SUHSD Board Meeting Mar 22, 2023

001today uh good afternoon welcome to this Wednesday March 22 2023 regular board meeting of the Board of Trustees uh at this time we are opening to see if there are any comments about items on the closed session agenda um I see one attendee if you would like to comment about any of the closed session agenda items please raise your Zoom hand okay seeing no one wanting to make a comment about the closed session items we'll recess into closed session and plan to return to open session at 6 pm thank you hey good evening everyone and welcome to this Wednesday March 22nd 2023 regular board meeting of the Board of Trustees at the Sequoia Union High School District we opened the meeting at 4 pm then recess to closed session we now return to open session

002um we'll start with roll call okay our student trustees will be here soon I'll start with Justine Nori here trustee coo here trustee Dubois here vice president Stevenson [Music] thank you the next item on the agenda is approval of the agenda before approving the agenda I have two change requests for the board from me number one I'd like to move item 15.1 related to superintendent's contract to be immediately after the report out from closed session and before the consent agenda number two after Consulting with our superintendent I would like to pull our discussion item 14.1 relating to correspondence from the community it was my decision to post a student's first letter as a discussion topic I believe the topic of heterogeneous classes versus leveled classes is an important topic it clearly has a lot of

003community interest we have not discussed it as a board since I joined over two years ago and I don't know when if ever our families had the opportunity to learn about this and provide feedback since our discussion would be referencing the letter I thought the most transparent way to proceed was to post it and talk about it we receive feedback after this posting and decided to post another letter that also requested transparency from the board the feedback has continued and I no longer believe that this forum is the right way to address those letters regarding the student's first letter when we discuss this matter we want to hear from our professional staff represented with data to review and also provide the community with the same opportunities in regard to the second letter I know that

004the superintendent has already sent an email on how our Equity work will continue and the board supports her in this effort with that said I move approval of the agenda with the two changes I just described and request a second I make a motion to approve yours you second okay so I made a motion carry seconds all in favor of approving the agenda with those revisions aye aye okay unanimously passes with that said there may be some of you who want to comment on the items that have been pulled the public May comment about items not on the agenda during the public comment section of the agenda which is for items that are not all agenda so if anyone did come here tonight to make comments about the items that have been pulled you still

005have the opportunity to so comment okay the next item on our agenda is report out on the closed session items by a vote of five board members in favor zero against the Board of Trustees approved the settlement agreement for case number 2022-2023-13 by a vote of five board members in favor zero against the Board of Trustees approved the settlement agreement for case number 2022-2023-15 so the next item is 15.1 which we moved to be just after the report on the closed session items the next agenda item addresses the board's Open Session discussion and possible approval of an employment agreement with superintendent candidate Crystal Leach regarding her employment as superintendent with the district the proposed employment agreement also addresses all of the terms of her employment as well as the effective date of the employment agreement

006the proposed employment agreement contains the following material terms term and work year the term superintendent employment agreement with the district will be April 1 2023 to March 31 2027. superintendent compensation and other terms of employment superintendent shall be paid beginning April 1 2023 based upon an annualized salary of 291 979.25 superintendent shall receive a master stipend of 1283 dollars upon receipt of a satisfactory evaluation at the end of the 2022-2023 school year the superintendent will be eligible for 2.5 percent merit-based step advancement increase on July 1 2023. while serving in the position of associate superintendent administrative Services Ms Leach shall also receive an associate superintendent administrative Services stipend of four thousand twenty two dollars and forty three cents per fiscal month until the associate superintendent position is filled by the district or until June 30

0072023 whichever comes first this associate superintendent stipend shall be prorated the superintendent works for less than a full fiscal month in the position of associate superintendent administrative services number five superintendent shall receive a 100 per month expense allowance to cover transportation and travel expenses number six superintendent shall be eligible to participate in the district's Health dental and vision benefits program on the same terms and conditions and subject to the same limitations as a District's management employees as those benefit plans providers and other terms and conditions may change from time to time number seven superintendent's terms of employment include the same work year and eligibility for sick leave time vacation holidays and District technology devices consistent with other full-time District classified management employees number eight superintendents terms of employment also include professional meetings slash dues and

008Leadership and Equity coaching this concludes the summary of the proposed superintendent employment agreement a complete copy of the superintendent employment agreement is available from the district office upon request at this point I welcome any comments from the public about this agenda item if anyone would like to issue to make a public comment from in the room there are comment cards on the table over there you fill it out along with the item on which which along with the item on which you wish to comment and provide the comment card to Laura Louise and if you are in the zoom audience you can raise your Zoom hand and we will see the total number of commenters and then take public comment if any let me know as a comment please raise your Zoom hand now or

009turn in your comment card now foreign seeing no comments okay saying no uh comments do I have a motion to approve the contract so moved we're going to discuss a second so moved oh second I second okay is there any discussion about this item this will be my roll call for comments oh I can start first um I just wanted to congratulate uh Crystal Leach um and I think through this process we as a board were able to align on what's important and what we were looking for in a superintendent and we also heard feedback through the survey and through focus groups and so coming out of this I think we are stronger as a leadership team and I have full confidence that Crystal Leach will get us to where we need to go so

010congratulations welcome aboard Crystal um we're excited that you will I guess not join I don't know what other word to say uh stay I don't know stay good okay um I wish I could do something fancy like combine some words or something but my mind's not working um but congratulations um we're excited that you are on board um I know that for me and for all the comments that I've received from individuals in my constituent area but also none and my not in my constituent area we're really concerned around Equity um and what that looks like in your commitment to continue to do that um starting with continuing the work that you did when you put the equity Council together during the interim superintendent the first time um in response to a lot of the

011feedback we have gotten from the community but also internally from our bypoc staff and their and allies who really didn't feel like they had a voice internally and that grassroot um internal push was embraced by you and I think it continues to be embraced by you and so I'm happy about that and your humility to learn and to have an equity coach and to really continue the work in ways that make sense for our district um for the way that we are designed so I'm excited that you will be continuing that work yeah I can go next so I've actually you know got to work with Crystal for nine months when I was a student trustee right after she became interim superintendent for the first time and I'd also like to reiterate everything that both

012my colleagues said about her leadership I mean from the time when I was a student I saw how much of a fierce fighter she was for all of our students of our district during probably one of the toughest time that our entire education system has ever faced and I know she'll continue to do such great work and I really look forward to all the great things that I know this board and this District's going to do over the next couple years and I don't think there's anyone else I'd rather have at the helm of it than Crystal each I want to say thank you for saying yes thank you for agreeing to work with us I think what I want to share is when I first joined this board the board didn't really do Retreats

013and I'm really big into training but we need lots of training as school board members and that wasn't really the culture and then we started to do Retreats a little bit longer a little bit longer some were good some were not so good and the two strongest Retreats that we have had as a governance team Under This Woman's leadership we had to retrieve two retreats in the last two months okay they were all day um they were highly effective we were joined by cabinet in the last a retreat and I learned a lot um so thank you I think you know I think she knows what to bring to people to bring us together and to get us working um like your tagline together we go and you did prove that you can bring people

014together during covid which was a terrible time to be a school board member and for all of us in education when 700 and 900 people were watching our meetings she was able to bring people together and that is the work that we have to do now right we need to bring people together um and I am absolutely confident that you are the person to work with us to work with the community to work with the staff to work with our students so thank you for saying yes so I just want to take this opportunity to elaborate a little bit on my quote that has been in the papers and it was in the press release that Crystal is the right person to lead this District now we have several major items to address including facility

015construction project moving forward with a new Equity training partner and deepening our connections with our feeder districts Crystal has the connections within our community the prior professional experiences and the necessary skills to lead us through all of these plus I know whatever else comes our way in the future I'm very excited to have you in this position with that I call for a roll call vote okay I'll start with our student trustee um let's survive via Zoom uh student trustees Rodriguez Velasquez yes okay she's on trustee Nori yes trustee coo yes trustee Dubois yes vice president Stevenson yes president again yes that's why I just motion carried congratulations Crystal okay for me again after she finished so thank you all um I just have something that I I do want to share see if I

016can get through it without blubbering um colleagues staff parents and students I am deeply honored and humbled to accept the position of superintendent of the Sequoia Union High School District I want to thank the Board of Trustees for entrusting me with this incredible responsibility and for their faith in my ability to lead our district forward as I stand here today I am acutely aware of the challenges that lie ahead of us but I am also filled with a sense of optimism and excitement for the possibilities that await us I'm committed to working tirelessly to ensure that every student in our district has access to a high quality education that prepares them for success in the 21st century to achieve this we must work together as a team we must collaborate with teachers staff parents and

017community members to create a culture of Excellence that Fosters academic achievement Innovation and lifelong learning we must be proactive in identifying and addressing the unique needs of our students and provide them with the resources and support they need to succeed I am also committed to fostering a positive and inclusive School environment where all students feel valued respected and safe we must work to build strong relationships with our students and their families and to promote and to promote a culture of diversity equity and inclusion I want to reiterate my sincere gratitude for this opportunity I look forward to working with each of you and to build a better future for our students and in our community thank you again for this opportunity of service now we'll take the five minute break okay we're returning from our

018brief recess and moving to approval of the consent agenda does anybody have any items that they would like to pull like I said are there any public comments related to the consent agenda anyone from the zoom audience like to make a public comment about the consent agenda please raise your Zoom hand now I've received no cards okay does any board member have any item that they'd like to pull from the consent agenda you want to pull um number seven four okay so we're pulling item 7.4 any board member want to pull any other item okay with that do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda absent item 7.4 I move approve the consent of consent thank you a second wait a second thank you a roll call vote student trustee Rodriguez Velazquez yes

019Justine Ori yes trusteeco yes trustee Dubois vice president Stevenson yes once and again yes motion carried okay is our practice to act on items pulled from the consent agenda immediately following the consent agenda vote um you pulled item 7.4 would you like to talk about it I just wanted to make a comment about teacher sabbaticals I wanted to say thank you for approving the six sabbaticals I read them all with interest I think it's the best thing we can do for uh teachers and other staff members to send them on a sabbaticals um and the things that our teachers are doing really excited me it's going to bring back um just a lot of information a lot of power and our teachers work so hard they're overworked and I know they're very stressed so I

020just wanted to say again how much I believe in sabbaticals and I would even like to do more so thank you yeah I wanted to also say as a new trustee I read all the sabbatical applications with a lot of interest and I know some of the folks offered to come back and report back on their projects and I would encourage them to do that I think it would be really great to see the results the fruits of their labor and how it's going to make an impact on the district yeah I'd like to Echo that too all the reports look great and you know I really look forward to hearing all of them come back and share what they learned and how it can impact our district thank you okay I'd have a motion

021to approve item 7.4 approval of sabbatical leave for the 2023-2024 school year so moved second yes Justin Norry yes trustee Co yes trustee Dubois yes vice president Stevenson president Ken yes motion carry thank you um next on our agenda is special recognitions special recognition so tonight we will be recognizing um Woodside High School teacher Amanda Olson and Career Technical education programs culinary arts foods and nutrition and student leaders so helping us with this recognition will be principal van putton thank you superintendent leech and Board of Trustees um they say that food brings people together everybody in the audience yes or no so we did bring some food to share we are breaking bread we are going to share our brownies um but this particular group of students um under the leadership of Miss Amanda Olson

022they have actually really brought some joy and um and satisfy tummies to our campus and to our community and I think oftentimes people think of foods or you know a cooking class as oh a fun elective it is that but it's actually an amazing tool and skill that these kids many tools and skills that they're walking away from and walking away with into their post-secondary um careers so I'd like to recognize the following students um for their continued leadership and professionalism in catering multiple school events this year on campus off campus private homes they have been articulate professional joyful nervous at times but so proud when they start talking food and presenting all of a sudden there's like a whole nother light to them they have been volunteering their time outside of class for events

023and pathway promotion and they are motivated to pursue career careers in the culinary arts and hospitality industry and I'm really really proud of them and excited that they finally get a little bit of time in the spotlight so the following students and if they're absent we will make sure that they get their certificate but come on forward Miku Sato Sophia cumbrone Annabelle Bechtel dalga villamare Valerie Corral Grace Ricketts and Remy Guzman Guerra and Miss Amanda Olson hey Karen Karen can you slow down and say what their names are again okay we'll do this Miku okay [Music] go away [Music] okay all right ready on three one two three brownies thank you I definitely think that we should recognize culinary arts throughout the district if we are going to be blessed with food okay the next

024item is Board of Trustees superintendent comments and committee reports Shanice will start with shawnice and rotate around aye thank you all for coming out and the lovely brownies really appreciate it um I wanted to share that I've been in the community quite a bit um and recently worked with Redwood City together to make sure they got the lcat they were asking about our lcaps so I think the more that we can share it with some of our partners out in the community they really want to partner around the lcap not necessarily just to be involved in it but like because they're doing after school programs they're doing all these different things so I just think that's probably a lot of our partners are wanting how to support us and so I thought that was a

025really good great conversation um for those of you who receive recognitions you're welcome to stay as long as you want but should you wish to leave you're also welcome to that whatever's best for you just so I let you know [Laughter] um also I went to the csba legislative day and I specifically talk with Mark Berman with the rest of the with the Board of Trustees around the peninsula and um Diane papin it was a really good conversation to be in the room with other colleagues talking about the things that are impacting our budget um to talk about ways to support our schools and supporting some of the csba initiatives so I was really excited I think advocacy is one of our most important tools as we think about some of the Hidden cost of

