that's what we're trying to tease out um because up until Glenda was hired there wasn't aosa for this work in the district so she's basically come in hit the ground running created a Coosa position is basically doing director level work at this point anyway she's doing all of this coordination kind of work to kind
127of figure out how do we do this because we do want to make sure that we're using these external entities in a way that is uh there's someone at the building who has an eye on which kids are getting served are they getting served effectively and is it how do we measure the effectiveness because sometimes we partner with external organizations that are doing a lot of cool things but is it showing results for kids is another story and some of them aren't measuring it they measure what they do they don't measure the impact on kids so what counselors are trying to do right now is act as if they are trying to do both they are trying to do what's already on their plate um things haven't really come off their plate since 2021 they're
128actually adding all this stuff on top of everything else they're already doing um and so this coordination of service right now feels not insurmountable but it is it's it's um squishy and we're trying to figure out what to do with that next and that's part of the strategy work for next year and ongoing with uh Dr Chone and Glenda can you talk a little bit about the standards and the coordination of care yeah absolutely so in October of 2023 I I had to remember what year we were in at this point um the California standards for the school counseling profession the update was released and in that standard two is all about mental and Behavioral Health um one of my other hats is that I am a board member for the California Association of school
129counselors and with our state we don't have in the department of Ed uh we have an office of student health but it has it's staffed with a nurse and it's staffed with some support but it it doesn't have the social worker it doesn't have the school counselor so some of our professional organizations act as the and the partners and consultants for the Department of Ed and so what you're asking is something that we're working with in 1997 the national uh School counseling standards came out ASA then updated it with a model in 2003 but as we know and this goes back to a trustee Rich you know so we've got a national model then what does California do with it what are California's priorities which model is California going with and one thing post covid
130and I know it's happened Nationwide is that we've seen student mental health issues Skyrocket um California has been a little faster in addressing some of these needs and part of that work has to do with our school-based Mental Health Services that our our school counselors our school social workers um our school psychologists who have really worked to evolve some of the practices that we are competent to do but have never really been called on us so now we're developing those systems and processes so as we are working with our Community Partners which we always have we're expanding our our networks and our reach and our goal as we continue to evolve as a profession in California is really track with our leas how many kids are we referring what does that process data look like
131and then come up with some sort of mechanism for how do we track the perception data for the services that those kids are getting when we are working with our Community Partners thank you so much um I just want to put Ravenswood out there because I think this is one of the very issues that they dealt with maybe about two to three years ago when kids weren't improving consistently and it was because Partners were doing all these different things in different ways good work but just very different very different and so one of the things they started to do was to align the partners on the goals of the district and that began to help and so um I want to put that out there because I know we're not doing it alone um and
132if our the community understands and I think this came out with our meet and greet um in the service area that I work in um a represent that they talked about every District does it differently because they go across palto private schools all kind of stuff and they said everybody just does it differently so I think from a community perspective there's some way we can at least communicate what we're doing then they can automatically align themselves because they also want kids to do well in school and go off to college so I just want to say thank you you guys are representing the counselors um I give a shout out to you all um really appreciate you all thank you any other questions okay thank you all do you want to have a break five
133minutes five minute break thank you you're welcome you're welcome push through yes p through till the end so we are at we are ready to get started we're gonna do let me see where I am I'm I think we're at discussion item 15.1 and the first discussion item is the first reading of the administrative regulation 5 5121 grades and evaluation of student achievement um and we're going to open it up to public comments I have none in person are there any public comments on Zoom please raise your [Music] hand I see none okay great um so we're going to get started with this discussion item and I'm going to turn it over to miss Hansen good evening members of the board superintendent leech and members of cabinet and the audience I am here tonight to
134talk to you about something much less Earth shaking and groundbreaking than the presentation we just heard which was really really awesome work was really exciting I am here to talk to you about necessary work though so this may be a little conf conf using and if you feel like it is it's me not you so please feel free to ask me to slow down or clarify anywhere in the process that I need to because I am bringing to you four changes in one night to AR 5121 and the reason we are bringing them to you all at once is because they don't need to be in effect the goal isn't to have them in effect until the beginning of the next school year so as they started acquiring this spring I knew there were others
135and I thought we would just bring them to you all on one night so I've spared you three other 5121 presentations because I know you have a few other things to do but now you are stuck with me for one big presentation this evening so um hos I'm not seeing the presentation I'm sorry I should have looked and checked with you during break that's that's a really awesome I love that that was nice not to date myself but it looks like an OP ad you know what that is right op come on Ocean Pacific it was a brand back in the day I know yeah whatever just I'll stop now I'll stop I think he would have been that's the B that makes it even more ironic I think he would have worn op a
136low point for me was several years ago my son had a friend over and he was wearing a shirt um I can't remember what band it was but he was wearing a shirt and I was like oh my gosh I love your shirt he's like totally vintage right I'm like never mind I take it back oops what did I do right hope I'm not making all busy are you doing things so way or is it me you're controlling it I'll stop I saw it under the agenda attachment that you pulled up a moment ago there it is where's that the policy there's the policy how about the other one there it is thank you so much just still scroll down okay um so before you this evening is 5121 we're going to be looking at
137four different facets of 5121 this evening so uh is there a way to make this bigger without totally messing it up are you guys okay if you can see part of the next screen all right thank you for bearing with me so a few things that I want to explain before I dive into this proposal um the they all have to do with the infinite campus which in many way ways is a program that serves us nicely I was in ivp when we switched to Infinite Campus and in that position we were clicking our heels because it was such a good product at least at that time for building the master schedule it is not a perfect product and there are pieces of it that are a little bit onerous and some of those pieces
138definitely have to do with the way that teachers give grades so a few things to know if a grade is in Infinite Campus there is no way to keep teachers from using it so any teacher can use any grade that they see in Infinite Campus we cannot remove a grade from Infinite Campus until four years after we stop using it because if we do then a student who got that grade if they are still with us it will mess up their transcript and iy will not understand how to communicate that the student got that grade which no longer exists so what that means is if I am a teacher and we have this situation right now with two grades I've got arrows pointing to them na non-attendance W the board removed na two years ago
139we have to keep it as an option for a grade in Infinite Campus for two more years because right now well next year's Juniors and seniors some of them earned Nas when they were freshman and sophomores when those grades go away if the na goes away it messes up their transcript okay so I'm a teacher that nonattendance that that makes sense to me this kid isn't attending my class I'm going to give them the na it's no longer a grade in board policy but we cannot remove it from what the teacher uses until four years have past another hangup with Infinite Campus is Infinite Campus does not have very much space to leave an explanation so there's no way for us to add warning this grade no longer exists please ignore it cannot take that
140kind of text and many people have asked for it because we have so many grades that confused sometimes about what some of the grades mean so um all of that said let me move you on in case your eyes couldn't read what is displayed on the screen at the top the slide at the top that's how the system looks in Infinite Campus and I went ahead and I uh I made a table of it so that you could actually read it and as needed I will refer back to this table a couple of things to point out you will see here that I've crossed out the W at the bottom of the middle table and the na at the bottom of the third table and that's because those grades for all intents and purposes we
