001i would like to provide an overview of tonight's meeting after a few procedural items the board will hear 30 minutes of public comment at the end of the meeting there will be another and final opportunity for additional public comments so if you do not get to speak at the beginning of the meeting we encourage you to stay and speak at the end to request to participate in public comment click on the participants button at the bottom of your screen and select the raise your hand button when called upon you will be unmuted to comment by phone you will be prompted to raise your hand by pressing star nine when called upon once again you will be unmuted the board president will call our students first so if you are a student who wishes to speak
002tonight please add student at the end of your name if there are a lot of people who want to make public comment not everyone who raises their hand will get to speak once again you are encouraged to stay until the end of the meeting to do so president alpha will determine whether to set tonight's speaking time at two at one two or three minutes for speaker and on an individual basis uh he also has the discretion to allow for extra time for those who need translation or have other speech needs when your time has elapsed you will hear or you will see vice president brown hold up a sign letting you know you have 15 seconds left if you are still speaking please finish your sentence but try not to speak beyond your time thank
003you proportional preliminaries granted raise your hand um thank you so much and um uh welcome to the april 14th meeting of the berkeley school board um uh the meeting was called to order at seven o'clock p.m um miss terrace can you please call the roll director laura babbitt here student director miles miller here director julie sinai here vice president brown president president tyler president thank you ms jarris um as ms chair has mentioned if you would like to be a public comment now is the time to raise your hand once we start public comment um if you raise your hand you'll be able to speak but at the the public comment at the end of the meeting so if you would like to speak in public comment please raise your hand now um all right
004we're going to approve the meeting agenda we need to make one change um an item [Music] in the on the consent calendar item 11.10 it's the approval of contracts and purchase orders item two in that item is a contract with lifelong medical that we have pulled out as action item 13.2 but we accidentally left it in item 11.10 so um we're gonna remove um item two from that list in item 11.10 and vote on it separately um because director sinai has to recuse herself from that um from that item so are there any other besides that one changes are there any other requested changes to the agenda um all right can i have a motion to approve the agenda of that change so moved my director sinai is their second okay second by vice president
005brown ms charles can you call the world please direct your best event yes director babbitt yes director miller yes director signer yes vice president brown yes president yes all right we have our agenda vice president brown i'll turn it over to you to um report out on closed session please thank you president alper for item 3.1.1 the board heard an update and gave direction for item 3.1.2 the board heard an update for item 3.1.3 the board heard an update and for item 3.2.4 the board heard an update this ends the reading of closed session notes thank you vice president brown um okay now is time for public comment i'm gonna give everybody a second or two to raise their hand um if they'd like to give public comment okay um if anybody raises their hand
006at this point they'll they will be able to speak but in the public comment after the meeting so there we have um uh that we have a few a little bit smaller crowd tonight um so vice versa brown will be able to give people two minutes to speak um the last speaker will be alex day i know in the audience you can't see the list of participants but we can and um alex day you'll be the last speaker anyone who signs up after alex day can speak at the end of the meeting um the first speaker um oh and and so vice president brown will hold up a sign with 15 seconds left and then the end time and so that everyone will have two minutes uh first speaker is um matthew tablom followed by
007jonas lamattari brownell um i would like to speak about on three topics tonight and thank you for taking my uh comment here the first one is full opening in the fall mr alper mr stevens you've used the words commitment and signaling in order to uh indicate your uh the boards and the districts intend for reopening um in the fall those words are not reassuring at all uh your performance in this past year have not given the public any reason to trust that you're actually able to deliver on these signals or commitments you have to deliver some more stronger clear uh proof that you're actually able to deliver for example orientation in person language tasting testing in person graduations in person which brings me to item number two which is graduation i asked this board to
008direct the schools from elementary through middle to high school to perform in person graduations for all graduates at all levels if the warriors and the giants can bring thousands of people persons to their stadiums for in-person sporting events so should be able to do so berkeley schools item number three in-person board meetings it's time for you when berkeley is in orange tier and everybody's vaccinated to come back to the boardroom and bring back in person at the allowed capacities audience and person from the public for in-person board meetings lead by example you're signaling you're committed show it come to the boardroom perform these meetings look at this community in the face you know you could allow me to actually also be on video in this meeting but you chose not to throughout this year a
009time to face the community and do this in person thank you very much thank you miss jonas mattery brownell good evening busd school board directors and superintendent stevens and community uh i serve psychiatric hospitalized adolescent students as busd's herrick hospital teacher and i also work in a few other ways in usd too and i have some prepared comments that are about a minute but so i actually first just want to say you know um kind of as a little analogy in my work at herrick hospital um every day there's a safety check for every student things change you know we um we desperate you know we always do not want a student have to have to go from the php to inpatient but that happens why does that happen to protect their life and we
010have to respond to what's going on on the ground right now in our county uh and in our state we have about the same rate county-wide and statewide and we're averaging according to the la times coveted tracker the unadjusted rate i acknowledge this is the unadjusted rate is about seven for both the county and the state new cases per 100 000 population per day that used to be called widespread risk level anything a little over seven widespread risk we've plateaued at a high level we can surge again in california like many other places are in the u.s we can't predict what what it's going to look like in the fall so um we have to prepare for multiple scenarios so now my prepared comments first please compensate classified staff with hazard pay for this year
011as other districts have done they have been working since the fall of 2020 in buildings with adults and children present on campuses with known infections and before any vaccinations were available even now they deserve this and secondly please plan well for the undesired but indeed possible scenario of yet another rise uh you know in coming weeks like oster home dr osterholm and many other people are warning my time's up so just don't wait until cases have surged for a week or two please thank you right away if we need to thank you thank you sarah bowles followed by yvette filetka bowles uh yeah uh just her case positivity rate is uh a quarter of a percent so you know let's actually use real data uh getting to my comments though um so i did a
012public records request to busd along with 65 other families we wanted to know why our middle and high school kids couldn't go to school five full days like our elementary kids we asked for emails texts maps school site plans whatever you worked on to decide how to reopen middle and high school since january of this year what do we find you have no classroom maps or site plans like you did for elementary they don't exist you can't produce any records you really need to understand how various school board directors can say it's too complicated to even figure out when the district appears to have not done any of the work to assess upper grades against changing cdph guidance so given that your preliminary responses we've got nothing you really need to explain to the community
013why why didn't middle and high school kids deserve the same investment in school return preparation as elementary kids why that's the end of my comment thank you miss bowles yvette valarco followed by uh nova plazage miss flarka if you could let me know if i when i have 15 seconds that's great sure you mean be you say it out loud yeah sure okay thank you yvette palarka i teach at martin luther king middle school i'm speaking on behalf of the eon bam caucus first it is completely outrageous that the district is operating full-time with full-time reopening for the elementary school students and also that there's been a reopening of the middle and high school grades when all the studies have shown that at the higher level at the upper grade levels the spread of covid19
014is almost or just as high as it is amongst adults but so therefore the district is playing russian roulette with children's lives as long as the schools are open not only is there still a covet 19 pandemic but there's a new pandemic which is the uk b117 variant california is not in a bubble and neither is berkeley so even if the cases are low right now they will not stay that way if the schools and the entire economy reopen europe is now the epicenter of the coven 19 pandemic and they are now in the process of having to shut down again because their local hospitals are completely overrun and this time they're saying the threat is different because the b117 variant is not only more contagious than last year's virus it's deadlier brazil is not
015that far away nor is latin america nor is arizona or texas the state of michigan is at a record high for coveted hospitalizations of children and one of the biggest drivers of the infections the state officials are saying are outbreaks among youth athletes those associated with k-12 schools and this week the state reported ongoing or new school outbreaks which includes infections linked to classrooms after school activities and sports the cdc just published a study in jama pediatrics 15 seconds in over a thousand cases 75 percent of the patients did not experience covid19 symptoms but two to five weeks later these their children they became sick enough to be hospitalized and 70 of them are put in the icu chosen to keep their kids in distance learning full-time are doing the right thing keep doing that
016and all the parents should make that choice to save your children's life thank you miss felica um nova blase followed by roberto great good evening thank you everyone um i have a different perspective i feel like we are absolutely in an educational crisis and the cdc has determined that it really is safe to send children back to school distance learning is harmful so i just want to respond to that last speaker but i also want to say thank you very much for opening up elementary school for five days a week that has made such a difference for so many students and so many families i'm on the call tonight because i want the same for our middle and high school students we can do it berkeley can do it marin across the bay they have
017done it we can we can do it here in berkeley too and it has been said before our kids really can't wait um i'm very concerned as was mentioned earlier this evening that the signaling that we've been getting is not towards reopening but towards continued virtual engagement and that is deeply troubling to me and to many families and to students as well so i want to say um and i feel somewhat awkward but superintendent and board you're all sworn public servants and transparency is necessary to earn public trust and that trust has been so eroded and for so many people that is part of what nobody liked about the trump administration and so that trust really needs to be earned back and so what i am asking for tonight is for more hours for our
018middle and high school students this spring for in-person graduation for a commitment to plan and to clearly communicate what will happen in the fall in terms of reopening we want to be so supportive of our entire community and just frankly the way this process has happened i feel has torn our community apart so thank you very much for your consideration thank you thanks so much um berto followed by greg kidd there we go hey thank you uh for taking my comment roberto santiago berkeley unified distance choice advocates uh the community is fairly torn apart and i'd like to say maybe people can stop making these whole blanket statements distance learning is not harmful for our kid for all kids you guys need to talk about your kids i urge the board to keep all options
019on the table based on what is happening in the fall but to continue to improve it continue to iterate um talking about distance learning and what's been going on the last couple weeks you guys are really fumbling the ball on providing even an equivalent service to what we had before in general the schedule is not the same as what was outlined in the letter we sent today my kindergartner had three specials in a row that's fun but we're not doing the book writing and the reading and the math that we were doing three weeks ago um superintendent stevens you keep talking about the 83 number you need to disaggregate more data because so far nothing you've released has shown that it's 83 the number was 76.23 or something so you can either go on the
020radio with that or give us what you have that you think makes it 83 the numbers don't add up uh my student my fourth grader lost math intervention services maybe some of those 19 substitutes who didn't want to come back in person can be employed over distance learning as tutors we don't need to have the exact specialist but let's get something for the kids who need those interventions right now there's no science for fourth grade what's going on there you've had several weeks you had time to plan this but you couldn't plan science classes i got an email from the teacher said hopefully we get science back at some point but this is the learning loss in distance learning it's happening now it wasn't happening for my kids before but it is happening now because
021we're losing what we used to have i've talked to several parents who don't know what's going on with their iep services right now um i'll just throw in in my last 15 seconds distance learning should be an ongoing option for families for whom it works and it could be used to supplement or augment independent study because those kids could use more contact hours and if we could do it virtually that would be great please keep the meetings online for people who can't attend in person so even if you do do them live do them in person or do them online and get these things captioned zoom has it as a service man how are these not captioned that's the most basic language service you can provide for people who are deaf or hard of hearing
022thank you very much thank you um greg kidd followed by ron levy hello this is actually emily castelli i apologize my work identity picked up my my you my zoom only has steli parent of an eighth grader and an 11th grader thank you um for talking to me um i just want to address a a number of items one the first is the inequity between grade levels kids at the elementary level are getting four times the instruction of middle and high school and it shows the second thing is i believe that is an illegal number of instructional hours by law so i'm not sure how that's even happening the public health department cdc everyone says cohorts are no longer required why are we using cohorts now distance learning has clearly been harmful if you read
023any of the front page of the wall street journal new york times every week there's more and more articles showing that if our kids had unions maybe they would be in school bring back as much in person now as possible outside of the existing district plans and particularly i want to advocate for graduation in person um in my case i have an eighth grader but sixth eighth and twelfth grade the usd can follow the public health guidance which uh allows for a lot of people in an outdoor space you know properly socially distance and this is so important for our kids who feel like they have not progressed at all in a year and at least we can show them this small bit of progression i'll yield back my time thank you thank you so
024much um uh oh that was great that was emily okay um ron levy followed by karma smart my name's ron levy i have a daughter at washington elementary who's just thrilled to be back full time seriously it's all she talked about over spring break think about that spring break so thank you for making that possible for her and for all the other children who've been waiting for this week to come now on the other hand my son who's an 8th grader at king participated in our so-called hybrid program before the pandemic my son and got 30 hours per week of in-person instruction not including band and jazz this week he's getting 10 hours via remote classes that is 33 of what used to be acceptable 33 on top of that he went to in-person school
025this week for four hours of craft projects and scavenger hunts nothing in the core curriculum nothing of real educational value we're in the orange tier now our community has demonstrated widespread commitment to public health and safety our movie theaters will be at 50 capacity tomorrow our stores a hundred percent our middle school and high schoolers will still be at 33 percent with no end in sight to be clear i am not questioning the spirit of the teachers principals and school staff they deserve our thanks and applause i am questioning the leadership of this school district which doesn't set proper goals and puts politics hiding behind the complexity of quote-unquote logistics over kids and science school ends on june 4th tonight i publicly challenge the superintendent school board and berkeley federation of teachers to present a