026running a district working with students who have um um more costly needs and not that we don't pay those costs but we we also want to get reimbursement for those costs so um that was really inspiring for me to kind of remember about the public school system and the support that we need um I wanted to say I had a number of conversations with the community um around our learning needs some of the information around the tracking and lcap and so many other things that people are really concerned I think I took away and some of them were within my constituent area but also outside of it and just really how our community deeply cares about the kids and our the students and Scholars in our school um and so that's that's been like resonating

027with me um and then want to talk about dreamers unite um Sequoia High School High School really turned out dreamers unite and the students led the workshops and presented they brought an alumni team back to talk about what is it like to go to school when you're undocumented or a person who doesn't have papers in this country and just kind of the barriers as well as waste and navigate that I thought it was actually very powerful and telling what work for our district what are the bright spots of what's working for our district so I'm excited I was very excited for the young people who did that from mental health workshops to how to apply for financial aid to many other topics um and so I look forward to attending Oya this weekend and maybe

028the Women's Conference that some other folks are doing around young women and inspiration as it for women's month and then the last thing is just looking forward to our um as we come out of our board retreat and going into our third Retreat um we've been retreating a lot um and so I'm just like I'm ready to get it down on paper and get to work y'all so I'm just really looking at Community engagement I know our school works really hard to get community engagement but yet it still is an area of growth for us and opportunity and so really want to dig in that because I do think it's a new day and people voices need to be at the table from all different communities the eight districts and that feed into us a

029partner with us um but also some of the areas I'm concerned about which is like what is equity what's is that my phone oh I'm sorry I thought it was my um but also defining equity and what it means to this District because I know a lot of our feeder districts are also doing their own plan or have their own definition I'm looking at Amy who came from Belmont Redwood Shores but I know Ravenswood is so many schools are so many areas in our County are dealing with that so just want to make sure we have a grounding on that and really thinking about academic success for all um so yeah and welcome again Crystal so those are the comments I wanted to make today yeah so I'm happy to go next um first of

030all I've also been out and about the community I'd like to thank thanks to trustee Dubois actually able to go speak to a group of young men who are mainly Juniors at Sequoia and Carlmont and share with them a little bit about what it's like to be involved in your local community and the importance of local government so you know that was really fun to talk to some of our students and tell them about my experience and also what opportunities that are available for them in our local community to continue to be involved and like trustee Stevenson I was also able to have a lot of conversations you know a lot of them were tough conversations with people across our district both in area D both being teachers parents students and trustees and other Elementary

031School Districts that feed into us about some of the issues that our districts face and you know I think what I really came to appreciate from all those conversations and one thing you know I said even when I wanted to run for the seat was how much I really appreciate how deeply involved our community is in public education you know I actually came from when I when when I was in Middle School we actually moved from Fremont and you know I was shocked right away when I got here How Deeply all of us are invested in the success of our all our students and you know I think when we have when we have that you know it's just kind of coming together and finding alignment I think we're you know really on the verge

032of being able to do great things to really improve the academic outcomes for all of our students and I really look forward to having more conversations about how to best go about doing that all right um so uh just like trustee Stevenson I also participated in the csba legislative action week um and that that used to be a single day trip to Sacramento but due to the pandemic it switched to Virtual and they decided that was actually a good thing because it brought out so many more people uh than that like I never used to go because I have to work I can't take a whole day off to go to Sacramento but I could take half an hour here half an hour there is much easier so I had a chance to uh speak

033with state senator Becker because there are actually three of us so we due to Brown actor you can only have two people from One District participating in each of these meetings so I had a chance to participate in the meeting with with state senator Becker and the other good thing about it being virtual is each legislator Has a Field representative as well as a representative in Sacramento so both of them were on the call as well and these are people that are focused on education on behalf of that legislator so it was great to be able to talk to them about bully funding our schools I specifically spoke up about one bill called ab1023 that's sponsored by um assembly member papan and that relates to increased cyber security support for school districts so I think

034that is definitely something everyone is keeping an eye on as as uh folks are trying to hack into our systems and we we have a lot of sensitive data in our student and staff information records so I think that is something very important and it was a pleasure of being able to speak to um the the legislator and their aides about it and actually I wanted to thank Senator Becker as well because he was initially not supposed to come and somehow he managed to show up for a few minutes spoke with us and then continued to listen in as he was going to his next meeting so that shows to us how important education is to him and appreciate him squeezing Us in in between two meetings at the Capitol so um that was great

035I also wanted to share that I had a chance to see Fanny that was a production at the Lucy Stern theater and you know I never had heard about family Lou Hamer um and I realized now that she was such an instrumental figure in fighting for black voter rights in Mississippi in the 60s and I had never heard of this and so it reminds me that our history books don't always tell all the perspectives that are happening at at that time and it's taught through a certain lens uh highly encourage if you haven't seen that production it's open through April 2nd so go see it if you you get a chance and then lastly I was glad that the sun peeked out today because that bomb Cyclone just came from nowhere and there were trees

036down and and branches everywhere I really appreciate our superintendent as well as all of the facilities folks for scrambling and doing what they could to keep students and staff safe at our different schools and I understand that Menlo Atherton had to close due to power outages but you know I really appreciate and recognize all the the work that the facilities crew is doing to try and keep things up as much as possible and that's it okay um so I've also been out in the community quite a bit one of my favorite things was seeing woodside's production of Cinderella I was the first person out of my seat to give a standing ovation I loved it my husband's tired of seeing Cinderella with me so I took a friend and she enjoyed it as much as

037I did um I also wanted to say I attended I was not at the legislative meeting for csba but I did attend Mark Berman's Education meeting with other trustees um from around the peninsula and he brought up two bills that he's sponsoring ab105 which is a computer science requirement and ab873 which is a media literacy requirement and I think our feedback to him was we don't like unfunded mandates my specific specific feedback was please talk to teachers we keep putting more and more on their plates and we don't take anything off please talk to teachers before you have these great ideas um I also gave him my feedback which my colleagues have heard about um there's and there's an ed code you know we cannot ever um hire somebody or can't hire somebody easily who

038has been convicted of a felony and there are times where people when they're very young may have a substance abuse problem and may get into trouble with the law and there are times when people you know have been clean and sober for decades and there's still a hiring problem I am troubled by this because I really believe that if somebody has overcome addiction it should be a badge of honor we should actually know about it and we should praise them so I brought this up um and my colleagues have heard me talk about it and um I'm so passionate about this I off I really would like to do more about this because I feel we have a substance abuse issue in our country and it should not be a stigma um rich and I

039were at the Redwood City together meeting and that was exciting Rafael has done an incredible job raising money he's way over budget like a hundred and do you remember how much time he's like 120 over budget lots of Partnerships one of the things that we've been working with him on is we'd love to have a stronger partnership with our high schools and I know he's going to be having a conversation with um our principal Ogden at Redwood and that could be exciting I hope that turns into something um uh Amy and I both received a letter from former School Board member in the San Mateo Union High School District he's very involved in rotary and um in his letter he says that he believes that our district is not um Exchange program friendly so um

040I think I have passed that letter on to our superintendent and that might be something that we want to think about because I'm a big believer in exchange programs I think travel is so important and the other very exciting meeting I was part of principal Sean priest invited me to Sequoia High School to be a part of what's called The Chapel Hill or Chapman Hall project and what this is um it's sort of a pilot with um a researcher Youth Development experts as well as non-profits like life moves and others and it's a way of identifying at-risk kids that might not be on the radar of the staff and then working with life moves to get families into housing a very exciting part of this is that teaches kids to advocate for themselves and this

041is new for life moves usually they just work with the parents and now they're working with students and there's a lot of other very very exciting components to this Pro to this project so um it seemed to me like a best practice I was very honored to be part of the conversation I learned a lot so thanks hey I've got a couple committee reports Kerry mentioned that she and I attended the Redwood City together um for those who don't know Redwood City together advances the success of Youth and families through Community collaboration we heard a presentation from a group working on early childhood education and their focus was really on recruitment I'm talking about trouble finding Early Childhood Educators and they had a program for trying to get people into that career path and then

042the discussion went more broadly into Workforce Development for other organizations that were there the road City School District shared some of their efforts to get new teachers in and one announcement for those of you who are interested April 6th from 5 to 8 PM in uh there is a the sv2 community night celebrating cccs which stands for Community collaboration for children's success that's a relatively together event with its Partners if any of you are interested in attending that's coming up uh next I attended the lcap community engagement event in East Palo Alto last week I want to recognize and thank our superintendent and cabinet along with the principals who were in attendance for their efforts to engage with the East Palatine community and lastly I participated in the legislative action week along with Amy and

043John Eason found that to be a useful way for us to start engagement with our local legislators I think it was nice to see USB to put it on and I think all of us that participated found it useful and for those of you who um didn't get a chance maybe next year you might consider it okay next up is um Crystal Leach gonna get me again um so on the brief uh recess that we took um Edith and I were counting how many trees that we have lost at Sequoia this year so then I was doing a quick tally of the trees that have that we have lost across the district since January and we are now currently oh I forgot these two out there so we're at 14. and and these are not

044small trees these are large trees some of the remnants of the giant Redwood that fell in a previous storm over there and so going back off of um kind of a piggybacking off of what trustee Koo said just an abundance of thank you to our entire facility staff often when we get these storms they are working well into the night some of them are even staying the night here um and working with tree removals and you know dealing with the creek behind Redwood so the the team is exceptionally large and it also goes down to the the the site staff so the custodians the plant managers and the ground screw each and every site that make sure that the site is cleaned up and safe for students to return the next day so um I'm

045getting a little Twitchy I wonder if I still live in California you know with this weather that's happening as we have more storms approaching [Music] um next year we are saving a little bit of money on trees this trees though because we were going to remove some of them so I mean you know but and we've been pretty lucky so far um as far as damage goes so I just wanted to um thank our facilities department and all of our site facility custodian and grounds staff okay before we go to the student trustee comments I'm just gonna uh make an announcement I've seen that there have been some changes to the people who are in the room as well as people who are on Zoom that we pulled item 14 the discussion item So for

046anybody who wants to make a comment about items that are not on the agenda can do it as part of the public comment um so next up is student trustee comments can you all hear me all right can you hear me can everyone hear me okay we'll uh Circle back to student trustees and we after we hear from uh the Sequoia District Teachers Association followed by American Federal Federation of state county admissible employees good evening um I listened intently to all of your um presentations of the work that you've been doing and I was glad to hear that the trustees have been sharpening their lobbying skills because we are aware that California has its first anti-trans student bill in Committee in Sacramento and I would hope that our trustees would join with our Educators in

047impressing Upon Our legislators how much that bill cannot pass how important it is that trans students have school as a safe place where they can be themselves authentically without fear I also want to thank the board especially president Ginn for the humility in recognizing the harm potentially caused by the discussion item originally on the agenda and changing path I'm confident that within our new superintendent our District staff and with teachers we will build evaluation protocols feedback Vehicles feedback loops to ensure that we are serving students the best possible education and making that challenging and rewarding for all students later in the agenda we're going to talk about bargaining we're looking forward to setting bargaining dates and moving forward on that with the district and we wanted to congratulate superintendent Leach and point out that while

048the bond that she worked tirelessly to pass has a number of green elements to it we are distressed that I believe 14 trees is the most that any superintendent has lost so we will be watching thank you is there a representation a representative from uh AFS me wishing to make a comment okay so uh we're going to circle back to the student trustee comments can you all hear me yes okay great sorry about that um I'm sorry I couldn't join you I wanted to make sure I made it in time for my comments today so I figured I'd hop on Zoom um and happy women's History Month even though it's kind of the the home stretch I didn't get to say that last meeting um so I just wanted to say thank you to all

049of our women out there our mothers our black women our women of color and our queer women for being the strength that glues our community together um it's a little update on students seniors are finally receiving their college decisions including myself um and many come out at least in the next week or so most of the UCS are out um and it's been I know Bonnie asked me about this last meeting um it's been quite competitive this year and I know I've been hearing a lot of you know wait lists and rejections and I wanted to remind our students and our parents that these decisions aren't a reflection of what our students have worked so hard for in these past four years it really is a lottery and it's a tough process um and you

050know it is what it is and we all kind of our door opens so I just wanted to put that out there um and like everyone's been mentioning recently we've had some pretty rough outages this is like maybe my second or third week in a row where kenyatta's been out for two days or more in the week so I've just been at home going through my college classes um but you know we're thinking avantika and I that this is definitely a part of kind of future safety plans as well having kind of making some preventative measures for potential trees falling on buildings or you know power going out during school um because I know especially for the comprehensive sites it's it's quite a challenge to kind of get students on and off campus that the

051power just goes out randomly um so I think development of you know plans and policies would be helpful for our community um and our families and I know that some students have also been struggling with you know turning in assignments and making sure that they're getting credit for missing assignments due to power outages um which is unfortunate and of course up to the discretion of you know the teacher the school whatever it may be but I'm hoping that we can be a little bit you know sensitive with one another when it comes to things like that um yeah and I can imagine in the coming years that you know California weather is going to change a lot so it's really imperative that we kind of work on these preventative measures before you know the absolute

052worst of this climate change kind of hits us um and again relating to discussions today congratulations to uh superintendent leech um I'm clapping and you can't hear uh but I just wanted to briefly express my hopes and my expectations that our new superintendent will be engaged with students on the social and academic level um and I can imagine that the community has similar expectations and I hope that the board in the future will kind of grow into a supporting initiatives that truly and accurately reflect the heart of our community and really take on a diverse worldview other than that I hope that everyone has a relaxing and fun spring break before we head into the home stretch of the school year thank you all right thank you for those comments hey the next item is

