001okay i want to call us back from closed session and it is now 706 and we have nothing to report out on closed session so we're gonna um i wanted to make one comment ahead of time that i know that there's people in the adjacent gym next to us and we have some people here and we did that for the purpose of sharing our excitement with the teachers and the classified staff for each site that are being given awards that we're so excited about so we wanted to split it up a little bit so that when they came in there's more space for them because they'll have family members with them so that was the purpose of that so um we're going to move on to 5.2 and this meeting is recorded for live streaming
002and archiving on the district youtube channel if i could have you all stand and join me in the pledge of allegiance to the pride 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 thank you please be seated okay item number seven the approval of the agenda can i get a motion please i move that we approve the agenda is written thank you thank you can we get a roll call confidence yes hasty moss yes yes chesty masali yes trustee grubbs yes thank you thank you um we're going to move on to a really exciting portion of our evening which is the highlight of our 2122 employees of this year recognition program um it's been a little while since we've
003done this because i don't think we were here last year in the office were we i don't think so so but virtually yeah it's different this is so nice that people are here so i'm going to introduce um dr gill who's our assistant superintendent of human resources to share with us this wealth of wonderfulness good evening madam president trustees superintendent community members and our wonderful employees that we're recognizing today so this year we are going to do this program a little different but before we actually start the process i just want to thank all of our wonderful employees in our district teachers classified employees and administrators for being amazing people and doing every single thing you do on a daily basis for our students we have the best employees in the entire universe i say
004that that is for a fact [Applause] so today it will look a little different because usually we bring everybody in at the same time because of covert we are being conscious for having how many people we can have in here one time so we have invited two schools at a time and uh uh those those like the two schools are here right now turner and and uh henderson employees will get recognized they will leave then the next two schools will come i also want to take a moment to thank alfredo romero um bruce lambert and um leslie dr beatson and tim rahel they all played a role in georgina martinez in making this happen because i have people who on the other side who are managing making sure everybody knows when to go inside when
005to come out we are trying our best to make sure to make this a safe but super positive experience for everyone okay awesome so the way we are going to do this is um i'm going to request um let me just explain first and then we'll do it all the trustees you will come up step forward and the superintendent if you could come on this side dr young and uh so we'll stand right here uh i will invite one school at a time the principal will come and read wonderful information about each of the employees the employee will come forward we will give the employee their certificate honor the employee employee will take a picture of course with the masks on all of us with the employee and the trustees and then the employee will
006have a seat then the next employee will come forward the one thing we will not be able to do this year which we did in the past when we did this in person at the end we took one picture of all of the employees of the year since we won't have all the employees of the year in here together today but we're going to make the best positive experience with this situation so with that my request is if all of our wonderful trustees and superintendent if you could please come forward so um first off our school that we are going to honor the employees from is turner school mr slater please come forward [Applause] thank you everyone michelle gomez is an outstanding kindergarten teacher and stellar team player she consistently cultivates and builds the emotional
007social and educational needs of all our students for staff members michelle is someone who is always positive and full of support she is a source of strength for our team and definitely for me as principal and she always is willing to step up to take on a challenge michelle creates a classroom environment where students love coming to school and are wild about learning since she's been at turner michelle has shown incredible commitment to her students and our staff honestly last year before the year started in distance learning did not know how the kindergarten teachers were going to pull we're going to be able to pull it off how do you engage students on a screen that have never been in school before she was working with a new and exciting team and her experiences and
008winning spirit provided a huge lift for our team michelle set the tone and the standard for collaboration and an unwavering commitment to do whatever it took to make wonderful things happen for our students it was inspiring and serving our kindergarten team dig in find all kinds of creative and innovative innovative ways to engage our kindergarten students michelle is one of those teachers that does so much behind the scenes and never has one to throw herself into the spotlight for it she works hard without needing any accolades which speaks a lot to her character and who she is as a person michelle gomez exemplifies what it means to be a dedicated and amazing teacher she is passionate and a true champion to each and every student that she encounters on behalf of the turner school community
009we are very proud of michelle gomez congratulations [Applause] how are you doing [Applause] okay okay rebecca deleon works tires oh rebecca de leon works tirelessly courageously and with great compassion in her position as food services leader at matthew turner elementary as a food service provider rebecca deleon plays such a vital role in the lives of our students she ensures that our students get a nutritious meal and are ready for success every day rebecca also interacts with the students with such a positive and caring demeanor she goes out of her way to get to know each student's name and truly cares about each one throughout my six years at turner rebecca has led our team with incredible hard work professionalism and grace while in distance learning rebecca carried out her job in 100 degree temperatures heavy
010rain and cold on two occasions rebecca's tent blew over and she still continued to serve and deliver nutritious meals to the car windows of our students and families rebecca is steadfast in her loyalty and her sense of mission to our staff students and families she 100 respects and appreciates the magnitude of her leadership role and the potential each day holds to build relationships with students create a sense of belonging and to provide healthy and tasty meals to our students and staff each day rebecca stays cool under pressure problem solves effectively and she is willing to go the extra mile to get us through the most difficult times she provides us with the confidence that the operation and the service of our school cafeteria is treated with exceptional care and one and a wonderful sense of
011trust on behalf of the mt mte staff we are very proud of you rebecca congratulations [Applause] okay [Music] [Applause] well done mr slater and congratulations to both ms gomez and miss dallian we really appreciate all you do so let's give turn in a big round of applause again please now i'm going to ask miss buck from henderson school to come present to herself [Applause] i think [Applause] so you guys know who to call um i'm going to congratulate our classified employee of the year first so miss carrie anne granger come on up [Applause] if you like samoas i could switch them no thank you okay so i'll try to do this without tearing up because we have spent many time in my office in tears um carry on is just amazing as classified employee of
012the year this year i'm going to read to you some things that her colleagues have said about her she has a collaborative spirit professional demeanor positive nature and a hunger to do her best to help our school she expense everybody loves her she has been such a support for all of us students and staff carry on cares about kids she's been a rock for our school this year and is essential to making the day-to-day flow at jhe running smoothly she is always willing to do anything to help our hounds and is an invaluable asset to our staff carry on is a multi-tasker thankfully staff support in any way she can she advocates for students she works hard every day and offers to help in all areas she's amazing with the kids and helpful to everybody
013she goes above and beyond for everyone at joe henderson while juggling at life at home she has a huge heart and should be honored she even stepped in when we had no librarian and made it possible for students to get books csea don't call me um she also saved two children's life with the high mcm heimlich maneuver at lunchtime can we just give her a hand for that [Applause] i do need to tell you both slater and more have tried to steal her from me thank goodness she's also loyal uh and we couldn't get through all of this without carry-on and we just wish we could clone her so congratulations carry on thank you and to honor our uh our certificated employee of the year i'm going to call up my right-hand person kelly hughes
014and we also have more finance welcome miss mandy esteban our employee of the year okay good evening i am honored to introduce and share a little bit about our joe henderson teacher of the year mandy esteban i've had the privilege of working with mandy for the past 15 years mandy was a part of the very first grade level team i was placed on when i was when i first started teaching at joe henderson as a brand new teacher i was so grateful to work closely with mandy she was always willing to share advice strategies and other tricks of the trade some of the strategies i still use in my classroom today are those i learned from mandy and the rest of my teammates and i will forever be grateful to her for the grace and
015support she gave me during my rookie years of teaching when i sat down to prepare my thoughts for this evening and thought about mandy the first thing i thought was how could i possibly share about all the qualities that make mandy the perfect choice for teacher of the year in such a short amount of time it's nearly impossible but i decided to rely upon one of my favorite second grade i can statements i can understand and use adjectives common core standard ela literacy 2.1 of course so here are the top three adjectives that best describe mandy compassionate mandy has a huge heart for her family both human and furry her friends her colleagues and her students when you talk with mandy you always feel heard this is especially true when it comes to her second
016graders as many of us in this room know oftentimes being heard is what our students want most especially our littlest learners and no matter how busy or crazy the day is mandy always makes time to listen to and truly hear her students when i asked one of her current students what they love most about mrs davon they answered i love mrs davon because she's really nice and really good at teaching she is kind and patient with me one of her teammates said it best when she said mandy is like a second mom to her students and always takes the time to meet their individual needs however small they might be helping to tie a shoe listening to a worry or resolving conflicts after recess mandy is compassionate fun if you know mandy you know she's
017really a kid at heart this is probably one of the biggest reasons she's able to connect with her students as well as she does she's always looking for ways to engage her students and will stop at nothing to infuse a little fun into all of her lessons as one of her teammates said mandy doesn't let fear of paper scraps or a gooey mess get in the way of providing fun hands-on experiences for her students and can often be found at the end of the day standing in her classroom with a look on her face that says what was i thinking i too have seen that look on her face but the look on her students faces after one of those experiences says it all it's the look every teacher strives for the one that says
018i didn't know learning could be so fun but don't just take my word for it listen to another of mandy's students who says i love mrs esteban because she's funny silly and an amazing teacher she makes learning awesome and fun as a colleague and a friend mandy reminds us of the importance to having fun too her laugh is contagious and she always manages to make you laugh even on the most challenging of days recently as a member of our sunshine committee mandy has helped to infuse some much needed fun into our lives boosting morale with our now infamous wagon that makes its monthly round about campus delivering treats and other goodies to our henderson staff mandy is fun dedicated mandy works tirelessly on behalf of her students to meet both their academic and social emotional
019needs one of her teammates shared that mandy is aware of each and every need in her classroom and sees each child as an individual she connects with families on a personal level and always makes them feel comfortable in her classroom she works so hard to truly understand each child and each family each second of their lives mandy is a fierce advocate for her students mandy is also the queen of finding a teachable moment and expanding on it going deep into subject areas to ensure that her students have a solid understanding of the content she differentiates her instructions so all of her students feel supported but also challenged outside of the classroom andy has served our school and staff in many ways including being a teacher representative on the parent teacher group board the treasurer of
020our sunshine committee and our voice on the recent return to school committee that worked hard to ensure a safe and successful return to campus for all just to name a few mandy is dedicated as i said earlier i could go on and on about how amazing mandy is the list of adjectives to express how deserving she is of this honor is never ending but i hope my second grade colleagues would agree that i've said enough to demonstrate mastery of this standard mandy exemplifies all of the qualities of a top-notch educator she's so good in fact that she has fans and students that aren't even in second grade yet one kindergartner said to me i like mrs davon because she's funny and she gives hugs and i hope she's going to be my teacher soon because
021i want to be in her class i couldn't agree more if i could go back to second grade again i would want to have mrs esteban as my teacher but lucky for me while i can't be a student in her class i have the privilege of calling her my colleague but more importantly my good friend congratulations my friend on this well deserved honor [Applause] [Laughter] [Applause] okay let's give miss esteban and miss granger a big round of applause again excellent readers excellent presentation thank you so much so now we are going to request all of these guests take and have fun and go out for dinner whatever you need to do and now so we can bring our other guests thank you have a good good night [Music] recovery anytime you need okay now we're
022going to recognize our wonderful employees from farmer school and sample school from formal school we are going to recognize two employees one is employee of the year for the school other one is employee of the year for the school and for the district as well so miss fleming could you please come forward thank you let's give them a big round of applause all right hey good evening everyone i'm going to start off with honoring our school classified employee of the year and district classified employee of the year mr peter sharp so when you think about oh sorry get him up here okay so when you think about peter kindness integrity thoughtfulness and dedication and being very detail-oriented always come to mind while his role is to ensure that facilities operations maintenance and safety are priority
023he is very clear of the impact that that has on student learning a direct impact you can find him at our school site at 5 30 a.m sharp every day walking the facilities opening all the classrooms making sure that things are in order because peter cares about the way that our staff sees our school the way that our students see our school the way that our families it matters to him it matters to him a great deal because it creates a sense of safety a sense of pride and we see this consistently in peter if you want to know where he's at in the morning you will find him in the cafeteria sitting with our students getting to know them building relationships making sure they don't waste any of the food and they eat and
024encouraging them to read not because anyone asked him to do that but that is who he is that is his character and he doesn't look for anyone to applaud or to speak about it he does it because that is the kind of person that he is and what he values he builds relationships with everyone that he comes into contact with and he constantly works to build and strengthen those relationships every day adjusting to covert protocols there's has been nothing easy about that process and he's taken it on and he's taken charge with that in the midst of modernization at our site to maintain some level of stability for all of the students and the staff that we serve every single day he carries himself with kindness and grace and we are honored to work alongside
025you every day peter congratulations [Applause] is [Applause] thank you peter i'd like to next call up mrs masters our one of our amazing second grade teachers [Applause] mrs masters is a well-rounded educator who is inspiring to all that are fortunate enough to be able to be in her presence she is humble she is reflective she is student-centered she is calm and she is very collaborative she understands that we serve human beings first and she analyzes each situation the different perspectives of everyone is involved and worked towards solving conflicts there is an art to teaching and she shows that in so many ways she understands that it's not only academics it is also the social and emotional well-being and the mental health of the student she serves and she doesn't just use those words she puts
026them into action every single day she teaches the whole child and is grounded in her values and actions doing for others is what is important to her for veterans day she rallied her second grade team together to write letters to veterans and she personally delivered those letters so that the residents in a retirement community could know that their services and their sacrifices were of value she sees yeah she sees the humanness and every situation and if you want to feel heard if you want to feel valued if you want to be seen go and sit down with mrs masters she is able to be present she is able to listen and she is able to make all that are in contact with her feel a sense of belonging and value she is an asset to
027our school she is an asset to our district and an asset to our community and we at mary farmer are so proud and privileged to be able to work alongside you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you mr sharp and thank you ms masters thank you so much for all you guys do for our students for school and then good luck to mr scharf for the county and hopefully stayed in the national championship as well so we're looking forward to it and we're going to be cheering you and supporting you uh at the county level when you're going to be there in may so looking forward to that so let's give them a background applause again [Applause] so now we'll go to sample school and miss more please come forward thank you so much thank you um
028thank you for this opportunity to highlight some of um most amazing people that um consider to be a heartbeat of our school the first person i'm going to talk about is michelle binky chapman our teacher of the year [Applause] michelle michelle is small but mighty [Laughter] she is somebody who thinks of everybody else besides herself always she is always checking on how i'm doing how our staff is doing how teachers are doing other kids are doing it's endless she is tireless in the fight for doing what's right she is fiercely protective of her students and goes above and beyond to make sure her students needs are met so they can excel michelle is so loved and admired by her staff it was a slam dunk when we voted for who we wanted to honor it
029didn't even need to count i want to thank michelle for allowing me to work beside you and allowing me to grow in my leadership and i am absolutely honored to be able to present this award to you tonight it is so deserving [Applause] one of these is yours so get it on the way back thank you whichever one you're so welcome the next person i get to honor i'm is miss maria maroquan ascencia [Applause] maria is or miss maria is our lead day custodian let me tell you miss maria came to robert semple in 2019 about three weeks before we went into shutdown so she got a short trial run how to run a school we went into shutdown her second year was hybrid juggling that and this is her first real year and i