026finalized plan for 100 percent back to in-person school in the fall for all students who want it by the june 2nd board meeting this school year can't end all of you don't get to graduate with a failing grade of 33 percent thank you mr levy karma smart followed by rudy gippalone good evening busd school board and community members i come to you speaking as an african-american parent with a child diagnosed with high-functioning autism that started ninth grade this school year at berkeley high to begin i was looking forward to my son being able to socialize at school which will be crucial to enable his success in his adult life social anxiety problem solving skills and emotional regulation can be best developed and practiced in the context of the school environment amongst his peers to really
027actually benefit him so i hope you all you all are prioritizing that all children are able to practice that within the classroom setting because studies and news reports have shown how much this pandemic has affected children's mental health and much of it has to do with lack of socialization in addition if the preschool and elementary school-aged children can do full days then i don't see why the middle school and high school aged children can't as well lastly as a dance teacher myself i feel it is important to share that i feel and research supports that physically emotionally mentally and culturally and even spiritually dance and music are irreplaceable in the lives of our children music and dance can help heal depression and relieve stress as well dancing and performing arts in a group helps to
028facilitate learning how to work in a group helps to develop dynamic creative thinking and promote self-confidence just to name a few benefits outside of the obvious physical benefits let's make sure we are fair in how we approach all of the extracurricular classes and activities which could easily be taught outside with coordination and proper planning given the outdoor space at berkeley high thank you thank you so much um rudy chip alone followed by hillary clintonic good evening thank you miss smart thank you mr levy thank you once again to the board for welcoming my comment tonight i'd like to hear from each of you individually president alper vice president brown mr we lost you for a second but you're back but you're on mute okay so tonight i would like to hear from from the board
029individually from president alper from vice president brown from director sinai and director vasudejo i'd like to know how you as individuals with voices are able to let stand the inequities our middle and high school students are being subject to by keeping them out of classrooms full time by law what is offered to students in grades k through 5 needs to be offered to students in grades 6 through 12. so could we their parents the people who voted for you hear from you tonight thank you thank you um hillary clintonic followed by our last speaker alex day uh hillary i think you're on mute um we can't hear you when it looks like you're muted why don't we why don't we go to alex day and then we'll come back to miss clinic okay go ahead
030uh mr day you're on mewtwo there you go hi um okay weird i don't know how i'm on video but anyway um good evening everybody my name is alex day i teach ninth grade ethnic studies and social living at berkeley high and i'm here this evening primarily to speak in support of hazard pay and no questions asked approach to qualifying any covet second the usc employee for at least up to 10 days of paid sick leave in response to some um demands i've heard from some of my classified co-workers um but first uh just having come for my first two days of in-person instruction in my c-building classroom i kind of wanted to directly and respectfully respond to people who are calling for more hours at the high school level this spring um the sea
031building that has uh all of ninth grade humanities and a lot of bhs and a lot of ac and french and a lot of special ed on the first floor has no hvac um and without getting too far into the science that really constrains a full roster of 28 to 32 kids from fitting in my room in my room this is literally how much space is between students desks with 28 to 32 kids so um it just talking about the c building alone if we have to split classes in the c building that has a huge ripple effect across the campus and respectfully uh to the ninth grade parent who brought up the outdoor spaces that is a good option we would just have to do a lot of planning um uh that that we
032have not done yet on how to do that hold on one second excuse my child um now uh uh back to my primary uh purpose tonight um so i've been hearing from my classified co-workers um i know but you're succeeding today there you go go ahead go ahead yesterday no problem no problem um uh co-workers about they deserving hazard pay uh and so far from what i've seen this spring and from my experience as a part-time grocery store worker myself it seems that their level of risk is analogous to grocery store workers especially when when the safety officers and custodians are going to be having to work inside with many hundreds of students on campus city of berkeley has said grocery store workers get hazard pay oakland usd has given their classified employees hazard pay
033it seems that that you know no disrespect but it does seem that there is money from the state to do this um and then also the no questions ask approach to qualifying covid employees i just think makes the most sense given it seems to be kind of an onerous uh uh level of proof to have to show i got covid from both my parents scott and thankfully did survive covid but you know they they it took a long contact racing and they didn't have work so i just i just think that's unreasonable to expect much mr um appreciate it okay um miss uh kilmenick i think you're back with us you were on mute before can you hillary can you hear me now yes we can go ahead hi yeah i just wanted to say
034i'm a parent of a fourth grader at ruth acti and a sixth grader and eighth grader at king middle school and i would like to hear what specific plans are happening to bring our kids our middle and high school kids back to the classroom this spring and in the fall we need more than being told that signals have been sent that's not very reassuring and like to know if there's no hvac in the c building at berkeley high what is being done where are the plans we deserve answers thank you thanks so much and thank you thank you to everyone who came for public comment now we will hear from our unions um mrs do we have um miss coleman yeah thank you um um miss chairs where are you um do you do we
035have um any comment from bft tonight president alpha we do not have any okay tonight okay i um i don't see any um i don't see i'll give the union leadership a chance to raise their hand i don't see any okay what about um district committees oh miss okay miss pastica on behalf of the um planning and over the be planning and oversight committee uh ms pastica you have five minutes there you are great can you hear me yeah you're yeah you're a little quiet go ahead okay here we go uh good evening my name is terry pasqua and i'm here on behalf of the planning and oversight committee the pno is an advisory body combined comprised of representatives of every school in the district that makes recommendations to the school board on b sub
036and bara which are two special tax measures passed by berkeley voters that supplement school funding bisup generates an additional 32 million for the district over the baseline property tax the majority of which goes towards supporting smaller class sizes and teaching and bera supports teacher and staff recruitment and retention this is an overview of the piano meeting from last night and the questions and comments we had to staff dr stevens provided a budget overview that included how decreases in student enrollment may significantly infect the general fund by about 8 million dollars if enrollment does not rebound a question was asked about the causes of the overall decrease of about 700 students and 224 unduplicated students to understand if the decrease in enrollment is likely to persist throughout the rest of the b step measure which is
037three years and if so how b sub funding would be affected if at all we then turn to looking at the b sub budgets and the p o has already voted on the teacher template which is a calculation to reduce class sizes and is the second and is the largest single b sub expenditure which is about 15 million of the 32 million in bsap revenue so the rest of b step funding is allocated across 10 different budgets and how those monies are spent are determined by the superintendent the bisup director and program managers who make recommendations for how to spend specified shares of b sub dollars based on what the measure says and on district goals so notably this last year the p o did things uh differently in three ways uh the first thing
038is that the p o revisited budget several times based on this unusual academic year and we saw several drafts of individual budgets over a few months and rather than parsing out the budget approvals over several meetings the pno last night was asked to review the final drafts of all 10 budgets together and take action on them so uh we allocated or voted to allocate approval of more than 13 million dollars and um these approval plans will be coming to the board on april 21st secondly in response to p l questions each budget that we reviewed so all ten of them had summaries that highlighted um new items such as changes in each budget from the prior year specifically laid out other revenue streams that were supporting each of the proposed expenditures uh notably the sustainability
039of spending in these budgets through the end of the measure given that some of the budgets are in deficits are in a planned deficit spending mode uh how diversity equity and inclusion are supported and uh specifically what data metrics are being used to report outcomes and qualitative benefits number three what's different this year is that also in response to p o we heard a presentation about the over-sustainability of the bsa budget for the remaining three years specifically looking at how planned deficit spending is currently happening and again notably it was identified that in the high quality instruction budget which is 66 percent of what b-set funds are spent on uh reduction in discretionary spending of about five percent of the budget or around 300 000 in per year in total may be needed and in
040order to achieve that balance budget by the end of the measure we looked at a couple of options that are affected by cost of living increases enrollment and costs so given the three points above the kind of questions that were asked last night included an appreciation of the inclusion of data metrics in uh budget analysis but there were several questions again asking for clarity as to how the district objectively assesses the impact of spending decisions on students number two uh more information was wanted on how the reorganization of the district's program evaluation department might impact the work that bisep does there was a question on twi math support and sylvia mendez thousand oaks and long fellow about uh how uh at longville schools how that support is allocated among those schools and some parent advocacy
041happening at sylvia mendes and questions about expenditures supporting african-american and latinx students at berkeley high and the intersection with school site funding so we did a lot of work next on our plate is going to be tackling um two budgets that fall under bara the special measure that just passed supporting teacher and staff recruitment and attention and carry over funds from the prior measure so thank you for the opportunity and um the meetings are open to the public thanks so much thanks for your service on that committee ms pasticon for your report um not seeing any other committee representatives it's now time for board member comment um and superintendent comment and then we will move into our agenda for the meeting um is there a board member who'd like to give a comment director sinai
042any would you like to go first i'll give a comment oh treasure but okay so hello everyone welcome back hope you all had a wonderful spring break i definitely enjoyed myself and was glad to be able to return and see so many of our elementary school students back in school on monday the smiles are huge the teachers are happy parents are happy it was just great to be in community again with everyone so thank you to all of the staff and to our labor partners for the work that you put in to to deliver what we have been able to deliver and i am looking forward as always to seeing the presentation uh tonight especially towards middle and high school so that we can see how we can do more for our teenagers and in
043doing more for our teenagers i'm also hosting a conversation tomorrow night with councilmember ben bartlett and the topic is showing up strong for to finish the year and how can we as adults show up for our teenagers and do more um so please come out and help us brainstorm ideas in ways in which we can actually make in-person graduation a reality other social activities arts and increased instructional minutes that's one thing i wanted to say i'm also going to be having board office hours starting in may thank you president alper for pushing us all to do this and getting it on our website so you will find that on may 2nd between 2 and 3 30 i will be having office hours also may 23rd sunday both days between 2 and 3 30. and that's
044all for me thank you thank you director babbitt um who wants to go next go ahead and sign up i can go next um i too want to welcome students and staff back it was exciting to go to the elementary schools uh right before spring break and listen to the kids on the playground and watch the really hard work that all of the staff were doing to create the new um you know layout on the school playgrounds and the order and how they were managing their recess and their lunch and um i just want to say everybody was stepped up and enthusiastic but it also clearly was a new way of working and a lot of logistics um and our facilities folks did a phenomenal job mapping out the playgrounds making sure that things were
045squared off and dots were there where kids could stand that the hallways were well labeled and so i think all of our staff have really like stepped up and made this a great experience i also really want to you know recognize and thanks that the families and the students who are still in distance learning um need to have a high quality educational experience and there are some challenges that we've been getting a lot of emails around around schedule changes and new teachers coming on and i just you know really want to say this is not one program is better or worse than the other everybody is doing their best to meet the needs of their children and so it's up to us as the district to do the best we can for all of our
046students so i know the superintendent and staff are working to look at the tweaks that need to happen on distance learning and continue to try to make sure all of our students are having a robust experience i i do want to say that i am concerned and i hope superintendent stevens will talk a little bit about the middle and the high school around the reduction of the instructional minutes um and the way the schedule is working um i i did hear from one parent that a teacher actually told his or her students that they're only going to get through 60 of the curriculum this year as a board member i don't find that acceptable um and so i would really compel our administrators to touch base with our teachers and if our teachers are having
047problems getting through the curriculum how can they work together either through peer or through support to make sure that we are getting through the curriculum because again our students need to have as full a robust curriculum as is possible i appreciate the comments that people made around having a clear roadmap for opening in the fall and i do want to encourage us as a board to see um you know in working with the superintendent administration to come up with as clear a plan as we can before school ends so that people head into the summer knowing what to expect in the fall and lastly again i want to echo the appreciation of president alper kind of tickling our emails about getting the open hours i know that you know we are receiving many emails and
048anybody who is looking for an opportunity to talk or zoom if they have asked for that i have done my best to try to engage with anybody who has been looking to have a virtual meeting but i am going to be doing open office hours i might change my may 2nd because i just heard director babbitt and i are overlapping on some time so i don't want us to both do it at the same time so you have to choose one or the other but i was going to do it may 2nd from 1 30 to 3 and then june 5th on 1 30 to 3 both at cafe layla social distance steam and mast required um and uh so but i will i will look uh director babbitt at my may time and maybe
049we can juggle so that we're not we're not competing so keep an eye out on the website because my time might change great thank you director sinai um and the office hour any officers that are scheduled will be on the school district website if um which is berkeleyschools.net school board and you can see everybody the schedule and it's a good idea to check before you go to make sure that it hasn't hasn't changed um but thank you for that um director sinai um oh yeah sure director miller all right i just have i want to pick you about off a point on dr stein i was talking about with curriculum time from my understanding specifically that was a decision prior made at the beginning of this year from the term limits and the high school
050schedule being decided i from what i i mean in every one of my classes my teachers told me we weren't going to come close to covering all the content this year anyway so i thought that was a well-known thing from the community um and it's unfortunate that has to happen but that was something pre-decided months ago and that's i think if that's a value we went into this year thinking about we maybe wouldn't have picked this high school schedule necessarily but we're in it now so we ought to keep moving um i will also be at the discussion that um director babbitt is hosting i think it's very important we listen to our students at this time of year um and i will be there i haven't registered yet but i will definitely be there