053for public comment for items not on the agenda so if anybody wants to comment about an item that is not on the agenda which includes the former discussion item number 14.1 this is your opportunity to comment about items not on the agenda so if we could see a show of hands in the zoom audience tell me there are and I'll ask Laura how many we have in the live audience we should make a comment on this how many we have four live I'm sorry we have four in person and two right now online let's give it another few moments if anybody in the zoom audience wants to come comment about any item not on our agenda which includes the former discussion item 14.1 now is your opportunity to comment about any item not on our

054agenda it's request that I clarify that item 14.1 was a discussion of Correspondence received from uh suhsd staff and community we've removed that as a discussion item so if anyone wants to comment about it you would comment during this public comment section for items that are not on the agenda okay so we have seven total comments so our board policy says that we do three minutes but not more than 10 without a board approval to go longer um I would propose that we give each speaker uh three minutes and go 21 minutes but I want to see if I'm seeing nodding heads okay so um Laura if you can fix the the get list of all of the people who currently have their hand raising whose cards are in we'll take those public comments each

055commenter um for those who are live in the live audience there will be a countdown on the screen that well there's several of them in the room there's one that you'll see right in front of you when you're at the podium you have three minutes when that gets to zero uh your time for public comment has ended for those of you are in zoom while you are speaking there will be a countdown timer um Laura Lewis say will lead us through public comment and each each person will have up to three minutes thank you thank you our first speaker is Leanne Stroup thank you for granting time for a public comment on the anonymous letter sent by students first which objects to what they term D tracking last fall members of Ma's English Department were

056called to address the board regarding Multicultural literature and voice our newly instituted heterogeneous freshman English class at the time we had virtually no data to offer other than results of student surveys and grade distribution even now I can offer only anecdotal evidence drawn from the performance of the cohort of 10th graders currently enrolled in ASE English 2. having taught as English 2 more times than any other course in my 28 years at Ma I can say with confidence that the students in this year's honors sections are performing at the same level as students who previously began their High School careers in as English 1. I will acknowledge that the first few weeks of fall semester were challenging as we asked students to perform some unfamiliar tasks but after the initial adjustment period students are meeting

057our expectations that said one of the most important goals of mclv to make honors and AP courses more accessible and attractive to all students as yet to be achieved my three as English 2 classes are still strikingly homogeneous almost all of my students attended Hillview or law Entrada middle schools out of 79 students only five came from Ravenswood as many scholars have pointed out the chief determinant of academic success if we measure that by matriculation in the most selective colleges is tied to income level and zip code in my long career as a teacher and department chair nothing nothing has frustrated me more than our inability to move the needle in this regard ideally 9th graders who begin their High School career and heterogeneous classes with peers from all of our feeder schools would feel

058confident about enrolling in the honors track The English Department at Ma is working hard to make that change a reality mclv teachers implemented new strategies and assignments this year to prepare their students for honors level work and over the last few weeks as English 2 teachers visited every single section of mclv to make a personal pitch to encourage students to enroll in the fall I begged the board to be patient to let our department work through any kinks in implementing mclv and to gain a longitudinal perspective on its efficacy yet here we are a few months later with a call to reinstitute as English 1 for next fall Not only would that change be virtually impossible it would also be unjust may I continue briefly it would also be unjust and unfair on I mean

059just to finish the one sentence of thought sorry yeah foreign our next speaker is superintendent Gina sidaria from Ravenswood I've been eating trustees congratulations superintendently um I Crystal I want to thank you for making yourself available to chat as soon as I learned about the letter being agendized I appreciate your time and transparency Gina can you speak up just a little bit publicly I would like to make a comment regarding the letter written by sequoyin High School District students first regardless of the context as to why this letter was written anonymously advocating for the board to revert their decision to stop detracting I am present here tonight to be the face and voice of our students of Ravenswood when there is absence of representation and voice then folks share a narrative of our story that

060is incorrect and we are not able to advocate for policies that disrupt inequities I'm present tonight for it to be known and for it to be clear that we want to commend and applaud Sequoia High School District specifically Atherton for its recent policy 2D track and make sure that all students have equal access to courses in the 9th and 10th grade I'm here tonight to represent ravenswood's instructional leadership team who do not want this board to revert back to practices that would reinstate systemic barriers they're often divided by racial lines leaving our children of color behind whoever wrote the letter made it explicitly clear that they want their kids to stand out in a highly competitive system among University crowd we get it but between the lines it was read that they do not want

061their kids to be mixed with Ravenswood children additionally I'm here because our data was misrepresented it does not tell the whole story of our children the letter only reinforces the same message that continues to perpetuate a narrative about Ravenswood that is only based on one data point our children are more than one data point and their potential should not be dictated and limited by it this one data point does not take into account the nuances that our teachers are making in the classroom that take place in our heterogeneous classrooms the exponential growth it does not take into account the exponential growth our children are making toward proficiency they did not share the data about how students who are on grade level continue to make their typical annual growth and even stretch growth which refutes the

062notion that their honors students would not would not be prepared or perhaps it might even regress if sitting next to another student who's not at their same performance level the coyoon High School District board superintendent leech and team Ravenswood is cheering you on and applaud this district and the staff for embracing policies around the tracking we encourage you not to look back nor be pulled back to practices and policies that are proven to harm students who have been historically marginalized I am here to reinforce that Ravenswood wants to continue to work with Sequoia High School District as a value-added resource to make work the work that we've done together work collaboratively proactively to move forward the equity work we have embarked on together and to dismantle the status quo thank you our next speaker is

063Abby Corman good evening Board of Trustees and Community my name is Abby Corman I've taught in this district for 10 years I'm a resident without electricity right up the road and charging over in the corner over there and I'm a voter and organizer of passionate folks for me recently I've just attended the CTA equity and human rights conference this past weekend and been inspired by the work being done in our state by passionate Educators working for our youth and I left believing that together we can move forward in this moment and Achieve win-win solutions for all stakeholders if we work with each other listen to each other and agree on changes to propel our district forward toward a more Equitable and just education system I have to admit I'm confused by our agenda today and

064our agenda processes in general during Alan sarver's tenure as president during the pandemic I remember him having a board correspondence agenda item at each board member board meeting or at least sharing out what the board had received through email I have prepared comments for both 14.1 and public comments and folks prepared their time tonight around the original agenda but apparently we cannot speak to them both or we've had to edit our timing based on the decision this morning I'm wondering are we moving toward hearing board correspondence again I've learned in therapy and other work that impact matters more than intention it appears like board members may have their own agenda they're pushing by highlighting some letters they've received over others I have to admit I was aghast that one letter out of the I imagine

065hundreds you received since I write so many were able to come on to the agenda so readily and easily within two days this school year we've not heard once from students first even in public comment because I've been listening I hope you're more mindful as we move forward about how every action you take shares your values more than any statement or comment that you make and for my last 43 seconds I'd like to reiterate what we heard the superintendent from Ravenswood District say that we all many of your community members commend and applaud suhd for its policy to detract we are all four removing systemic barriers that leave our children of color behind and we need to be mindful we're not perpetuating a narrative about Ravenswood children or any of our students because our children

066are more than one data point thank you thank you our last speaker and person is Chris Thompson I hope I hope um but heartfelt we wish you well Crystal as a former board member you may remember that I have a passion about research literature on education um and I'm grateful to Stanford context and where I can take advantage of access to that literature in my brief comments here I want to share what I think are one can reasonably conclude from the research on D tracking there's surprisingly large literature on tracking and D tracking from which I've drawn two conclusions I want to share with you first tracking Tracking not D tracking is not good educational practice ten years ago William Mathis at the University of Colorado drew the same conclusion writing that quote an expansive

067body of literature conclusively shows tracking has been harmful inequitable and an unsupportable practice he was not the first to reach this conclusion nor is he the last making the same point I want to recommend to you a paper by Pedro now Guerra who is well known to members of this board as being an education leader he wrote with with a co-author that tracking serves to perpetuate and reinforce educational inequities along race and class lines in most schools placement and designated tracks corresponds strikingly with race and class privilege upper tracks have disproportionate number of Stu students from affluent backgrounds while the lower tracks are filled with poor and economically disadvantaged students interestingly in the in the the thrust of nogueira's Articles is even more relevant to the second point I want to make from the research

068literature and that is that we should not be asking whether to detract but instead how we implement this instructional change if there is if there is mixed conclusions on the tracking in the research which there is admittedly it has more to do with the results of the differences of the challenges of implementation here I would recommend an article to you and I'd be happy to provide a list and the Articles to any of the board that wants to take a look a piece from Beth Rubin she writes my work in detracting schools leads me to conclude that the most successful instances of detracting combine deep structural reform with thoughtful pedagogical change and are undergirded by an engagement with students and teachers beliefs around Notions of ability and achievement when these facts facets converge the positive

069results for students are startling I'll repeat when these facets converge in detract environments the positive results for students are startling in conclusion 14 13 seconds I think it's valuable for the board to examine the implementation of detracting on the other hand I believe it is well understood from peer-reviewed research that returning to tracking would represent represent a fundamental failure in meeting the educational needs of all of our students thank you thank you to the to the chair we've had two more hands raised since our last count three three more hands right since our last count oh four speaking to speak speak in the microphone so sorry we're discussing there's four additional people or five additional people who have raised their hands at some point we have to draw a line and we're discussing whether the

070people who um have raised their hands later we'll get the same three minutes or we'll get some other number of minutes um since we were well past our 10 minutes of public comment whether we would do three full minutes two minutes minute and a half or what we would do for the additional commenters I'll see her we'll try to make this not take too long Shanice what's your opinion I wonder consideration that some people who were planning their time around certain items and so they have come in I wonder if we can just say right now like this is the last group something like that because I think people are planning their time differently I'm looking at Carrie I'm supposing three three full minutes for the additionals three full minutes for the additionals is what

071you're proposing two you're proposing two Terry's saying three I'd rather do the full three minutes please topic Amy do you think three Amy I think it would be more appropriate I can do three yeah I I'm in support of three okay three minutes a piece for the remainders and uh no more hands after the ones if you could get a list of who all is not as razor-handed not made a comment and we will take these comments and they'll conclude the public comment okay so we will end after page when you come okay our first speaker on Zoom is Chris Roble Mr Robel can you hear us you'll need to unmute I want to move on to the next person okay we will come back to you Mr Robel our next speaker is Heather hop

072oh did he just are you there Mr Robel okay our next speaker is Heather Hopkins board I'm a Woodside High School parent and a trustee of the Los comitas Elementary School District which is one of your feeder schools theater districts as a community member I wanted to let you know that the board's decision making and Communications process over the last several months has felt very destabilizing on on Friday um in the wake of the most recent major leadership decision that rocked the community it was kind of alarming to find the last minute edition of the critical conversation of D tracking um put onto the agenda moving forward I hope that President Ginn and the board will actively rebuild trust with the community by proceeding more thoughtfully in my opinion a well-governed board transparently forecasts discussions

073and initiatives to the greatest extent possible um last night and again this afternoon I emailed the board a letter uh signed by 116 community members most of whom are teachers in other District staffed but also represents local school board trustees and former trustees parents and staff from the Stanford Graduate School of Education and since I last checked an hour ago eight more people have added their names basically the response was fast and furious indicating intense staff and Community concern that the majority of the board will act on a desire that some trustees have telegraphed to us over the last several months which is to reverse the detracting initiative when this discussion does come back to the board we hope it's done with plenty of notice and with the good governance to recognize that this is

074a programmatic decision and that it should be made based on the recommendation of our experts our district leadership and staff speaking of District leadership and staff I'd like to um welcome uh superintendent leach into the role officially thank you thank you um so Chris is back we'll uh we'll open the forward to him Chris robell I'm sorry about that earlier can you hear me okay yes we can great thank you Chris trobel um yes two unrelated topics first of all I would strongly encourage the board to stagger it's timing of these board meetings so that it's not at exactly the same time and day as the Redwood City School District board meetings there roughly every two weeks and they're both at Wednesdays at 7 pm every two weeks so there's got to be some other

075day of the week maybe the other Wednesday when the other District isn't happening so please consider that uh there's a lot of whole there's a whole set of issues around my that I have concerns around regarding lack of transparency um anyway I'll stop there so please reconsider your um the timing of the meetings the second issue with respect to school bonds and um by the way I want to uh reinforce what um trustee Dubois said talk to teachers right they they know probably what's better needed for the classrooms than anybody else right I trust teachers um and similarly with Shanice I I applaud her for talking to Mark Berman I also spoke with Mark Berman and also Jerry Hill several months ago regarding these School bonds right 97 of these School bonds come from developers

076so this is a pay to play they fund they fund the program to tell us how great these School bonds are and then of course we pay for them in terms of higher costs for the contracts that they get awarded and um and you know of course I'm thinking somewhat cynically that we should redirect those towards uh underground utilities for PG e but anyway on I I seriously think these School bonds one out of roughly one out of every three dollars currently goes every three dollar every dollar that that that the taxpayers pay only a 33 cents goes to the school districts because of interest rates that are so high and I'm a former CFO so I'm telling you this is not a useful a good way to spend money with school bonds and secondly

