Azusa Unified School District Board Meeting - November 16, 2021

001my good evening everyone thank you for joining us here at isuzu unified school district at our board meeting tonight today is november 16 2021 and it is 5 30. i will go ahead and start in calling the meeting to order and i will go ahead and start and transfer to mr i'm sorry my first sergeant marvin herbert students brenda emeril marquez sydney ramon and armando ramos who are the gladstone gladiators jrotc i'm handing it over to you guys to lead the flag salute 1.2 freeze colors place your right hand over your heart as i recite the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all orders thank you so much

002gladstone gladiators for leading us on our flag salute today for our board meeting we appreciate you in everything that you do and your service and thank you for sergeant for joining us tonight as well hope you guys have a great rest of the evening and join our our meeting as well moving on to item three point i'm sorry one point three roll call we have board member rodriguez pena president board member bo here board member career here and board member bruce gonzalez and i board member ariana's i'm here so there's five of us here the board of education encourages public input when the public wishes to address the board of education on an agenda item they may fill out a blue card they can come here in person or they can join us on zoom

003giving this flexibility we'll go ahead and um start with our public since there's nobody here out in our in our um in our room we'll go ahead and start with 3.1 public comment we have anybody on zoom we do oh yes sorry about that we do have one uh jenny telemontes you mean i meet your mike [Music] um can i start hello i'm man start uh yes ma'am can i please have your name uh jenny talamantes welcome jenny hi um i'm a sophomore at godstone high school the students at gladstone here were shocked to hear that the district would close down our school and make even more impactful changes to our lives after all the changes with covid we've heard that current sophomores would have to transfer to use a high for their senior year

004and freshmen for their junior why can't we have a normal high school experience why should we have to go through all of this we went through the changes with covert and struggled to adjust to that yet we did it personally i've had to deal with the lack of social interaction not just for my friends but from teachers i wasn't able to truly get to know them i myself and many other students suffered from learning laws with distance learning i missed out on my freshman year and all the traditions and events at gladstone now we are back in school and facing yet another obstacle now we may be forced to we may be forced to leave our beloved school friends memories and teachers i have learned that if a student leaves ausd you lose money that

005the state granted you for that student that money then goes to the next district that that student attends that means if you close gladstone and force students to move to azusa high they would lose a tremendous amount of money how do i know i know this because i've spoken to 84 students who would leave this district and attend northview high and other surrounding schools in other district 84 of wood of which i could name right now that is at least fifty one thousand four hundred and eight dollars actually it's about it's one hundred and two thousand eight hundred and sixteen the district would lose from the names i have listed i have the names i could tell you right now but imagine the students i don't have listed if you proceed with these plans i'd

006just like to say thank you for your time sincerely a future northview student thank you that's it thank you for your comments we'll go ahead and retract back to 2.1 approve the agenda can i please get a motion to approve 2.1 removed second we have a first by board member career we have a second by board member rodriguez pena let's go ahead and cast our vote and it passes 5 0. moving on to our general functions 4.1 and i please get a motion to approve four point one question to open public hearing i'll be open the public hearing second we have a first by board member career and second by board member rodriguez kenya and go ahead and cast their vote it passes 5-0 we will now convene a public hearing to receive public testimony

007concerning proposed trustee voting area plans associated with the district's transition to a buy trustee area election system under the california elections code section one zero zero one zero the board must hold at least two public hearings prior to holding up a public hearing to adopt a final trustee voting area plan we have the presentation if i could just have one moment to share my screen hello everyone and welcome to the public hearing on the trustee area map options my name is brandon lalonde and i'm joined tonight by justin rich from cooperative strategies and we will be assisting the district on its transition to a buy trustee area election system before we get into the map options tonight which is the focal point of what we're going to be discussing tonight it's important to first look

008at what the california voting rights act is and uh what to expect in the process going forward so the california voting rights act or cbra is a law that took effect in california in 2003 and it prohibits the use of at large election systems when such when such a system either impairs the ability of a protected class to elect candidates of its choice or its ability to influence the outcome of an election and what we've learned over the last 10 years is that this is a very low standard it's very easy for for prospective plaintiffs to succeed on these lawsuits so we have been advising public entities to transition to a buy trustee area election system because the cvra claims are not only easy to file and easy to prevail on but they also have

009a right to attorney's fees and expert witness fees in one public entity case that's gone forward the public entity has spent over five million dollars defending the suit and the suit is now before the california supreme court and interestingly the public entities do not have the same right to attorney's fees and expert witness fees it is a one-sided statute that is in the law so now why transition to a buy trustee area election system such a system is the only safe harbor from a cvra claim meaning that the public entity or in this case the school district would be immune from liability once they transition to the buy trustee area election system under such a system the school district will be divided into trustee areas and a governing board member will be elected for each

010of those trustee areas importantly board members are elected only by the registered voters in the particular area where the governing board member resides and i think this will make a lot more sense once we have the maps in front of us and mr rich will go through that process current stage we have now drafted the maps the demographer has used the 2020 census data and additional data to draft these maps and importantly the population in each trustee area must be as equal as practicable and that is from education code section 1002 however case law has established that a certain amount of deviation is permissible that's a 10 deviation between the largest trustee area and the smallest trustee area other uh things that we must consider in drafting these maps and that the board must consider

011in adopting the maps is that the maps must comply with the california constitution must comply with the u.s constitution again must achieve population equality comply with the federal voting rights act be geographically contiguous protect communities of interest be geographically compact and not favor or discriminate against any incumbent political candidate or political party and with that i'll turn it over to mr rich because he's the the man in charge of the maps thank you brandon i appreciate it on this slide we've included the full boundaries of the azusa unified school district and we've included on here the various jurisdictions that either are contained within the district or are just outside the district's boundaries uh it's it's important to note we've listed the total population here which is just under 70 000. and from time to time

012we get questions about the the adult population we've included that as well it's just about 55 this is all based on the most recent census data uh that we received in september next slide one of those um additional data sets that that brandon talked about or alluded to is the citizen voting age population this is a measure of the voting strength of various uh groups minority groups and and it's important for us to keep an eye on we'll we'll talk a little bit more about this as we go through the maps and the uh specific demographic composition of the various trustee areas but the citizen voting age population is our best estimate of eligible voters based on it qualifying based on age and also citizenship status the largest protected class in this case is the

013hispanic latino voters at just about 59 percent uh in and that's important because as we draw various trusts as we draw the trustee areas and and provide you with different scenarios we want to see what the effect is on the percentages of that protected class uh this the protected class is defined by the federal voting rights act um and these are racial and language minority groups we want to make sure that we're not impairing their ability to elect the candidate of their choice the map on the left-hand side is a color graduated map it shows the density of the hispanic latino voters based on each census block which is ultimately the puzzle pieces or the building blocks that we use to draw these maps the darker the color the more concentration there is of the

014hispanic latino voters the lighter the color the less concentration next slide so this is our first scenario and admittedly on this slide there's there's a lot going on so i'm going to just help orient everybody towards the the information that we're presenting here first of all we have the zoomed in map which you can see takes up most of the slide there and the various colors which i'll talk about in a minute represent the various trusty areas as we've drawn them um additionally we have the full extent of the district up in the right-hand corner so what you'll see is that we're really zoomed in on the southern portion of the district where the majority of the population is concentrated we also have this red box here which shows the total population and it also

015has a key com key [Music] statistic here that's the variance brandon talked about the variance between the largest and smallest trustee areas so that variance is listed down in the bottom of the table in the third column there um as he mentioned the the variance that we're targeting is less than 10 and in scenario one the variance is 9.2 percent we also have the the election sequencing uh which is how these uh various trustee areas the the election cycle that they would be on whether it's 2022 or 2024. and so let me just talk generally about the maps here you'll see in yellow is trustee area one uh there's a legend up in the left-hand corner here so trustee area one is that yellow portion it is generally in the southwestern part of the district

016um really bounded by azusa avenue and the 210 freeway except for a small portion that runs along the 210 freeway that is really commercial space i think northrop grumman is there also it does does extend north of the 210 in the area where where the azusa quarry is trustee area 2 you'll see is in green again down in the southern part of the district and is bounded by 1st street and arrow highway north and south and then west to east is azusa avenue and citrus avenue trustee area 3 is in that pink color and you'll see that it's really takes up the southeastern portion of the district it does cross over the and north of the 210 it's bounded by pasadena avenue and then south of baseline road it's bounded by citrus avenue and and

017extends to the eastern part of the district in blue we have trustee area 4 which really runs from first avenue along san gabriel avenue up to sierra madre avenue and and it extends it it does include the portion where both azusa pacific university and citrus college are and then it's bounded to the north by sierra madre avenue trustee area 5 generally runs up san gabriel avenue and then across sierra madre avenue to take up the northern part of the district next slide so as we mentioned the citizen voting age population is relevant for purposes of the federal voting rights act what i want to point out is that there are four trustee areas in this particular scenario where we have a majority protected class of the hispanic latino voters this again is based on citizen

018voting age population which is our again is our estimate of eligible voters and you'll see that in trustee areas one two three and five there are more than 50 percent of those voters in those trustee areas next slide so comparing scenario 1 to scenario 2 we've taken a little bit different look at this particular scenario in particular with trustee area one we followed along the 210 up until azusa avenue and it takes that whole southwestern part of the district following along azusa and the 210 trustee area 2 is slightly different in that it drops down from 1st street just a little bit to the 210 freeway so that does make a bit of difference in in terms of population um it becomes the smallest trustee area in this in this particular scenario um because it's

019shrunk slightly uh trustee area three really shifts east and north to take up the portion that is uh that includes uh azusa pacific university and in citrus college um and then trustee area four uh adds area to the uh just east of azusa high school and north of sierra madre there's a small portion that that it adds there and then trustee area 5 on the western side follows along the 210 the northern side and then gives up that small area just north of sierra madre avenue i'll point out in this particular scenario that the variance is 8.1 so it's slightly more balanced from from a balanced population perspective and next slide i will also note that in this scenario there are still four majority protected class districts this time it's in trustee areas one two

020four and five uh so so that's important for us to to keep an eye on next slide now in trusty area three i i will note that the um this this particular scenario we we tried to create a little bit more balance in in terms of the variance so the variance is smaller but you'll notice that really all of the trustee areas were sort of rotated clockwise for uh lack of a better visual it it is a little bit more broken up just in terms of where it where where the dividing lines are so you'll note that trustee area 1 extends further north above the 210 the the eastern boundary also shifts over from azusa avenue and then trustee area two also shifts to the west to to take up that that territory west of

021azusa avenue um and also shifts on the eastern side away from citrus avenue uh trustee area three takes a smaller portion of the area on the eastern side of the district north of baseline um and then trustee area four uh again in in this particular scenario like scenario one includes that area where where the two where the university and the college are trustee area five shifts generally northward uh on the western side of san gabriel avenue and then shifts south to cover that area i think it's just north of where the promenada is if i remember correctly uh so this is just kind of a different look again i will point to the fact that the variance is lower but it does cut along roads that are not as you know what we would consider