051um i also want to speak on um a comment i heard about the arts as well that's very important to me um arts education as a person who's done band in every year my time i can since fourth grade in busd and participated in many berkeley house art programs i believe those classes should easily be able to come back as well as happen outdoors i myself have participated in in-person band for the past three weeks at berkeley high school once a week for an hour and a half um we socially distance we've had these special special arrangements made for playing of course playing our wind instruments these aren't string instruments so i feel that can happen any of the other art classes can probably happen as well um and i also want to second um
052the fact that we need to support our distance learning kids much more than we are right now as well they're the ones who specifically requested not for a change in their schedule and not to be disrupted and i feel like with the emails i'm getting that is what's happening and we really need to advocate more on their behalf and i'm sorry if that's happening to you i really am and i want to see what we can do to change that thanks dr miller director vasadev yeah thanks so much to all my board colleagues and i echo uh gratitude to president ty albert ii for pushing us to start our office hours soon um i have been meeting with constituents mostly virtually and so my office hours will probably be one virtual office hour and one
053office hour in person so check the website the next week and i will update that information for everybody i um also echo my concerns for our middle and high school students and like director sinai i did not know that it was common knowledge so thank you director miller for for stating that that we weren't going to get through the whole curriculum for for the high school students at least so that's concerning to me and i'd love to hear more from our superintendent during superintendent comments if possible or at a later time about that i also just wanted to say how excited i was this week to see all the students that were coming back i had the chance to be at sylvia mendez this week and to see the students in person and to tour
054the school and to see all of the mitigation efforts that the staff has worked so hard to put in place and i echo director sinai's just gratitude for the staff and the huge tremendous effort that that took and really also wanted to thank principal valerio for telling me you know how the students were doing both in person and also virtually because our two-way immersion program is being overseen by principal valerio it's got unique needs and so it was really important for me just to kind of hear from her like how's it going in distance learning how is it going in person and to actually be able to see our students and their and our educators um just the logistics of trying to set up breakfast and and just watching that kind of play out i
055am so grateful to our nutrition services and to all of the staff at all of our schools for um having to work out the complexities of the schedule just to do something that you know doesn't seem very complicated like breakfast but it actually is a complicated operation when you go and look at look at that in school and so um thanks for everybody thanks to everybody who came out and gave public comment i do want to keep hearing from our middle and high school families please reach out reach out to me personally at my board email would love to hear your concerns and i'm excited and looking forward to our discussion tonight about our budget and to all the various you know you can i'm sure for those of you that have already seen the
056presentations that aren't going to be presented but um just to continue to engage with the public there's a robust community engagement process that the lis district has laid out and i'm excited to to hear from everybody about our budget priorities thank you thank you director vice president brown thank you president albert good evening everyone um as always thank you so much for taking the time to come out um to our school board meetings and to those of you who spoke during public this evening thank you um for doing that um i just want to um take this second to respond to some of the things that have been said on the diet in regards to curriculum and just remind my board colleagues and all that there uh in response to the pandemic there's been a
057reduction to instructional minutes right so a reduction to instructional minutes in turn has a huge impact on pacing um uh of curriculum so whereas i can't speak to the 60 that was uh brought up this evening just want to remind us all of um the impacts of the the reduction to instructional minutes and how that impacts our curriculum just from the perspective of a teacher additionally thank you president alber for encouraging all of us to do office hours please check the website for my office hours as well and i will be prioritizing virtual office hours and then we'll give an update on in-person office hours thank you great thank you so much vice president brown um dr stevens um thank you very much president elper um like my governance team colleagues i also want to
058offer thanks to um really the community and our community of educators all of our staff for what has been a really remarkable period of time i've been able to spend most mornings out on the sidewalk of a variety of our schools i've visited nearly all of our elementary schools now since we've reopened and it's just been a really remarkable scene i've talked with dozens of families now sometimes on their very first day of returning school and the overall sense of sort of patience with these new logistical procedures that we're putting in place gratitude to be seeing one another gratitude towards our teachers and then generally a sense of community and gladness that we are through this very long period of time where we've been largely suffering separate from one another inside the hallways i've had
059the opportunity to walk through classrooms visit teachers and pop my head into classes as they're taking place those scenes are equally remarkable i know that our parents right now don't have the benefit of stepping into our classrooms to see what they look like but those two are scenes of joy there's a lot of great kid energy in our buildings right now it's fun to be on see recess to see class taking place and then overall to hear from teacher after teacher after teacher about how glad they are to be returning finally to the work that they love so much i've just had such a renewed sense both of optimism and the real passion that drives our educators and this community so my gratitude to everybody my central office colleagues principals staff both classified and certificated
060who have worked so hard to get to this point several board members have referenced that we are sort of continuing to keep our eye on safety and school reopening while we also look ahead to the future this evening we'll be sharing a budget update um providing a good amount of detail about the particular sort of ingredients that will go into this budget planning process and what our financial forecast looks like and then we also have a presentation this evening talking about the development of our local control accountability plan or what we call the lcap this is the equivalent of our strategic plan and we are at the point of writing a new three-year lcap so this evening we'll talk about enhancements to the typical annual community engagement process that leads to revisions in the lcap
061and this will include special lcap workshops for families as well as a joint jointly composed ad hoc committee to solicit feedback so we do hope that the community will both stay engaged with us as we talk more about our current reopening about the fall and then plan sort of for the long term as they're eventually incorporated into the elk cap so i'm looking forward to those presentations and the discussions to follow thanks very much thank you dr stevens um now we will move to our consent calendars their motion to approve the consent calendar unmoved motion by vice president brown is our second a second second by director basta dev ms chairs can you call the roll please director rabbit c do you wreck your back of this student director miller e uh director sinai vice
062president brown c and president alpha c all right director babbitt you have inspired us all um okay the um consent counter has been approved so we will now move to our first discussion item which is the phased plan for school reopening i'll turn it back over to you dr stevens thank you very much president elper i'm going to take just a moment to share my screen uh so i'm glad to be able to uh offer an update to the community and to the board this evening about uh what it's looked like as we um uh reopen schools both at the elementary middle and high school um i won't do um a lot of sort of recap of details about schedules and safety practices but rather try to give you a glimpse sort of into the
063scenes that have been taking place both in the week prior to spring break and then just in the first three days of this of this week i'm joined this evening by director of state federal and special projects michelle sinclair she'll present just a few of the slides about distance learning specifically and then she's also here to answer questions ms sinclair typically holds a pretty broad portfolio of responsibilities being the former principal of craigmont here in berkeley she was very gracious in accepting an offer to sort of step forward and help coordinate distance learning families experience as we move through these final two months of the school year so she is sort of intimately familiar with all of the details of the distance learning program elements of that program that are still in construction and we'll
064be able to respond to boards questions as as they come up so this evening we'll talk about each of our levels elementary on campus and distance learning as well as middle school high school and then go back to uh recap the board's direction for the fall of added to this list i'm also going to speak in a bit of detail about current state requirements as they relate to in-person graduation events and talk to you about how we'll approach in-person graduation for for june these are the dates that we are working towards we're now well through a portion of this we began just before spring break right after spring break april 12th introduced a large number of additional grades to our reopening plan this included upper elementary middle school and ninth grade term seven support at
065berkeley high school btech and bis next week we bring an even larger number of high school students back onto campus and then find the sort of final element of our reopening is that all high school grades will return for pm classes at berkeley high school and at btech so let's have a look at our early childhood education centers and our elementary schools as they've come back to campus so i've got lots and lots of pictures to show with you these are all recently minted and a sort of i think a great reflection of what it's looked and felt like as we as we've reopened campuses this is a picture from our early childhood education schools and additional pictures here you can see what it's looking like inside of our ece campus i believe this is
066king that we're looking at here a happy face we jump over to oxford and have some sort of images from our tk through two reopening that took place prior to spring break and i'll make special note of all of the additional preparations that had to take place as oxford as they're getting used to a whole new set of logistics as well as a brand new campus this is the first time that the west campus facility now oxford elementary has been used in its current incarnation and it's been a long time since we've had young people on that campus more images you get a sense of the enthusiasm taking place among our school communities here are some images from malcolm x and it was really a delight for me to be at malcolm x just this
067just on monday of this week to be able to speak with families as they're returning and then here a picture of some of our bears staff as they've been returning to offer after school programming this particular picture is of aaron jorgensen who coordinates our bears and learns program as well as several staff members from rosa parks and so it's been really great to be able to welcome our school our students back we have some statistics that we can offer you sort of as as of right now this is just looking at our tk through grade 2. total enrollment on campus this is as of this week is now 3108. we have 759 students who continue to be enrolled in the distance learning option here in our elementary grades and then of the students we were
068expecting to return back during this week of march 29 through april 2nd we had an 89 attendance rate in that first week so that means that 89 of the families who signaled that they would be back on that first week actually came and attended class the week before spring break we owe a very large sort of word of thanks to all of our ptas on all of the campuses that i visited and across all of our district we've seen this a remarkable display of affection and enthusiasm from so many of our pta volunteers our campuses are decorated with signs like the ones that you're seeing here there were goodies set out for our educators as they were returning and then you could just see lots and lots of chalk images plenty of volunteers on hand
069to help with things like things like attestation in general just a very high level of goodwill on all of our campuses we'll jump over to talk a little bit about distance learning and again michelle sinclair is here to answer questions for these particular slides i will um turn it over to ms sinclair uh if you're there and i'll let you sort of walk through some of these highlights sure i am here hi um well i'll say that we have 751 students and 35 teachers um were we opened up with we had we had some um technology issues just because of the transferring over so we had to basically create a new school we've never done this before clearly and so we arranged that by by opening up a new school at one site inside oxford
070so that caused a little bit of confusion but we were able luckily we have a lot of district support and we were able to offer our digi tech team support for families we had an open session for that um each of the beginning of the the year of the distance learning for k tk through two and then for three through five um teachers in the beginning of each of their weeks started doing one-on-one meetings with families and reaching out by phone or by text or whatever they could do to to try to connect with their new families some of our teachers are returning and they have their existing classes already there or many of their existing students already there so that was that was nice for them but particularly for the teachers who were assigned
071as who were previously maybe tsas or getting to know new students from other sites we were able to keep teachers with their current site and even if they were say a tsa from their site we kept them with the students from their site and then we added only one other school in most instances now of course as we're moving around and that's one of the nice things is we've been pretty been able to be pretty fluid with this so as parents are requesting um we are able to accommodate i i would say all of the requests at this point and um we've been trying to place as much as we can students with their cohorts from their same school so um there's one hour more of zoom instruction with our new schedule and all five
072of our distance learning twi teachers are bilingual there are two combination classes in in twi a tkk and a 3-4 which was a success for us because we didn't know how this would all turn out in the end um enrichment classes are that's been kind of slow moving but they are coming around now because of again it's just the logistics of switching over and our um specialist teachers are now many are doing um dual roles where they're they're teaching both in person and in distance learning so um really my hat goes off to them because they've been really flexible with this but i would say that scheduling there's been a bit of a delay but for the most part we're getting there and i would say that we're very close to full capacity on enrichments
073right and i might just add sort of um one one bit of commentary on all of this and that is just the the sort of um really staggering logistical complexity of creating what amounts to you know berkeley's largest elementary school 751 students with 35 teachers doing it in a fairly short amount of time and working through what has just been a really complex set of issues related to staffing in some cases some involuntary assignments of staff technology issues communication issues scheduling issues this really has been very complicated work ms sinclair all of the distance learning teachers and all of our principals have done a phenomenal job to pull this together under circumstances that have been challenging and very fast and yet there are still some details um to be resolved you heard ms sinclair talk
074a little bit about the enrichment classes and we thought that we would pull one particular class's schedule and enrichment schedule to give a sense of the sort of current way in which enrichments plug into a distance learning class so we're right now looking at an actual class from malcolm x this is their third grade class and we can and miss and claire maybe you and i can tag team our way through this but sort of talk a little bit about the ways that the distance learning schedule works from the teacher and then the ways that ms sinclair and others have been working to build the enrichment schedule and this is as i said before rescheduling all of these by hand across all of our distance learning distance learning classes so the um the sort of
075blocks that are high are colored in salmon color represent time with the distance learning teacher there are now four 45-minute blocks of time built into our schedule this is one more block longer than the previous distance learning schedule due to overwhelmingly positive feedback from our teachers we maintained the a group and b group feature of the distance learning schedule this allows distance learning teachers to work with half of their group at a time which teachers have uniformly said is of value to students and then it also creates space in students day in which we can try to schedule enrichment classes so in this particular instance you can see how music for group a and group b is scheduled into this particular classes schedule you can see art showing up and library those are represented at