141don't consider them anymore even though they are available I will not be heard if you need to step out don't worry I can come give you the him lick too you all right I happen yeah I hate it when that happens um uh they I I crossed them out because you guys don't need to think about those grades anymore except that teachers can still give them the other thing I want to point out is that there's a series of grades that have an m at the end of them am BM CM DM and those grades I mean they're modified so a student and we get about 10 of these a year a student who is taking a class who has an IEP who needs to have reduced um standards they have to meet a standard
142but at a modified level then a sped teacher can fill out a modified grade form and the teacher can um calibrate a little bit differently what the student is going to do um to meet the class's expectations again we have got almost 9,000 students in this District uh most of them earn sixth grades a semester that's 5,400 grades times two that's 10,800 grades we probably give out 10 modified grades or fewer a year but it is a category that exists in our system the last thing that I want to point out because it's going to come up tonight you can see under credit coefficient what that means is that it meets a graduation requirement and then under GPA value this is this is not the grade bump so I didn't say anything about apib in
143some of our honors classes tonight because it's not part of the board policy uh that's up and I didn't want to confuse you anymore than I already am um but this is the grade scale of course an a is a four a b is a three Etc and what I would like for you to note is if you look at the F the F gets a zero that gets factored into a student's grade point average currently right now you will see that under WF if a student withdraws from a class and they are failing they get a zero that is currently figured into their GPA we'll come back to that any questions for me so far okay so the first one we're going to look at is H for health H for health is not
144currently in our board policy but it is an option in Infinite Campus so teachers are giving the H grade as they should be to students who have a doctor's note that excuses them from PE it's a medical so it shows in the system that the student met in quote marks that requirement they don't have to take PE but they still need to make up the units they would have gotten for PE in electives and some other class so the first recommendation that I want to make is that we add the H that we are already using into board policy for students with health how you're wondering did this happen and here's how I think it happened here's a grade Legend I love this I had to go back to find this when we were doing
145the na it's from 1998 it's before things were in software um and this is the policy that was adopted the Legend in February 18th 1998 you'll see at the bottom of the list there's a p p there means medical ex excuse in physical education but during covid when we went pass no pass we started using the P to signify pass we never updated in grade in board policy when we started using the H instead of the P I don't think this is controversial but you tell me the first recommendation before you this evening is the proposed AR language an H shall be given when a student has a note from a doctor excusing them from PE the student does not have to take PE but must make up the 20 credits via electives and if
146you're wondering well does that mean they can't take an additional science class to make up PE it doesn't it just means when you've already met your grad requirements and for science we call it an elective after that so basically you've got to take those units in another area proposal number two this is not currently an option in Infinite Campus it came as a proposal from our middle college teachers and it was quickly an enthusi enthusiastically picked up by our counselors It's in progress it's basically a bookmark this is for a student who has failed a class in our district they are making up that class through Edgenuity Credit Recovery they're in progress of making it up that doesn't have to end at the end of a semester but sometimes for instance a student will be
147partway through a course that they're making up in the independent study program they'll come back to the campus in the fall the counselor will say you have to make this up you have an F in it the student will say I was making that up in independent study the counselor will say I have no record of that so what the in progress would tell the counselors when kids switch between schools or when a student goes from Edgenuity during the school year and has a different teacher in Edgenuity during the summer this student is in progress of making up that grade again it's a bookmark it doesn't impact the GPA at all when the student finishes recovering the course the grade that they earn in the course would replace the IP someone who always has good
148questions for me asked me earlier this evening whatat happens if the student never finishes that IP and we can handle that one of two ways it's just a mechanics sort of thing it's you it's you can't do double jeopardy for grades right just like you can't take the same class twice for credit you can't flunk the same class twice so it wouldn't become an F it's either it just stays in the system as an IP or we could just remove anything with an IP from the system when a student graduates but it doesn't matter it's not here neither here nor there so the second proposal before you this evening is that we add to our AR and then into Infinite Campus IP means in progress of completing a course for credit recovery of an F
149an IP shall be given only when a student is in process of credit recovery for a course they failed when the course is completed the IP is replaced by the credit recovery grade any questions about this one yeah excuse me so the H I'm glad you have that I know I had a child who could not take PE due to medical condition per their iup and 504 plan so I'm glad to see that there uh so I do think that makes sense for some of our students who have medical conditions we're so close to the Children's Hospital as well so we get a lot of kids from that area um far is the IC you mean what is it called in progress IP oh it's IP sorry I put IC um IP is so would
150IP I'm trying to think about what credit recovery is and I I'm getting kind a little confused but I'm thinking about a child who has a health plan and they can't complete their class because they've been hospitalized that's an incomplete we already have that the student has not plunked the class they have not finished the class incomplete that's incomp complete correct okay and Credit Recovery are those students who received an f and they're trying to make it up and all that this does is a kid who starts a credit recovery at genuity because they don't end at the semester oh okay it means that they don't go to a different campus in our district or to summer school and have to start all over again because there's no record in the system that they were
151partway through the class is there a timeline for kids to complete the IP mm- so it could take them a year okay because they're taking it on top of all their other classes and oftentimes it's a kid who's taking seven classes okay all righty thank you any other questions all right this is everybody's favorite grade to give the credit grade it is really really popular and for the most part that's good because here's what the credit grade should be used for it should be used for athletes who finish the season it should be used for exhibition projects it should be used for nucleus and it should be used for student clerks teachers assistants peer tutors because those are all uh activities in our district that we want to give kids credit for but not a
152grade for people have come to use credit credit for all kinds of different things because it's there so why wouldn't I I do want to give a kid credit for this they're a nice kid and I don't want to have to give them another grade so we are going to have to do some ongoing work and I'm so grateful to the counselors and the ivps because we made this big list of everything at any site that people use the credit for right now and then we talked about what should it be used for and that was how we narrowed down on what its appropriate use is so the credit it's very unclear in board policy what it's supposed to be used for it's Credit in lie of a letter grade A CR shall be given
153when a student has achieved minimum to maximum objectives with some degree of excellence and is chosen not to have an AB or D on his record record it is also the grade assigned to students earning credit for successful completion of a school athletic season exhibition project nucleus student clerk teachers assistant or peer tutor a grade of CR is not college prep so the other way a student can get a CR is they can apply and say I don't want to get a letter grade for this class I want a credit or no credit the teacher has to agree to it the parent has to sign off on it and if everyone agrees then they can get the credit grade instead of a letter grade for that class if you get a CR it is not
154college prep so really we just want to clarify here what that should be used for and then we'll do the ongoing training and honestly it'll also be a lot of just dumping in an Excel spreadsheet all of the grades for semester and going back and telling teachers who gave the CR in areas where they're not supposed to hey you need to change this um just so we educate people on going I've thought about making a laminated card for everyone in the district with these but I didn't know if that would be too pedantic so I try to remember I have a first grader and I don't people don't appreciate that at work um but anyway so this is just to clarify how this CR supposed to be used thank you for doing that because I
155I know a couple of parents who dealt with this and it wasn't clear and when they got the credit they realized that it didn't go to their GPA it didn't count through a through G and they were just being nice to the kid yes and so then it it actually impacted their access right and so I'm I'm glad you're making a clarification I'd love for you to share with parents what these all mean as well um just in case Justice checks them balances or with some of our programs that are actually helping kids help them with their their their schedule as they talk to their counselor because I do think this is important we probably should just make this all a page on the website yeah all right last one no one's beating their head