022major roads next slide in this particular scenario i will note that the majority protected class districts are there's three of them in this scenario trustee areas one two and three uh which is uh three versus four which we saw in the other two scenarios next slide all right i'll take back over here um just some final thoughts before we get started uh before before we end here um this does not change the overall district boundaries importantly it does not change school attendance boundaries and i know sometimes people get up in arms about changing attendance boundaries that's not what we're doing here and even more importantly than that it does not change how the district is governed each board member regardless of what trustee area they end up in they still owe a fiduciary duty to

023represent the entire district as a whole and it's still one district with common goals and common challenges looking at our schedule we've already done the pre-map public hearings that are in gray we've moved down now to the map stage which is kind of a blue color we've done the november 2 public map public hearing number one we've done tonight november 16th uh the map public hearing number two and for the december public hearing it's a little bit different than what we did here tonight because we're going to do the presentation again but then the board will consider a resolution and adopt the map that they feel uh best represents the district and then we will submit that both to the uh the county and petition to the state board of education this is the district's

024cvra webpage which is available through the district webpage and it will have all of the information that we've gone over here today and some other information that we think is helpful including an upcoming hearing schedule and will be available for any questions thank you as part of this public hearing members of the public may submit comments on the establishment of voting area boundaries for the new trustee voting areas that will be established as part of the district's transition from an at-large election system to a bi-trustee area election system speakers will be given three minutes to make comments on this matter in this matter only do we have anyone from the public we do not have anybody on zoom wishing to make public comment thank you do you have any comments or suggestions or anything from

025the board yeah yeah i just have one question so did i hear you say that the scenario two was a more balanced map from the one two and three thank you for the question uh in in terms of of balance so when when we look at simply population balance uh the the second scenario is slightly more balanced than the first scenario but it is not in in terms of uh when when we look at scenario three that is the most balanced just in terms of the variance um i will note that that is one factor all three of these map scenarios are valid based on uh the the total variance being less than ten percent uh so that is now that we've checked that box and we know that that each of them are valid

026maps i think there's other considerations that you have to weigh um keeping communities together uh dividing along lines that make sense and don't run down smaller roads and things of that nature and also the fact that there are um in in scenario three there are there is one less uh majority protected class district so i think all of those things need to be weighed and considered thank you can you speak to the significance of you said scenario 3 has one less protected class district can you speak to the significance uh that would have for the community sure i can talk a little bit about that and brandon can can weigh in as well um i think the fact that um what what the federal voting rights act wants us to do is to make sure

027that we're creating opportunities for protected classes to be able to elect the candidate of their choice so the fact that we have in scenarios one and two an extra trusty area that would be a majority protected class district i think is really important and frankly um you know that's that is from a um from brandon's job of you know defending the district against a potential claim is is an important one um i what we did see though is that there is a it is more balanced based on based on that variance um so i you know again i think that that these are legally valid but one would point to the fact that there is um or could point to the fact that there is another majority protected class district and that that's beneficial in

028both scenarios one and two and justin's exactly right from a legal standpoint every one of these maps would would suffice but if you do end up selecting for example map three there could be some question in the community as to why you didn't choose the other maps that had four trustee areas uh with protected majorities but again that's just one of the considerations the other considerations that way in favor of map three is the population balance thank you for all your comments seeing that there's no more comments the the public hearing received public testimony concerning proposed trustee voting air plans is now closed thank you and if the trustees have any other questions for me or mr rich please let us know if not then we'll see you in december hey thank you for um

029being here with us tonight great thank you next moving on to our agenda item 4.2 approval of resolution number 21-22 a resolution of the board of trustees of the isuzu unified school district proclaiming a local emergency ratifying the proclamation of a state of emergency by governor newsom dated march 4th 2020 and authorizing remote teleconference meetings for the period november 16th through december 16 2021. can i please get a motion to approve 4.2 seconds we have a first by board member greer and we have a second by board member rodriguez tanya we can please cast our vote and it passes 5-0 moving on to item 4.3 we have a our communications presentation i'll go ahead and turn it over to our superintendent arthur ortega thank you board president if you give us a quick second to

030set up our presentation here okay good evening uh board president board of education and uh staff and ausd community tonight we're going to be providing the board of education with an update on our communications in a cycle of continuous improvement our aim tonight is to highlight work that has been taking place to ensure that our communications are stronger and clearer before we begin i would like to share my appreciation to tara lynn fenders who provided us with feedback and input on our communications plan which subsequently drove uh tonight's uh presentation uh so with that i'd like to turn it over to lika hear me speak right in good evening we are we are uh good evening uh board president superintendent and the aoc community my name is lika waters and i am the director of

031communications and community engagement here at the unified school district i am here this evening with sam carlton who is our communication and we are very excited for the opportunity to share with the board our progress focus and direction for aosc communication i have to say that this is a strange experience for me because i'm normally on the other side of zoom so being here with you guys in person is very um before i dive in i'd like to take a moment to first talk about the communication first to talk about the communication specialist so when i came to the district the communications office was already a team of new people shortly after i arrived the communications specialist was vacated and that allowed us as a district opportunity to re-imagine the position of communication it had

032previously been written as a an administrative position or a secretarial position when we realized that we had the chance to re-imagine what this could be the question then became what is going to serve our students what's going to serve our district and what is going to help improve the communications of and the answer to that question was very clear it was that we needed a graphic designer and so we had the opportunity to rewrite the position uh we flew it and i did a happy dance on the day that we hired sam carlson he's been a great asset to the district and to the communications uh so shifting our focus back to today we will highlight our district priorities from our communications plan and talk about things that we have done to further communications in

033that area the first priority that we will discuss is did you take that picture a jump rope for heart i did that's when we had our voice that's when we had our hula hoop contest great picture of it sorry just thinking i feel like but not on i think i can just share it from mine and i'll just i'll push it through that makes it easier okay so redirecting our focus to today um the first priority that we'll talk about from our community and is establish an effective employee communication plan to improve internal communication and complete engagement and this is something that every organization and every district has you constantly receive feedback from employees about too much information or too little information and so we want to help strike the balance between those two and

034one of the ways that we have accomplished that is through ausd and focus which is our ausd announcements and update one of the pieces of information that we received when we arrived at the district was that several employees were of the opinion that we were suffering from email overload there were people from many different departments and from many different offices that would regularly send all staff emails and what happens when you receive an inbox full of emails your tendency is just to skim through all of them rather than to give them an in-depth read and as a result we had many staff members who were missing important information from various departments so within focus we have a centralized place where employees can go for all important um announcements anything we want to share regarding awards

035uh appreciation for staff and all directors and all uh assistant superintendent have the ability to send in information to be posted in on infocus sometimes the flow of information is great and we have a lot of announcements and sometimes we have none so we don't we don't try to force it we just make sure that we're reaching out to all staff to give everybody an opportunity to participate in adding announcements to ausd one of the things that we also did with ausd and focus is that we added ausd communications at asusa.org as the reply to email address this is a significant change because normally when emails like this go out they return to a dead email address so if you had a question and you were you were to respond to the ausd and focused

036email it would have previously just gone to nobody and that would give the staff members the impression that their emails were not being paid attention so with the established email address aoc communications sam and i both have access to that and we can farm out those requests and those questions to the department that they belong to next i'll turn it over to mr ortega or superintendent communication thank you uh so one of the things that uh we have been working on again in a cycle of continuous improvement for staff born out of necessity of the pandemic we started doing what we call uh general sessions these general sessions are live sessions uh with all staff all staff can attend they happen every other week on google meet and that is an opportunity for staff to

037come and hear updates from a cabinet and after the updates staff has the opportunity to ask questions provide comments ideas uh share high fives or concerns and a cabinet there is there uh to to answer uh any of those uh concerns i'm sorry when did you say that you guys have this um general session it's every other week every other weekend the staff receives an email on when with all staff or just classified or csga all staff all staff wednesdays all staff on wednesdays yes 3 15 p.m every other week um on the off weeks when we do not have a general session we send an all staff email and in that email we provide updates um and uh communication about things that are happening within our district that email also will then contain hey

038next week we have the general session here's the link please join us uh we have added uh two new features uh to this uh uh every other week email uh one is a data point uh we try to put uh some data point in uh those emails uh those data points are meant uh to create uh curiosity uh create conversation uh create reflection create questions so that's one thing that we debuted uh this year something that just debuted uh last week is we are also now uh including in our every other week email is something that we are calling ausd in a minute uh that is a uh video snippet no longer than one minute that highlights things that have happened in our district in the last couple of weeks if you give me a

039chance here i will show you our premiere of that of that video if i know how to do this which i don't know if i do um okay i try one time and if it doesn't work then we will leave it at that uh spare let's do that nope that one allow me to do it one more time oh there he goes that should be it right there all right this is uh this is what these videos show all right let me get back so again just a small snippet uh some people like communication to read communication some people like to listen to communication some people like video and so just a small snippet of highlights we plan to include uh one of those uh every other every other week we also uh started a

040weekly uh meeting with our union president that happens on thursdays again an opportunity to share updates uh to have open lines of communication to problem solve ideate listen and so that happens every week that is something that we started uh to just have more face time between uh cabinet and our union president uh partners for parents uh we have continued the superintendent and parent roundtable process this year we are doing a hybrid and so parents have the opportunity to come in in person or to join virtually and come and again be part of hearing uh the things that are happening in our district and then cabinet being available uh to uh to respond to any questions uh any comments or any concerns and to listen to ideas uh as well this summer we also introduced

041a cold call campaign where i had the pleasure of calling over 100 families in our district just a cold call the purpose of that phone call was obviously to make a connection uh but to see how summer was going to see if they had participated in any summer program and to let them know that we were super excited about them coming in person regards to students we also sent a welcome back message to our students via their email address and that was really cute i got a lot of responses from students because of that email and then this year we are reimagining uh the student advisory council something that we are launching this year with 15 high school students from every from all three of our high schools um in collaboration with our student board

042members uh and then jennifer edick bryant we all brainstormed together uh the best way to do this and the student board members uh felt that instead of having an lcap food advisory and then a superintendent student advisory that we would have a superintendent student advisory council and part of their work would also be alcap advisory and so we are meeting on a monthly basis uh here on campus and so really excited to um to jumpstart that and elevate uh student student lastly i just want to share um that on a monthly basis we do put how we communicate infographic out to the community uh via all of our channels this is just to to ensure that the community knows how they can stay connected with the district depending on their on their likes or on

043their preference again once a month we put this out just as a friendly reminder and for any any new people that might have moved into the area or have uh students uh in our in our district a big piece of what we do is also awards and recognitions now as a communications department we are in charge of creating certificates for all district and board recognitions and we also design and order awards for all of the of the year ceremonies that take place we also seek recognitions to add to the board agenda our goal is to be able to constantly uh highlight the amazing things that our our staff and students are doing throughout the school year and one of the ways that we gather this information is through our monthly tell me something awesome form

044now this is a form that we send out to principals and site directors and it's pretty self-explanatory we just want them to tell us something awesome that's going on at their school site whether it's something notable a student has done such as a an art project or an athletic accolade or maybe it's a recent honor or scholarship that a staff member has obtained for the school we want to make sure that we are creating those opportunities to highlight and recognize employees this is important because it increases our district loyalty it creates that buy-in as a district we want to make sure that we are valuing staff and rewarding them for all their efforts that go noticed and unnoticed we also want to make sure that we are showing students that they're a part of this