030have to tell you also the love is so strong at robert semple also a slam dunk on selecting miss maria as our classified person of the year maria is so kind she is so smart she's thoughtful and incredibly hard-working she never stops where is miss maria i have no idea you i have no idea she's a bee all around school um and in fact we use radios where's maria you know she can never be found maria one of the things that that you do bring to our site is a strength in building relationships so maria does all of the tasks that she needs to do and somehow she finds time to for our our halloween festival to turn all of our god-awful garbage cans into beautiful monsters and goblins and ghosts at thanksgiving she turned
031our hand sanitizers into little well she didn't she helped some of the kids make turn them into turkeys she sent me a picture can i put hearts on all the tables for the kids at valentine's day and then probably one of the most touching things was a little girl at lunch second grader came up to me and said mrs moore it's my birthday i said oh happy birthday she said would you tell miss maria it's my birthday miss maria came over and sang her happy birthday in spanish so thoughtful we love maria we love you and thank you for being a part of our family [Applause] oh thank you miss panky chef man and miss murray and for all you do for our students on a daily basis we greatly appreciate you let's give them
032a background applause [Applause] so again thank you so much everyone for coming now we're going to ask you to go have fun we're going to bring our next team thank in okay is thank you [Music] um yes okay good evening welcome everyone thank you so much for being here so right now we have liberty school and banisha middle school so we're going to start with liberty school and to present liberty school's words i am going to ask miss louis please come forward thank you so much [Applause] this is one of my most favorite nights i just want to say and and plus i'm not presenting a highlight okay okay um liberty high school is proud to introduce miss brenda weiss as our classified person of the year this lifestyle [Applause] i'm going to try to
033try to keep a straight face on this one miss miss weiss joined liberty family two years ago and immediately embraced our school and our students and what we stand for liberty she has many responsibilities during the day just to list a few running the main office connecting with parents on a daily basis corralling teachers with love for their attendance and keeping me in line which is a big deal her positive attitude is infectious and she continues to strive to learn more about her job and how she can do it better she'll call she'll ask questions she takes notes she's meticulous i love her she color codes it's fantastic but all the but of all the things she does during the day miss weiss connects with our students she's more of she's more than an office
034manager she is a trusted adult that students can go to when they need anything from a spare chromebook charger to words of encouragement and care she takes the time from the busy day to make sure that the students and the staff and myself that we're all taking care for and set up for success liberty high school is grateful to have miss weiss as a part of our team we love you for it [Applause] smiles [Music] [Applause] um at this time it's my absolute pleasure for me to present to you ms kathleen sotter as liberty high school teacher of the year miss soder exemplifies that's bolden and clarity the spirit of liberty high school she always always puts her students first she's compassionate caring and understanding this year i've asked miss soder to step in different
035roles and responsibilities and she never has turned me down yet she she says no problem i can do that and she is willing to do whatever is best for liberty high school and our students miss soder's true magic is when she works side by side with her students she builds these amazing relationships that gives students confidence and sense of belonging her students have stated that they would never achieve their full potential without her a student told me this year she's one of the first teachers that i've ever trusted miss soder works tirelessly to ensure her students in liberty high school are successful she does so with grace and kindness we are truly thankful to have such a remarkable teacher as a part of our liberty high school family thank you [Applause] awesome [Applause] thank you
036so much miss weiss and miss sauder for all you do on a daily basis for our students we greatly appreciate you and let's give liberty school and their wonderful staff another background of classes [Applause] and now i'm going to request ms doskey to come present awards for vanessa middle school thank you all right good evening i would like to invite amber kelly up our classified employee of the year [Applause] amber kelly is so much more than a school librarian she is eager to be part of our school community and engage in activities outside the four walls of the library when amber joined venetian middle school she began to update our library to meet the needs of today's middle school student amber provides assistance with the nwea and casp testing she trained to administer the lpac
037and also serves as our el coordinator as a participant in the cali reads literacy grant venetian middle school hosts an annual family literacy night amber has regularly researched and helped develop the program for this night while we were out for virtual learning last school year amber helped run the homework club and game nights for students to participate in via zoom when there are school-wide events amber participates not because she has to but because she sincerely wants to a couple of the comments that amber's colleagues mentioned about her is that amber has transformed our library this has become a very special and welcoming place students enjoy hanging out in the library and that says a lot about the environment amber has created and amber is always so friendly and upbeat [Applause] all right i'd now like
038to invite up bonnie ramirez our teacher of the year and also our district teacher of the year so when students walk in to room e9 it is not simply a classroom it is a family bonnie ramirez creates such an amazing environment that is not only supportive but also challenging bonnie is our special day class teacher and teaches sixth seventh and eighth grade students english history math and science she is a master at her craft she is able to determine the academic social and behavioral needs of each of her students and design curriculum and activities that allow them to blossom students in e9 thrive i'm always thrilled to get a phone call and e9 pops up on the phone and i answer it and am on speakerphone with everyone on e9 and they're inviting me down
039to the room for a brain break and i love it it's a highlight of my day uh the students remind each other of expectations hold each other accountable they encourage and support every single student in their e9 family bonnie's students truly benefit from being in her classes and she helps prepare them for high school by navigating the waters of middle school as some of bonnie's colleagues said about her that bonnie is 100 percent present for all of her students and their individual needs all of the time her students are a part of a very positive environment another colleague i truly believe bonnie ramirez has the toughest job on our campus the students she has are actively learning and on top of that she balances she's also a department chair so she balances the entire department
040uh someone else said that bonnie's creativity is over the top congratulations bonnie [Applause] okay [Applause] so but miss dalski was talking about mr ramirez about i have to tell you a story i'm a storyteller if you guys don't know me uh about three years ago mr ramirez asked me to come to her classroom because they were reading a book from uh india like a girl little boy who came here from india and and so on it was so fascinating the most amazing thing was that the students miss bani students in their classroom uh we actually they they got to know me and i got to know them and we shared lots of stories and talked a lot so every time i'll go to that classroom afterwards they remembered me so so then they sent me
041a picture a two actually piece of papers with their pictures and some uh language on it so they're actually posted right in front of my office as you enter my office so the days when i'm having a difficult day i typically look at that picture my ladies in the office know too that she's looking at that picture that means something is going through her head and she's reminding why is she here okay she's here for these kids and that that's why so thank you miss bonnie vince ramirez for giving the world knowledge to your students and and i just had to tell that story and [Applause] so again congratulations to miss kelly as well thank you so much and big round of applause for all of the ganesha middle school employees okay even though we
042love you absolutely we this is the time to say goodbye so now new friends leave and we're going to bring our next other friends here [Music] congratulations is okay i'm sorry okay yes okay so thank you so much for being here we do have a few more seats up here if any would like to sit down so um this is our last group for the recognitions so we're going to start now with vanesha high school and miss kleinsmith if you could please come forward [Applause] good evening uh very excited to recognize our certificated our teacher of the year magumi sakamoto who's here with her beautiful family come on up so that is the perfect example of megumi and why she's so amazing she is so caring and thoughtful and positive you cannot be around her
043and not be smiling and feel just her warmth um i enjoy going into her classroom it has to be one of my favorite places on campus and i think all of her students feel the same and she came to teaching a little bit later in her professional career she was a yard supervisor and a parent educator before becoming an amazing teacher and we are so lucky that we have her at benicia high school she's a teacher in our special education department working with our 10th grade students and our process at benicia high school for our educators of the year is to reach out to our staff and our students and our parents to ask for nominations she had the highest number of nominations and that's particularly special because as a case manager and a teacher
044in special education she sees less students in the day than our other teachers would who would normally have about 115 150 student contacts so even with less students she had more nominations from parents from students from staff members from colleagues because of her communication she's amazing with communication she's proactive she's thoughtful and caring and so everyone that she works with just feels that they're in good hands that someone's looking out for them and making sure that they're ready to learn they have all of their needs taken care of so they can be successful she's part of our sources of strength program she's part of our pbis team she really helps build such an amazing culture on our campus and i can't say enough good things about her so so glad to recognize you so well
045deserving sakamoto [Applause] [Music] i'll also just briefly mention she wasn't able to join us tonight but megan siegel is our certificate classified sorry employee of the year our school librarian who was so amazing that we unfortunately lost her she's now at cal maritime as an amazing librarian um and and she's very special to us she's actually an alumni from bonita high school also and continues to help us as we transition so i definitely want to make sure to mention her tonight megan siegel so again thank you miss mugumi thank you for all you do for our students and and i also want to thank miss siegel uh for her service for our students and best wishes to her let's give banisha high school employees a good revival [Applause] i should have this side this earlier
046but it's never it's better delayed than never right is that what i was saying is because it's just escaped my mind i think i'm getting older that mr ramirez is also going to be representing our district at the county level and we wish her the best of the county because who knows manisha might be representing at the state or the nationals [Applause] so now i'm going to request miss tania courtney to present the district office classified employees of the year [Applause] good evening everybody thank you for allowing us to be here and i want to let you know that i am honored to present our employee michelle baldwin [Applause] michelle is amazing she is work at the benicio high school center kitchen she is a lead and she worked really hard and she's very dedicated
047she is part of the team that put recipes together to they have a team and they together they work on it but she's very particular and very picky so we we try out with our students with our staff and if there's something that needs to be tweaked she working on it and she presented the best meal we could ever have for our students she also it's really good about talking to our students she puts through about 200 to 250 students and her line every day in 12 to 15 minutes the amazing connection that she does have with the students who greet everyone with their names and with a smile and with kind words if she see a student very sad she takes the time to connect with them and make sure that she have that
048student leaving a cafeteria with a smile or at least feeling feeling important and we know we can solve the problems but we're kind of their moms there right also if if a student come to the cafeteria when the line is gone and they're looking for something particular she goes out of her way to connect with other clients to see if we can find what they're looking for always looking for the best for our students um [Music] let's see make sure i didn't forget anything again we are so lucky to have her and our team because she does everything she can to make the the kids happy and they are don't miss out a meal at times they come by and always the first question is have you eat yet are you hungry and we make
049sure that they are taking care so again thank you michelle for doing everything you can for our students [Applause] okay [Applause] thank you miss baldwin for all you do for our students definitely and thank you miss courtney let's give actually a big round of applause to all of our district office departments [Applause] so now i would like to invite miss corona to present our management employee of the year [Applause] goodie i always do this good evening everyone thank you for having me here i am honored to introduce shelley miss shelley million [Applause] when i first uh realized that uh miss shelley was selected as a management of the year i was um very excited to say you know what the 30 plus years i've worked in education this is the first time i have the
050honor to introduce and have an outstanding psychologist uh in my team so it is with great honor to have her here um just a little bit uh when i first met um shelly she came to our school psychologist meeting and she i'm really gonna miss the baking um it is sad to say she is retiring but um she came and she prepared this uh ready to bake the dough and everything it was it was great um thank you for that and i heard wonderful things that that is uh something that she normally does unfortunately we haven't done that because we've been meeting via zoom but i just have to say that um just by getting to know her the past few years i've noticed that i can say with very proudly that miss shelley is
051very uh caring she cares for her students she goes the extra mile she goes above and beyond she is uh very organized i asked her colleagues what would you say about shelly what what are some things that you would say about shelley and someone mentioned one of our colleagues mentioned she's very organized and she uses a lot of post-its and yes because every every couple of months i i see the order of all these posters it's like who's ordering all those post-its well it's miss shelley so yes she is very organized she's caring um the other thing is that she is a good listener um her report writing is estellar she does go above and beyond she does not cut corners but she's very quick in assessing her students and also she did i mentioned
052she is very caring um it is sad to say that um for a short time that i've met her i am gonna miss her um but today we're here to honor her so congratulations shelley [Applause] congratulations [Applause] ms million congratulations on your retirement we appreciate your long-term your dedicated service for our district for our students you will definitely be missed your psychologists i will say because i also get emails from them they're big big fan of yours okay so so so um we are we are honored that we had an opportunity to have you serve our district for all these years thank you so much and congratulations before we wrap up i just want to say one last time this event would not have been possible without the help of so many people first of
053all we have been working on we started working on this like way back in october i mean you could tell all the behind the scenes work so all these staff principals everybody who writes the nominations help us let's pick through the committee and then everybody who gets all of this stuff ready which is miss martinez my hr team kathleen zully she was working until midnight last night to make those just to decorate the boardroom with that like you know everybody takes pride in making she was like oh my gosh our employees really need this they really need their declarations everybody either do whatever they want to do and then um maria silva and cynthia bogart so i want to really thank everyone and everybody who helped with the bringing everybody organizedly alfredo and limits beats
054and a couple of the team members out there thank you so much everyone have a beautiful midnight and we love you but i think if you want to go now i will not say you have to leave because you're welcome to stay if you want okay thank you again [Music] thank you georgina ohio okay chair yeah [Music] can you um i don't ever look at yourself oh um we all here um i want to welcome everybody back um again congratulations to all the the members uh teachers and and class classified and certificated employees of the year and the district office employees of the year it's wonderful to recognize you and we really appreciate all the work that you do so with that being said um we're going to move on to our reports excuse me
055our student reports we kindly asked our students to not come tonight because it was a really long long beginning so um they're not going to be here to present anything this evening and next up is dr young with our superintendent report very good thank you uh um merceda and board welcome everybody uh glad to see every um everyone love that event very positive just a couple of quick things from me um i wanted to let everybody know that the high school did a really cool thing with eighth incoming eighth ninth graders and it was a wonderful event where they had the kids go over there in groups in the high school administration and i believe the counselors met with the kids and talked about course options and and just welcoming them onto the campus so
056one of the things i thought was really wonderful is uh principal kleinschmidt reached out to the kids the high school kids to see who would like to help uh you know partner and greet the kids and they come over and she said she had a hundred kids 100 high school kids that signed up for it that wanted to do it and i was listening to tell the story it was so sweet because they were so much funny to hang out and be with the 8th graders and incoming ninth graders and vice versa in that spirit of service and caring and it was really beautiful so it's uh it's a new tradition that that will foster here in our knives school district that was nice um the other thing i wanted to point out that uh
057you know i think we have some speakers tonight and uh we received a number of uh emails i just want to i just want to know that uh i i know it's difficult it's been a long a long road with the pandemic a long road with all of it and uh and we're hanging in there well but i know i know it's been long and tiring um one thing that i would like to emphasize is um on february 28th which is seven uh instructional days away uh dr mark galey who's the uh the secretary for the california health and human services will be making an announcement regarding the possibility of lifting masks for schools because as we know that they've been lifted for other organizations but it's still in place for schools schools are still
058under that uh mandate and as a government agency we're you know we're under that so i know that we're all looking forward to that i certainly am as your superintendent uh i think it would be a great day for all of us uh and again we're waiting for february 28th seven instructional days away and we'll we'll see what that announcement looks like we don't it's not confirmed yet we've heard some news that uh there's the chance that he he will make that decision uh that will come from the governor as well so i just wanted to comment uh on that and then we had a lot again a lot of parents who had an opportunity to excuse me share their thoughts i will have you removed if you keep doing that we'd like to have