156on their dis yet I'm impressed this is a change that has already happened in board policy but was never updated in Infinite Campus so this is partly an FYI and it's also here because I am recommending a clarifying sentence in the AR so what is currently happening is that if I withdraw from a class right now and I am not passing the class there's a zero that is factored in to my GPA so I get penalized for that this was a big deal in a long process much like the na so here are the reasons for the change and then I'll talk about the input we got on it assigning a GPA penalty to a withdrawal grade is not a practice in neighboring districts or in the state college and university systems this GPA penalty
157impacts students Cal grant eligibility no GPA penalty in current AR 5121 for earning a WF exists it was once in the AR but was removed however the update was not made in ic so if you look at 1998 you will say that there was a zero if you withdrew from a Class A WF but somewhere along the way that got changed and there's actually no longer supposed to be a point penalty for a WF so this all started earlier this year when we went to take this to subject area councils to get their input and the original recommendation was we should just have a w we shouldn't have a w fail a w pass but then as it worked its way through we realized if we get rid of the wpw and a student wants
158to take a class over we don't know if they were passing it or not passing it so then we realized what we were really trying to get at was that zero in the GPA so we took it to our subject area councils on the subject area councils one sack was unable to come to agreement because one department chair on that sack wanted to keep the grade penalty on the other 12 subject area councils there was unanimous agreement to remove the WF GPA penalty so this is literally all of the department shairs in the district except for one from sped to English to CTE to World languages to the bilingual resource teachers to the ivps recommend that we remove this penalty which is good because we already did it and then here are some comments if
159you need them there were concerns about students dropping classes late and the impact on scheduling oh this would be reasons to keep the WF some felt there should remain a strong deterrent to withdraw from classes late into the semester potentially encourages kids to not drop a class if they're or if they're in over their heads to drop earlier and then these were all the comments on the cons of keeping the WF the Cal grant um grade kids on what they did not what they didn't do more Equitable colleges and other districts aren't doing it less of a barrier for students who might try something a little bit challenging and so we are recommending that we remove the w well it's already removed I am recommending that we add the following sentence to the AR and
160all the changes by the way are in red on your attached board document or ar document and the sentences the wp WF will not be calculated into the students GPA that is all thank you so much are there any questions final questions okay so this is a discussion item so I guess you will bring it back I propose on consent unless anyone objects does anyone object object bring it to consent we heard youone thank you thank you Miss Hansen so now we're going to go to 15.2 um and this is discussion of our regular board meeting for the new school year um and so we're going to bring it up for discussion so Crystal yes so attached um in board dos is a draft schedule for the 2425 school year for board meetings uh starting
161in uh August all the way through the end of the fiscal uh ending in June um so this is these dates have been verified against holidays and then also uh verified with uh regulatory documents that are due periodically through the year but I do believe we have some potential uh scheduling conflicts with board members so we can talk through that yeah so for me at least the September date doesn't really work so like any other week in September I'm happy to does anybody have any other conflicts I mean for me I'm out of the country the um from October 6 to whatever it is but but basically the October 9th date doesn't work um so like are you out all of October no it's just for two weeks or it's a week and a half
162you know when you get back uh I think it's the 16th so you're back the 16th yes in the in the past we don't always reschedule because it's so hard for staff sometimes we don't always reschedule for one board meeting member you can if it works but you don't have to okay for board members to occasionally meet Miss a meeting correct but these are corresponding with some dates so the um we could move the 18th to the 11th September September so one at a time September what September it would be September 11th Wednesday September 11th is the week following Labor Day so then we would still be able to post Labor Day is the second so you would post Friday the 6th do anybody oppos to moving to September 11th it's only one meeting that
163month I was gonna ask about that can I ask a question it seems like there's fewer meetings than we've had in the past that was intentional there's yeah um especially hope throughout the fall uh there tends to be lighter agendas than we were finding that it worked okay because just sometimes when we have fewer meetings the the agendas can get so overpacked sometimes they can during the fall it that's usually in the spring when we when we bump bump up to holiday weeks but in the fall um usually okay for and that's just for August and September one other comment if if we know what day uh elected people will be certified I think we want to have the meeting the first Wednesday we'll we'll talk we'll talk about December which was we spent a
164lot of time on the December schedule I think there's a rule about having there is can can we go one at a time can we start with September so September 11th okay yes okay and then Amy you said you'd be back when uh the 16 so I'm gone six to 16 so we do have two meetings that month um proposed is the 9th when because we have two meetings in the way that October is a little bit longer of a month I think it would be then so we have the 9th and 30th so we could have one to 16th that gives us two weeks she's not back in she's not back October 2nd would work I mean I don't know if that works if we already move September one week earlier to move October
1659th to October 2nd but I don't know what but then we would need to still we would do oer we have one at the beginning three weeks in between and then one at the [Music] end we could we could we could probably do that October 2nd yeah any objections so we'll keep so we'll move the 9th to October the 2nd and keep October 30th I expect everyone to dress up for halloweek um okay December December Rich so when we looked at December couple things we are at csba that first week um so the first so the first week is out we have to approve um we have to approve uh first interim we can get an extension because it will be done prior to the 15th but the deadline for that is the 15th County
166Council said Laura what did County Council say m the new elects are um officially in office the second Friday of December which is December 13 December 13th yes yes so we moved it to December yeah which I I was trying to actually do the 11th but it didn't because it was the 18th or because it was the 13th sorry is that okay okay I thought so too all right any any study so in November there's only one board meeting is that correct and that's on that so uh for I'm sorry for what month for November there's only one board meeting so for uh November there's only one board meeting and December there's only one board meeting okay did you say we're moving that one a week earlier which one which one December no December remains
167on December 18th har we can throw in a study session or two for you okay I think do we have do we have any study we can we can schedule special meetings and study sessions a little later those are a little unsure right now so yeah cuz usually we want to have like one or two board Retreats yeah so we and yeah this does not include board Retreats um or potentially any these just are regularly scheduled board meetings okay any other comment alrighty so this schedule I don't think we have to put it to a vote correct this is just discussion we'll bring it back for adoption on consent okay thank you all right the next discussion is on the board self evaluation um and so I'll I'll be doing that Crystal um so if
168we can put up the PowerPoint oh yeah yeah I'm sorry thank you um vice president Nori do we have any public comments on the self evaluation we did not no one wants to say anything okay great can you put I'm sorry for the self EV yeah no I haven't but let's check with the zoom oh okay there's anyone on Zoom that has a public comment on this item please raise your hand the board self eval evaluation I see that okay thank you can we go ahead and put up the PowerPoint okay so as we pull that up um annually we do our board self- evaluation um in coordination with our superintendent evaluation um because we are just as much part of the team as a board as we are um also supporting our superintendent um
169so this is the time of the year where we began to do that um and wanted to share the process and kind of where we want to go with this um and I so I'm waiting for that to happen um so that we can have a final discussion to when that gets started did I go ahead let me find my PowerPoint okay yeah so I want to share with our uh board self evaluation we did this a couple of years ago um I remember um trusty du was helpful in helping us figure this out as well in the team prior to this one um but the quote is O often the best judge of what works in governance and What needs Improvement are the governance team themselves um and so I'm excited to talk about
170self board evaluation My Hope Is that there'll be more invest and reflection I know it's a little hard um in public spaces to talk about ourselves um but my hope is that we can trust the process and really um think about how this not only can benefit our team as a whole including our superintendent but also how it helps us with our communication and support of our community to improve ourselves and um as EDI says everybody gets evaluated so this is just part of that learning environment learning about ourselves thank you so much and so we're on the second page so why do we conduct a self board evaluation to demonstrate accountability ensure that the district governance effectively supports student achievement and the attainment of the district vision and goal this is part of our
