3/9/2022 Board of Education Meeting

001am i going to actually hit the gap at your leisure you kathy i am calling the chico unified school board meeting is open but we are going in to close we will be back at six o'clock for the full open meeting and anything that's decided enclosed will be announced at that time thank you i called the school board for march 9th to order and i know some of you are standing there are some more chairs there if you wish to get a chair to sit in so we have been in closed session and i need to report an action that we took in closed session the board took action in closed session and voted 5-0 to approve a final settlement with employee and consequently authorized the board president to sign the settlement agreement which i

002did so that's all the announcements we have from the closed session so with that i'll call you to the flag salute i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you so we move to student reports so at each regular board meeting we like to have our students share with us some of the unique things that they're doing and tonight we have students from marsh junior high school and i'd like to invite jessica camp to the microphone and to tell us what we're going to hear about good evening and thank you so much for allowing us to come and share with you some of the great things happening at marsh um tonight

003we are here to highlight really how we're supporting students with some social emotional learning and activities as they rejoin us in the classroom settings so i'm going to go ahead and welcome up our marsh gators they will introduce themselves as well as their grade level and talk about their experiences we do have a slideshow for you tonight um so our counselors will kind of speak a little bit about what their goals are of the programs that they've introduced and then i will have our students take it from there so gators come on up [Applause] hello everyone thank you for having us here to be able to present kind of um the programs activities and um some wellness counseling that we've had at marsh junior high i'm jorge salazar i'm one of the school counselors there

004i'm marcus hopkins and i'm the wellness counselor and we'll have our students introduce themselves and state their grade level as well hi i'm sean painter and i am in grade level seven hi i'm andre gascilon and i'm grade level six sixth grade hi i'm reid peck and i'm grade level six hi i'm leslie and i'm in seventh grade hi i'm marissa and i'm in eighth grade hi i'm landed i'm in eighth grade okay so marcus and i will briefly kind of discuss what we what programs we have at mars junior high and then as we discuss some of those programs and activities we can have our students that have participated in those give a little bit of perspective on you know their uh their experiences with these programs and so if we can get the

005next slide please so um in march this year we've um had two three social groups that we've run um the first group is called the gentleman's council and the topics of that group were bullying healthy relationships and and and um working together and then the next group we ran was the set apart mentor group which focused on career goals uh we we talked about the power of words um and learning to use our words correctly and choices and uh positive self-image and then the last group that we currently weren't running is a gender identity group um most of the groups that we run are for we do them for sixth graders and then we also have a seventh and 8th grade group that we run during the lunches on tuesdays and thursdays so the first

006person will have come speak is is sean painter [Applause] um i was in the gentleman council group and the set apart mentor group um they're both like i guess they both teach you like how to be uh friendly and like actually like kind of people like uh um and kind of teaching i kind of felt like it you know kind of helps um people and the gentleman's counsel group definitely like teaches you how to you know be a gentleman [Applause] i'm landon i was part of the gentleman's counselor and what i liked most about it was meeting new people there and learning about like different emotions and their so i just want to say i appreciate both of these um i call them gentlemen because i actually did the gentleman's counsel group and it was

007actually during lunch so if you know anything about junior high it's very hard to get junior high students to to miss lodge and re and you know the the time but these these two guys they would make sure that they made all the groups and so they they always came in there and gave their best effort yeah very good so the um out of the gentlemen's council group we ended up doing a gentleman's uh movie night and what we did was we got um a bunch of students together that the counselors have picked and was just an opportunity for our male students to uh to interact with some of our male staff and so uh what we did was we we gave those students what we called the golden ticket and they would bring that

008to the movie night and then on that night they would we had uh boxes set up and they would actually vote on the movie that they wanted to see and so it was a really good turnout and so like i said we also had a lot of community members uh donate we had the cookie shop they donated um 50 or so cookies round table gave us about nine pizzas and walmart excuse me costco also donated waters for the event and so the the speaker for that wasn't here he was supposed to come so he didn't show up so we can go to the next slide and so um one of the activities that we also do is uh we do lunchtime football and so this has been a um a big event we've we get

009probably i would say maybe 20 or so more kids at lunch we do it mostly during the sixth grade and seventh grade but and it's just a time for kids to come out um we do a lot of team building we we talk about being positive it helps them with social skills some of the times we get those kids who may not go out for a sport or you know the the regular sports team but they come out and it gives them an opportunity to play and it builds a lot of self-esteem so um we're going to have andre come and he's one of the guys who comes out regularly and plays with us hi my name is andre gastelum and i participated in the sports at lunch and i really enjoyed i really enjoyed

010it because it let me get my energy out and allows me to stay focused in my classes and also my favorite sports football because i play football and then i'll just do it [Applause] and so going to our next slide um this is um leadership usually does this it's usually on fridays we call it fun fridays and so leadership comes out and they have different activities for the kids and they do cornhole i know our leadership teacher he's out there playing music basketball so it's a lot of different things going on at lunch so again it gives our kids like something to be involved in at lunch and and you know sometimes you get those kids that are just like sitting around on campus but on fun fridays you'll find a lot of those kids

011are joining in and playing at some of the activities so we're going to have reid coming he's going to talk a little bit who's on leadership he's going to talk a little bit about fun friday hi my name is reed peck and i participate in leadership we've done lots of fun things this year like every friday we have yeah mr hopkins said it we do um cornhole play spike ball and also listen to music um we do we in a couple weeks we'll have our first school dance and also i help with spirit weeks and i work for the student store i enjoy leadership because it teaches me skills that i can use for the rest of my life [Applause] all right so not only do we offer outdoor activities for our students but we

012also offer some indoor activities just because we know that you know kids also like to participate in stuff indoors and we like to have that for the students and so as you can see some things that we have been doing in our library is playing card games playing chess drawing coloring and just allowing for the kids kind of express themselves and kind of just have that little social time inside the inside the um well not classroom but inside the library and so we did notice that the goals of these activities you know like like some outdoor activities are you know building social skills helping with numbers and um you know strategy building communication and just all those things that come along with being able to socialize and play a game you know with with a

013group of students and um so we have uh leslie ramirez here who participates in our lunchtime activities on a regular basis and we would like to hear from her hi my name is leslie and i like to participate in lunchtime activities because i get to have fun and meet new friends this year i have made new friends and i have played different games like bruno fuego and mancala and practicing and i practiced my english skills with my friends i'm always excited for lunch time and again mr salazar mr hopkins and miss ramos when i play fuego i help mr hopkins on the game to win leslie what's your favorite game for that library well my favorite thing is like pastime with with my friends and yeah and play games okay good thank you [Applause] another

014thing that we also offer our students is our social emotional learning which happens on wednesdays we call it our wellness wednesdays we've been using a curriculum called go be great which they also have empowerment journals i mean those are kind of like you know private journals for the students to kind of jot down some you know some feelings and kind of what they what they go through as we do the lessons um and we also have uh coming up is our may mental health awareness and that's kind of like um just an awareness of mental health we also have the 1000 flowers project coming up random acts of kindness around campus and we also have our self-love challenge which is our 30-day challenge where we have kids kind of meeting some challenges throughout the month

015to kind of meet some goals you know in in self-love and kindness another event that we had that we felt like was really impactful was our red ribbon week and we had different activities we had a lot of a lot of great information for students such as you know physical mental health substance use and abuse information personal safety and the kids loved it because they got to see kind of like you know models information on what you know substance abuse is and what it does and kind of the effects of those in you know long-term effects and um we also had our co-counselors you know miss uh sheila snyder and gabby buckham help us with those events and um it was really successful throughout the week and a lot of kids participated in that as

016well and um we have uh marissa ragosa here to talk to us about um red ribbon week because she was a big part of helping us put that together and kind of run the activities throughout the week all right hi i'm marissa i participated in ribbon week i liked it because it was fun helping out and teaching others about the effects of drugs and smoking one thing i learned from it was how much secondhand smoke can affect your lungs that's great thank you and just to kind of tie everything together um we also offer a lot of other things on our campus that really have an impact with our students that you know a lot of them do get involved with other things as well such as our multicultural club our cubing club our esports

017club drama club lgbtq plus club club live impact mentoring cjsf little big buddies our blast program garden club and activities and of course all these things you know promote cultural awareness a sense of belonging leadership development skills development community service enrichment and a lot of other things as well and so just to kind of finish off we have a lot of photos here from all the clubs and organizations that we've had and all the participation that we've seen from our students on campus so what would you guys like to say to your two leaders here i would like to thank him for teaching us all these things um thank them for allowing us to be available to all the activities all right i say thank you because she's helped like to understand and like um

018will help us and yeah okay i would like to thank them for helping us like like see new things in life good yeah i like to thank them for letting us have activities at sports like baseball basketball and football so have you already committed to chico high with your swag you're wearing there not really but just that's the junior football team i play for right now oh all right i wanted to say thank you for letting us on here to talk and stuff okay everybody thank you [Music] and i just wanted i want to thank all of our students for being here it's tough to get up and talk in front of adults in the crowd in a setting like this and you guys did a fabulous job and huge thank you to the staff

019that put all this together we really appreciate you [Applause] i think that's an excellent segue to the superintendent's report and recognition so i'd like to invite damon whitaker up to the podium damon's going to start off with an announcement and then he's going to jump right into announcing one of our staff award winners thank you um madam president members of the board thank you for uh allowing me to come up and present tonight i do have an announcement um so we are very fortunate um last night our boys basketball team defeated board high school in the norcal regional championship game that is the second regional title the boys basketball team has successfully won in the last four years the victory last night has advanced them into the state championship game for division three so the

020boys basketball team will take on venice high school out of los angeles friday night at four o'clock down at golden one arena it's quite the experience for our kids i was fortunate enough to be there four years ago with the 2018 team who won the state championship and the kids are going to have an amazing experience and an opportunity to go down there and play on an nba court in front of a large capacity crowd and so we're very excited for that team and the opportunity they have ahead of them friday night all right [Music] i was i was curious if my cif pass would let me into that or if i might have to pay to get in i think we have you covered okay thanks yes and if i could invite two of

021my outstanding teachers up here to join me tonight gail olson and stacia morrissey please [Applause] yes she said i'm a liar and yes i am i i i asked the two of these amazing teachers to join me tonight uh they both believe that they are here to answer questions related to our recently passed block schedule that they were so instrumental in moving that conversation forward on our campus but instead i have asked both of you here tonight so that i could recognize the two of you for all that you do for our students and our school community first let me introduce gail olson gail is a special education teacher at pleasant valley high school gail has always been a strong voice for our special education students advocating for inclusion and equity gail does a tremendous

022job not only working with our students but also with our parents through the iep process iep meetings can be very challenging and difficult at times gail is always supportive of this process with parents which creates a comfort level our parents are extremely grateful for i would also like to introduce stacia morrissey stacia is an english teacher at pleasant valley she is our english department chair and a member of the english district leadership council as an english teacher stacia has created a classroom environment that students feel safe and heard there's always great student engagement in her classes and she too is a huge advocate for students on our campus stacia continually supports ideas and opportunities that benefit our students as the english department chair she has been a strong mentor to all of our new english

023teachers supporting them with curriculum and ideas stacia is very respected by her department and viewed as someone who was a strong collaborator and supportive of her department members recently our teachers voted on a waiver that would change our current schedule to a blocked schedule for this type of waiver to pass it requires an 85 percent approval it is an understatement to say that getting a waiver of this magnitude to pass is difficult these two ladies were extremely instrumental in the passing of this waiver gail with her expertise as a union representative wrote the waiver but more importantly her impact was felt by the creation of a motto when was the last time you tried something for the first time i believe this concept really impacted our staff and how they approach the block schedule conversations