059you stay but we will have you removed so please stop interrupting yeah all right and then so this we appreciate keeping it simple and uh those are my comments for for this evening and thank you doctor yeah appreciate it do any of our um trustees have anything to share in board reports okay okay last time that i shared with you i was talking about the upcoming potential of um changes and adjustments to the valero meeting i just wanted to let you know i did go and we did make adjustments to our bylaws so there will now be six meetings per year instead of instead of the the four and the the meeting that i thought was really good and i'm hoping the community will be interested and hopefully participate in is instead of the one
060december meeting which is open to everyone in the community there will now be two so there'll be one in june which information will be forthcoming and one in december if you want further information you can get on the valero website or you can go up on the banisha the banished phoenician unified venetia city website the fire department maintains a whole section with all the information from valero we had el capitans coming and i know leslie's got some good information for us the other thing that i did is i zoomed in as a participant on the solano county board meeting last week um i was a little upset at that board meeting i was kind of disappointed in our um board leadership there um [Music] i i just will say this that i am very proud
061of the colleagues that i serve with on our board because you don't talk to your colleagues that way there was a lot of inappropriate behavior in interaction and i think it didn't bode well for the community to be able to be witnessing to that it was quite disturbing um one of the things that they did have as a member was dr mateos was there he is our county health um specialist and i was real appreciative of the information that he also shared about the virus and his position on what he felt about children and the idea of masks so with that said what i'm going to request is i know that the 28th is when the governor or our county california helped but i would really like this board to come forward and do a
062special meeting before that time if nothing else we are ready because we will have been proactive um i i'm doing this to my to my president and my superintendent um it allow us to be prepared for what's coming down from the state but i think the time is now so that is the request that i am making to my my leadership thank you mrs furuchi anybody else have anything to share no no i don't either i um do you have folks in the audience that are not wearing their masks and i will ask you to put it up over your nose we're going to follow protocol this evening if you're not interested in following protocol we're going to ask you to leave thank you i appreciate that um we're going to now move on to
063members uh public comments from our members that are here um before we go into uh these public comments that i have in my hand we had we had three that came through email today because apparently there was an error in our on our website that said they could still make the phone calls in and i thought it would be best in to to do make good since they thought it was still active and it has now been corrected um that we read those comments and i asked mrs frucci if she would read those comments for us oh maybe maybe it is too sorry thank you okay so the first one is from natalie heckman it says dear board members i've attempted to call and i'll continue to call to try and leave my public comment
064for tonight's board meeting please forward or input in the public comment if i am unable to leave my three-minute voicemail my name is natalie heckerman i am a third generation venetian and mother of two in the busd i am a nurse and educate myself by reviewing peer-reviewed medical literature to make informed decisions when it comes to masking and vaccinating my children i have recently had the pleasure of meeting superintendent dr young of who informed me that my concern should be directed towards the state level i sent letters to the governor the senator and the assemblyman offices regarding mass mandates and vaccination this is in your preview to consider making your own decision for our district given the recent district decisions of el dorado and roseville these counties stepped up for their communities and have taken
065action it is the right of parents to make risk analysis based decisions for their children not school or government officials please look at this form from a parent perspective you are taking away our legal rights to determine the best course of action for our school from a medical standpoint you are also not taking into consideration that covet is still in its early stages i respectfully request that you make indoor masking optional for our venetia children here are a few reasons why one this should not be compared to childhood illnesses like mmr and varicella which are eradicated with inoculation covid cannot be eradicated by vaccination at this time the cd second the cdc website states surgical mass do not catch all the harmful particles in smoke did you know the size of smoke particles in a
066wildfire are a point a negative .5 micron which is five times the size of the stars clover virus three the consensus in our community is that mass should be optional in schools i personally polled 130 persons who responded in less than 24 hours 68 percent of those agreed that this should be in the parents choice not mandated fourth take into consideration the recent public events like the playoffs and super bowl in la where there were 70 000 plus attendees unmasked in an indoor space my kids asked why do they not have to wear masks like we do indoors they are with people they don't even know and are so close together make that make sense one of those attendees was the california teachers associate association board of director member jesse aguila at the rams nfl
067championship game who was not wearing a mask in an overcrowded area this is just a hypocrisy shouldered by our children next our children can dine in restaurants indonesia without a mask and the general public regardless of vaccination but yet they can't sit sodaly socially distance in a classroom unmasked requiring children's to wear a mask you are promoting the idea that the mask can prevent or treat a disease which is an illegal deception practice it is unlawful to advertise okay and thank you mr before before um you read that i failed to read the comment or the procedural item and i wanted to talk to you guys about the bell we decided to put that in so that mrs martinez is going to ring it at three minutes she's got a clock going um so that
068you know that it's coming or that it's there um let's see um please note that busd has moved to in-person meeting meetings we ask that members of the public who wish to attend including those who wish to address the board wear a mask over their nose and mouth at all times all functions of the board meeting including public comments will take place in person members of the public may address the board at a regular meeting on any item within the board's jurisdiction speaker cards are available at the entrance table please note the item you wish to speak to and submit a card to the board secretary the board president will call all the open session general comments government code section 54954.3 during the public comment item comments for items on the agenda will be called
069during a specific item comments are limited to no more than three minutes per speaker or the board may limit a total time to 20 minutes per item with the timer displayed in the monitors so keep in mind that the time by law no action may be taken on any item raised during public comment periods and matters may be referred to staff for placement on a future agenda of the governing board please be reminded to keep your comments respectful as students may be watching the board meeting and i thank you and at this time um mrs rucci if you want to read the second letter yes thank you the second one is from suzanne johnson the retired vacaville police department did you ever think this would happen in the united states for the past year we
070the people have been threatened coerced bribed to take an experimental vaccine by our own government coercion is illegal threats are illegal and bribery can get get any one of us in jail so why are these tactics being used on us in the name of science experiments belong in the lab not in our children most especially we weren't being given clear and complete data from the government on the results of these experiments i am personally devastated by 17 deaths within my circle of family and friends in 2021 only a few were from long term or natural causes only one had covered but died with the treatment of ramada three unexpectedly died within the days of the vaccine over half had existing health issues but according to family members rapidly declined after the vaccination kidney and liver
071failure heart attack blood cats and stroke this year was heartbreaking unlike none i have ever seen i fear for our children's lives and future cohort is not a threat to the children but the vaccine is and there are multiple documents and statistics to prove it the united states department of health and human resources our services concluded in a 2010 report that less than one percent of adverse events were being reported in the vars report on the 30th of december in 21 sydney powell stated that the vars reflect more than four percent of the incidents applying the math that means in 13 months there have been up to 2.3 million vaccine debts 4.1 million permanent disabilities and 3.1 million myocardis empiricitis no wonder an insurance company announced a 40 spike in the 21 death claims which
072they believe point to the vaccine it's officially recommended for children the particles pharmaceutical companies will have no liability but you will they are protected but you are not the school board is an elected group whose assignment it is to represent the people not the government unconstitutional mandates that are being shown to harm our children like maxim vaccines do not represent our best and in fact are proving to be negligence in and of themselves we need you to be informed we the people need your protection and representation of our constitutional rights therefore we request that you stand with us against this tyrannical and experimental mandates please join the other school districts who have already taken a stand and oppose the mandates this action will surely make you heroes thank you thank you and um now i'm
073going to call up people in the order of which they were received first person um to speak is brian and if you could spell your last name for me please just brian vogue oh yes okay thank you so raise your hand or can you please put your mask up i have to speak without we are all speaking with our mouths okay this is how the children feel in class but uh raise your hand or shout if you're in the tornado if you have child age children here in benicia none up here okay but we've had kids okay but currently your kids are okay my fault okay so give me back like 10 seconds as a father and a resident in benicia i implore you to end this first mass mandate that our poor children are
074subjected to there is an overwhelming and growing number of us parents who are witnessing the harm that these masks are doing to our precious children these masks are harmful in so many ways in the most innocent among us these priceless children are at the mercy of us adults to protect them and right now our children are being harmed physically mentally and emotionally i have witnessed how these masks are destroying families marriages and relationships this needs to end actually actual science rejects and condemns the use of these masks on children and compelling forcing them to to wear them an entire day is nothing less than abusive i spoke to a benicia school teacher who said kids do not mind wearing a mask at all all day long what i met a parent two days ago and
075this parent told me that their fourth grade child who attends a benicio elementary school comes home most days crying because he hates the mask and begs begs to not have it where it had to wear it he says he hates that the teachers force them to wear the mask all day what psychological damage are you doing to our children it is not for the health and safety so what is it is it state or federal covenant money which in order to receive you have to force ineffective unhealthy oppressive masks and vaccines on our children you are using our innocent children as pawns to qualify for millions of dollars of covered funding i see kids who are scared to remove their mass i see kids walking completely alone at all grades with their whole faces covered
076you see their eyes you don't see their smiles you don't see their faces you don't see the sweet smiles from kids that we used to they're covered they're oppressed what damage are we causing to these children that they can't even look at their co their their students and see the interact with each other this is an essential critical child development thing that kids must do it's documented doctors have talked about it therapists and the damage that we are causing now and in the future we can't even quantify i know you know mr miceli i see you in the gym and i applaud you for working out and exercising and you don't wear a mask and i totally support that so here as a board member if we are we ourselves do not comply with these
077type of mandates that we're enforcing on kids it's it's the definition of hypocrisy we need to end this we need to protect our children from this tyranny they are subjected to us to protect them and they have no say in this we tell them you go to school you have to wear a mask get the word all day long and it's horrible it's depressing it's sad thank you our next speaker is amber clemens [Music] good evening um i will just say it's so nice to be in person with with everyone here um tonight i'm asking you to be proactive and put our children's needs first and schedule a special board meeting to vote on preemptively removing mass mandates to begin march first post the relaxing of the cdph guidelines and newsoms review on the 28th
078we have an opportunity here to provide mass choice as soon as possible for our children you even have the power to lift the mandates now look at roseville el dorado rescue union so many other districts that have done this for their children be a leader and give these children a mask option i'm not asking i don't think anybody is asking you to say no masks we're asking that you give our our parents and our choice our children a choice and an option thank you thank you our next speaker is leo mojito hi i'm here to support ending the mass mandates for our kids for all kids vax and unvexed it's all about choice let let those who want to wear them wear them and those who don't shouldn't have to it seems like people want
079to call names these days like anti-mask or anti-vex it's simply a complex issue i got my child's vaccinations and my dad who's pictured here died from the vaccine and i had to watch him languish literally for a month as he suffered because he had forecast catastrophic strokes from the vaccine the second shot to be exact so being pro-choice doesn't make you anti-anything it's just a cult-like behavior tactic to attack people who don't agree with you and it's despicable if you choose to live in fear and let your kids sit in a filthy mask that's your right but you don't get to force that fear on my family and tell me i'm a trumper because honestly i hate trump this rhetoric makes you sound like you're in a cult sometimes and calling everybody racist cheapens the
080actual meaning of the word our kids deserve better they deserve to see smiles they are not at risk for covid like the elderly and those with comorbidities yet people sit in judgment acting like if they want fresh air and in their lungs that they're gonna kill grandma it's a guilt trip it is our children they should never have to bear because grown adults are terrified of death i hate to break it to everybody in this room but death comes for us all there is no escape it's not selfish for not wanting to be a fearful coward i choose life while i'm still here and that doesn't make me anti anything so everybody needs to stop being controlling pompous tyrants and let our children breathe thank you our next speaker is julia ecker hi um i'm
081a parent of a high school student and i had to pull him this year from benicia high school he's a 11th grader and i had to pull him because i was picking him up from from school and he was upset um i had to move him to liberty because he just couldn't do the long day with the mask he became depressed he became withdrawn and struggling he told me one day that in weight training kids were getting sick in their masks they were vomiting this was in weight training at the high school he was also getting dehydrated as well and all the fountains were taped off and there wasn't any water available for him close by um and at lunch there was so many people in line he just couldn't even get in there to
082eat i mean i know every parent has their nightmare story and um in regard to the last two years of this pandemic if you've had a child and i understand that some of you have children and um this has been the most challenging horrifying year and i know that the teachers have been trying to hang tough do what they're told but this has to stop the time is now every parent that has come here tonight to support getting these masks get these kids unbound if they choose to not wear a mask thank you um we can all agree on that as far as um as far as we put the mass on the children we need we need to free them we need freedom now they're our future you guys have the power [Music] to
083not wait till february 28th i mean if somebody falls dead of a heart attack god forbid in this building and we go to the defibrillator machine oh wait we're not gonna we're not gonna save these this man be or this person because we have to wait till february 28th each child is struggling every day these parents here seated have to go through the routine of getting up in the morning getting your kid ready and it's a struggle they see now that you can go into certain stores without a mask and why can't they why can't they go to school when is it going to be their turn who's going to stand up for them how are they going to get their education properly these kids are so deprived and behind by almost two years of
084proper learning i know everybody's trying to do their best but it's it's the time is now you guys have it we're [Music] looking at you guys [Music] thank you [Applause] um our next speaker is nicole wasco offerman that was very emotional okay um dear superintendent and school board trustees i am a parent of two elementary school students at mary farmer elementary um i think i love my school and i think that the teachers and the staff have done the best that they can under these conditions but i'm here today to request that you the board motioned to hold a special board meeting to discuss removing mask mandates and pulled back covered restrictions at our schools you as the board need to recognize that you can implement change you have the ability to give choice to
085the parents it is time for the individual person to be responsible for themselves when these mandates and restrictions were put into place we didn't have the tools that we have now there is a vaccine and anyone who wants it can get it testing is readily available home test rapid test pcr test all available to anybody who needs them or wants them masks anytime any type of mask you could want you can get it and if you wear the right mask correctly one-way masking does work hospitals they have new medication and new techniques on how to treat this virus we no longer need the school board and the state making these choices for us these mandates and restrictions are hurting our children these mandates and restrictions are taking the focus away from learning these mandates and
086restrictions are putting added stress and added tasks onto the teachers which takes away from their primary job teaching please call for this meeting so we can express our concerns about how masks are physically and mentally hurting our children and we can explain to you why they're not helping in the way that they are meant to i understand that the cdphs update this week is wanting to revisit masks in school on february 28th but you as a board have the power to proactively prepare to do this sooner and discuss vote on an agenda on how we can cut back on restrictions immediately please be proactive and be ready to drop the mandates as soon as possible um i'm gonna add in a little bit more because i have a little bit more time not really the
087restrictions on the elementary school kids specifically are are really getting there and i'll break it down and i'll email you in particular but the fact that there is no open water fountains on campus is just it's outs it's ridiculous it's it's not the teachers jobs it's not the principal's jobs to add water it is we have drinking fountains let's use them what about the potting in the elementary schools these kids are forced to stay with each other all the time there's bullying happening there's negative psychological effects and these teachers are having to deal with this when really they should be focusing on teaching these children and i know that that in the beginning that was maybe the right thing to do but thank you thank you our next speaker is greg thomas good evening i
088hope you all had the pleasure to attend the uh solano school board meeting where dr mattheus thank you spoke uh i it's hard to catch everything he said being out in the forum but the end of his speech brought to light some new information to me that i didn't otherwise think of and that was regarding um the the vaccine implementation and what effects that may cause and his worrisome on that and in short what he what i took away was that he was saying that the major majority of the people that aren't getting vaccinated are minorities and therefore their children would follow along with that as well and with that in mind i noted that solano county is the sixth most diverse county in the united states the sixth that's huge then i looked at