076the two o'clock blocks on monday and tuesday and then you can see as well pe enrichment and art enrichment built in missing claire am i missing anything about this or just generally the process of hand scheduling all of this enrichment um no it looks good we also are offering garden there on wednesdays um some classes are some enrichments are 30 some are 45. one more thing i would add is for music i feel like we distance learning got a kind of a better situation with music because um our all our instrument teachers are offering multiple classes so if there has there have been some situations where something might conflict but there's a whole myriad of options to go to say if you play the clarinet you can go to a clarinet class with your teacher
077you've always had you can go with your class that you've always the in-person class that you've been with after school or on wednesday that's a distance learning only where they're very small classes and you can get more um one-on-one type instruction thank you miss and clara so let's um sort of jump ahead and have a look at on campus learning at our middle schools this is all just brand new as of monday of this week just a couple days old at this point and we'll show you a few images from some of our campuses here are members of the long fellow team they were all decked out in brand new t-shirts for the return on campus learning on monday here again you can see what it looked like on the longfellow campus taking a peek
078inside of classrooms you get a sense of the social distancing that's in place what it's looking like if students are in science class and we have more work to do at our middle schools we know that in the coming week we're looking forward to being able to offer a morning version of an ad camp for families who are continue to seek more on campus time for their um for their middle school age students we've been working with an organization called sports for learning to expand supervise sort of supervision at our elementary schools and we'll be adding members of their team uh to the middle schools in fact the board just voted to expand our partnership with sports for learning to include middle schools we're also hard at work on collecting ride requests from our middle
079school principals and we'll be working with our transportation department to plug in bus transportation for middle school families who may need it because of the am pm nature of the sort of hybrid learning schedule that's taking place at our middle schools so there are still sort of additional enhancements taking place at the middle schools and then we're looking as well rather looking forward as well to ongoing communication with our teachers about ways that we can expand um afternoon offerings to additional students as well to expand from two days to potentially more days per week so more details to come about middle schools but we wanted to give you a preview that there is still work in front of us to expand on campus learning opportunities for middle school age students and then we'll jump over
080to the high school take a look at some images from berkeley high and from btech so berkeley high and btech are organized a little bit differently way back when almost a year ago now we decided to divide the semester into things we called terms these are roughly four to six week periods of time in which students take three classes at once we are right now in the middle of term seven so the seven of eight term seven of eight terms and for these next two weeks as term seven is finished up freshmen are coming on this week grades 10 through 12 next week for what we're calling term 7 support this is targeted support for students who may need support with projects to get ready for finals if teachers are giving those exams and generally
081who need to get so help get catching up or going deeper in their curriculum so this two week period opens up on campus learning opportunities to hundreds of bhs students and bta students and then will be followed on the 26th by a fuller reopening for the remainder of the term eight that's roughly a five-week period of time to close out the semester and in fact the academic year and in that particular version of on-campus learning at high school students who select to come back will be able to take as many as two of their in-person two of their classes in person in the afternoons each schedule is being hand crafted by the bhs administrative team in order to maximize the number of on-campus opportunities that students will have here again we're looking at images from
082berkeley high school just over the last couple of days and please keep in mind this hand scheduling is laborious and time intensive every single student who has requested to come on as having their schedule crafted by one of the administrators to maximize the number of classes that they can attend in the afternoons this is new information for our community this is up-to-date survey responses from berkeley high school students and families about their interest in returning to an on-campus experience this is data that i pulled just earlier this morning and you can see of the 2 000 or so responses from high school age families uh that roughly 40 percent are electing at this point to uh remain with distance learning uh and sixty percent um i will be returning to uh on campus environment in
083addition to taking the online classes in the morning we do have some disaggregated data available right now keeping in mind that this is about 2 000 responses what we're looking at is uh disaggregation both by race and ethnicity as well as several other categories special education english language learners and what we call sed or socially economically disadvantaged as is the case with other responses to the question about returning to distance learning there are discrepancies percentage-wise disparities by both ethnic group and by some of the other categories that we've disaggregated you can see in general that the highest rate of response for returning to on-campus learning is from families who identify as white and then you can see that the lowest response this is also in keeping with other survey responses at other levels is from
084african-american families who are choosing to return to campus only at a rate of about 26 and then you can also see differences in response rates right now which is also worrying to us that we're getting differential responses from our families and we've really been boning up on the sort of individual family outreach both through our counselors through administrators and through our ofi staff to make sure that we're capturing families responses for this final term of the school year i'd like to jump ahead just to have a look at in-person and virtual graduation events and bring the board up to speed on the most recent sort of guidance from the state of california so let's have a look first at the cdph guidelines about graduation specifically first it is so true that there are capacity limits
085by venue and i'll show you show you those in the next slide all attendees including staff performers students and families count towards the total capacity of any particular venue when we have in-person graduation ceremonies we must monitor the number of attendees if we have multiple ceremonies taking in the same uh sorry taking place in the same location there must be a two hour period uh between the ceremony ceremonies um and then um we must limit attendee groups to a household unit folks within the same household do not need to do six feet of distancing but different household groups must have social distancing we will be required to have fixed seating and actually assign seating face masks will be mandatory as well self screening and pre-registration is also a prerequisite and then in terms of the
086ceremony graduates are required to keep six feet apart and then a lot of the sort of festive activities that we're so used to at graduation ceremonies continue to be prohibited this sort of graduation specific guidance is sort of tethered to a broader set of guidance as it relates to gatherings and events some of which are duplicative and some of which are unique and they're worth reviewing so everything i'm reviewing on this slide is specific to events taking place while a county is in the orange tier you can see some of the same sort of requirements around face masks and social distancing and then here particularly in the center sort of panel you can see that there are venue limits or capacity limits these are sort of drawn to sort of rather track to whether the
087event is taking place indoors or outdoors for indoor events it's only capacity outdoor events 33 capacity and then you can see some of the sort of additional sort of restrictions on private events as they're listed here um so to talk a little bit about how we will approach in-person and virtual graduations um we do plan to permit in-person graduation events at all of our school campuses and we are right now working on guidance that will be issued to all of our schools about how to go about this we will insist with all of our school communities like cdph is insisting for us that the terms that i've listed here be adhered to strictly they include a limit on out-of-state travel that means folks coming from outside of california to attend a graduation event that will
088not be permitted outdoor events only 33 venue capacity social distancing pre-registered attendance assigned seating no eating or food service as part of these graduation events and then we will also be asking our schools to pay particular attention to the ways in which families who are not able to participate in in-person graduation can still participate in a virtual version of that experience we continue to be in a situation where our families have a variety of needs and it will be the expectation that schools account for that full variety of needs as they're planning for in-person virtu and virtual graduation events and that's why we've taken care to list that these will not be exclusively in-person graduation events but rather a mix of the two mediums so that all families will be able to enjoy graduation events
089in the way that they're able to at this moment in time we've shared these slides many times and i'll review them quite quickly we will continue to ask as our families are on campuses that they adhere to all of the safety elements that are described in our school reopening plan and as we've shared a number of times we continue to be sort of mindful of the number of procedures that we will be asked to implement some of them could disrupt in-person learning they include contact tracing isolation and quarantine procedures we haven't had to use those yet in the first eight days of our reopening but we're committed to using them should they be necessary we will continue to ask that families engage in that daily health screening the app that we have created and that
090students should stay home if they're sick or experiencing symptoms of covet 19 visitors to school campuses will continue to be prohibited and then we do ask that all of our families recognize that substitute staffing continues to be highly limited we have very few substitutes able to work at this point and so if a teacher becomes sick from covet or any other thing we are very likely not going to have substitute staffing in either the distance learning environment or in the in-person learning environment we're working hard on this we've recently raised our substitute rates to 225 dollars per day in an effort to attract a greater pool but right now that is limited and we could experience disruptions in on campus or distance learning as a result of not having enough substitutes and then as i
091have so often as we all have so often we continue to emphasize that patients kindness and cooperation are still important values for our community important for each of us as individuals to exhibit those values we're not through this yet we've still got to lean on one another to keep each other safe to celebrate our successes to pride each other to do better but to really fundamentally recognize that we are a community going through still very difficult circumstances one last thing on health we are very happy that we are rolling out bit by bit a student covid19 testing program this is a picture just from today from oxford elementary school you can see standing behind beth rein there is l.k monroe the county superintendent who visited oxford oxford this morning with me and this is gives
092you a sense of what the student testing program looks like here we have one of our rns associated with pmh labs um who has created a mobile testing cart uh and she's taking that cart from classroom to classroom to be able to just discreetly offer a test to all of the students whose families have at this point submitted their consent forms we do highly encourage families to participate in testing it is free there will never be any cost to any family as a result of having a child participate the tests are painless these are the mouth swabs the students can do the tests themselves under the supervision of a registered nurse and this just gives everybody an added sort of level of comfort and safety as we practice a whole set of protocols to keep
093one another safe in our on-campus environment lots of information is available to our families about our student covid19 testing program we highly encourage you to just jump onto our busd website to check out the student covid testing pages they are separate for both pre-k and elementary and then another page for middle and high school and families will continue to receive lots and lots of communication from schools about how to fill in their consent form and make sure that their student is also being tested for free as one of a number of precautions to keep us all safe and last just to reiterate related to the fall of 2021 the board of education gave very clear direction unanimous direction the last time we were together that the district will allow all of our labor agreements to
094expire and then labor agreements related to the pandemic specifically by doing this what we do automatically is return to the 1920 bell schedule for all schools with the same school start and stop times for all students this will effectuate a return to five full days of in-person instruction for all students and that we will develop a distance learning program in both english and two-way immersion if that is needed we'll be working with distance learning families over the course of the coming few months to understand their needs and design options for those families i know that it's been the source of concern even among some folks who spoke in public earlier in this meeting that this seems like it's not strong enough commitment and and yet it is in fact all that needs to happen to
095be able to revert to a full in person's bell schedule by allowing all of these sort of time-bound mous associated with the pandemic simply to expire by a matter of law we then revert to our existing contract and that contract describes the school day that we were accustomed to before the pandemic took place so i do urge community members to recognize that this is a firm commitment to return to full-time schooling and this is technically the way that we would enact that from that commitment is simply to allow our pandemic mousse to expire so my thanks both to the board of education for this opportunity to present and then again to our full berkeley unified community as a reminder wherever you are whether you've chosen to come back on campus or remain in distance learning
096you are part of the same community you continue to be valued and will continue to hold your family's needs as we move through these final months of the school year so thank you very much and i look forward to the discussion great thank you so much dr stevens it's a staggering amount of work on your part and on the part of um all of our employees and and families as well so thank you so much um i want to we've allocated about 20 minutes for discussion and questions and i would like to do we did last time where we go around and ask one question at a time and um so we sort of so we mix it up um i will start by since i don't see any other hands up right now i
097will model asking one question which is um director sinclair and and i might have missed it and thank you for stepping up into this brand new unexpected unprecedented role of being principal of our largest elementary school and um i'm wondering if you can talk a little bit you talked about enrichment i think i i didn't hear you talk about an interventions um but i might have missed it and can you talk about whether i know that some of the intervention many of the intervention teachers have have to be pulled into teaching you know classes and so how has that affected the intervention services that kids are getting and how and how are we making up for that well currently many of our like you said our rti tsas we call them teachers on special assignment
098who would normally deliver interventions as well as our literacy coaches um have been pulled into distance learning because if you think about this we've created a whole new school for 750 kids so we had to do this and it's actually i find this to be extremely valuable because they're super knowledgeable and i did like today i'm holding regular staff meetings with them and they're all sharing ideas around how they're you know serving students in literacy and in math and we have experts in the room which is really great um we currently are not offering interventions i hope we can get you know there's seven weeks left i hope there's something we can do about this we talked a little bit today about our sst's um or student success team meetings and we were talking about
099oh how could we do this so we're trying to think creatively but right now we don't have a solution to this to be quite honest yeah there's there's we've offered money throughout the year or um funding for teachers to do interventions after school and i'm hoping and we do have this is a really good use for our coveted money for example so i'm really hoping we can have some opportunities to either pull new groups of students or um or you know have students still working with their if say if they're in distance learning still work with their in in-person teachers okay thank you director sinclair vice president brown hi director sinclair thank you for joining us um tonight the parents spoke about their child's schedule and the three enrichment classes that they had back to