024with an open mind stacia is equally credited with our block schedule waiver passing as she took it upon herself to host campus meetings at lunches in order to give our students excuse me in order to give our staff opportunities to engage in conversations about block scheduling i can say with all certainty that the block schedule would not have passed had those discussions not taking place it gives me great honor to be able to recognize these two outstanding teachers at pleasant valley high school for all that they have done and continue to do for our campus and our students all right [Applause] all right you got to turn around damon [Applause] and for our final award i'd like to invite up andrew mole [Applause] good evening i just want to start off first by thanking jorge

025and marcus and the rest of their espit for all the work that they do over at mars junior high all of your efforts are truly appreciated over and over so thank you so much we appreciate it [Applause] and as always i'd like to thank the board for your endless support of alternative education in every way um it's heartfelt and we really really appreciate it every year and same with you blind folks over here all right so thank you for the opportunity to recognize a remarkable human being tonight in september of 2016 the alternative education family was fortunate to add a new member a new member of the family who demonstrates unconditional love and support for all students as an instructional paraprofessional she exhibits a level of compassion that should be modeled after she never hesitates

026to seek support options for struggling students and advocates for her students however possible staff and students alike depend on her every day because she is extremely reliable with one with one of the strongest work worth ethic of work ethics i have had the privilege to work with in alternative education we are constantly refining our practice to meet the needs of our amazing students and evolving to the changes in our community while striving to deliver the best service to all stakeholders this wonderful woman plays a vital role in our efforts to do exactly that with a calming presence she is strongly suited to meet the needs to meet students needs where they may be academically and emotionally as an administrator i am absolutely grateful to work with someone who is committed to the overall well-being of

027students with a level of professionalism i truly admire i can say without hesitation that the entire alt-ed family can always count on her for anything and everything anything and everything to support our school site we can all share the unique difficulties associated with the impact has had on our campuses throughout the district last year when we discussed strategies to identify support and re-engage students she spoke up immediately and developed a tutoring program available to all students on campus she is so reliable that when we experience a situation that calls for a creative solution her name is the first to come up i can only imagine how she feels when she sees me walking her way and as if if she has a few minutes to chat again i'm absolutely grateful to work with such a

028committed individual please join me in saying thank you and correct congratulations on receiving the superintendent's award to a person our family admires in so many ways we love you we appreciate you miss malika lawrence [Applause] congratulations [Applause] all right so now we're going to go back to announcements because there was someone who didn't leave their name but who wanted to introduce the topic of katie worth is that person here somebody who wanted to discuss katie worth ah hi kathy hi you didn't know your own name i i i didn't even know my own name i didn't know to uh put it anywhere so i apologize okay um i'm just here to let you all know that katie wirth the author of miss miseducation how climate change is taught in america is coming to speak here

029in chico but that's not the most important reason i'm here to tell you is that she starts the book by going back to her alma mater chico junior high so she is one of us and so i just wanted to let you know that um if anybody wants to get in touch with her while she's here please contact me but i thought it was really important she uh a local girl done good and award-winning uh emmy and uh ward so that's the important stuff i wanted to tell you i got a couple nods so people got the importance mark what's the date and the time of her it is march 30 march 30th wednesday at six o'clock on campus in calusa 100. all right and i will leave the information at the table right here

030perfect thank you and thank you let's see all right that was announcements oh because he damon did the basketball game okay so with that um we have items from the floor and we have a speakers list generated so um go in sequence here so danielle penny and i'll remind you that you get three minutes and jim hanlon will click when you have 30 seconds left shepard you got to watch it madam president board and staff my name is danielle penny and i've been an employee at chico unified since 2002 i'm here today to share a story to bring awareness that i believe chico unified wants all students to feel safe and heard assembly bill 1266 and california education code 2215 require that k-12 public school students who are transgender or gender non-conforming be allowed to

031use bathrooms and locker rooms without regard to their sex at birth these guidelines while attempting to accommodate transgender students violate the rights of the vast majority of the student population who happen to be cisgender i am respectively asking that the school district immediately implement policy that will protect its cisgender students while at the same time accommodating its transgender students a young lady experienced discrimination in our district when a request for an accommodation was not taken seriously this young lady was uncomfortable as she noticed a transgender student was changing at a locker room near hers this transgender student is a biological male with male genitalia the young lady went to staff and asked if she could be moved to a different row in the locker room as she was not comfortable undressing in front of a

032biological male staff told her she could not move so she chose to not dress down and her grade was docked as a result i am concerned about the emotional and psychological harm a young lady will suffer by having her unclothed body viewed by a biological male against her will and having to view a male's unclothed body in a school locker room this violates her right to privacy potentially exposes the male genitalia to innocent young ladies and risks triggering significant trauma to any young lady who bears the scars of sexual abuse these risks are potentially catastrophic to the young ladies as they ex and they expose the school district to possible legal action i am here tonight to ask that the district immediately implement policy to ensure that all students rights are protected we must educate

033staff to take it seriously when a student shares that they are uncomfortable changing in front of those of the opposite biological sex this young lady that i speak about tonight was a brave young lady who asked for an accommodation yet when it was denied her grade was docked and she was sent a clear message that her rights were not as important as those of transgender students i think you would agree with me that this is not the message we wish to send the young people who are entrusted to our care i urge you to please fix this thank you [Applause] all right our next speaker is loretta torres hello again i'm loretta torres i'm a grandmother with uh three gr three grandchildren in your school districts i'm here to talk about the the lines the

034district lines that you're going to be the maps you're going to be voting on but mr landau i have an aside before i get into that if i have enough time i hope you queried last time last meeting that you wondered why people were so angry parents grandparents at school board meetings throughout the nation actually and it's and i'll tell you why it's very evident during this last two years we have become aware that some of our children have been discriminated against because they chose not to wear masks little tiny two-year-olds there's a gentleman here who sometimes gets angry doesn't speak but i talk to him afterwards he his he's never been interested politically or to uh to even come to to board meetings but he is now very very interested and very angry because

035his two-year-old on her own decided not to wear a mask and her teacher made her sit out in the cold last winter and not only that i was the this little child was being which she quotes the teacher was mean to me now a parent is going to be angry and a parent and parents and grandparents are angry and we've you've lost our trust we don't we don't trust you now to go going forward the masks will come off but the trust is not going to come back we don't trust you to not teach our children about uh their curriculu to be transparent in the future for uh the sake of transparency when parents want to know what's in their classroom is being taught like transgender uh studies and identification in grammar school or a

036critical race theory none of us want our gran children and grandchildren taught in in certain ways we'd rather you just taught them to read write and do arithmetics a tick and think for themselves now okay my time is almost up so now i'm going to get into i believe you're going to be voting tonight on green or orange and i wonder mainly how hard is it would it be for you to go back to blue because everybody in back of me the majority of the parents want the blue wanted the blue map and i admonish you for please try to do the best for our children in going forward the orange map is very political the green map go green if that's all you've got but try to try finding out if you can do

037bring back the blue anyway thank you for your time [Applause] i want to remind the speakers who signed up that items from the floor are not items on the agenda they're not items on the agenda so julie threat hi everybody julie i'm an aunt kid's here grandma cheerleader um i want to talk a little bit about getting ready for the vaccine mandate or whatever else comes at us from covid i've been looking at a lot of the best practices around and trying to think of the ways that maybe we could be more proactive and get kind of ahead of the curve rather than waiting and waiting for something to come and dump on us and there are definitely a number of things that i think at least could be considered or thought of and i

038haven't obviously vetted them all out but as these ladies behind me now i kind of just ideas ideas ideas ideas they just come all out so um wardrobe of ideas as ruth sarnoff would say okay so the first one is i'm not hearing a lot about what's good for the kids what's best for the kids we hear a lot of the parents talking about their kids and the teachers talking about their kids and the staff talking about the teachers and the parents so just on a lot of things that the kids are having their voice actually heard i found a couple of districts that have a um a student board member so they have a representative and they've got a whole process obviously set up where there's a student like a junior senior that's up

039there with you all on the dice don't have voting power obviously don't have all the bells and whistles but it is an extremely important job they take it very seriously i was listening to this gal and she was really you know representing the kids and the students in the schools so i think that might be a good idea to at least kind of turn the tide back to hey we've got a voice for the kids and see what um maybe you can set up with that type of program and actually she was like looking to do actually a vote for it next time because they're so big of a district um then we've got communications and again it's we know what's going to happen we just spent six months going through this whole mass debacle

040and we're waiting and waiting and waiting for a lot of the things to come down and we're sitting in the middle going well we can already be proactive and we have a lot of power that i don't think we necessarily think about there's two um two ways you can kind of look at the positive and the negative when we're looking at this vaccine mandate and ways that we can start looking at what they're doing to try to join forces and get ahead of the curve sacramento city unified school district is already implementing this whole vaccine mandate they started it january 1. they've got the whole turnkey kick going they've got the bells and whistles the charts the graphs a lot of things nobody a lot of people are going to want to see but they've

041got it in place i would assign somebody right now to just start going down they're monitoring it looking at it find out where their holes are is it the exemption form did they change your exemption form they probably at this point have the best exemption form find out what's working what's not working so you don't have to restart that whole process from scratch if that's the inevitable let's at least look at the one that's already on it the second one is let's join forces with all of the other school districts in butte county let's have the beaut county united instead of having a durham person come in here and tell us what they're doing let's just do a whole resolution for one county and band together as several counties maybe with our our elected officials

042that's the two things all right so that's our last speaker and then items from the floor we didn't have any speakers on that correct oh okay sorry all right so now we move to our consent calendar does anyone on the board wish to pull an item on the consent calendar yeah i'd like to oh my microphone's not as loud as last time and i'm not going to complain about it because i'm that's better uh i'd like to please pull item 8.1.2 consider approval of minutes from meeting march 2nd okay 8.1.2 all right and then anyone else all right uh we do have public comment on the consent council yes we do i hadn't forgot that okay so um julie three you're you're also on for the consent calendar items they're actually a lot of good

043information i was just going to give a testimony to one of the items on here it's the college connections item agenda that's on here when i first moved here five years ago a dear friend of mine had a daughter at pv and she signed up for this program and i for something in college connections of course why not i mean if they're if you're going for you know your honors programs it's got to be something like that or you know get connected with other types of college opportunities no this is a completely different program it took me a little while to really understand the type of person that would be really good for this because it's not for everybody and so when i talked to erica this morning she said that next month i think

044you're having the presentation you're having a person come in here and give the presentation so i would definitely support this program and highly recommend that everybody behind me can listen to the to the next month's agenda where they actually go through the detail it's fabulous all right thank you it is a very successful program right so we have one item pulled um no others okay all right so may i have a motion sure i'll move the passage of the remaining consent calendar items okay with the exception of the i'll second that motions okay okay the speaker who was on the speakers list was called and spoke no one else was on it all right so we have a motion um and with that um i'll take a roll call vote robinson i landed why kaiser

045i dolby i tennessee okay five to nothing okay with that we'll move to the 8.1.2 the minutes of the special board meeting yeah just for clarification i pulled this because i was not present at that meeting and so i will not be voting uh i also was not present for the last half hour of that meeting so that's also an issue for me too so that means that two of us would have to recuse ourselves you might be referring to a different meeting okay i was in the all right uh okay so uh you're gonna recuse yourself okay all right okay so with that uh clarification may i have a motion about the uh minutes of the special board meeting at 3.2 move passage of item 8.1.2 okay in a second second all right so