089the demographics at my daughter's school and it is over 50 percent minority he spoke that what happens to these children that if they don't get vaccinated and they don't go to school what is left for them if they aren't being educated and they fall through this huge crevasse we make it's not a crack it's going to be a crevasse and what happens to their lives where do they fall in the grand scheme of things those are lives lost potentially drugs whatever where are they going to fall without an education without an ability to gain good employment go to a college i'm an ibew member international brotherhood of electrical workers if you don't have a high school diploma or equivalent with this year of sea algebra or better we don't even want to see your application
090yet so and all the other trades are the pretty much the same way they can't even get into a trade where do we leave them we spoke tonight all of our teachers that we looked at and celebrated for their achievements and we spoke of the culture and how we brought all this together what happens to these kids we essentially abandon them this woman i'm sorry i forget your name i think what she alluded to was are we going to be the tip of the spear or are we going to be followers when we read our history books we don't read about followers their names aren't mentioned we only hear about the leaders thank you thank you [Applause] our next speaker this evening is jason brink [Music] um my notes were kind of broken into two
091parts because i added some stuff today after watching the presentation um earlier um that teacher appreciation was pretty great right people usually have favorite moments of the night when something like that happens my personal favorite was a speech about a teacher talking about the face or the look on the face of her t her teacher that she was given the war to at the end of the day i think that's pretty ironic since these kids haven't seen their teachers face in two years um when you guys make statements and say things as a board member um it's it's important to understand what you guys are saying mr young was next door in the gym and told people to put their mask on because it's a law it's not a law the other thing is um
092you also stated that you guys have to wait for the governor to make this decision you don't it's happening all over the state there's several school districts that are removing the mass mandates for our children so now with that part done um here's the speech i wrote was just basically um my name is jason um my children represent a fourth generation in this town they're a third generation at banisha high this is the first time i've addressed the school board i'm requesting a special meeting to vote for an immediate removal of mass mandates in our schools this mandate removal does not require those that still feel the need to wear a mask to rip them off their face as somebody said at our city meeting it's pretty dramatic this also well this will allow um
093well-informed parents and students to make their own decisions we can all find studies and facts that support our different beliefs the problem is your choice to enforce a mask mandate forces my child to wear a mask well my belief of no mandate still allows you to make a free choice for your child a lot of you are educators in this room the best part of being teachers is seeing the results of someone someone understanding how to research and form their own opinion and make the right choice for themselves so remember let's do the right thing because it's the right thing to do thank you um the next person i have on here is speaker number 11 but i'm gonna have to ask you what your name is uh kathleen smith kathleen smith yep um thanks
094for having us here today to have the opportunity to speak appreciate it i think we can all attest that it's been a pretty difficult time for parents teachers all of you it's just been somewhat unsettling um still remains that way but i think what the reality of uh some of us being here tonight and using our voices is that it's time to change um and i think i look to all of you as leaders of the school community and ask that you don't sit back and wait to make change i've observed the board for a couple years now i think you stall out a little bit i'd love to see you stand up when you have the power to do so and be proactive yep for our kids i think someone said that yeah for
095our kids for sure and it would certainly help me as a parent too it's hard to parent during all this i think i heard mrs frucci say that she wanted to have a special meeting so i guess my question to the board is how do we get that on the books who does that we we don't do it at this point we don't we can't say that information at this point so okay i'm just just saying you have to get immunization is it motion tonight or how does that work no there's no emotion on that tonight because it wasn't on our agenda we have to follow guidelines okay thank you yeah all right um well that's great um anyways just ask you all to be proactive step up and make a choice for our children
096they're truly suffering it's been tough and it's so hard to watch the city relieve the mandates it's hard to explain to my kids why you can go out anywhere else in this town without a mask on now um and at school they have to put it on all day long it doesn't make sense it's hard to rationalize with kids they don't get it so please help us help them that's your job do it thank you [Applause] mr andrew miller hi um it's me again i came here directly after work tonight my main point tonight is you can do this before the 28th you need to do it before the 28th i left work today as i do every day from the er half of the patients that i saw today were covered patients and the
097youngest one was 75 years old um i've been doing this since the beginning and have yet to see a child come in now i know that there has been a child die in our county and that is terrible it's awful this whole thing has been awful i think that you guys when you started with all this did what you thought was best and i understand and now we have much much more information than we did then and it's become clear that it's time to end it and every day that you wait is another day that my kids are suffering my daughter has been through so much i can't even share it in public and it breaks my heart every day every single day and now the city they don't have to wear a mask anywhere
098but at school if i get one more notice from miss beason from my son's class that'll be the whole class that has had covered since kids don't even wear these things right they don't work and i'm begging you to end this insanity thank you thank you i'm gonna call it janice mccloud okay so no no speaker okay thank you okay how about bruce mccloud good evening thank you for the opportunity to talk uh i hope no one minds if i change the subject there were reports recently about book bannings in benicia schools i'm a resident of benicia my two grandsons go to benicia schools and this is a great concern to me book bans are the bread and butter of repressive regimes around the world it starts there the next thing they're burning the books
099imprisoning the authors and in some places even killing them is this the direction we want to start to head i don't think so kids go to school we're trying to really open their minds expose them to things so they can make their own decisions limiting what they have access to does not promote that at all so let's leave book banning to the repressive regimes and let our kids learn which they need to do thank you thank you [Applause] in our next speaker is speaker number eight if you could please give me your full name cameron wagner thank you good evening trustees and dr young i'm here tonight to urge you to hold a special meeting to discuss dropping the mask mandate in our schools it's important that we follow the city of benicia's lead in
100other districts from all over california and let the mass choice be of the parent and the student please do not wait you guys are leaders act like it you can see how upset we are let's not take this any further it's for the kids listening to these people it just got my blood pressure up and it hopefully should get your blood pressure up you don't need to wait don't do that there's times during this whole pandemic it just all the freedoms that we are losing i feel like we're in a communist country i really do and this is just getting ridiculous a lot of the things i am seeing are biblical and i'm not here to preach jesus but you should get your house in order if you don't it is important that you guys
101do your jobs to protect the kids if someone was bullying your kid and doing things that you wouldn't agree on you would step in and you would do something that's how we feel i feel like you're bullying my child and then it that's all i'm going to say i'm i i'm upset i want you guys to do the right thing just do it thank you thank you [Applause] um we have two more speakers left next one is speaker number ten and if you could please give me your first and last name i'm casey wagner thank you and i hope i have everybody's attention we've been noticing a trustee who has been looking at their computer the entire time and we're here tonight not to waste your time but to show you how important this is
102i respectfully ask for your attention thank you good evening superintendent young and trustees as you know on february 15th the city of benicia lifted the mask mandate they took this action to follow the solano county public health and california department of public health state masking guidelines the leaders of our city did the right thing and have given the choice back to each person if they want to wear a mask or not but benicia children are still required to wear a mask because you have not prioritized the health wellness safety and sanity of the benicia unified school district community that you represent you have chosen to not put the discussion of mask mandate removal on the agenda for tonight's meeting or any previous meeting so i'm here tonight asking you to motion do i don't know
103if it's motion if that's the correct term but make an emergency meeting not a special meeting that requires a 10-day notice an emergency meeting that can be done now to remove the mask mandates in benicia unified school district preemptively beginning march 1st or before truly you don't need to wait until march 1st if you choose not to make this motion it will be very telling of how special funds and the funding for covid and all of those things play into this role please do the right thing for our kids it's for them we need this if you wait another day they're suffering another day we're not crazy parents wasting our time down here our kids are at home we'd rather be with them this is so important please do the right thing emergency meeting thank
104you thank you and our final comment this evening is from bertha um they're still out there because there's no seat so there's she's out there okay so somebody could let her know she's up thank you so much hi bertha yes you can step to the podium um can you please tell me what your last name is maul emma willow thank you go ahead so i am a mom of four beautiful children in the school district and um i am here um i also work with kids in the school district in the classroom and uh first of all i want to ask if you guys would please um consider addressing a mask mandate lift it is very difficult on the students some of the covid policies have been very disruptive in the classroom being that i
105work with many children of all different ages in the middle school some have a really difficult time with these masks some just sit there and play with them it's very distracting during their day and sometimes it's distracting for the students around them as well because they're sitting there and playing with the mask um the other thing is the water breaks um at the middle school a lot of the drinking fountains have been lifted other than some are still covered but mostly the newer drinking fountains have been um they're not covered anymore and people can get their their water with if they have a water bottle um some kids still don't carry water bottles they still go to the drinking fountain um the point with the water that i wanted to make was you guys let
106them eat inside the cafeteria on rainy days without a mask on but they cannot sit there and take a sip of water inside the classroom they have to go out of the classroom to get a drink of water that just does not make any sense um my children have come home several times with headaches because they they don't want to take they they don't want to take that time the extra time to walk outside the door to get a drink of water even if they have a cup or it just doesn't when they're working on their classroom it disrupts the classroom to stand up walk out the door to get a drink of water every time just let them [Music] get water for pete's sake the other thing is i just think that we just
107need to get the mask mandates office as quickly as possible that's my my opinion thank you thank you that that ends our open session comments and i thank everybody for sharing their thoughts with us we're going to move on to uh let's see here thank you good night um consent calendar all matters listed under the consent calendar are considered by the board to be routine and will be approved by the board in one motion there will be no discussion on these items unless members of the board staff or public request specific items to be pulled um to be where am i just lost my place i'm sorry members of the board staff or public request items to be pulled and discussed sorry about that um so we have 11.1 is our our meeting minutes for
108february 3rd 2022 and 11.2 approval of the personnel there's only two okay we do this all at one time so do i have a motion and i have to approve the consent calendar thank you can i get a second a second okay thank you roll call please mrs martinez a second i have two seconds thank you we're so eager president zeta yes trustee moss yes trustee farrucci yes trustee maseli yes trustee groves yes thank you thank you okay um our next item is our informational item and it's the consideration and approval of a superintendent search firm and tonight um okay uh okay um tonight we have two companies with us that are going to do a presentation um the first one that we're going to call up is mcpherson and jacobson the other company will
109be headed off to the office to wait for the presentation to be done and questions to be answered and then we will switch and make a decision after we hear both both groups speak to us so without further ado mr oh thank you mr ferguson and nicole anderson and nicole anderson thank you hi um and and you guys are uh here with like pearson and jacob mcpherson and jacobson so thank you so much for being here and submitting the paperwork that we have the opportunity to read we really appreciate that and i'm going to let you go ahead and speak first of all two comments it's it's tough to be a board member in california tonight that was tough to tough to go through that for you i understand that second of all thank you
110very much we really appreciated you scheduling this presentation on the night of staff recognition that was that was really nice to see it's a very positive thing for you guys to do um my name is bob ferguson nico anderson nicole you want to introduce yourself hello everybody great to see you again i'm just honored to be in your presence and here to um support bob in the process of sharing about the superintendent search process and i'll chime in where necessary but great to see you and just honored to continue to contribute to the public education system and finding great candidates and finalists for boards to do the great work that you all are doing and i'll stop there because we've had plenty of time to hear what that great work looks like but i'm just
111honored to be here tonight thank you my name is bob ferguson i'm a retired superintendent i live in napa california about 38 minutes away on a good day i work with mcpherson at jacobson they're the only firm in california that's supported by csba csba interviewed probably 10 to 12 different firms and decided the cs mcpherson jenkinson was the one that they wanted to use i've done about 15 searches in california the largest district was 73 000 the smallest was 210 students one of the things that we do is a little bit different you have two good firms tonight two excellent firms um but we do things a little bit different um we sort of tailor the process to the board's desires we give you some really good we have a format we use but we
112allow you to change some things maybe there'll be some questions later on i can explain that one of the things that we really do we talk with you a long time listen to you mostly and try to get exactly what you want we ask you for characteristics background experiences for who you're going to look for in your new superintendent we also ask every applicant that applies to speak exactly to those desires that you want we don't want a textbook you know copycat sort of letter to you we want the letter to specifically talk about the issues that you bring up in terms of what you want to sing your superintendent we do a lot of one of the biggest things we do is a lot of community interaction a stakeholder review i asked the coach
113you can talk a little bit about that but i've done as many as 38 separate meetings in a district um we do a online survey but we really spend a lot of time in terms of listening to the stakeholders out there and want them to be part of the process to give you more information when you make your decision yeah so one of the things i appreciate is um and i don't know if you all recall this way back when dr young showed up and benicia had the pleasure of actually being a part of this process and i was a parent at the time and one of the things that i really appreciate was having the opportunity for my voice to be heard in this process so one of the things we love about the
114stakeholder input process is that you are allowing um your community to really share what their desires are about the next superintendent they get an opportunity to share the great things that they love about benicio's community about the school district they also get to share their perspective about the issues and i think it's really important that that be something that that's heard um in the process so that the incoming superintendent can have a really good idea and a good sense about the whole picture that your stakeholders actually view and so it's important i think to have that process and we pride ourselves on it because it is one of the best ways to get great input um we provide a report after that process and it's something that you as a board get to see so
115you get to really understand what the community feels about not only this role but also about the community and then also it's a great tool for us to do recruitment so that we can really advertise out and help those potential candidates understand is this the right fit for me right and to be fair to them like what are those things that we need to know so it's a great tool um that we pride ourselves on and again you said 38 um i said well that's a lot but definitely um it's actually one of my favorite parts of doing searches is just to be with the community and hear their voices and also to gather that so that you get a sense but also it's a great tool for us so um it's one of the
116things that we do that sometimes is very different from others but it also is a process that i think is one of the most valuable tools you can have that actually informs a lot of the work you do even beyond just hiring your new superintendent so really really appreciate that process and again you will get that report it's something that's a public document and then it's utilized throughout the process and so i just want to share that as you know one of the criteria that may show up down the road is when you're hiring and interviewing for the superintendent role you also use that as one of your forms of criteria to see how they speak to some of the things that even the community is looking to see so really powerful tools i want
117to definitely share that insight thanks nicole i failed to mention i had the privilege of doing the search back in 2015 when uh what's your name again dr young was was uh was hired i want to share with you uh this is like this is from i just finished sonoma valley about six months ago but this is a copy of the report that we give we also have an online survey in which we get probably two to three hundred individual comments because that's confidential sometimes people don't want to say things in open meaning but they want you to hear things like to pass this right just take a look at this uh we give that to you uh we also you most people publish it in their in their with their deport documents and we
118also um give it to the new candidates coming in so they can quickly see what's going on um but one of the biggest things and probably the most time consuming is the vetting process where most furs make a mistake it's in the vetting process they miss something they don't get everything i've had many cases where people have actually changed their names to try to get around who they are and that's a little concerning sometimes but we go three deep we spend we spend probably almost 30 days just doing bidding on each individuals we ask you up front the criteria you want do you want something from california do you want a sitting superintendent you want somebody with teaching experience all those things are factored in so we give you every when we get together to