045community as well it's not just the administration making the decisions receiving the awards receiving the spotlight we want to give the spotlight to students as much as possible as well and this is um just one of the many things that we do in order to to just create positive relationships within our community and now i'm going to turn it over to lika who will speak a little bit more about those relationships now we will talk about um another district priority develop and maintain positive collaborative relationships with stakeholders to strengthen support for the azusa unified school district so one of the ways that we do this is through community relations and one of the important things to know about our community relations effort are that is that it's not limited to sam and i going out

046into the community or to sam and i being present on committees within the city community relations is something that we all engage in at different times so every time a board member represents the district on a committee every time we show up to an event that the city is hosting or one of our community partners is hosting to support we are showing that we are an active member of the community that we have an interest in what's going on in a city as a whole and that we are willing to be a collaborative partner and support uh other organizations and other um efforts within the city i'm going to turn it over to mr ortega to talk about manipulation from the superintendent's side thank you so some of the things in terms of community that

047again we have introduced number one is city council meetings going to city council meetings i was one at i was at the city council meeting last night um and so i am there as a public member and so i fill out a blue card and i take the opportunity to speak about and highlight things that are happening in our district for people who might be interested in city council meetings but might not have kids in our district or do but that's just an avenue that they're of interest as you want to make sure that we're spreading news and updates through that channel as well we have revived our ad hoc committee meeting that includes myself and two board members the mayor city manager the mayor and the city council again to improve uh communications and

048keep those lines uh open uh we are also on different city groups and committees like parks and rec we have a seat on that and we also get involved in other initiatives like all in for azusa we are also active and try to support our chamber our rotary uh working with apu and citrus uh just to name a few one of the things that we are a big believer in in terms of community relations are letters of thanks or congratulations or in some cases condolences so when we hear about a significant event that involves one of our community partners as a member of the city that the district has a good relationship with we are very intentional about sending uh that person a letter or a card to express either our gratitude for their help

049our condolences for a loss uh what this does is it shows that we value the individual person and not just the organization because of the partnership that we have with them along the community community relations lines we also participate in the state of the city and state of the city is one of my favorite events and i always say it's because we have a captive audience for a certain designated period of time so this audience that we have is essentially forced to listen to our message but it gives us a chance to shout from the rooftops all of the significant things that we would like to point out about our district this event has evolved over the past couple of years due to covid and it has been virtual for the past uh two years

050so one of the things that we have done is we have also transitioned to producing videos to take our time up in the state of the city so instead of somebody up in front speaking we have a video that is shown that represents all of our accomplishments this past year we worked with an organization called school stein to create our video and one of the benefits of having a video is that we can also have that shared on our social media channels on our website and the city has also been a great partner with letting us publish things through the public access channel so our state of the city video for example from last year also ran on the public access channel for several weeks so this allows community members who may not necessarily have

051a child in our district a chance to see all of our accomplishments from throughout the year all of these efforts work to show that we are invested in the health of the wider community that we are a collaborative partner and it also works to increase support for when we need it and i think one of the one of the major changes are one of the major improvements that we have seen from community relations efforts is that it keeps clear lines of communication with our external partners open and what that does is it cuts down on the chance for miscommunication with direct lines of communication open we have a person or people that we can go to to ask any questions that we may have and we get the verified word uh right right from the

052person who's in charge or right from the person who has the ability to make the decision and that has been extremely extremely helpful for us in addition to state of the city we also utilize a variety of media to maximize awareness for and support for ausd's goals and for ausd's programs and schools and the first way that we use media is our website the website is a is a big one for us it is our primary external facing communications method for our district and for our school sites so for those of you who have been around you may have been familiar with our old loop website our old loop website was not very user friendly the platform was just limited in what we could do and it was really hard for our principals and our

053site level directors to be able to get in there and make changes and frequently make updates so we had recently switched over to using blackboard as our website host unfortunately for us our timing was a little off because we chose to start this transition and then clovid hit so we had grand plans for how we were going to work in person collaboratively collaboratively with our directors and with our assistant superintendents as we transitioned our website over and we had to change that into a virtual process but it still worked out really well with the rollover to blackboard we had the opportunity to redesign each school district website and then each page within that website um that is significant for us because it allowed us to have full stay over what our websites communicate so right

054now we have 18 different websites including the district and the school website and that's a total of 447 pages within those websites that we manage in partnership with our school site directors a huge part of what sam and i do is in partnership with other departments and with other people in the district and a great example of that is our collaboration with principals in order to keep our website updated so with blackboard we have been able to onboard our principles and a designee of their choice into the system so that they have the ability to go in there and make changes to make updates to add events to the calendar to add photos and i will say that for the blackboard platform one of the most uh complicated things to do within the blackboard platform

055is to add photos to our website photos have to be you know resized and edited so that they fit the screen perfectly and our principals have been amazing at learning how to use these new tools that they may not have previously been familiar with they have been willing to you know dive in and engage in hands-on learning and sam and i are always available if they need to be retrained or if we need to onboard new people uh to know how to work and utilize the blackboard website platform uh one of the things that we have been intentional about as well is uh just making sure that our maintenance on our websites is up to date um sometimes that involves making sure that our links to other platforms are working and that they're feeding into

056the website as much as possible a lot of that we do we partner with mis for for things like that and they've also been a great partner with helping us to switch from a school loop to blackboard in addition to our personal audits of all the district and school web pages we also send out a monthly cleanup checklist and this goes out to all our principals and site directors and on that checklist is a variety of things that we want them to work down the list through to make sure that their website is as up-to-date and visually appealing as possible so some of those things on the checklist include making sure that their staff directory is up to date we want to make sure that any employees that have parted ways with our district or

057have joined our district are being reflected on the website we also make sure that the the principals and site directors are updating their photos particularly the ones on their home page as as the event as the year progresses and events happen we want to make sure that parents and students get to see all the fun things that are going on at the school site level and that they're not looking at photos that were taken two years ago we also have our principals and site directors check to make sure that their headlines and features are up to date now that's the section in the top right hand corner of the school site and this is the main point of information for anyone visiting the web pages this area shows everything that is currently happening or upcoming

058in the district and at the school site level we also have the principals and site directors check to make sure that their documents are being updated so if documents are out of out of date or no longer relevant we we ask that they remove those before checking that box on the checklist and then lastly we have them look over their calendar their their events are always being updated and we want to make sure that we uh and notify the public of everything that is happening at the school level and at the district level now i have some good news to report about our district website recently we had blackboard our web hosting provider who they they're a company that manages hundreds if not thousands of business and school websites throughout the entire nation they they

059approached us and said that they wanted to use our district as an example um for a cohesive brand and uh the right way to use websites so they were very impressed with our our school and district website and they'll be including the azusa unified school district in their upcoming uh program that is going out to their audience and this overall goal for the website is just to make sure that our information is easier to navigate um we want to make sure that our staff can also access it from the phone so we when we migrated to blackboard we now have the ability to create website updates on the go so our our principals uh community liaisons and site directors are able to make sure that their website is up to date not only on their

060desktop computers but through using the district app and we also wanted to make sure that our district was looking as beautiful as possible and so blackboard offers a lot more ways in which we can customize the look and feel and design of our website uh transitioning over i would love to talk a little bit about ada compliance now in this context ada is americans with disabilities act and this is something that we've been uh doing ongoing training with for for staff and those editing the websites to make sure this is going forward are recognizing uh ada compliance now some of this ada compliance at the website level includes uh adding alternative text for images so any image that goes up on the website if someone who is visually impaired cannot see that image then there

061needs to be an alternative for them to be able to to get the experience of viewing that image and this is where alternative text comes into play so with any image we upload we write out a one to two sentence explanation of what is going on in this image so for example this slide here i would describe it as front entrance to valleydale with vikings mural present something along those lines so that someone who cannot see the image can get an understanding of what's going on we also make sure that our compliant that our pdfs are following ada compliance this means that we no longer host pdfs that have been scanned or that have been taken from a picture we we ensure that pdf documents have text that can be selected and copied and read

062out loud by screen readers and this is an ongoing process to train staff on how to make sure that going forward that the documents they upload to our website are following that pdf compliance and then and then lastly we um we switched to blackboard partially because our websites now allow really easy access to google translation with people speaking multiple languages within our district we want to ensure that our information is viewable in the language that is most relevant to the viewer so at the top of our websites there's a google translate option with a selection a drop-down selection of different languages that the user can select and when they select those everything on our website will automatically be translated into their language of choice this ada initiative at the website level is important to us

063because we not only want to make sure our information is accessible by people by all people but also we want to avoid any potential for litigation as a district and so by doing our audits and our monthly checklist to principals and site directors this is how we help uh maintain that ada compliance now i want to turn it over to lika one of the things that sam and i actually noticed as we prepared for this presentation and as we were reviewing today is that our current uh compliance for on blackboard is 90 which is excellent so blackboard has a tool called ally that helps us know where we are in compliance and where we are out of compliance we have made a concentrated effort to work with our partners in every department to have them

064either recreate or even just remove it's not relevant pdfs that are not compliant and that has done uh wonders for our compliancies for within blackboard as a whole so when we noticed that we were really proud because that's a big jump from where we were even a month ago as we were working on on this effort i'm going to transition now to blackboard link so you might notice a trend we are a blackboard district we have a lot of platforms that we use that are blackboard based blackboard parent link is the system that we use to send out all calls to send out mass emails and text messages to our community through blackboard parent link we also have the ability to post directly to the app blackboard parent link is an excellent tool for both

065the site level and the district level to communicate to parents as a one-stop shop you can send your messages in very in every modality with one click through this blackboard parent link platform so this is another great example of how we are really reliant on the partnership of our principals and those that they designate use the blackboard platform we are in a continuous process of onboarding a new staff to uh to blackboard parent link to make sure that everybody has access that need to have access as there are updates to the platform we work with our principals to make sure that they know how to use the new features and even as features are taken away we make sure that they are aware that there have been changes to the platform one of the important

066things about blackboard parent link is that it helps us to also keep an eye on the accuracy of our data so through blackboard parent link every school and the district has the ability to pull what is called a bad addresses report the bad addresses report is important because it tells us which parents have um outdated phone numbers or outdated or incorrect email addresses so we then know that these are the families that we need to target to reach out to to ensure that we have correct information for everybody so this is an ongoing effort we encourage our principals and our site level users to pull that report monthly to see if there have been any changes from prior month one of the reasons why having accurate data is important for us is because in an

067emergency we are reliant on blackboard parent link to send out those messages we also utilize social media and the website for that but a direct our direct link to our appearance is blackboard apparently mis has been a great partner as well in helping us to make sure that our data is accurate through mis we have a nightly upload of our data from aries so if somebody moved or if they got a new phone and changed their phone numbers and that was entered into aries at the school site level every night at midnight that report gets updated and pooled into blackboard parent link so that we have the most accurate information possible we also utilize blackboard parent link at the district level for our weekly announcement weekly announcements are another opportunity for departments and for assistant