046matt seconds okay so we have uh a motion to consider the approval of the minutes of the special board meeting on uh march 2nd uh with caitlin dalby recused all those in favor robinson i land away kaiser i tennessee all right so four zero all right thank you with that we move to the discussion action calendar um and the first item is the california voting rights act uh draft maps and the sequence by district elections and then we would adopt the resolution after that so um we do have several speakers on this item and sarah vargas hi i'm sarah vargas and i want to start with saying yes to everything danielle said um and then to this good evening i am a mother of five kids in the chico unified district two graduates and three

047are still in i am speaking tonight because the green map is the only objective map thank you to mr tennis and to mr lando for pointing that out last week the map was prepared by professionals hired by this board and given clear directions by this board to draw equitable districts that represent the community and the things it holds dear neighborhoods demographics and so forth there was no consideration given to where the current board members lived and how they would fill these districts the preparers did not know thus making the green map the only option in the minds of parents in our community after hearing robinson's rationale as to why the orange map should even be considered i could only come to one conclusion she is putting herself before the interests of the children parents community

048schools and any other stakeholders in chico unified for that alone a vote vote for the orange map makes it very clear you do not understand your role or responsibility to this body i asked a friend if they were attending tonight and her reply was i don't think it's going to make any difference even if 100 people showed up wearing green their decisions are made and they don't care what we say or what we think and this is exactly what the problem is you have forgotten who you serve it is not newsome and it is not the teachers union and it is certainly not yourselves if you're not making decisions based on what is in the best interest of everyone except yourself you have missed the mark on what it means to be of service to

049the public choose our children and choose what is best for chico unified for the next 10 years vote green please thank you all right [Applause] and dustin vargas everything that she just said father stepfather of five two graduated three still in so very vested in this i'll start with saying thank you for your service i know it's not easy though the demands are very clear on that so with that said i went back and forth with how to open my comments i started with a movie trailer voice over an entire city fed up with political science crashes the school board meeting on districts i got a little too dramatic i settled on the ringling brothers ladies and gentlemen boys and girls children of all ages chico unified district proudly welcomes you to districting on my

050right we have ellie eileen gerrymandering robinson tom why so serious lando kathleen this isn't a town hall kaiser caitlin glad you could make it tonight dalby and matt last hope for our children tennis doing battle centering is the objective green map prepared by professionals and approved by parents and community versus the mysterious last minute cover your butt protect my seat at all costs orange map stay in your seats watch out for flying objects this is sure to be a crowd pleaser pausing for effect okay so tom you wanted to know why school board's become so polarizing nationwide to touch on what was just said a few moments ago this man it's a circus this is no business in here here we are doing it to it it never should have happened and kind of the

051feeling i got was you wanted to play the victim and gas like the parents in the community for coming up here and calling you on it and that's not all right that's really it's not all right um we teach our children better than that and we should represent ourselves better than that [Music] dr kaiser i spent a few minutes looking at the numbers after your speech about equity and hispanic vote you endorsed a map that further deluded the hispanic vote it was odd you can try and dismiss the numbers but they're there so i'm not sure how that worked out and then um to to follow up on what my wife said remember your roles you appear to have forgotten them the only vote for our children is the green math anything less shows the

052community hearts you know whether your servants are or otherwise many thanks to the diligence of people in this building i'd like to specifically thank julie and gina the community appreciates them more than you know and you get a lot of speakers so thank you the next speaker is randall chase randall chase madam president i'll take this off madam president board members superintendent i'm here tonight to talk about the maps and after look after spending several days perusing the maps i i believe that the green map is the map to adopt and then by doing that you set the foundation for this district and for the board to operate in this district it's very important and not only uh that but you talk about the social economic impact of of it and and that green map

053addresses that i think in the best way thank you very much thank you julie treat okay um i think the best things i'm just going to maybe talk to each one of you since i've been here most of the time and watching the meetings back and try to see if i can answer some of the questions that you've had outstanding from the last meeting um so i will start so i'm going to top of the page so um miss dolby supervisor board member dolby did that wrong so you were flavoring favoring the blue and the purple map pretty much towards the end of november and you were very respectful and very um you really wanted to know what the hispanic vote was going to be for these maps on november third you had um elaine

054ward here for a good deal of time asking her and she was very clear the purple map was best for the hispanic community gina backs came in on november 17th again at the end of the meeting and you guys brought her up here to actually show you why the purple map was the best purple purple was the way to go purple had the highest and um was most consistent with the spirit of the law and actually rob confirmed that for you all you asked him and the household income was again something that you guys had but then you started getting into the weeds so i think that was a part of the hard part analysis paralysis paralysis paralysis kind of drug this out we kind of lost focus we eliminated the blue map you and

055the movement straight on because forest ranch was split but i was looking at the maps and it was actually a ridge line over to the left so the key for me here is i was starting to blame the consultant because he was asking for tweaks and tweaks and tweaks we could have fixed that put foreign together put the line about you know three blocks short all the way to cohasset it wouldn't change the numbers much but he could have tweaked that but it was already eliminated uh miss robinson so and you guys have been here for the full two years i thought that was fabulous too the hispanic vote again very important for you um you again called that any vote but the blue would be gerrymandering that was on november 17th and rob agreed

056gerrymandering and then your issue was addition franchising the voter which was interesting to me because every every group goes through that the states are going through that adam kinzinger doesn't get to run that's too bad and so it's um if i voted for tom lando i don't live in this district anymore so next time i'm disenfranchised because i can't vote for him so that kind of is is regardless of the whole thing and then ms kaiser so you argued that the blue was the most balanced the household income you were it was very powerful you wanted to keep all the neighborhoods together that was absolutely critical for you but then we split up the two maps that favored the ethnicity the balanced income and the neighborhoods we illuminated them so now we're here with green

057that doesn't do that and that's favoring orange i'm like we just went back to purple and blue and then mr lando you didn't say any comments at all i went through every single meeting and the meetings were there there was no questions or comments you did um reply to an email for me that said um because i put in a map after that 17th meeting you said people come up with maps i did spencer bird did and um you emailed me back saying looks very interesting would like to look at it more see tonight the meeting that was february 16th and then that was the meeting you left at so this is all wrong the purple map by far is the best one it's been there for two years it's a neighborhood map now the

058elementary school map it fits all the bill bring back the purple map [Applause] okay and the last speaker is shasta a what matters my name doesn't matter what matters is the map and getting a good fair balanced map this representative that does the job that it's intended to do and we need to be really making a good decision here a wise decision i would urge that we adopt the green map it gives us good coverage it gives us balance it addresses the needs of the hispanic uh population and being represented properly and i would just urge that this is the way to go and and um and move forward thank you all right okay so that's the end of the public comment and thank you for those who did submit their cards at a time

059and so now we move to the boards discussion okay um we've got the demographers and mr gant here right there you are hello um since we just went through this whole discussion a week ago have there been any substantive changes that we need to know about thank you were you done yeah mr james i have a question can you confirm something for me mr murray um i was looking at the criteria for the grain map am i correct that the treatment of the high school districts with the green map does each board members is basically split 50 50 per high school district yeah maybe not 50 50 but each trustee area covers a portion that is in each of the two high school boundaries so there's no trustee area that's entirely within one or the

060other high school area percentage-wise uh do you have any recollection of of where the green map was in terms of uh representation in a high school district uh i for each one i don't know that i ever actually crunched the numbers on exactly that split but i can tell you based on because we uh had the map that had the trusty areas that followed the high school boundary where it worked out that the total district population came out pretty close to 40 and the pv boundary where you had two trustee areas and 60 and the chico high boundary where you had the three areas on that map and so on the green map uh you do have more of those uh boundaries that are you know include more territory uh on the chico side just

061because the populations ultimately still have to balance in order to have each of the five areas covering both high school boundaries and so some of them uh are going to have different percentage splits but each of them you know does you know that was kind of the directive we had with that one was to find a map where there would be that ability that each board member would represent the neighborhoods that were zoned to each of the two high schools thank you you're welcome yeah rob isn't it true that our high schools have about 40 percent of the students who come from outside that high school district if i remem remember correctly yeah and i'm actually going to be presenting your updated demographics a little bit later tonight and i if i were smart and

062knew what you were going to ask i'd have had that number uh fresh off the press for you so but i mean that sound it's probably fairly close to that uh at the high school level uh may not be quite that high but yes you do have some uh pretty substantial uh migration between both ways uh between your two uh primary comprehensive high schools yes all right thank you anybody else have a question for rob that they want to ask for clarification i have a quick clarification question just because this this got repeated a couple times and i just want to make sure i'm understanding when were we first presented the maps so the see i think we have uh do we still have the slide that has our original uh schedule on the show

063i mean we pulled that up because yep i clearly just did not memorize everything we had the fourth slide there you didn't memorize all the numbers come on but yes so uh yeah so october 20th so we yeah we went back to october there we go yeah people from the crowd can shout the answers from playing at home but yes we do have not two years but five months yes uh yeah because we because we completely uh you know did not you know just because the populations had changed we could not use any of the maps that were developed in the original process that was haunted at the beginning of the covet pandemic in march of 2020. and good evening uh members of the board superintendent staley this is jamie can you guys hear me

064okay just to answer uh dr kaiser's question your in-migration and out-migration at the high schools ranges from 25.7 to 33.4 of students in and out okay the whole the whole okay the whole district so the high schools have less migration there's only two choices typically right yeah it really just depends on the grade level in the individual school and how that ranges and like rob said he'll be presenting your full demographic analysis update for this year a little bit later and you can see those numbers by school okay thank you uh any other questions that any board member want to bring up uh matt okay i have a comment um is that okay yeah it's a comment no yes all right okay so um if no one has a question for our expert demographers then

065we can um move to discussion excuse me uh okay do we have a motion i move the green map okay we have a motion to move the green map i'll second that okay okay so that's now up for discussion i'd like to just very briefly i've made a lot of speeches about these maps and i don't want to repeat them but i want to thank the people who came out to speak on behalf of the green map obviously agree with you and i want to point out for the benefit of everyone in attendance and that the orange map has had by the standards of this conversation virtually no public support i remember clearly one email that we received a couple of months ago about it and i remember one comment here in favor of the

066orange map now my memory might be fuzzy and i'm biased so my recollection of the history on this could i could be mistaken probably am you know it might be two emails and one speech we have heard very consistently and not just from a a finite easily defined number of you i'm hearing at this point from a very what i would consider a broad coalition of people from different walks of life and ages and stages who don't like the orange map and what it represents you know as we are all aware democracy is having a moment in the world right now and i think that the only appropriate choice for us to uphold democracy in this school district in an unadulterated fashion is to support the green map because it was created by somebody who

067had no idea you know which incumbents if any would benefit from it the criteria that he used to draw the map i think was very admirable and we've got an opportunity to to do something uh and make a statement in favor of objectivity and reasonableness in the choice of this map for the district so i urge passage of green thank you [Applause] um all right clapping this is a discussion now among the board members so um that's just really slowing us down eileen thank you madam president i think this process that we've had to go through has been [Music] misunderstood misinterpreted um i'm not sure how we got where we are we did not choose we meaning the school district did not choose to move into district elections that was forced on us by a

068law firm that was busy suing districts that didn't do this the law that we then had to follow set up the criteria that we needed to use to allow for protection of voting strength by protected classes and in this district that's our hispanic voters with a smaller minority of african-american voters those were the criteria you are all right we did not ask when the demographers began their work to look at where each current board member lived as we were ending the process of coming together to look at the the maps the green the purple and the blue we became aware because someone asked a question of whether or not they would be able to run for election it when it got to november and when we looked at started looking at the sequencing and how