119finalize what you're going to do we give you every single application that we have whether we have 20 40 or 60 you get every single one we also put them in two piles the piles that we didn't do the piles that we want you to look at and you have a chance to look at any of the forms any of the things why wasn't this person selected why is he not or she not here being interviewed in the process i mentioned before about doing some things different with interviews we give you the option if you want to do a community interview on the same day of the of the regular interview there's some pros and cons to that if that's up to you that's a bored decision we also give you an option of sometimes
120doing a social interaction prior to the actual interview where we have two board members with breakfast to work one board member or two with coffee two with lunch so that when you get to the formal interview in the afternoon all five board members have a chance to meet and talk with a candidate on an informal basis and more importantly they can't get a chance to see you and talk to you in a formal basis that makes that really formal interview much more productive much more interactive and much more comfortable for both parties um i'm finishing up the davis joint union system right now so the timing is perfect um we can start tomorrow we probably should start tomorrow um which my guess would be that we could probably do interviews around the first part of
121may maybe the last part of april um i think it's important that we move quickly there's a lot of jobs out there right now a lot of people come here jobs and we'd like to get venetia out there right as fast as possible and get it advertised as quickly as possible um the price total you see about 17 700 that includes everything um again we're a little bit different we allow you to we work for you you don't work for us we really want to format it the way you want it best done i know four of you have not been through this and i know diane you've been through it one more time hello again um and so help work work to walk a little bit walk you through that in the process i
122know we wanted at 15 minutes so we try to make it as quickly as possible and that you have some questions to ask afterwards so with that thank you so much i appreciate the information that you shared that helps clear some things up but we we did put a list of questions together that um that are in no particular order and i'm just i just kind of put one of our trustees names against each question it doesn't mean that person wrote that question it just we're just splitting it up so to make it easy i'm going to start at the end with mrs grubbs thank you um what is your process for getting a diverse pool of applicants will applicant will candidates be sought out be sought out of state two out of state is
123your choice um we we give you a credit you tell us the criteria that you want again we work for you you tell us what you look for we are very strong in diverse applicants i think about i think it's 40 percent of our superintendents are from minorities we have a large number of females um we actually search for you know hopefully bilingual sometimes um we try to match the needs of the district with the experiences of the candidates it's almost like sort of the matchmaker in a wedding you know you have a culture of the board you're the culture of the district we have candidates we try to take the strongest issues not every candidate is strong obviously there's no great superintendent has all the qualities we try to get the characteristics and backgrounds
124that match your biggest needs and work through that does that answer it i was thinking more about what the process was for getting a divorce diverse pool of applicants yeah and i'll just add to that one of the things i shared earlier is i was part of this process as a parent and this was my first introduction to superintendent search firms on my journey as an educator i actually jumped into this process with mcpherson specifically because of the focus on having the opportunity to create a pool of candidates who were what we call diverse and that might be people of color it might be women it might be people i say is culturally proficient also and that's another concept that maybe someone's not a person of color but they're very culturally proficient educator which means
125they understand how to recognize differences respond effectively so also kind of looking at it from the lens of getting the right match as bob said but one thing about the process and i think we pride ourselves on the network that we have as consultants so while you'll have you know you see bob standing here i'll be kind of supporting from behind but the bottom line is we have other consultants and being a national search firm we have a process of our networks being able to make sure we have a pool of candidates we know and that also we outreach and this is really important about our relationships is that there's so many folks who have aspired to be superintendents and sometimes haven't had access to the process when we talk about diversity so one of
126the reasons why i even signed up to be a part of mcpherson was just to open that door based on all the networks so when we think about process to give you an example is connecting with our colleagues at casa which would be our african-american superintendent and administrators association for california there's also causa right which is our latino and latina superintendents and administrators you have the national groups so there's a pool of folks who kind of fit into that network of affinity groups that we have to be plugged into because we know we don't have all the answers right here and that's where we often have to do that outreach but with the relationships we've had i'm i think i'm on my seventh search um at this point so we've had so many opportunities to
127connect with folks so that process in itself is kind of embedded in what we do and so we pride ourselves on that and are very intentional but in that screening again as bob said it's about getting you the right fit but also making sure there's access to folks who may have never had access to this process because of the experience of going through unfortunately a history of not everyone having that kind of access to the process so we're kind of living it which is super exciting um at this point in time and i've had the you know opportunity to help place numerous um people of color numerous women and they're doing phenomenal jobs and they fit those criteria so thank you i don't want to cut you short but but we have like 13 questions
128so she gave a great answer yes she did thank you okay um next will be mark okay um pardon me if i get this wrong but what i'm what the question looks like it's asking is are you guys going to be the ones that are going to guide us or are you going to have different people from here i will be the lead consultant and nicole will be assisting me so you guys will be the ones we would work with this is not a bait and switch you're going to get tired that was the question okay all right thank you thank you okay next um diane for she okay i really kind of think um sorry about that i i kind of think he answered this already for us but it was they were asking
129if you do background checks for the final candidates or for all candidates coming forward to the board we do background checks on uh everybody that we put in a list that we want you to look at if you pick somebody out of another list we'll do a background check right away on them but we probably spend a good oh four to eight hours on every candidate and we do it three deep so we will give you a background check on every candidate that meets your criteria uh and you will get just that though like when you say background check there's kind of another layer so your finalists will go through a more extensive one fbi the fbi does a finalist which we will see yes absolutely what's the difference between those two well the fbi
130check more does the fingerprint check goes into whatever files the fbi has uh our background check we talk to people we go three deep we you know we talk to friends colleagues um teachers administrators previous employers we we also search google do everything else um so but sometimes the fbi has access to information that we don't have thank you okay um dr boss all right um so my question is what will be the impact on our administrative assistant so um miss martinez what is that impact going to be on her that's a good question for one member sitting at this table [Laughter] we we do the heavy lifting um we we really do heavy lifting we would ask her to be sort of the point of contact to help maybe schedule some schedule with the
131board uh maybe help us with community resources in terms of people that we should have asked coming to meetings and who we want to ask to come to the meetings but we do the heavy lifting and then 95 percent of the of the of the work period good question though thank you oh it's my turn um okay in reading your proposal documentation i can see that most costs are covered in that one dollar amount that you shared with us um but can you clearly state what extra charges because as i was reading through i could see that there were some extra charges that potentially could creep up what those would be and approximately what the budget it would be for that we have no extra charges what you see is what it is so so
132when we bring somebody here and if they're from out of state who who covers the board if you decide to bring somebody in from out of state most commonly the board will pay for expenses for that person coming to the interview um [Music] or even from out of town i mean if southern california again that's something we can talk about as a board depending on when you depending on what day you interview sometimes uh boards want to interview on the weekend because they have jobs during the day it's easier sometimes for sitting the superintendent to get away from their job on the weekend again that's something we could talk about how you want to do that again it's your decision how you want to structure that okay so one thing that i will say that
133is kind of a variable is how you decide on advertising so that's that would be one that we couldn't say until you decide so in the first meeting you would decide what that is and so like running it through edcal running it on ed join they charge those associations charge so typically like i would say yeah maybe 1500 give or take how long you want to run it and that's just literally based on their pricing um we both live nearby so literally like this right literally there's no hotels and flights and all those things that sometimes um you know come into play so the middle is very minimal there might be like some copying costs and these are all things that we work through our home office and then kind of look at here's the
134extra expenses and so what he gave you was like maximum it would never go beyond that but ultimately there are some things we just wouldn't know because it's really through the process but it's pretty big yeah that amount does incorporate advertising uh edcal ed join whatever you want to do it does not include advertising outside of california which could be different but we also have a national website with nick pearson and i think they get about 8 000 hits per month on that website okay thank you okay mrs grubbs the final three yes yes and yes the last one's no though we can request a number minimum number yes absolutely you you know again the most average number of interviewees would be four i've done as many as seven over three days um i mean
135we would ask the board to spend probably two days if you do four candidates because it's an all-day process um so it's up to you we work for you you tell us what you want to do we'll we'll suggest for we'll give you some formats if you want to do five you want to do three i've worked with a district i want to do seven i just work with district one and do two up to you thank you uh if no one in the first round uh works out and we need to do a second round of candidates what is your policy with that we do it no charge except for expenses okay thank you sure yeah no i know i'm coming sorry okay uh my question is actually related to the brawn act what
136we're what we were discussing is are there any additional brown items that we may need to be aware of that we may need to have clarified as they relate to as they relate to at the interview process or the search process that we might find ourselves engaged in so are will you guide us through that absolutely we'll also talk with your your attorney firm you see different firms and different directors have different views uh traditionally the closed session items would be uh interview questions uh the selection of the interview of the candidates um discussion of contract issues et cetera everything else is in the open we want to be as open as possible we're very comfortable having it open we don't we're not hiding anything we want the public to feel that they're involved in
137the process okay up to your your your attorney firm as to exactly what as well but usually it's for definitely as the interviews are a closed session the discussion of candidates is closed session sometimes doing the interview questions is closed session sometimes it's not depending on your firm okay i just remember there were some times with our when we did this the first time that we had to be mindful of yes we are mindful of that thank you dr moss all right so this you kind of answered this but just for clarification um i know you mentioned the fbi background check so um what kind of background background check do you do and can we get a complete copy of the background checks that are being performed we will provide to you a one-page or
138two-page summary of all the background betting we've done giving you what we think are the strongest points to consider for this candidate and also telling you and working with you and some of the questions we have in the canada um again what we usually do sometimes and i think we did it diane when you're here um we meet with two board members prior to the board meeting have every application there go through with two board members every application so when you get to the actual board meeting most of your questions have been answered and then we bring to you maybe a total of six to eight maybe nine finalists that meet the criteria that you've selected then it's your choice and quite frankly our our goal is to make you uncomfortable at the final meeting
139because we want to bring four candidates not one candidate three fillers four or five whatever you want strong candidates that you really have a strong discussion for i then i did elk grove seven board members and and at least five had a different first choice took about three hours for that discussion right is there is there a a way to get a full copy of things so there was one piece i heard you asked dr moss was about the like criminal background check so remember i mentioned the final list right there's another layer and so what happens is there's the criminal the education piece because also they're looking at their credentials and then their uh financial check as well um so there's like three actually areas and then typically our home office gives us kind
140of the green light that they're good i'm not sure if we give that report out though um i think i've done it in some cases the board the board can get um access to exactly what right to the records that we're looking at so you can see i mean there's like the first five or six pages are really the the form is long and tedious to application form but the first five pages really have all the recommendations in there for different people you get a chance to see those so again total disclosure we don't hold anything back we let you look at everything you want to see thank you um my turn um what is on your your proposal that we initially got you have csba written on there really big i just wanted to
141know what the connection is with mcpherson and and csva being used as sorry as a as a so emboldened on there so about about 10 or 12 years ago csb were doing some searches um they got into some trouble because of lack of vetting as they pulled out of the search process but school boards went to them and said we want your help so i think it's 19 i mean 2012 or 13 somewhere in there csba invited firms to come and they talked with each firm for about three or four hours their process etc etc and they chose mcpherson and jacobsen to be the firm they wanted to work with for two major reasons the success eighty percent of our candidates stay five years and the doctor young you met that criteria um and about
142uh about uh sixty percent hundred percent say about ten years that was number one number two was the openness the transparency uh the fact that we don't tell you what to do we allow you to work with us and and do a process so it's been a good relationship with csba for the last i think we've been with ever since about i think 2013 somewhere in there okay thank you mrs grubbs oh wait we wouldn't ask them this question no no no no never mind um yeah go ahead mark we're going to skip it we're switching questions that's okay so now you have to whatever you want to do whoever speaks i'll talk to you okay can you please elaborate on your personal experience and background but that you and your team part your partner
143bring to the role and responsibilities for the sufficient position of superintendent okay i i've been i i retired from tamil palace union high school district um i heard the name el dorado used i was super into el dorado high school district um i did interim in saint helena interim in hal mountain interim in sausalito um i i was a school superintendent i was a high school principal junior high school principal assistant superintendent i worked in four or five different counties um i joined mcpherson originally in 2013 i've been able to do about i think 15 searches now up and down california so i sort of know what the process is and i i really try very hard to to bring to you uh the expertise that i have the contacts that we have nicole mentioned
144we have a lot of people in california you know when you get a little older you know more people um and so we talk to a lot of people about canada sometimes we find out some very interesting things um by just by the fact that we know a lot of people that answer it i hope thank you and so finally mark yes uh please describe your screening process well you give us the criteria you tell us what you're looking for we we do our best you get as many applicants as possible we go through the applicants and match that they match what your criteria is those that match the criteria which is probably going to be anywhere from eight to 18 candidates out of about 40 or 50. we then go to the process of
145screening those we also make very sure as we go along the process that the candidates are still involved most top candidates will have probably two or three jobs you're looking at we want to try to hold them into our space as much as possible so we have constant contact with them um i would use davis right now davis uh we're doing discussions right now i'll probably talk to probably 10 or 12 sitting superintendents and they want to know the first question i ask is what's the board like that's the first question i ask second thing is what are the issues and that's why that stakeholder thing right there really is a valuable tool for us and we go through it it takes a long time it takes it takes up to three months but i'm
146looking at your we want to get out there soon so i think we can do two and a half months or so starting next week literally we would probably be able to have you coming to interviews the end of april first part of may um the only thing about that too is we'd like to get a candidate on board that that person could also spend time with dr young visit the district um feel comfortable um you feel comfortable with them do some sort of community outreach to meet a new person coming in so it's a it's a we do a an excellent job in screening that's really what we're known for thank you were there um that was the end of our list but were there any things that didn't get answered that you would
147like to ask before we do the switch i do just want to confirm so i know that you're um you've your firm has conducted is it eight hundred and seventy searches since um because it sounds like that national assertions we have duo mcpherson is one of probably the top two national firms uh so we do a lot of we've done we've done um you know las vegas we've done uh atlanta we've done a lot of big country some big city firms in california i'm guessing 80 90 000 maybe over 100 since 2013 so we've done a lot of searches and quite frankly with our success rate has been excellent okay great thank you we're all good guys okay so yeah we're going to have you go to the super secret room that sounds exciting oh
148yeah yeah yeah yeah dr young promised to be food in their forest right thank you thank you so much here's your um okay thank you yes thanks for being here we appreciate it thank you thank you thank you good job guys and i think i'm going to ask for a motion to extend the meeting because i know for sure we're going to oh yeah so yes i can do that i think we can wrap all that agenda up in 20 years no okay so i'm gonna ask you for a motion okay we can do that wow we have a lot to do that way it's in between and thank you georgina we were thinking about you oh we're still on live still hello everybody hello welcome um we have uh dr cavazza cavazza's and mr