077more importantly it can't be used for things inside the walls of the classroom and I've talked to a lot of teachers and it's what they need is not more buildings especially when enrollment's declining what they need is uh AIDS and smaller classrooms and academic programs and things that are actually going to effectuate better student outcomes so please and again Shanice talked to Mark Berman and others and I have as well and I know there's a lot of uh problems with this the threshold for approval on a school bond and a parcel tax should be the same percent otherwise you get strange uh incentives where people are going for school bonds when they should be going for parcel taxes because a parcel tax can be used for anything right and mayor G anyway I won't go

078into that but um acknowledge the problem there and people go for school bonds even though that's a waste of money thank you our next speaker is Caroline Coleman good evening ladies and gentlemen and everyone the beautiful board members love seeing your beautiful faces can you hear me can you hear me yes we can yes we can thank you so much so uh my name is Carol Ann Coleman I'm a teacher at Sequoia High School I'm also a Community member in Redwood City and I'm also a parent of a Sequoia High School student um I wanted to congratulate um his leech for her uh new uh position um I love how you welcome the room and your approachability and your open mind um lots of words I wrote down on my Post-It is the workplace teamwork

079Equity work every action needs to be intentional um hopeful grateful um a lot of credibility in the room um and I'm really glad to see everyone is um taking their time to speak out if results also want transparency um I uh about about the 14 0.1 um I the school I work at uh has been detracting for a very long time I've I've been working in the biology the science department for seven years and um everyone's welcome in biology and we have a mixed group of students all different learning styles all different um ethnicities all different cultures and since I've been working in the biology area every I would say every student except maybe a less than one percent have been able to access the material and go on to physics or chemistry the following

080year um the current program I'm in right now is all about access Equitable practices and understanding that all of us have internalized biases that we need to explore every day I said it every day not just at a training and not just with certain people um let's see I've got one more posted but I don't know if I have time to say it um we all commend we all applaud we do want to remove systemic racism we don't want to perpetuate inequities um and I am concerned about the quick response to the letter uh because I I've never seen that happen so quickly have a wonderful evening and I thank you for your time Thank You Caroline our next speaker is under parent and you're welcome to introduce yourself if you like hello thank you

081can you hear me yes we can um so I'm I'm actually remaining Anonymous and I want to explain why um retaliation is a real concern from students and parents um many people do not feel uh commenting at the board is a safe space because uh many of us including students retreated when we spoke up during the pandemic so I am choosing under the brown act to remain remain anonymous um and I just want to let you know why um again there's there's a real concern about being retaliated against um or being demonized um as many of us were during the pandemic um so I just want to explain that first so congratulations Crystal um we're really looking forward to your inclusive and experienced leadership at the home of our district um I want to really

082highlight the mission of Sequoia Union High School District which is to engage and prepare all students to excel in a global Society this is an excellent Mission and really a Guiding Light for all policies in our district the freedom to choose is a fundamental aspect of our democracy providing choice to students affirms our Democratic Values removing barriers to rigorous classes is key to successful education providing academic supports for students who are not prepared for rigorous academics is incredibly important supporting stem initiatives and other rigorous initiatives will help us compete in a global economy um ensuring that we have standard-based grading policies is excellent to again improve uh student outcomes and their education as well as partnering with theater schools I want to highlight Sequoia High School has been very successful in providing choices in various

083tracks through the icap and I IB courses teachers and administrators have done an outstanding job of increasing every year for the last like 10 years the number of students of color in those rigorous classes in the icap and the IB classes they've done an incredible job of marketing the icap and IB program and their best practices at Sequoia High School should really be looked at the data is there they are currently tracking and removing barriers and supporting students and it is working and they are supporting our incredible Sequoia Union High School District Mission I am very concerned about the lack of transparency with the entire detracting process thank you for your comment our next speaker is Jenny varghes blim hello um thank you for having me uh thank you for allowing me to speak I

084signed on right after a work meeting so that is why I did was not able to raise my hand earlier I'm going to start with this quote because I didn't think I was going to start with this quote but I heard someone speak right before me so I feel like I need to start with this quote it is a quote from David W Orr who is an ecological literacy educating our children for a sustainable world that it's a quote from this book um and it hangs in my office and I stood up and grabbed this quote so I could read it right now based on what I heard the plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people but it does desperately need more peacemakers healers restorers storytellers and lovers of every

085kind it needs people who live well in their places it needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world have more habitable like habitable and humane and these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it that is a quote that I look at in every piece of work that I do and I hope that is a quote that every single person on the board on your board believes in congratulations to superintendent Leach I look forward to continuing to partner with you to continue to make sure that this quote is happening in Sequoia Union High School District I believe if that if people believe this then they're willing to say their name because they're they believe that they have that everything that they're offering is for everybody

086I was hurt when I saw how ravenswood's data was used in that letter by an anonymous group of people who never have to show their name but create so much harm for our students of color I really hope that it's not just Ravenswood data that is looked at long term when we talk about making a more Equitable Humane habitable world but we look at data from all of our feeder District districts to see how we can make sure every student is able to succeed and what we Define as as success I'm part of a community of practice with your District where we are looking at how we tell our story and how we look at data and I really hope that we can continue that work together I really want to make sure that the

087peacemakers the healers the restorers the storytellers and lovers of every kind especially from Ravenswood City School District those who are marginalized that their stories get to be told thank you thank you our next speaker is Kendra gregg hi you can hear me yes we can okay yeah hi kendrag I do not speak anonymously um it's been quite some time since I felt compelled to address the Sequoia award so um glad to be here tonight I want to speak on the student's first letter um I can't speak to the writer's intentions but I can just comment on what it reads like it reads like a faction of parents feel that they're entitled to have their kids in de facto segregated classes it implies that students worth and value and potential can be reduced to a single

088test score it implies that students only contribution to a learning community is based on their reading level and really what it reads like is one group feeling that students from one feeder District do not have the right to occupy the same space as students from other feeder districts because it might somehow diminish their expected experience or opportunities to quote race ahead in regards to detracting the writers State very clearly that they quote don't have confidence that can work in a school like ma which I I think some clarity is needed there um so tonight I I really I felt compelled to speak because I remember these types of conversations I remember this type of commentary because it was not that many years ago when I spoke before the Sequoia board in regards to the boundary

089map changes I remember community members making claims both in public and anonymously like things like home values and property taxes and zip codes and test scores should somehow entitle certain populations while denying others and I I just want to to say back then the board some of the very same people in the room tonight took a courageous step they made a bold and brave decision to move towards more just and Equitable policies and it's been encouraging in recent years to see that the district has continued to make moves in the direction of equity through initiative such as the tracking classes and I want to encourage the board to please stay the course um unfortunately in an era when seems like the rest of the world and all of us were redefining what success means and

090what achievement means and what the education system could look like uh sadly to me there's always going to be people who cling to a very narrow very limited Viewpoint um just keep in mind it is hard work it can be it's expected to be uncomfortable I just ask that the board don't let anyone derail you from that important work continue to be courageous and and stay the course again not Anonymous if any of the anonymous writers of the letter would like to reach out feel free to contact me and open a real collaborative dialogue I'm very proud to be a Ravenswood educator and ready to do the mirror work alongside any other folks who who are willing thank you we have next from Alan Sarver Alan if he can unmute yes yes I um I'm

091not not used to uh having to unmute myself I haven't been on this side of one of the zoom meetings I'm Alan Sarver former trustee and uh I would like to begin as well by congratulating uh superintendent Leach on her permanent role very glad to have you aboard uh in response to that letter that is being discussed uh I wanted to give some kind of historical perspective as well uh the primary focus of this board for the past 15 years that I've been involved in at least 25 years prior to that has been closing the achievement Gap it has been a long-standing suhsd initiative to broaden AP and IB inclusion strongly encouraging students traditionally excluded from APS to take at least one compass and other programs for Rising freshmen increasing quote mainstreaming of students traditionally

092tracked below AP Pathways additional support and language focus and counseling to include AP classes for targeted populations all of that work was based on numerous National studies over many years confirming that tracking is harmful to both under served and privileged student populations the results have been significant continuous increases in AP participation in AP completion in AP test participation an AP test passage in GPA in graduation rate the previously excluded demographics have seen significant improvements in all areas long privileged demographics have suffered no declines research projects and initiatives with expert Partners toward de-tracking were openly discussed in numerous board meetings and highlighted as defining goals of the district the distinction between rigor and difficulty has been a major focus of the lcap process over the past five years with broad stakeholder input ensuring that the district

093would move away from the ways in which the Su hsd students first group describes AP courses as being too stressful for many students if the level of content and rigor of the new untracked courses are indeed equivalent to those of the former honors classes I recommend that the current courses be designated as honors restoring the cachet while no longer excluding the low performing students tracking is not the solution tracking is the problem thank you Alan our final speaker is Paige there we go good evening board thank you so much uh president again for bringing up that both letters actually and for publishing them and also for acknowledging the importance of both of the issues um even though they had to be removed from the the um agenda tonight my name is Paige winikoff I am

094the co-president of the Menlo Atherton PTA I also happened to serve on the Los lumidus board of directors I'm a trustee but I'm here to speak tonight on behalf of the mapta um because I was asked we've had a great deal of interest from parents not only parents from ma but parents from the Middle School um who've asked they don't ask about tracking they I think I think everybody would agree that tracking is probably a bad thing um but but people are asking what happened to the classes are these classes of available do you have classes for my child that will challenge that child and and be appropriate for them is is the school going to give provide an excellent education for my child that's what we're hearing um both the PTA requests a form

095for some kind of discussion we also would like to see some data to know whether changes that were made a couple of years ago are actually working for for everybody are they working for the targeted groups that that are we hope to bring up are they working for the groups that maybe would have liked to have taken classes which are now not offered um we need data but we mostly need a forum for discussion we were I was glad to see that that this agenda item included letters from both students first and a um a letter in response but I I think we need to have some kind of form and I don't think a board meeting probably isn't it but for people to talk and hear and find out about the data that's out

096there what's what's happened we've had two years now of the elimination of as English one and yes chemistry at Ma is it working that's that's the question um not just anecdotally but broadly um let's see the last thing I'd like to say is the achievement Gap that we're trying to fill is not a gap between you know certain races that's the chief mcath that we're trying to fill is bringing everybody up to a level that exceeds standards and it bothers me that we seem to pit races against each other sometimes when we have these conversations I I think we can reshape um reshape this discussion into a meaningful one and I'd like to see a forum for that thank you thank you that concludes public comments okay the next item is a information item 13.1

097presentation at the Sequoia Union High School Districts 2023 to 2024 initial collective bargaining proposal to the Sequoia District Teachers Association Mr real all right well uh good evening president again superintendent leech uh Trustees of the board and our audience here both virtually and in person uh for those who don't know me I'm Todd Beal assistant superintendent of human resources and I'm pleased to be up here to present the district's initial proposal are all sometimes called the Sunshine proposal for negotiations with our sdta Teachers Association so I'll go through what we have um for our proposal um and then but first of all I do want to thank Greg and our sdta for presenting last word meeting on the proposal again thank you very much for doing that so pursuant to government code section 3547 the

098Sequoia Union High School District presents the following 2023-2024 proposal for negotiations regarding the collective bargaining agreements with the with sdta this initial proposal is based upon the district's interest and principles these interests and principles include maximizing the achievements of all students by providing a quality education so that all students are engaged and prepared to excel in global Society compliance with legal mandates maintaining a fiscally responsible multi-year budget that includes new legally mandated expenses for increased employer contributions on behalf of employees for stirs and pers Retirement Systems employee statement column increases increased special education costs and other increased business and program expenses and the continued retention and recruitment of quality teachers and staff and offering comparable total compensation yes I know it's a very long sentence sorry so the following are the proposed articles uh from

099the district number one is uh article the alignment wages the district which is to maintain a total compensation package that is commiserate to that of comparable local districts while maintaining the fiscal stability of the district next is article 6 Health and Welfare the District of Maine is committed to providing Health and Welfare benefit coverage that is to its employees and their families the district recognizes the cost of Health and Welfare benefits as an integral part of the total compensation package to be considered in conjunction with salary the district has an interest in negotiating of a Health and Welfare benefits package that is commensurate to that of comparable local districts while maintaining the physical stability of the district article four hours the district has an interest in reviewing and revising the following article topics first in

100preparation of time calculations sorry yeah time calculations class meeting time minutes non-classroom assignments and preparation times contract cleanup regarding obsolete effective dates regularly scheduled faculty meetings you know next page six fifth teaching assignments and update composition of calendar setting committee and revised section 7.1.1 to match that of section 8.2.1 uh next is Article 5 for transfers the district has an interest in reviewing and clarifying the following article topics contract cleanup regarding bulletin boards and other ambiguous language voluntary transfers and and voluntary transfers next is article 7 for leaves the district has an interest in reviewing and revising the following articles under leaves reviewing revising sections 1.6 1.8 and 1.9 regarding sick leave and personal necessity usage and review a new advice section 11 regarding sabbatical leaves the next article article 8 is for procedures and

101evaluations the district has an interest in reviewing revising the following articles for evaluation topics first is the district has an interest in revising and reading to add to meet or unmet into satisfactory or unsatisfactory and next the district has an interest in evaluation forms for non-classroom unit members such as counselor psychologists speech and language Pathologists and teachers on special assignments uh next is article 10 our agreements procedures the district has an interest in reviewing or revising article 10 grievance procedures and processes uh next is article 12 class size the district has an interest in reviewing and revising the following article for class size and its stipends Article 13 is a partnership here assistance program the district has an interest in reviewing revising articles for the partnership peer assistance program next is article 14 post retirement

