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 you can 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 9. once again when called upon you will be unmuted if you want to speak you should raise your hand now if you wait to raise your hand until the public comment period
002starts you will not get to speak and you will have to wait until the next public comment period the board president will call on our students first so if you are a student who wishes to speak please write student at the end of your name the board president will determine whether to set tonight's speaking time at one two or three minutes per speaker and on an individual basis 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 see vice president brown holding 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 you so thank you thank you so much and um
003i'm going to call the meeting to order we we began at 701 pm um ms charles can you please call the roll student director miles miller here director anna vasudev director laura babbitt here director julie sinai here vice president khadijah brown president and president president thank you um and let's let's approve the agenda too we're gonna um we're going to pull um item 11.5 from the consent calendar and put it on the action calendar at the end of the meeting this is the job description for the sustainability coordinator um the board member wants to make a suggested revision to that description so we'll just we'll pull that for action and vote on it at the end of the meeting are there any other changes to the agenda that anyone would like is there a motion
004to approve the agenda with item 11.5 pulled for action i'll move it version by director cyanide director miller yes director vasudev yes director babbitt yes director of simone yes vice president brown yes president yes okay um and vice president brown i'm going to turn it over to you to report on closed session i thank you president albert good evening everyone this is the report from closed session for item 3.1.1 the board heard an update and provided direction for item 3.2 the board heard an update for item 3. 1.3 the board heard an update and for item 3.1.4 the board also heard an update thank you thank you vice president brown um who got a call telling her that her report from close section was excellent um i'm going to work we're about to do um
005public comment although i want to make a few comments first this is that this is the time to raise your hand if you'd like to make a public comment because the number of people have raised their hands we're going to limit the public comment to one minute each so if you can start planning your comments to not exceed one minute that will make sure that we get as many people as possible to speak in the time allotted and we'll and we'll begin public comment in a in a moment i wanted to first take a moment right now um to acknowledge both the killing of eight people six of whom were women of asian descent in atlanta last week um and acknowledge how that tragedy has affected members of the asian american pacific islander community here
006in berkeley and um want to thank my colleagues in advance for indulging me a few comments at the outset of our meeting um this attack was the most recent result of the most recent instance of this country's long history of white supremacist violence violence that has been inflicted on asian people in this country including by way of the chinese exclusion act of 1882 through the internment of japanese americans in the 1940s and abroad in the u.s wars in vietnam korea the invasion of cambodia in the philippines the violence the violence and the racist rhetoric has been exacerbated in recent years as our own president our own former president relied on the chinese exclusion act and in cases like korematsu to support the arguments he advanced in trump versus hawaii the travel ban cases in the
007supreme court and especially this past year when crimes against aapi people have increased 150 this attack also brings to light this country's treatment of immigrants migrant workers poor people sex workers and of women it's impossible to understand what happened in atlanta without acknowledging the ways in which the many facets of the victim's identities intersect rebecca solman writes in her book hope in the dark that quote hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch feeling lucky it is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency hope should shove you out the door because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and the marginal to that end in
008the immediate wake of the shootings in atlanta director vasudev began working with aapi leaders in the region to draft and put on our agenda a resolution condemning the violence in atlanta putting it into historical context and calling on the district and our community to come together in support of our asian pacific islander families and staff dr stevens director vasudev and i are meeting with leaders of the aapi community in the district next week and we are all looking forward to learning about how we in the district can do more to support our aapi families students and staff i want to urge you to read the resolution on our agenda tonight which discusses the history of scapegoating of and violence toward asian american pacific islanders in the united states that i mentioned before and also takes
009on the myth that aapi members of the community do not experience oppression and are not impacted by white supremacy my hope is that we can can all of us in the busd community commit ourselves to learning about the history of violence against aapi people in this country and here in the bay area so that we might emerge from this particular moment of great pain with a better understanding of the racism that aapi members of our community live with every day our participation in perpetuating that racism and a renewed commitment to the listening learning and teaching that bring about real change i want to close these remarks with the words of my friend jenny wong our city auditor who wrote a piece in j weekly about growing up as the child of working-class asian immigrants and
010in it she writes about the violence she and her family endured and how due to their immigration status they were forced to endure that violence silently jenny urges us to quote stand with us against asian anti-asian racism help create space for asian americans to share our stories and elevate them when we do through the continued sharing and understanding of the asian american experience we can work to process our collective trauma combat the hate and move in solidarity towards a more compassionate and equitable world please know that we on the board and in district leadership are committed to doing just that and thank you for indulging me with those comments i want to welcome everyone to tonight's meeting we're looking forward to hearing public comment i want to again ask you to raise your hand now
011if you'd like to speak after we start public comment if you raise your hand you'll be able to speak but we'll have to wait until the end of the meeting at our extended public comment period and we will limit public comment to one minute um tonight we have one primary discussion item on the agenda which is the reopening of our schools and i hope that everyone can stay for the discussion hear the superintendent's presentation and the board's comments and questions this is a very exciting and extremely busy few weeks as we have been welcoming students back on campus at all grades over the past few weeks and we will see our youngest students back five days a week starting on monday there's still a lot of moving parts and and i know there's still unanswered
012questions and dr stevens will discuss them as best you can during the presentation tonight we will also be discussing the fall and we hope to make clear tonight the board's expectation and direction that we will be open for normal business in the fall of 2021 all grades preschool to 12 full day five days a week in person in other words our normal bell schedule the one we used last year and the one we never imagined we would be deviating so dramatically from if needed we will have a distance learning program as well but our hope is that providing clarity about our commitment to returning to full-time in-person five days a week of instruction at all grades in the fall will provide some welcome and certainty some welcome certainty for families so again with those opening
013comments thank you for being here please stay if you can for the superintendent's presentation and discussion um and with that um we will move to public comment again as ms chaires noted vice president brown will be the time keeper i mean we'll let you know when you have 15 seconds left please wrap up your comments when when you see her holding up the sign that says time's up um so that we can have as many of you who would like to speak um speak um all right so um again if you now it's time to raise your hand the last speaker we have is going to be neela rosen um i know again you all in the audience can't see what we can see which is the list of speakers but neila rosen will be
014the last speaker and anybody who raises their hand after her will be able to speak at the end of the meeting but the first speaker is sarah bowles followed by leah katz miss balls i'm calling for ty alper to resign after his comments last board meeting he said that he's aligned with teachers not families alper has violated his oath of office he swore to represent the electorate and uphold the constitution not bft california is clear students of all ages should be on campus to the maximum extent possible now after a year you are out of excuses to open schools five days per week k to 12. public health says it's necessary teachers are vaccinated the majority of families want to return three feet of distancing is now merely a suggestion and you've got the money
015to do it safely you just lack will tamil pay union did a 180 this week and announced full-time for its 5 000 high school kids april 13th your failure to anticipate and rapidly respond to changing conditions that prioritize kids is a failure to lead it means you're no longer fit to serve the public thank you thank you miss katz uh leah katz followed by liza lutzker fantastic hi can you hear me yep go ahead great thank you good evening my name is leah katz and i'm both the sylvia mendez parent and long-time berkeley high special education teacher and case manager i'm speaking tonight as a proponent of a hybrid schedule for this spring that maintains our wednesday equity groups this time is a powerful tool for increasing access for all students who struggle whether they
016return in person or stay in distance learning this spring wednesdays will be the only opportunity for small group help for students who remain in distance learning if we remove the equity groups we are disincentivizing the distance learning option which is a terrible position to put some families in either they take advantage of the additional time of teachers and attend in person or they remain in distance learning and lose access that their peers receive this isn't fair to families for whom distance learning is their only option this includes my students who have been taking care of siblings families who can't send their students back for health and safety reasons yet and families whose current situation doesn't allow for travel back and forth as a case manager i and many of my colleagues have pushed in with
017students during their wednesday support classes we've participated whoa in desmos and note-taking activities which help us gauge our students learning equal access to educator support is essential for us we must serve all our kids thank you thank you so much um liza lutzker followed by lindsay can you hear me good evening board um so i want to speak quickly on two items number one i would just like to say in the sustainability position in terms of sustainability our major source of greenhouse gas emissions in this city are 60 from transportation and there's very little that's called out in the sustainability plan around transportation and specifically there needs to be call out for the safe routes to school program district-wide that's critical especially as just this week one of our parents of a busg child was
018hit with her child who wasn't hurt but saw the whole thing this is critical we protect our children number two i've been emailing you comments about distance learning and what we really really need to support this in an equitable way families were told that they would be given a choice about distance learning or staying in person and what is happening now is that the choice is being becoming basically a forced option to go in person unless you are saying you have incredibly extenuating circumstances your the schools are not uh students are not receiving teachers at sylvia mendez where i'm a parent we have a brand new teacher coming in who is not part of the community there is a serious equitable issue here and i encourage you to actually support the distance learning choice thank
019you thank you lindsay followed by kara eisenberg hi thank you so much and i want to also um thank you for the clarity that you provided um at the beginning of the meeting um regarding the fall of 2021 and i'm wondering if the board can please put out a statement in writing to that effect um and and and thank you so much for that clarity regarding um whether middle and high schools can open now i just want to state that under the recent revision of cdc and cdph guidelines it seems like logistics aside it would be safe to open middle and high schools now and in fact i think what's really great is under current guidelines we need basically three things to stay safe masks three feet of space and the ability to open windows
020now that so many in our community have been vaccinated and the good news is those three things are things that we can expect our children to do if the restrictions that we need to be observing are too draconian it will be too difficult for children um to observe them so i just wanted to say i think we're in a really great position safety wise to come back full time and we should do that as soon as possible thank you at all grade levels thank you thank you so much lindsay next we have kare eisenberg followed by paul haynesworth hi there can you all hear me hi my name is kara eisenberg and i'm the literacy coach of bam i'm also a parent of a student in berkeley i wanted to tell you all about the
021experiences of teachers across the district to prepare to reopen schools in person the process of staffing both in-person and distance learning classrooms has brought undue stress chaos and inequalities among schools in this past week my personal experience was volunteering to teach in person then yesterday being moved into a distance learning teaching position instead when they when the class was closed but things keep changing i may have an email right now saying i am being moved again why because the district underprepared and under estimated the needs for staffing to fill positions this could have been avoided with better planning almost all elementary school tsas have been reassigned to teaching positions some voluntarily but many involuntarily and most in the last 24 to 48 hours okay i don't have much more time but at my own school
022site bam classrooms were consolidated in the last two days and this is not unique to bam i want to say to the board and to the superintendent that elementary teachers are happy and excited to get back into the classroom buildings and see students in person we teachers continuing in distance learning want to support growth and learning and well-being of students while they remain at home but this chaos around reopening has created more trauma on top of but what has already been a traumatic year this didn't need to happen we can do better by students teachers and families thank you miss eisenberg um paul haynesworth followed by rainbow rubin mr alpert tonight i respectfully call for your resignation from the school board we elected you to represent the best interests of our children clearly our children's
023interests are not best served by keeping our schools closed as our board president you are our chief elected leader through this crisis berkeley has had three opportunities to re open at school to re in-person instruction all three times you failed now entering our second year of school closures you have still have no plan to reopen high school or middle schools for the remainder of the year schools must open safely now parents have no reason to trust you with august either there are challenges there and voices in the community pushing to keep usd closed or in hybrid you caved before and we have no reason to believe you won't cave in august your job is to choose our children first and ask yourself what is best for them one year in your results speak for yourself
024i urge you to resign now thank you thank you rainbow reuben followed by um rudy sivane sorry hi there can you hear me okay yeah go ahead good evening everyone i'm just asking you tonight to please consider updating the mou with teachers to remove the item about installing ionizers in the classrooms ionizers should not be used in our classrooms they do not remove viral particles and they do increase ozone which is a toxic gas that irritates the respiratory system in order to best protect teachers and children's respiratory health during reopening ionic ionizers should not be found in our schools hepa and merv 13 filters are the appropriate and evidence-based technologies that can protect us from respiratory agents nina goldman the city of berkeley's school and child care liaison has stated that berkeley public health shares
025your concerns about ionizers in classrooms and schools we have communicated these concerns to busd and hope the district is reconsidering their use given the possible dangers so i ask you why ionizers are being installed and i also ask that you please consider that they're unnecessary ineffective and potentially harmful please do not put them in our classrooms thank you um rudy followed by gladys stout mrs rainbow you're muted rainbow already went um go ahead rudy can you hear me yes okay thank you this is rudy's mom my name is val chipalone we want a commitment of five full days for middle and high school for those students who want to return in person now with all due respect i am calling for ty alper to resign after a year you are out of excuses to open
026schools five days per week k through 12. public health says it's necessary the majority of families want to return three feet of distancing is merely a suggestion you've got the money to do it safely you just lack the will a tamil pious union did a 180 this week and announced full time for its 5 000 high school kids as of april 13th your failure to rapidly anticipate and respond to changing conditions that prioritize kids is a failure to lead it means you are no longer fit to serve the public thank you thank you miss chipolon um gladys stop good evening to school board the superintendent and president thai albert for trying to find the balance of teachers and families i would like to thank you for sharing the data the results of the surveys last
027week transparency is important especially when we're looking in areas where inequities may present themselves it makes the case that a serious investment needs to be made to distance learning to maintain the commitment to equity and closing the achievement gap when looking at african-american latinx and socioeconomically disadvantaged students it's important for the community and the district to recognize this i'm also here to talk about sylvia mendez we've received the instructor list thankfully they are all bilingual that being said only one current classroom teacher is in distance learning the rest is made up of our substitute literary coach math resource teacher and a newbie usd hire while i am grateful that we have these gifted teachers i question if it aligns with the equity that the superintendent spoke of in the town halls and emails with one
028exception all our in-person students will have their current teachers dl students will not only have their current teachers but in most cases will not have a grade level teacher i ask that this will create a greater learning disparity many parents were worried and upset at our district learning town hall today we were told that the district sometimes makes promises they can't keep i'm asking if that's true was this just a promise that you were not able to keep thank you thanks very much missed out um deborah nelson followed by roberto santiago hi can you hear me yup hi i'm the parent of a 10th grader at berkeley high i urge you to reopen middle and high school for five full days you can do it safely and you can do it now new cdc guidelines
029adopted by both the state and the city allow for just three feet of distancing that means there's room for everyone cohorts are no longer required the cdc recommends cohorts only if community transmission is within a certain range we're no longer in that range crowded hallways are not a safety risk as superintendent steven's info session two days ago a panelist cited a study showing that as long as students wear masks passing periods do not lead to increased infections there are no more obstacles to safe reopening for five full days for all grades the only obstacle is you clinging to old plans that don't meet the current reality if you act now you can salvage some of the current school year thank you thank you miss nelson um roberto santiago followed by paz canales all right hello
030president alper board you and i disagree on some things but i call for you to not resign instead to keep listening to parents and putting investments into distance learning um what i'm asking for today is for continued intervention services for just distance learners my child's intervention services were determined during the iep but were provided provided by gen ed and are no longer being given for the rest of the year i find that unacceptable i call for the continued service that we've been getting it's been great we love it we want to keep it i also call for the district to release further disaggregated data on the return to school surveys i would like the district to acknowledge that many families were forced back due to unintended consequences of the reopening plan and to acknowledge that