149juan garcia there he garza sorry my apologies um and they are with the company leadership associates and they are the second company that we are looking at to make our decision this evening on who to hire so i welcome you and we look forward to hearing your your presentation so welcome thank you very much uh we can go to the second slide please um first of all i want to start out by introducing uh ourselves i am blanca cavazos and um just to give you a little bit of my background as you can see i was the superintendent of taft union high school district if you're wondering where that's at if you know where bakersfield is in the central valley basically to the west of that currently i am still the co-director of the axa
150association of california school administrators uh principals academy and i've been doing that for a number of years i've been in education almost 40 years retired recently after almost 40 years in education and i've taught at the elementary and secondary and college levels i've worked with adult school so a long history in education good evening i just want to commend you for your recognition of school employees it's a nice job some great people that deserve some acknowledgement my name is juan garzan i was superintendent of kings canyon unified school district in fresno county for 15 years we had about 24 schools over 10 000 students it was nice a seven member board prior to that uh assistant superintendent hr high school principal for ten years and went all the way back to teaching and coaching and
151all of those different things after my retirement i wanted to continue contributing to education governing boards and leadership and i've been a partner with leadership associates for five years i'm also the director for the access superintendents academy among a lot of other things that i do for volunteer work so pleasure being here this evening um the next slide not only do we basically co-direct the the searches that that we do uh together that we do together um but we also have a strong administrative team that supports us and just like you have an excellent uh executive assistant to assist the board and and the superintendent this is the team that supports us in making sure that everything is coordinated so the district is not left coordinating everything on their own there is a support person
152that will be connected and will help make sure that all of those things happen and that materials and packets etc are are sent to you and to whoever it is that you designate so this is just a list of your accomplishments but honestly sitting there in the audience listening to you recognize the best of the best it's very very clear that the the number one thing you have going for you is that you have an outstanding staff and a very caring and supportive community i i would say that's your number one asset that you have it it just came out so loud and clear and it was really a privilege to be able to sit there and and listen to that um and i i think the other that i would also say that that
153is clear in listening to you even the speakers tonight is the the fact that there are people that are long-term venetians that have been here for a long time are committed and love this community and so i i think those are two there's a lot of things listed there that are accomplishments for the district but i think that's really at your foundation and the next we consider ourselves leadership associates the a premier executive search firm and uh we do the vast majority of uh searches in california we are really a california team and we also it doesn't mean that we do not do national searches because we do but we are really centered in california and we get applicants from outside california and it really depends on you the board as to whether how wide
154you want that search to be whether you really want to do more of a national search or whether you really want to center it in california blanca and i are at the face of leadership associates tonight but if you look at the map there you'll see that all of our partners are successful retired superintendents who want to continue serving school boards and school leadership and we're located throughout the state of california we do not have an office we all work out at home but we have a conference call or zoom call now every two weeks to connect to support each other help each other with recruitment help each other with reference checking and that's important that you know that there's a a team behind this team working together uh we're we're associated with a lot
155of different organizations and i'll list they're listed there but i'll just highlight a few khalsa is one of them for example one of our partners david verdugo was the director for khalsa for many years axa all of you are familiar with axa currently the interim director for is mark ecker one of our partners in the firm and there's other examples there but every one of those organizations has names and faces behind it that we can contact for recruitment and reference checking we are all successful retired superintendents that want to continue serving public education we believe that public schools are at the foundation of our society we value good strong leadership and we believe in integrity equity excellence diversity diversity inclusion accountability and transparency that's who we are and that's what we do that's very important
156we help our clients in a variety of different ways and one of these ways is uh an area that that we believe makes us different because not only do we conduct executive searches but we also provide professional growth professional development for governing boards like you for superintendents for cabinet cabinets we also provide them for aspiring leaders aspiring superintendents the next slide on ys i just want to i i know that you are quite capable of reading but one of the reasons is that we are successful superintendents there is no one that is a partner in leadership associates who has not been a successful superintendent in california school district and we all as you saw that list of organizations we are all re remain actively involved both in presenting and also attending professional development ourselves so
157that we can stay on the cutting edge of what is going on because as you know quite quite well this uh over the the past two years if you didn't stay up on what was happening you were out i mean you were absolutely out and so it's very important for us and we model that ourselves we not only expect that of of those that we work with but for ourselves also that we also participate in professional development and continue to to grow we are also partners as juan mentioned earlier we're not hired consultants we all have a vested interest in the success of every single search that we do and we're also uh committed to that continuous improvement for ourselves um and and also for the districts that we serve and the superintendents that we
158are successful in recruiting uh the next page you can see here what uh some of the executive leadership development services that that we provide um and as i mentioned earlier that is really what distinguishes us we have a lot of contacts within these networks um that we where we're providing this professional development because we're seeing them early they're coming in early and we're able to watch them grow as well our four-step process our four-step process is the key to the success that we've had over the past 25 years the search process begins with you if selected we would meet with you at our next meeting and begin to discuss protocols with you and we'd also ask you three key questions one is what qualities and characteristics would you like to see in your next superintendent
159what are the challenges facing venetia and what are the successes and then we would go over other details of the search but those three questions are very important because the responses that we would get from you would help begin to develop position description which would be the second step in meeting with stakeholders in that first meeting we would work with you to identify key stakeholders there's organizations and groups out there and city officials and police and fire department that are involved with the services that you provide we would ask those groups the same three questions including students union leaders from both associations or if you have more associations from classified employees from parents from any type of stakeholder group that has a vested interest that you would identify we would invite them ask them the
160three questions same three questions we would also do an online survey that would cover two to three weeks basically asking the same three questions and we would look for common threads throughout the responses and develop a position description that we would bring to you for final approval that position description which reads something like the venetian school board desires a superintendent with the following qualities and characteristics that helps sort out people and see what your needs are what you're interested in so that they would know whether they have those qualities and skills and experience that you're looking for to begin with we would also use that for recruitment the other two questions we would use to when we'd asked what are the great things happening here to recruit obviously this is a great location to begin
161with who wouldn't want to live here just driving here is nice but above that some of your accomplishments would help us attract and recruit people and then the last one what are the challenges they need to know what they're getting into no surprises you don't like surprises and they don't either so you'd approve that position description we would recruit advertise and then bring all of the candidates back to you we would go over their history the reference information and we would provide a recommendation based on our experience these are the four or five that we think best match your position description but you would get to select sometimes boards go with all our recommendations sometimes they sort out change the order that's that would be your decision then we would work with you on draft
162interview questions that evening and invite the candidates to come we would be here with you during the interviews set it all up and then take you through a process round one and round two in the interview process uh bringing back two finalists after the first round and there's a good system that we use for that after you get down to your finalists we would continue to work with you on the key terms of the contract the the interviewees that you would select for the interview would all fill out a contract parameters worksheet of what their expectations are and that's important because if one of those expectations that they have isn't similar to what you'd be willing to offer no need to bring them here in advance so we would take you through all that process
163and also work with you on just a press release and through the whole process from beginning to end that's our four uh step process this is a draft timeline i won't go through it in detail but basically it highlights the steps i talked about in february we would meet with you march 7th through the 21st go through all the stakeholder input process and then bring the position description to you towards the end of march for your approval we could do that virtually on the phone it doesn't have to be a special board meeting or at a board meeting once we get consensus from you on that position description work on recruitment in march and april and then bring the application deadline bring all of the candidates to you around march 20th or march 20th may
1647th sometimes the interviews could be one day sometimes it's two days depending on on the number of candidates that you would wish to interview and have the contract approval at your may 24th board meeting may 26th board meeting sorry didn't have my glasses on uh that is a draft timeline at our if selected at our next meeting we would firm up that timeline make any adjustments shorten it or lengthen it depending on what your desires are in in closing our search would really be your search we're here to support and work for you our fees are all inclusive you saw that in our contract proposal we don't ask extra for this type of advertisement or this particular service that includes everything and as mentioned earlier by my partner blanca we're the premier uh superintendent search
165firm in the state of california we do 70 of the searches in the state that's seven out of ten other firms the county offices and some districts do that on their own and that's because of our reputation and our success the process we use and how we do that how we work with the school board and your support staff so we want to thank you for the opportunity and we're ready to answer any questions you may have thank you um we're going to do a little housekeeping here for just a minute um because we're going to go beyond 10 o'clock and that's when we have to get a motion on the table to extend our meeting beyond 10 10 pm so do i have a motion i'll move to extend our meeting beyond the 10
166pm daimling do i have a second i'll second thank you roll call please president yes christy moss yes yes yes and trustee grabs yes thank you thank you housekeeping done we prepared a list of questions and they're in no particular order and they are being read not just by it may not be the person that wrote the question but we're just going down the line so we're going to start with mrs grubbs here at the end thank you for being here i'd like to know what is your process for getting a diverse pool of applicants and will candidates be sought out of state as well as in state as some of the statistics that we shared with you earlier with regard to the success we've had what diversity have to do with recruitment we do
167not have a stall of people waiting but we do have a knowledge and a list of people of diversity that are interested either their up-and-comers in associate or deputy superintendent roles or current superintendents that are wishing to relocate so we recruit very heavily based on the interest of the board and then as far as reaching out uh for out of state candidates with our firm we don't need to reach out really they they apply quite often because of our recognition in on our website we have over 800 subscribers that uh have listed up to signed up excuse me to receive advertisements for positions but recruitment is the bottom line for how we look for diversity and i would also add to that if you look at the list of organizations that we belong to that
168that's also uh one of the ways that we are able to get a diverse pool is because we belong to those organizations and we have connections with them so we're always trying to reach out and make sure that the word gets out there and that we get a wide pool of applicants thank you mr miceli thank you so the next question is uh if we were to go with get would we be working with you guys or would you be sending us other consultants okay thank you that's good um okay i'm the next question up for you do you do the background checks for the final candidates or for all the candidates coming before the board all the candidates and we go way past just the list that they provide as references we we go
169deeper we do extensive uh reference checking because that's very very important and do you share that with us in detail okay thank you um just just to give you a little bit more there is a box that candidates can check and it says basically you know whether they authorize us to go beyond that list obviously if someone does not check that then we've got concerns um but i i would go back to also the connections that we have statewide the partners that we have statewide it's we're really doing that reference checking and getting information that is not necessarily on paper that connectedness those relationships where i may call you you've worked in a district and i may tell you what do you know about dr garza what can you tell me about dr garza and
170that's where really the value in the service that we bring thank you thank you i know that you shared earlier that you do have an administrative team we want to know what the impact will be on our um administrative assistant there will be a lot of communication because no matter what happens you as a board and your administrative assistant know the district the community the staff better than we do the process was pretty well explained but there's tons of communication with every detail up to as an example how to get an online survey that with using surveymonkey we provide it all in a variety of different languages and so there's we'll talk with your tech department or whoever you designate to assist us with that all of those things tons of communication and also setting
171up the um setting up the stakeholder groups uh you know because we how do we connect with them except we need to connect through you through the district and so helping us set up those uh stakeholder meetings putting the link on the website uh those kinds of things but our our support team will be working directly and communicating and trying to remove as much as possible so that that uh georgina is not overwhelmed by that thank you i know she'll be happy to hear she says yay two of the team members that were mentioned before were administrative assistants for superintendents so they they understand the work ah there you go that's good um in now we read the proposal that you submitted and we see the dollar amount that you're requesting or asking to as
172part of your fee and you're saying it's all inclusive there's no other hidden fees anywhere like for sure there's no extra advertising fees or what about if somebody comes from out of town to interview then how does that work if someone comes from out of town to interview it's your call on whether you want to provide a stipend or not okay is that what's the general policy that you've seen happen how's that i would say that out of um the last 40 searches that i've been involved with only one district has provided a stipend west contra costa and i say that publicly because it was public knowledge right they provided a stipend for out of state people that that's the only one that i recall the others took care of it themselves for the others
173for out of state it's at their own expense okay so that would be your thank you that's that's good to know um and we're gonna move back down to um mrs groves [Music] uh prior to the presentation of the candidates and on the on the timeline the data set there we present the candidates to you a few days before that we provide you with a view only portable portal excuse me i'm still thinking superintendent portables i apologize a view only portal and you get to see all of the applicants every single their application their reference letter their resume everything prior to the meeting you can't print it out but you can view it and then that night we present all of the candidates recommend four to six you could choose to interview six eight four
174three whatever you decide once you listen to all of the their history and the reference information you decide as a board we will provide a recommendation because that's our job we try to make your job easier your call recently they've been in person so if we get an initial round of candidates and none of them seem to work out in a second round of candidates is needed what is your policy on that we will re-advertise and go through the process of recruitment again and only the cost for the advertisement is what we would at no it's only if we do a second search so no that we advertise again and start over so just to clarify that so no extra charge no extra cost for that for that because because no candidate was selected but
175advertising no no advertisement that's what i thought i think what juan meant is if the superintendent did not work out that's different it was a whole new search but if none of the interview worked out and we needed to do a second round of um no additional cost thank you thank you that's what i thought he said okay all right um okay so now it's me again sherry okay so this has to do with the brown act so are there any brown act items that are related to the searches and the interview process that we need to be aware of will you work with us how do you make sure that we don't get ourselves in trouble okay so our administrative assistant prior to board meetings will work with your administrative assistant and say this
176goes in closed session this has to be open session what can and cannot be an open and closed session and we will also remind you in our first meeting what what is uh brown and what we need to do related to brown act and we will always be very cognizant in that because it's very important we understand the legal implications so we might do part of the process in open session and then go to closed session come back to open session but we will work with you on that and provide the language for that board meeting okay right and then um what kind of background check do you do and can we get a complete copy of the background checks that are going to be performed okay the reference checking that is done is is
177our search processes are confidential okay it's important to share that with you most of the time that people that are applying for these positions are successful where they're at and when they apply for another position they're jeopardizing their current position okay so we will provide you with the with the information we'll share with you the reference checking that we did in detail but we don't provide copies of that okay because it is confidential information both for the candidate and also when we do the reference checking we want you like if i were calling you for a reference check we want you to know that it's confidential and we're not going to use your name so that you can speak freely we will tell you who it is and everything but we don't provide anything in