102Employee Program the district has an interest in updating article 14 section one and finally article 17 terms of agreement that district has an interest in a multi-year agreement term with reopeners on salary and benefits and finally I look forward to working collaboratively with our Union Representatives with Greg and Edith and their team so looking forward coming up as we get our date set up so thank you very much if you have any public comment on this item I do have one public comment card maybe when in the zoom audience would like to make a public comment on this item please raise your Zoom hand now okay let's take the public comment okay um I have a card from speaker Greg grazinski sdta bark nature hello good evening and um like everyone else I want to

103congratulate uh superintendent Leach on her recent appointment um very nice thing to hear um so I just wanted to come up my name is Greg grazinski I am a teacher at Woodside High School and I am the bargaining chair for the Sequoia District Teachers Association and um I just wanted to express my thanks to Todd Beale and to The District staff in putting together this uh proposal it um and thank you for the work that you put in to this proposal um it's a fair amount more detailed than most of the proposals that we have gotten that are Sunshine here at the school board meeting and so just wanted to thank you for the time that you put in and that we also as sdta look forward to a productive bargaining session and setting up

104some dates in the very near future so that we could begin with the process of bargaining thank you thank you okay do I have any board member comments or questions okay the next information item is the lcap community engagement update good evening members of the board and most especially good evening superintendent Crystal leech it makes my heart so very happy to say that we are going to be giving you this evening the input thus far on our lcap practice or excuse me process for 23.24 so as you know we are simultaneously putting into place the action items for the lcap for 22.23 while we are building the lcap for 23.24 the 2324 El Cap will be the last l cap in a three-year cycle after that we start all over again so I'm about to

105call up to the podium Diana Wilmot our director of program evaluation and research to present on the community engagement survey findings and she will be accompanied by Janelle bugarini our El and literacy coordinator and Lily Cuban yes our district apparently liaison lead could you how do you pronounce your last name thank you I have been calling you oh stop you stop um Lily you're worth a million bucks um to talk about the parent engagement that they helped us to achieve and then after that I am going to ask from Zoom land um The Honorable mutiyu fagbayi to join us he will be presenting on our community engagement meetings you heard a little bit about him earlier this year he is the president and CEO of pers performance facts he has national state and local level

106experience helping districts with strategic plans and putting in place uh goals and actions that are edible and doable so we're excited he's working with us this year and we hope will be helping us to reshape what we bring to you and what you give input on in the 23-24 year so with no further Ado Diana Wilma come on down okay still no step stool okay Board of Trustees superintendent Leach members of the audience it's so nice to see you tonight congratulations Crystal very excited to see you in that leadership role I am here to present the lcap community engagement results as far as the survey is concerned just a little bit of background on it uh in terms of how it was put together this year I worked in conjunction with student services putting together

107a very comprehensive survey for students to take students teachers staff parents to take once this year making it an annual survey and we also worked with Rich again trust again and the two student Representatives uh on the board to review all of the questions and clear up some of the questions that were confusing from years past and I went through a whole process of evaluating how each of the questions aligns with our lcap goals and so with that I am going to share some of the results with you and give you a sense of who participated in the survey our representative it was of our community and some of the key takeaways that are some of the successes and some of the things that we still need to work on so let's see the arrow

108there we go okay so first off is our student survey um a little over 5 200 students participated in our survey I'm going to share with you the representation that exists in this survey I I do I want to acknowledge the total enrollment is my kind of reference point for determining whether or not the survey was representative of the student body so on the left hand side you'll see the pie chart of our the breakdown of our total enrollment by ethnicity and on the right side you'll see the responses by ethnicity you can see that's kind of a mirror image um with hispan Hispanic students being slightly very slight over-representation of I'm sorry of our white students but mostly representative of the entire student body as a whole um you could see the orange being

109a little bit smaller on the right side which is 37 instead of 42 but for the most part pretty representative and I this kind of comparison is going to happen throughout the presentation just to give you a sense of whether or not the survey um mirrors the representation of our of our community similarly uh students who participated across our student survey were from all of the schools the enrollment is the left side the responses are the right side a very slight over representation by students who attend ma tied an EPA but mostly again representative of the entire student body as indicated by the students who responded similarly free and reduced lunch population enrollment on the left side survey responses on the right slight over representation by students who do not participate in the free and

110reduced lunch program but pretty close 19 and a half percent is our enrollment and 17 percent was the responses but pretty pretty close so now I'm going to go into the survey and talk about in each case the greatest strength and the opportunity so um we really dug through this data with uh student services Human Resources Educational Services kind of try to pull out some of the key takeaways that we felt were impactful for our work in the next lcap so one of the greatest strengths we saw was that 73 percent of our students said they frequently or almost always have classes with students from different racial ethnic and cultural backgrounds and 22 percent some say they sometimes do this is very uh much in line with our El Cap goal number two on the

111flip side the greatest area for growth was around and we did change this question um a bit uh from the years past so that it was not just about excitement but just eager to participate um so nine percent of students said that they were not at all eager to participate in class 63 said they were slightly or somewhat eager and then we have some five percent eager beavers extremely eager um so this was just a you know an area where we felt that you know looking at our lcap goal number one on level of Engagement this was essentially one of those questions that we could really think about um in more than just seat time and are they in class but are they eager to participate in class when we looked at the parent Guardian

112survey there's a you know there's uh you could see about 2 000 or a little bit more than 2 000 parents that participated um and I'm also going to do the same thing I did last time with the student survey and say is it representative of our student population um I have to assume though that there is um one survey per household for this kind of uh representation and that was not a guarantee you know parents were allowed to participate both parents or if there's more than one child so it's my best estimate of whether or not it's representative of the community um again I'm referencing the enrollment of the students and then the parent survey responses so there is a slight over representation by parents who indicate their child attends Karma and Ma as

113indicated by the light blue and dark blue uh triangles there in the in the pie but mostly representative of the entire parent body and every school did have an opportunity to participate in this survey again this is another uh another um common uh demographic that we look at is our students enrollment by IEP and so there was a slight over-representation by parents who indicate their child participates in an individual education plan or an IEP but mostly representative of the entire parent body El status and this was are 15 of our population our English Learners our parent survey responses was nine percent I do want to bring up Janelle and Lily to talk about our Outreach for our families and one of the some of the ways that we did work to try to improve uh

114participation in this parent survey good evening everyone Hi um Yale coordinator nice to meet some of you I think it's the first time I've seen some of our new board members um but in terms of the work that we were doing with our with the with the Panorama survey and making it one of the big things that came up last year that was really hard to access the survey because parents needed to have a code there was a whole entire process that we needed to train our parents around to support our families this time around it was a lot easier to access the survey links would put in school websites and parents just needed to click one one link took them to the survey then they selected the the you know the information that determined

115what school they were going to and then it was just a lot much easier to access another um input from the previous year that that we took into account this school year was that sometimes the the even the translation that was done in Spanish was a lot difficult like very difficult to understand some of the questions were not very clear you weren't sure what really it was asking so Diana Lily and I took the time to really go through every single question in English and Spanish to make sure it was the question aligned and it made sense it was like you know the it's a lot easier to understand both for the parent survey and for the student survey so we didn't want to complicate it um or provide very difficult under like topics to

116understand our Concepts to understand and the questions that we were trying to get information and feedback from and and additionally I think we really continue the work that we were doing with our um bilingual parent Liaisons at each of the school sites and I'll let Lily talk about that a little bit more yes hi everyone congratulations superintendent leech very happy for this decision um yes so one of the things that we uh improved this year I believe is we provide the parent coordinators and myself uh we provide Chromebooks for families and the family centers or offices so every family will have an opportunity if they don't have access to the internet or any other devices that they can come and completed it with us and all the parent coordinators were available to answer questions over

117the phone also to encourage parents to complete the survey included myself I mean in addition to other other school years communication went out in English and Spanish the school sites also send out phone calls and rebel calls to make sure families were completing the information and just reminders through pen um through canvas and I see for them to complete it thank you Janelle and Lily um partnering with you is awesome and I feel really grateful the work that they did around the Spanish translations was was remarkable it really you know sometimes you get a Google Translation and it's just not quite right so um having the experts really understand the context of the questions was wonderful um to to make it better and so we're gonna go on to talk about the strengths and challenges

118of the parents survey um 84 percent of parents said that communication with people from their culture is not a problem and three percent said it was a large or very large problem we did dig into the demographics of those three percent to see if it was you know kind of more or less uh one particular group but it seemed pretty much kind of all over I mean not all over but you know just representative of the of the group at large um maybe slightly more of a represented with the free reduced lunch um with the 21 from free and reduced lunch and 41 not but for the most part um it wasn't one particular group that said it was a very large problem um nonetheless this we felt was a pretty important strength uh aligning

119to our Equity goal or El Cap goal number two and thinking about how we how our communication strategies are reaching out to people from various various cultures and the flip side our greatest area for growth 14 of parents said they are not at all satisfied with the amount of connection they have with the teachers at school we took away the question about do they show up at school because we know that my high school you know parents don't often show up at school but we took we did keep the question about staying connected with teachers at school um and uh we we found that 18 are a little bit satisfied and 35 are somewhat satisfied um and they're about seven percent of families who have a tremendous amount of communication with uh teachers at school

120so it's kind of it's just an opportunity to think about how we how we uh work and connect between the family and the school and create that community I'm moving on to the staff surveys now I'm going to try to move quickly I've got three staff surveys teachers School staff and District staff we were pretty intentional this year about trying to um survey create the survey for District staff that look different than School staff because well quite frankly we don't uh at the district office uh have as much interaction with students so some of the questions were not as applicable so we made sure to pull that out separately we we could see here we have um many certificated teachers participating in the staff survey and they are cutting across all the schools all the

121subject areas and we did the best with HR thank you HR for getting me the data around whether or not this was representative of our population so the teaching staff breakdown looks like this in terms of the percent um uh on the left hand side is the actual percent of our teaching staff and how they break down across schools and the right side is the response of the teachers and how that breaks down across schools you could see a over representation of the teacher surveys from ma EPA tied um but again mostly represented the entire teacher population minus Redwood um and but there were um there were teachers at each site that did participate the greatest strength that was shared by the teachers that they are trusted quite a bit or a tremendous amount to

122fit to teach what they think is best this shows how much we believe in the in the power of our teachers and their abilities their intellectual uh stamina to keep to provide students with the right curriculum and 16 said they were somewhat trusted and eight percent said trusted a little bit and one percent not at all and the greatest area for growth was around feedback um so this is in reference to El Cap goal number five which is coming up in the next lcap talking about human resources um I put it on here and had conversation started to have conversations with HR about utilizing some of the survey data to inform their work and uh they were excited to have data so I'm excited to work with them and help them kind of peel apart

123this data the nine percent of certificated teachers said they get no feedback at all and about their teaching and 33 said they get a little bit feedback 37 some feedback two percent get a tremendous amount so that is something for us to uh look at and think about how we provide feedback for teachers the non-classroom school staff so these are mostly our classified staff or certificated administrators or stuff on site but they're not in the classroom it looks like this in a real world a representation with um and the left side and the right side being the responses again slight over representation by non-classroom staff who work as classified contractor management and certificated management but mostly representative of the entire non-classroom staff population this is where they work on the left side is where they

124work and the right side indicates you actually responded to the survey um a little over representation from ma in the survey and a slight over-representation at EPA end tide and Woodside was very underrepresented in this particular survey the greatest strength we found was that 79 of non-classroom school staff said their colleagues showed quite a bit of or tremendous respect to them giving a sense of their their respect in their in their role at the school I'm not going to make any interpretations but you know the data speaks for itself this is a reference to El Cap goal number two as well around equity and inclusion from the staff perspective and this is regarding El Cap goal number one around classroom engagement um and um actually no it says I'll cop goal number five it's five

125not one my apologies this is about a professional film and opportunities for our non-classroom school staff they're looking potentially for more individualized professional development opportunities 23 of them said they'll get almost no input into individualizing their professional development opportunities um nine percent said they get a tremendous amount of opportunity to create their own professional development opportunities and my guess is it probably depends on your status in that role for non-classroom School staff lastly this is where I said we did a District staff one it's slightly smaller group of people but slightly different survey since it wasn't as dependent around students um being around as much so this you could see is about 70 so people and this was very I mean not as representative of course smaller number of people to even access but it

126was overrepresented by um classified contract certificating management and certificated contract the low numbers of responses have may have impacted the percentages so um nonetheless we're really happy that people participated in these surveys and that everyone is represented in some way the greatest strength here is 84 percent of District staff said they do the work they do is quite meaningful and and or extremely meaningful um 13 said it was somewhat meaningful and no staff thought the work was not meaningful at all which is great because you know at the district office it's it can be challenging when you don't see the kids every day because we know we're all here for the kids and that's what why we do the work we do so when you have folks who work at other district office feel their

127work is Meaningful it really uh says a lot about the the organization the greatest area for growth here at the district office was around conversations about race uh 26 percent of District staff said they almost never have important conversations about race even if it makes them feel uncomfortable 28 percent have these conversations once in a while and 36 sometimes have these conversations seven percent frequently due and 33 almost always do this is in reference to El Cap goal number two around equity and the work that we are continuing to do so if you use survey takeaways ongoing Focus needed and engaging students to participate eagerly eagerly in school um mutual respect is a greatest strength among staff and students and both ranked feedback on performances of District's greatest area for growth there is a growing