171board policy what is the board self- evaluation process this came from our handbook a written appraisal distributed to board m members two weeks prior to decid upon date each board member completes the written appraisal appraisal independently the district confidential staff will compile individual responses into the summary and the board members will review the summary report as information item a subsequent open meeting part two facilitated work session superintendent will work with the board president to develop a prop proposal related to the agenda and external facilitator this proposal shall be discussed and revise as necessary approved by the board as a whole in Open Session a date and time established during this time the board shall review summary report provided by the facilitator following the working session as an information item on subsequent public meeting so here's
172my recommendation based off the research we have I have done um conduct csba District um governance team board self evaluation as electronic and individual responses are confidential and the csba provides facilitation in line with the governance board self evaluation they need about six weeks um lead which we do have um so $4,000 um sud doesn't have a written appraisal form on file we don't still have one um written is no longer efficient um so um having something online helps us to be more efficient individual responses are confidential and show a measure for Collective response the board receive automatic summary with save staff time and csba would provide facilitation that would allow us to do individual and Collective responses update our governance handbook as needed and strengthen our communication amongst each other to support student achievement
173strengthen a relationship and support to our superintendent the evaluation um for those who have not done this before is the divided in two parts first is the condition of effective ordinance oh ordinance sorry you guys governance um around Unity governance team roles and responsibility governance team culture governance team operations board meetings governance leadership development and part two would be Board responsibility setting Direction establishing the structure creating a supportive environment ensuring accountability demonstrating Community leadership for each statement individuals will select a descriptor that would most accurately describe the extent to which a board demonstrates the quality characteristics on the next slide it says how to use the self- evaluation um results um the board can schedule a special Open Session as a conversation almost like a study session or a workshop um and the report can
174guide some of our communication and also set goals for our board that's separate than the Strategic it's kind of like our professional development um which means that some of our um Retreats and things of that sort it could guide some of that work um and so it help structure our board conversation confirm our strengths which are in green confirm our areas of growth and identify areas where perceptions are mixed um and then focus and set goals and then schedule development workshops based off that and so I want to open this up to board discussion um determine and agree a timeline for board self- evaluation determine the evaluation to I suggest csba and then expand consider us to expand the completion also the cabinet but that's just me I'm always more open to those who work
175with us and meet with us often beyond the superintendent um to be able to give us feedback because I think that perception is is could we impact their work we sure do um and so that would be helpful so I want to take this moment to talk about that we do have a leadway for um csba to to do this with us um and also facilitate an open session yes who's the facilitator from csba um I reached out to Angelina that's who I reached out to is she the person um yeah she did last and then it'd be Workshop format when we have the discussion based off our policy it could be a work the results can be in a workshop well we have to discuss in a public session but then it can guide
176but a workshop is public just as long as it's yes yeah yeah it doesn't have to be a regular meeting it has to just be an open session right I guess I'm curious since since I'm new so how how did the boards self evaluation process work last time with CSP we did the survey and then they had a slide that had the cumulative like the averages of each thing and then there was like a discussion where if I recall there maybe 40 there a fair number of like these numbers between one and five and then you could say oh look notice that one with this number and then talk about it I haven't found it to be transformative but I don't think we have time to like really bring in something somebody something new the
177whole time I've been here I don't think it's been transformed yeah I I mean I would recommend that maybe just really like really focus on that Unity of purpose I like the idea of bringing in cabinet um I don't know if we I I actually think the evaluation does help I think where we struggled at last time is really having a real open conversation it was within our regular board meetings and I think it should have been Maybe be something separate where we can have more intimate conversation but um I do think it's helpful um because it gives insight to our behavior and how that what is that communicating to others and how they see us and how they want to work with us but also our reflection as individuals as well as collective um
178and I know that it's hard doing self evaluate I mean we're asking our superintendent to do it I mean it's it's hard it's hard work um but think as leadership and I I've said this before if we're going to ask others to be reflective we have to be reflective even if it's not transformative is only not transformative because we don't want it to be transformative so you do have to invest and Trust the process um and it creates an opportunity to have conversation my my suggestion would be this time is to do after we do it I really we've never done this before and I think it's really important we should ask each board member how they really felt about it and then that could be feedback for the next time right what could make
179it better [Music] um that's it okay so I was actually there I think three I think all the candidates were there except you actually at the past board self Val I thought it was fine like the format and stuff I don't know about the consultant like I'm fine if we wanted to go with the new one too but other than that I thought the process was fine how we did it last year so we can look at getting a different consultant through csba but I think the tool itself and having someone else do it outside of lore and myself to be able to do that would be helpful so we're looking so we do want a facilitator um we can figure out if it needs to be a special Open Session um and I can
180figure yes I can figure that out with Crystal so I'm going to go ahead just to clarify I don't believe it has to be a special open session it just has to be Open session it just has to be open session so you could choose to put it at a regular meeting oh okay or you could choose to have a separate meeting for it gotcha thank you for the clarification and in my previous experience we usually had uh board self- evaluations at a board retreat because then it's yeah it's much more um conducive to conversations and trying to dig deeper into um issues that are raised so Crystal together we can work she say that again I couldn't oh I was just saying that um in my past experience we always did it as a
181board retreat because then it's it's just more a smaller group and you dive deeper into the results and yeah so we'll look at a Open Session I'll work with Crystal around the date um but we probably will need to get this started pretty soon to give them some leeway to put out the document so that you guys can fill it out the other thing is do we want to I recommend expand it to Cabinet I feel like this last year I'm like we impact their work so it'd be nice to hear from them beyond our superintendent um because I know she's graciously get them involved yes the questions are about board members by board members so if we had the cabinet's responses merged in with ours that might make it confusing if you were going
182to do cabinet you'd probably want a separate so you have the board average and then the cabinet average and then the questions probably wouldn't be exactly the same question s so just having someone who's not on the board fill out questions is as if they were a board member may or may I don't remember all the questions but it might not like it may not work and it might give funny results if if we all think we're really bad something they all think we're good or vice versa it would be it it would just be what it is I mean we do our best with whatever we have but I'm just pointing out that that they may not be questions that are exactly right for people like you know how's the how's your experience on
183the board if you're not on the board like it would be so just point of clarification um is it the boards wish to have cabinet involved I don't think we've gotten there yet okay he's saying the tool doesn't work I understand so if it if it's the desire of the board to get cabinet involved then I'll make sure that we have a tool that's able to work that's why I say I'm not opposed to that but I just wanted to point out that I think you that it would require something else I don't know what your vision is shanis but if that changes anything for you that it it may it may or may not be the same tool okay so thank you for that I didn't think about that so I think what I
184if if um the board agrees with me if I have folks who agree I just work with Crystal on a way that they can give feedback to us um and csba may use this tool if they feel like it's appropriate but we may be able to find another way to get that feedback fine going whatever the two of you want to do why thank you I'm fine with getting cabinet feedback too okay because especially we've been working a lot on our governance and it would be good to get feedback if we've improved over time right I hope so um yeah I'm fine with it okay all right crystal we have a lot to talk about okay thank you all right so we are moving on you guys it is only 57 we are doing good