031the initial 83 figure that was repeated several times was a lie i read one report that there may be two possible return dates but that hasn't been communicated officially so i'd like to get clarification on that and uh other than that please just keep working all we want is a fair shot without having to go out and write graffiti on buildings we're trying to do this the right way thank you thank you so much mr santiago paz canales good evening uh can people hear me yeah we can hear your past good evening my name is pass melendez canales and i'm here as a representative of latin latinos unidos berkeley we're here to express our support for the demands of the el parent community reflected in the elect community letter and especially the following three topics
032first we would like to ensure that the hiring of the consultant to rewrite the el master plan is done in conjunction with the community dlac and the district tsa overseeing eld programs which have been discussed in the original plan second we would like to see that the district commit general funds to support all el students and extend support to those who have been reclassified and not just rely on supplemental funds to meet this need third we need a commitment for funding of the twi program thank you for sharing the data of um elementary enrollment choice survey on march uh 19th and 20th uh transparency is important and in this case it helps to show inequities according to that data latinx students are 1.7 times more likely to then white students to stay in distance learning
033and african american students are 2.1 times more likely to stay in distance learning um there are disproportionate numbers of black and latinx elo and socioeconomically disadvantaged and special students remaining in business learning so resources need to go to distance learning to support the students and funds for learning loss need to be distributed appropriately according to this data thank you thank you so much miss melinda's kinase um next we have um mrs duncan harris followed by yvette folarka hello my name is monique duncan harris i am one of the teacher leaders of the math department at berkeley high i'm speaking this evening to advocate for the continuance of the wednesday equity groups that we have had as part of our distance learning schedule for the entire year thus far i am speaking for the entire department
034at berkeley high when i say that the wednesday time is extremely important and must continue for the remainder of the school year some of the reasons for this are that this time is where we are able to provide targeted support to a smaller group of students we are able to spend time talking with them and are able to have fun which is difficult within thai group when you are not seeing their faces and they don't really know each other students who we invite and who attend on wednesdays are students who do not typically participate verbally in the large class many of us have asked our students if they would attend in person these students overwhelmingly have said they will not for various reasons meaning we will be taking away one of their main sources of
035support lastly these are the students who need extra support i personally invite my students every week i select them based off of their performance for the days before their grades on assessments and work completion almost all the students i invite are either students of color have an iep a 504 or are currently in house students who need this structure i also want to add due to the time we'll be returning this is a structure that half our students will have gotten for the entire school year making the decision to change it extremely inequitable thank you thank you so much um yvette falarka followed by ron levy mr yvette fellarka i teach at martin luther king middle school and i'm speaking on behalf of the eon bam caucus there is no way that the middle schools
036in high schools should open full time if that happens there will be blood on the hands of this school board of the superintendent but also of the people in the community who are pushing to endanger children who are not vaccinated and put them in situations that will make leave them not if they will get coveted when they get covid and when they bring it home we know that you just look at michigan in the past four weeks the number of covid cases rose 105 percent among children ages 10 to 19. we cannot we've already thrown the whole last eight weeks of school into total disarray to pander to a layer of the community that has had the privilege to not be affected and as affected by this pandemic as others but it's not just black
037and latino and latino communities it's also poor communities who have been hit the hardest and it is absolutely imperative this whole reopening plan should be shut down because we've got to protect the students and their lives and their families thank you miss vodka um ron levy followed by jennifer can you hear me yep everything we aspire to about community and equity and busd is lost when the only thing that's equitable now is that everyone has had to live through busd's collective non-scientifically grounded fear-driven institutional failure together a rising tide lifts all boats but two hours of bailing water twice a week with a teacup does little when your ship is sinking relentlessly 24 7. busd is better than this there's no reason why our middle and high school kids cannot be in school five days
038a week except for quote unquote logistical issues kids needs access to full-time in-person school for social academic and mental health reasons the hybrid offering is an insult to every child and parents who lives in this community is far less than most communities in this country have had for many months with far fewer protective measures in place and it moves us no closer to resuming operations that make a real difference in children and parents lives five full days a week with real distance learning offering as well hopes and wishes for the fall are not a plan thank you jennifer followed by tanis santiago jennifer you're muted i like to address the idea witty and i'm going to throw out some terms like free and appropriate public education deprivation of free and appropriate public education and discrimination
039discriminate at the of the school district on the basis of age alone you're going down i am not calling for anyone's resignation because we're going to hold you accountable we're coming for you this is a violation of rights on a large scale and when you deprive a huge developmental need and continue to do so when you know other states and other school districts near us have successfully opened k through 12 without a rise in cases i know about arizona i know about minnesota instead of ringing your hands and talking about equity you could have been studying up and finding out what people did right you have not done so i am going to recommend we just go rise up do the class action lawsuit and force correct action we're coming for you i don't want
040you to quit because i want you to suffer the consequences of depriving a huge chunk of our students freeing up appropriate public education thank you thank you jennifer um next we have tanisa santiago followed by rosina karen hi my husband and i chose remaining in distance learning for our children along with lots of our fellow parents and caregivers at malcolm x specifically to make room safely for people who really need their children to return in person the way the district chose to dole out information to families in dribs and drabs with lots of take backs and avoidable clarifications if they had just been clear from the beginning during this decision-making process has been really frustrating and really disheartening so then is it any wonder that we're seeing really sharp racial and socioeconomic disparities in the
041decision-making process who trusts you and who doesn't and why so it was really encouraging to see data released around the different families decision to remain in distance learning or return in person thank you for this transparency it's a step toward equity but it's only a step and the rollout of information about distance teacher assignments isn't giving us a lot of confidence here i'm calling on all of you to take clear actionable steps to bring us closer to that equitable treatment thank you thank you rosina karen followed by stephanie shadow thank you president alfred can everyone hear me okay yeah right i want to start by thanking our very hard working board members i know that you're all a part of our community and have been working really hard throughout these very difficult times the word
042unprecedented has become overused but it really is and so i appreciate all of your efforts and your heart that you put into the work i also want to appreciate superintendent stevens who agreed by email to explore the possibility for creating a busd stipended position so that we could have post master's level counseling interns in our schools i am rosina karen i'm one of the middle school counselors i'm at longfellow middle school and all of our middle schools have the usd staff counselors and under typical conditions we are fully engaged in our schools and very busy supporting our students and their mental health needs as we learn more about the long-term impacts of this year of covet and distance learning we need to do everything we can to provide top quality counseling support for our students
043if we can add post-masters level interns to our district by creating a position for a stipend then that would give us more uh more resources and more experience in serving our students thank you very much thanks so much um miss karen um stephanie shout out followed by daniel f sorry go ahead my name is stephanie shoutel and i am a cast teacher um and cast wellness coordinator at berkeley high and i want to echo my colleagues leah katz and monique duncan harris and their comments earlier to urge the district to urge the board to continue to lift up and advocate and not do away with our current wednesday distance learning schedule wednesdays have become this year pretty much up there in the top like best parts of my week why because it allows critical more
044personalized support to those students who otherwise would only barely squeak by if if get by at all in terms of achieving success in my classes who comes to my wednesdays it's the quieter less academically confident students who have so many insights to share but rarely will share them among 25 plus students who many of whom they perceive to be smarter than they are on wednesdays they will come with their ideas they will come with their clarifying questions life updates and it's the difference between cameras on and seeing the latest hair color that a student has decided to choose um i have the benefit of teaching seniors now who i taught as sophomores um who i i can see and and i can support in a particular way and i see how important these wednesdays are
045and it's literally the difference for these kids between passing with the d which isn't really passing and passing with a b which is meeting standards i know my time's up last thing if we are truly going to offer equity and distance learning is a real option we need to not do away with our awesome wednesdays and understand that all students can be served on those days in the current plan thank you so much thank you um we have uh three more uh public commenters daniel f followed by mary lou watson and then our last public commenter will be nila rosen um and then we will have another public comment period at the end of the meeting um daniel f you're you're muted daniel uh okay can you hear me yep go ahead yeah thank you
046uh president stevens and dr superintendent stevens and president alper and thank you for making this time i am calling for ty albert to resign after your comments last week at the board meeting after your abject uh abdication of responsibility for students and after your failure to actually commit to your oath of office and supporting the students and and being there for a student after a year you are out of the thesis to open schools five days per week k-12 public health says it's necessary the majority of families want to return three feet of distancing is merely a suggestion you've got the money to do it safely you just lack the will mount ham union did a hunt a 180 this week and announced full time for its 5 000 high school student students april 13th
047your failure to rapidly anticipate and respond to changing conditions that prioritize kids and kids education is an abject failure to leave you are no longer fit to serve the office and i request you resign immediately thank you thank you um mary lou watson followed by nila rosen and then we'll move to our union and committee comments watson hello this is actually sam franklin using my wife's computer i don't have a screen i can rename i apologize hello there um i would like to start by saying ty i appreciate your opening comments about supporting the aapi community the importance of us doing that i was also reminded though of something that happened in a pcad meeting a number of years ago when a black father was talking about the welcoming schools curriculum for lgbtq families at
048the time and he didn't hold that against that community for all the support they were getting his question was when are we going to get that we the black community going to get that support and i was struck by the fact that when you were talking when we ask for the support after the harassment after time it's really a reactionary position and what we need to do and the board needs to take the lead on this is to create a welcoming everybody curriculum not just a welcoming families for the lgbtq community but welcoming black families and welcoming latino families and welcoming everybody so we can be proactive rather than reactive thank you thank you mr franco um uh nila rose miss rosen you're our last public speaker before the union and committee comments miss cyrus
049is miss charis mila rosen steve i assume you're here for union comment is that right yes okay so just hold on a minute okay can you hear me no go ahead yeah okay uh thank you um so um i'm a parent of uh two children who do not um get school on wednesdays so it's it's actually very heartening for me to hear um that the wonderful parts of wednesday um and i'm i'm super happy to hear that those have been going so successfully um i think that is a very good demonstration of of equity in our district but the bar is too low for everyone with four hours so i'm certainly willing to give up school one day four hours is too low i want to really encourage you don't continue to stroke fears really
050help to lift everyone up out of fear be the innovators and the positive problem solvers that you want our students to be don't hide behind it's too complex there are lots of solutions including live streaming that are extremely equitable um and i want to really encourage you to look to your colleagues in napa in san mateo and santa rosa and livermore who all serve diverse communities of students and who are all back in school and they are back in school for more than four hours we can do more we can do for our community and i want to encourage you again lead from a place of courage thank you so much thanks for hanging in there but fro with courage okay thank you um now we'll hear from our unions um i believe we have
051two recorded um comments uh one from bcce and one from bft but mr cons is here on behalf of local 21 so mr collins you have five minutes oh thank you board can everybody hear me yeah okay um so first i wanted to um say thanks to everybody in this district that's done so much amazing work in the last year it's been a very very frustrating and anxious year for everybody involved it's it's been something that none of us have ever seen in our lives before and you know the teachers at distance learning are teaching extra hours the principles maintenance custodial upper management the board um it and it's not it's stuff that's not always seen and so it needs to be said so thank you to everybody in this district that's made kept the
052wheels turning um secondly i wanted to um show support for two different positions that are coming to the board tonight for your approval the first is the the reimagined uh payroll benefits manager i think this is a great um efficiency in the department um it's a it's a very uh functional position and it's very doable um it's it's reasonable and it's sensible so i think you guys should approve that position um the second one is the sustainability plan uh program manager uh program coordinator sorry um so we we are there this is a the district has had so much activity going on with sustainability and things are only going to ramp up from here for the last two years the district has paid a consultant to do this job pretty much um and so we
053could do the right thing this is a good bold move it's always been a ultimate ultimate goal for the district it's in the annual plan to have a position like this and we're ready for it um so uh yeah so that's it thank you board thank you mr collins and thank you for your leadership in particular around sustainability you've been one of the driving forces for sustainability in the district and we really appreciate your service in that regard in addition to all your other responsibilities you're very welcome um let's now move to um mr hernandez frank hernandez who is the president of our classified union uh ms chairs do we have a uh comment from him yes i will be sharing my schooling momentarily okay good evening board members and superintendent students first i would
054like the board to help me acknowledge and thank those bcce members that continue to work in person since the school shutdown last march we are thinking approximately over 200 classified members who continue to leave their home and work through this pandemic office workers have kept the business of the usd operational from payroll to supporting administrators needs for distance learning classified staff and technology managing chromebooks hot spots and demands of shifting all of our students to online learning and platform and supporting all busd staff technical needs nutritional services who continue to work year-round to keep students fed distributing meals even though schools were closed and other classified staff who continue to go in person to their sites i want to give a huge shout out and thank you to our instructional aide and paraprofessionals eunice who
055also shifted their work to distance learning for the academic year we were also very much appreciated i would like to thank all bcce members for coming together to support reopening the schools i am pleased to announce that berkeley council of classified employees members have ratified the phase ii memorandum of understanding for the reopening of schools i'd like you to know that our negotiating team has worked diligently to reach the agreement for putting in place safety measures for a safe return to school for everyone as we enter the next phase of reopening it is important that all of buc know and adhere to the agreement of the memorandum of understanding certainly there will be challenges but if we all come together and with understanding that we are all here for our students lastly i would like
056to address agenda item 11.6 payroll benefits supervisor i need the board to understand the impact that this will make on bud employees i did some research and found that some of the surrounding school district districts there were there isn't one person who covers both departments for example alameda unified school district has a payroll supervisor and a benefits supervisor new haven has a payroll manager and a benefits manager oakland youth unified school district has a payroll supervisor and a risk um manager san leandro unified district as a payroll supervisor and a risk vital manager urge the district to hire a payroll supervisor and a supervisor for benefits in payroll alone there was a vlt member paid over eight thousand dollars there was also a bft member on leave overpaid by 25 000 the custodian paid over
057six thousand dollars there were over a dozen applicants for the payroll supervisor position that were turned away after the position had been posted at the last minute the district pulled it back which showed that it was not well thought out had they gone through with the original application process they would have had a payroll supervisor by now look at the fact that this was discussed with the board a month ago and there is still not a payroll supervisor or have the process start has started again more time wasted due to one position that never existed there was a lead accounting position created in 2019 brought to the board by the assistant superintendent there isn't anyone in that position to this day there was also a physical service manager created at the end of 2019 brought
058to the board by the assistant superintendent there isn't anyone in that position to this day how many lead and manager positions are going to um going to continue to create scene to those who are pushing for this position please take in account that previous payroll um supervisors were visually overwhelmed with just the payroll department and i'm afraid that we if we add the benefits department's department to their workload there will be a quick turnover to that position i'm sure that is not the goal of the district there are two major departments that need their own supervision thank you um thank you so much mr hernandez um for those comments and for your leadership i mean now we will hear from bft president matt meyer i believe right ms charis right okay main board members and