128need to raise a level of comfort and having important conversations about race most staff do feel their work is Meaningful and parents would like to be more connected with their children's teachers many staff commented that more time was needed for staff development at this time needed to be used to collaborate with peers and all in all the survey included 7747 respondents and was represented of the student body parent community and staff so thank you I will pass the Baton to meet you maybe we could do is see if there's any questions or comments on that and then have a a recess okay mutio I told you you'd be on about seven o'clock I owe you big time we're gonna take questions from Diana we're going to take a brief recess which I agree we need

129absolutely please don't quit because I really like working with you Diana I like working with you too answer questions please okay yeah I have one comment card okay so we're gonna first see if there's board comment or questions and then we can um specific to the survey does anybody have any questions or comments about it go ahead Carrie it's a couple questions um you know the response from parents that they want to be more connected to their teachers I mean I thought really I actually don't like that question in the Panorama survey because I just want to make sure that we're all on the same page really at high school level we want the kids to be The Advocates unless they're special ed kids right because I was in one Special Ed training years ago

130for certain kids then there's more interaction right with teachers so do we need to be doing more parent education and I also asked this question because our teachers are so busy right and we want them the priority is their time needs to be spent with kids right and yes and then also with each other so do we need to correct do more paranab or how do we sorry just real quick if maybe one thing that might help answer that question maybe it won't for this particular one but I remember there were some constraints when we were looking at the questions that certain questions were like connected to I forget what they were but there are some constraints that certain questions had to be in there for other things if you can maybe can I think

131we were limited uh in some of the some of the questions that we wanted to have some continuity from prior years and we were getting rid of the question about um just coming to the school like visiting the school um but I think each year we can get better at improving the survey and and and considering whether or not we need to rephrase the question or does this feedback go back to like Charlene Margo on parent I mean you know although I know she's doing a lot of this right um should it be tied also to the parent education work we're doing some of the responses I'm going to suggest that we bookmark that and that maybe it would be helpful again for somebody on the board it was really helpful to have Rich work

132with us this year on the questions so if there are themes and things that you would like to see um updated for next year then we can do that also we start a new cycle next year um in the lcap process I don't think it means we necessarily want to dump all the data we've gotten over the last several years but um it's a good time I also think for making some more structural changes so I'm going to note that okay and then Rich is going to tell us who's going to work with us okay and then one other question um that so many staff members said that they rarely have conversations about race and we've been doing all this Equity work so that doesn't pardon me who is the district office in November when

133when the servant oh okay got it thanks yeah and just regarding that parent question it was how satisfied are they with the amount of connection they have with the teachers at school so yeah yeah it might I mean it's interesting to think about whether or not parents want you can I can imagine freshman parents feeling having maybe I could disaggregate and look at how it is for parent to a freshman versus parents of seniors and hope to see that the you know like the sliding scale that as the older they get the the more the more students are advocating for themselves and the parents don't feel the need to be connected so I can disaggregate the data by grade and I think that might answer some of our questions about that so I just want

134to say so I mean I actually kind of disagree with you and I kind of do feel like if parents are saying that I think that is a valid concern you know I can say for myself there probably is a kind of more drop off from middle school to high school how much you are engaged and I don't think that's necessarily anything against teachers or what they're doing but I think it is a valid concern I think you know we do talk sometimes about how we want our district to be more customer friendly I don't know if that's the right word to say but you know I think it's worth noting if parents do feel this way what can we do to make them feel more engaged because I think when you know we kind

135of talk about alignment too when we do get everyone on the same page we do get parents kind of understanding what's going on in the classroom I think it makes everyone feel better the other question I had kind of on a different topic was so the way you did the survey is this the Panorama so is that the same Panorama that all the students take every year yes well I mean so you know this is just speaking from my experience as a student but you know I think I've also had conversations with this with trustee Dubois but you know I think we do kind of wonder sometimes is this the best way to go about getting data because I mean I know what it's like to be a student so I don't know students are

136always you know wanting to fill out these started surveys in a way that's accurately representing you know what they feel at the time or if it's simply like uh you know I just want to get this done with I don't see a point in it so I wondered if you know what if there was any like ideas of how to actually get more student engagement I mean maybe Panorama is working well but you know I just wondered it's being from my own experience you know I kind of sometimes wondered like what's the point of this I wondered if there's any kind of way we were thinking about to get more student buy-in into this process as soon as we figure out how to get more student buy-in on the cast I think this is one

137way for us to get student input but I think you're completely right um Shanice asked me when we're looking at student engagement how are we going to drill down on that and she didn't say this but that's an area for growth for us every single time and so I think in areas where we see Trends um that we probably need to start doing things like student focus groups student panels so that we are getting kids in more organic settings or more personal settings um to to get further input but we're also open to other suggestions no completely and I was just curious so how many questions would a student have to answer in the survey because I mean I kind of forgot how many questions I answered but I feel like it was it was

138so this year um it was actually a little longer than it had been in the past because we did two different times last year we did one on SEL and one on lcap and this year we combined it um and one thing we did we asked everybody to do is do it in class so that um it wouldn't it wasn't something they had to do on their own time and a volunteer voluntary way so I think that's one of the reasons why we have as great of response rates we do um I think it it did take a good 30 minutes to do um the questions or it was I I apologize my microphone was on when I said that was long so I'm sorry it it was long it was long I agree I

139agree it was long um so it was a it was a toss between yeah it was long it was good but it was awesome I didn't mean for you to comment I just didn't know my microphone and I said that so I apologize Yeah well yeah the other choice was do it twice and we felt like doing it once would be kind of the biggest bang for our buck if we did it during class once and just minimized any disruption to instructional time all right so I have a couple of questions um on this one that the survey is long and I as a person who's working on a community assessment project in the community um some communities and cultures don't want to fill out anything that's going to best too long and what I

140hear from young people when they fill out of a survey I've been asking questions about kids data and all kinds of stuff to get some confirmation from youth about what they need and they will they have said over and over to me we don't really fill those surveys out we just we just fill it out we don't really like always tell the truth or we're rushing through it so sometimes getting more accurate information the more information and I know you have your standards and the fits and all that kind of stuff so I hope I hope that here knowing that that is like the regulation but I also want to say that young people don't always fill the survey out so that it's accurate data and so I want to us to think about like

141um I'm thinking I'm doing a community assessment around African-American Youth and we are only asking questions that we actually use like and and helping them to understand that these are really important or setting the tone around how important their voices are so I know that you do some of this Bonnie but that's like the first thing that comes to mind so I I want to honor what you're saying and and believe you and students say that they're not taking it too seriously and it's super long it's a catch-22 one of the things that Diana did this year was we had great input on the Panorama survey last year as we always do and I think we burnt the bejeebers out of our constituents so then when it was time to take the mandated healthy kids

142survey which is super long and you have to ask all the questions they got hardly any responses and we wanted to acknowledge that many board members are very concerned about mental health so we wanted to get you great results on mental health and Diana said I'll work with them and I will combine the surveys so it's it's I don't know what to do with that feedback I know that's why I said I hope this here um but I also am trying to like hear students who say that um but I am happy you yeah but I'm happy you did it in class at least you don't have to do it on their own time so um I think the other question that I had let me get my phone out I had it written out

143um there were some results that you had shared that I had questions about and Bonnie I know you you sent me some stuff it wouldn't open for me for some reason um but there was one of the questions is is it still there I think it's in I don't know what slide it's on but it says strengthening a sense will be long no no no hold on wrong one sorry it was about being eager um participation in the classroom and the the data was kind of low they you know they're not as ex am I correct did I read that can you share more about that because I actually would love to dig deeper into that area do you know what I'm talking about Bonnie yeah the question about eager to participate it was a

144Student Response it was the area for growth that we referenced and you know we obviously we we plowed through a lot of questions asking students um and and we're just sharing with you the two the two questions that we think are the most powerful maybe we see the same ones year after year and we'll just ask those ones going forward yeah so um this again I could disaggregate this um you know more by any which way we want uh to look at if it's you know a grade particular grades are more eager to participate than other grades or particular students from um depending on their participation in different classes and what they're not they're eager to participate this is just an overall general based on the 5200 responses um there were nine percent of students

145that were not at all eager to participate and uh 20 who were slightly eager I guess in my mind that question is actually pretty interesting I think it's it's a reflection of what the teacher wants more feedback and the people who give feedback is the students um with parameters of course uh and I I wonder if we dig down in that area if we ever have time um I think it could give us some ideas around strategies around what works for students especially if we break it down into kids with different needs um and what does that look like in the classroom to really hear the voices of students I hear teachers always saying they want to hear more um they they get excited about coming to school to teach not for the adults but

146for the kids and so I wonder what would happen if we Elevate those voices um because I think that would be worth it I think that would be really really worth it the second thing that I wanted to ducktail on is what sophic has said about parents not feeling connected to their teacher I think there is this you know when we think of brain development and brain's not really being developed to their 25 years old and so as a person who had a freshman um who was not functioning like a complete freshman and having to be up at school a lot I think there is something to say about voting in how much parent engagement needs to happen or parents being connected and that freshman year um I hear it from even when I was

147part of the ma foundation and and being um because that's the school I went to so I can't talk about all the other schools so it's not me being biased but that's the school where my kids went for seven years with my three kids but what I heard from parents who were like me who were on that board who were not for my community from my community that freshman year is really difficult because it when it's a shock I'm going to M.A because it feels like an MA it feels like a mini College I think a lot of our comprehensive schools feel that way so how do we phase in that Community like how much parents should be involved What hap at what level do they start calling the teacher do they wait for the

148a kid whose brain not quite developed to advocate for themselves when they really don't want to like all that kind of stuff or better yet they just don't want to be seen they want to do what they want to do right so um like what do we do about that I think is something for us to kind of think about from a developmental perspective for the for the brain development as well as parents and I know for myself I understood after M.A was like please please let your kid do it right I'm like okay um but like almost having a visual of like this is what engagement looks like and as they get older this is what it looks like and you decrease and they increase but it sometimes feel that freshman year sometimes even

149that sophomore year their parents are cut off and really given that message that you cannot advocate for your kids your kids need to do it themselves um and so there there is kind of a attention there with brain development so I wanted to duck tell on that and I and I thought about what um um Kerry talked about that you know some kids are are we were looking to have kids more advocate for themselves and sometimes with kids without I with IEPs maybe not so I think it just depends on how the severity of the IEP there are some students who were just working on life skills with and so they they may not always have their voice together but we want kids regardless of where they are with the severity of their needs to

150be able to advocate for themselves through a person-centered approach which is based in disabilities which means we're giving kids their voice and then they're able to challenge and then they're able to take it out and I kind of think about my my own kids as they're older now it might be because I was like this but anyhow but they're starting to give more feedback to people um and they're learning to use their voice through the system and I think if they don't practice that regardless of what their needs are they don't know how to use it when they go out into the world where um it's not so voice friendly um so I just been thinking a lot about how we should be with our students so that they get the skills that they need

151once they go out into career in college and whatever choices that they have After High School so those are my two cents Amy you wanted to call me yeah I had a two questions um one related to what were the results from last year's survey where the the areas of growth and strength similar and if we were targeting certain things from last year um you know did we improve or how are we tracking from year to year and then the second question is related to what kind of evaluations are in place right now for teachers just so we have a better understanding sure so we see the same thing themes um over the years uh the for a long time our greatest area for growth has been student engagement um I would say it looks

152like that's improving partly because we've broken apart that question and we're showing somewhat eager in the past we only showed the very low and the very high and the results but I would say that's still according to the survey our greatest area for growth and the work happening around that is a lot of work on student engagement in the classroom um particularly in the areas of student voice and student dialogue and Rich talk but I agree that we could use some student focus groups and some student panels to talk to us more about those areas and what they would find to be most helpful we did it during the pandemic specifically to the pandemic but we haven't done it on this topic since and then staff consistently says a greatest need that they have is

153more collaboration time um and those would be those are the two areas that I see come up Year and that they need that would that their feedback on their um on on how they're doing at their work is traditionally an area for growth press as well and then Todd I don't know if you want to say anything about evaluation process we're coming with you really yeah just uh just shortly the evaluation process is identified in the collective bargaining agreement there is a multiple step process that goes through it and depends whether or not you are a probationary teacher or if you're a tenure teacher a probationary teacher you're evaluated more often within a two-year time frame before you're considered or it could be considered an attend your teacher there are other areas for like a

154self-evaluation teachers can choose others that have been in your tenure profession for a certainly at the time they can can look at with an agreement with their administrator to kind of a a broader range of evaluations so instead of doing it once every two years maybe it's once every five years or so but it has to be based on their previous evaluations and how will they do so there's multiple levels to an evaluation depending if their probationary or tenuring it gives a follow-on question are there any informal evaluations or feedback versus the formal uh for well the other formal the other observations and after the observations they can come in and have conversations with their Administration Administration should follow up with them uh in writing as well uh with the reservations there could also just

155be discussions with the teachers or the staff in general for participation and help but we also have which I'm very proud to to partner with what we have with our sdta is our uh you heard before about our partnership here Association or assistance program that is another way I spoke too fast oh sure our partnership here assistance program okay um that is sorry about that I know I can fly through really quickly um but that's another way in which in terms of providing support for our teachers uh it's a great opportunity for them either as veteran teachers within our school district to partner with coaches as a way to assist in their um the progression and their skills can I ask one more question it's not of Utah sorry um not like that thank you