185time um we are going to talk about right now the approval of the doob description for executive director of people culture and collaboration uh before we get started are is there any public comment I have two public comments in person let's see who it is I wonder should we get the raise of hands and are they in the room or on they online in person I don't know who they are should we get the count on Zoom oh there's some on Zoom yeah well if no we haven't asked yet oh can we get the count on Zoom as well all right going once twice three times okay we have two we have two on two online two in person and I don't know who those people are but I'm sure they have something to say
186so thank you okay first up is um Edis salvator in 3 minutes three minutes we're supposed to do like 10 minutes but I think it'll be okay for three unless you guys want to do two three [Laughter] minut I'll be quicking you'll still have minutes three minutes thank you all right um I rise today with a uh issue which I have brought before you before which is SD's ongoing concern with the ratio of administrative positions to non administrative positions in this District though I have been assured I have not actually seen the paperwork I've been assured we are not out of compliance with the state um I do see that we have currently 79 classified and certificated administrators in this District adding this position would be number 80 um if we have 800 employees more
187than 800 employees eight a thousand employees that means this is 8% of our district is the administrative little topheavy I think the state average is supposed to be 7% the ratio so we are always watching that and always concerned that said I do believe that we have seen a dedicated attempt follow through on the previous superintendence plan for um implementation of equity resources and training and efforts in this district and I we have a new superintendent who has a new plan and this job seems well positioned to support that plan my only concerns with the job description as written is that it is not clear it says that this uh Position will include coaching and um interfacing with staff and students and it's not clear how that will happen um I don't know if that's
188normally explained like in our El coordinator position I didn't check the the uh job description to see if it explained how that person interacted with staff but because it would not be supervisory over staff but would still have a prominent role to play interacting with staff i' like to see that um fleshed out more I hope to hear um some more about it in the discussion okay thank you uh last comment in person is Abby Corman good evening last board meeting I mentioned my disappointment in hearing our District's restructuring of Dei and the elimination of one of our Equity tosa positions for the 2425 school year but I was proud of board at the end of the last meeting asking to hear from those Dei coaches in a formal board presentation to honor the hard
189work on the ground work Taja and Pablo have put in and I'm so pleased to see this position created and to know that this position will be a part of cabinet it took a few years but this Grassroots recommendation from pre pandemic is finally coming to fruition I hope whoever is hired helps racially diversify our cabinet and knows our community in in order to serve them best I am still wondering though and hope you are too what exactly are we restructuring toward whatever it is I hope we will continue both the district Equity Council and site Equity councils our racial Affinity work bipo Focus stress resilience professional development cultural grad celebrations and really much of or if not all of the work Taja and Pablo started to systematize Taja and Pablo's work faced many obstacles
190including systemic and structural ones and I hope we're working closely with them these last few months and even the fall semester to build upon their work even though we are continuing one of these positions I know in the fall we will not have either of them so I hope that we're coordinating with them closely to build off of their work I'm proud of this district and the board for affirming the importance of a focus on Equity even more so after hearing the hatchings presentation I loved the big five learnings and that we're talking not just about deficiencies but also missed opportunities as well as not just putting on a Band-Aid but addressing root causes and creating evidence-based processes for interven intervening and not skipping steps I really look forward to us incorporating as truste cus
191said the plan do study act cycle into more systems I look forward to hearing more about our vision and how we're deepening this work together intentionally thank you thank you from our Zoom audience our first speaker is Jenny Bloom hi my name is Jenny varges Bloom I am a board member of the Ravenswood City School District um I am just commenting today to say thank you for having this um position put into the cabinet this is something that um I know a a bunch of community members from East paloalto and East um Meno Park came together and asked for um a look into the equity work and the ways that you guys are thinking about all students on your campuses um to make sure that they feel like they are part of the campus um
192back in 2020 and um continued ask that we have made in the last um couple years as well and I think that from all of the meetings that I've attended and heard there are many groups of students and parents and families and staff and um staff and administrators who want to do that work um and so I think having someone that is proactively thinking about this role and is sitting on the superintendent's cab cabinet um an executive committee I think that is a really important part of the work that we need to get done and I look forward to um having that person work with all of the districts that feed into your into your high school district including ours so um thank you for this position and I am looking forward to um seeing
193who that person will be um if it is approved by your board and I recommend that you approve it thank you thank you our last our last speaker on Zoom is parent here we can't hear you oh sorry can you hear me now yes I can hear you now right thank you uh yes uh my my comment is focused on something that come up uh several times over the last couple of years unless I've missed something the board has not defined what the term Equity means so uh until you do we do I don't see how you can be hiring such a high level position that is focused on an undefined term uh one of the district feeder schools I saw yesterday has a definition it's a very simple one and just thinking about it
194I thought I'd share it with you because I'm hardpressed to think that it wouldn't get pretty near Universal agreement from the community they defined Equity as quote each person receives what they need to develop and Thrive again each person receives what they need to develop and Thrive the prior superintendent had uh her own definition and it was pretty similar to this that I think she was going to start the process of formalizing it I just don't think that ever happened so if you're going to approve a job description for such a high level position in the superintendent's cabinet I believe I read um that uses the term Equity literally 13 times in the job description at least Let's uh let's define it um and the other thing I see in the job description is that
195in some places Equity looks like it's being conflated with the term social justice which can mean a lot of different things to a lot of a lot of people so it says Equity social justice in some places so again my input is simply like can we please after all these years put a definition on on equity and maybe now is the time since you're hiring such a high level position that is focused on this topic thanks thank you thank you so now we would turn it over to our superintendent Crystal Le thank you and thank you for um the comments um and the interest in this position um as the background um states that creation of this position uh of the equity executive director of people culture and collaboration is essential to our districts commitment
196to diversity Equity inclusion access and Leadership and accountability this position will provide the Strategic leadership and expertise necessary to develop and Implement a comprehensive plan to Foster a diverse Equitable and inclusive culture that aligns with the district's Mission values and goals so I I do have to acknowledge that this district has discussed for several years um a definition of equity um and we have made we have we have been tried and true on our efforts with consultants and internal Staffing um to further this discussion and create a larger sense of equity um inclusion and belonging within our district um you know there forms and types of equity uh racial educational gender Etc so it's important that we are defining it to something that actually fits our district and all words um can be weaponized and
197used to create a narrative I am trying to calm those down and to look at the true meaning of what these words are not what we see in the news not what we see nationally but what they actually mean to our district and how they can benefit our students all of our students so I think that this is the next step um for uh when I was serving as interim and I was meeting with the EDC we did talk about uh a director of an EDI position title than what you may have seen before because it's so much broader than when we started this four years ago um so I'm I'm really hopeful with for this position been working um kind like I have ideas in my head so it's like um getting them out
198and to be able to share a larger plan um and vision of how I see this work actually being done in the district uh the first step in this journey uh in my superintendency is to seek approval from the board tonight any comments yeah I can go first so um I think my thoughts are I think a lot of times the reason our Equity work hasn't been successful in our district at least when I talk to teachers is really some of the work can be kind of divis and that a lot of people feel like it's kind of pushing me out of there's only one right way and we're aren't really interested in having conversation about what Equity means or how there are different perspectives on what we can do and that there's kind of
199one Orthodox way so I I do kind of agree with some of the public comment that it is weird to me that we still haven't defined Equity but what I'd say is more importantly than any you know what's in the job description is who we actually hire for the role and I do trust our superintendent to hire someone who really will approach equity in that collaborative way that tries to bring everyone together instead of dividing people apart because I do think we aren't immune to some of the division that does happen and I think that's a big part about why a lot of our Equity work doesn't end up very successfully so I think more important than any like job description per se is who's actually in the role and I trust that we'll take