178writing on reference checking and we also uh do just google searches for example to try to gather that information and and when you get down to the top candidates we do have those conversations of is there anything that we need to know you know is there anything that we need to know before we move forward because if we get any surprises down the line it will not be good it will not be good and especially it will not be good for you and so we try to impress that on those candidates and that's i think that's another part of the service is that we do talk to the candidates so that we know get to know a little bit more about them um and and be able to ask those questions and have those frank
179conversations so that we could tell you you might say we're really really high on this candidate and we might at that point be able to tell you you just need to know x y z and if you're good with that that's fine it's your search at the end of the day it is your search so for example if the the person you know the candidate gives you what here's three references then you just basically check the three references do you go beyond that do you go to the community do you do any other kind of like confidential you know research that you can or is it just here's the list of my references you check the references and that's it we go way beyond that because uh the people that are applying the references they
180list they're not going to list anybody that's going to say anything bad okay and the letters of recommendation that they request are going to be good letters right so that's a given uh we need we go past that that's the value of having these people in located that partners assisting us with the reference checking because as as wanka said somebody knows somebody that knows somebody that can tell us something about somebody in the state of california quite easily it's just calling the right people uh in modesto and i was over there calling the local some of the local clergy that were familiar because they hear stories from families about and they they work with with the school district so we try to reach into the deep corners to try to find out what we can
181because you need to know what you're getting and if i can i'm going to just give you a quick example just recently one of our partners said to me um i need to get some information on a candidate who is from your area and they're in this district and i said i know the superintendent in that district you tell me who you want to find out about and i'll contact that superintendent because it's someone who's opinion i trust that's the other key piece is we're not just talking to anybody we're talking to people who who are we believe are giving us accurate information because we have a relationship with them already i'm sorry well i just wanted to um say i appreciate the authentic and person to person contact in doing background checks but i've
182been wondering if you use any professional services or government services to go into those background checks some of us subscribe to some of the different services that provide you information about whether how the people whether they have a criminal record whether they have they file for bankruptcy and all of those things so we have access to that type of information also and do you use that fairly often or i do and i think most of the partners do i mean because if a person can't handle their finances they're not and it's unlikely that they're going to be able to handle the finances in a school district so yes we use it regularly um my next question um was supposed to be for the other company that's here so we're going to move on to mrs
183grubbs i'm going to skip my question because that was for the other group so now you're on 11. okay um what's the connection of csba and leadership associates our connection with csba [Music] we're associated with csba but we we work with them we have we're collaborative we use them for reference checking too we talked to some board members i've served on their superintendent's advisory committee in the past presented for them presented at cspa conferences yes thank you okay this is fruit yes thank you so i and i think you kind of answered this so if there's anything you feel that we need to know would you just add to it but can you please elaborate on the personal experience and background that you that you both have that you bring to um the search for
184superintendent through your roles and responsibilities and understanding of the superintendent personally i i believe that my experience as a superintendent when i hear about from you with regard to the qualities characteristics and skills and experience that you're looking for you know i reflect on whether i have those skills to begin with and then i begin to do the type of searching for someone that best matches those and someone that can work collaboratively with the board you know work as a team because that's so important having served with the same school board in the same district well different board members but with the same district for 15 years the communication the working with the school board the style of the people what the board is looking for so i think my experience in those arenas would
185assist in helping you select a good candidate thank you and i would say also as a former superintendent there is research that says that the stability of a board and that working relationship with the superintendent impacts student achievement i mean that's hard to believe but there is research on that and so uh it is it is very important for us for me to be able to say to someone you know this is this is a really good place for you to be this is a board that you can work with um you know and and to find the right fit i used to hate that when i was trying to apply for an administrative position and they would tell me you're just not the right fit but having been a superintendent that right fit is
186critical it it's a make or a break and so our our goal is to find the right fit for your district thank you and you have a great reputation as a school board and as a district so i think that's going to facilitate the process greatly we pride ourselves on getting along you know work well we collaborate well um go ahead mark so if you could the last question is if you could describe your screening process which i think you might have kind of yeah i think they pretty much did i just will i think yeah i think i think we're good yeah we're good okay um this time i want to thank you for your presentation it was wonderful and we're going to have you stay in this room um while we deliberate here
187um we're going to call in the other group to come back and then we will be making our decision shortly just hang on all right guys oh [Music] okay oh [Music] you know i want fresh eyes i don't want to have preconceived ideas in the notion because they've been here already i think we need to go with the fresh group yeah mike's on okay yeah okay um folks we're gonna we're gonna talk right now um but it's directed so that you can all hear we want to be very transparent with this decision-making process and so that our folks at home can understand what is going on this is a very awkward uh moment for all of us because this is something that doesn't happen very often and um with that being said we're just going
188to talk you're going to hear us confer with each other but the mics are all going to be on so that you hear what's going on so um continue your conversation i think that's good points that you're making diane on um on one versus the other i i hear what you're saying um cece did you have any input as far as your thought process of which you would feel comfortable i i i do but but i was curious to hear what diane was saying and i didn't okay so i'm sorry that final little bio break huh okay um so i it kind of came about because i just kind of looking at both um both firms it it to me it is important to have those connected relationships that really kind of kind of are
189reaches wider so it's not a narrow it's kind of narrow search and i know that that both indicated that they can you know reach beyond california i mean i don't know if we would have to do that necessarily but it is important to me that that we still have that ability to to look at all possible candidates um looking at price wise um mcpherson um the fee is uh seven seven little over seventeen thousand dollars the leadership associates is twenty four thousand five hundred um mcpherson did indicate that that fee those fees should be all inclusive i think with the possibility of maybe having to um extend for advertising was that correct there may be a little bit more with that um i did appreciate that mcpherson has the connection um it seems like strong
190ties with csva which is really important um in terms of you know i think about like school board oversight you know things like that it's just important to have those relationships and so um so that's kind of where i'm where i'm leaning and i i yeah and so that's kind of where i'm and then i know that ryan you have to share some things yeah well what i was what i was just reminding us of is the long list that leadership associates also had with all of the other groups that they are official leaders of and one of the biggest ones we use also besides the sba is axa and they are the directors and they are in charge there and that is a superintendent organization so i i think as far as knowing that
191there are contacts and connections i i don't think that's something that we have to be concerned about you're trainers for csba which i know i've seen them in action because and you've also in education so you would have seen i mean we've seen them right we know that they're there and they're doing it so i to think that one has it and one doesn't i don't think is um is something that that would be a distinguishing difference um the thing that um i also am looking at because i've done the sister nobody the second time in this district is i really think it's it's too it's my preference that we have fresh eyes um not that we have not that we go back and use the same group not that there's anything wrong with them
192but there's it's like there's already preconceived ideas and the notions about a district and when i wanted somebody to come in with fresh eyes to take us to the next level we um mcpherson served us really well yeah so did you have concerns with mcpherson before um what the what we did do at the end with mcpherson and bob knows is we chose not to have to become the coach of our superintendent at the time because we were having some some concerns and disagreements um there were there were times when we were struggling to get some information and we didn't get it the way we thought and maybe that was our fault because we were new and as i said i was a brand new board member then so i'm like i don't know um
193but we actually did go with another organization to be our superintendent's coach because we felt that that was something that was very important to the team um the other thing was is our attendant our assistant was actually consumed with the superintendent search and that was something we were concerned about my concern for georgina this time betty was heavily heavily heavily involved so i was really excited to hear that there's a support team behind her because i think that's to our advantage because the reality is is why this is going on from february to the end of may there's a district that's got to be run and the idea that that all of a sudden is being overshadowed by a superintendent search i don't think we can afford that especially in light of what's going on
194these days in the world of education so that is a concern of mine so those are a few of mine so i will move the mic on thank you anybody else want to share any information about how they feel about these two companies you know i i am so new to this process and i'm so out of my comfort zone um there were a couple of things i appreciated mcpherson's um [Music] transparency about uh background checks how it's done they were they were very clear i also um and this might be a bias nicole knows our district she knows our district very well um i i think i think in this day and age it's so important to have um strong deep deep dive background checks i'm not sure um [Music] i i thought that
195you know leadership was okay on that but i left with i i left with a question um so let's see i i i think that's all i have i think i think i need to listen more [Music] um you hear what what with all the um veteran groups have to say thanks yeah i thought both uh groups did a really good job i didn't really find one thing or another about either one so i'm pretty open either way what i liked about leadership was that they have been superintendents directly and i think that could be a really big plus in my eyes as far as the process um there may be things that we didn't get the right answer i think regarding the background checks and not being able to see it but then again
196after hearing the way it was explained by leadership and that it is private information and it could i mean none of us are going to go out and make phone calls to their bosses that people that are applying to say watch out be careful you know we we wouldn't do that but i think in every effort to make the the person applying for the job feel comfortable it would be knowing that that information was confidential and we would get the tidbits that that we would need to make those good choices going down the line again this is a new process for four of us it's it's a little bit daunting but i i know um i i think we will be able to get the information that we need um from one of the companies
197that we choose um either of them would have offered the same amount of information i believe um i like the all-inclusiveness of leadership um i felt i don't know i they were they both both the companies spoke well um but i think i mean i'm leaning towards leadership but that's just my personal thought and i don't know how how you all feeling this just and i don't have the answer to this either but you know definitely um both firms did offer you know great information i honestly think that both firms would actually be able to do the work absolutely i guess the only thing for me when i think about decision making and processing you know inclusion it's like i i mean it's great that everybody in leadership has been superintendents but i also just
198want to make sure i guess in california but i also want to still just make sure that the lens you know in terms of that pool that we're pulling from is not just you know and so me i've been a member of the association of california school administrators so i know that you know when we were all in axa we all communicated together and there was just that circle of folks who communicated and so yeah but you still had all these dynamic people who may not have been in that loop or may not have been a part of the organization and so unfortunately they were excluded and so i just want to make sure that if we have a group of folks who were leading this work from this lens of you know we've all
199done this i want to make sure that it's still a broad you know it's still a broad-based search so that so that we're not missing out on you know on candidates who should be a part of the process who may not because they don't know this person or that person right because i've seen it happen in education i think what they both explained really well was that who they look for and where they go is going to be dependent on our direction so i think we're going to be if unless i misunderstood them we're going to be the driving force about where and who they go so i i think i appreciated that because because i do think education is changing so fast and that is everybody's role and so my so i think that
200a broad based search would be important um [Music] and one that really recognizes that the changing face of education and maybe can think outside the box and maybe comes up with new ideas and doesn't say you know kind of stuck in in one mold i don't know and you have to remember leadership they both they're both about all the groups that they're involved with they are going to be able to pull from all of these different avenues that these different tendrils you know go out so i feel confident either one would be able to provide to us a search that is broad in relation to so many areas that we are going to give them the guidelines on that's right and so diane did have that concern about how much our um our board assistant
201yeah my how much it might add to her um her workload so i think that's something to consider as well okay any other comments or do you think we're ready to move forward and make a vote okay so i'm not even sure how to do this um i think we just say all those in favor of blah blah blah raise your hand so we'll jump or or we'll just go down the line and i'll say who i want you say who you want or i think i think someone can make a motion for it try our preferred choice and then we can vote from there okay got it if you want to make a money sure i'll make them okay so is that okay yes yes so i'd like to make a motion that we
202adopt leaders leadership associates as our search team for the 2022 superintendent search for venetia may 21 20 21 and 22 22 23 is it's 22 right right you're right you're right it's twenty two twenty okay wait a minute are we going back in time sorry yeah okay and do we have a second there's no second on leadership okay um then let's i guess do we vote then how do we do that i think the motion dies and then you break another motion well i would i would have could i have second yeah you could tuck in i can second it yes yes i would be good with leadership sorry this is all yes please president yes justine moss no trustee for richie yes interesting um masali sorry no trustee groves no okay all right well
203then we are going to award the contract we need to do another motion and somebody put up can we have a motion on the table for um regarding mcpherson and jacobson please i will we approve uh mcpherson jacobson for our superintendent's search thank you do i have a second i'll second no and trustee moss yes trustee ferrucci now justin miceli yes and trustee groves yes all right thank you so um at this time i want to thank our presenters that are here um i want to thank you both for being here to share all the information you both would have been equally wonderful to have on board and helping us through this process so i think at this point i have let's see i have to have um a motion to approve well we just
204did that right we just didn't know so at this time i'm gonna um let mcpherson and jacobson know that we are going to be happy to work to work with you folks and working and getting the best of the best of the best superintendent for our district and we know there's going to be a lot of work involved we know we're going to have to set up a lot of meetings and we want to thank you for for being that those people for us so i thank you and at the same time i want to thank leadership associates for being here um that is this awkward this is just really awkward i'm so sorry um but yeah so so congratulations and then also thank you so much we'll be looking at each other that's good
205that's good and that's good all right thank you i i i'm going to be the lead on with with the board and then we'll work on different people doing different things okay sounds good thank you thank you so much thank you have a good evening okay um moving on to uh item 13.1 is consideration and approval of the site and district safety plans mr thompson is here to share information with us thank you good evening everybody my name is sean thompson and i'm honored to be here in my capacity as safety coordinator at venetian unified i have a very focused uh and fast presentation for you um we're gonna outline two things we're gonna go through the four uh updates and and changes we have and the plans that you've reviewed and then i'll do
206a quick quick and kind of brief overview of the safety work we've been doing since i last spoke to you in february of 2021 okay i like to always include this slide it's representative both graphically of our unified plans in our district it also kind of reminds us that we take advantage of edcode's requirement and encouragement to unify our emergency protocols as well that allows our site councils and our safe school committees to be able to do so and the primary reason we've been doing that for many years is that as we have kids come up through our elementary schools uh to our middle schools and then to one of our one of either of our high schools um they're continually using the same terminology and you know at learning age-appropriate responses um which makes
207it safer for everybody students and staff we have four primary updates and changes to our plans this year the first is that the what used to be called the crisis response section is now called the emergency response section we did that in order to align with industry standard terminology and that when you say crisis response or crisis support you're generally responding or talking about now you know emotional or or traumatic kind of incident support so shifting that name over to emergency response plan gave way for our second edition which is the crisis response to emotionally traumatic incident section um i want to acknowledge the work from the division of student services both ms krona and mr gomez contributed quite a bit to this section uh it's it's extremely um supportive of not only administrators and