068superintendents to get out any information that they need to to our parent community when we use blackboard parent link to send out weekly announcements we send it through every mortality and then we also post it on our website so that folks can go to the website to read these announcements as well one of the important things to note is that we cannot include a large string of announcements in a text message and text messaging is one of our most successful ways at reaching our parent so we have been utilizing bitly to send a shortened link to the announcement on our website so the parent can get the link on their cell phone click and it takes them directly to these announcements on our website um we we also have the ability through blackboard parent link

069to track which methods of communication are most successful both at the district level and at the site level so every time a message goes out within a couple of hours we have the ability to go into the back end and to check a report say if i sent this in an email and a text message and as a phone call a which which one was most successful it even tells us how long people listen to our uh voicemails or to our voice calls so if somebody picks it up and then hangs up that is reflected in the blackboard report um so that's another way that at the district level and at the site level we can track where our parent engagement is at we also have the ability to send messages and info quickly in

070the event of an emergency so blackboard parent link also has a mobile app that we can use so if we encounter an emergency or if our site directors encounter an emergency but they are not at their computer they still have the ability to pull out their phone and use the app to send that emergency message um as quickly as as possible um next i'm going to turn it over to sam our app is a wonderful asset to our communication initiatives it is an all-encompassing method of communication our our app features many different things that are available at just the top of the finger and the best part about our app is that it's not just limited to those within our immediate community so for instance someone who does not have a child within our district

071can still go on to their either apple or google app store and download our app to still access the information that we are sending out the the app uh communicates lunch menus and aries uh peach jar e flyers which we'll talk about momentarily and even the school contact info for each particular school additionally a user using the app can choose which schools they wish to subscribe to so if they have a child at dalton and at hodge they can just select those two schools and they will only get messaging related to those new schools if a community member for example wants to see everything that's going on the district they can select every school and the district to get the maximum amount of communication that we send out our app is also important because it

072provides access to our social media channels but the distinction between the app and going to the social media channels directly is that our app allows viewers who do not have social media accounts to still view what's going on on our social media so it allows everything to be to be shared at a moment's notice and also allows our faculty and staff to update the websites as well we also put send push notifications through the app viewable in the notifications area in the top left when you pull up the app and most importantly it is free for everyone to use and we are constantly uh collaborating with blackboard to make sure that we are maintaining the calendar and social media integration and making sure that it is continuing to integrate well with our other blackboard products

073we also frequently check our app and troubleshoot for any errors that happen on different devices now one aspect on our app is peachjar e flyers and this isn't just limited to our app this is also viewable on our website but i'm going to let lika talk a little bit more about that peach star is a secondary email system that we have access to so with hdr we utilize our list our data that we pull from areas of our parent email addresses and school sites and the district are able to send out any flyers that contain announcements that contain events that contain invitations to anything that we want to notify our school or district communities about and those flyers go directly to a parent's email address but like sam said it's not just an email they

074also appear within the app and then they also appear on the peach star section of the district and or school website a peach star is also the method that our community partners can utilize to send information and updates to our school uh our school site individually or as a whole if they choose any community partner who would like to advertise an event that is free can use phdr free of charge we have worked with our city with a library with their recreation center to help familiarize them with peach star and show them how to utilize it to announce their activities and their resources to our community i know one question that we have had about phdar in the past is uh the costs associated with people who are advertising an event that does charge a

075fee so for example uh within the city we have several different baseball and softball leagues and to participate in baseball and softball there is a fee associated with signing up for that so according to peach star's rules that neces that wouldn't necessarily be a free for them to send on peach star one of the things that we did to um help kind of combat that is we worked with peach star to gain peach dark credit and these credits that we have we have the ability to give to our community partners so they can advertise uh events that would normally uh be charged that's before so this has really helped our community engagement and this has really helped so that we are invested in helping our community to get the word out about their events and

076initiatives all of the flyers that go out through phdar that are not from the district or the school site have a disclaimer on the bottom that way the reader knows that this is not something that the district has sent out but that this is something that an external company or an external organization has sent out any flyer that gets sent to peach dart could be sent to districts or school sites comes to sam and i in the platform first and we have the ability to give it a thorough read through uh to make sure that we understand everything to make sure that there's no clarifications needed uh and just to make sure uh that is something that we are okay with advertising to our uh community um i can't say that we have never had

077any problems uh with anything coming through pee star and as our community has grown more and more used to the digital world uh peach star has become more and more useful for our community partners a couple of the features that hdr has that our community partners and that we have utilized um are that within the flyers that you send out we have the ability um to send uh to send links that appear as a button in the email so for example if you were sending a flyer and your goal was to have somebody sign up for something within the embedded email you could have a button that they would press and that would take them directly to whatever a site or form that they needed to access in order to sign up for for your

078event um peach star there's also easy buttons to forward anytime you post a flyer to peach star in return you receive a link that you can use on social media or that you can even just text to anybody who who might have need for it a peach jar also eases the burden on our secretarial staff but for those of you who remember the days of paper flyers uh what this included was a large stack of printed material that was sent to each school site individually and then the burden was on our school secretaries to count out these individual flyers according to how many students were in each class it was a very very time consuming process for our site secretaries but preachtar has completely alleviated that burden um and freed up a lot of valuable

079time for for our site i'm gonna turn it over to sam to move on to branding now branding is a topic that gets me personally fired up but it's definitely one of the more important aspects of our communication now when uh in 2018 we made we first began this branding effort by making um a transition from our logo that was previously a low quality one one that could not be used across all mediums and instead we we updated it to make it high resolution and give it a little bit more of a modern feel now this logo is vector based which means it can be scaled down as small as we need or as large as a billboard or a skyscraper and still retain its original quality so we definitely wanted to make sure that

080our our logo could be seen at all sizes without losing any kind of quality and without becoming pixelated another effort we've made is to establish a district color palette as well as a color palette for the school sites before before this effort we've had different variations in colors that were being used throughout the district and at the school site level we decided that in in the the name of uniformity that we would establish uh specific color codes for each school site and for our district branding so now gladstone high school has one specific color of red that they use aziza high school actually has a color code assigned to that light blue that they use in their branding and this has created just more of a cohesive feel at the school site level and the

081district level as uh as you have in your hands we've also updated many of the district materials such as our letterhead and our business cards our letterhead now features our board of education prominently at the top of the page in an easy to read manner with our contact information at the bottom we thought that updating the letterhead would be a good way of showing importance and consistency with our messaging when documents and information is sent out on different kinds of letterhead it's disjointed at the the reader level which communicates to the reader that we're disjointed at the administrative level and so to eliminate that we wanted to make sure to create a letterhead template that is being used now by all the district departments that in order to ensure consistency between the documents that we

082send out the business cards there are also new those are the recent update we've done the redesign our business cards previous to this redesign only featured information on one side and didn't include our um our branding colors you'll also notice on the those specific business cards that the paper quality is different than our new ones for our new business card redesign we've increased the paper quality we've increased readability and consistency between business cards and we also added a splash of color and our logo to the other side now if the business card is being displayed or is set down on someone's desk with the previous design if it was face down it looks just like any other white piece of paper now both sides communicate information and help communicate that bold message of our branding

083one thing that we want to emphasize is that we have not been wasteful in this process so we have a lot of or we had a lot of the old letterhead we have a lot of envelopes that have our old branding on it and we don't want to waste those we want to be good stewards of our resources so our process has been to phase things out as we run out so as we run out of our old envelopes we'll order new ones with the new design as people run out of the old business cards they can place an order for the new business cards we want to make sure that we are just utilizing our resources effectively and not being wasteful in this process part of we do part of what we've done as

084our branding effort is to train and equip our print shop staff to be able to update business cards for example when necessary now there is a faster turnaround time because business cards don't have to necessarily go through our office because we've created a template and trained the print shop staff now users can place business card orders with the updated design directly through the print shop without that lapse in time going through a middleman additionally we we've done a lot of design in the past few years and if i could go to the next slide please okay yeah i'll just keep on the same side our our design for the most part is done in-house now prior to 2018 there is a large portion of our design that was being contracted by third-party companies and while

085effective it um it did limit us a little bit with what we could say and communicate we had less control over the look and feel of our design materials and it um it costed money so now with designing things in-house there is definitely a cost savings some of the things that we've designed include banners posters board packets infographics social media graphics and things that go out to the community such as uh advertising materials the the uh the change for doing most designing in-house now let's now lets us be uh have a faster turnaround time with our design materials we don't have to wait for a third party agency to get changes back to us that we either approve or deny now we can make changes quickly and effectively and make sure that our branding is

086being honored in the process now something we've also done is increase our social media engagement and this is also something that we are striving for consistency with [Music] we take a different uh approach to social media than some of our neighboring districts do so some of our neighboring districts tend to put all of their eggs in one basket when it comes to social media platforms meaning that they will only utilize instagram or they will only utilize facebook or twitter we take a different approach in that we utilize everything and our opinion on that is that with each different platform you engage with a different audience so with within our instagram platform that is where we access our students most of the time with facebook that's where we access our community members and our parents with

087twitter a lot of our community partners and partner organizations are on twitter so each platform serves a little bit of a different purpose but we also try to make sure that we're communicating consistently and consistent consistent messages across all social media platforms uh we have also have a question on that so with your different social media feeds you differentiate the content for those target audiences at times we do and at times we don't so if there is something that is targeted towards the community partner we will be sure to put that on twitter but that does not eliminate us from also putting it on instagram or or facebook uh we have also recently begun to utilize linkedin uh our plan for linkedin is that first we need to build up our our followership on linkedin

088and then we can utilize it as a platform as another platform or an additional platform to advertise any job openings that we have and we also utilize youtube we didn't include that on here but we are also big youtube users uh in that every single board meeting is live streamed to youtube so even this one is live streaming on my laptop right there and we also utilize youtube to post any videos that we happen to make for the district um our youtube channel is also a great way for us to reach people who may not necessarily have students in our district but that find our youtube channel and uh you know watch our our video series that we have um available on there our policy with our social media is that we want to make

089sure that we are extremely responsive on our platforms but we also recognize that not everything needs a response so sometimes there are going to be people who have you know an opinion on something that they just want to stay on facebook that doesn't necessarily require us to respond to it but at other times there are legitimate questions that parents or community members have and we want to make sure that we are engaging with those either in a response to a comment or in return as a direct message to the person or the organization um we also make sure that we are doing a consistent and a good job of onboarding our school site staff to our social media platforms so that they also have the ability to get out messaging at the byte level we

090currently utilize a platform called facebook business manager and that allows us to integrate all of our social media channels into one place uh that's significant because it allows sam and i to have access to every single social media channel at this at the site level um and then it also allows us to make sure that our social media channels are being updated regularly both at the district and at the site level uh one of the great things about facebook business manager is that our site principals and sam and i can post through multiple social media sites from just that one platform so it's not like we have to go into instagram and you know write the post and then sign in to facebook and write the post when you do it on the business manager

091um you can send it to uh both platforms at the same time which is a time saver for our uh our principal they also have the ability to utilize uh the business manager app to take photos on the go so if a principal is at an event or if they're having an assembly uh they can just click a picture on their phone and then use the app to upload it to multiple social media channels uh they have also recently been using uh this app to go live on instagram and facebook uh so recently we had halloween parade and because of kovid a lot of we could not invite the community to these parades as we normally would so a lot of our principals were able to utilize um the live feature on this app to