059dr stevens i'm matt meyer president of the berkeley federation of teachers i'd like to start tonight by recognizing the efforts of our educators throughout the district next monday we will welcome preschool and tk32 students back to in-person learning this would not be possible without all the moving parts working together to do the best for our berkeley students bft also wants to recognize families for their partnership over the last year we know it hasn't been easy the logistics that go into opening up our doors after having a year of learning online are tricky we knew that staffing would be a challenge but would like to recognize publicly what is happening now at most sites in negotiations the district said that subs would be provided for classrooms of students whose teachers would be staying in distance learning
060instead numerous teachers have been forced last minute in a change of job role this senate change has left every elementary school without intervention services for students many teachers who plan to teach in person are being forced into distance learning roles our members expected that they get to keep their own students in person which was a huge selling point of this plan many now find themselves in distance learning positions without their students because of last minute changes teachers who volunteered to be distance learning teachers knew this would happen but for many of our teachers they unexpectedly found out while setting up their classrooms that they would be dl teachers some classes are being combined making class sizes that are much larger than in a normal year 14 classes have been disbanded increased which results in at
061least 28 classes having major increases in students these teachers will not know anything about these students or have time to really integrate them into the classroom this is the biggest deal for our lowest grades where material preparation and cleaning is a major part of the job some k classes are increasing by close to 50 percent and are so big that we cannot be sure an ia a release teacher sped case manager or classroom volunteer can safely be in the room at the same time because of the full inclusion model these classes could end up with high numbers of students with moderate to severe disabilities without the classroom occupancy for them to get the support they need additionally the dl classes are maxed out it is not tenable to serve 25 kindergarten students that you've never
062met and not had time to meet their families before in a class they can't fit in on one screen and each one needs a lot of individual time to stay focused in a zoom lesson despite these challenges teachers are working hard to get their classrooms ready and in many cases making calls introducing themselves to new families our teachers are flexible and will make it work because they want to guarantee a smooth start for their families and students regardless of the rollout our teachers will be waiting for their students either over the computer or in person with open appropriately distanced arms while all this is happening bft is working hard on finalizing schedules for secondary schools that will begin after spring break our teachers hold equity front and center and want to make sure that no
063matter how the time is split up there is time to serve all of our students in the day this involves balance and trade-offs bft's current proposals reflect this balance we can't wait to support our students in person and for those that aren't coming back to campus over the computer we look forward to next year when there'll be time to plan for a full return to in-person instruction thank you mr meyer um okay now board committee comments um miss pastica for on behalf of the p l committee you have five minutes thank you good evening everyone my name is terry pastka and i'm here on behalf of the planning and oversight committee that's an advisory body comprised of representatives from parents and educators from every school in the district that makes recommendations to the school board
064on two special tax measures passed by berkeley voters that supplement district funding b sup and bera as you know bsap generates an additional 32 million for the district over the baseline property tax with the majority of those funds going towards supporting smaller class sizes and teaching and bera which recently passed last year is a measure that supports teacher and staff recruitment and retention i'm here tonight to provide an overview of the kinds of questions and comments the pno members asked of bsep and busd staff at last night's p o meeting so we started off with the superintendent providing a district budget overview that highlighted the additional 16 million in one-time state funds recently made available for coveted relief and a review of the numerous spending options that were being evaluated we also discussed what the
065various spending options were related to district priorities as outlined by the school board the general questions in this area involved given that given that most of the 16 million at least in this initial presentation looked like it was going to be spent on staffing and creating new programs but recognizing it's only one year funding there are questions around will the district then have to find additional funding next year to sustain these new positions and programs and if so what would be the ballpark of that amount and then also we were interested in learning about how this adding staff and new programmings in response to this one-time budget uh comports to this projected 9 million funding cliff that we've been hearing about for 2022 and 2023 due to the decline in student enrollment and then we
066also had some questions about um the piano as you all have heard me report on has been having ongoing discussions about how does the district assess effectiveness and success of the various programs that are funded and comments were asked um along uh the line of shouldn't there be a baseline review of the effectiveness and success of the various programs that we're currently funding before significant investments are made for uh current or new programs so then next we received an overview of given the infusion of state funding in the usual funding year the p o re reviewed several budgets that were under the high quality instruction budget along professional development programming evaluation classroom support and expanded course offerings and also reviewed additional budgets for student support associated with student achievement strategies and counseling it was quite
067a bit of information we were asked to review in a short period of time so we also talked about this information is going to be coming back to the p o before being asked to vote next month then in response to the p o questions continually about monitoring income and expenditures in the short term against making sure we make it to the end of the measure we looked at projections that highlighted that under current expected income and expenditures the b step measure would end on the positive side however significantly below fiscal goals and so we had a conversation around what was the process and decision making as to the timing and um when funding priorities were going to be reassessed to make sure appropriate funds were left in the measure and then we heard updates
068from the program manager for library music vapa and instructional technologies questions around here looked at what's being done to make sure individual teacher classroom libraries that have been decimated from distance learning are are replaced and it was highlighted that pta book fairs for individual schools have been very successful in the past in supporting individual teacher libraries for music and vapa the questions were focused on their fund balance and if it would last the rest of the measure the three years under their current spending and then as the close of the meeting came came to an end and good at the order there were some comments looking at wanting to see continued math support for latinx student body and generally edl students as well as encouraging the district to consider different kinds of metrics of evaluation
069outside traditional test scores and grades which traditionally benefit only one segment of the student population and then lastly there were questions and concerns about the shortfall in pta funding given that ptm funds often goes towards salary positions and uh what happens so salary positions if ptas don't meet their goals so thank you for this opportunity to give an update we covered a lot of material in a short period of time and uh we'll see you next meeting thanks so much mrs paskin thank you for your service on that committee leading that committee um okay next miss cyrus we have a recorded comment from our dlac district english learner advisory committee co-chairs rodriguez one of the two co-chairs for dilap this year tonight i'd like to report what's been discussing this year at villa we learned
070that the district has been interviewing potential consultant to work on the el master plan it was shared that it has difficult funding building welcome debate and currently there's a strong candidate that the district is considering this is a person not bilingual but we work closely with an assistant who is with a supported advocacy of latinos to needles at berkeley we will have the opportunity to hold conversation with the consultant and assistant as a part of a collaborative effort to make sure that this person is a good match for the needs of the community we believe that a collaborative process in this election is so important our families have waited so long to revise our el master plan choosing the person who will hold this work so closely is a process that needs to happen in
071collaborative with us and with the families believe me when i said that we are ready to partner with you in order to make sure that we are thoughtful in every step of of the way of rewriting the el master plan this is the meaning of family and parent engagement we are equal partners in this process and decision making not silent recipients again our families and community want to partner with you in this work we look forward to do this upcoming meeting also a culture for d-lag and another topic that we have been discussing is funding very plainly we need a district to commit dedicated funds to uplift our children not temporary funds or funds that are dependent on a number of students from a shrinking source but dedicated general funds to give access to education
072to language learners this is what is needed in order to ensure both programs and accountability to students we have two dedicated general funds the amount of support that our children receive is not enough and we see this clearly in our classification rates year after year and every year we observe and commend that the funds that are dedicated to support our students are not enough and every year sites report budget cuts even at sites that have success in the classification every student in our district who is learning english deserves to have the following specific and consistent support in developing english so that he or she can have access to their education regular communication to their family from the school on how the child is growing in english and how to support them a developed language a
073path towards their classification in six years or less a developed plan for the required four years after the classification that ensures academic success this plan should be shared and updated with families twice a year for that time dedicated district personnel more than one to oversee all of them we've had three joint meetings with back this year that have given a lot of things to rethink when we are considering the needs of students it also help us to see what our prior requests have been valid in requesting that funding be both increased and guaranteed in order to improve our eld brand in april we will meet the with back again and we will have the recommendation that reclassifier students be identified as a focal group in lta while we are required to keep an eye on
074reclassified students with our current funding practice reclassifier students do not get founded in el funds because they are no longer english learner in the state makes this requirement the district must make a plan to carry out which of course require funding and staff to do so as we have said in january for years dylan has requested that we dedicated more funding to eld programs across the elementary level so that every child gets the same opportunity to succeed by receiving the same amount of support from one school to the next by a specific and consistent support in developing english we can no longer rely on george a number to decide on funds to support services or program 20 students at one school may need more or less than 20 at on the other side but we
075continue to give schools the same budget year after year without considering the students themselves we argue that this is unjust and some children continue to get support five days a week while others only get support twice a week of course the outcome will be different for language learners language practice must be consistent now more than ever as we transition back into personal learning for some kids school is the only english language model they have finally d-lag as the district maintained funding for three wis students sites despite their proven success every year for the past eight years family turned out the board meetings giving testimonial about why the program means what it needs every position is needed to serve students and build community with families if we are district that offers this unique program with the
076unique needs and requirements resources that is working for kids we asked the district committee to be in a twi supported district by establishing the funding from reliable funding resource like general funds or district should use their practices as a model for the other sites again our goal is to make sure our students are growing and thriving in summary we want to restate that we look forward to connecting with the consultant as we requested that reliable funds be dedicated to both eld and twi programs we look forward to report more from the lab next month thank you very much um from our dlac co-chairs now we will um i don't believe there's any other committee comments so we'll move to board and superintendent comments um is there a board member who'd like to go first i
077can go first tonight dr miller thank you hi everyone thank you so much for coming out tonight's meeting i know there's a lot happening in the world and um first i want to take a second to address um the school board's new appointments to the berkeley youth commission um after me and um executive superintendent assistant the superintendent assistant um jessica we interviewed um two different candidates and appointed both of them the first is um ashabar gershwat who has demonstrated great leadership and youth and government has volunteered abroad to build homes for families and is also a writer for the berkeley high jacket her leadership she will bring great leadership to the youth commission as well as um nina thompson who has demonstrated leadership through her work in showing up for racial justice the justice education
078project and as a member of the harm education response organization both are incredible students so i had the pleasure to talk to and i think will do great work for the city of berkeley next i do want to talk about um i mean it's not recent we all know it's been going on for months the absolute hatred towards our api community here literally across the bay in san francisco trigger warning a woman was brutally attacked um like a couple days ago and we really need to step up check in with our community members and i want to take a second to um shout out this new student-led organization with berkeley high students in it called bay area aapi they are having a protest friday april 2nd at 2 30 p.m um it's a march starting
079at oakland city hall and they will be walking to lake merritt amphitheater and there will be a rally i'm guessing there will be speakers um again their instagram is bay area aapi um also they have a gofundme in their bio four resources for the protest and they've already reached their goal which means that any extra money will be going to asian-led organizations so please if you can check out their instagram and donate um we really just need to check in with each other and um yeah i really think there's a lot needs to be talked about hearing from comments about our business learning decisions and what we're doing right now so i can't wait for that discussion but i'll say it again that instagram is bay area aapi please donate to the co-fund me in
080their bio and show up for the protest on friday april 2nd 2 30 p.m it's a march starting at the oakland city hall and we'll end up at the lake mirror amphitheater where there will be a rally thank you so much director miller um and thank for your thank you for your efforts to um uh to interview the candidates for the youth commission and recommend those appointments to the board um director baba did you have did you just have your hand up yeah i'll go next okay great thank you thank you so much director miller you are just so amazing i wish we could keep you forever but i know you have to go on to college and greater things but come back have my seat one day um today in my comments i also
081wanted to um acknowledge um the work that is being done to stop asian hate um and to thank jennifer rose who put together a rally on sunday at martin luther king park i'm so grateful that i was able to attend and you can look on the berkeley side facebook page to see pictures from that rally the daily cow also did a very good article and write up on it and i was very inspired by all of the comments there especially again as a board member ty upper said earlier from our city auditor jenny wong um it was definitely moving so please check out those articles to find out more about it and the message the speech that i did was is posted on my facebook page and my biggest point was how do we stop
082asian hate and what is it that we need to do as a community to stop asian hate and so it boiled down for me was to be the light and to spread love so please check out that just a big quick four minute speech and hopefully will also inspire you and give you more ways in which we can stop hate asian hate by spreading love i also want to shout out the berkeley community safety coalition thank you for letting me know about the aapi youth rising rally um their announcement says let's show up for each other if you haven't already please take some time to learn about the sharp rise in violence against the asian community there is a virus there is a racism is a virus toolkit provided there is lab there is links
083to live data to inform you about this and you can find out this information at aapi youth rising on social media and then this sunday march 28th from 2 to 4 p.m at berkeley aquatic park people will be joining in solidarity with the aapi community and we're inviting all of our council members local bay area youth and other speakers who will be sharing their stories and this event is open and of course welcome to all so again sunday march 28th from 2 to 4 p.m meeting at the berkeley aquatic park next to the waterside workshops 84 boulevard drive and then from there they're going to be marching onto the san francisco bay pedestrian footbridge to hold up signs along the overpass so bring your masks double up bring your signs and love again you can
084find this information at aapi youth rising on all social medias next i'd like to announce that um healthy black families is having an emergency town hall meeting tomorrow march 25th from 5 to 7 pm on school reopening what we need to know i will put the tiny url in the chat hopefully everyone will see it but if not it is tinyurl.com backslash townhall s-t-e-p again this is healthy black families so it's definitely geared towards black families and i hope that many people will come and to join i will be a guest speaker for busd so will maria carriedo the busd early childhood education principal and katya hazen who's the principal of washington elementary school next it was a pleasure to see the facts disclosed that a majority of our families of all races socioeconomic status
085english as a first or second language and learning variances and our spit or sped families that they all want to return to in-person learning so thank you for letting the community know that this is a majority need or desire of our community i'll give more of my direct comments after i see the presentation tonight on distance learning but dr stevens i hope in your presentation that you can answer this question that i received from a parent which represents many parents questions and also parents of all demographics she says i wanted to check in and see if you have any update on getting more information from middle and high school why are we stuck on just two hours two days a week schools all over the bay are transitioning from hybrid to full-time learning after spring
086break our teachers are now fully vaccinated the transmission rates are low the cdc and the california department of public health have adjusted their recommendation and now require less distancing what is the hold up in berkeley i'm desperate to understand whether this is the union or what is the immovable object here honestly parent to parent we are suffering here this is bad for kids what can we do to push for a real reopening in earlier emails this parent also attached research that she put together for us and in that presentation it has albany comparing their in-person middle school hours and other surrounding communities highlights ranged from 10.25 hours in neighboring orenda to 14 hours in lakespur to 8.2 hours in mill valley where they are scheduled to where they are now scheduled to open middle school