200some time to make sure it's someone who really can focus on bringing people together no matter their differences to our common goal any other comments comment um I I do agree that it's important to Define what Equity is because as I look at um comments made by community members or just different stakeholders they all have a different definition of what Equity is and some people are confusing it with equality and I know in my previous District it took us we went through a journey of defining equity and then having an equity policy as a result of that but it took a whole year so it was not like one person deciding what it was but it was more feedback from all the different stakeholders different drafts and everyone reviewing the drafts and tweaking it so
201then at the end of that process yeah it took a long time but then everyone was bought in that this was the right definition for the district um and I know that SEO I think participated in the equity Network um a few years back um because I remember like we all gathered together as the County right um and so I think that was the beginning of that journey and why so many districts started doing the definition of equity work so I think we can continue that effort and really hone in on on a definition but I I'm in support of this uh position because I think this person could actually lead some of that work in terms of defining what Equity is and bringing people together I think I have a perspective than trusty Nori
202I wouldn't say that our Equity work has not our Equity uh work has not worked um so this is a huge district with many moving parts and there's so many people who have done amazing work for so long um so I think about the reimagining of Redwood I think about the work with uh restorative practices the work with trauma informed learning the work with our Mental Health Providers the work the principles do with their St the work the teachers do so Equity work is a work in progress um and even like the brary changes I mean there was a time when kids from East paloalto were scattered and it was heartbreaking at one point really high-risk kids um were best to kont and some of those kids did not do well some kids did beautifully
203at carmont but many kids did not and the belonging work that takes place um I think I think the sites are operating with the definition of of equity right and that is really striving and public education has a hard job we are striving as a district to give every kid what they need we are right and we that comes in every alap report um and there's just been so much work so we um I think that this Bo is also operating with the definition that we're we're striving to give every kid what they need I think I'm getting tired and there's another piece of that right belonging Equity is belonging when I when I interviewed the woman who's winning the Emily Garfield award Equity work is compassion and this district is so compassion compassionate and
204I see it I see it when I when I visit our schools and when I talk to our staff so it's not true I don't want I don't think we should say that our Equity work has not worked because so much has been done we still have work to do right but aren't we I mean aren't we operating with we we're operating with definitions is not true that we're not off we're not OP we're operating without a definition of equity that is the work we do as a public institution every day right yes absent of a defined um you know as I stated in the background absent of a defined goal and defined definition this work is being done throughout the district right I mean um and we do as Carrie you notably said um
205you know it's very much a collective um with how the sites are doing it to the um lens that we use and through all of our departments um up to Cabinet you see it in the LC cap and you see it through that we still have a a lot of work to do um this is something that is is uh always ongoing and as we continue to build the relationships with our partner districts um and uh and just uh where we are um also just in the the state of of the world today um in education and creating a safe and welcoming environment for all students um I think I think we can do that I have a comment May a little different than how you guys have been going um I want to start
206by saying I do not want any employee of this District to feel that they do not fit here because of Any aspect of their identity by which I mean race gender religion or any other aspect and I want every student in our district regardless regardless of any aspect of their identity to have their education needs met I've received push back from constituents about this role um we this board have heard from various groups about issues that a person in this role isn't that this job intend job description is intended to Define that they would work on to help address I know I'm not aware of every issue and concern in the district but to name some that have been raised in this room our concerns that black educators are being pushed away concerns that black
207students do not feel safe and concerns that Jewish students do not feel safe our district has tried to using Consultants to help with these issues and in my opinion the efforts haven't worked Crystal recommends his job description to try a new approach and I'd like to support her in her efforts to try that new approach that said I don't support the job description is written if the job description is Rewritten to exclude the words diversity equity and social justice along with any references to Dei while keeping the words that I understand to be what actually intended in the role people culture collaboration inclusion access leadership accountability welcoming and belonging then I'd be comfortable and I'd vote Yes diversity while celebrations such as strength and diversity are great the organizational efforts that I have seen in
208this District in the name of diversity have appeared to me to attempt to provide opportunities to some people and not others based on their identity I understand this practice to be illegal Equity this word can mean equal opportunity which I support and I believe our whole Community widely supports but it can also mean equal outcomes which I do not support and which I believe many of our community members do not support given the ambiguity in the term I think we should not use it at all and especially not in a job description social justice has a same potential interpretations as Equity that is I support and believe that the community supports and believes equal economic political and social rights and opportunities for everyone but it can also be interpreted as an intent to take away
209from some to give to others which I think is for partisan politicians and not anything that our school board should do to either students or staff there have been recent articles in the New York Times as well as other news outlets about other organizations moving away from certain terms and I think we'd be well served by making a similar shift if we can use words that reduce ambiguity I think we should I ask that this job description be Rewritten to keep people culture collaboration inclusion access leadership accountability welcoming and belonging and either exclude the terms Dei diversity equity and social justice or at a minimum provide clear definition of what each word means and explicitly what they don't mean that diversity does not mean making any decisions based on race or based on any other
210identity factor that Equity does not mean equal outcomes and that social justice does not mean reducing opportunities for some to increase opportunities for others and then with those changes be brought back for us for approval and I do want to say I agree with what sopic said that who's in the role is super important and I would like to be able to support this role thank you any other comments alrighty let me say mine let me take a deep breath there was a whole lot said um I just want to be frank um Rich your comments triggered me right um and yet I respect them right I I truly respect them um and you were courageous to tell your truth so I want to tell mine as I sit here and I look at the
211Ravenswood alumni it started there for me um when was that Crystal it had to been oh my gosh whenever Carrie and I went to meet with them because I had to go back to my root I didn't grow up here I grew up in Ohio and I know what I know what exclusion looks like um and I know what it looks like for folks who people have said privileged looks like right being a social work worker working with Appalachian families working with Orthodox Jewish families all kinds of families and um being very privileged growing up in a a Suburban neighborhood after um red lining was illegal so we were able to move other places than certain parts of Cincinnati that really segregated people and so I sit on that history coming from Ohio to California
212and having the privilege of living in East Palo Alto and having my neighbors um deal with astronomical um barriers related to education um and so being very hurt and having a community that was hurt about some of the things that have been said um in the last two years um in this board meeting as it relates to who has access and who doesn't um caused a lot of paw a lot of tears and I went back to my roots of who I am as a person and went and talked to my elders and brought Carrie with me I said Carrie we need to go talk to the elders because something doesn't feel it feels like history again um sitting with the Ravens with alumni I'm a person who sit at the feet of our elders
213that's how I've been taught because you can learn from your elders in their walks so I love hearing about different people's history going to the Jewish Museum talking to family and friends talking to Crystal talking to different people because your context matters right um and so even when I hear the parents saying um that I may or may or not disagree who talks about this is hurting me I actually feel you right because I have my own context so sitting with those Elders they talked about their experience with this district and they were born way before us and what they have talked about and the tear the tears that they had the adversities that they had in seoa Union High School District is documented they didn't grow up saying woo woo SEO is great that