069that would happen we didn't know yet because it hadn't been approved and so when we looked further into that issue of sequencing we discovered that it wasn't just a clean move into the process with the green blue and purple maps that we had but the by developing the orange maps which the demographers developed each one of the current board members could be in an approved district and the community would know who was going to be up for election with the next election and no current board members if they chose to be running for reelection would be running against each other i thought that was kind of a clean way to get into this process of districting when the support for the orange map was expressed and and i'm one of the ones that it was

070immediately seen as the word the with the word gerrymandering came out and if you look up the definition of gerrymandering it doesn't fit but the perception was that something funny was going on and we were trying to guarantee a seat on the board if you look at the statistics of our last three elections incumbents were not reelected so if you're an incumbent on this board right now your chances of being reelected aren't good um so my my need was only to make it as smooth a transition as possible if you take a look at what district elections do yes it it appoints um a district and says you can run if you live in that area for that district once you're elected guess what you're on the board of education of the chico unified school

071district and you have every single student in that district to represent you don't represent that district you represent all 12 000 kids in this district and all of the actions and considerations you take are on behalf of every single one of those kids regardless of what district you lived in to get elected i want you to think about that the politicalization of this process has been okay i'm going to end and not define that because it has upset me this isn't about politics this is about kids being taught in our district and who represents that district on the board of education means absolutely zero if you're being a responsible board member you are doing what it takes to investigate all of the things we have to consider for every single one of our kiddos okay

072tomorrow oh i'm sorry i thought you did okay i just want to move the question oh so we don't have them on the table all right so uh if there's no further discussion and the context of this again is following the law of the california voting rights act which was explicitly structured to try to strengthen recognized minority groups and our only sizable group since the new census data came out was hispanic and they were very dispersed and so most of the districts designed were to be relatively equal in numbers um okay so we have a motion to approve the green actually what okay go ahead please i do have things to say and i was going to say it with my vote but i actually want to hit on these beforehand because i want to

073follow up what board member robinson said so i want to start off by saying there is nothing inherently wrong with any of these map options each of these maps all do what's best for kids and the decision to draw district lines has everything to do with a threat of lawsuit and hardly anything to do with what's best for kids except to make sure that we are elevating the vote of our hispanic population and that when we do that we are also evenly distributing the population within the confines of the law so what we're voting on tonight are maps that fall within those criteria one does those slightly better than the other um and otherwise neither map gives member robinson an advantage she's in the same situation with both maps if we talk about individuals and

074running for re-election and all those things board member robinson has just as much right and ability to win that seat again with the green map as she does with either orange map it's equal even she has no skin in the game with this z-ro it's actually mr tennis and i who have the most to lose in this decision in the ability to run for our seats again in 2024. so i don't understand why this has become so politicized and people have become so angry and have been bullies and have harassed board members in front of kids in front of other community members it's pretty disgusting to see adults act this way i watched on youtube when i was stuck where i was stuck last wednesday i missed a flight and i watched i was disgusted

075absolutely disgusted at the behavior of the adults in this community shame on all of you who acted that way now the decision for maps tonight is not political no matter how much you want it to be no matter how much you yell about it being political it's absolutely not this has been political grandstanding at its finest in our little tiny community who should just get along fine and yet we've been allowing ourselves to become more and more divided for what for what benefit because it's what's best for kids no we all up here represent our students all of us and we all up here represent our communities i just went off i just went off script got a little emotional there sick of it so i want to touch on a couple points um i

076don't think it's going to make a difference for uh somebody said i don't think it's gonna make a difference our public comments not when they not when they come off the way that they do not when they're you know accusing people of being a certain way without making actual points about the data about the evidence um i got called out in a public comment about um the purple map and pulling that i pulled the purple map because it's split forest ranch from cohasset madam president i'm sorry i'm going to call the orders of the day i'd like to get this back on the topic of which map we're going to choose i actually just have a point to make and that is the the map that i'm voting for tonight has nothing to do with

077the harassment and the bullying that's been going on by our community zero so that was the that's the take home message i'll be done all right thank you with that we will take a roll call vote and i want to start with matt tennis i all right caitlin so it's my concern that that an endorsement of the green map is an endorsement of the behavior of this community that have that have spoken the way that they that i've addressed but i do vote for the green map okay and it's not because of okay those experiences all right i'm gonna vote nay everything caitlyn said including the eye okay robinson i okay so it's four to one so the green map is selected and now we need to uh look at the resolution 1570. madam president

078i believe we need to have a discussion about sequencing before we get to the resolution right okay yes so and uh get that let me get the green map up here so we can uh for what purpose because we're going to talk about election district and election um now and i'd like to be able to see where's what rob you gonna come up okay thank you rob yeah and so with this green map we do have a suggested sequence that's been printed uh we believe yeah we are assuming that uh given that all of the current members of the board including the three whose terms will expire in reside between areas four and five that those two areas will hold elections in 20 or so in 2022 i misspoke that leaves the other three areas

079numbers one two and three with no current board members residing one of which uh because you need to have three seats elected in this coming november election uh to hold its election in 2022 with the other two waiting until 2024. uh so this uh suggested sequence picks area one to be to join four and five in this november's election uh but that is something that could be you could select area two or area three uh if you had some reason for a preference but your suggested sequence that's been published so far as the default uh does have areas 1 4 and 5 in 2022 all right any reactions to that from the board or ideas rob why why area one as a was it just random that i would have it was fairly arbitrary for

080me i think really uh you know just because it's first in line uh just because it balances out a little bit with the east to west but uh it is again it is fairly arbitrary and i don't think any harm or benefit would particularly occur if you picked either of those any of those three districts to be the first one to hold its election all right maybe recognized does anyone up here have any reason not to like that sequence or want to do something different i'm considering whether or not here we go i'm considering whether um how much of the geography matters it's possible for everyone to be on the the far south side of town with this uh so i'm considering moving for but you're you're kind of talking about the more urban center

081it's possible for someone for all three of the uh seats to be won by people who are who are very far south of town with one four and five i don't think it's the end of the world if we pick one four and five i just two guarantees as someone from the other side of town i just am surprised because five goes has a very large physical area one has a very large physical area so the two small smallest physical areas are two and three um i think geographic size is um i guess if we're going to discuss changing sequencing would we want to have a motion or for unless we're asking questions i mean i guess we should be asking clarifying questions before we get into any kind of discussion i guess i do

082have a question and do we have and forgive me for not having this in front of me um ideas about the population density within say um area one in particular uh i mean i've never run it by density in terms of the actual i mean each of them has approximately the same population within the trustee area have not done the calculation of people per square mile right i think you mean just the number right not the density no i meant the density really yeah but that's not an illegal issue rob on the sequencing with two of our member positions not the expiring in 2024 correct in order to serve beyond 2024 would they have to run in 2022 that's i'm sorry that's that's my question okay yes the so for members tennis and dalby uh

083as was referenced a bit ago uh with those two uh areas four and five uh scheduled to hold their election in uh they are currently hold at-large seats on the board but those uh terms expire in 2024 and given that they live in areas four and five which would not be scheduled to hold another election for the trustee area seat until 2026 if they did not want to have that two-year interruption they would need to go ahead and run for the trustee area seat and then should they win that they vacate the at-large seat they start a new term that runs from 22 to 26 and then it sounds like from when i've heard another conversation it would be more likely to have an appointment to then fill the thou vacant at large seat for

084the remain for the remainder of its term until 2024. that was what i thought answered my question i'll move the staff proposal or the proposal so if i can clarify that you're moving that the order of sequencing would be one four and five yes okay and then two and three and twenty-four okay do we have a second i'll second that motion okay did you want to continue discussion i think you were i think you were making a good point actually um about how area two is more densely populated um and so it could be that there are um just a different opportunity for voters i appreciate that i also tend not to think that it's a huge deal i pretend to agree with member robinson that whoever gets elected is going to represent everybody regardless

085of where they reside so i'm happy to go with the staff recommendation we're doing a loop around the center and then you know mr tennis and i will be at large the other the other aspect which nobody has brought up is the this does change the act of somebody running and these are our three biggest areas so it would be you know the na the nature of the outreach in terms of getting that going so we have a motion and a second that the sequence of voting be areas 1 4 and 5 and 2022 of the green map and then in 2024 it would be areas two and three correct okay all right so any further discussion all right if i can have another roll call vote please robinson i landed y kaiser eye dolby

086a tennis eye okay five zero all right so that's the order of sequencing that's that and that's the green map and then um for the do we have to vote separately on the resolution correct okay so the resolution is and this just codifies the green map and the sequence of elections okay so recognizing the green map and the sequence of elections do we have legal advice here okay just want to make sure um no i'm waiting to see what he okay so um the resolution 1570 1570-22 notes both the selection of the green map and the sequencing that we just passed and so we need to vote on that uh may i ask a quick question to staff first yes thank you um because it was brought up last time have we heard anything or

087had any communication with the county regarding the timeline the county the county board of education will not schedule their meeting until we have a map and a sequence selected okay so we didn't miss out on anything by putting it up thank you all right so we have a motion and a second on the resolution um do we have a motion i thought we did oh we didn't i'm sorry i'll move the resolution okay okay now we have okay katelyn and dolby all right i mean tom katelyn oh man okay all right so uh take a roll call vote robinson robinson aye okay kaiser eye dolby aye tennis eye okay five to nothing the resolution so we got that i know all right so uh madam superintendent do you want to have a moment of silence

088and now that this is this process is over i just want to thank jamie and rob and paul for bearing with us through this whole process thank you all for your professionalism and your knowledge and your thoroughness yeah absolutely thank you thank you um so uh yeah jamie's in the corner there okay so uh superintendent staley did you have a sense that we needed to go to a little out of order here or no i think we need to move on i just want to make sure we continue okay all right so the next thing up is uh discussion action on our covet update and michelle bunch thank you good evening i'm michelle bunch your coveted lead for chico unified school district who's advancing slides for me okay thank you [Laughter] perfect with declining case

089rates and hospitalizations across california and the west mass guidance is being updated for k-12 schools on february 28th governor newsome and the california department of public health announced the mask requirements and k-12 schools would shift to recommendations beginning on march 12th california data trends have improved significantly there's been a 66 drop in cases over the last two weeks of february hospitalizations have dropped statewide admissions and test positivity rates have also dropped this is our butte county health department cases by week from their dashboard and you can see the case rates have dropped significantly from the peak of omicron in january and this is our chico unified data trend and you can see we tend to follow the county trend and you can see our case rates have dropped significantly from our peak in january as

090well state why the projections for hospitalizations show a continuous decline so moving through march they expect them to continue to drop and they've been following that trend and you can see endless hospitals numbers peaked and also are on a decline locally on february 28 the california department of public health issued updated guidance after they reassessed and affirmed safe in-person instruction is essential and schools should contin continue to provide mitigation resources like test testing and mask availability chico unified offers many mitigation resources we have 22 employee and student testing centers across our district we test employees students and parent volunteers in january we responded to the need to provide a symptomatic testing center and with the help of maintenance and operations moved a mobile testing center into the parking lot of the district office with the

091help of the butte county office of education we secured 12 000 home test thousand kits over five adult masks and over fourteen thousand and ninety five child masks we've distributed hand sanitizer as well as mounted dispensers in our classrooms across the district cusd worked with safeway to offer voluntary vaccination clinics for the primary series of the covid19 vaccine as well as a voluntary booster clinic as a result of declining cases rates and hospitalizations beginning march 12th we will move into a mass recommendation in california following spring break from march 14th through march 18th chica unified plans to make masks optional when we return to school on monday march 21st 2022 we respect the diversity of our population and recognize that our families take different positions regarding masking and mitigation we ask staff students and families