087full-time for all students once teachers have been vaccinated in april it's hard to even articulate how upsetting it is or it was as a berkeley parent to see these numbers in print what is the justification for giving so much less time to berkeley kids than those in our surrounding communities so again hopefully the presentation tonight can answer these questions clearly finally in the upcoming weeks i will be announcing community meetings for the lcap plan because i do want a collaborative community plan proposal i know that our staff is now overwhelmed and even the director of special projects who leads the lcap plan is now becoming a distance learning principal so since i did this as a parent advocate who was deeply involved in all district committees and as a leader of parents of children of
088african descent i know that the stakeholder collaboration led to our nationally recognized plan this time i want to be diligent to ensure it includes successful implementation and comprehensive evaluation plans so thank you everyone for looking out for these meetings dr stevens i would also like to ask if we could come up with some kind of community calendar so that all of these things can be posted in one place we can put a disclaimer on things that aren't led by busd so people will know the different activities that are happening within our community i also understand that ophi now sometimes gets sent this information so that they can send out to everyone and people feel hurt when ofi says well we don't know if we can send this out or not so we can solve all
089of this with a community calendar that where people can post updates so people can know what's going on it can be their choice whether they participate or not and again for these lcap meeting plans email me at laurabet berkeley.net if you want to make sure that you receive this communication in the meantime so again thank you everyone for coming out tonight for all of your public comment and to our staff who are jumping leaps and bounds to make in-person learning work for our elementary school students and i'm hoping that before this is over we can definitely offer a better distance learning plan a remote learning plan hybrid learning plan whatever you want to call it in person plan for our middle and high school families thank you thank you um who's next coach vasudev sure
090thank you everyone for coming tonight and for your public comments i really appreciate you taking the time to join us at tonight's board meeting and i'm looking forward to our discussion tonight about reopening thank you to latinos the berkeley and the dlac committee members for your comments calling for a community-led process for the hiring of the el master plan consultant this work is important and i know that district staff will be reaching out to you to make sure you're a part of the selection process for the master plan consultant i also appreciate your comments asking the district to commit to better supporting all ell students including reclassified students and i look forward to partnering with you in these efforts i wanted to remind everyone that march 21st marked the first day of the commemorative period
091to recognize and teach about the contributions of chica next and philippine x labor leaders cesar chavez huerta larry it long and philip veracruz if you're not if you have not had a chance please check out the wonderful website the district staff created for the commemorative period which was sent to our entire busd community and last friday's letter from the superintendent schools are encouraged to host school-wide activities in the name of cesar chavez dolores huerta larry it young and philip and to develop community service events that create and strengthen the connections between school culture and local activism i recently had the pleasure of attending the latinx needles the berkeley high school meeting and to chat with berkeley high students about reopening it was a really rewarding experience for me i'd like to thank all the students
092that were there to share their thoughtful views on what you'd like to see in our reopening plans for the high schools i'd also like to take a moment tonight to recognize a special berkeley high junior charlene b wendia escoat who i have recently appointed to the city's youth commission charlene mentioned that she'd like to use this opportunity to speak up for her community so thank you charlene for your service i'd also like to use my board comments tonight to thank the asian american and pacific islander families who have written to us to stand in solidarity with you in denouncing hate crimes against our aapi community throughout this pandemic the violence on a national level against our aapi brothers and sisters has only increased as i have stated before in other board meetings this pandemic is
093both a pandemic of coba 19 and a pandemic of white supremacy the recent hate crimes in georgia reflect a disturbing reality of anti-asian hate that plagues our country to our aapi families please know that you're not alone in denouncing these painful and hurtful acts of violence towards your community i stand in solidarity with you and i'm proud to have worked with local aapi leaders in drafting a resolution for busd to denounce hate crimes and bigotry targeting asian americans and pacific islanders it's on the consent calendar for tonight this resolution calls on all community members and leaders to join us in condemning racist attacks against asian americans in all forms and renewing our commitment to speak out against such attacks to encourage the reporting of hate crimes and to defend and protect those targeted furthermore the
094rise of anti-aapi racism and violence that occurs every day also serves as an important reminder of the dire need for ethnic studies from k-12 grades because if we do not develop anti-racist and anti-racist consciousness for our youth white supremacy ideology will continue to persist and this violence will continue although the resolution is only a first step please know that i look forward to working with our aapi community to develop actionable solutions in support of our asian american and pacific islanders students families and staff members thank you everyone for joining us tonight thank you so much director vasudeva director sinai thank you i too want to thank everybody for showing up tonight um and for those of you who have shared your opinion with us i want to express my support and solidarity with our asian
095american pacific islander community our students family staff teachers our neighbors and our local businesses there's a long history of discrimination in this community and across the state in the country against the aapi community as described by president alper and the resolution that condemns violence and hate and stands in solidarity with our aapi community thank you director vasudeva for your leadership on that resolution and continuing to move that forward the recent attacks against the aapi community unfortunately are not new but have been elevated and alarming with the levels of violence as members of the school as a member of the school board and the berkeley community i stand together to end the hate and violence against the aapi community and communities of color and i'll work together to ensure a safe respectful and inclusive school environment
096and community thank you director babbitt for bringing up the rally on march 28th at aquatic park with the aapi youth rising i think we really need to to step up and stand up with our our young people and the community as a whole in this spirit of solidarity and unity i also want to address the emails i received expressing concern over the last week of the superintendent sharing the disaggregated data demographic data of families who have selected in-person or distance learning for their students sharing data is important for transparency and decision making to ignore the data is to let the majority rule without regard for the needs of the minority it's critical that we as a board have an understanding and a sensitivity to the needs of families that are disproportionately impacted by coven 19.
097yes the majority of our families are choosing to return to in-person school this is exciting and this is why we have worked so hard with our labor partners to get schools open and at the same time a higher percentage of our families of color our african-american our latinx in particular with 28 and 22 percent respectively and our students coming from low-income communities have a higher percent of families choosing distance learning these are the communities that have have that have experienced disproportionately the brunt of the covid19 pandemic the pandemic we've talked about has exacerbated long-standing health disparities a speaker tonight said that now that so many of us are vaccinated we should go back 18 of alameda county has been vaccinated 21 percent of berkeley adults have been vaccinated most of whom are 65 years old
098and older the latinx and african-american communities have higher infection rates hospitalization rates and death rates only nine percent of the county's latin next population is fully vaccinated 13 percent of the african-american community is fully vaccinated access continues to be a barrier there are significant represent there's a significant representation of essential workers who are unable to work from home who risk losing their job and their income if they get sick and there's many folks who still live in multi-generational households i am thoroughly supportive of opening our schools and providing as much in-person learning to our students as we can additionally the data demonstrates the importance of the board and school administrators staying committed to ensuring a robust and high quality distance learning program for our students and families it's not an either or it's a both
099and and in the spirit of my earlier comments of standing in support of our families and our communities of color i urge all of our families our teachers and our staff to respect the difficult choices that everybody is making right now our data is not being presented to so divisions it is to inform our decision making and i appreciate everybody's efforts and the work that we're doing in this extremely difficult time so thank you thanks so much director sinai vice president brown thank you dr president alper and thank you director cyanide for for your comments this evening they really resonated with me and i hope they resonate in the hearts of our community members thank you so much for saying that um good evening everyone short comments tonight just a huge appreciation to all of
100you who came out and spoke um to us and who have been emailing us um on a continuous basis regarding um school reopening so thank you so much for for your comments this evening um i share the sentiments of my board colleagues and sending my heart out to the apa api and the aapi community and the recent events of hatred racism and violence that have been shown recently but also historically i would like to give an appreciation to director vasudev for your work on the resolution that all of us were happy to approve and show our solidarity to in addition i would like to also thank director vasudev president alper and superintendent stevens who will continue to lead the work on this i would like to thank sam frankel for his public comments this evening
101pushing us to create communities that are not just inclusive but also welcoming through the vehicle of curriculum of culturally responsive curriculum um and i would also like to thank director babbitt for your comments around ophie um week after week we hear about how ophea has been the bridge for communication and for resources for our families especially the families of our most vulnerable learners and let me remind you when we talk about ophi we are talking about an office or a department of a very small few as we position ourselves to serve our community better with school reopening we must prioritize the expansion of this department in response to the needs of our families who have said week after week opie makes the difference for them finally i would like to thank president albert publicly who
102doesn't get enough credit for the ways that he shows that um not just in meetings here with the school board but also with the city um and prioritizing that we need to reopen our schools he said he said that message over and over again this is not an opportunity to defend you but to publicly thank you um and tell you i do not want you to quit because then the responsibility no i'm kidding i don't want you to quit but you are doing a really wonderful job and continue to lead us as we reopen our schools and my hope is that our community will continue to work with us as we try to reopen our schools as quickly and most importantly as safely as possible thank you thank you vice president brown i appreciate that
103um i made comments earlier so i will turn it over to our superintendent now thank you very much president elper um i'd like to begin this evening first by extending condolences on behalf of all of berkeley unified school district to the family of mr ken hunter kenny as he was known as a long time employee at washington elementary school he's also a graduate of berkeley unified school district he was an attendee at columbus elementary martin luther king and was also at berkeley high school only a few years ago mr hunter earned the outstanding educator award in 2018. he is succeeded by four children and we send out our heartfelt condolences to all of you and mr hunter's extended community extended community and family and then i also want to offer my personal sympathy both the
104katya hazen and all of the folks in washington community who right now are mourning his loss his passing is a reminder that berkeley unified school district is an organization made up of deeply caring people human beings who commit themselves to serving our community serving children he was one outstanding example among so many in our community who are committed to serving our families so please know both the family of ken hunter and washington school community that our hearts are with you i also want to stand in solidarity with all of the members of the board and members of our aapi community as we flatly condemn both the rise in violence that we're witnessing most recently but the long-standing violence and bias experienced by members of this community this evening i'm very proud of all the members
105of the board of education especially i'm grateful for the leadership of director vasudev for bringing forward a resolution that both calls on the district to both affirm its commitment to inclusion for all students but to deepen its commitment particularly to the aapi community here in berkeley this particular leadership act in my view is consistent with a long standing trajectory pattern of leadership by this board and by berkeley unified school district to stand in solidarity with communities of color and with marginalized communities generally just in the last year we've seen a number of acts of leadership by this board including the black lives matter resolution passing a plan to identify and root out disproportion and identification in special education services ongoing efforts by the newly renamed office of civil rights to provide proactive training to all
106of our employees in a number of critical issues related to equity the transgender and gender non-conforming students resolution which we continue to work on and then an unflinching commitment to try and illuminate both differences and shortcomings in our district through the use of data as we saw most recently in a commitment to publish data about family enrollment selection but as we've shown over and over again data both about the strengths and shortcomings of our collective efforts ultimately this resolution is about safety it's about inclusion it's about respect for all these are the long-standing values in the district but this is a moment to redouble our commitment and our efforts towards those values i'd like to offer the community an update about the state assessment in the middle of all of these sort of difficult discussions
107that we're engaged in as a community this week the state of california has made announcements about the state test what is known as the sba or casp assessment for this year the state is allowing districts some level of flexibility in assessment practices rather than giving the state test districts will be able to select from a number of local measures provided that they are standards aligned and that they're given in a uniform way we appreciate leadership at the state level to make what i think is a very necessary decision to acknowledge the very difficult circumstances taking place in all of our districts in the state of california we appreciate the flexibility and we'll share more in the coming weeks about exactly the ways in which berkeley unified will meet this particular requirement i also hope that
108the berkeley community is aware of the budget building process that is now taking place this is at this stage taking place mainly in the form of advisory committees but we ask that members of the community be on the lookout for invitations to offer your feedback about the development of the 2021-22 budget this is an interesting budget year and that the state and federal governments have made available to us a large amount of one-time funding to support a whole variety of needs including school reopening but these funds are also meant to wrap our arms collectively around this generation of young people who have experienced an unprecedented disruption in their learning we'll be seeking feedback from the community through a series of town hall and other events intended to sort of solicit the best possible thinking about
109the ways that we can support our young people not only as they transition into in-person learning but over the next 12 18 even 24 months of their learning i encourage members of the berkeley community to check out several webinars that the district has hosted over the last two nights on monday we were very grateful to members of the ucsf cares team who provided an outstanding set of resources and information for all community members about the ongoing need for layered health practices taking place in our schools as we return to in-person learning they reiterated for us the importance of a number of these practices why layering these practices is important and why at this moment even in the presence of now more and more of a vaccine availability that we must not as a community let
110down our guard the video recording of that particular presentation is now available on our website and we hope that members of the community who are interested in questions about school transmission safety practices and then particularly health disparities check out this particular presentation on tuesday evening our facilities department along with executive director john calise hosted another health related webinar for our community this particular webinar focused in on facilities preparation mr khalis was able to walk through a number of the various strategies that the district is implementing in anticipation of a return to in-person learning this includes widespread upgrades and ventilation systems as well as the purchase of hepa air filters and for folks who are interested as well there is a lot of very detailed and technical information about the benefits of the ionization as one
111of a number of strategies to be installed in our classrooms in just a few minutes as we move into the discussion item this evening i plan to share a little bit more about the family enrollment data i also plan to share fairly detailed data about exactly what's happening on school set staffing all of this data illuminates that we are a community of many needs there is no single dominant perspective there is no single dominant set of needs and i respect very much that both my colleagues and senior administration as well as board leaders have been wrestling in earnest with the many needs being expressed by our community as we hear from our community about a variety of economic health related needs education needs we will continue to work in the best best way we can
112to maximize all of our available resources to meet as many of these needs as we possibly can as you see us sort of working through complex details please know that we are really taking seriously the information that we have about the broad variety of needs that are that we're encountering here you'll also hear in the board discussion a very strong statement about the fall of 2021 about next school year about how we do anticipate uh that we will be returning to five full days of instruction across all levels in the way in which we intend to do that please know that we do have many challenges that we're working through this week and next week as we try to reorganize in an unprecedented way this entire district to be able to provide services in ways
113that meet all of the needs of our family i'm looking forward to sharing this information i'm looking forward to the questions and comments of the board and then hope that community members will stay engaged with us to offer their perspectives their commentary and their best thinking we really do depend on all of this feedback as we try to make the very best decisions we can on behalf of all of our families so with that president elper i'll turn it back to you and appreciate the opportunity to give some comments thanks so much okay now move to the consent calendar is there a motion to prove the consent calendar i'll move to approve the consent calendar is there a second a second second by director babbitt thank you uh miss chaires director miller yes director vasudev
114yes director babbitt yes director sinai yes vice president brown president helper yes thank you miss terrace all right now we'll move to our first discussion item which is school reopening so i'll turn it back over to you dr stevens thank you very much so so what i hope to be able to do this evening is provide a fair amount of detailed information about exactly what's happening as we reopen our schools across the district elementary families will find new information in this presentation about how we're approaching staffing both in the distance learning program as well as our in-person program and there's been a lot of changes taking place in the district as we knew there would be when we committed to reorganizing the district to try to maximize the instructional opportunities of both families in person