214what they did was they said we had to B bound together to have success because the barriers in the district were so ins steeped that um they said they couldn't rely on just the system they had to rely on themselves and so yes things were blocked for them so when I hear you I honor you and I know how people feel because I've had it done to myself and my children as well as the elders from our community because of the work that Crystal and Carrie and I have done those Elders are now texting us saying thank you for listening to us thank you for telling us their story we're trying to figure out respectfully following their lead about and working with the EPA archives trying to figure out what that means and so I
215sit here and think about the word diversity equity and inclusion it is not a weapon unless you want to use it as a weapon it's just as simple as that because it's broader than race it is children with disabilities it is people when I call I'm just GNA tell a little bit of my story call and say can I get a meeting and people don't pick up the line or they have meetings because I'm 94303 because they assume I'm not coming to the meeting I have problems with that so when I look at this and even though I'm angry about not angry because Simone helped me um but like I think about why I got on this board was to help because I was having issues with how we were talking about equity and so
216because it wasn't a definition but because there were so many other things in the way we couldn't even get to the definition we were just flying trying to do everything and I also hear some parents also talking for communities without talking to them right and so that has their own own ideas and own Solutions and so when I think about this Dei work I feel so passionate about it because we don't want to intentionally or unintentionally leave people out which is why mtss was so powerful what you've been presenting is like we're going deeper just not wider right that wasn't happening to students who come in in a variety of ways right whether you're AP student everybody think you're smart and all this stuff but you're suffering on the inside because we do have students
217like that that's why we had several children and um contemplating suicide in the southern part of our County um and having to deal with 5150s right and I yearn for those kids as well and so when I think about Dei I'm Not Afraid let's look it we can be an example of how to address it and I think it's important that we stand on that um and not be afraid of the words now when it comes to equity we have not created a definition I actually said to Crystal that might be the first thing that we needed to do we just never got there right and we were making decisions on equity on opening up and all this kind of stuff and wasn't taking other things into consideration but we opened up school anyway why
218because it was the right thing to do but it also hurt some folks right because they were dealing with things that other folks didn't deal with and people in other parts of our County such as carmont didn't come back they were like we'll see you in a fall right and so you have to kind of think about personalization and that's what Dei and Equity is all about it's some level of personalization as much as we can as a public system serving 9,000 kids I mean like it's not like serving 300 right um when I think about this title I actually challenge Crystal I'm like what does this mean right and so when I think about this being at the cabinet level it is saying we're going to be at the for thought right um and
219that this person is almost like a liaison to the sites and the people right and bringing it back up uh and so work we say if you're an executive director you should have a case load as well as the ones who are on the line so you don't forget who you're serving and so that's kind of what I see this position as um but I'm just going to be honest if we use it as a weapon then it is a weapon but I love what Nori said sopic I apologize that we have to trust our superintendent to understand our context as a district The Good The Bad Bad and the Ugly saying what we're not going to do like we're not going to repeat this lesson right so we hear your heart excluding people but
220I'm not afraid and I hope our superintendent isn't afraid to talk about things headon it is not going to change from conversations I heard a teacher say um to me particularly this week which is prime I'm not going to be scared to talk about the hard topics in a respectful culturally humility way meaning that I can still learn I can still be sharpened which means there's a conversation which means I can adjust when it needs to happen and so my hope is that part of the job description is cultural humility within the organization um the last thing I will say is good job Crystal we finally have a position that we have been promising individuals since the first day I got on this board staff were hurting May 20th 20 I'm looking at Abby 2020
221there was a letter sent about people not feeling like their voices were heard and the impact is black teachers leaving that might not be all of it it might not be all accompass but to me there's something wrong there's something wrong with par parents crying on the on our microphone saying you don't see me you don't hear me you didn't have a meeting you didn't understand me or the kids you have to bring back from the Brinks justify why we have Community liaison positions that is what Equity is about and I would say to you you told me what does it take to be a border trustee pay attention look at be intentional and so I'm going to challenge you to partner with me because we don't want your constituents to be left out just
222as much as mine or Amy's or siic or Carrie the last thing I will say the good work still happens thank you EDC thank you to those who weren't part of the EDC thank you for those who are sitting in a room that thinking about equity and making sure thinking about intentionally about all of our kids I want to say thank you not everybody's on the list but this is a statement saying no longer will attitudes intentional or unintentional keep any kid from access and matter of fact because we believe in you so much we're going to believe in you before you believe in yourself and we're going to make opportunities for you and we're going to think about each other my hope as a good govern governance board which is what I saw a
223few years back is that at some point our board can work together to understand each other so then when it SS to the right or left we're challenging each other saying where's the negotiation here so that we can impact those not only on the bell curve but those in the middle as well um and so I hope that that's okay if this is a problem we can talk offline um but that triggered me because there's historical factors here that some kids have not been seen and it is also some of our white kids who people don't even think about um and I do think there are some kids who are living in situations that show up mightily as my grandmother would say show up you don't have to look like what you feel like and
224they come to school every day um and they're living and they're taking AP classes and they're extraordinary um and yet they feel a loneliness on the inside and that adult who has space for them that's why I want to give more time to our counselors that they have the time and individuals have the time because education can be an adverse childhood experience and if it's a positive childhood experience it cancels out two or three first childhood experiences so I want this a place to be of belonging for everyone and have compassion I've been blessed by having not so great people at the district but they sharpened us to be better and I've had other people who embrace my own children and their friends um and now they're coming back to work for us because of
225that experience and I want it more cons consistent and intentional I look at s think I always tell him he had a beautiful experience and I want that I want to join him in having that for everyone G first I want to say I'm sorry you were triggered I know what that feels like um I want to respond to your statement first of all rich I don't want you to be on a different path I I think you're on a different path I don't want you to be on a different path because I care about you I think you are smart and you add a lot you are on a different path I know you feel like you're not I tell you you're on a different path when it comes the people the philanthropists in
226our area and our nation who care about Equity social justice and inclusion I think every philanthropist I pretty much that I know who supports public school and kids who need help they care about these things you'd be on a different path than so many of our staff members I mean I just I haven't met I mean people teachers get into public education because we represent de this is where this is where democracy plays out is this is this is what where we represent Equity social justice and inclusion they are not bad words um our staff members I I mean I just don't know very many that would say I not for this work I'm not for these words I don't want you to be on a different path [Music] um this if we if we
227really want to serve all kids we actually have to be about these words it is about social justice I mean social justice to me I I it conjures up images of people who have been the best humans in history right like Mother Teresa like a Martin Luther King and on and on I mean the type of people that we all strive to be and can't be social justice is a good word Equity when I interviewed the woman who's winning the um Emily Garfield award um she's gay and she to shared a story that when Gavin new opened up you know gay marriage in California she was there waited in line 5 hours got married and and was all over the Press I think I remember her picture do you guys remember all that press a
228woman with pink hair that's the woman who's winning the uh Emily Garfield award and she was a bit afraid to go back to school because people weren't as open then and she was hugged by so many kids right so inclusion that word that word is for so many of our kids and for somebody this woman who's winning the the Emily Garfield award I don't want you to be on a different path I know that there are some people that are cheering you on but there are others that are like no no this is what we do in public education um and again this district is operating on the definition of equity I'm going to say it again the definition we are operating on that nobody can agree disagree with is we are striving to get