156Todd um the question I have um is there on the survey question it says when you broke it down for schools it says confidentiality protected on is that the parent survey participation it was slide number well it doesn't happen number hold on I don't know what number it is it 12 um hold on I don't know what that means okay it was on I'm trying to figure out oh maybe ten slide 10. maybe maybe they just didn't choose a school and so they're just confidential like they left it I left it blank oh okay okay so it's nothing like about that okay no no and then my last question we didn't do get any any students at our Gateway do we do those do they fill out the survey so no they're not considered they're

157considered outside of our okay gotcha um and then the last thing is um I know that we work with our Liaisons that are Spanish-speaking and thank you so much to getting um the surveys out but I know we have a parent um a Tongan apparent liaison were we able to get Pacific Islanders families out to fill out the survey do you know I'm looking at Lily not saying you need to know everything but when it comes would have to try to help them right through the questions sorry so um yeah she was part of this um training and I'm sure she she reported back that she was able to help families with the survey yes alrighty thank you quickly actual last thing I just thought of this but you know I might be mixing up

158surveys but if I remember correctly when I took the survey there are two questions one was there was a question at the end where you could give like write feedback basically anything I was curious if anyone do we looked through those are there a lot of responses or there is a place for open-ended responses that we need to kind of call through and word cloud and do some qualitative analysis and we have not had a chance to do that yet because I think that's something that it is very valuable you're curious yeah because I guess someone who takes a time to write something might have feedback I guess the other question but I think there's also a question where you'd list out people you consider were close to or friends right or is that another

159survey um really because I thought it was there before covered is it the caliber maybe it's the California oh maybe that's a good survey yeah no no the the California healthy kids survey is still given to ninth grade and 11th grade at right is it every year yeah so that Cal but what we did is we combined forces with student services because they had an SEL survey that was separate from the lcap survey so we smushed those two together and so that we weren't asking kids the same question more than once and we were able to ask some mental health screeners earlier in the year because this was in November so if you were in ninth grade you'd be taking three surveys except two of them were combined now too this year two surveys in

160the past three all right thank you so much any other board members have comments questions so I I just have one sort of uh procedural type question we had two trustees speak about like parent relationship and specific ideas we didn't get to kind of a consensus on anything um you know I there's sort of two ways that parents can be more satisfied one would be that they something more happens the other be that their expectations would be different like and either way you could be more satisfied like if what's the right role for the parents in a student of that age and of each of the ages and I don't know what would be I mean there's sort of the setting strategic Direction and then setting the right metrics what would be like the right

161is this something that we should somehow revisit in a future board meeting or something about like what's the perhaps there's a second question but I just sort of it sounds like we had some amount of um differing of opinions on like what's the right question what's the right thing to try to measure involvement yeah right what's the right amount like what's for someone who's 17 or 18 years old how involved should their parents be in their classrooms Etc so I'm I'm sort of asking a procedural question we didn't get to anything that we call guidance here but it sounds like there was a some some feat what should we do for next steps I mean so one thing I could do is I could look a little deeper into the open-ended responses just to see

162if I pull out any kind of extract any other additional data from that from the parents perspective I think that might glean something and um we could look at you mentioned Charlene Margot um and just kind of getting a sense of is how much of the parent project in the parent curriculum focused on uh um parent engagement in schools and I can chat with her a little bit about that to see how she measures that um and maybe just re-look at the questions again when we we uh administer this next year yeah there's somewhat the question itself and the other is what what is our what is our expectation yeah what is it that we we want um prior to the questions when when would you be working on developing the next survey like roughly

163what month summer so there's something that sometimes before the end of the Academic Year we need to if we're gonna so if we were going to have any sort of board if we were going to do anything with it we would have to do it before June because they're doing the survey in the summer you create this can you talk about again where you create the survey for next year correct correct yeah so Janelle has a thought I'm passing it along um the the also one one thing to consider is that our parents um do take the survey earlier in the school year they complete the survey in November and so like we were to ask them now I wonder how much more they feel they have been involved throughout you know maybe at the

164end of the semester great and then through through the spring semester much more involvement may happen but just to consider that the timeline of the survey I think it would also be important to disaggregate the data a little bit further to see if we can get the age groups for that but then I also um I wrote down that I would be interested in asking that same question to teachers to see how what they measure the parent involvement to see if they're close or they're great um that is a great question and I think when we have when we kind of Pare down the number of a number of questions that are really of most interest to us asking them in all on all the questions on all the surveys the same questions so that

165we can look at how all the respondents respond to the same kind of question will also help really move our system forward okay thanks so much uh we need to take a little uh we do have one oh sorry yeah we should take the public comment prior yep sorry okay Abby Corman sorry everyone I do need to use the restroom myself so I'll be happy for that break um as I've said publicly before I do believe in our lcap goals and I'm proud of them I believe moving toward on the ground action Beyond work by management and meetings will help our district students immensely I look forward to hearing our steps towards this work tonight we heard about Community engagement for the lcap and I appreciate the effort that went into this the reflection and

166changes from years past and that there was an increase in responses I also appreciate the comments I just heard from trustee Stevenson and trustee Nori bringing up that they brought up pushing us to find ways to have students and stakeholders engage more deeply my comments are similar as I've said before in fact at our last meeting we cannot be satisfied with the current feedback levels that we have from our community as well we may say that they're statistically representative I must continue to argue we need to be hearing more from our community and from more of our community I think we heard about 7 000 respondents when my best estimate a full stakeholder responses would have been over twenty thousand I especially appreciated hearing all that Janelle and Lily did and the work that the

167single bilingual parent Liaisons at each site did I wonder what changes in community engagement we might see with more funding to these parent liaison positions I also want to applaud the effort Janelle Diana and Lily did to make sure our survey was translated well thank you I'd love us to always put that effort in does our district rely on Google translate heavily do we not have a positive have a position that ensures all of our translations are accurate I do not know but I'm afraid after hearing this presentation that this work falls on bilingual staff who do not get any additional stipend for having this skill and are therefore asked to do things that their monolingual colleagues are never asked to do I wonder how much time and effort this took to get even this

168much engagement which while statistically representative was less than a 50 response rate I also wonder if it is or could be someone's job to stream them streamline the communication and requests of surveys we expect our family students and other stakeholders to participate in so that our feedback is Meaningful currently I believe only some students and community members feel as if their voice matters in this district and we need to figure out a way to address that skipping ahead I agree with President Jin that a review of our communication procedures would be a valuable future agenda item and I think a step back view of tonight's meeting shows that our community is not feeling heard or reached out to in ways that make them feel connected I look forward to us trying new practices to engage

169our community members by more deeply funding needed on the ground positions to do the work with parents such as bilingual site Liaisons as we work to regain trust and be better thanks thank you okay with that we'll we'll take a recess is uh we'll return to 8 55 Apple time okay that concludes our recess and we are going to continue with the information item all right mutiyo are you still there very much so there you are much you thank you so much for being with us if you would just let me know when you want me to forward the size slides I'm going to turn this portion of the evening over to you okay thank you very much good evening everyone nice to um see you all again uh some of you have made before

170I want to start by uh saying hello to president Jean and also can you hear me so far Bonnie you sound great okay and to the other trust this as well I look forward to uh meeting all of you and working with you and I want to con congratulate our new superintendent um also it's nice to get on the call tonight and hear other folks congratulating you so I look forward to working with you it's been a pleasure so far the two or three times we've worked together thank you and I also have to give a shout out to uh Bonnie uh who's just being just really terrific in bringing me and my team up to speed and being a a great uh thought partner in this process so the I usually like to start

171every meeting we do by putting up position in perspective and we call ourselves uh facilitators that a facilitator is a guide a guide does not come out of control but a guide does direct leaving it up to the partners or clients to choose to follow follow along so what we see as our role is guiding the this the uh your school system towards whatever you define as your bliss so the process of developing a plan is one of the you can think of that as articulating what bliss bliss might look like for United District but I want to ask your Indulgence a little bit as I just kind of Boardwalk as I've listened last couple of hours there's one idea from a very well-known document that uh has been on my mind for the last

172couple of hours as I've listened to the conversation and that document is the preamble to the Constitution it talks about we the people and what we the people want is to build a more perfect union it doesn't say to build a perfect union it says a more perfect union which is a recognition that at any given point what we have in place might not be quite it might not live up to the ideals we have in mind it also the that one worked more in front of perfect also it's about continuous Improvement it's also about uh at least for me it tells me that there's better uh that tends to be better than they are right now so that when we run into what seems to be difficult times as reflected in some of the

173comments this evening about the uh you know tracking or the tracking that we ought not give up on the ideals or the Big Ideas that we share we want to hang on to them and then figure out we have to work together to figure out how to make them work for everyone uh in fact in the name of your District the word Union is part of it also so we want the the work we saw was going to go in a straight line and when I was pretty but we can build a more perfect union if we continue to believe in the ideals or the ideas uh that form the basis for having a Union High School District in the first place there's just so many different ways that that uh Preamble the part of

174the Preamble uh came to mind for me this evening as I listened to your presentation so the what what I've been asked to do tonight is to give a very brief update of the work that we've done so far a couple three scheduled conversations two of them uh completed around feedback from stakeholders and that too is work in progress uh it can be more perfect and we can talk some more about how to make that happen uh but I want to start with a few slides just to set it context for the four or five slides on what we learned and the first slide is one on the screen a profile of our students it's a very diverse School District at about every 20 students roughly eight and uh Hispanic uh Latino roughly 8 out

175of every 20 and white students then with the spat a splattering of the of other races and ethnicities so we do have the Russia ethnic diversity on the next slide we also show other ways of thinking about our students in terms of the programs or special supports they qualify for so out of every 20 students are about three students with disabilities roughly the same number or the same proportion as students who are whose first language is not English and about 30 percent uh six out of every 20 of our students come from homes classified as low income next slide please okay so the back against you the more perfect union and really picking up on the union piece this is the slide of uh why as a district and it's a very powerful statement I

176mean really powerful statement that wise to produce consistent excellence in outcomes for all students regardless of their background and circumstances that's why I read that and that's still that's work in progress and the way out the easy lazy way out is to you know try to um amend that or get a workaround that's the easy lazy not so uh energizing way out the tough away but the one that I believe is more ultimately more satisfying is for us to figure out how to make the why a reality that's that's the real work uh that we want to do and and how well are we doing so far well this chart uh shows a snapshot of where our students are much of the data is expressed in terms of out of every 20 students and then

177we just colorize to get a feel for where where we are so we're looking at a snapshot based on performance and state tests in language arts and math uh engagement in schooling as measured by uh of proxy like attendance and suspension rates performance and coursework showing how many on 9th graders have at least 60 credits which might be an indication of them being on track to graduate within four years uh how many what percentage complete a2g courses and how many are taking and passing at least one uh AP or IB course before graduating and so on the uh you know we can look at these specific details later around but it's quite obvious that for some of our students back against the why we did doing pretty well for some other students they're not doing

178as well yet and that this is not new news it's just a reinforced really the very positive uh idea that you have a very as a school system get a very strong statement about why earlier tonight some people describe those in terms of closing the achievement Gap we're not there yet you know we're not there yet but we don't want to give up on being there or we don't want to be looking for you know a quick quick way out so the lcap planning process is really about alignments how do we get all the arrows going in the same direction towards a shared set of values and goals the arrows to be people there could be processes there could be programs and structures but if even if you want to ask a four-year-old which of

179those two circles will likely give more um Pleasant results they will tell you it's one on the right and so as the our approach to planning then we suggest that the primary aim of planning is unity of purpose or alignments and we can go to the next slide and we cannot have that alignment without embracing diverse voices of all of our stakeholders the survey results we just saw a few moments ago gives us a clue as to where each of those different groups are and the few slides that I have to share with you just make the same point if we want to get all students home again back to the more perfect union we have to keep working on ways to get those diverse voices how do we get more types of parents who

180traditionally haven't been able to reach how do we get the you know the students on board and next slide please so the sessions we've had so far that three of them are you know the first one was I think was the uh Pac that was held on the 24th at the district office we had one Zoom session um about a month and a month and a half ago and then we had uh we scheduled one just that this past week 2016 at um EPA so what I'm going to show you uh highlights of the uh key findings from what we could make out on the next slide are the six l-cap goals what we brought to the conversation with the participants was to have them reflect on where we are on the six goals what's

181working well in each one of those areas one is improvements and what suggestions do they have for improving uh our probability of success on each one of these six goals so in terms of what's working well you know three main categories of things that are working well and you see some of these also under when it's Improvement again in the spirit of building a more perfect union uh the uh I was quite pleased to have many parents talk about the attendance system much better than it used to be a bit pleased with the increase attention and attendance the follow-up with students who are front of chronically absent and at The District's approach to addressing attendance uh problems is more integrated more focused than it's been in the past on services and programs especially from uh

182non-engage speaking parents who are very pleased with influencing translation services that the uh some of the changes that have taken place at the suicide level have sort of leveled the playing field different programs or supports and services that seem to make access to college much easier and much uh much more approachable for many students and and families and then around teaching and learning you see this on you see both sides of this piece they are cross restructuring some felt or was positive they did tracking of the freshman classes also found in that category and more more than uh one set of participants talked about teachers being very helpful to their students so you know three broad categories the around one its Improvement three categories here also the students were actually advocating for more teachers especially