115and families in distance learning this evening i'm going to be a little bit more general in my comments about the high school level and that is because we are i think in the sort of final paragraphs of inking agreement with our labor partners about exactly what high school and middle school learning will look like i will return again to the the theme of cobit safety in our schools sort of hitting on a number of the sort of elements of our layered mitigation strategies as a reminder to folks as we reopen that all of these strategies are important and will be in place and then would i like to conclude tonight's discussion by asking for direction from the board of education about the fall of 2021 it was just on friday of last week that the
116cdc modified its social distancing guidelines for schools to emphasize a distance of three to six feet on saturday only a day later cdph the california department of public health sort of followed suit and modified its own guidance and the city of berkeley did the same thing for folks who are not following along closely all of these health organizations are now recommending that there be a minimum of three feet between students student chairs and classrooms they continue to recommend the teacher and staff desks remain at least six feet away from one another and they emphasize as we already know the importance of mask adherence at high levels that is that many members of the community are wearing masks and then they also emphasize the importance of six feet of distancing at times when students and staff
117are not masked because of for example at lunch time we continue to remain on track with our reopening timeline those dates are listed here they include in a way that excites all of us on march 29th just this coming monday a return of students to our preschool settings transitional kindergarten all the way up to grade two right after spring break on april 12th we'll experience a much larger series of reopenings this is grades three through five in our middle school grades our ninth grade at berkeley high school is where as well as btech and bis and then finally on april 19th grades 10 through 12 at berkeley high school to return to spring break which is now only a week and a half away we continue to strongly advise family and staff not to travel
118in keeping with current recommendations from health authorities as we prepare for this sort of major transition in the way we're delivering instruction uh there are a number of campus preparation days taking place um these campus preparation days are a little bit different according to the level according to elementary middle or high school and i'd like to offer a quick review of what's taking place in preparation of the shift to in-person learning so in general on each of the days that i'm signaling staff at these levels will be shifting to a wednesday distance learning schedule that distance learning schedule does feature synchronous zoom instruction albeit more limited and the reason for this is to give our education all of our classified staff an opportunity to be on campus to participate in and complete important health trainings
119to become familiar and actually master health protocols on each of our campuses and then very importantly to set up their classrooms in keeping with all of the guidance families uh at the end of early ed level all the way up to grade five are experiencing these transition days in fact as we speak they took place yesterday wednesday thursday and friday of this week that's march 23rd through the 26th and if you've been wondering why there is a sort of reduction in distance learning zoom sessions this week it is precisely because of this transition period middle school is a little bit different today in fact and then again next wednesday instruction consists only of the 915 advisory class but all of our small group supports are canceled again this gives opportunities for folks on campus to
120get themselves set up as well on monday march 29th the morning advisory class will be canceled and then finally on april 1st and on april 2nd those two days will consist only of the advisory class at 9 15. at the high school the preparation time is somewhat more limited that will consist of two wednesdays in which small group instruction will not be taking place that's wednesday march 31st and then again after spring break on wednesday april 14th we really do appreciate the patience of the community as we've needed to shift the attention of all of our teachers and classified staff to the physical preparation of our campus spaces and we do all of this to be sure that we are ready and fully prepared to implement the health protocols we're required to once we come
121back on campus let's now have a look at elementary schools and i'd like to sort of offer some information about the distance learning program and i now distinguish this sort of from the distance learning experience that most folks have experienced over the course of this year in that we're now talking about roughly 18 percent of our families who are in a specific distance learning program just last night at about 8 o'clock families who had selected the distance learning program for a whole variety of very legitimate reasons uh received a letter from administrator michelle sinclair michelle sinclair is a former craigmont principal she's also the director of special state and federal projects and she'll be serving in effect as our distance learning principle from now through the remainder of the year we're really grateful to ms
122sinclair for her leadership and her willingness to step up and add this large responsibility to our already crowded plate of duties in this letter families were advised of who their distance learning teacher will be the large majority of our distance learning families did receive a new teaching assignment we understood very well that this would be the implications of moving in this direction it had the benefit of both offering additional time to distance learning teachers on zoom as well as additional on-campus learning and it does come for these families with a change in their classroom teacher and we ask all of our members all the members of our community to recognize that there are many sacrifices taking place across the district in order to accomplish this reorganization on the right of this slide you can see
123the revised distance learning schedule that now includes increased time with the teacher this is a full distance learning day that begins at nine o'clock and concludes after two o'clock in the afternoon i'd like to provide some very detailed very transparent information about what's going on with our staffing right now essentially what has happened is that we have needed to select teachers for distance learning as well as teachers for in-class learning this process has both included a solicitation of volunteer teachers those who wish to teach in the distance learning program and then to ensure that there's adequate staffing in both distance learning and in person has included an ask by our of our teachers on special assignments if they would be willing to teach in one or the other of the two programs and in seven
124cases as you can see it's involved involuntary transfers of our teachers on special assignments so let's pick apart this data a little bit more i'd like to offer a few explanations so among the classroom teachers who are now in the distance learning program 17 of them have moved over and are teaching in the same grade one of those teachers is now assigned to a new grade and that person is a volunteer one of our certificated staff members who holds a teaching credential volunteered to move over and become a classroom teacher we're very grateful for her that she stepped up and answered the community's need thank you for doing that we have one substitute teacher who is covering a class in person that's at ruth acti elementary school we appreciate her stepping forward among our teachers
125on special assignments these are literacy coaches and rti teachers five of those staff members stepped forward on a voluntary basis to become classroom teachers for the rest of the year and seven teachers we had to ask to move from their current positions into classroom positions to all of these tsas i want to say both thank you we acknowledge with a lot of gratitude um that that you're making a sacrifice to be able to serve the community in this way at this moment and then want to acknowledge that our plan for staffing which hinged on what we understood to be fairly certain data about the availability of substitutes it was really dramatically altered over the last two weeks when we learned that folks who had previously said subs that we had previously said they would work
126were in fact sort of not able to sort of sign on the dotted line by the time we've we finally asked them to so this has caused in the last week a number of um unanticipated shifts which accounts for some of the rushed communication to our staff and the rush communication to our families we apologize for this this work is highly complicated and we recognize that we want to continue to do the very best job that we can to communicate transparently with all of our families as we organize this really unprecedented and very complicated shift another method that we have had to employ in order to fully staff our classes is to combine elementary classes when teachers left to move into the distance learning program where we did have some capacity in other classrooms we
127were moving students essentially combining classes we have done this in 13 instances and the total the 13 instances across all of our roughly 250 elementary classrooms the total number of new positions that we've created for this distance learning program serving now about 770 students is 31. and just to give you some sense of proportion this is roughly equivalent to building two new elementary schools in the middle of the school year that is the staff of about two elementary schools combined um this week part of the work that teachers are doing who serve students in different ways these are non-classroom teachers is to redesign their service schedule among the folks who are very busy this week rewriting schedules include special education teachers our rti teachers and literacy coaches those who are not assigned to be classroom
128teachers el teachers eld teachers and all of our specialists as well are needing to rewrite their service schedule these teachers are becoming in the true sense of the word hybrid teachers they will be both serving distance learning students and serving the students who are now on campus last week we hosted a very special town hall for special education families and in that town hall we shared this information that to the maximum extent possible special education teachers and all related service providers will schedule all of their services in keeping with the goals and service minutes identified in the iep to the maximum extent possible any differences that we experience in these service levels will be documented in the distance learning plan that we will continue to use to sort of account for the differences between the
129iep and our ability to provide those services let's now focus on in-person learning at the elementary level where a lot of shifts are also taking place for families who are returning to campus i do strongly encourage you to check out the busd website where you will see the now posted school reopening plan for busd that plan is about 40 pages long it includes detailed information about safety practices about the encouragement so that we're giving to families to participate in things like daily health screening information about student covid testing and as well in all the appendices of that plan you will find highly detailed reopening plans for your particular school each of these reopening plans includes very specific times for arrival and dismissal entrance and exit points information about how to complete the daily symptoms screening
130which is a requirement for all of our families classroom setup information playground designations lunch and recess schedules ventilation systems as well as specific locations for our after school program we're giving very specific guidelines to our teachers about how exactly to set up their space in keeping with um the guidance from the state of california we ask that all of our teachers attempt as best they can to begin with six feet of social distancing between all individuals uh and then if needed to drop that social distancing down to four feet uh we fully recognize as many of our members of the community do that the california department of public health has modified its guidelines to include three feet and we plan to approach our labor partners about these modified guidelines just as we have many times
131before when these guidelines are are adjusted we do have partitions desk partitions available for classroom teachers upon request although they are not required and then i won't read it aloud but there's a lot of other information we're providing to teachers about room setup the use of air purifiers opening windows et cetera our classrooms uh will look like something like this here's a sort of picture of a classroom from berkeley arts magnet this is room b1 set up to achieve four feet of social distancing capacity which provides a total capacity student capacity of 22. our teachers have lots of examples like this to be able to work from and each teacher will be working with site administration to set up their room in keeping with the guidelines of the state also included in the school reopening
132plan are detailed campus maps that show exactly where entrance points are here again we're looking at bam and you can see the way that principal molina at bam has set up entry and exit points by grade level this is going to require a little bit of learning for all of our families as we get used to new ways to come together in the morning and to sort of pass through a number of screening stations we ask all families to remember that visitors to our campuses are not allowed you'll need to say goodbye to your to your child out on the sidewalk at the screening station and then staff will be available to accompany students to the proper pickup locations and then on into their classrooms to say a little bit more about special education teachers
133who are working in person and special education students returning to our campus there are a number of sort of ways that special education services as they're delivered in normal times intersect with the guidelines provided by the california department of public health i'd like to review them because um they are sort of important in their implications for service provision um so first um the guidance um to our educators is uh special education and teachers is that they should work with students from only one stable group at any given time this will be different for many of our special service providers like our special ed teachers literacy coaches rti teachers who very often create pull-out groups composed from multiple classrooms that will not be possible at this point at any time point that classrooms are being used
134by mult by multiple groups that space should be cleaned including a cleaning of all high touch surfaces and we are aware of adjustments made by cdph that emphasize cleaning and not disinfection [Music] special education teachers and specialists should maximize their use of outside time if possible and as well as much as possible should try to maintain even more than a six foot distance when they're working from students from multiple groups it may be possible that teachers will select still to use virtual learning even when students are on campus if that turns out to produce additional efficiencies in the way these services are provided let's now move on to talk about middle and high school and here because we are still working with our labor partners to finalize details you'll find that i'm being far less
135specific about the exact schedule for middle and high school because we have a number of very sort of different needs and far more logistical challenges at middle and high school than we encountered at the elementary school we continue to look very closely at this model of hybrid learning and i'd like to talk a little bit more about what's happening at the middle and high school level and why we're looking at this model particularly as opposed to five full days which was what we were able to achieve at the elementary level so our current survey data from from families indicates that in the aggregate about 75 percent of families will select to come back to an in-campus sort of on-campus learning environment this means roughly that one in four students in every single class at the
136middle school in high school will not return and we also understand from looking at our data that there are disparities by demographic group in the number of families at these levels as well who are indicating that they will return as important as it is to maximize on-campus time we also have an obligation to all of our families who will remain in distance learning for a variety of very valid reasons to leave intact the distance learning program we have simply been unable to come up with a model that would provide five full days in both of these modalities both on campus learning and distance learning even as we get to an agreement with our labor partners which i anticipate tomorrow we're committed to staying in dialogue to improve opportunities for on-campus learning even through this year
137but the core of the challenge that we're facing is that commitment to maintain a high quality program for both students who are on campus and those who will remain at home so this schedule i know is familiar to many families in berkeley we've been sharing it now for several months i expect that we will be finalizing details of this schedule i hope tomorrow and as soon as we do we will be issuing fairly detailed communication to middle and high school families about what this will look like we hope that middle and high school families will join us for a series of specific town hall events that we'll be hosting next week just last week we completed three town hall events one in english one in spanish and one specific to special education families this week
138we've done two town hall events on health related items and next week we'll do four so these will specifically focus in on middle and high school one to take place in english at six o'clock on the 30th one to take place exclusively in spanish at 7 30 also on the 30th one that will relate to special education on april 1st at 6 o'clock and then we'd like to host a special forum on middle and high school specifically for our black families and caregivers on thursday april 1st from 7 30 to 8 30. we'll send more information out to our full community about these town hall events very shortly let's now talk a little bit about covid's safety in our schools for families who continue to have questions or concerns about safety again i urge you
139to check out our school reopening plan which is available on our website it offers a high degree of detail about the kinds of safety practices that you can expect when you when your child returns to campus they will include the ubiquitous use of face coverings by all students that's inclusive of our pre-k program and all of our staff now there will be limited exemptions made for those students who have medical issues and there will be a process that families and special educators can use um to to go through that exemption process social distancing will also be an element of our practices you heard me talk earlier about revisions to social distancing requirements or guidelines a little bit earlier as will be an attention to stable groups stable groups continues to be an important element of
140aspects of contact tracing and transmission minimization hand washing and sanitizing will be emphasized and explicitly taught at the younger grade levels as will cleaning ventilation upgrades were really thoroughly detailed last night and i encourage anybody who would like to learn more about our ventilation upgrades to watch last night's webinar vaccinations for staff are now well underway in fact the district's partnership with the city to provide vaccination appointments for all of our staff has concluded we'll also be sharing information about covid surveillance testing this is asymptomatic testing for both students and staff and we will continue to implement a rigorous program of contact tracing in quarantines in keeping with guidelines from our local health jurisdiction we continue to urge all of our families returning to campus to recognize a number of things first that face coverings
141will be required we will be following all expectations as they relate to contact tracing isolation and quarantines and this could result in a disruption of in-person learning for individual students potentially for classes or in particular circumstances even for entire schools please know that we will follow those procedures very strictly all families are expected to confirm every single day that their child is coming to campus that they are free from covet symptoms we've designed a very simple easy to use google form for that purpose and we urge all families to keep their students home if they are sick or have any coveted symptoms please also know that visitors to school campuses and classrooms are prohibited except for a few limited volunteer roles and that substitute staffing as i described earlier in the chart that i reviewed