092give parents a way to attend the parades virtually um we use a we use a proactive approach to social media and that we maintain a schedule of posts with our principles so our principles depending upon the grade level are responsible to both post to their site uh social media and then also send us a post that we can repost on the district uh social media so what this does is it helps us make sure that we have an equal representation of all of our school sites on the district page we have noticed that there are occasions when maybe we have community members who aren't aware that we have full site social media channels until we post um or repost something from the school site level and so that has helped to increase our followership at

093the site level we've also trained principals on how to use facebook business manager to schedule posts ahead of time so in the same way that we at the district level schedule post we also have principal schedule posts to go out on facebook and instagram which saves them time as well now i'd like to get a little bit into uh how effective our social media actually is now on the screen i know it's a little bit small but this is a just an example of the average amount of people that we're reaching with our social media in any given month so we're reaching about 11 to 12 000 people on a monthly basis through our social media channels and we're also getting an engagement of around six thousand to sixty five hundred people per month uh

094on our youtube in a month we have about uh 35 minutes that are watched of our social media of our youtube videos and i would like to give you some up-to-date numbers uh particularly on our facebook so our facebook likes are actually on an all-time high they've been growing since 2018 pretty steadily we've seen a 31 and a half percent increase for our district facebook page and number of likes as well as substantial increases in likes throughout our district school site social media pages some school sites in 2018 did not even have facebook pages and so we made a concentrated effort to establish those pages and establish branding when it comes to that and regular posting to drive up that that audience engagement we we also wanted to establish consistency with how to access our

095facebook panels so what we did was we we modified the urls of all our facebook panels so that they can be easily accessed by typing it in the search bar at the top so to access any of our facebook school site channels it's just the school name plus ausd so for example ellington's facebook panel could be accessed by facebook.com ellingtonausd and just swap out the the school name to make it easy to go between google facebook pages now in addition to these facebook like increases it's it's not important unless we're seeing how we're doing in the grand scope of things now i want to highlight quickly how we compare to our neighboring districts in regards to social media following and social media like so our ausd page is facebook page is leading all our neighboring

096districts in likes our twitter is growing steadily as we continue to engage members on that platform and our ausd instagram is also leading our neighboring district and followers as well and i'm happy to announce that ausd has more total combined followers in all of our neighboring districts and you can see some of the numbers at the bottom of that screen we're leading by over a thousand with 7 366 likes or followers and this is an effort that we're not slowing down on we want to continue to drive those numbers up and make sure that we're engaging people on all of those platforms and capturing existing and new audiences one of the things that has been extremely useful as we work to drive up our social media presence is the use of photography and videography so

097we have an established process for maintaining a database of photos for use in promotional materials for use on social media both at the district and the site level so sam and i when we go to any school site or to any event we always make it a habit to carry a camera with us and any of those photos that we take at a school site event we then come back and edit and then upload them into a google drive file that the school site has access to so they have a steady supply of fresh photos that they can use for their social media for their website and then sam and i have a steady supply of photos that we can use in promotional materials one of the things that i love about the way we

098advertise in the district is that we utilize our own photos instead of stock photos so our advertisements are truly reflective of the diversity of our community and i think it's awesome to be a kid in our district and to maybe drive by a school and see your face on a banner that's hanging outside of the school though sam and i don't have any formal training and videography we've both done a lot to boost our skills by watching youtube videos and other different tutorials we have access to lighting equipment and to multiple camera tools that we can use to shoot videos that we need to in-house uh an example of this would be our coveted safety protocols video public safety protocols video um that was created in-house on our youtube channel we have an inside ausd

099series and then most recently since we have moved truly into a digital world a lot of awards ceremonies and recognitions have been virtual so sam and i have had the opportunity to go to school sites to record acceptance speeches we have recorded thank you videos that we send out so this has really been a great and useful tool for us to um drive up our social media but then also just so we have a steady supply of uh photos and videos for our own social media use and for our advertising use um we also make sure that when we're creating videos and photos that we are exporting everything in the format that is needed for the platform that it is going on so it's noticeable when you have a photo that doesn't fit a certain

100platform we want to make sure that all of our materials are appearing as high quality as possible no matter where we post them having a steady supply of photos and videos really has created a faster turnaround time when it comes to promotional materials we no longer have to search for uh videos or photos that that are fitting our purpose that are fitting our promotional purpose we have a great supply a great data bank and with easy access to it it really makes the job easier for us when choosing which photos and videos to use in advertising it also creates more personalized messaging students parents and community members see familiar faces in our materials and we are not reliant upon other organizations to provide these stock photos for us and then it's also a cost savings

101for us in that we don't necessarily need to hire photographers for most projects that we do at the school site level we also make sure to share our photos and videos with the principals and site directors so they have access to those as well for their own social media posts while we reserve some photos for special advertising materials the vast majority of photos that we take are available to our principals and they're also categorized so we we label what the event is and every photo gets the name of the school site so it's easily searchable and in a moment's notice for both principals and for us at the district level conditioning to our next priority we want to maintain a positive media relations program to enhance the district's image one of the ways that we

102do this is by maintaining relationships with local media and we manage visiting media when they come to our school sites so we do have a an email list and a phone contact list of local media partners that we can reach out to when we have news that we would like to share about our district an important thing to note about these media relations is that this has really transformed over uh the past several years uh as as a whole we have transitioned more to digital methods rather than paper methods of informing our media partners about things that are going on um prior to a couple of years ago if we had something to send to local media we would write it up and sometimes fax it over to our media partners now we can accomplish

103that with a text message or with an email so it creates faster turnaround and responses if a local media partner wants to pick up on a new story um and it really just helps us to know who and know who to turn to to get word out when we have uh instances that we would like to share with media um some a recent example of this is um we actually had a reporter from channel 4 show up at azusa high early one morning without notice so this reporter showed up and normally we know that a reporter is not going to show up for no reason normally when they show up they have a purpose or there's something that they're trying to get at um this was not a reporter that sam or i uh were

104familiar with but we we met with them uh we we talked to them we helped guide their interactions with parents and students um media are allowed to be on the sidewalks in front of schools um so while we can prevent them from coming on to the school site we cannot prevent them from being on the sidewalk but these uh media these media partners were they were okay with that um we had the ability to really establish relationships to find out that this media partner this reporter had a parent who was working in a school district and i think that helped us to build a rapport which led her to tell us that she showed up because their news station received a report that we were not sufficiently testing our athlete and so he thought that

105there was a story that she was going to get by coming to the district and asking students and parents about our testing protocols for sport so we were happy that we could change the narrative through that story and that we had been testing our athletes long before it was a mandate and we had already had a an established procedure and the students and parents that were questioned about this also seconded our response that yes we have a very well established uh testing protocol um so this is just one example of how by establishing a positive relationship with a reporter from a news channel that we didn't uh previously know we were able to change a narrative of a story that could have potentially been a negative um we also make an effort to respond quickly

106to media inquiries so time is of the essence with a lot of things there are a lot of times that a reporter will call and they're wanting information for a story that's going to go out that evening or maybe even the next morning so making sure that we are responding at a moment's notice is extremely important one of the other things that we do is we develop talking points for staff members so when we know that there is something coming up that a school or the district may be contacted about we make sure that we're working with the superintendent and that we work with cabinet to create consistent messaging that we can send out to those who might have to encounter some difficult questions or unfavorable circumstances um we have also been able to do

107a significant amount of advertising in the san gabriel valley tribune the san gabriel valley tribune has a couple of publications that our that are um specifically for school advertising um one example of that is their illuminate magazine and another example of that is their um in a class of its own publication and both of those things happen twice a year they happen in the fall and they happen in the spring and so this is where a local school districts get to you know take out an ad you get an advertorial which is you know a couple of paragraphs where you can advertise something and then you also get um to include some sort of photo or visual along with your advertisement uh this is significant for us because the san gabriel valley tribune has a

108a weekly weekday readership of 72 000 so we have an example that of some recent advertising that we did and the in the class of its own publication i'm sorry i don't have one for everybody but we are on pages three and eight and this is just to give an example uh of something of an advertising uh piece of material that was uh given to the hands of seventy two thousand people that we wouldn't normally be able to read so the san diego valley tribune has been a great partner to us in offering opportunities um for media recognition uh and then also uh just checking in with us on on a periodic basis to see if there's anything that we would like to that we would like to share um in in working on our

109media relations we also make sure um that we our that we are uh inviting local media to school sites where appropriate um recently at the beginning of this year we had the announcement that meals were going to be free for every student and for us as a significant announcement so that was a piece of information that we were able to beat out and that we were also able to text out and we received two responses um from this one of the responses was from fox 11 news the fox 11 news recently established a kind of a feel-good segment called get inspired and their angle that they wanted to take on the universal free meals program was how school sites are transitioning from a uh drive-through uh meal distribution to now providing meals in person in

110school for every student um so fox 11 uh sent out a crew um they filmed our drive-through uh meal pickup process uh we worked with a family that they interviewed to provide the family talking points uh and the family um was just a great advertisement for our district and the significance of our drive-through meal program and also universal free meals the second response to this inquiry that we received was from spectrum news the angle that spectrum news wanted to take was they wanted to speak to students about the significance of having access to free meals at the school no questions asked so we were able to work with two students from gladstone high who participated in the interview we were able to work through their talking points and to help them formulate what they wanted

111to communicate the reporter from spectrum news came and she spent about an hour or so with the students and she participated in a lunch period uh at um gladstone high so our i personally feel that our um media relations have taken a little bit of um a turn within the past year and a half or so with movid um we have not been on campuses where we had the ability to invite people as much as we would used to so now that we are getting back to a more normal school year i'm excited that we will have more opportunities to invite local media onto campus for opportunities for recognition another district priority of ours is to achieve coordinated communication both internally and externally regarding anything that's crisis related or safety related and one of the

112ways that we do that is through our emergency communications to our staff as leak had previous previously mentioned we established an ausd communications at azusa.org email address as a central point of communication for all our staff whenever anyone has a question or needs to send out a notification to staff one of the ways we do that is through that email address so as leak had previously mentioned it is no longer a non-response email address but it instead has the two of us reading and looking over it and sending out messaging internally through that our goal for our emergency communication is really just to drive home cons a consistent message when there's an emergency situation sometimes there are false facts floating around or miss misleading information where people aren't on the same page our goal is

113to be able to be the voice of authority for the district and get everyone on the same page and sometimes that involves giving talking points to our principals at our school site sometimes it includes uh formulating and rewriting a message to our community which is another aspect of how we achieve coordinated communication so we also do uh community communication as well and this is done primarily through our blackboard platform parents can receive phone calls or text if there's an emergency situation at one of our school site we also have a tip line on the district app this district app tip line allows parents and community members to submit anything that might be a hazard or a potential emergency for our district this tip line is also located under the communications section of our district website