100back without any instruction can you kind of speak to that and clarify that you know i didn't hear that sorry i wasn't here for the um discussion but i i can tell you this that enrichment has been a little bit slower to roll out than we had hoped and it's because of the coordination within person so you know as as principals at their sites are trying to fulfill their their prep obligations with either pe teachers or science teachers at the same time i'm trying to pull these teachers and put them in distance learning we've gotten a lot of it resolved i would say that there are each grade has something different so i we can't talk uniformly from tk to five for example four or five has all the instrument options right so they have
101a lot of enrichment um kinder through third every class has pe i can tell you that um science is you know in in this it mimics what we did in in person two we don't not every class had every enrichment when we were in person in our normal schedule so it is it's mimicking it but it's not as full as it would be as we would hope it to be right i'm sorry i should have gave you more context the parent was concerned that their student had many enrichment classes and not um in-person instruction and nothing enough instructional minutes to um maybe their core um classes like math science or math ela and things of those sorts so maybe you can speak to um when scheduling changes will have or scheduling will have some normalcy
102um i mean we expect to see that yeah i can tell you that the instructional minute should all be the same for everybody this is um contractual and the teachers are teaching that first block and then they're doing an a b group and then they're doing the second block so that shouldn't be different enrichments are not supposed to overlap and i have a master schedule with all the um the classes and i don't see that happening so i would need more clarity on that maybe if that is happening for for families maybe just give it the rest of this week to maybe work out some of the kinks and they should see some normalcy next week yeah and also i would hope that people would contact me i'm going back and forth with families and
103i welcome families to reach directly out to me thank you that's great um i saw director sinai and then director miller you're muted julie sometimes that's the best way um so i want to shift over to berkeley high um and the survey questions not the questions but the survey results um clearly there is a very high percentage of families particularly african-american and latinx who did not respond which mirrors our elementary survey although this looks much higher um my question is what happens to the students whose parents did not fill out the survey saying what their student was going to do how how are they assigned either in person i mean how are they assigned to the afternoon activities um i i'm gonna have to guess on this one i'm i'm imagining that and uh the
104way the berkeley high school administrative team is responding to families who have not yet responded is to not schedule them into an in-person class and probably to adopt the default that that means that they're not participating i do know that the team is working hard on outreach both through their counselors you know we have 20 counselors at berkeley high school we have two offi liaisons and administrators are also making calls to try and reach out to families to get a sense of their interest in returning um but because the the you know all of the in-person learning is taking place between 9 and 12 in the morning no student loses their distance learning class schedule what we're talking about is scheduling into that afternoon block for families who have responded affirmatively that they do want
105to participate okay thank you um director can i add to that yeah directors yeah this happened in elementary as well and we had a good 180 families i think it was who had not responded and what happened with that was all of a sudden floods as as schools opened parents started responding and we were um you know some of it was just we didn't have the email was wrong or you know something happened like that but we were able to respond and get everybody placed so it was interesting to me to just see that i think some for some families they felt like they had to see it first or you know like really really understand that this was happening and then with it we've i i think at elementary we've been able to reach
106every single family at this point that's great thank you um director miller and then director bossie dev than director babbitt um i just wanted to make a point this is kind of piggybacking on what we were talking about earlier curriculum-wise and what's being cut off necessarily for this year um i just want to because i've been getting a lot of emails about this as well and questions from students and just to be clear no new content is being taught during these after school sessions is that correct that is correct um each teacher will be making his or her own decisions about how to make best use of that afternoon time but no new content is being taught nobody's being disadvantaged by not coming to campus in the afternoon and there's no great advantage for a
107person who would be attending in the afternoon okay oh thanks um director vasudev uh yes uh thank you director sinclair and and um superintendent stevens for your presentation i uh i can't even imagine how difficult this job is director insider just to be the principal of the largest school that we have so thank you so much for taking on this challenge and surprise as my uh my my son's former principal i know that you'll knock it out of the park full confidence in your ability to do this well um i my question is about i thank you for being just like honest that there's no game plan for how to deal with you know interventions right now i think you know i think it's really important that we're honest with the public and thank you
108for owning that and for saying that tonight my question is that for the summer do you think that there's anything and i know that you worked on our summer plans and i've heard just really positive feedback from the community about about our catalog so thank you for your for your work on that too do you know if that's a possibility to start tracking kind of the students that that were in these receiving interventions right that are whether they're in distance learning or in in person learning right now to try to see how we could support them via the summer has that been talked about or is that an option or is this something that might have to wait until the fall and i don't know if if maybe the superintendent would be the best person
109to answer that yeah i don't um it's a great question and i don't know the answer to sort of tracking the students whose intervention services have been lost because of the staffing decisions we had to make i will say that you know when we sort of embarked on this reorganization of elementary schools to be able to create the five day per week option we knew that we were going to be putting every single resource we had into the mix and we knew that we were going to have to use all of our staff to cover this expanded set of classrooms we also had to make just to sort of say it we made some difficult decisions about consolidating some classes as well which meant essentially ending some classes and distributing students to different teachers all
110of that was sort of how we were able to make this work and so while the benefit is a five day per week in person program we lost some things along the way and we know that i do know that they're we're taking a sort of a case management approach to tracking students into our summer school program we're developing a data set with criteria to be able to identify students who we want to see seated into after school into summer experiences and this is a greatly expanded summer catalog that we'll be offering as well as sort of supporting kids to find their way into private options and to city options i don't we haven't yet talked about you know sort of tracking maybe the additional kids who may have been disadvantaged by the loss of
111intervention in these last seven weeks but we are sort of taking a case management data-based approach to seating kids in our summer programs great thank you thank you director babbitt so first i have a comment and then a question uh my comment is around the narrative that um african americans who didn't respond to the to the survey in general and then saying well this is the lowest group that wants to go back you had 53 percent of african-american families that didn't even respond so let's not say oh 45 of white people want to go back and the lowest number of black people don't want to go back when you don't have that factual evidence and it's really disturbing because we know that there is this narrative that black and brown families don't want to go
112back to in-person learning and this is this rich white person's kind of call to action and so you feed into that when you label it this way when you describe it this way we've said this to you via email i've said this to you personally and i would really appreciate it if we would not buy into or promote negative stereotypes that's my comment and hopefully it will be received and then secondly i like to say when it comes to the questions around the mapping for middle and high school and what we did to prepare for an in-person learning that was a comment asked by a parent this presentation really didn't respond to many of the comments made in public comment from middle and high school families so i was hoping you could address that what
113were the preparations around classroom management sizes and the things that facilities did put into it and again we're talking about a hvac system when we're talking about making a commitment to returning into fall is that true false what are we doing i'm happy to respond to that question um so we did all of the same analysis of facilities for our middle and high school as we did for elementary so we developed the same data set for square footage measurements for every single instructional space elementary middle and high school that we did all of the same facilities preparation that we did elementary middle school high school and then we also had you know a considerable amount of additional work to do to analyze student schedules um and teacher credentialing uh this was distinct at the middle
114and high school level uh and those sort of additional complexities that you know the six the six class schedule that students have unique course schedules especially at the high school where some of the sort of logistical complexities that we were not able to resolve um and the reasons that we couldn't get to a five-day return with a five-day distance learning option alongside of it and then director babbitt i'm gonna just acknowledge your comment as well i do appreciate the feedback i hear it if i misspoke if i didn't describe you know the sort of differences in respondents versus the differences in a larger population i apologize that was not my intent to sort of categorize all families just the ones who responded well i don't think you're still hearing me when you say it that
115way period you promote a narrative that even though you had a data point you did have a data point but it was an incomplete data point so to highlight this low number when you have 53 percent who didn't even respond that it's almost as if it reminds me when distance learning first happened back in march we hadn't even given out computers yet to black and brown families and we had data going up about black and brown families not checking in taking no ownership for the fact that we hadn't even provided them with access so those are the those are the concerns uh and that's what it that's the nerve that it strikes when we label our people and then we start creating race wars and then the community starts saying oh well because the black
116people don't want to go back or because the latino people don't want to go back like no it's because of all the challenges that you have described okay thank you thank you um i wanted to ask one quick question then director sinai um i don't know if this is for director sinclair or dr stevens but the 35 teachers in distance learning um well let me ask you a different way how many new employees if any did we end up hiring because i know we were not able to get the substitutes that we thought we were going to be able to hire or we were able to get maybe one or two um did we hire new brand new people new to the district who were who are teaching no no not at all could i
117actually i should call on assistant superintendent samantha tobias espinoza i think she has the answer uh yes i ended up actually hiring three people um two brand new to the district and one who was a classified member of our staff prior um who has now become a certificate and that was for the distance learning um working in distance learning one of them is working in person okay because it's twi sorry okay that okay i appreciate it i just wanted that to clarify that um director sinai and then we can hopefully move on to the next item thank you um i'll do i'll do the director babbitt i've got one comment and one question and director babbitt thanks for asking the questions about the middle school stuff because i was going to ask this so i
118don't have to um i i want to um director sinclair i ask you to maybe go back that you weren't able to be on during public comment and listen to the public comment um that was at the beginning of the meeting because there were a number of examples of conflicting schedules and having to compete between science and enrichment or the three back-to-back enrichment classes without any academics so if you've got a great master schedule fantastic i'm also curious in the sense of like the malcolm x model and how is that mirrored in other schools so you don't need to answer now but i just ask you to go back and look at it um and my question is is a grad question um one component is if if you know things continue to improve which
119you know as people said we don't know but if we end up heading toward and in the yellow um by the time graduation's happening i'm assuming we will adapt to whatever the guidance is under the yellow tier and my question is kind of whether we're in orange or yellow or back in red but um how does a family know what their school is considering for graduation activities will the principal soon be communicating are we helping the school sites look for venues because i know someone talked about the giants game and if we had a stadium that could seat 48 000 people or 25 000 people and we could spread them all out that would be great but you know uc berkeley has their own criteria plus expenses if we were you know looking at using
120any of their venues our venues so our kind of who's who's looking at that and how will families know what to expect yeah um so um i'll talk about the high school first which is by far the most complex um so uh right now um cal is not renting out its facilities and and so that is an option that's not on the table um the team has been looking at alternative facilities and then also exploring just using the bhs campus and i think it's the bhs campus that will prove to to be the option that we use we have roughly i think 800 or so graduating seniors way more than can fit into a single event and so if this happens and details to be you know details forthcoming we would likely be looking at
121something like eight to ten smaller graduation events spaced out over multiple weekends that would likely track to small learning community some of the small learning communities are fairly large like you know ib and ac can be uh you know hundreds of kids they may need multiple events and then we would also do some affinity-based events as well the african-american graduation aapi graduation and latinx events would also take person place in person and then we will fold in bis bta home base and some other smaller programs into events so berkeley high school will have details coming out to families as we work out these details and then there will also need to be an option for families who will for any number of reasons just can't participate in an in-person event at this time um arcade
122schools will approach a little bit differently we'll be issuing guidelines to them in the coming days and then ask much like they do under normal circumstances ask school communities to organize their own graduation events and that is sort of more in keeping with the way that we've done things we are exploring the assumption is that that the middle schools are going to be able to find space on their campus or do multiple days or something as well i think the most the most reasonable expectation is that these will be taking place on middle school campuses as opposed to other places we are right now exploring um uh just sort of a number of sort of technology options to facilitate schools live streaming events don't have anything in hand yet but want to support our schools
123to be able to do that so that we can offer the virtual version of the experience to families as well okay um director babbitt maybe one last question and then we'll move on okay so i wanted to know are the teachers on campus at the middle and high school so that you know as we begin to open up for more students to go on that there there will be enough staff to meet the needs of those who do want to go back for the afternoon schedules um i if i if i'm understanding your question correctly you're asking are all of the teachers working at the middle school level and if and if numbers increase can we accommodate them is that do i have the question right director babbitt yes middle and high they are so
124all of our staff is working at this point with the exception of those who qualify through a process you know organized by human resources because they have some underlying medical condition we do continue to have capacity to seat more students at the middle school level if more families select to come on and then we'll have capacity to seat additional families in the high school model as well if more families choose to send their children to school okay great thank you so much thank you director sinclair um now we'll move to item 12.2 which is budget update and discussion priorities um dr stevens if you'll just give me one moment i will switch slides well hey guys i can ask one more question i wanted to know about the arts uh in particular things like afro-haitian