142will continue to be highly limited this means that if a teacher is sick sort of standard sick leave that we may be limited in our capacity to provide a substitute teacher for that class we're working very hard on this and it is an issue up and down the state please remember the pandemic is not over even though we're returning we're still taking safety very seriously and that we're going to need each other one another's good will one another's patience one ano one another's willingness to remind each other of the importance of these practices so that we can stay safe i will continue to emphasize as i have now for the full year that patience kindness cooperation compassion for one another will be critically important as we work through all of these challenges together as a
143community i'd like to emphasize that there's a high level of staff among all sorry high level of stress among all of our staff members right now having visited school class school campuses even today i can tell you that everybody's working hard on this and yet there is a sort of a lot of tension in the air and every act of kindness exhibited toward any member of our school staff is greatly appreciated we need each other more now than ever before and then on to look at the fall of 2021 so i know that it has been a question for community members across berkeley what will the fall look like what what level of assurance can i feel um that that school will return in the way that we previously knew it before the pandemic and
144so one of my sort of asks of the board this evening is that the board indicate through direction to me and to staff in very clear terms their agreement with the statement that i've written out in this slide and i'd like to read it out loud the slide says that for the fall of 2021 busd will allow all labor agreements related to the pandemic to expire and will as a result of the expiration of these agreements returned to previously bargained contract language uh which means that we would be returning to the 1920-2020 bel sorry the 2019 2020 bell schedule for all schools with the same start times and stop times for all students as we experienced before the pandemic that we will as a result of allowing these agreements to expire return to five full
145days of in-person instruction and that we will develop a distance learning program for both english speaking and pwi students uh if it appears to be needed and i appreciate the block's guidance on this point and look forward to discussion about all of these points i'll close just by reiterating that we are a unified community that while our family's needs may vary a great deal our district is working hard with our community to be able to meet these needs and wherever you are wherever your student will be learning in the closing eight weeks of the school year please know our commitment to maintain that community our commitment to your family and our commitment to continue to work through these challenges in a way that serves our full community in an equitable way so thanks very much
146for the opportunity to share this information and i look forward to our discussion great thank you so much for all that work and information dr stevens um i'm going to turn it over to vice president brown for the first question comment and then director miller thank you um thank you superintendent stevens i'm really excited about our earliest learners who are going to get to go back to school soon um so i'm super excited about that i want to take the opportunity to to highlight that and grateful for um i left this out in my comment but grateful for our pcc staff um and those are part of our teachers union who have who bcc who have been on campus from the very beginning of our first opening phase and our teaching staff who have joined
147them so thank you so much for that and also thank you for your continued flexibility around um around what your classrooms will look like um throughout the rest of the year we know that when we join this job as teachers we know that we have to be extremely flexible so thank you for your flexibility your continued flexibility around that um i wanted to go back to page 17 of the presentation in regards to the hybrid model uh why don't i share the screen one more time so we're all looking at it together thanks so much and can you help me know which slide you're referring to slide 17 which is um the hybrid model this over here yes thank you so much um superintendent stevens if you if you can can you please address families
148who might have challenges or who have expressed challenges around caregiving and also transportation as a result of a pm hybrid model and also what the district's plan is to maybe support and address those challenges and concerns yep i appreciate both questions so there's two ways that we're thinking about the challenge that this particular schedule will present to families so one has to do with being able to create opportunities to be on campus in the morning to participate in distance learning while being in a classroom under the supervision of a member of our staff we're not in a position this evening to be able to articulate firmly that that will be an option but we're working hard on that i imagine that we will have to look again to one of a number of partner organizations
149to be able to expand our staffing as this model as you can sort of hear is requiring sort of an expansion across sort of multiple dimensions the other aspect of our thinking has to do with expanded transportation capacity at the middle school level we're right now in conversations with transportation providers about expanding our bus fleet and as well we're looking at an another uh sort of ride sharing model that would make individualized rides possible to families who may need it so we do recognize that this midday transition provide prevent uh sorry will prevent some families from participating and it's through these two mechanisms both morning supervision or midday transportation that we're looking to remedy those particular equity challenges thank you so much and next before i pass it on back to president alper on our
150model there's something that says lunch transition to school um before students actually arrive can you speak to the district's continued um commitment to serving our students and making sure that we provide uh lunch options and opportunities for all of our our scholars yeah thank you for that question so meals will be available at all levels this is both elementary middle school and high school we at the elementary level will be making available both breakfasts and lunch and that will be true for middle and high school as well so if a student has eaten lunch at home and then makes their way to campus that's acceptable but please know that there will be meals available to all of our students as they arrive to school at midday all right um what i think i'm going to
151ask my colleagues to do because they're pr people might have a number of questions is let's ask one question or make one comment at a time and we'll go around in a circle and that way we can keep it sort of moving through the different board members and we can have all our questions answered but just one at a time so director miller you're up next can i compromise and express three opinions and then a question because three opinions go right together throw me off okay thank you so um sorry ahead of time fellow directors uh so my first idea um which i've heard from other students is something we can add on to the after school offerings is freshman year tours i understand we can't do a full capacity um orientation but many freshman
152families have explained they want their kids to get to know canvas before they become sophomores next year or if we find another way to include more freshman classes on campus in order to give them more of the berkeley high experience and i know we have organizations such as link leaders and leadership that already have student volunteers who plan those kinds of trainings and so something to look into also um just based off students off that schedule that was on slide 17 um you know part of the concern is because what what's the current schedule is that there's two classes lunch and then one class and so what students see in that schedule is there are three classes and then lunch and it's not a huge necessarily the opus and other school districts students are already
153taking three classes in a row but in berkeley when we've already been conditioned to that two longer break and then our last class um some students are expressing concern about it especially those who aren't planning to return to campus because their wonder is what's the payoff for me in this situation and the idea of payoff is also very prevalent in students who are planning to return especially since we haven't clearly stated how many cohorts they'd be able to participate in if a student can only come to one class two days a week like that doesn't seem like enough for these students which is why what i've heard from other students is we need to offer more opportunities and if we can't expand the teaching period at the end of the day i just say we
154allow them to be more cohorts also just going based off patterns students who need help in one subject probably need help in others like it's not just like i think it's very rarely like a one and done situation like if they need help in their math class they probably need help in their science class like those are two very connected subjects and so um i personally believe students should be able to go to all of their classes after school and that way they can be an a group and a b group which means they could get three days on campus at once instead of the two we're proposing right now on top of we'd have to work out of course than what after school activities they can participate in sorry from talking fast so i
155guess this is my question um what do like what are we looking at um after school then right now for students who um are making that transition sorry i got messed up in my head because i talked a lot sorry i have to look at my notes anyways my question is um what are we thinking cohort wise for students right now because i just personally don't think one is enough and we need to be able to expand that and allow students to go to as many subjects as they possibly can it's a great question um so i'll start sort of just by describing what exists in the guidelines right now so the guidelines do not establish a firm cap on the number of cohorts or what what we're now calling stable groups that a student
156could participate in during the school day the guidelines do continue to point to stable grouping as one of a number of important strategies and they generally say that the fewer stable groups a student is part of the better and there's two reasons for that it both lowers transmission risks across groups and then it means that there is sort of it facilitates contact tracing and minimizes the need for large-scale sort of quarantining if there were transmission across multiple groups but the guidelines also allow flexibility um and that is sort of where we're you know sort of as we design a schedule uh we're more thinking that the sort of appropriate number of cohorts would stable groups would provide students the opportunity to attend their classes students right now take three and be able to participate in
157an after school activity as well okay cool yeah i definitely like more dialogue on that in the future on the specifics and what we can do to support our students through cohorting because that's something we value right now as it seems great thank you director babbitt okay i'm trying to figure out which question i want to get out first since you've changed the format on it well it's just we'll come back around to everybody too so we've got two high stakes a decision so um well first i noticed you said that one in four families at middle and high have decided not to go back and i just want to highlight that i'm constantly in contact with families and administration at longfellow middle school and most of that one in four for that community is
158not coveted fears it's not vaccine i'm not vaccinated or any vaccine hesitation it is simply the model the model does not support equity for those families who live outside this district or this city who work outside of the home and who don't see the value and come into school for two hours a day twice a week and uprooting everything that they already have in place when initially we didn't we didn't even market it as educational support so much as we did extracurricular activities so again it's i just want to be very clear that the model we have put forth does not support a higher rate of return for people to choose to come back i'm very appreciative of us trying to work out that transportation with the hiring of the service it's a perfect use
159for all of these one-time funds that we have so i'm definitely hoping that we can make that a possibility and i'm definitely hoping that we can get the word out that this will be educational support offered during these times after schools because we know from the data that it is so important and it is so needed and i'll save more of my data comments for my next go around but just want to end by thanking um the longfellow families for um arranging a parent carpool and for that principle putting it out on the e-tree making it clear that it wasn't a busd thing but it was the community coming together to try and overcome this transportation hurdle and i hope that other schools if they haven't also done that can also participate in some kind
160of carpool rally or whatever we need to actually make equitable results because every hour counts every instructional minute provided to our students it counts you know it's the difference between below standards and meeting standards and above standards for so many families so many families are supplementing with private tutoring funds that's their extra hour but they have that obligation you know they have that privilege and that opportunity to do that for their bank for their student so we really if we really say equity is our focus then we need to start walking that out and i'm really hoping that our unions will also join us in that and what they agreed to over the next few days and since none of my other colleagues mentioned this which i was surprised i will mention that the bft
161is having a a what is it called it's called spring forward a community building discussion bft in collaboration with parents and caregivers and bosd staff is hosting an online conversation tomorrow the 25th from 6 to 7 30. there's no url on this flyer that i have but i'm sure if you go to the bft website you can register there for that thank you director ballot um all right uh director sinai [Music] how many questions are you gonna pack into one question one long one now my question is around the distance learning um and this is a pretty compact one we've got a number of emails i know you you mentioned the sacrifice that everybody is needing to make and we've gotten a number of emails about um you know what could be perceived as a
162disproportionate sacrifice of students who are just excuse me distance learning with all the new teachers that are getting assigned to that that program so my question is um with director sinclair overseeing the program as an administrator is are there professional development or strategy to help those new teachers not only learn the curriculum but also look at community building through virtual environment as students are i know you you work your best to keep students together but just kind of what support are these new teachers i appreciate the question i might offer uh sort of a clarification first um so the vast majority of the teachers in the distance learning program are our teachers um who have been doing distance learning you know in their school communities with their own classes throughout this year um so that's
163true both of classroom teachers who are just remaining in distance learning albeit with new students or it's true of the tsas who have been also working virtually through this this school year we do have a very small number of new teachers joining the distance learning program and we will be supporting them through our professional development department and we've got a whole host of resources developed over the course of this year about how to teach remotely um but it's it's a very small proportion of our distance learning teachers who are new um versus the far more veteran sort of you know majority of the staff so just to clarify the majority of the staff and have been through our various units of professional development around zoom education and the distance learning program um will the new
164will the few new that are coming on how is there time allocated for them to be able to get up to speed or to begin to develop that um some of that is taking place this week so part of the sort of these transition days also permits our distance learning teachers to do a number of things reach out to their new classes and those things are happening this week and then it also permits the few new teachers to be able to participate in professional development now this is not the only opportunity they'll have we'll continue to support those new teachers and we have resources especially through our digitech team that is both coaching resources and professional development resources from now a year's worth of professional development on remote instruction thank you your director bossie doug
165thank you president adler i am first superintendent i just want to acknowledge and thank all the staff for everything that they're doing just to prepare to reopen and the herculean task of just like you know trying to staff the district right now and i'm re reassigning people i can't even imagine how difficult that must be my question is about the involuntary rti assignments and i'm concerned about the impact on the children that are currently working with their rti teachers what is the plan to mitigate some of that impact yeah i appreciate this question as well so a number of our rti teachers literacy coaches either volunteered to take a classroom or or were selected you know essentially sort of asked to take a classroom this again just to restate it was not the original plan
166we had done pretty what we thought to be thorough surveying of the availability of substitute teachers well in advance of making this plan public really testing its feasibility for staffing we thought that we had adequate number of substitute teachers to work in person and as we began to actually approach people with firm asking for firm commitments time and time again those commitments just did not come through so just to give you some sense of how dramatic a difference that was in our planning of the roughly 20 folks who had indicated they would be willing to serve in this role only one eventually took a classroom and a classroom assignment so this is what has necessitated over the course of about a week and a half implementing a number of sort of what i would just
167consider sort of dramatic actions including using tsas and consolidating classrooms again i offer my apology to those staff members and to community members who have felt over the last week that this has just happened very quickly it's been a little bit like building on sand as we've sort of over and over again found that planning assumptions are not holding true so in terms of sort of those services what we now have in front of us is trying to figure out a way to keep those services intact as best we can we did have to make the difficult decision of sort of valuing students ability to participate in class on campus over certain online sort of provided services we did not touch eld services no eld teacher was asked to step into a classroom so those
168services remain intact and then we'll need to work across multiple school communities and to be able to try and reorganize the provision of intervention services as best we can it is also the case that we'll be asking our teachers who have data about these very students to be trying more in-class interventions as well for the students who for these last eight weeks data indicate need additional supplements great thank you um i'm going to call in myself dr stevens oh i want to i guess second with dr bossie to have said about the gratitude for the complexity of the work that's gone into um reopening and um and the excitement that vice president brown expressed about the fact that we're doing it and the kids will be back on campus five days a week starting on
169monday which is just super exciting and i think we're all looking forward to seeing hopefully with our own eyes [Music] i had a question so a number of the secondary families that i've talked to and and students that i've talked to are excited to come back on campus they're particularly excited to see each other um and they're excited just to to be on campus and um and they have a million questions and i and i'm really um sort of loathed to suggest more town halls i know how much a burden it is on staff to to um to do these town halls that are that have been really well attended and will really well run and informative um and so i'm not necessarily suggesting a a high school or middle school student only town hall
170although i think that something that something for students to be able to come and ask the many questions that they have and have them answered would be really great and and maybe it could be done at the existing town halls but but in the same way that we try to do at the board meetings where we we say we're going to call on students first if that can somehow maybe be done but i i really think students have did i mean my director miller can probably speak to this but i think students um have just as valid questions just as many questions and they're not the same questions that their parents and caregivers are asking they're really different um and they're really important that we not um leave them unanswered and so maybe it's not