114and users can choose to submit tips using their name and email address and phone number or they can submit tips anonymously as well we've also established a method for staff emergency notifications so when there's something on campus that could disrupt a normal school day and whether that's a severe emergency or less of a severe emergency like and i have established a protocol that principals and directors can follow when there's that kind of situation so for example if there's police activity or a lockdown or media presence or some sort of death with staff or with a student we have a a tangible document that is housed at the school sites that lets uh that lets the secretary or principal work their way down the list of people to contact uh you can't see it on this

115screen but on the reverse side is uh a list of phone numbers and contact information people at the district office and the police department so as people work their way down there our goal is for principals to just have to make one call in the event of an emergency reach someone and then they can pass the ball off to someone who is on that list we also work with local law enforcement and emergency services we have a an ongoing relationship with these local local departments to ensure that we are just keeping our students and staff as safe as possible for example if there's a helicopter overhead one of the school sites we're just in the neighborhood immediately like and i we reach out to the lawn uh local law enforcement agencies to see whose helicopter

116is it is it the sheriff's is it azusa pd and what is going on is there a situation that warrants a potential lockdown or is the situation under control and so this is an ongoing continuous relationship that we have in moments of communication and outside of moments of communication make sure that we are as coordinated as possible so that everyone can be as as safe as as we can now i'm going to turn it over to lika up on the screens we have the youtube or the youth truth survey results from this past year so the top graph is elementary school the next is middle and then the bottom graph is high school um since last year was the first year that we used youtube we don't necessarily have any of our own ausd data

117to compare these results but we can compare it to the national average of schools that you that use youth and we can compare it to the state you can see at the top with the elementary and then at the bottom with the high school ausd parents state that they feel more informed about important decisions regarding their schools than parents from youtube schools in the state and nationally when we look at the middle graph we see that we rank higher than the national average of youth schools but slightly lower than the state of california overall our middle school parents report that they feel less informed about important decisions than our middle and high school parent these numbers are a great benchmark for us since we don't have anything and that has to compare it to our

118goal is that in the future we would see all of these numbers go up and with that we have reached the end before we open it up for any questions or comments um i do want to as um we showed earlier that blackboard had reached out to us we're going to be featured in their catalog coming up working with uh challenge fenders she has also requested permission from us to use our communications plan with other districts that she is working with them just as an anchor or a sample of a solid communications plan so just wanted to do to share that last piece of information can i also add one more last piece of information i forgot to include some of uh some of the things that sam and i have planned for these next

119couple months of school year uh so one of our major projects is going to be creating a district athlete that can serve people so one of the things that we have noticed is that when we onboard new staff we are not doing a consistent job or as good of a job as we can uh with uh orienting our new staff to our school district or our school sites letting them know uh what our vision and our core values are so this piece of communication will be a one sheet that we can use in partnership with our hr partners at staff orientation and then it is also something that we can sprinkle around the city um so our plan is to make sure that it is an accessible places for people who may not necessarily have

120students within our district it's something that can be kept on the front counters of our school sites uh and it's also something that we can give to realtors should the need arise so occasionally we get um you know a call or an email from a realtor who is asking for materials about our school site and we plan to use uh this district faculty to serve that purpose one of the other things that we have planned that we are really excited about is our year in review uh we have not previously done a year in review and as we thought about ways that we can uh you know maybe improve or summarize our efforts at the end of the year is by sending out uh an overall um mailer of some sort that highlights all of

121the significant accomplishments both at the district and the site level so this is something uh that we will mail out to our ausd community um at the end of the year uh once we have once we have ended that is plenty thank you so much um for your presentation um i want to go ahead and open it up to our board if you have any questions any comments great presentation a lot of information and and it was really good because there's also um information that i was not aware of and i appreciate that so i was just gonna i just noticed something we talked about the calendar and i'm not sure if it's my website or it's a calendar but i noticed it on the on the um my google calendar um i do have

122information of schools but certain ones uh how do i say that um with the calendar that's on here it's not on the the one on my screen the google one i don't know um do they connect or am i are you so you're talking about the calendars that are on the app is that correct and then the calendar uh that you subscribed to they don't um are you referring to the board of education calendar the cowboy no just my personal one what did i have the google calendar yeah and i do have that um it does show some you know events or things that are going on but but not all they don't all okay i think i'm understanding you so what it sounds like is um with the cal web calendar that you guys

123have access to it's specifically for the board of education and we invite our school site to add events from their school calendars to the board of education calendar so that you guys are aware um so what might be happening is maybe some of our school sites are are not inviting the board calendar so we can look into that and make sure that we're here don't understand easier to show you yeah that was what i mean right but that's something yeah because you know i'll start to follow the challenge but i'm happy to look at this but then i have to look it you have any more questions board member rodriguez can you or just one more i'm sorry on the notifications i noticed on the app on the notifications uh out of 16 schools i

124noticed less than five schools use that um app i don't know if you notice that but under the notifications there's always the same schools but there's like less than two or three schools use it but not all the students i'm not sure the principles um are aware of using it or it's very helpful isn't it is it less than i just noticed that not everyone's using it just the point of clarification when you say the notifications are you talking about the pop-up notifications to the app or the listing of notifications referring to the notifications uh button okay the list yeah yeah okay um that that also could be something that we work on doing a better job of training our site level uh blackboard parent link users so those notifications do come from blackboard apparently

125uh one of the things that we ask them is that they make sure that they click the app button they have to physically click the button in order for it to go to um that modality so we can definitely make sure that we're giving our site a refresher on how to use that button effect okay thank you those ones i know thank you thank you for that um board member rodriguez kenya we have board member bo hi good evening thank you for all the information um i have several questions but i'll just go ahead and start with a couple um regarding the general session and then the um the ausd in a minute videos are those published on youtube on the aucd channel i took a peek and i didn't see them did they do

126they live on youtube for people to view they can and they will live on youtube this was this last week was the first week that we have done it and that video has not yet made it to youtube or social media that the easd in a minute that one yeah um and i have a little bit of feedback maybe before we we post it um mr t could you play it again or just you pull it up again and we don't have to watch the entire um but just to refresh our memory of what we were what we looked at and then the general sessions are those going to be do those live somewhere on youtube in case a staff member wasn't able to attend are they able to go back and look at it

127i'll defer to mr ortega on that one we have not made a habit of recording the general assessment superintendent said that he hosts every other week on wednesday at 3 15 the general session for all staff and so people can attend or zoom in is that also do they is it only in person or is it by zoom as well it's online it's google me or okay google me so it's online that's what i was referring to if you couldn't attend like for example if you couldn't attend a board meeting would you view the archive yeah so liko was correct right now we do not record uh those uh sessions um they're on google meet but we do not record them but we can definitely consider recording them and just keep them in a shared

128folder but that's not something that we currently do and i have the video ready to go so my my first impression is that the great video it has you know upbeat music has great pictures but it doesn't tell me it doesn't give me any fact it doesn't tell me award-winning athletic or did you know we offer preschool or do you know we do restorative justice and i think that could really enhance um that getting the message out there so that people come away in a you know 37 seconds with two or three key points about the district can i ask like clarifying questions though these these videos that are one minute who is the target audience because i what i'm hearing is that the target audience is our staff is that correct yes that is

129uh actually maybe i should defer to mrs ortega so from my point of view i would say our staff but it was the idea that he dreamed up though yeah so the the ask was that as we are sending out these every other week emails um that we are able to to share with our staff things that are happening across our district i could see the the multiple usage of this but into in initially that was the thought that that was less than less than 60 seconds um every other week uh just a highlight of some of the things that are happening happening across our district but again i can see the multi-use aspect of it but that was the initial thought it would be great if the if the community could see that in

130the and um remember i agree with her in the top you know you can put will say leadership or you know what are these kids doing or you know who are they in other words but i think it would be great if we did if they did it on um for the community also so they do know what programs we have and what it's a they're a great video but i don't think much that's very true i agree with that i do want to preview uh that we are working on a video series uh that's going to be launching here pretty soon our first video is going to be on our pathways that we offer in our district and the second video is going to be about our early childhood education program the pathways video

131is currently on i'm gonna try to sound like a videographer but i'm not say the cutting floor uh but uh footage has been taken um and so working on putting that together and so that'll be the first video highlighting our pathways and our second video that's going to be lined up is for our early childhood education programs we also do plan on featuring those videos on the public access channel on our youtube and on our social media board member career i have a handful of questions but i'll i'll start with at least one so i think that this this was this was helpful to provide a actually this is this was a pretty extensive snapshot of some of the different uh communication initiatives and efforts that we're putting in place one of the questions i

132have is in regards to quality control so when we know that that there are some things that are are happening centralized here at the district and we have the both of you here as professional communication experts to be able to to lead the charge in the district but on school site where we have uh either our administrators or or administrative support the administrators who are who are then executing on some some of some of these tasks on a school site they are not necessarily the communication but they're still the ones that are on the ground level to provide the information what what do we do by way what what can we do by way of quality control to ensure that as board member rodriguez pena is saying that like the calendars are are updated consistently

133across across the board i know we talk i heard you talk about some of it some of the efforts that are that are being put forward but it's not it's not the case necessarily where every page is updated staff staff wise or i mean i've seen some of those some of those discrepancies um i wonder the same thing in regards to highlighting programs at certain school sites how do we identify what what does it look like since we have communication experts centralized to say okay for this for these schools these are things that need to be part of what's highlighted so that if i am a new you know family that's just moved into the community and i'm looking up a school site that's closest to me and i see that valley dale has fully

134immersion that's there and it's up and it's clear and i'm able to see it how can we how can we work with our school sites to identify so my question is in regards to quality control what what can we do to to ensure that there is consistency of usage of these resources and and identified featured information for all of our various school sites where we don't they don't have housing i'm gonna give uh lika and sam a little bit of think time uh while i respond to a couple of things uh number number one uh some of the quality uh control mechanisms that you heard of tonight are relatively new these are not quality control measures that have been in place for a long time for us just to give you some context that these

135are relatively new um as we have brainstormed together um those particular pressure points and pain points um i'll let them talk a little bit more about that but in terms of the sites i do want to give a shout out to to lika twice a month we do have something called ml meeting management leadership meeting and at those meetings lika takes the opportunity to really provide some professional learning um and some some things to think about in terms of communication to our sites and and not just our sites our um our departments uh as well and so i just want to say that that's that's another vehicle that we are using uh to try to up the ante in terms of how do we drive a consistent message how do we highlight uh this last

136time we spent time talking about uh key messages um and so just you know some some of those things but i did want to kind of point out i i do think that there is room for growth in that area um i do utilize our time in ml uh as our opportunity to provide some professional learning in the area of communications uh however our ml time uh is limited it's not you know a day-long meeting uh so i think that there are opportunities for uh sam and i who host uh trainings for our site directors and our principals um specifically related to communications for a longer period of time than you know 20 or or 30 minutes a lot of our quality control effort as well um we we have again like mr ortega said

137uh we discussed pain points we analyzed uh the things that we were doing well and we analyzed the things that were like maybe we should be doing a little bit better um when we are you know working one way and we realized okay this is not serving the purpose that we want um we look for opportunities to do pivot and so one of the ways that we have pivoted recently is that um in the past the burden has been on uh principal or on directors to like send us a text message or a calendar invite like hey we have this going on or hey you know western justice center is doing this with our students or we have this initiative at our school sites and that that burden is great on our principals and our