125dance and our plan for the fall if we're going to have some kind of [Music] way in which we have a test pilot of people who may want to still do the streaming as well as the distance as well as the in person because we do need some kind of backup plan for the unseen which i think one of the commenters said tonight on public comment and you know right now we would be in a better position if we were able to do some streaming live streaming out as well as in person learning so can we think about some kind of pilot plan some teachers who may be willing to do that um because we don't want to get in a place again where everybody where we have to keep distance learning at the core
126uh we can think about that yes and then as far as the arts are concerned how are we going to do um like afro-haitian dance and band and music and all of those things director babbitt are you talking about in in the fall or for the remainder of this year well i know for the remainder of this year my understanding was they said that they still couldn't do dance even if they did it outside and i didn't understand why they couldn't have danced outside yeah that i haven't heard i don't i don't know why there would be a restriction so long as it's socially distanced than outside i don't think that there will be any prohibition and i i can loop back to the high school folks to clarify if there is a misunderstanding okay
127great thank you so much all right let's move on to item 12.2 great um so uh shifting gears um we uh pauline follons the assistant superintendent and i would like to um offer a sort of update on uh the 2122 budget and then just sort of begin in a very light way to talk about some budget priorities what we hope this presentation does is sort of set the stage for both the board and communities understanding of the scenario that we're facing as we budget for the coming school year so we'll share lots of information about enrollment projections about cost of living adjustments and then what we're anticipating to be some of the both deficits and difficulties that we may experience as we start budgeting for the coming school year um so i am going to
128turn it over to assistant superintendent fallensbee um i'll step in just to talk a little bit about the lcap but we'll let her conduct the majority of this presentation assistant superintendent follows me are you there i'm here thanks all yours so um so as as dr stevens mentions we're going to be looking at the lcap reporting and planning process and i think that actually comes first we're going to look at um covet expenditures as well as our spending capacity in the unrestricted general fund in lcap and bsep and also we're going to start looking at multi-era projections and some pre-community engagement um in terms of staff's work to build off-board priorities and again we want to mention this is pre-community engagement we're just sharing some of our ideas with the board and then we're going
129to look at next steps so if we could go to the next slide so this is actually um our lcap so dr stevens did you want to do this then yeah i'll jump in so so one sort of important part of the context for this year's budgeting is that we are sort of at the cusp of writing a brand new three-year local control and accountability plan or what we often just call the lcap the lcap is a template designed by the state of california to be used in all california public schools that template has eight different sort of prompts for school districts to respond to we're asked to look at our data to identify greatest areas of need and progress to identify gaps in our progress identify schools that are have been targeted by the
130state for additional forms of support to engage stakeholders to set goals to define actions and then ultimately to establish some outcome measures and targets we will be writing this plan over the coming couple of months and engaging the board and members of our both advisory committees and the community in one portion of this plan at a time this plan will incorporate aspects of the general fund supplemental funding funding bset bara federal funding and acts as the sort of strategic plan for the district for the coming three years so uh this next week april 21st as we're back at a regular meeting of the board members of the public we encourage to tune in we're going to begin the first aspect of this lcap planning process and that will be a look at current data for
131the purpose of identifying sort of areas of greatest progress and need so we just wanted to sort of paint the picture that this budget presentation along with the next presentation on the lcap engagement plan should work together we should see that there's a synergy between decisions we're making in the 2122 school year and the way that we're identifying needs and ultimately capturing those needs in our written lcap plan so back to you assistant superintendent follows me okay great thank you so this um slide looks at our 2122 budget scorecard and it looks at our different funding sources that we're going to be focusing on for this budget period so um for the general fund we had talked about um our cola actually giving us 3.3 million dollars but when we looked at our um increase
132in expenses um we are actually under other sources and uses i haven't there's a link here to our other sources and uses this this um picture looks a little different from what we've shared with the board before so now we're looking at cost increases um as well as changes in other sources and uses and that's um spending four million dollars in the general fund so whereas our decreased um student enrollment has no impact on 21 22 because we have the benefit of um of a hold harmless clause um we're actually looking at a deficit of seven hundred thousand dollars um before we even start considering budget considerations for twenty one twenty two l cap um it's similar um their cost increases are 201 thousand dollars the decreased student enrollment um there's a 284 decrease student
133enrollment that impacts lcap but the bottom line is um they're also facing a negative of 978 thousand four hundred and thirty five dollars um bsap um whereas they're looking at an increase of two hundred and thirty thousand dollars in their revenue their cost increases at one fifty two thousand no impact on decreased um decreased student uh on decreased student enrollment however they're also looking at deficit spending of thirty 130 dollars um with a hundred and seventy one thousand dollars in um one-time revenue and our covert relief fund um it's 16 million dollars in several um in several buckets um with several requirements and several expiration um points and we'll be bringing that back um at our following meeting with more detail so um so on to the next slide so um just an update of
134what we're spending our covet funding on um and we can be we can bring the entire list back to the board but this is just to give you an idea of what we're spending our funding on um we increased our contract for sports for learning for grades six through eight um we did um in-person stipends um for instruction for all units that's estimated to be three hundred and three thousand dollars we had additional staffing for lifelong um we're looking at 75 000 for increased hot spots our communications team needed 25 000 for increased communications due to covet and we also have additional staff for student coding test cove testing a hundred and eighteen thousand seven fifty five so on our next slide um this is um just remind a reminder of our revenue assumptions and
135i shared this at our second interim when i when i came to the board the last time so um this time we're looking at 2020 which is our current year and the changes in our assumption for the out years 21 22 and 22-23 so we can see that um our enrollment um 98-44 in 2021 but we're projecting um a decrease the seven percent decrease in 21 22 to 91 55 and um which will be um we're expecting it to be flat and this is only if we have we see no increase um in our enrollment right now it's trending this is a seven percent decrease but where it may um be as much as um four percent but we're going to be getting additional um enrollment data on by may 16th so if this number
136changes we'll change our assumptions as well um our unduplicated people count our student account went from 2743 we're projecting 25.51 which is a drop in our further drop in our on duplicated student account our rolling average um our calculator actually um averages our numbers so this is the impact um on our upp which impacts our supplemental fund and again our ada funded what i thought i would do i had a row for funded as well as projected so the column will be focused on 21.22 you can see we're projecting a decrease in our ada from 9426 that's the bottom line um and we're actually projecting an 80 on 80 of 8766 however we're funded on the prior year so in 21 22 we're funded at the higher level but we can see in 2223 we
137would have to be facing the actual declining or projected decline in ada and that's the year that we're talking about as being our cliff um arcola 3.84 is the um is the amount that both school services and um department of finance we have agreed on that number however for 22 23 this is an estimate so um the um the department of finance's number was significantly higher than school services so we're landing on 2.11 for 22.23 so 21 22 is the year that we're focusing on however we have to keep an eye on 22-23 because there's such a projected change in revenue so we have to be planning for that as well um on the next slide um and i wonder um just before we move on i know we've used an awful lot of acronyms
138on this slide i wonder if we can sort of quickly we all use this sort of this this code but not not everybody speaks it um i wonder would you would you be willing just sort of for the benefit of folks watching and who may not know some of these terms could you break down some of the acronyms for us please sure and um so upc stands for unduplicated pupil count so these are students who are um considered in our unduplicated buckets so either they're english learners they're free and reduced um so they're um homeless and um i think that's it faster you and faster you think so um so these students if they are in more than one bucket yet they can only be counted once um in the upc um actual count there's
139also an unduplicated people percentage so they're um this is the percentage um of the students to enrollment that's cap that um we use in our um lc do we have to do xcff as well so um the lcff calculator which is our funding formula for um that's that has been known in effect for some time our ada is our average daily attendance and uh we get that number we report that number to um um three times a year however for this period we're actually able to use um for 2122 we could use 1920s number because of a whole timeless clause because of the pandemic and um and in 21 22 we can use the higher of the current or the prior year so um and then ada projected that's just the projected um average daily
140attendance so thanks ron thanks very much thank you i appreciate the run through okay thank you so um so for enrollment and revenue projections um we are um still planning on using a seven percent enrollment assumption for 2122. um we are this is a conservative approach however um as i mentioned earlier round two enrollment deadline is um may 16th so we may revise our enrollment assumptions based on what we are we learn from our round two enrollment projections as well as the governor's may 15 revise so um right now we're we're um keeping the seven percent declining enrollment but we'll be revising it um as we get additional information and i should share just in the sort of spirit of full trans full disclosure we are you know regularly watching our current enrollment um the
141numbers right now that we're collecting in from the enrollment office um appear to be stronger than the minus seven percent decline that we experience this year maybe that we're on track for sort of a minus four percent so we are in any case going to recommend continuing a sort of conservative stance with our enrollment projections but the numbers as we're sort of collecting them right now are a bit stronger than what we're reflecting here okay thank you so um we're going to take a very brief look at collective bargaining and just looking at the impact um of a one percent increase and this is a typical approach for districts um before we start negotiating um we all know what the impact of one percent is um and it's usually the impact of the unrestricted general
142fund so on the next slide um we have some examples of what um one percent raise um does to the unrestricted general fund but it also impacts lcap and bsap um so the three scenarios um a modest moderate and a cola so we're looking at a one percent raise and a one percent um bonus or a one time um you know you can see um just a simple math it's 1.1 percent um ongoing spending and 1.1 um one-time expenses so for year one it will be 2.2 and then going on moving going onwards the out years it will be 1.1 and similarly for a 2 raise and a 2 bonus we'll be looking at 4.4 percent in the first year and then ongoing expenses of 2.2 million and similarly with three percent um 3.3 um
1436.6 and 3.3 ongoing so this is as an overall summary um for student enrollment um what does this actually mean for the general fund um in terms of um student enrollment we talked about the cliff in 2223. so it was if we're looking at a seven percent decline it actually is going to mean um an eight eight million dollars in ongoing budget reductions in 2223 and one million dollars in one time reduction in um in um one time in 22 23 as well so i'll be this will be um become clearer when you look at the multi-year slides on um following on the following slides and again we looked we talked about the seven hundred thousand dollars in excess of new revenue so that's a reduction in spending in 21 um where deficit spending in
14421 22. and again we talked about collective bargaining we don't know exactly what the impact will be but we're expecting it um if it's it's a one percent it's 1.1 million um if it's um a three percent bonus and a three percent ongoing we're looking at 6.6 million dollars and any in new investments that we um we have in the general fund at this point we will have to make a corresponding dollar reduction in spending or other budget adjustments to account for any new expenses so um so in terms of general fund reductions for 21 22 we will only be presenting a fraction of this amount tonight but we have looked overall at several um several scenarios that impact the general fund but tonight we'll be focusing on an amount that's not um as significant
145as these totals here so um just want to say um so we're looking at this is before data analysis and before community engagement we're looking at organizational efficiencies um in terms of looking at our visa office communications um or unemployment insurance that's a cost that i was just made aware of recently and it's not actually surprising in terms of our employment um the unemployment employment paid by the state um our rate is going from point zero five to two percent it's like a forty five percent increase it's a significant increase um and then of course we're looking at the conversion from qss to escape um and again these are not recommendations this is a preview of one of the many categories of our needs and if i can just expand on that what we're envisioning
146is that in coming board meetings we'll be sort of not only presenting data looking at needs but then also bringing sort of bundles of potential options not for sort of recommendation and approval in the early stages but simply for discussion these three items that we're bringing today are just the first of many to follow so just want to emphasize that there will be many more ideas coming before the board for discussion and ultimately that discussion will lead to more formal recommendations by staff to the board in the later part of may and into june thanks so this is um our first area that we're looking at in terms of our bicep and our bearer offices um these suggestions are predominantly um a bicep bearing director and i think this was already shared with the piano
147um at their meeting last night so there's a recommendation that bisep will pick up an additional 30 thousand dollars to fund a b-set bearer director reorganization um also a communications manager it was an increase of twenty thousand of which the general fund will be picking up two thousand and the set eighteen the communications specialist fifty thousand dollars a obesef expense and communication relations um projects these are actually consulting costs that um will be a general fund cost um so over 170 000 we're gonna have the general fund picking up 72 000 and beasts are picking up 98. and um bsap has already as i mentioned taken this to their piano and we this is before um community engagement with the general fund um on our next slide so this is the rate um actually it's
148from 0.05 to 1.23 which is still very significant so this is um this is um a statutory change um this is the overall impact to the district however this is one of the areas that um in our workshops we've been advised that we can actually use our covet funds um for one time we're assuming this is one time there's also some discussion that um the rate may not actually be increased but this is just something that's it's not finalized as yet but if this comes to pass um it's likely it's going to be one time and we can use covet funds to cover this cost and on our next slide um so this is where we're looking at um our enterprise system and looking at our one-time costs and our ongoing costs so um in
149terms of our licensing and technical support one time 140 000 um our listening and technical support ongoing 376 000 and our escape training costs one time 192. so this is 708 thousand dollars which is a significant investment um we are considering having this um being paid for by covid it's an allowable expense um and um it's interesting to note on this slide that um the business enterprise system what's ongoing the 376 part of that um we now pay i think just over a hundred thousand dollars for our existing software system and for the all year we're going to have to have both systems so in 21 22 and 20 to 23 we're going to have both both systems so when you look at the totals in year one the general fund impact is 72 000