171at the district level maybe it's encouraging the the middle school principles and and the berkeley high administration to have those town halls but um is that something you've thought about or would be open to doing uh both um we don't have plans to do that yet but yeah we've done a number of student town halls um they've been both informative for us and i hope valuable for the students who attend um i'm going to nominate director miller to work with me uh and and make that happen if i can cut him for a second i would yeah please this will be my thought and then i'll wait my turn next time too but i was actually going to respectfully request if we could do a student town hall for student club leaders student activity leaders
172whether that um happens at the different middle schools or high schools by principals but and even if it's not district-wide just we need to have those meetings because each one has been well attended and students have like i'm pretty sure at all the ones we've done at least 100 students have showed up to them which is absolutely crazy and they need that extra space where they feel comfortable asking the questions like president albert just said where they might not have the same questions as their parents or caregivers so that was going to be my thought if a request to have those meetings and i would definitely help want to help organizing those at the middle school level and high school level because even those questions are going to be different i didn't mean to steal
173your thunder director miller i'm sorry as an apology i'll let you go next and ask your next question then i'll go to you director babbitt that was i'm counting that as my turn because oh that was your turn what do you have do you have another thought or question i guess really quickly um i just pay attention to the new schedule because seventh period science labs happened after school happen after school and um i bet there's been some thought to that but i don't see how they could all happen during zoo period just they maybe could but um there are students enrolled in multiple science classes and i don't think making them pick between which lab they have to go to is a good rule to go by that's it that's fine yeah we we
174are accounting for seventh period in the way that we're planning i know it's not represented on that very simple graphic but you can expect information about both oh period and seventh period great all right um director babbitt it's your turn again and then uh yeah and then vice president brown actually brown is the first okay so we'll go to vice president brown and then back to you director batman thank you thanks um i wanted to take a look at page 15 in regards to the special education teachers um i've been getting some correspondence from families who are a little nervous about um oh you're sharing it again i was like do you want me to do that or yeah i would appreciate that that would be really great it's this page right here um some
175families who are nervous even after the town hall meeting and even after last board meetings presentation from um from sean about uh disruptions to their services if they are deciding to stay in distance learning um and so given you know the rest of the time that we have on this subject can you speak to that superintendent stevens and to those families who have those concerns yeah i can um so so we are not reorganizing um case loads for our special education case managers their caseload though is changing and the main change is sort of that their physical location for the last year all of our case managers have been supporting students remotely we know that about 70 percent of our special education families will select to come onto campus and that means about 70 percent
176of each manager's caseload will now be at school in the same physical space where they're working but still 30 percent of those students will remain in distance learning roughly and each case manager will need to rebuild his or her schedule to be able to provide services in the real physical space and virtually there are a number of sort of rules and guidelines that special education teachers will need to adhere to as they're working in the sort of school environment that include what i've listed here sort of avoiding combining stable groups um doing cleaning in between the sort of use of this of the same space by different stable groups [Music] special education teachers can do push in but then we're asking them to sort of pay attention to extra ppe or pay attention to extra
177dispensing they can also be working virtually even if students are on campus so each individual case manager will have to customize his or her schedule and this is elaborate work it's really sort of figuring out where to access students in their caseload to disrupt general education teaching and to maximize the benefit of that particular sort of intervention time so there is no single way of doing this every single case manager will have a different schedule any difference between the scheduled services and the iep will continue to be documented in the distance learning emergency plan just as we've been doing and families should be expecting to hear from the case manager about the ways that those services have been scheduled everything that i just described to you also applies to instructional assistants and so we may
178find that scheduling instructional assistance looks different and at moments may be more inefficient than we were used to before the pandemic so i can't answer exactly what will happen on a case-by-case basis but know that case managers remain consistent and that each one will be scheduling services and that there will be communication about those services with our families and when can our families expect to receive that communication superintendent stephen um especially because uh you know we're still getting emails about families who have not received that communication and they're still feeling um a little still feeling some challenges around having to make a decision really quickly um so just to ease their minds when can we expect that communication to to be given to our families um i would anticipate that um case managers are going
179to vary a little bit they just began this work yesterday uh and so they you know they now have class lists of families who will be in person and remote they're also then getting those teacher assignments for distance learning and so they have to now coordinate with new distance learning teachers they have to coordinate with in-person service providers to build these schedules and as i said it's just it's elaborate work even to build a schedule to provide services for like 20 students so it may be that some case managers are able to produce schedules tomorrow friday some case managers may actually go into next week by the time they get their schedule finalized and publish their service minutes to all of the families i just wouldn't be able to commit on behalf of every case
180manager exactly how complicated a task it is they're facing but knowing that families should be able to receive it soon um hopefully will yeah if it's not this week i would expect it in the early parts of next week thank you your turn yo we'll come back to you vice president director babbitt okay thank you so much um since she picked up on sped and um dr stevens mentioned health challenges i just want to remind everyone that the city of berkeley is now doing vaccinations for people with underlying conditions ages 16 and up and i go on there and play with the things to see how many appointments are available they do have appointments so please um go get vaccinated if you qualify um secondly um talking it's still about this with our rti teachers
181and the forced moves to distance learning i just wanted to say this just supports the greater need for us as a board and a district to make sure that we prioritize in our funding updating our hr policies and practices updating our software so that we can actually hire faster stronger and better i'm looking forward to working with assistant superintendent samantha as well as pauline and meeting with them on a routine basis so that we can actually um you know make that a real real possibility over the next year or so especially with these one-time funds and then that leads me to my question which is around you know the fact that we had to force people to do distance learning um because we're not exploring the live stream option right where people could actually be
182in the classroom and at home with the same teacher even if they were doing distance learning still in a classroom you know on zoom versus and people all around are doing distance learning right so that middle and high we could have more of that id hill cohort model um and so i know just from our conversations one on one dr stevens that this has been this hasn't been something that the union has wanted to do but i'm just wondering is there a way in which we can ask some teachers who may want to do that if they're willing to do it even though it's not in a contract or you know whatever whatever i know we have some very good tech savvy teachers who would be all in to do something like that who really
183care about equity who really want to serve as many students as possible in this model so is that even possible um yeah i do think that we have that poll and we just don't know the results um i do think that it's possible you know i continue to hear really clearly from from matt meyer the president of bft that even as we come to an agreement um in the next couple of days we hope um that he wants to stay engaged with the district to continue to maximize in-person learning opportunities for our students through the rest of this year and so i do think that there's conversations in front of us about how to work with teachers who are interested in this technology to be able to move towards live streaming in their classrooms we
184have her just sort of as a general body the teachers have had a lot of concerns about trying to do two jobs at once both manage classroom discipline lesson planning instruction in person and then managing remote learning now i do know that it's being practiced in lots of districts some successfully some less so but here as we've been engaging with our educators we've been getting the very clear message back that there's a lot of concern about trying to do two jobs at once so i think the way you're proposing which is to find find the evangelists the folks who really want to do this and support them to do it well is the way forward all right um director sinai uh i like that idea i think dr stevens we talked a little bit about
185another district where they're piloting exactly as doc director babbitt says as you find some teachers not even just the evangelist ones but also some of the ones who um are a little bit more challenged and test out the equipment and see how it can work i think it's a great idea so my question my one question for this round is um around the covid safety procedures there you mentioned it there's a number of emails that we've been getting around the hazards of ionizers so it's not just the question of ionizers being one of a number of strategies but some concerns and research that it's actually dangerous to have ionizers um in the classroom can you talk about whether or not our facilities have folks have looked into this and what um kind of where the
186conclusion around that is falling i can't yes um so this um this technologies are we've been thinking about it in two ways or what's the evidence that suggests that this adds to our overall risk mitigation portfolio uh and then what's the evidence that there's any risk from the installation of ionizers in our classrooms um so we have done a review of that research and we've been working with professionals in this area the particular machines that we've selected gps has strong evidence base that there is no ozone production or as i or more accurately there's five parts per billion ozone production of these machines which here in california is considered to be negligible the air we breathe for example has 20 parts per billion and then there is a research base that says that this can
187be added as a layer of risk mitigation against covid19 this is a technology that was developed in response to sars has been used in multiple settings and so i encourage any member of the community who is interested in learning more about exactly what the technology is what the research base related to this technology is to go back on our website and watch last night's webinar which was hosted by our facilities department there you'll get a thorough overview of all of the ventilation preparation taking place in the district and then a really thorough treatment of these ionizers as well um by a number of folks who can discuss them at a far greater level of specificity than me thank you okay um do i i i'll jump in here and then if you're still if your
188hand is still raised i mean if you don't mean your hand to be raised you can lower it um on the i want to ask a question about the fall dr stevens because i know you want direction from the board um and i'd ask my colleagues too if you um to just weigh in on whether you agree with the direction that that the superintendent is seeking um obviously given my comments earlier today i do and think that it's important that we provide as much clarity as we can for families and and employees about the fall and our plan to be able to offer full entire in-person instruction in all grades um can you can you say a word or two about why um why we believe that or why you believe that we'll be able
189to do that in the fall um even if we're not able to do it right now yeah i can um so so uh let's start first from sort of a health perspective and we're all sort of watching very positive trends taking place both in community transmission vaccine availability all of these things i think give us a very strong reason to believe that by the time we get through the summer that there will be you know continued dramatic improvements in community health conditions um i also believe that this is sort of the right move to make just from a labor perspective you know we have contracts already in place that define the duty day the sort of work responsibilities of all of our employees and that given the positive trend and health conditions given what we
190anticipate probably to be ongoing refinement of those health guidelines that it is a safe assumption that we would return back to the previous sort of contractually defined school school day and that by letting these mous expire simply sort of pass at the end of june that we would be in a strong position to be able to just move into a reopened five-day full-day school school experience the other sort of aspect of this is that you know we launched the year under one set of conditions and we sort of built the district around distance learning and we built the curriculum we built the term schedule we built all of these individualized student schedules in keeping with the conditions we encountered over last summer it's much more feasible over this summer that we would build a smaller
191distance learning program for any families who may continue to need it if it's necessary but that we won't need to feature distance learning as part of the core experience for so many of our families we think that it will be a small program and not constitute the sort of majority experience for the district so it's for these reasons that i think that this is the right move and i think that there's also sort of a strong signal that we should send to the community that while we make these moves this this spring through a hybrid model that we fully intend to reopen for five full days at all levels in the fall i think our community is counting on that sort of clear reassurance i'd love to provide it i believe the board does as
192well and that it's sort of an important thing that we can do at this moment thank you dr stevens um director rasadev you're muted as an alpha are you looking for guidance for the fall right now are you going to call on us later for that um i would now would be great all right um well now yes i i agree with the superintendent's um slide on guidance for the fall i would say um and i think you put in that slide right the option of developing a justice learning program for those families that might still choose to or if there's in the event that there's a surge during the summer which we really hope not um but those caveats are in place great thank you so much director buster um uh director i can't
193remember who had their hand up first um director babbitt and then director sinai i think i'm in the next round all right director i remember my turn order oh you're good okay director sinai and then director batman um i support the superintendent's uh recommendation on the slide i i'm a little bit of a nervous nelly um in the sense that i i i do want to make sure that we are prepared you know for the potential of a fourth wave um but i think the way that you've laid it out uh and also given the science around transmission that um you know looking at in person five days and coming in the fall uh in august basically not you know not even the fall august late summer is uh is reasonable um and i also
194like the idea that as we think about distance learning and we think about our remote robust independent studies program that um in a way that we couldn't do it last year because of the speed in which the transformation occurred you know that there might be a lot of learnings that we have right now especially for families who decide that independent study or distance learning has actually been really good for their student um that you know independent study is an option you know for those students and we look at that at the elementary level as well as the middle and high so um yeah so i'm i'm i'm supportive of the direction thank you um director i mean vice president brown oh right i was going to come back to you i'm sorry vice president brown
195and if you could share your thoughts on the fall too that'd be great yeah i'll just share my uh my thoughts on the fall um first or you know i'll ask my question first so my other question in for sped was um what are our plans to expand our um employees in this bed department as we enter into a entire full school school reopening um in the fall so that was my question um superintendent stevens and then i'll give my great direction for the fall i'm happy to talk about this um so those plans are actually taking place right now um we are right now expanding the number of a position that's called the registered behavior technician position these are highly trained one-to-one aids so we're working with a company called spg a partner of
196ours to be able to expand rbt staffing for this for this year and we're also working with a second company to be able to expand the availability in on the short term of instructional assistance for special education we're doing that while we review our eligibility lists while we seek to expand fte of our own employees and hire in our our own staff so that is happening now as we speak also included as another example on the slide deck for the superintendent's budget advisory committee just last night was a line item for the expansion of special education case managers to be paid for at least initially through through covet funding potentially then through bsep as a way to be able to lower case loads and provide additional service for students with disabilities thank you for that
197and also thank you so much for um sharing that we are going to work with partners but more importantly sharing that we're prioritizing hiring um through the district um and hiring employees through the district i know that um we we want to we want to do that right we want to hire people within the district hire our own employees put money in the pockets of people who are who are here um but understand that sometimes we have to um we have to make shifts to in order to fulfill the needs so thank you for um for saying that in regards to the fall i want to echo director cyanide sentiments around um making sure that we are we are fully and adequately prepared for the fall i i know it is important to to give
198our community um the information that we are preparing for full reopening um in the fall minus mlus and returning back to business as usual and i'm excited to be able to say that on behalf of the district that we are going to do that however i want to caution us to really use this um this time in the spring to learn um from our mistakes in the fall to make sure that we're learning from um our reopening plans right now and taking a daily um and gathering daily data that will help us to be able to open safely from everything from uh student tests to student check-ins and testing all the way to how person or how distance learning um is going and i want to ensure that if we are uh go if we
199are going back to business as usual that also means that our distance learning plan um still has to be a strong one because there will be families who will opt out of coming into school coming back to school in the fall so just just because we are we're doing away with our mlus and going back to business as usual does not mean that our distance learning plan does not get enough uh support as our in-person learning thank you thank you okay um director miller and then director babbitt yeah um i just want to start off by um saying i do support the direction i think um i mean i just think we gotta like i don't really have to say besides that i mean as a student i've understood how painful this year has been
200i've understood the necessity of why we've done what we've had to do but at the same time i mean i just can't imagine telling a middle schooler that they're going to miss two-thirds of their time middle school or a high school or they're going to miss half their time in high school or in elementary school they're going to miss one third of their entire elementary school experience i just i mean i won't be here at that point there will be a great new student director in my stead but if it doesn't happen i'm coming back and i'm having my words um anyways i want to speak on the staff issue you talked about a little bit um at the high school level specifically i i know this came up in a community discussion a little