092to be kind accepting and respectful as people make decisions that best meet their needs regarding masks and i'll end on our cal osha requirements they are still in effect on february 28th governor newsome signed an executive order extending the emergency temporary standards through may 5th these standards require unvaccinated staff and volunteers to continue to test weekly in chico unified coveted site leads on all 22 sites track weekly testing compliance and we currently have more than 84 percent of employees vaccinated with the primary vaccine series and i wanted to take any questions that you might have i just want to give you and your staff accommodation since i've had to take my little ones for testing several times they're always there and they're extremely caring and uh a lot of people have used it and i

093think it's really a wonderful resource so thank you thank you they like it that it's outside too that's our bonus especially when the weather is wonderful okay anything else all right thank you michelle i have one thing so just to clarify yes chico unified is mask optional for all intents and purposes at the end of this week i mean after the end of this week after the end of this week yes we will we will be on spring break next week um but when we return to full session will be mask optional but yes it begins march 12th what's our plan for communicating that to families we have sent out aries communication to families already explaining the changes and also sent a communication to all staff through staff announcements it's been communicated through our principles

094at our different school sites um it's it's on our web page and so what is the impact to staff exactly as far as changes for masking for masking yeah um we will continue to offer masks that's something that we can offer staff and students um there really isn't a huge change other than students will make the choice whether they want to mask or not and staff will respect that choice in their classrooms and staff will have they have the choice also staff will have a choice as well all right thank you regardless of vaccination status thank you i just realized i made a big mistake because i didn't go through the list of speakers on the covet update oh i thought we were doing the covet update all right okay i guess i didn't make

095a giant mistake [Laughter] all right thank you thank you now we get to do it okay so i have two students i have jacob pianapina is that correct all right jacob [Applause] do you mind telling us how old you are in what school i am 11 and i go to marsh all right thank you hello i am jacob pena today i will speak on mask also thank you for those who think kids should have a choice i would like you to know about how i've been asked if or why i am an anti-master and even friends got asked if they are my friends because of it i also would like you to know that i've been interrupted by staff for choosing to sit outside after being asked why why i want to make it harder

096on myself by taking off my mask division is all this mandate has created allowing a choice is the right thing to do thank you for listening and have a good day thank you jacob all right very good okay what about andrew pena kenya i don't know so andrew can you do the same your how old you are in your school yes okay um good evening my name is andrew pena i am in fifth grade at little chico creek three weeks ago i decided to stop wearing my face mask at school the face mask has affected me in many ways i find it hard to breathe comfortably and this distracts distracts me so i tend to touch and mess around with my mask a lot i even get headaches often and feel tired more i i

097believe this is due to the mask so three weeks ago i decided this is enough since making it since making the choice i cannot attend class so i sit outside with my chromebook as a teacher it's still it is still winter but i can't go into the library or cafeteria so i i so what plans do you have for kids like me okay all right so andrew it will be your choice uh when we come back from spring break okay deanna lindstrom hi i'm deanna lindstrom in an experiment conducted by dr harold wallich a research letter for his 2021 clinical trial labeled experimental assessment of carbon dioxide content and inhaled air with or without face masks and healthy children found that the normal content of carbon dioxide in the open is about 400 ppm or

098parts per million a level of 2000 ppm is the limit for closed rooms without mass children's carbon dioxide levels for just three minutes were found to be between thirteen thousand one hundred and twenty and thirteen thousand nine hundred and ten ppm of carbon dioxide and inhaled air under surgical and n95 mass this explains the headaches our children are having from the continued force use of masks in a different study conducted on children by pediatricians authors of the book highlights in general pediatrics and pediatric emergency care dr martin chalamet and dr jeremy cohen found that out of 3617 participants more than two-thirds of the children had functional problems related to mask wearing these functional problems include mood disorders anxiety sadness anguish and we're present in half the children parents are not forcing their children to wear

099masks you are we are not coercing them to rebellion not to wear them what we are doing is asking our children at the end of the day how it went just as parents always have our children are coming to us telling us about their headaches and their sadness and their struggles they are coming to us in tears filled with anxiety and turmoil because they are being bullied bullied by the adults who are allowing themselves to feel better with false comfort by justifying keeping the mess the district states that bullying will not be tolerated yet you are the biggest bullies of them all you should be applauding these kids for standing up for their rights not keeping them out in the freezing temperatures not segregating them and definitely not ignoring them day after day history has

100repeatedly shown us that the majority doesn't always make the right choice and you should be supporting them not suppressing them look at oscar schindler and irena sandler from the holocaust they knew that what the nazi regime was doing was wrong they took a stand against the majority to protect many innocent lives durham roseville and placerville schools districts are just a few who have taken after such great leadership examples of how to stand up against the majority to protect the children there's a list filled with people such as heinrich himmler and heinrich mueller who set up and oversaw the camps and genocidal programs of the jews these people went along with whatever adolf hitler wanted some chico unified board members fall into the same category by following what they're told with zero consideration for the children

101and these conditions by their unwillingness to stand up for them by repeatedly saying we will not go above or below the law parents and children are like are watching you and we will not forget any of this this is far from over i do not care if the mask mandate ends at midnight on on the 12th unmask our children now and just in case you can't see my son's side that he made on his own without any coercion it estates unmask all kids including me thank you all right julie treat hi everyone okay so a couple things um i hope you could take this to heart as we're moving forward to a lot of decisions coming down from us on this vaccine mandate and whatever happens is is irrelevant to kind of what i'm going

102to talk about i really would love to see us create a vaccine-free zone let our school districts our school properties be vaccine-free meaning even if there's a vaccine mandate even if there's a vaccine choice nobody talks about vaccine there's no mobile mobile clinics coming into the school property to give vaccines there's no celebrating kids that get vaccinated there's no charts that show this high school is this much vaccinated and this high school's low vaccinated vaccine is like a drug it's like a bad word we should eliminate it like we do anything else with that's drug-related it's nobody's business it's a health issue the mask if we learn nothing from the mask issue we don't want these kids divided and we keep doing it doing this is one thing we can't control just eliminate this word

103it's a swear word there's a swear jar something like that it's got to be eliminated there's no talking about vaccine at school in our our public health organizations driving the public schools i want to flip it upside down public schools should be driving public health and trying to figure out a way to pressure them to come up with programs and come up with ways to make this you know more manageable down to the little level to our school level to our little kids and i would love to get some information how that's organized is it are you guys getting your information from the state to the county through the education line and public health is getting it from nih to the state to the county line or is there work together i think that's always

104where we have an opportunity for some things to fall through the cracks somebody over here is thinking somebody over here is talking is our county head talking to the public health person to net york or you know where do we get the information from um and yeah i just there's ways you can operate within the law the gray zones get some really smart people together and come up with some ideas brainstorm throw them up on the on the on the board and don't have to leave it all too i'm poor michelle who's got i can't even imagine doing that person's job so but thank you for your time tonight all right okay our next speaker is roof sarnoff ruth sarnoff okay you want to clear the aisles people of your bag so that she okay

105okay good good i know you got it and and i do have some documents that i will like to put in the public record at the end of this okay time that i speak and in regard it's regarding volcanic action that's taking place all over the planet and i am one of those people who thinks that we are and i think i have enough proof to show that we are in the midst of climate change already oh yes and as such i think it's important to look at the some of the little things that we can do in the coming period to make people safer i don't know if the fixtures in all of the gyms which uh at least for those children that go in that are part of the prep end of the

106society here have fluorescent lighting but it's very poisonous and i don't know about the newer type of of lighting but every building every sports arena every everything is going to be challenged in this very close period the the volcanic action's been going on for a long time that's that's why you remember all those movies with the with the fog lights if you were in london and in the city and in poor communities if you didn't ever watch the movie my left foot you ought to watch it and maybe watch some of this the what's going on in the ocean like chasing corals or my octopus teacher so those are things that we could start doing now to help educate each other and to help look at more than one thing i i hope that what

107happens in the short run is is beneficial with the way the um division here on the on the uh planning it should never have ever gotten to this point because there's a whole history of times when uh the supreme court like within citizens united said corporations are people so now we have a privatized country and so i just want to say that it's just difficult and i'm through so thank you very much and i'll give my my documents to the yeah the person over here thank you yeah ted yeah ted will take it okay all right thank you ruth so our last speaker is sasha a sasha a she left okay thank you all right so we move now to the discussion of the new course proposal and adoption of the three-course model supporting the

108next generation science standards and we're going to have you instead of j huh that is correct all right and i'm going to turn this over quickly i probably need to raise this up a little bit phil is that better so i'm going to invite mark kessler a current science teacher at chico high school to join me here at the podium because he's much more aware of the nuances of what we're going to propose tonight so as he's coming up to the podium to join me come on up mark we do want to first thank the board in engaging in this conversation it's been a long time coming yes as you'll see in the presentation we are significantly encouraging the board to understand we might be close to 10 years behind this conversation in relation to

109the state so our goal tonight is is for mark to walk you through a presentation we think will provide the rationale to move to a three-course model which will be a significant shift from what we currently do however we plan to implement implement that shift over the course of three years so it would be very similar to what we did with the shift to an integrated math model and as as i said before i i appreciate mark's willingness to walk you through it board meetings are not his favorite um how he's he's willing to join us tonight um before i turn it over to him i do want to recognize we do have other staff from our science departments here we have tom george we have barbara bertipelli from pleasant valley high school we have

110admin from chico high we have um lucas kennedy from chico high school here as well i do want to recognize too that it has been a challenge to gain consensus in the pandemic environment to try to bring everybody together for them to completely understand all the nuances of these shifts and i want to applaud the efforts of the folks who have been engaged in that we we started this conversation a couple of years ago and as i um as we as we go through the presentation presentation tonight i think mr kessler is going to provide a strong rationale um through for a shift to a three-course model all right thank you all right thank you mr shepherd and um thank you to the board of education for making time on the agenda for this my

111name is mark kessler i am science teacher chico high i'm the chair of the department and a member of the district leadership council for science and i thought that one place to start would be and by the way i being a science teacher i have a lot of evidence to back up this claim for these course models so if it gets too long let me know or if you want more information please let me know um i don't want to take up too much your time but i do want to be thorough and and make a good case for these standards so the next generation science standards were developed they were developed around 2008 there were a group of of there were a group of scientists and industry leaders and the the science teachers associations

112and they all got together at universities and they all got together and said uh one of the problems was they were looking at data and they were going uh-oh the united states has always led in sciences we've always led the world in science and innovation and other countries were starting to uh start to gain on us and that we're going to lose our lead in that and they started to look at what we needed to do and one of the things they discovered is that we spent a lot of time we spent a lot of time on knowledge and information but not enough time on skills scientific skills and so the old model of science education is more information lecture textbook a student writes down repeats the information and maybe does a lab that then

113demonstrates what the teacher told them and they said well that's not how science works with inquiry science works with argumentation and critical thinking science works with data analysis and using that data to back back claims and being able to look at data with integrity so there are some of the original goals are listed up there i'm not going to read them all it also was during the the no child left behind era and there was a real interest in getting away from the rote memorization of the multiple choice tests and to move towards a more comprehensive thorough testing process and the new cast test does just that it's very different from the old star test and so this was adopted by 44 states in the u.s and the framework was adopted by 44 states which

114is incredible when you think about it we get 44 states agree about anything and that's that's good news and it was it was adopted by the california department of education in 2013. and the california department of education adopted it in whole and they also put their own twist on it which uh is on the next slide and these are the appendices a2m that were added by the state of california and they addressed some things that they saw that were really important and missing and a few of them i've quoted there and i'll see if i can read from this distance one uh one of note is appendices of appendix d all standards all students and there was an understanding that the way that we traditionally teach science students weren't getting all the science standards and