183uh they talk about um uh insufficient adult capacity to connect students to resources and the need for additional creative ways to get students to school you know flip side of the attendance uh positive comment made early on they there were some comments around open up on campus the uh again positive and things that need work you know how can we make sure we have we address the challenges posed by an open campus without the students feeling at it without having to wall them in you know one more time and then around teaching and learning the flip side the concern about heterogeneous classes teaching practices and some detract classrooms okay no surprise that we're not all on the same page about what that means yes and then finally finding staff to offer more CTE courses I

184think it's almost like yes um for uh in terms of access for English Learners I think most of the comments will be what you would expect transition give having information about transition to college transition through the college process having school meetings that are focused on how to help and support Spanish-speaking families not just on budget and um the making it easier for parents and families to have support for their ell children and several points around transition making them smooth and and simpler strengthen your sense of belonging for Youth and students especially those who have been formally incarcerated or who are forced to you or in foster care and then we transition from high school against you whole secondary options and then the final section again this is the contention of the transition uh point then

185in terms of suggestions for improvement next slide please just three broad areas professional learning for teachers regarding differentiation so that they can better meet the diverse needs of their diverse populations more meaningful metrics of student learning Beyond just test scores and then having more opportunities for uh City participation on programs and services you know less class time more people more people time how do we take the teaching and learning beyond the classroom and parents student government and student voice Mark cancel us again and then personalized learning Pathways for for students and then on the transition side it's really about connection beyond the school of career Affairs job shadowing uh speaker series and so on and I think we have one more slide maybe that's that's the last one yeah so you know overall the as

186you probably would have predicted the there are several things that are going well and somebody thinks that are going well can be better improved but I did not as well as they could be yes and the although the groups the participant sites have been a small we have about money at about 10 more scheduled 10 more listen sessions uh yes we've got about 10 more constituent groups who will be giving us input so that that's where the process stands I can only only three have been held so far uh the story I've seen it's holding uh well we have to continue to figure out how to get more authentic feedback from other participants once we have all that in then the exercise that comes stands on the planning form the lcat plan itself will be

187in two phases we think about all this as just input into a very focused conversation about what can we glean from these constituent conversations and how do we incorporate that or integrate them where they wear the same applicable into the plan for the 23 24 school year and then next school year we can also talk about the lcat plan for the next three three years cycle that starts in 24 25. I'm not unhappy to take your questions now thank you okay thank you uh board would you prefer to see if there's public common person do you but do we have any public comment Laura if anyone in Zoom uh attendance would like to comment can you please raise your Zoom hand now okay saying none Laura's are none uh in the room okay sure okay

188okay we have one on Zoom Caroline Coleman sorry there's a slight delay um I just wanted to say this is really encouraging I really appreciate you taking the time to uh share this it makes me feel really good about shifting pivoting and um hopeful so thank you for that thank you thank you very much I think that's it okay any board members have any comment okay go ahead first of all it's nice to meet you virtually thank you and I I wanted to say something stood out to me on one of the slides um when you I'm sorry I'm sorry sorry sorry I'm getting tired um you talked about a more perfect union um I think coming off this meeting today with various pieces to it that's beyond your presentation um there's something that you

189said thank you Laura it's all in my mouth but anyhow I lost my thoughts now oh thank you for the stem I really appreciate that um there was something on the on one of the slides that I thought was like inspirational and aspirational for us which is diverse voices aligned to a unified Direction that's that said it all for me um I know you know I'm supposed to comment on the on the PowerPoint that I'm trying to find on my computer now uh but I I thought that that was pretty insightful to put on there um I know we're getting more feedback but this really sounds like some of the emails that we've been getting so it's not unusual some of the information and um yeah I'm just I'm interested in knowing more um about

190a couple of things one of the things I know I asked you Bonnie challenges and opportunities posed by open campus this is kids going out for lunch yeah and people don't want it oh they don't come back I'm sure they want it I'm like oh I'm like what's the challenge they don't come back is that the challenge some some don't and then there's some wondering uh you know they don't come back on time uh a couple parents also expressed concern about safety okay you know that when they walk around during this during the school day okay but they like the idea of the uh you know the freedom or the options kids have versus having them walled in and again you just haven't quite figure out how to write balance that was my read of

191where that comment came from that was a very frustrating okay Bonnie did you want to say anything I had the same take you did okay and then my other question is additional creative ways to get students to school is transportation an issue is that what that means no it means what can we do to incentivize motivate Inspire some of our students who are less frequent attenders to be more frequent attenders oh okay okay a school attendance um in one sense you can think of it as people the students voting with their feet if it's the kind of place that really engages them and inspires and they will come if it doesn't and they get a better offer from somebody else they likely to take that offer which would be things that happen outside of school

192students vote with their feet and so there is a message there thank you um I think those were the only two things because I wasn't quite clear I forgot to ask you prior to um but yeah this this is very good information I can't wait to hear more YouTube okay I think that concludes the information item oh I had one oh sorry Amy didn't know go ahead um because I saw on um I guess it's slide 45. um there was what needs Improvement was better understanding by adults of students aspirations sense of purpose and passions as a bridge to connect students to learning so I think that ties in very well with the uh student engagement piece but I was wondering did that get translated to personalized learning Pathways for students on the following page

193in terms of suggestions for improvement or how did you transition from those opportunities or what needs Improvement into suggestions yeah the connection you made it's really very powerful I didn't pick that up before but that's definitely a through line that can be run from you know the suggestion for something more passionate more exciting for kids and something much more highly personalized I don't recall what are those came from the same person but they definitely they definitely connected so the suggestions for improvement was still a summary coming out of the community engagement but it may not have been the same person that's correct yeah with the uh five or six pages we shared about what what it's Implement we've tried at this stage in the process to be as close to what people said we're not

194well and interpreted it much that's not a large enough information based on which to make General sweeping statements but so most of those really came from um as close to verbatim as we could get at this point that's great thank you okay thank you thank you Mateo thank you look forward to working with you I'm Crystal congratulations again much appreciated thank you all right all right take care everyone okay the next item is approval of the 2022-2023 second interim report so we do have Christine gong with us tonight uh she is the Director of Business Services also known as The District's controller thank you superintendent Leach good evening everyone so tonight I will be presenting an overview of our second interim financial report our district is required to submit two interim Financial reports to the

195County Office of Ed the second interim budget report reflects actuals through January 31st and projections through June uh you can see this um so this the this slide here is a um it's the second interim at a glance with um numbers for our revenues and expense and our projected ending fund balance but I want to talk about here so this is a um a worksheet comparison comparing our first interim to Second interim our total change in fund balance increased by 20 million 21 million dollars right here and that is from a five million dollar increase in Revenue right here um the majority of the increase was in our property tax and that's due to transferring less of our property tax to our charter schools because of their declining enrollments and also another big increase uh

196was the state revenue that's for the transportation funds uh part of the requirement of receiving the transportation funds is the board approving a plan which is included in tonight's agenda on the expenditure side the close to 16 million dollar decrease was aligning our salaries and benefits with position controlled and some our unfield unfilled vacancies and also adjusting the art music block grant and our learning recovery emergency funds since the board has not approved an expenditure plan uh hasn't approved an expenditure expenditure expenditure plan uh the funds were taken out of our second and our second interim budget and also we were deferred some of the educator Effectiveness expenditures to the out years so that what makes up the 21 million dollars um from second interim to personal this is a chart showing our multi-year projection

197for Revenue um you can see that uh in the out years it's decreasing and I will talk about that um after I show you the chart on the expenditures this is a chart that shows that a majority or funding comes from our property tax and uh 12 comes from our state tax uh seven percent is federal uh sorry seven percent is our local funding local funding meaning interest income our donations our foundation money um and our rentals and leases and four percent comes from our federal funds this chart shows our expenditures for our other multi-year and as you can see in 22-24 and the out years that our expenditures are um decreasing so let's talk about our Revenue on the revenue for our multi-year you can see that our our revenue is decreasing in 23

19824. it's because of the expiration of the one-time funds in our federal and state revenue and also we didn't we don't budget in any one-time donations in our local Revenue on the expenditure side uh total expenditures are also decreasing because positions and supplies and services that are funded from one one-time dollars are not included in the outpiers but but as you can see for the current year and the two out years are unrestricted budget um has a surplus so we anticipate um having a support Surplus friend for three years um in terms of our other funds we are projecting to have a positive ending fund balance um and I welcome the board to ask any questions if they have any questions about our second interim okay um oh I was just gonna move approval but

199first we'll see if there's any any um comments or questions so I just had a question about the local funding I think he mentioned that donations are not included so what is uh included in the local funding um interest income rentals and leases and some of the foundation money that funds some of our positions so then donations is actually separate from Foundation money then correct because sometimes it's one time okay all right thank you [Music] any other questions I guess I kind of had a more general question so I know the district did get a lot of one-time funds during covert so I guess going forward how certain are we that our financial Outlook is good without access to these one-time funds like is that a concern at all that the money that we had

200or how we spent it I'm just curious about that um if you look at our multi-year projection on the unrestricted side which is uh this column we're showing a surplus so we're not deficit spending so for the next three years um we're showing a surplus so the district is not um deficit spending that increasing the fund balance maybe just a connected question can you talk about the assumptions between uh the 2022-23 83 million total expenditures and then that it'll be 71 million uh in the 23 24 for the restricted funding that would what are the assumptions that lead to that difference in the expenditures between those two periods the 83 million and the 71 million 83 the restricted funds in 2223 and the restricted funds in 23.24. it looks like there's an assumption of roughly

20112 million dollars less restricted expenses and I'm just wondering what if you know where that however oh that's because we're not funding any of the one-time positions in the out years does that how many people are currently working in one-time positions I don't have that information currently at hand but I can't get it to the board okay thank you [Music] any other discussion motion to approve they're removed a second thank you do we need a roll call Laura okay all in favor approval aye aye okay thanks so much nice to meet you by Zoom thank you for your presentation thank you and next we have approval of the Sequoia Union High School District transportation plan go ahead Christine thanks Laura um per assembly Bill 181 the home to school transportation reimbursement like I mentioned before

202in order to qualify for the state transportation funding the board must approved the district's Transportation plan the transportation plan outlines the current Services provided for students who did not reside within walking distance of our school as well as transportation services for students who are experiencing homelessness students with disabilities and students participating in the Tinsley transfer program the state funds US 60 percent of our prior year Transportation expenditures less are lcff Transportation add-on so our entitlement for next year is 2.7 million dollars let's go stop it because topic yeah so I read this and I just had a quick question about section five so I'm kind of curious like why why is it just Tinsley students who get Transportation if they go to another school or is it all students or is it the result of

203the settlement of the original lawsuit that's the result of this settlement from the lawsuit I guess my question is about the Tinsley so we have students that go across the eight districts for Tinsley or some of them not all of them I'm not for sure I think most it's not all of them yeah yeah but the ones who end up going to Palo Alto does one thing so cloud is that Transportation look for us is it because they they chose like their feeder school as karma because they were in a certain uh Tinsley school is that what I'm thinking yes then we would transport to Karma okay so if they were in a Tinsley program and they were in Belmont Rebel Shores and they choose Karma even though they're in East Palo Alto or Belhaven

204we provide the transportation to get to those schools okay gotcha thank you you might not know the answer to this I'm just curious is that a significant number like do a significant number of Tinsley students stay where do most of them end up going back to Ma I don't have that information I thought years ago the feeder districts did their own transportation and then they contracted out to Sequoia Union correct did they pay us back for that some do yes and we do have mous for the ones that we currently provide transportation for right so some don't pay us back or some do no um they've just reduced the amount of need if they use our transportation services they do pay us for it okay uh motion to approve so welcome to the chair we

205have one public comment oh thank you uh from Abby Corman hi I think maybe I've misinterpreted this but I I'm still um uh eager to have this comment because I'm I was thrilled to see Transportation on the agenda because this is an issue I've been concerned about for quite some time especially after my transition from working at Sequoia to Menlo Atherton um I thought at first and I had in here to ask are we looking into increasing transportation services or doing a review of them and because I hoped for both um all I concurrently offer is anecdotes from my class um where I have shared with you data some of my students they're not graduating but they are also tardy and they're frequently absent from the Intensive and intervention courses um I make it a

206purpose to welcome students saying I'm so glad you're here no matter what time they arrive when they're tardy and reaching out to absent students telling them that they were missed and asking them if they're okay I often hear of outside life experiences that are severe and significant and make sense that they're missing school that day I'm using this relational pedagogy and coming from a place of curiosity I've also learned that many of my students walk in the mornings to Menlo Atherton from EPA it takes about an hour sometimes in the rain some of my students pay for Ubers to school some of my students share that they're late because the 296 and other SamTrans buses send the small bus instead of the larger double bus and so they have to wait for the next one

207because they don't want to push their way onto a crowded bus or safety concerns in multiple parent meetings I've heard parents share that they won't let their students take the public bus because they don't feel it safe but they also don't feel like biking is safe over the freeway but they're not home to drive their students to school I'm wondering if we can look into dating data about safety and transportation if this is not something we were already planning on doing how many students feel unsafe getting to school and back home again how many students have faced violence or threats going to and from school is part of our chronic absenteeism because we're not transporting our students safely into our classrooms ask us to look more deeply at this because it troubles me almost every

208time I reach out to a student and hear legitimate concerns for why they could not attend that day thank you okay any other comments from board members motion to approve so moved a second thank you all in favor aye that concludes the items on tonight's agenda do I have a motion to adjourn move to adjourn a second okay all in favor adjournment aye aye hey good night