201while ago as well um it doesn't have thinking about student activities i understand the staff issue for specific um instruction possibly but for like specific student activities such as um staff looking over student clubs that are happening or other student activities it doesn't have to be one-to-one um you know you could have one one staff member watching over multiple groups especially since many clubs and many other student organizations have said they want to hold their spaces out outdoors and that just provides another layer where it doesn't need to be you know we kind of look at our how we do things usually and we try to adapt those and usually yes there would be one sponsor to one like student-led activity on campus but it doesn't have to be like that this year and i
202just hope we're looking at options where we don't force ourselves into that situation um because we just i don't know i just we don't really need to do that i think you know one staff member for possibly four socially distanced clubs doing their own thing or like four different student groups doing their own thing is enough for me or like two maybe we also have many volunteers parents and other people saying they want to do these things as well so i don't see how that specifically would be a staffing issue i mean if you want to talk about other concerns i'm happy to hear him but just based off the information i've previously heard just not understanding that side of it director miller i'm not sure i totally know how to i think i understand
203the point you're making although i don't know berkeley high school's club structure well enough to to respond with any information i'll definitely pass that along to principal ragosa um encourage you to do the same but what you're saying makes sense to me yeah i mean i won't go into it pretty much how usually is there's one stat sponsor per club and so there's been like talk about planning necessarily or like who's going to be supervising student clubs around that structure and that's when you talked about a staffing issue for after-school birthday activities in your presentation and so i was wondering if that's where that was coming from um but i just was saying i don't see why that has to be an issue when we don't have to have it be one to one like
204usual that was my i don't want to we can talk about more another time as well great thank you director miller um so i'm going to turn over to director bowed i think by my account everybody has weighed in except director babbitt so far on the fall so if you could also address that dr babaden appreciate it yes i will weigh in on the file which was actually my uh last comment so most people know that i'm not a huge fan of um distance learning because of the isolation the mental health results because of our increased suicide rates and every demographic because of the food insecurity because of the challenges for working parents because we have so many moms who've had to quit their jobs to support it so i am definitely um in favor
205of reenacting the original contract in the original bail schedule and i want to add this other um piece of information that was forwarded to me it's an article from the world the wall street journal and it says the long-term economic cost of lost schooling students who are falling behind now because of covert restrictions may never catch up in their skills job prospects and income this was from february 25th 2021 and it says the lost schooling cost on average american children have lost 116 days of reading time in the early days of the pandemic and 215 days of math these losses will be hard to make up and they leave this generation of children struggling for years one economic economist projects that this skill shock will cost the economy up to 30 trillion dollars in economic
206output over the next 100 years final point in this arg in this article i want to raise is although teachers around the world have different styles and standards for learning there is one thing on which they all seem to agree a computer is no match for a classroom so i definitely support us returning to in-person learning i did not sign up to be a school board director of an online k through 12 school district so i am definitely hoping that we can overcome all of those challenges and in that one of those challenges will still may still be stable groups it may still be cohorting and so i definitely hope that we reach out to other districts who are open now and who have overcome that challenge and we learn from them and we use
207their best findings their best practices so that we also won't be limited by by this need thank you so much director babbitt um and thank you to everyone for your comments and your direction and i think dr stevens you have your direction um on the with respect to the fall and i think um director babbitt said it well so with that um i'm going to um move us along um if that's all right um to the first of two action items i don't want to forget the second one um the first one i think what i think they'll both be relatively quick um the first one is the approval of the declaration of the need for fully qualified educators is kind of a motion to approve that item so moved motion by director sinai is
208their second second second vice president brown miss charles director miller yes director master bev yes director babbitt yes director of sinai yes vice president brown yes president yes okay and now we're going to move to item 12 uh what was a let what was a little what was item 11.5 which is the approval of the job description of the sustainability coordinator um i know director vasudev that you had some comments you wanted to make about this um dr stevens maybe you could just just so that people watching know what we're talking about maybe you could just tell us what we're talking about and then i'll ask director vasudev to share her thoughts i'm happy to do that um so so it has been um it's a long time aspiration both of the berkeley community and
209berkeley unified to sort of do right in the area of sustainability um the board created a sustainability plan for the district back in 2018 just before i arrived and for the last roughly year maybe year and a half we've been using a combination of our own funds and a grant to essentially sort of hire out for a sustainability coordinator position this is somebody whose job it is is to help all of our employees both spot opportunities to create a sustainable district but as well to push forward really important projects so this coordinator position is meant to bring the position in-house it's intended to be funded through measure h which is the newly approved berkeley bond this is our maintenance bond or sorry maintenance tax and so there's sort of coming from restricted funds just gives
210us the opportunity to push the sustainability cause further faster through through having our own full-time staff member okay director vasadev do you wanna do you have some comments yes i do i just wanted to add um something to the essential duties in the position and so in working with other sustainability offices and other districts i know that transportation is a key like a key pillar of sustainability um the transportation sector generates the largest amount of greenhouse gas emissions and so for this reason i think it's really important that under essential duties that we add that this person would be you know this position would be in charge of also coordinating district-wide communications about safe routes to school and that they would be in charge of also disseminating information about transit affordability programs for our middle
211schoolers and high schoolers and so you know the county has several transit affordability programs for the older students and i would like this this role to be able to send out that information to everybody i can respond it is still possible for us to amend the job description just from a technical perspective it's coming here for review by the board its next stop is then the personnel commission uh and between those two stops um we're able to um add the feedback of the board and that that is certainly sort of in keeping with the vision of this position what what so you don't you don't have any concerns about adding what director boss dev just said uh i don't i'm seeing samantha tobias vanessa also shake her head that this doesn't you know dramatically increase
212the duties or sort of might lead to any um i think sort of raised eyebrow on the part of our personnel commission colleagues okay well i'm really excited that we're moving forward with this position and um uh we passed the sustainability plan that i mean maybe you just said this a year or two ago and um this is a really big step forward and and i appreciate director bassett of your thoughts and additions to the description do you want to make the motion director basically yes a motion to approve approve with the with the um sustainable transportation okay um director resident has made the motion is there a second a second second by director babbitt thomas chares second miller yes director of avastadev director babbitt yes at director sinai yes i'm really glad we're bringing
213this in-house vice president brown yes president alpha yes all right uh thank you thank you director rosadev um and dr stevens oh that's it okay um now this is an opportunity for extended public comment so um if you'd like to give public comment now you're welcome to do so just raise your hand i'm gonna give you all just a minute to raise your hand um so that we um so that we know how many right now there's one person um okay a few people raising your hands which i appreciate um so i'm going to give people a minute because once once we start i'm going to cut it off so that we um keep to our time here all right raise your hand now all right there oh flake okay now now i'm cutting it
214off there's six people um six people and um because there's only six people we can give them two minutes each vice president brown um six people will be monte tableum a ben nikia baird roberto santiago sam and cielo rios those six people those six people only two minutes each um mr table go ahead thank you um and thank you for allowing two minutes i was about to ask about that for months now with this community has to struggle with the 60 seconds and the clock ticking in order to express itself first i just want to ask why won't you put a motion there and actually give director stevens a clear answer by yes or no i to his question as to whether he can nullify the mous and reenact the regular contract vote on it
215you concluded this item by basically asking dr stevens to sort of understand what you all told him in longer or shorter arguments be clear in your commitment by telling him give him the clear directive that he's asked for vote on it now put a motion and vote on it now and say it that's item number one number number two is i'm asking why should the community believe you why should the community trust you president alper when you profess to to ensure us that there will be a full back to school in the fall you've failed to lead this district to reopening in numerous opportunities throughout this year why why why should we trust you now we're gambling and we're gambling with the future of our children who have lost a year and now you're asking
216us it will be you're telling us it will be fine in the fall dr stevens um mentioned all kind of like wishful thinking about the situation being better but why should bite that be the condition people ask for your resignation at the beginning of this call i think you should take it seriously because this is a lack of trust in your ability to actually deliver on what you profess to uh offer thank you thank you mr table um next we have um a ben hi can you hear me yeah we can go ahead okay great so i am wondering what it would take for you to prioritize opening high school and middle school full-time this month or next what would it take there is tons of scientific research about the harms um and to be
217blunt will it take a suicide like it did for marin and nevada for you to reopen the schools that's all please reopen the schools full time thank you thank you for being here um next we have nikia baird followed by roberto santiago hello i am a high school teacher berkeley high i have a tk and fourth grader in san francisco unified um and so i am dealing with that as i'm teaching um from home um i've been watching most of our board meetings i really want to thank director miller for some of the input that he's had um i really um i really think that as we move forward and that we're talking about the fall we need to think about some of the some of the things that we've learned and then we can
218move forward and also being prepared and i could say many many things one thing i want to talk about is technology and one of the reasons that i think it was so difficult for us to transition when we talk about streaming from our classrooms and such i will tell you that the computer in my classroom is older than my students i'm sorry it's just we really need to invest in some technology uh especially at berkeley high there's a huge difference across the classrooms and we have to do that because we need to be prepared i'm here teaching from home with my own children in my class in in my room i'm in my dining room right now i'm creating a lesson for tomorrow and i just i hope that we can come together a little
219bit um i understand the parents um that some of the comments are really really harmful i think and i hope that we can start moving forward this is hard on everybody we have to learn from this move on move forward there's a lot of things that we've learned as teachers we can do better but we really have to invest in each other and and in some tools that we haven't had that we need so pain we could paint a picture and uh director miller painted a great picture of berkeley high i hope that we can get a lot of the board members um at berkeley high in my classroom next year when we're back in person and we're doing things better with better tools thank you thank you mr beard we'll be there um mr
220santiago you're next followed by sam hi i'm back again i don't think any of you should resign i think you should keep working and keep doing the jobs that you were doing before this this has been hard for parents and hard for everyone uh director uh sinai i hope i'm saying that right i have first time seeing you you are fantastic thank you so much um look my family has been fighting against racism and fighting for rights in this district since my mom entered kindergarten in 1957 you know there's only been about 12 years since then that we haven't had someone in our family in this district i could tell you looking at my family going way back the the suicidal thoughts the depression the anxiety came from having to go to school not for
221not being at school and so i think everyone who needs that absolutely they should be able to go back but we need to make sure we're still focusing on the kids who are actually doing better with their mental health and doing better with their academics because they don't have to go and face that every day and this isn't against teachers but public schools have systemic racism it's not calling anyone a racist it's just in the system it's how it's ingrained in it all right so the school is going to keep us safe from the best of times as people of color so there's no way that many of us feel like we're safe going back now right so again i want to call for continued intervention for support for literacy and math for uh for
222distance learners maybe some of those substitutes who didn't want to come back in person maybe they can at least go online and help with some math tutoring in the afternoons um you know i also want to again ask for disaggregated data on uh again thank you director sinai um but disaggregated by school location and zip code because i think that tells a whole other story if you know berkeley i want to know what's being done to address child care needs for faculty and staff who are being forced to return to campus the plan to protect families who did not receive informa enrollment info from truancy laws or any kind of negative repercussions if they don't show up either distance learning because they don't have the links or on campus because they didn't know they had
223to go and please give some mental health services for distance learners thank you very much thank you mr santiago uh it's and it's pronounced sinai julie sinai no thing i mean i'm i'm not accepting your body on behalf of dr cena but i'm sure she accepts um thank you for your comments um sam wonderful can you hear me yeah we can go ahead excellent um my name is sam and i'm the chair of the youth commission but not representing the youth commission i'm so glad to have been able to speak to a lot of you and i just wanted to mention something i'm not sure if you've already talked about it i couldn't sign on in the beginning of the meeting but recently students were told about the go guardian um application being put on
224their computers to allow their parents to monitor their activity and i just think that a lot of people are mad about this and a lot of people feel like it's an invasion of their privacy and i think it also puts a lot of at-risk students up for the risk um you know lgbt students who are maybe not out to their parents or need to do research or you know young people who are looking for sex education and so i think that there's even though there are certain restrictions during the school day there's a lot of kids who maybe that's the only time they're looking i also think that it provides an equity issue where it's mostly chromebooks and so most the people who are especially on school uh given chromebooks are low-income students and so
225if low-income students are being monitored far more than more affluent students who have their own macbooks or whatever i think that's a big equity issue in a lot of different ways and i also think from my understanding students weren't really told about this it was kind of a last minute thing we just got an email hey this is on your computers we've been watching you and we're starting to watch you and so i think it's just a big issue and i don't know if you've already talked about it so i'm so sorry if this has already come up but um i know a lot of students are emailing the school and they basically said we'll send out more answers as time goes on but hopefully we can can look into that um the only other
226thing from kind of earlier just a little thing i know you guys were talking about a town hall for students hopefully that could be during the school day for students um i know they'd have to rearrange classes but i think that would um be be a very helpful thing to make sure students have time to come thank you so much everyone thank you sam thank you for your leadership on the youth commission and just know that um we are very much looking into the issue that you raised right dr stevens yeah uh yeah i can offer sort of an update just at the end of the day i've been sort of uh tracking a number of communications coming from students uh like sam mostly from berkeley high school i'll give just a quick little bit
227of background um very quick because we're really we really shouldn't respond um so quick and dirty is that we will do additional research we've decided just to pause the implementation to learn more about the issues that are being raised by high school students thank you and and sam i also hope you noticed that we um have added we appointed two new members of the youth commission tonight and we're um slowly filling up our vacancies so that you have a full house there and um we really support and encourage the work that you're doing you and your colleagues are doing thank you so much i appreciate that of course um okay and our last um commenter for the night will be cielo rios hello hello okay you can hear me um i i've i think i've
228emailed each one of you um over the past two weeks and you understand where i'm coming from i would like to ask you again to release the disaggregated data by school and zip code i think that the public needs to know what those numbers really are i also want to ask that you consider the elementary school students that are going back to distance learning that you provide that that are i'm sorry they're not going back to distance learning they're staying at home safe i want to know how you're going to emotionally support those kids and provide them with services to understand why they're at home and their friends are at school my last point is actually a question i understand that you're not supposed to answer this okay take your time i'm one of the
229distant swimming families i identify as mexican i struggled when you sent that form i've lost so many family members this year i couldn't even go to their services why did you sign my daughter up for in person i got the most offensive email i have been reliving this trauma the past two weeks that i've had to display my trauma to people because i have not been shown any attention i have not received any communication why is this okay why didn't i hear back from you guys how come no one emails me thank you miss rios i'm i'm so sorry and um we will be in touch with you we'll be in touch with you i'm so sorry thank you for coming tonight yeah miss rios if i could jump in if if i could trouble
230you to email me directly so that i have a way to do it i have emailed you friends would you cry i'm just checking my email i have emailed you i have asked you why the district made a decision on my child and my behalf without my consent i emailed you all of the board of cc'd on the email and i emailed enrollment berkeley.net my husband is on the email too i have emailed you i'll look out for it then thank you i just found it i will re-forward it to you so it'll be at the top of your inbox thank you thank you mr director babbitt um and thank you for for coming and staying so late mr yes and dr stevens will be in touch with you um thank you all thank you
231all um for your comments and questions and direction tonight and with that i will adjourn the meeting goodnight everybody thanks