115every other subject students get all the standards but in science we were putting our developing students in in earth science classes and we weren't putting our our the ones that were on the fast track or the university bound students weren't getting earth science so we and then the students that were in earth science weren't getting physical science or chemistry to a large degree and they noticed there were real gaps in this we weren't teaching all standards to all students we were teaching some standards to some students in some groups and some standards other groups and so there was a recognition that that that needed to be addressed so that's uh conveyed heavily in the california version of the next generation science standards and then the other thing they provided was appendix k was a course

116models and mapping for the middle and high schools and so what we're bringing to you today is one of those models for the high schools which is an integrated model which blends our science in with uh with with life science physical science and chemistry so this list if you could click on a blue link i might have a chance of reading this that's going to be hard can we no the board does have access to these documents it's my understanding that you were i can i can cover these without reading them um okay so first the first uh we have a list of dilemmas that that this addresses and and uh i i do want to point out that this process has been going on a long time every single district district-wide staff development meeting

117since i've been a teacher here we've had a separate session to go over this it's been discussed at length of both high schools it's been a topic of the of the science dlc for for three years and at least at chico high it's been a topic of every department meeting and it's been something that as a dlc member i've provided either written or verbal updates at each of those department meetings so it's something we've discussed a lot as with any change there's been there's a variety of takes on this and not everyone agrees 100 percent but there's a general understanding that we we need to move towards ngss and that's what the state's asking us to do so the dilemmas we have first is college readiness and the universities have already moved towards the uc

118academic senate has passed a resolution to move the to change the d designation in a through g to match the ngss the adoption of ngss the uh second is if we could go back to that we were that was good we had before click on that link uh the main one there that one okay i can read the title so that's good the other is uh test scores and now the science is on uh the science test is now on the dashboard it's on the district dashboard so this is another indication of the emphasis that the state of california is putting on science and so we need to make sure that our students are getting all the standards so that they can perform well on these tests currently with our current model many of our

119students aren't getting earth science standards or physical science standards that are necessary so they're taking a test they aren't prepared for they're seeing information on the test that they've never seen before and so they're at a real disadvantage and so is our our score as a district our scores at the i i can't quite read it but i believe it was 67 percent we're not uh i'm doing this by memory but 67 were not considered and not that standard in our 2019 cast test so there's a real need there you could scroll down in the next one all standards all students which is one i mentioned and so that's again this idea that's emphasized heavily in appendix d and mentions the need to make sure that there's equity and that all of our students are

120have the opportunity to learn all the standards the next is our wasc accreditation and in that there are two highlighted statements here from the chico high wasc that indicate that we're supposed to demonstrate and we're in wasp right now we're supposed to demonstrate that we've done this so those uh those quotes pulled out of wasp show that this was something we committed to in 2016. the next one is uh oh my goodness i believe that's hiring oh no that's the we're behind other i got it we're behind other districts and we surveyed the dlc kelly kuhn and i called about 100 schools we reached about 20 and we we talked to him and they were all from all over the state from southern california northern california we wanted to know what other schools were doing

121and we found that they had all adopted these standards and these course models a while ago and we were quite behind so that dilemma is we're behind other school districts including oroville yuba and some of our writing districts as well so the next the next dilemma is hiring high quality oh non-college rep courses yeah i'm not college prep courses so one of our challenges right now is that we have we're the only department at the high schools that have non-college prep courses so these are courses that if a student takes them they don't get the ability to to apply to a university so we're deciding right now in middle school some students are put in non-college prep courses as soon as they take that they have even if they take all the english and math

122and history college prep courses they don't have the age of 83 a to g requirements that allow them to apply to a university so we need to part of the proposal is to move to an all college prep science course model so that everybody has an opportunity and we're not deciding in eighth grade whether a child will have an opportunity to go to a university mr kessler now's a good time for me to interrupt this as any can you back up we're on number eight now i guess is that right yeah and i don't have that sheet unfortunately but this is an eye test for me it's going really well you were talking about um the the all standards for all students and in in i was trying to wrap my head around it as

123i was trying to read it there and um is that this one here that was number i think we need to go four or five maybe there it is number four this right here i tried it didn't it didn't want to do it it's blocked or something like that okay i'll just here it is um all standards all students can you expand on that a little bit um because my recollection is they were um when i went through chico high there were some students that were taking like you know ap physics and history and stuff like that and you know they were totally awesome at it and i was more in the the earth science category surprise surprise right um anyway um are you saying that that all the standards that they were looking at

124i mean clearly you're not saying that everything they were learning and in ap physics and history and and and chemistry i'm going to need to know those too if i'm if i'm more the earth science right so so that is uh correct we still have and you know when we get to the course models will make more sense we put that slide up but there there still is uh after the the idea is that we get students to take the three main courses which are biology in the living earth chemistry and the earth system and physics of the universe so they take basically bio biology chemistry and physics all integrated with earth so they get all four subjects in science all four disciplines at that point that can be done by your sophomore year at

125that point a student can be done and they fulfill their d requirements they can apply to a university at that point if you want to go further if you want to take ap chemistry or ap biology or anatomy or ap environmental science then you can do that your junior and senior year and the idea is to make sure that we're not leaving first of all we left the earth out for about 60 of our students so that's that's something you know we need to make sure everybody's getting earth science and the other is we've left chemistry and physics out for the most part we've left those out for about 40 of our students so the idea is that everybody gets gets all the standards in their first two or three years and then from there

126you can expand upon that when you say they get all the standards is that a little bit misleading it's kind of like you're making rather than having some people go this direction and some people go this direction you're keeping them together so they're all going the same direction is it not accurate to say mr kessler that they're not going to go as far in this direction at a younger grade they're gonna go further they're gonna go further everybody's gonna go further everyone's gonna go first so the physics and the chemistry brainiacs who i went to school with they're gonna go further in that direction and and i'm going to go with them no no that you could if you bet you know if you choose to but you don't have to we only have a

127two-year science requirement and the idea is to get as much coverage of this of the standards the next generation science standards for as many students as possible as soon as possible when they get to high school and at that point then there's all kinds of options and the neat thing about it i think is we're going to find that there's some students that were put in a track that was for all intents and purposes a dead end for science and we're going to find that some of those are going to go oh i really like this this is really cool i'm going to take more and we're going to have open up opportunities for more students to go further and we can't do that if they're not exposed to it i think when we get

128to a couple slides down it's very clear that you're going to have kids be able to go into ap but yeah not all kids will a graphic will help on this for sure uh so and just to continue with these we're almost done attracting highly qualified science teachers our universities now are all the college program all the teacher preparation programs are for science include next generation science standards so they're going to come to our district expecting to do this and if they come to our district and we're not doing it we're going to have trouble getting those highly qualified teachers they're going to say gee they're a little behind on this i'm i'm going to go somewhere else where they're doing it and with science is already difficult to staff with all our different credentials

129and we're in a teacher shortage right now so it's really incumbent on us to make sure that we can attract the high most highly qualified teachers we can by making sure that when they apply to our district they know that we're on the leading edge and innovative in our programs the last two have to do with special education students and one of the downfalls of the program we have now is that our our our non-college prep classes have about special education students so they're being put all together instead of spread out into more broadly in general education classes where they can have an opportunity and a least restrictive environment to to have the benefit that all the all the other students have and so this model would do a better job of distributing those students

130and also it's a challenge for a teacher to manage 10 or 12 ieps in one class and this would lower that to more like three or four ieps in a class which would make it much easier to give those students the attention they deserve from the teacher and give them the individualized attention that they're supposed to get last one is students of color and we have some graphs coming well those graphs we have bigger ones those coming and we have a situation where 69 percent of our students of color graduate from chico high school without having taken a college prep physical science class which means 69 of our students of color don't have the they have haven't attained the a3g requirements to apply to a university and of course not everyone applies to a university

131and not everyone needs to go to a university but it sure would be good as everybody when i graduated from high school had the opportunity if they chose to i often tell my freshman i'm like you don't know what your senior you is going to want and your senior you might be really mad at you if your freshman you if you get to the end of your high school career and you don't have the opportunities that everyone else has so the goal is to make sure as many students from all groups have the same opportunities when they graduate from high school i just need some clarity on you know we talk about students of color not getting to take a college prep science class how does this how do these next generation science standards gonna

132grant greater access to students of color to college prep courses than what we have right now well because there wouldn't be any non-college prep courses they would all be college prep courses so then it completely takes away the possibility not completely because it's not completely because you still need to get a c or better instead of a college prep class you still need to get a c or better to get the get the a3g requirements so to get the d requirement you still need to do well in the class well enough to get a c and that's the job of the student and the teacher to work together to ensure that they meet those goals and they get get the marks that they need to get there why are we not doing that now you

133know with this the the systems that are in place now are they somehow discriminatory against students of color well we we put these in place the the old standards were put in place in 1998. that's before the human genome was sequenced it's uh 10 years before the first iphone was released is before the internet was really a thing this is uh we have an old model and that's why we're here we're here to bring a new model a reform model one that brings us up to date and takes away some of these dilemmas that we've had in science education and so we just we're just working on a model that's you know it's i was just reading that the california drought is 24 years we've had the driest weather in uh in 1200 years well

134these old standards were from 24 years ago so it's it's just a long time coming and it's a lot of work change is hard change i think it's just human nature that we change means risk change means we get out of our comfort zone i guess what's throwing me off is the is that the treatment of students of color i don't see the connection i feel like you're not really taking me there in terms of why what we have right now is bad for students of color versus this which is going to be i would look at it this way is we have we're taking middle school data and then putting students in classes in their freshman year where they have less opportunities and so the idea is that we put them all in a

135class that gives them the opportunities in their freshman year we get the data from their freshman year we're using i think probably everyone can agree that middle school years are probably not the best data on a human being i'd like to make an interjection [Music] this past i think it was monday or it was the year of women scientists and there were 3-d modeling of all the women scientists that were put in d.c and one of the women who was a woman of color couldn't even talk to the interviewer without starting to cry saying if you never see someone who looks like you who's doing this kind of work you don't realize that you can do it and i think many students don't have exposure at home or perhaps even from their teachers that they

136might be a scientist i helped build this idea when i was a trustee for the csu with the uc and the idea is it's basically hands-on learning about things that people can see in the real world around them instead of memorization and so i think it's way more intrinsically both the ability to understand it but also to conquer it so tom and then eileen i just wanted to speak to math questions just to make sure that we're on the same page right now after eighth grade uh some people registrars students parents decide that you're going to go into either earth science or biology and that effectively seals the science courses you're going to be into the rest of your high school career so if there's any kind of bias i mean you know and any

137kind of advice at all on anybody part and a student who might really be good at science gets put into the earth science course that's it they're going to be in the non-college prep set of science courses that gets them a high school diploma but it doesn't prepare them for entrance into college so we're saying that at that one moment we can eliminate that potential for bias to have any access by saying everybody's going to take the exact same course in ninth grade which is a college prep course and then we'll see if they have interest they can go beyond those three courses they have to have and if they don't have interest they take the three courses they've got a solid foundation in all of the domains of science you don't have to drill

138down super deep and they've met the requirements for college thank you for that explanation and would you like to add to it well yeah eileen and then i'll come to caitlin but but also we're in presentation still so i kind of want to see the presentation move forward if we are at a point i mean unless it's important to bring it up now we can have the rest of this discussion during debate or ask questions for clarification from from the presenters eileen um yeah i i had a fascinating time reading through all of this um right now i'm on a page that is describing a new course proposal outline and it says chemistry in the earth system now is is that the second or the third of the yeah can you um scroll to the