138directors and especially at this moment um so we have pivoted our approach in that we of course will always welcome and always ask our principals and our directors to help keep us informed of the things that are ongoing at the spite level but we are now also reaching out directly to teachers and staff um to give anybody and everybody the opportunity to let us know what's going on um as mr hodega has said before secretaries are the key to life at our schools and so we have realized that they can be a very powerful powerful source of information um for what is going on when it comes to quality control for social media and websites that does involve a lot of training and we have principals who maybe their technical skill is not as high

139as some others but their willingness uh all across the board is 100 so we've really put forth an effort with finding them on how to use media tools um to create videos and photos that are high quality and that will reflect well both on the school and on the district in in terms of emergency communication we also advise the the school site to defer to the district and so all the messaging in regards to emergencies is passed down from the top level down to the school site level um we do not want principals or school sites uh going rogue with their emergency communication and so as a form of quality control like you um like you brought up we we monitor that at the district level and let our messaging and talking points trickle down

140to the uh the school site level [Music] another question i have is in regards to communication channel so again it's helpful to see the vast array of communication panels that you that you both laid out we have had conversations on on the board level around how how do how do we highlight certain things and i think as as i look as i am somebody who i look around it's easy for me to find information but i it may be because i'm sitting from a privileged seat that i that i i find it easier to gain access to some of that information what what do we do by way of exploring new and more effective channels because even though we continue to push this information out there still is a a you know a large contingent

141of folks who who that you know the narrative is we're not we're not hearing information we don't we're not provided with with the update so again as the expert how do you how do you assess the channels and the effectiveness of the channel and and grow that perception as well as the the the actual engagement and information that shared out with with the district because we've had conversations where we talk about it but recognize we're we are we are not the experts but we can talk and say we'd like to get the information out there more but so you as the experts what are some of those things that you're doing to to learn some new channels and more effective channels that we haven't tried in the in the past there are a couple things

142that immediately come to mind so with the current channels that we have we have the ability to send voice calls text messages app notifications website uh social media uh we also have the ability to look back at the items that we sent out to see what the traction is to see you know which mediums uh our community is paying more attention to and we can focus on growing those or utilizing those more uh one of the things that we always say is that our methods of communication are only as good as our data and so if we do not have correct email addresses or correct phone numbers uh for our community then that is already favoring our efforts no matter which modality we use to send out information so we have recognized that as a

143point that we need to specifically look at each month and we need to work with our site partners to make sure that our data is good so that the information that we're sending out reaches its intended target one of the other things that we do is we can consult with other districts so we are a part of two professional organizations um one of them is the national school public relations association and the other one is the california school public relations association uh and it is just uh two great resources for us to say hey we are having these communication issues a who has experienced this and b what have you done to combat it or what are some modalities that you are using that have been extremely successful in your communities um we also have

144established a regular meeting with pios from the area or communications people from the area and so that i think has been a good method of i don't want to say comparison um but just just a good avenue of information to see what has been successful in their area that we could potentially um you know borrow and implement here um if you have anything in mind specifically that you are thinking of in terms of like modalities that you would like us to explore i'm happy to explore this for sure board member chris gonzalez so my um my initial reactions i think were a little very much in line with um i think the line that adrian was going in right i mean i feel i appreciate i now understand the very details of all of the

145activities that we're doing around communications um but i think when i think about a board level and board perspective and really the you know what what we should be doing with this is you know in my mind to me the important piece is um a little bit that was at the end of each of these reports and really about the the key metrics right so in my mind it's really about the in each area what is the goal and what are those metrics and how are we tracking those metrics and so i think as a board member i would really appreciate understanding have seen those fleshed out right whether it's about the internal communications whether it's about communications with families whether it's communication externally how are we going to be tracked what is the goal

146how are we going to be tracking those goals and let's look what is the baseline or where you know where have we seen movement um and i would just say particularly for me and i think we spend a lot of time talking about it i i think um when i think internally i think the themes that i hear over and over again is around um maybe not necessarily around like we don't know which programs are happening right but we don't know what's happening like so something happens a decision was made and people feel like well i didn't know about that right um and so thinking about how do we ensure that we're communicating so people understand those pieces right um and that's more about like the working conditions and i think the other piece where

147i i mean i i i hear us asking a lot of questions and and i mean i ask them as well is is around how do we know that our community understands what's happening in our district right so how do we know that that a parent who has a three-year-old knows that they can enroll in our preschool programs how do we know that they know there's a dual immersion program or if i wanted if i'm interested in stem and i really want my kid to dive into science they should be looking at dalton right so how are then to me i think that it's in here but i think it's not i'm not sure that i heard a lot of focus tonight about our current audiences and so we think about how do we just

148reach the more general broader audience within azusa and and then and how do we track it and i will just say i'm i'm guilty like adrian i'm not a communications expert so i'm not going to sit here and tell you how to do it but what i'm saying is the board members i would like to see how we plan to track that and how we plan to see that grow um so those are the that's the big picture i just had a couple more specific questions so artudo in terms of translation so are there things that we that we actually translate with our staff are we are we relying primarily on google translate for the website for the website it's both so most of what you see is google translate but if there are forms

149or pdfs or things like that that the that the website doesn't translate and then we translate those so that okay so that's i think that's important to understand because in my understanding when i hear other people that they say like google translate is not very it's not very reliable right so i mean i'm not saying i don't think it's feasible for us to translate everything but just as long as we're understanding that it's important that important pieces of information need to be translated with our translators and not just relying on google translate um and then the other question i have is around this the use of shortened urls right so usability um i really appreciate it when i when i get something from the district office through through the alert system because there's always a

150bitly um i don't necessarily see that coming from the school sites i'll see messages of like go look at check out your email or go look at facebook to get this information so i think back to the comments you made earlier about training i think that's the piece that's really important around like how do we ensure that we've outlined the best approaches for each medium whether it's text messaging or social media posts and that everyone is trained up so that they know what to do and those that's it that's all i had yeah yeah he is speaking of communication um i in the elementary school on their website it uh does show a link where they can look up the staff members but you talked about they can change them or delete if someone's out

151there but if you notice at the um at the middle school at the middle school at the middle school in the high schools and the adult school there's no link to click on staff so uh my mom and i have my daughter has six classes how do i find send a message to their teacher if i wanted to speak i can show mister and that that's that's an easy fix there also might be a case where it's in a different location on the middle school high school for example i know gladstone high school breakthrough staff directory down into more specific departments um especially with counselors as well and so it just might be in a slightly different location than our our elementary websites which is tends to be more straightforward with their staff directories board

152member oh it's under our school you can find the staff you go under our school but if there's any if there's any thing missing on the school site level please let us know we're happy to look into it and and get that implemented yeah i see it i didn't see it at first either but it's under our school and then you have to click the uh administration certificated staff counseling staff support staff um that also makes you want to i'm looking at this and i see that there's there are actually staff photos for the most of these on glaston but then there are other school sites that don't don't have photos so even that would that goes in line with uh some of the quality control pieces i mean so if if we i think

153that that is is more inviting and welcoming for someone to be able to see you know who the teachers are so if if we have that at one school site um that that's one of those quality control things that i would i would wonder or hope what do we have to do to get that at each of our school sites as a as a standard train them uh yeah i will say that um we i think in the past have um tried to give our site some like ownership over what they do and in some ways that has worked extremely well and in some ways um there are things like you said quality control wise that that we need to uh work on like glaston high school got very creative uh in the you know

154differentiation of their staff um and i would say that glaston high school is probably one of the schools that has um some of the more tech savvy uh people and so they've had you know the resources to be able to do that because they have mr hague there yes but but the goal would be to bring everybody up to that standard um so that we're not seeing the type of differences that we are from i i would like to let you guys know so i i went on on blackstone high school website and i did see where i can go ahead and change it to another language which is great i mean it's amazing but now i can't switch it back to english yeah this this is um this is it's an easy fix but

155sometimes uh it's like glaringly obvious and you overlook it there's actually a button that says i believe it says something along the lines of revert to original website at the top of the page i think it's like in the left-hand corner i did it too it's a different language a lot of users try to actually go back down the language list and switch it to english there it's not there the button's actually at the top there if uh english is not in in yeah yeah it's it's not in the list because um it's what our website it's what the language our website is already originally in and so it's just a button right there at the top to put it back to how it was oh you're you're not the only one so yeah and

156i will say that it's happened to me more than once could that be i don't know can you include because me personally i went back to where you know it says translate did we include english in there just would it be possible that's an integrate so whether it's possible i'm not sure but i can ask so that's an integration that is automatically there from blackboard uh but we have a great relationship with blackboard so we can contact them to see right something more because i i was looking just at the at the site i wasn't looking at the top to make it more prominent right right it was something that um yeah yeah i i will for sure submit to get to ask them about that thank you one of the things that i i

157also you know agree with my colleagues is um one of the questions that i had um but first of all i i just want to tell you guys compared to where we were and to where right now it's it's humongous different i i do have today so thank you for that and i know it's it's a you know everyday process learning curve and curve and being able to to um you know be better because we can do better and right and this is a big monster i get it and thank you guys for your presentation of an hour and a half and you guys are just blowing through it and you know getting that um being able to be uniform the colors okay there was times where i would go to you know full slice

158as a coach and they didn't know what color they had we had to guess and so being able to have that uniformity um of knowing you know what the colors are what you know it really brings a lot of um just a piece to the eye so thank you for that um one of the things that um i i see kind of the quality control right um it so is this and i just just want to ask is this something that the principles is this part of their everyday like do they spend 15 20 minutes or how does that work right because like we see some websites at some schools that are just bam just full of pictures full of this and um you know for example you know my daughter goes to lexman high

159school and they use a link called more and it's amazing i just get the text and i get the link and i go and everything's there you can translate i mean it's amazing and so um you know the other school that my other kids go to same thing principles like on it like texting a sunday i get all you know i get i get the text go to the links i know what's going on during the week i know what's happening here i know whether you know meetings are going to happen um but i don't i don't hear that from other schools so you know with that being said i is it something that like i said our principles you know um are all principals um every day are they doing 15 20 minutes are

160they only doing it on fridays i mean would it what does that look like it looks like gonna say something yeah this is something again that this is um something that is important to us we're trying to build up the capacity in terms of branding consistent messaging um i appreciate uh the comments uh i do also feel uh that we have made uh quite a bit of uh headway in in this department uh i don't say that just to say because i feel it i think our youtube survey demonstrates uh some of that and i also get a in lots of conversations from people from the outside and people from the inside appreciative of all the communication and all the consistency um i have people saying this is the seventh time i've heard this like

161enough um but that's a that's a good sign to me that again we're being consistent with with what we are with what we are doing but we also know that that there's a huge opportunity to build up uh to train um and to and to get better and so we are actively working on that uh you know speaking about uh modalities again trying to introduce um video as a as a modality of of communication uh trying to introduce the public access channel uh in the city as a mode of of communication uh just trying different things to for different for different audiences knowing that communication is a two-way street um and and sometimes um i as a dad of daughters at a school right there's things that i'm sure i'm communicated to but i would