150for the first year but for the second year because it's 336 it's going to be ongoing we have to um include that um in year two which again that's actually our um oh cliff here so that you'll see this um in our multi-year projections and in terms of the lcap and what we just presented um there was a savings of 125 thousand dollars in l cap and then um code will be picking up two point three million and b step ninety eight thousand dollars and these are several slides that we worked on and we've been kind of massaging so we've been kind of moving things around with these numbers so okay on our next slide so um this is now the undistricted general fund so this um this the revenue section and the assumptions this
151was actually um no change from our first interim so um i can go over the cola um cola assumptions as stated there are 88 ties to our previous slides our unduplicated pupil percentage and our average daily attendance as well as our cost of living adjustments is cola and then our lcf funding you can see um the impact um of our cliff here which is the second year that's a 4.5 million dollar reduction that we're looking at our state and local funding actually remains unchanged but cola is giving us an advantage um an additional funding in 2223 and remember this is an average cola that we're using for 22 23 and 23 24. um on the next slide um so we can go on to expenses of that so um the expenses that are um the
152top expenditure um line as well as the nine million dollars eight million ongoing that was actually from our second interim so this is a significant um budgeted reduction that we want to keep in everybody's um mind and um and in terms of our and this is all pre-community engagements if we went ahead with the recommendations that we had presented on the earlier slide that would be an extra hundred thousand dollars um in the undistricted general fund five hundred thousand because of the ongoing costs for um escape so if we would have to make um we would have to make additional um budget reductions so in 2223 we will be up to 10 million dollars in reductions and um in 2324 it will be one million dollars and this is all in an attempt to balance
153our budget um and these these numbers are actually very bleak in terms of zero after um undesignated and point three and point two um but where deficit spending in year one which means a change in fund balance is negative and we have a surplus or the change in fund balance is positive for year two so um and these um slides this slide does not have any um impact of negotiated salary increases and any negotiated salary increases will require additional reductions so um the next uh so um do you want us to wrap it up sure thank you very much for all those details um so we imagine that we've got a number of next steps ahead of us beginning at the board meeting just in a week's time we're planning to come to begin a
154series of presentations to analyze current data such as we have it to be able to identify areas of growth and improvement as well as sort of equity challenges that we face this data analysis will lead us to a discussion of our lcap goals which we also helped hope to begin next week at the same time next week we'll be bringing a set of pno endorsed recommendations for our bsep budgets that comes to the board starting next week and then we plan to stay engaged with all of our advisory committees we've listed them there we'll continue to consult with key partners as well as launch a lcap community engagement process that builds on our current set of advisory committees to include a set of workshops um community survey as well as a joint committee that we'll
155describe in the coming presentation and with that i think we um we draw to a close and are now available for the discussion and questions great thank you so much um thank you assistant superintendent following me presentation um all right we have um another item after this but we still have time for discussion and questions if there are any um are there any if not we can we can move on and thank you um thank you again assistant superintendent sure um all right well then let's move on to oh and we can't forget to do the um action items at the end so someone please remind me now we move to item 12.3 which is an update on lcap planning process and community engagement um thanks very much president elper i'll jump in on this
156one as well um and then um i will also be uh leaning a little bit on uh director sinclair as well who um in her role as state and federal um sort of man uh leader of state and federal projects has also had a lot of contact with our lcap planning process and the engagement plan so in this presentation what we hope to do is really focus in on an enhanced set of community engagement activities that will take place over the next roughly two and a half months that will give us in addition to our existing committee structure a good sense of the thinking of our community what i'd like to do is describe those enhanced activities and how they will feed into the development of the el cap draft that will eventually come before
157the board in late may and then through the month of june so talk a little bit about the local control accountability plan we touched on that just in the previous presentation and then described this in community engagement process from april through june as we shared previously we are launching on this process of sort of combined process of writing multiple budgets that includes the general fund our supplemental fund the berkeley school excellence program as well as all of this one-time funding that we're receiving from the state and federal government and at the same time we're embarking on writing a new three-year lcap and we hope to braid these two activities together to make sure that we're using data to make decisions about our budget and then capturing those decisions along with thoughtfully composed goal statements and
158metrics in this next three-year version of the lcap this sort of complicated colorful slide is really only um for the sort of point the sake of illustrating that we actually have a number of plans that we're going to be bringing to the board at the next meeting on april 21st what we hope to do is bring something called the learning continuity and attendance plan also unfortunately same acronym as the local control and accountability plan we call it the lcp we'll bring the lcp for approval to the board at the next meeting on april 21st the lcp is a one-year retrospective plan that applies to distance learning we don't usually write a plan called the lcp but we've been required to during this pandemic period we wrote one last year we're bringing this next one to
159the board and hope to have that approved by the board it really is a retrospective sort of backwards looking report on our distance learning activities we also then have an annual update of our local control and accountability plan or lcap this particular update looks back at the 1920 school year so looking back now almost a full year and reports retrospectively on the activities that took place way back when and then finally we're renewing the lcap with the 21 through 24 rewrite and so we offer this slide just to sort of distinguish between these three documents it feels a little confusing but we'll talk about the lcp the lcap annual plan and then the 21 24 lcap i've already reviewed these slides in the previous presentation about what goes into the lcap what it intends to
160do for the district so i'll move through this and just now focus in on our engagement process so here in berkeley we have a pretty rich set of advisory committees that draw from all of our school communities that inform different district decision making that includes the superintendent's budget advisory committee or sbac the parent advisory committee or pac the district english learning language advisory committee called the dlac the educator advisory committee which is composed of members selected by our labor partners to provide feedback on planning as well as the bsep and bera program and oversight committee what we all call the p o and these are all composed of representatives from our school committees that comment on a variety of the different plans that we pass each year because we're at the cusp of writing a
161three-year lcap plan we want to enhance these sort of opportunities for engagement by adding in three additional components to our engagement plan they include lcat workshops to take place in english and in spanish a joint lcap feedback group that will consist of members both of our existing committees and will invite members of school site councils to participate as well as an lcap family survey that will give opportunity to a broad swath of berkeley families to comment on our goals and the actions we're planning to take in the next three years so to focus in on these lcap workshops what we're envisioning uh is workshops that would take place one in english one in spanish we're imagining three different topics taking place over a series of six different nights again three of these nights would be
162in english three take place in spanish the first of these workshops would intend to provide an overview of the lcap what is it as well as some of the key sort of student supports that are included in our lcap plan we'll focus on general fund supports supplemental grant supports and bsep supports in all of these the next series of meetings would intend to focus in on berkeley's current set of racial equity programs one program are sort of one evening taking place on march may 12th in english and then the next evening on may 13th in spanish and then a final series of workshop meetings for families to take place on may 26th and 7th and those will focus in on intervention programs such as they exist right now all of these workshops are meant both
163to inform members of the community but to solicit feedback so that we are well informed about sort of both the in the overview and on particular programs by our families we're committed to doing targeted recruitment for the spanish language events that includes reaching out to dlac parent leaders longfellows club de padres the silvia mendez community the long fellow community the to bilingual community reaching out district-wide to spanish-speaking families through a variety of media and then as well working with our partners and latinos who need us to berkeley to be able to sort of recruit for participation in all of these spanish language workshops the second component of this enhanced engagement plan involves creating what we'll call for now a joint lcap feedback group what we're imagining is sort of an ad hoc committee that would
164be composed of representatives from the current district advisory committees as a way to sort of you know encourage sort of crosstalk across these committees as well as representatives from the school site councils as well as school and district office the idea in composing a group like this is really to encourage a variety of perspectives across district office and schools multiple committees so that we're talking sort of in community about the challenges we face and some of the opportunities we have as we rewrite the dlcap we will be writing up additional information about this sort of joint feedback group very shortly and we'll get that information out to committee chairs to our school principals as well as out to the school communities so that we can uh sort of be well positioned to conduct these joint
165feedback groups and then we will plan to do a general feedback made available to all of our families in the berkeley community just about our goals about the actions that we have taken in order to collect from a broad swath of the community feedback about the lcap and where we should be going in the future put together between all of our standing committees these workshops the joint committee and our feedback survey we hope to be able to collect information from every corner of the berkeley community we will be engaged in targeted outreach to families who we really want to participate and provide feedback on this plan and then this feedback will be collated represented to the board and ultimately used in the creation of the new lcap so this is just a calendar version of
166all of the various committee meetings i've highlighted in blue the insertion of these new activities including this joint feedback group or what's labeled here is the community advisory committee all of the family workshops are listed out here as well as meetings with latinos unidos the pta council and all of our standing committees so you can see it's a very busy couple months of community engagement both on budget building and lcap writing and then we'll um so all of that will come together in the month of june where we'll be representing the draft el cap to the board of education in a first reading and eventually in a second reading and you can see those dates listed here that will also correspond to the passing of the budget at the end of the month so i'm
167very happy to take questions and discussion about this and we're really glad to be able to enhance our existing committee structure with a lot of new community engagement opportunities as well by way of next steps we plan to come right back to board of education next week where we will begin the review of data in anticipation of writing the new lcap plan we'll begin a discussion of our lcap goals and begin to share possible action items for the inclusion in the lcap and then as well we're asking the board to approve those two extra plans that i mentioned the annual lcap update uh as well as that learning continuity attendance plan those are the two retrospectives sort of reports on the last two years of activity so thank you very much appreciate the opportunity to
168present and look forward to our discussion thanks so much um dr stevens all right um director babbitt thank you so much for that presentation and for the details on how we're going to engage the community i just want to highlight a couple of things around the parent advisory committee i hope that we can make a commitment to actually responding to the parent advisory committee comments this year and be very diligent in providing the parent advisory committee the support that they need to make valuable advisory committee comments just for the general public this is the committee that is designated by the state to advise the board of their comments on the lcap plan and they are comprised of people who make up the major stakeholder group of lcap supplemental funds so as a board it is
169important that we actually get their comments and and that they are prepared to make those comments and i hope that you all have seen the um the emails from them around their meetings and their meeting times and the things that they want and um definitely appreciate your response to our parent advisory committee and then i thank you for the joint lcap feedback group um i think that's a very good plan since i'm on visa pno and i go to those meetings and everybody is always saying how do these funds interact with other funds and then everybody wants the same information they want data they want to know that they're funding the best program that you know we're coming up with the comprehensive evaluation plan and that we're not just approving because we keep approving so
170my question is how are we going to actually engage families during these meetings how are we going to make sure that it's more of a conversation or a dialogue and that people really feel like they are being heard or and have opportunity to speak as well we in fact we're just meeting earlier in the day to take on that very question is exactly what we want as well we haven't yet written the agendas for these we're just sort of thinking about how to build in these additional enhancements to the process you've described exactly what we hope to achieve and that is um meetings that feel both informative and accessible we don't want to present at our families we don't want to burden them with a ton of information which is why we're sort of thinking
171of this as a series we'll take it a little bit at a time and then want to make sure that we're sort of breaking down the information so that it feels digestible accessible and that we're creating lots of opportunities to talk and hear from the folks who actually do the work if there are questions and then more than anything just lots of opportunities to collect feedback so we've got some thinking to do about the best way to do that given that we're still restricted to the zoom format but want very much that this feels both engaging and genuine in terms of its interactional opportunities um director sinai uh thank you this is exciting and a bit overwhelming i want to start off by really appreciating dr stevens and director sinclair and the staff who are
172basically meeting most nights for the rest of the weeks left in the school year in order to do this very proactive engagement strategy i know that you know you can count on us you know in whatever ways we can help with outreach and engagement with the communities so please you know use us um i think we really want to help i i'm a um i'm curious on that the lcap well so first you know i think um director babbitt and i had a great conversation with director sinclair and dr stevens around looking at the local control accountability plan really as the road map for how the district is proceeding with how we're working toward our goals and looking at our previous outcap and even the first l cap and seeing how we use that as
173as the guide and then what do we need to do in relation to adding or tweaking and not necessarily a whole cloth brand new strategic plan but really building of what we've been doing for the last eight years eight years now for 2014 nine years um so i think the idea of the joint lcap committee is good i mean i think over the years when we've done these three years we've done something like that in person where you know we've gone into the btec or bta you know multi-purpose room and broke out into groups it'd be great if we could like with thought exchange is a good tool there are also other meeting facilitation tools that are for virtual meetings that we should really try so that we can break people up into cross-disciplinary groups
174so i think there might be ways we could be creative because that's a big group when you mentioned the membership of the lcap feedback group that's kind of huge for engaging people virtually so um i think if we've got maybe some um in our in our own family communities we have some skilled you know facilitators in our community if there's ways we can tap on any of those folks to help engage kind of what director babbitt's saying is how are we going to really make sure authentic voice is is is active at the table and it's not just presentation and questions um i'd like in the spanish speaking i'd like to make sure we include franklin preschool um those are families that are coming in to our district and hopefully staying in our district um