139the one that's so that's our old system that's our old model with a new model on the left so this shows it's hot and it's highlighted in color so you can see that the earth's earth and space science is in blue and the the amount of blue doesn't mean how much you're getting and the biology is is eighty percent biology and twenty percent of science so it's it doesn't indicate that but it indicates that it's a integrated course so on the right side is our old 1998 model which we're currently using it shows the non-college prep classes on in the left column of the peach color there and then it shows our current alignment with biology chemistry and physics since college prep classes on the left we have the three course model which then integrates

140earth science so now everybody's getting earth science it also gives our advanced track students the opportunity to take both chemistry and physics in the same year so that they can take their ap classes in their 11th and 12th grades and 11th grade is really as far as universities go that's when you want to take your ap classes because it's your junior year they look at so this is a benefit to all groups because it gives more opportunities the next slide shows the the pathways so this is the one on the left is the junior college um chico state pathway and and that one shows that you can take biology the living earth your freshman year and everybody would take that so everybody's in the same class they get a good introduction to science we get

141some good data on their learning we have we have everybody together and then from there they can start to differentiate into other classes and you can see how the we also have the csuc pathway and then the last one is the honors and science pathway so my um my point of bringing this to my attention when i read the course outline standards instructions methods and assessments and the topics the skill to be developed and the ngss standards to be addressed fascinating stuff you look at you know the description of of what the students are being not only introduced to but how they're working with it and how they're developing the the process of thinking through what to do about how the mechanisms of heat flow relate to the macroscopic heat transport to atomic scale interactions

142and particles it was interest i mean it was fascinating i'm thinking oh my gosh if i was a little kid what 14 at this age 10th grade this stuff is exactly what would just oh my gosh and now that we have block schedules in science and we can get to um having the kids explore things like atomic scale and interactions of particles and things in in these types of of lessons i just like i wanted to cheer um am i right in that that what we're developing and how we're going to be able to introduce it and teach it in connection with our block schedules that these are the levels that everybody takes right what i'm looking at that that we do have the possibility of really flipping a switch for some of our kids

143who are going to really enjoy this kind of scientific exploration am i did i get it i mean is that what the whole intent is your excitement is exactly what we're after thank you caitlin i have a question about um about the pathways um i did notice when i opened the um the course descriptions that um there's no prerequisites for biology and living earth so we can assume that all freshmen will will be taking that class if this is approved and that chemistry has the caveat of prerequisites being and enrolled in or past im2 so i am curious about how that affects sophomores who might still be in i am one yeah and that was an area of discussion between our dlc and there was some concern both ways but your concern was expressed and

144there was also a concern that maybe some wouldn't be ready without have been having the im2 and so in the end we came up with a compromise which is there's some language in there that says i believe a teacher discretion but what if a teacher doesn't want to allow that student for whatever reason to take the class i'm just wondering on this sequence here 9th 10th 11th if there's a sophomore and they're in im1 what's their option take a gap year as a sophomore because that doesn't make sense especially if they're interested it doesn't apply to chemistry just physics right um it so chemistry says and enrolled in or past im2 physics is has passed im2 yeah so that yeah you're right that would create a gap but they could still get the three years

145of science they could still get through they can still get through the pathway it might be that gap year for them to take that math class again to be sure they are prepared for that for that science class that would be that if i were a counselor that would be the tact i would take to make sure that student is prepared mathematically for the science course how and how does that affect their uh i'm just okay i'll just leave it at that all right matt where are we right now in the well we are uh i think you've pretty much covered the concept i will note that over 90 percent of all the high schools in california have already done this and as you note it has been a long time so i believe unless

146somebody has a very specific question we're at the point of looking at whether we would move forward with this adoption of the three-course model did we want to ask for a public comment first we could ask for that is there a public comment on this i would like to call in some a staff person who's in the audience too so i don't know where that would fall relative to public comment ruth i believe ruth right thank you john well i was involved a lot with the i think called the parent collaborative at the la unified school district and once again it's the reality of the total life of of children and where it's going um we had we had a lot of kids that were in these um mobile containers that were actually for storage

147and so they had a uh an air conditioning system in it just to maintain products and children by the thousands in la unified school district attended in that it was a question of poverty uh of uh only a few kids making having any advantage to to do anything that was important and um so um i remember uh one of the ways that i uh was very i was very active in trying to shut down a lot of the oil industry and oil oil wells and stuff and they were all over bunker hill and l.a unified had a um a property that was oil wells including one big tall one and also had a big um uh pit with uh was it like a tar pit in the tar pit uh was the gate was not

148was not locked and kids could go in and fall in any kid that would fall in that carpet would just be gone because it was tar and they would just sink in it would be like getting into what are they what's the other word for it but it was that kind of thing it was it was an immigrant community they were in had little those little oil wells within 10-15 feet of where they were living and they were sick and i asked them do you know about an egg smell up here and it was unfolded from that and i had a lot of experience with the separation of of people by by class by color by whatever uh distinction like you know whatever it is and in the long run it's not going to work

149and what needs to be done now is things like these these okay i'm sorry ruth that's the end of your time thank you okay good that's all right he'll help you back all right good thank you yes are you going to speak about the science integrated science all right so as a sped mom i always need to know a little bit more information about the program so right now my twins are freshmen at pv and they're in a modified science class their english level is not quite up there to be in a gen ed science course so i'm a little confused about how this is going to look for those kids that aren't in i am one or any of that i mean we are we are in modified science we are in resource english

150we are in modified math those boys probably won't ever get to and i am too so i just um i guess i want clarification i mean he said we would have all the kids together but then you have a teacher that has maybe five kids on an iep all teaching five different things with a class of gen ed kids sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't so what is the escape pause for my kids i'm going to invite erica sheridan she's been having a conversation with special ed um just to clarify some of the the expectations for students and also for the staff that will be in there as well i appreciate the question we just had our special ed collaboration at chico high this morning and they're on deck but they're also a lot of

151trepidation about what the model is going to look like and i think again we're launching something totally new but we do understand that there are students that will need a modified version of the biology of the living earth we also want to employ some of the co-teaching options where we'll send a credentialed special ed teacher in with a credentialed science teacher and they will co-teach again there's some kinks to work out but we definitely are aware that this is a leap but we believe it's a leap in the right direction for all kids so hopefully that it's still it's still in the works i would say but we definitely are aware like i said my special ed team this morning spoke about how to best support the special of students especially the ones that need

152a different probably modification of the course and again i want to note that this model is only going to start with one class in the first year uh yes department chair of what of science thank you and so um just to give you a little uh foundation the ndss started with a four course model that each student proposal would be take biology chemistry physics and earth science because of most schools having only a two-year requirement students didn't did not fulfill that four-course model at any time at any time most high schools do not require four years of science in high school so then um a three core month three course model was proposed and so many school districts have gone to having a graduation requirement of three science courses you still don't quite fulfill the

153four course model of having all the subjects um for every kid most kids that are college prep do biology chemistry and physics do not do the earth science non-college prep kids can do a variety usually life science and physical science the three-course model is weaving the earth science in with the biology the chemistry and the physics so trying to satisfy trying to fit all four years into a three year requirement we're still at chico unified a two-course graduation requirement so at no time some of our kids will choose not to take three years or even four years so they're still not going to get all four of the requirements for the state test so your name is barbara bertipelli right do you support this change we're contemplating tonight so i support the three-course model as

154a as we approach and hopefully at some point that chica unified does require three years my school district or my school at pleasant valley does not are not fully behind doing all kids take biology chemistry physics college prep and i i'm we have non-college prep classes life science and earth science um we are even willing to to suggest that we do have a non-college prep biology with living earth chemistry more of a conceptual chemistry alongside with the earth science and a physics non-um non-math a conceptual based physics class we're still trying to work out those ideas our teachers that teach the non-college prep are concerned about the kids being successful in a college prep class um speaking as a parent now my daughter had graduated she went to pv she has was in special ed

155from kindergarten all the way through um she was in some college prep classes um but also in sheltered like non-non-college prep classes also i don't if i'm thinking as a science teacher and as a parent there's no way she would have been able to do biology chemistry physics there's just absolutely no way she was she got through algebra one by the time she was a senior but i'm just being practical i've been in teaching for over 30 years and i think a three-course model is good i just think there needs to be some bugs worked out and i think everybody needs to be brought to the table at the same time and have some frank conversations i think you should be really clear we we actually got an email yesterday from um janelle ball who

156actually was a chemistry teacher when i went to chico high i think right and i'm feeling in my bones like there's a lot of movement toward passing this thing tonight so if you want to represent you know your fellow teachers and saying that you don't think we ought to do this right now but instead we ought to cool our jets and take a few more months and talk about it i think you should make that message really really clear i think i think more needs to be discussed and not just because of what janelle wrote um we've been having frank conversations um i think we do need to move to a three-course model i just don't think all the bugs have worked out and i think we need to have some friend conversations from both

157schools and maybe we have different you know john and i talked about this too about maybe at pb we don't do everything that chico high is doing with regards to having only non-college prep or having only college prep classes um if that's what we want to do and then kind of work it together see how it's going to we have two different models going on we're fine with that i just think that there needs to be some more i think everybody that has skin in the game needs to be involved and that's not that hasn't been happy i want to read one statement that she made to me can i hold on um because we're actually still in public comment i just wanted to do a point i just i just wanted to do a

158point of order yeah and make sure that we're okay speaking as a parent and i have a child in this still in chico unified he's a senior now he took biology he's taking college physical science right now and can would he have done chemistry and physics no so you're saying he would have got like a bad grades in in in these classes that we're contemplating switching to um my daughter definitely my son he struggles and that's that science teacher that's your concern is that this is actually getting harder that our our programs are going to get harder um i don't think the necessarily that i think with having the earth science in there will make it so it's it's not you guys it's still a point of order like i made a point like we're

159not in yeah okay so what i mean but this is public comment i understand like that was just my two cents speaking as a parent all right so so uh at this point i want to go back to the presentation i appreciate your uh honesty thank you uh diana were you gonna before i asked diane oh okay i do want to make sure that we keep in mind the differences in these courses so when we're talking about success or lack of success in a course we're not talking about the biology that students are taking would be the same one they take in the future i think that's a critical component of this however barbara is accurate in our conversation we were talking about has been said multiple times by multiple people including our administrators at

160chico high there are going to be some bugs to work out we're going to need to work some of these things out it's going to take time it's not going to be the first year of implementation i'm thinking back to the implementation of integrated math and the struggles we faced with students jumping into math a and their fourth and fifth grade teachers were still trying to scramble to be sure they were prepared for math a it took a long time i would say we're still trying to work out some of those details so i would encourage the board to to understand that these are different courses it's going to take some time to work many of these things out as barbara has described i'm sorry diane is longer winded than i thought it would be

161but i wanted to just make sure we keep those perspectives in mind all right thank you diana thank you as the director of student support and special education i usually like to take a backseat at most of these meetings i usually like to let decisions be made and then make sure that through the iep process that that's kept fully intact and that we support students in accessing every type of class that is available they are general ed students first and they have a right to be in every single class i honor what john's saying about the king said agreement worked out because if you look at this just on the surface as soon as you say that students have to have im2 thank you for pointing that out to move beyond the 9th grade science

162you're saying that 90 of my students with disabilities will not make it to the second course in this science however that also being said we've had very good conversations about how to include students with disabilities in these classes because that is the directive of the state and federal government under ida that all students be allowed to access the curriculum at all levels we do that through the iep we do that through accommodations we do that through modifications and yes there was a time 20 years ago 15 years ago sometimes even today when students are excluded because they're told they're not going to be able to pass a class and that is just not true these students going in those classes with accommodations and modifications that take that class out of the college prep realm with