208being able to put together a crisis support team for either an isolated incident or something that might be more widespread but it also gives tools to our psychologists and our mental health professionals uh when doing any type of crisis support and is also one of the supports of our threat assessment uh system that we're continually building um the third update is the uh updates to the incident command system which is aligned with our state sems plan we traditionally or previous to now we had individual site team teams which were made up primarily of site personnel but knowing that we're a unified district in a smaller district and having been to some trainings and taking more advice from emergency personnel have realized that it makes sense for some of our roles to be standardized with district
209personnel and some of them to be uh cypress now which is allows kind of better coverage and response so that if there's either a site-based incident or you know something like an earthquake that would affect all sites that were able to kind of have better coverage and a little bit better communication and then finally the site safety assessment there used to be a section called the safety audit that's been removed and turned into the assessment we've done that for two reasons one based on government code 6254. their terminology is any information prepared that can assess school site vulnerabilities to terrorists or other criminal acts is something we don't want in public records so that allows us to um so as we were getting better at this and as site councils and site principles we're actually
210doing a really amazing job of kind of identifying these vulnerabilities um that allows us we want to have that in a plan that we're addressing but we obviously don't want that in a public document and uh pulling that out also kind of responds to some of the constructive criticism we got from some site councils and wanting to make sure we have a little bit better observation and keeping track of that and having it make it make it a living document so that's something that'll allow me to work with the safety team as well as each site principle to make sure we're doing that that work okay um and then as far as our work update i always like to start talking about our excellent relationship with the phoenician police venetia fire um in the city
211of venetia um kovid obviously threw a monkey wrench into us being able to meet but luckily in the fall um all of all all four entities were able to send representatives again to our meetings we've had two meetings to this point they've been focused primarily on safe routes to school interdepartmental communication improvements that we've needed to make as well as working towards threat assessment we've um uh been able to uh like i said mentioned earlier the crisis response to emotionally traumatic incident section uh is part of that third assessment being that we don't want to just uh be forensic and working with these situations we want to try to identify any students or situations that might need support ahead of time and prevent a threat from happening we continue work with scoe and bpd to
212get that in place our infrastructural changes through director egan all the bond work that we're doing obviously brings a lot of safety change with that um and then director romero as well working um you know in capacity with site principles and myself to make sure we're addressing what's on those assessments as quickly as we can and then finally um we are a member of the we tip 2.0 community now all of our web pages have uh you know a link that's able to be clicked for anyone to do an anonymous tip that can be an individual concern about a student maybe having suicidal ideation for example or it could be somebody saw something happen on a campus and they want to make us aware so um it's uh really great that we have that uh
213there will continue to kind of develop that capacity that we have and so um that's what i have for you tonight if you have any questions i'd be happy to answer them um i have the weed tip it says coming soon it's like when so we we it's it's part of uh nbsia um so it's it's that you want to pay for that service it's part of the insurance group that we're with um so the the links are already on the web page uh to be able to be used by anybody that needs to use those um as far as signage posters we're working on getting those involved okay so it's up and running it just doesn't have the advertising it's not fully launched yet okay and we can find that just for our people
214at home as well they we can find that on the website yes on our district website yeah there's a there's a small graphic that's available on sites and the usd site okay thank you for the clarification anybody else have anything no but i would like to make a comment if you don't mind i wanted to thank sean for the i don't know the how the plans have evolved it's it's really refreshing to see the consistency from site to site and also the clarity and the documents as well when we first came on board and we're looking at them everybody was different and kind of doing their thing but um it's really nice to know that the district is now all aligned and that we are now reaching out and working with our community as well
215our city organization so that we have the support that way so um i know you've put a lot of hours and time into that with you to the sites and i just want to let you and all of the sites know i really appreciate the involvement and the change thank you joshua fuji i appreciate that thank you it's true we've seen a big growth with it so i really appreciate it so at this time um can i get a motion on the floor from somebody to approve so i'm sorry i'm tired consideration and approval of the site district safety plans i move that we approve the site and district safety plans as presented i'll second that thank you can we get a roll call vote please yes president yes trustee yes trustee yes yes i'm
216trusting yes thank you trustees i appreciate your time thank you so much thank you okay item 13.2 consideration and approval of busd after hours expanded learning opportunity program the e-l-o-p um mrs rice and mrs regis are joining us to share some information about this program all right good evening almost good night uh for cabinet finish community i do want to give a quick shout out uh to uh greta and brianna uh brianna excuse me they're here from miss wheat's leadership class and they are oh my god strong so tonight uh miss regis and i are going to share with you um what the elap or expanded learning opportunity program is we're going to talk about the funding stakeholder engagement we're going to share with you the structure and then also put forth a recommendation for
217approval so the expanded uh learning opportunity program is a grant a busc was awarded 377 with an intention for ongoing funding but we do not yet know if if or what that will be look like this funding is being used to run an after and or before school program and also offer this program to our students during non-school days for up to 30 days another requirement of the grant is that the grant focuses on social emotional learning also academic and physical support for our students that it's engaging and hands-on another requirement is that it includes community partnerships which we already have in place we're partnering with brickspace code b academy flying monkeys theater as well as art spinicia working right alongside of cdu and this program is not meant to replace what goes on in
218the classroom but to enhance what's going on in the classroom we are to provide a nine-hour day for students so that's the before and after school support and that's a really important part of offering different opportunities to enrich and enhance what the kids are learning there also another requirement is that we have a one to ten ratio for our tk through kindergarten students and then a one to twenty ratio so one adult to 20 students for our first through sixth graders this year busd is going to offer this program to our tk through fifth grade students and hopefully we will be able to grow that with additional funds next year another stipulation of this grant was that we must enroll 50 of our unduplicated students that's our homeless foster youth our multi-language learners our el
219learners as well as our socioeconomically disadvantaged students busd enrolled 100 of our students that qualify for this we invited them by mailing out invitations as well as following up doing some phone call outreaches to get student participation we invited a little over 500 students and we already have registered over 330 students stakeholder engagement so we had the busd after hours program last year if you remember while we were on virtual learning and we surveyed our families and over 88 percent of our families and students said that they were interested in having extended learning opportunities so last year virtually we offered more than 50 interest-based classes that were provided by our staff and also community partners it was very well received and we had really positive feedback from both the parents and students as well as
220the facilitators that participated now i'm going to turn it over to june regis to bring you into the nuts and bolts of the program um good night everybody [Laughter] and thank you for having us tonight um superintendent young and our board um this program is going to be offered at each of our elementary schools this year we chose the idea with the state is that you get started and so we will hopefully be able to go to the middle school the next year with more funding it's going to begin at 2 30 to 5 30. three hours that makes up the nine hour requirement that the state is asking and on fridays from 12 to five we will have the tkks they get out at um one and so that will make up their nine
221hour day um we will also based on state requirement have 30 additional days so we'll go through spring break and the month of june um it's going to be housed on the cdu and this part is important because most of our neighboring districts do not have a child development program that's like ours they have asus and 21st century and actually this elap is an extension of asus and 21st century benitia never um got the funding we applied twice and we learned that usually for aces and 21st century you have to have eighty percent or maybe a hundred percent free and reduced lunches we never made the threshold for fifty percent so we were never considered for the grant so we have our unique um cdu as we have popularly called the appearance pay and we
222have a subsidized program at robert semple so it made sense to have this program housing cdu because we didn't want to compete against our own self um who's illegible of course everybody was enrolled um [Music] assistant superintendent dr beatson enrolled every single student that qualified and so all our tkks that are eligible unduplicated students are enrolled we sent out um true snail mail we did phone calls we had everybody um the schools um called parents and the families were given an application to register so hence the reason we have 300 of the 500 qualified people registered what will happen daily the big piece that the state wanted is to have what they call now the new buzzword is high dose tutoring and so the district has chosen based on nw ea to use imagine learning
223and to focus on the math part of it because that was the most growth we saw since we did our summer program we have snack and physical play and our interest based community partners brickspace flying monkey theater drama code b i'm doing coding and benicia arts will do our interest based programs for this year so this is a sample of what will happen our community based programs will go to each elementary school one day of the week so and on monday at one site art will be there on tuesday that site will have coding wednesday that site will have drama and thursday that site will have legos on friday it will there will be no community partners but the staff will do a full day of um of fun and just having a good time
224free relaxing friday the logistics of it is that we have sent out emergency and medical forms to all 300 and something families that have registered because we and cdu need to know who can pick this child up especially if the child is being picked up before 5 30. at 5 30 all the students that are in the invited students will go to the front with staff just like a normal school day through the drive throughs at the different elementary schools and they'll all be picked up then we are doing all the compliance with the district's covet safety guidances we will be serving um healthy snacks through our um school program with director tanya at um food services on february the 2nd 22nd of 22 very special day or twos we will be having a family
225orientation a zoom orientation for all the invited families explaining everything about the program um dr beatson sent them a letter so they're fully aware but we wanted to have a face-to-face with them where we could answer their questions and also introduce them to the community partners that will be with their students also the community partners will bring their own staff with them that has been vetted and that will be so the board action before you do you have any questions yes ma'am so can you go back to the day-to-day activities because i'm assuming the brick space is like we did for summer school and we were observing that so on friday can you give me a little bit more information on that rather than just the whole fun day okay so on fridays we the
226students get out at noon normally cdu would have a entire week's worth of stuff that students do we don't have to do it monday to thursday but we do it on fridays okay so fridays we don't have community partners but we will run the program the way we do whether they do a cooking project whether you know they do physical activities they have an opportunity to do more of the high-dose tutoring because all of our teachers all of our lead teachers were trained by lisa goldson in ed services on imagine learning so we have that opportunity and just to have outside play to do whatever art whatever they choose for that day from 12 until they get picked up yeah just ask some questions yeah any questions guys no okay thank you both for presenting
227um this looks like it will be a great asset to our kids um at this time i would like to see if we have a motion on the table to for the consideration and approval of the busd after hours expanded learning opportunity program do i have a motion [Applause] anybody i'll move to approve the uh after hours program as presented oh i'll second that thank you can we get a roll call please mrs martinez yes president yes that's the um clerk moss sorry i'm tired yes trustee ferrucci yes trustee masali and trustee grabs yes thank you all right thank you and we're going to go on to item 13.3 means dr gill you are up we're going to be talking about the consideration and approval of resolution number 21-22-20 the release of temporary certificated employees
228thank you mr president trustees and dr young and community members so this is an annual item we bring forward for any employees who are hired as temp because certain teachers being on leave or any employees who are being hired as temps by using one-time funding um so that's so that's just a routine that we release them then depending on which positions are going to be open for next year which means if there are other employees existing teachers or existing employees who need to take leave we need to backfill those positions so or if there are positions that we need decide to fill um for the one-time funding so some will get failed some wouldn't um so that's an annual process that we do can i ask a question what does that mean for the i
229i know this is standard i do i'm wondering what that means for the classroom next year there's there are quite a few positions here each position is different what i'm trying to say is some positions uh a some of these employees are filling physicians behind a stress reduced work teacher who is uh only for certain percentage first years work low teacher so let's say one teacher says i am deciding to come full time next year that we don't need that position that position anymore that time position uh another position could be um uh they're i want to name them because then i'm going to be saying people's names i don't want to do that yeah but but so so there are quite a few positions where we have full-time employees but for whatever reason because
230of any kind of specific leave we have to backfill those positions so there's quite a few of those there's a handful that we hired this this year only that were covered funding positions temps so then that would be based on the decision from the board based on lcap and all those monies one-time funding which positions are being continued uh if whichever decision is made then those will be filled based on those so if a position is not being continued we will inform the employees this position is not being complete continued however if you are a teacher lord says speak you you know you have a multiple i'm just hypothetically sharing you have a multiple subject credential we have all these other positions open you can apply people go through the interview process and uh and
231that's that when people took temporary positions they knew they then they signed the contract then they apply for the position even when they apply they know it's the template thank you good question really good question um so at this time do we have a motion on the floor to consider and approve the resolution number 21 22-20 i'll move to approve resolution number 21-22-20 release of temporary certificated employees i will second that thank you roll call please mrs martinez president seda yes josie moss yeah trustee ferrucci yes christie masali yes trustee yes thank you moving on to item 13.4 um dr gill again consideration and declaration for california basic education skill test skills test the sea best waiver for a 30 for the for 30 days substitutes thank you so this is the request we are
232bringing forward uh uh we have noticed the we had a quite a bit short shortage of subs teacher subs in the fall recently we have been actually doing fairly well which is really good um but we have some candidates and also in general you know if somebody has a bachelor's degree somebody has a master's degree for whatever reason they are unable to pass sea best right so uh if they are able to do the job and uh we would like to be able to hire people who qualify for every single thing else and they can get a 30 day permit as long as we have an authorization from the board that if they don't have a c best and that will only be effective until june 3rd and if we have a need again next
233school year we will bring this request to you again if this is approved okay thank you um is there a motion on the table please or questions okay thank you it's always good to ask a question i'm glad you guys are keeping up on me you know um anyway uh can i get a motion i move that we approve the declaration for the seabest waiver for 30-day substitutes can i have a second a second thank you roll call please mrs martinez president sata yes christy moss yes trustee peru yes masali yes and trusting groups yes don't get too excited but item 13.5 is our last item for this evening and it's only 10 59. let's see how fast consideration and approval of new job description for instructional assistant dr gill thank you so this is
234the kind of actually it is exciting that we are you know going to be implementing utk we're going to have opportunities to provide education to more of our tk students the tk utk also universal tk also requires that along with the teacher in tk classrooms we also have an instructional assistant which we did wasn't the requirement until now so that means along with make hiring additional teachers for tk we also have to make sure we hire instructional assistants for all the tk classes new ones and existing ones so the first step in the process is the get a job approval before we start advertising the positions and so on so we will be adding these positions for the each of the tk classes are any questions for dr gill if i remember correctly from what
235tim had said before too this is a requirement to have this is the new requirement with the universal tk that's correct okay it's not it's not something where you we have to do it the yeah the the because the ratio has to be twelve to one right okay thank you so so that means that the instructional aid can't be pulled out to do something else is that correct it's her instructional age job will be to support the students within the classroom right but oftentimes um aides are pulled out of the classroom that they're in to go cover something else go do something else so according to the state um you have to have two adults one teacher and one eight in the room that's great well i'm just clarifying that the tk aid won't be
236pulled out to help in another classroom technically no yes correct okay thank you any other questions no okay so can i get or is there somebody that wants to make a motion about 13.5 i'll move to approve the instructional aid assistant job description as presented thank you do i have a second wait a second thank you roll call vote please mrs martinez president yes christie moss yes steve yes justine miceli yes trustee grubs yes yay thank you thank you so at this time i'd like to adjourn our meeting it is 1102 and i want to remind everybody that our next meeting is on march 3rd and look forward to seeing you then if you've hung out at home bravo to you so thank you so much everybody have a good night