175and they're an important point and i think latinos anitos will get like some of the community-based organizations but i'd like to make sure we do a real target with franklin preschool families so thank you great thank you director sinai um thank you to you and director babbitt for working with our staff on these plans um director vasudev and then director miller and vice president brown yeah thank you dr stevens i really appreciated just seeing the amount of different meetings and venues where you're going to engage the public i think that list is really robust and i'm i'm very excited but i echo the sentiments of my board colleague director julie sinai that this is really a call for us as board members too to step up right this feels very much like all hands on
176deck and so i know that we're all really passionate about robust community engagement and authentic engagement but you know we all have to be partners in supporting our district in that process so thank you so much i am for one really appreciated just seeing the listing of the the comprehensive list of recruitment for spanish language events i know that you're still thinking over the details and um also agree with what director sinai said about including our preschool families especially ones that are we're trying to recruit for our twi program want to make sure that they feel plugged in and are part of you know the decision making processes for our district my i just wanted to clarify something i when we look at racial equity workshops and we only see two right obviously that that
177looks a little worrisome but if you look at all of the different community engagement opportunities and all of the different stakeholder groups i just want to kind of clarify for the public that they might look like two workshops but there's all these different ways that we're reaching out to these different stakeholder groups and so it's not the the outreach for that is not minimal and so i just wanted maybe you can help me just kind of clarify that publicly superintendent stevens because i think if you look at that slide and you only see those two workshops you know you're like well that's not enough for our original equity work yeah we um we'll have some interesting decisions to make about which programs we want to feature we know that if we attempted to represent every
178program in every school that we would wind up presenting probably for hours and so what we're thinking in these workshops is that we'll thoughtfully select two three maybe four examples uh invite the folks who are in you know sort of most connected and actually implementing that work to come do something like a mini lesson um be able to engage with families so that they can learn a little bit about that program and then pull away for both discussion and soliciting ideas both to potentially improve that program programs like it or to add some programming we're not quite sure how the mechanisms will work but we know that we want to select a few programs so that it feels digestible comprehensible accessible to the families who choose to attend great and then one last clarifying question
179i know that we have this new aapi parent group that's organizing it's comprised of both district staff and parents and i'm really excited by it and i really want to make sure that this new stakeholder group feels like they have an active voice in this process as well and so they'll be invited to these meetings as well correct they will be yeah and um you're referring to a group of parents and staff aapi parents and staff who have just recently sort of coalesced and have approached us looking for partnership opportunities it is really exciting and so i'd love to be able to expand conversations we're having with that group about things like aapi heritage month or ethnic studies to include feedback on our programs and on our budget wonderful thank you yeah thank you for
180raising that director vestav um where are we director miller hi um thank you so yeah that presentation was really good um it was great to see all the different events my only request would be that the workshops are advertised in a place where students have excessive easy accessibility to them as well um the you know e3 posts students don't really check that necessarily and so if there was i mean i know berkeley high as a bulletin um if there's just any sort of communication that can happen to make sure that information is placed where students are receiving it in their emails that'd be great as well be on dr stevens tick tock channel um all right vice president brown nobody's supposed to know about that don't make me laugh before i have to ask a
181question dr stevens on tick tock um anywho thank you uh dr stevens for for the presentation i have a a question and a comment um i'm really happy um that you highlighted that we're trying to make these uh meetings more accessible for our families and in the cry for um more accessibility around language a lot of families have been reaching out asking for more language support outside of english and spanish and so not to get to the nitty-gritty of of the process but um just from a logistical base will there be opportunities for um further translation in some of these meetings i don't know that we will have the capacity to do uh translation in the meetings um although it could be the case we we've got a ways to go as a district just
182to be able to offer sort of simultaneous translation survey services for english language meetings i don't know that we will be able to get there for these meetings although it's very much on my mind you can see our effort to create a spanish language only environment for our spanish-speaking families that is the second largest language group in the district the third largest language group in the district is arabic speaking families there will have about 65 arabic speaking families here in berkeley compared to about 500 spanish-speaking families and a far larger group of english-speaking families of course um and if that is the case i really appreciated director sinai's a suggestion about doing thought exchange or possibly using that x aspect of thought exchange or maybe even another platform that allows families to give their feedback
183in the language that is most comfortable to them that could then be translated um into english to be to be used by the district i'm just in an effort to make sure that it's accessible to all um so that's my question and my comment and my suggestion those are all great we're going to do everything we can to make these as accessible as we possibly can that's both creating you know sort of language exclusive groups but also really trying to make sure that content makes sense that there's not too much of it um the questions are real and that we're just really focusing in on dialogue um and giving lots of giving people opportunities to really express themselves um okay director babbitt and then director vasudev i think maybe with the last question i just
184wanted to highlight that um in that timeline towards the middle of may there will be more people who are vaccinated by then so it might be possible to pull a number of people who may want to do this joint group in person because we're all vaccinated and we can go back to the bta conference room under those guidelines that have been submitted and i think that would be very helpful and useful and a sign for the fall we are committed to going back in person all right um i think it makes sense given the number of people that are vaccinated and still getting vaccinated this is also my plug get vaccinated people thanks thank you um director russell f and then vice president brown very quick no okay director rossette you're the last one no
185are you oh i'm you thank you um my question is about the joint pact and dlac meeting superintendent siemens will the presentations the budget presentations be available in spanish and in different languages for the dlac participants because i know that's been a concern in the past and so i just wanted to know if you could clarify that yeah we um are planning to have um this evening's presentation translated and it won't be prepared by tomorrow night i will be attending dlac and pac tomorrow night and so we'll have an opportunity to walk both members of both committees um through this information and then respond directly to questions and can take questions in spanish tomorrow night if there are any and we will be translating these materials so that they can be accessible but i know
186that they won't be prepared by tomorrow night but for the future meetings like the may meeting for example could we get the materials prepared ahead of time just because i know that that group has explicitly expressed that they want to be able to ask thoughtful questions but if the information comes very last minute there yeah we'll do the best we can um it's often the case that we're sort of planning the day of our board meetings and so it just creates the sort of the turnaround challenge um and so now that we've got to this point we'll translate this one and we'll work as as best we can to have materials in advance so that we can have them translated as well and that will definitely be the case for these workshops where we'll have
187all of those materials translated for families great appreciate it all right um thank you so much okay thanks for that dr stevens um now we're going to move on to two action items that because director sinai works for lifelong medical she's going to recuse herself um on um item 13.1 can i have a motion i'll move this one marshall vice president brown your second second miller um ms chair is still with us uh director yes director babbitt yes director miller yes vice president brown yes yes and director sinai has recused yourself okay item 13.2 your motion for that one approve that one i'll move that one as well uh motion by vice president brown second i'll wait all night i'll second i'll say second playing director babbitt director miller yes vice president brown yes president
188alper yes and director sana recused herself from that one as well um all right thank you now we have um and i should have mentioned this before this is our last opportunity for um public comment um if you've managed to stick around for um for the meeting which we appreciate um again we had a smaller crowd tonight but we appreciate you coming out so if you want to speak please um please raise your hand now i'll give you a minute all right um i'm just doing the math on my head um okay we can do two minutes for these two vice president brown um one two three four five six okay we have six commenters um and we'll cap it at six two minutes each um nila rosen you're first followed by lindsay no felt
189hello yeah hello we can hear you neil go ahead oh great okay thank you um i as a as a parent of a high schooler i just wanted to uh make a correction on the data um that um brent stevens put forth which was that the families filled out that survey it was actually done by students so that was the only way that participation could happen was through student survey and student email so there are potentially a lot of families that don't know that their child did not enroll and did did not select that they wanted to come back and it was not parent or family oversight so i just want to say you're you're putting students and their education you know in 14 15 year old hands without asking the families um and these
190young people who've been out of school for a year are making that choice for themselves when we should be scaffolding and supporting them more and and doing everything we can to provide them with teacher support and and access and i i just it's a really important point who who is asked and why there's such a low participation rate because the students were asked not the family or not both um you had to have a berkeley.net uh email to respond so i just i wanna i wanna see us really embrace our teens like they're only being offered three hours in person that we we just need to do more like arts day like let's embrace our teens let's work together to give them more and get them back on campus provide them with services and all
191they need thank you so much for doing that thank you um thank you so much um lindsay no phelp followed by sylvia mendez parent dd maybe denise can you hear me yeah go ahead go ahead lindsay um i have a comment about budgets that's my new thing now and i want to um pile on on the accessibility portion of it acronyms are really hard for people to engage with dr stevens you pointed this out but i want to say that when something is on the schedule on the calendar even as lcap or dlab or ssap or bsep or you know it's so confusing um can we title the meetings something that people can understand and engage with instead of just an acronym meeting i also um director babbitt have the same questions where are these
192funds accounted for how do they interact with each other especially where are the covid found funds accounted for are they in the general fund or the elk hab we don't the community doesn't know and everybody wants a piece of that covered funding [Music] what i have to say is that we can't let the intention of the funds get lost they are to help our students learn to give our children access to their education and improve outcomes ameliorate the deficits that we've been dealing with not just through covid but historically so when i see presentations with business expenses and insurance expenses coming out of our covid funds it just feels like a grab it doesn't feel like it's for the benefit of our students and i'd like that to be kept in mind when we do
193all this community engagement that um let's not do sneaky stuff thank you thank you um silly mendez parent so the mendez's there you go okay now i'm yuri do you hear me yes we do go ahead hi i'm daniel and i'm um i have one question from my kids and one from me my children want to know if the burgers served for lunch could have veggies at least pickles and lettuce instead of being plain meat and bread now that's you that cannot grab veggies from the salad bar it might be a good time to enjoy the veggies on a regular basis directly inside the burgers on my size and i wanted to thank you for the presentation and discussion tonight i really appreciate the presentation about lcap and the discussion that followed i'm also grateful
194for the honesty about the covet impact on students whose intervention teacher was poor to teach i was wondering on a bigger picture how many elementary schools are able to keep at least some interventions and coordination of services and how many have to drop totally their teamwork my question is as some school had to drop completely their custom meetings and intervention i'm wondering if the unique private impact will be taken in consideration when identifying students for some summer learning and also when allocating budget to school sites for support teacher for 21-22 thank you thank you ms stefan um monty tablom followed by our last speaker who'll be ron levy you for uh taking my question again uh the question is to uh uh superintendent stevens you again reiterated the um your confidence that uh allowing the
195mous to expire will just make everything disappear and in august you'll restart a new school year as normal now can you explain assuming we are still an orange tier meaning the same health restrictions and guidelines apply how do you correlate these two are you seriously saying that even if we're in re orange tier in late august you'll be or mid august you'll be able to open a five full day school year if so why cannot you do it now aren't you basically telling us that this whole issue of uh hybrid is just politics and contracts and has nothing to do with health there's a logical inconsistency in your statement that you have to clarify to the community it would be nice if you could answer now director um president um opera you said in the
196past that you're not allowed to communicate or respond i don't think that's true you're actually allowed to respond to actually directly just respond to a question from the public thank you very much for taking my second question thank you we're actually not allowed to under the brown act to to to respond to um questions but but we can take the question and respond in other forums um mr levy you i've seen it happen even on your board um ron levy you have the last comment of the night thank you for um taking my second comment i appreciate it um i want to address two things that um the superintendent stevens discussed in his um presentation about back to school first presentation tonight the two things are the surveys and the second the communication with parents
197about fall 2021 and the skepticism that you seem to feel is unfounded so first the surveys they're biased in a lot of different ways right they intentionally pit distance learning versus hybrid in person never once not this entire year has busd asked parents the basic question if five days a week in person school were offered would you return to school at this time that isn't a commitment it's an intellectually honest question and your lack of asking it frames the survey in a way that's biased to getting the answers that you want to hear not the ones that people care to give it isn't just the way parents are thinking you know it's just it's just not imagine if you'd ask that question beginning last fall and then in january at the height of the pandemic
198and the lockdown and then each month after that and then right before spring break you would be tracking the pulse of the community and the community would be tracking it with you but you don't have any of that historic data because you left it out and that was by design second that also is a form of communication second we were joking all about tick tock and it was a funny joke but it kind of hits the mark you're sending out emails from superintendent brent brent stevens who's that i'm sorry but like you're representing berkeley unified school district right we should be sending text messages you have a system called remind that teachers can communicate directly with parents directly on their phone but we're not using it district-wide you sent out an email two weeks ago
199stating that you know that this was the plan for that but you know any english teacher in busd can point out that your statements are intentionally qualified so you know next time stop emailing people on friday night at march you know friday night at 9 00 okay and then people will listen to you thank you all right thank you everybody thank you for coming out and with that i will adjourn the meaning have a good night everybody