162tell you that i don't know because i either ignore delete or not relative for me you know right now but nonetheless we are working really hard uh to to continuous to to be in this cycle continuous improvement and uh introduce uh pivot change edit as as we move forward um one more question that i had when um when we're trying to when we're on the asusa.org page and for example one of the things that you had in the slides was the um truth binder there you go i typed in this in the search box right and nothing came up so how does the algorith like how does that work where if i'm a parent not i don't know where to go on here and if i type here what i'm looking for i've i've noticed

163my even myself it doesn't go straight it doesn't give me anything it just blank so is this something on our end or is it something on black [Music] so this is a an issue we've brought up to blackboard in the past with the search results with uh the current search results it's pulling it's it's very strict and what it wants and oftentimes like you did mention it doesn't pull up anything and if it does sometimes it's not the relevant thing that you want uh blackboard is working on an integration with google to pull google google's algorithm for search results and since google is the leading web web browser in uh you know in our world today it's a its way of determining and indexing and finding information is a lot more robust but unfortunately that's

164something that needs to be fixed at the blackboard level the thing that we had that we noticed is that the blackboard algorithms require a more specific search term so blackboard is looking for a hundred percent match whereas google does not do that google will get look for 20 match and like let you pick what you what you want and so we we have not just us but actually many different blackboard districts have brought this up as a priority issue um for our communities so we we hope that we will see movement on that uh really soon and i can actually reach out to them and ask them you know where is this in in the process because i do think that there are times when um we put more pressure on them that they are

165apt to move a little bit all right and one last thing on our on our district website a lot of um some parents a lot of the spanish-speaking parents um a lot of the parents that i've talked to um last meeting that i had was in spanish they said that um one of the things that they would like featured on our website is a direct link to our our zoom meeting like they want to come and speak but they don't know how and and so how can we make this more accessible and i say spanish um because if um they can look through here right but how can we just the day of the meeting possibly have like headline this is our meeting today you want to join through zoom here it is you want

166to come in person you know there's our address type of thing where if they choose to come and speak for three minutes they're able to go ahead and not feel so stressed right um because they cannot find that link now just like board members that well i'm a little savvy i you know i can go and go into the agenda and i can go ahead and copy and paste and do all this stuff but how can we make it more accessible for all our parents to access our our meetings on zoom and i'd just like to add just something to that also i did have someone mentioned to me that you know there's no signage that our board meeting is in the back of the building and it'd be great it was some kind of

167signage showing where the board meetings are at um i've been asking so where are you meeting at but you know we're in the boardroom where's the boardroom uh but district office okay but location where the signage would be great just in the front or even the side because this is where we come in you know where the board meetings are um at would be helpful oh so right now well we try to do it on the headlines and features uh we try to put uh the current board meeting that's happening right now so for instance board study session november 15th and if you click on there then here's the zoom and here's the youtube right here but i think the challenge that we may have discovered is that that's what it looks like from the

168web but it's different if you're accessing it from the phone one of the one of the blackboard newly added features is that we have the ability to add a colored um banner i guess at the top of the website um so we generally reserve the color red for emergencies because that's a little bit intense but we can um we could set up like a reoccurring banner that pops up either like on the day of the board meeting or the day before uh the board meeting um and that would that can include um a direct link to the zoom so if they click on it then they are in the zoom rather than having to click on the headline and then click on one of the links and board member grier we might have been talking

169about something else because that one pops up that's actually the first one of the first things that pops up yeah i'm seeing that also there's the headlines and features i think maybe we're talking about something different but nevertheless i think it would be really good just to have like just like you said something that pops before they could just go straight to it and they don't have to click around to try to get to our meeting we can implement that and i believe that the thing that board member was referring to previously were the quick link so when you view our website on the mobile app you have to access the menu to get the quick links and so instead we reverted to putting uh the current board agenda as a direct link as a

170headline and feature and so that is something that we uh we manually put up each board meeting yeah i'm seeing that i think it was on there's like find it back yeah i think that's what it was but now it is it is easily viewable and while sam and i uh do love uh blackboard for all of it uh great features that is also another request that we have had with blackboard so when we redesigned our website we were able to pick like a bare bones starting point and one of the reasons why sam and i chose um the blackboard like skeleton that we did was because of the prominent quick links uh we were not aware at that time that the quick links did not appear on the mobile-friendly version um so we've been

171friendly nudging our partners over there uh to work with us on on that as well but in the meantime our work around is the headlines and features board member bo thank you um i have a couple of strategic suggestions um i know i've been working with mr ortega on um seeing how we can explore a partnership with the city or the chamber of commerce on getting street banners and poll banners um but i don't think i see that incorporated into the communications plan that you've included here um so can we make sure we get that in there so that we're documenting all of our good ideas that was one one small thing but kind of going forward um ms juarez you talked about uh realtors um approaching the district to get facts and figures right

172um i think i'd like to see us be much more proactive on that and create some sort of systematized realtor road show where two or three times a year we invite our local realtors and we have many realtors who are parents here in azusa and do a lot of work here in azusa invite them to take a tour of a couple campuses so they can come in and see what's going on and you can provide them those great facts and figures because there's nothing like going to a campus to see what's going on and i'm happy to be a thought partner on that and i know as we're slowly opening up campuses and people are um you know doing more and more things in person i know that that can evolve as time goes on

173so one idea is the realtor roadshow doing it two or three times a year and the second idea i have is to send out a welcome mailer to all new home buyers in the city of azuza i know when i bought my home here four years ago um i received home depot coupon adt coupon but of welcome welcome to azusa and i think it would be wonderful to receive some sort of welcome packet introducing all new home buyers to what ausd has to offer and if we're already publishing things like the efac um that could be something that we could easily leverage and we would have access to that database and as we're continuing to mail regular print um materials like our measure k update i think there's probably space on that brochure to have

174some you know did you know facts and figures a call to action you know enroll today things like that that if we're already sending out print mailers um always include something a little bit extra to highlight the district absolutely one thing i will add is that we yes we can definitely write the pool banners um into the communications plan but mr ortega actually did just ask me to take a quote um from one of the vendors that we use for our larger banners let's see what the pricing on that but like but yeah we can definitely the last last comment i have um i think this just communicate what would be huge for me as one board member if i if i saw this this happening i'm under the banner of continuous improvement if if

175we were to address some of these if we were to address some some of our shortcomings um so and i guess my mind is still under the area of quality control but i'm still there so if we were to address some of those different things and and list them out and so if we were to say you know featured programs on on school websites or or calendars i was clicking through a little bit and i'm also seeing discrepancies with lunch menus or so there's different communication pieces if we were to list them out and i'm not even defining a cadence but if we were to say this quarter this one we're we're looking at having addressed for this month we're looking at whatever the cadence is but if we listed them out and we're able

176to see that in a year's time these four things are are short up and consistent across the board at both sides or this you know nine months that's nine nine things that are again whatever the cadence is that that would be huge to be able to see that we have identified and we've laid out in a schedule or a timeline even if we missed even i mean i mean i'd like us to not miss but even if we even if we kind of put something out there as a target and if we got eight out of the nine and we didn't hit all of them that would be huge to be able to just recognize uh some some of the growth in in these areas in a way that i think it that you determine

177you both determine is feasible and i think i think on my part in on mr ortega's part we can we can work to make sure that we are clearly setting the standard so i will say that um one of my efforts has been directed towards writing a handbook a communications handbook for our site directors so that they have our expectations in writing um my plan was to hit that project card over the summer and then kovit always changes my my plans recently but i have i agree and i see the need more for our principals to not just receive reminders about hey this is the expectation but to have something that they can refer to to say okay i have some time right now to designate the work on my website what are the things

178that i'm supposed to be looking for because i think you're right and that we have an idea of what they should be looking for uh and we sometimes operate under the assumption that they know what they should listen for um so for me um i'm like i like i think i have a list of things that i can look at i have something that i can refer back to to make sure that i am you know hitting the right target and i think that would be something that was sort of our principles well is to have a reference point for all of it yeah because again if if we were to have a communications update in a year from now and to be able to say we laid out these these 13 areas and of

179these 13 areas these seven have been addressed and we're working we're still working toward these these other other sticks just seeing seeing the those things being checked off both reported out here but also recognizing it as as we're looking on the sites or looking at communication but that that i would appreciate as as uh one one board member and can i have that yeah so focus i do like the focus i think it'd be great if we had because the information is great have it um somewhere in the corner on our website you know it talks about like update based covering uh mask or preschool and then they click on the link and you know open enrollment memo i think the community or our parents it'd be good if we had a corner um on

180our website so they can also get this information that this is just a suggestion because it is i'm almost trying to keep one at myself you know and and i honestly i i'm i miss it sometimes and i always make a copy and i have a binder and i get in your binders i like your binder i do yeah and that's what i do so um i just think this information is really good and i think it's also good for the community and parents you know to know what what the mandate is on facebook for example right and they just click on the link and there you go yeah i like this thank you as i'm looking around the room and i'm seeing it i want to ask if there's any more questions just one

181one last thing i like um superintendent ortega he does a great job when he goes to the um console meetings and he announces the great things that are going on in zoos unified who just to keep pinpoint he only has five minutes so you know he pinpoints the the important things and and people are appreciative that he does go up and he does and not make an alternative unified thank you i add one closing i'm not at least on our part um sam and i are always open to suggestions i know that you guys hear a lot from other school districts about things that they do that are successful um we are always happy to receive examples of things that you know we can aspire to or things that you have seen that are successful

182um so you can i want you to feel free hopefully to pass those on to us directly or through mr ortega um a lot of the ideas that we get are from you know our partners in other districts that we brainstorm with uh and it's all it always helps to kind of like reframe um when we see things that are successful in in other districts as well um and sam and i are also um very much of the mindset that um we we have we will never reach a point where we have arrived but there's always room for growth there's always room for innovation and there's always room um you know to pivot and to add uh to what we are and thank you both for what you do to highlight our school district we've

183been wanting this for a very long time and also just thank you uh thanks for for sharing things for for um helping to provide uh insight into some of these some of these different pieces thanks for your openness to the to the feedback and and to the suggestions um let's let's let's keep going we're i think we're we're doing well but i think i think we have uh we have more you know have room to grow so let's let's keep going and i also just want to thank you again um for being open for the suggestions the constructive criticism that you know has come out i know you guys have been working hard um since before the summer when i met with you guys so i do see a little bit of the change um

184and thank you for just keep you know for keeping this up and like you said i really appreciate you seeing this like there's always room for improvement and so i think we're on the right track and i fully trust that you guys will go ahead and with the suggestions and thank you for having an open door you know for more suggestions or comments after this meeting um if we have any more we can go ahead and email those to you guys so i know where her office is i have good sex right now i'm sorry i didn't hear you i have good snacks right now so you should come see oh i'll be by tomorrow food right always brings oh yeah always brings people together well as we are done with this presentation of our

185communication department we'll move forward to the next thing in our agenda and it is 5.1 a german can i please get make a motion go adjourn 5.1 i get a second okay we have a first by board member rodriguez pena we have a second by board member career can we please cast our vote 5-0 and we are adjourned everyone watching us at home thank you guys for joining us tonight i hope that you guys will join us for our next billboard meeting you guys all have a great night good night