229every kid what they need and we are a district about belonging that's what the heterogeneous thing is all about it's all about that we are putting kids together freshman year because they will learn from each other and we trust our teachers if it wasn't perfect the curriculum needs more we know those teachers are working so hard to than you better thank you okay um I want to go next um two things firstly I think my comments were misconstrued in what I said first I think a lot of the work that you were talking about happened even before we had any sort of formalized Equity role and you know happened um before that and I think what I was referencing I was there during the USC PD or whatever and I don't think that was a
230success in any sense of the word so you know I think there are I'm sure there are great things that have happened I think a lot of them also that you mentioned were outside of the purview of what this role would even do in the first place and secondly the thing that kind of struck me at this discussion is I think we're too fixated on words like the only I agree with what you said president Stevenson but the only thing I push back is I don't think those Notions should be tied to words necessarily I think the ideas you describe far surpass any words and I think the time like I said before the time we spend debating about what these words mean really take away from some of the work that we could actually
231doing because I don't think any of these ideas should be tied to these terms and I think if we're fixating on the terms instead of what the goal we have which is that students feel supported that all students have opportunity that they don't feel like where their zip code comes from or what race they are determines their future or more ideals than what words we pick to um Define them and I think that's what trusty gin's point was which is where I kind of see some agreement because there are words that are more politicized and words that would distract but just the words we use don't change what we value and I think that's the part we all agree on which is what we value I I appreciate that and I also think it's actions
232and I think it's also not ignoring people's context and Community context that's why I was triggered um because we talk about people being left out there are groups of people left out groups for years not a couple years um and so I appreciate you clarifying that I do challenge you in the sense and then we're going to move to a vote um there's this I this activity that I do with people what's in the name we know words make a difference uh sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me yeah right right so words matter and so the great thing about the English language is that we can Define things so I do go back to the definition that I I do think there are lots of different definitions in
233work but we're trying to unify us right and into a purpose and a vision that could be part of the role to make sure we have a clear vision and purpose and Direction where we all can go together um um but it takes a lot of courage to me to do something and be an example of what it could look like when I think about our sarb it wasn't there before it took a lot of courage and unraveling and building up it wasn't easy you didn't have an award five years ago so take some work right and that's what this is right we know that it's the right thing to do but if we trust our superintendent who now has the context and the heart and she's thinking about all the kids and she's holding
234her own context of who kids are right and what she needed when she was a a teenager or her son or whomever we all hold those things and we have to trust it and we have to have conversation to get to an agreement around what that looks like um and I think we have to be courageous to have the conversation even if it feels uncomfortable so thank you for making us feel uncomfortable it must be the right all this I wanted to make resp I'd like to make a response a lot of people have said things about what I said so first I just want to remind that I'm comfortable with all of the words people culture collaboration inclusion access leadership accountability welcoming and belonging which I believe captured everything that everybody talked about and
235I support the role so every example that I heard anybody say is covered by the words that I say I support at least that's I understand those words to be so I guess my question would be could we agree that Equity does not mean equal outcome no no okay I'd like to hear from Amy I haven't heard from you I mean I think Equity is really about um having high standards for for all students but I I think we have to go through the exercise right if we have high standards and we're trying to put in the resources and the support so that um students regardless of their background can meet these high standards then eventually there there should be pretty equal outcomes like that's almost like the goal I mean it may not really
236reach there for a very very long time but if we're doing everything right and we're actually putting in place everything that a student needs they should be able to reach the same high standards so I guess that's my perspective um on on just Equity but I think we have to come together as a community to really Define that because that's just my perspective um but I think the other thing that you brought up social justice actually when I saw that word it is kind of a triggering word out in the community and my eyebrows kind of went up a little bit but then I took a step back and I said well there is a more formal definition of what social justice means in the education space and and there's actually a social justice standards
237um for K to 12 that can be applied and it's really focused on anti-bias right and making sure that um like there's four domains and and I actually went to to some of this training with my previous District after they came together with an equity definition then the next step we went to the um the Museum of Tolerance and then we were going through this whole um social justice standards and the entire District had representatives from all different stakeholders going through this but it's really centered around helping students with identity diversity Justice and then action and so being not a a bystander but like an ally and and kind of moving from first identifying and and figuring out who you are as a person um all the way to valuing diversity and then when you
238see something happening that is not right that's the Justice part and then taking action on what you see that's not right I mean that's that's really the focus around social justice and that's not what the definition is out in the new news media and all these people being upset but I think that all takes time as part of this journey so that people understand what social justice is supposed to mean but I I agree that there's some triggering because people are not on board with all of this right my general suggestion is to take out the words that are causing the triggering and still keep the words that have all the meaning so I'm not trying to take away from the position I'm trying to say these words like you just acknowledge this word is
239triggering like so why use ambiguous triggering words and we don't have to thank you all so much for your comments I'm going to take a pause right now right take a deep breath we've had our tough conversation and I respect it and appreciate it um is there a motion on the floor I propose that we uh ask superintendent to clarify the ambiguous terms and bring it back for approval next meeting so is there a second motion well I had a so I had a question um is is the approval of this time sensitive in in terms of finding a person to start on a certain date I mean everything we do is time sensitive um I mean I would like to open this up for Recruitment and hire um but you know we want to
240do we want to do it correctly I also know that um one tosa we have one tosa that's going to be here in the fall and they're out on um leave for a while so we do need a sounds like we need a position as well again is there a motion can you use microphone I believe there's a motion but there's not a second okay so it sounds like I'll do another motion I'll do another motion I accept hold hold on so it sounds like the first motion has that has died there was not a second okay next motion um I accept the superintendent's recommendation that' be a move yes that's been a is there a second I second all in favor I I all in all in not favor thank you did I I
241I think I said that right so thank you 4 to one to the chair okay so approval of the job description right okay thank you all for um the conversation um rich I hope that we can continue to have the conversation um and that we continue to engage in this process as we hire a person for this position thank you all right we are at 16.2 adoption of resolution 2016 is that right yeah no not 2016 y'all 16 um let me see let's see if there's any public comment I have no public comments in person I see no hands in Zoom all right so This one belongs to Christine thank you so so on February 14th the board approved a resolution authorizing scni Consulting to prepare the 2425 Engineers report as a maintenance assessment District
242included in the board packet is the preliminary report which includes the estimate of the assessment the final report will be brought forth to the board for approval at the June 12th board meeting I Ask of the board approve resolution number 16 to appr to approve the preliminary Engineers report thank you does anyone have any questions or comments no okay um can we have a motion please I move approval of this item I second all in favor I this is roll call oh sorry roll call we have to do roll call for the other one okay roll call student truste yya yes truste again yes trusty du yes trusty C yes vice president Nori yeah yes president Stevenson yes motion adopted all right um we are 89 minutes till 10 o'clock um and we're almost done
243we have do we have any future agenda items I think we're done I saw that look crystal is given to us the I was afraid we do not have any future items um adjournment y'all does anybody want to adjourn motion motion I move to a journ all favor wait who's the second though second sorry who said second one we can't go until someone does the second we need a second motion please Nori second thank you I'm in favor I