163the same students that are taking the college prep can pass those and on the transcript it is denoted that it is either that code that course code that denotes as a college prep class or a course code that notes it as not a college prep class by continuing to offer segregated classes that don't meet the standards we are developing a group of students and in chico unified the totals that we have right now are between 16.5 and 18.5 percent of our students are special ed the highest number we have ever been we have grown 200 students over the last two years because of fires because of co-wood because of dam because of people moving here i have 2 000 students that i want to make sure graduate with a diploma as many as possible with

164a college prep diploma but if they don't get that college prep diploma that they've had the opportunity to be part of the curriculum the discussions the rich environment and they may not be able to write a 15 page dissertation of what it is but they can tell you some of the discussions that went on when i listened to some of my special education students and the things that their parents come to me and say they came home and they told me about this they would not have gotten that in that segregated class and so while this is a really hard decision to do it and sometimes i'm really torn on it because i don't always being a special ed person having worked with so many parents i also don't always trust general ed or general

165ed teachers to be able to make those accommodations and modifications but i think in doing this and i love that they had the special ed slide on i love that they had the people of color slide in because these are groups that do not always have access that means that these people have thought about that they don't have all the answers yet i don't have all the answers yet but this is something that needs to be done and at the same time continue with our lcap model of mtss udl and access for all students to every single class i'm sorry i really try to stay in the background on this step no but i felt the student is really important to speak on yeah thank you i appreciate it diane thank you [Applause] i go

166back to the quote if they see it then they know they can do it if they never get to see it then it's not an area where they're going to have any confidence or experience yes are we in continuing discussion about approving the three-course i believe we are we're not in discussion um i mean i have as you know i have experienced as well with the special ed kiddos and i i believe that what i heard tonight in the presentation about how the integration of supports for our special ed kids to give them access of diane said to what's in the these courses and we we start with just one uh in 2223 and then i am so in favor of doing this and giving all of our kids i mean that's what that's what

167our our focus says in our our what's that official thing we go by um it says all of our students all of our students huh every student every day and and that's that's what i want to offer them and i think we're all smart enough to know we don't have all the answers yet and as barbara pointed out we've we've got things to fix um but that's what we do we fix stuff and if we're this far behind with the rest of the state in getting our next generation science standards begun shame on us i'm definitely in favor so we should probably let mr kessler finish his presentation and then get a motion and you may be done i think we're done the board has the proposals in front of them i think they see

168the sequencing living earth would be the first year chemistry the second year and physics of the universe the third year all right okay a quick question of clarification given what we've heard is there a plan in place to communicate with the groups who are skeptical as to fix these bugs as we go forward i think we have to the next step if if adopted would be the curriculum conversation and everyone needs to be involved in that kelly coombe she led the k-8 curriculum conversation when we adopted the k-8 curriculum and she's willing to join us and walk us through that as well mark started that with our group a while ago so people need to be involved in that as i said before we recognize that that in the last 18 months we needed to

169have more and more participation these conversations and the curriculum conversation would be critical because it covers all of the student groups we've been talking about what they have access to the sequence of the pacing we need to be sure people are involved in that so i guess my question is actually for barbara and diane you guys feel confident you've got to see at the table okay thank you all right um just to clarify one thing you can answer it probably ms ball wrote to me that she's been told by her principal i guess that would be doug williams that the three-course structure will mean eliminating our current courses of life science biology chemistry physics and physical science is that correct so the courses that would be adopted tonight would replace those those courses right the

170conversations we are still having are conversations about modification of courses how we can have students have the most access how we can spread you heard mr kessler talk about spreading those ieps out amongst multiple classes so to do that you have to have similar course titles right so you have for example in a master schedule you need to have eight sections of living earth biology living earth to be able to spread those courses out okay one more time um so earlier was mentioned a three-year phase in what does year one look like year one would be to offer biology to living earth with an understanding that the curriculum for this upcoming year would be a collaboration both on-site and between departments um that's you know that that would be as i said the next conversation

171we would also need to we we've allocated a million dollars just a rough number to the purchase of curriculum we've been waiting for that for a couple of years we started this conversation like we said in 2020 and that money's been sitting there so year one would be offering it now and having teachers collaborate on the curriculum and then spending the next year working our way towards the adoption of a curriculum which we bring to the board so if we okay this now that in two years every freshman will be taking biology at living earth next year forgive me okay thank you um can you tell me more and i'm sorry i'm drinking out of the fire hose here i'm i don't have a lot of background on this but um i understand from my

172communications with ms ball that there's also a four course option four course model in the next generation science standards so the four four course model and i'm going to rely on mark probably a little bit on this but my understanding of the four course model is earth is at the very end so in our in my humble opinion sorry there you go okay then these students who they're virtually guaranteed of never taking earth all they do is take two years of science earth is at the very earth and space i think is the very last course in the four course model mark am so a i'm model is uh not a whole lot different from what we're doing now and it was since we only require two years of science our best chance of getting

173there is to have a three-course model four course makes it nearly impossible uh maybe at some point we'll work we'll require three years but at this point we only require two years so the three course model gets us there in the most efficient way the main reason um i believe we have consensus about the three courses that earth science is is woven spiraled through those three years with the four course model it's a dm so students may never get the earth yeah a very small minority of students take four years of science that means they're choosing two years of elective science and so that becomes a pretty specific group of students and leaves a lot of other students out so uh caitlin i'm going to get you i just want to interject so when i

174was working with the uc the greatest area of concern and the least amount of experience they had was with earth sciences so i think your comment about weaving it in was right on caitlyn um when when do we have our students take the cast that's the um california assessments for science science california i can't even remember the acronym sorry number 11th grade this year it's both because of the last year yeah so some this year's more students are taking it normally in a normal year 11th grade in a normal year and then like in the spring okay thank you and the casca covers all all standards all right so are we uh i'm sorry i don't know who you are but i'm sarah pacillus one of the assistant principals at chico high school and i

175just wanted to speak about that if in the four course model it would make it more difficult for students to advance into ap classes in their junior senior years and so the three-course model would allow them to accelerate into those more advanced classes and speaking to the cast having the earth science incorporated into into the the three course model would give students more access to the information that they're actually going to be tested on in their junior year so on on that note isn't it not just the access but also the context i mean the cast test is it's not standard by standard it's it's integrated standards too yes that is correct thank you all right so uh are we ready for a motion caitlyn should i should somebody else do it no um i'd

176like to move approval of the three-course model with um the um modification that we remove the im2 prerequisites what with what we'll move the i the integrated math two prerequisites for physics and chemistry waiting to see if we get a second okay so that motion is failing for lack of a second really not even for discussion yeah for the sake of discussion because i'm curious about about some some things here all right thank you um so i want to start off by justifying my modification um of my recommendation and that's uh um not to speak about myself or you know talk about my background which everybody knows a fair amount of but i was an ap teacher um at the high school level and something that really struck me as interesting um when i was

177going through the ap training is is the emphasis that all students should be able to take an ap class if they want to not if they've passed a certain level of math yes if they've passed a maybe a introductory science to get into that advanced science but but really the the um at the heart of of that philosophy with ap was if a student wants to challenge themselves to take a class they should have the the option the choice to do that and if they struggle then they're going to take themselves out or they're going to get extra help to be successful and so when it comes to math and science they are very closely related in some ways my favorite saying is that science makes math matter and all you math teachers out there

178don't get mad at me for saying that but it's very punny in my opinion that the science the integrated science specifically really conceptualizes math concepts that was redundant but but by telling a student that they can't choose to take a class or saying you have to get special permission to take a class really creates a barrier for especially the students that we're talking about lifting up and and giving them access to those classes and so i would just encourage us to really consider what what is what is what's best for students in this situation and i think what's best for students and the reason why i want to eliminate the im2 requirement for the um the physics integrated in the chemistry integrated class is that some students just might not have had a good math

179experience so far but they could possibly do the the work that's required in that science class within context the word recommended work instead of required i would be happy with it to say recommended sure but i don't i don't want us to to create more barriers for students to have access to these classes so are you amending your motion formally to say recommended um sure we could we could definitely i can amend amend my motion to say recommended instead of having it be required and the second will all right so it's been uh amended to move the math class to be recommended not required and with that we have a motion any further discussion of this um i do i am concerned that this is the the only meeting i'm aware of that we've ever

180had on this topic is that correct yeah and it's a big change um ms ball told me in her email today she said uh i've been told that um this decision would mean eliminating our current courses of life science biology chemistry physics and physical science she said in my opinion that's a big change i don't think that i mean if there's even a hint that classroom teachers don't like this decision then i'm not prepared to support it right now and it sounds like there's some reservations on the part of our classroom teachers no disrespect to mr kessler and the dlc but i'd like to hear from more classroom teachers before we pass this so i will be voting no on this motion even though 90 of the high schools in the state are doing this

181um i'm concerned about our high schools you know and our teachers and how they feel about it and this is the only meeting we've ever had on it so so clearly we don't have adequate background listen i'm very actually persuaded by by the statements that you made to me about the idea of i mean i'll just be honest my gut tells me that i would have done better under this format that we're talking about then than than um than what i had for all the reasons that that you said and the reasons that you said too um you know i wasn't an iep i was not a special ed student but um i mean i had i was a daydreamer and i won't go into it all but the bottom line is yeah i mean

182hanging out with the kids that were the really smart brainiacs in my in my ninth grade and sophomore years you know and being alongside them while they learned physics and chemistry i think that could have enriched me but if there's reservation on the part of ms ball who i have every reason to believe is a good teacher and um the person with that long name that i've never heard in my life barbara bartibelli has reservations and says that her colleagues at pv have reservations about this and this is the only meeting we're having about it and we're going to make a decision that's going to eliminate four classes from now on yes no i'm voting no i i would like another you know another meeting or two to hear from those people with those reservations

183for my purposes so just to be clear this is the process that we utilize it does come through our dlc it comes to the board one time and one time only we don't bring them i mean when the recommendation comes forward it isn't on multiple board meeting agendas that doesn't mean we can't do that but that is the process i mean i just think this is obviously a really big decision and and and we ought to take more time to hear from our teachers i can i can definitely tell you firsthand that this conversation started actually as early as 2019 in dlc because i was on dlc in and so it this conversation has been being had over and over and over and over and over for eight years actually at both the middle school

184and the high school levels in this district well i would just say congratulations to fortress chico unified for having that conversation completely out of the view of you know public and me i mean it was just it's just staff that's how our process works as dlc did you want to add to that so it's a curricular decision yes okay so we have a motion we have a second and um yes eileen i i just was going to comment and especially especially to barbara who i worked with four years um i've been attending school board meetings since 1974 and i've been watching the sausage be made in this district since then this is how the sausage gets made there's a lot of work behind the scenes with a lot of our our organizational structure with the

185dlc and department meetings and and other things and that's the process and now it's here and the sausage not perfect but the sausage has been made and i i've i've seen it work out really well in the end not perfect going in but i'm definitely going to support this version of our science sausage okay all right i'm going to call for a vote you want to start matt tennis nay dalby aye kaiser i landed robinson i okay passes four to one what i would like to say to all of the teachers that have come and offered their opinions and diane i especially appreciate your emotional concerns is this is a process it's not over everybody recognizes that but it is a design so what has to be worked on with curriculum is actually to include

186all of your partners nobody gets left out in this discussion and i trust you to do that i really do so thank you okay so we're on to business services and we have julie kessel good evening thank you for your time every year we bring to the board the demographic analysis this year and for many years it is being produced by king consulting we have jamie eisman and rob murray here tonight to go over a presentation you've all been provided the draft report for your review i understand it is a tremendous amount of information so rob is going to give you a presentation that summarizes the information in the report and it's open discussion is currently a draft and it can be made a permanent report upon your adoption this evening but we can also

187make changes and answer questions if if the board desires i just wanted to mention that this document is heavily utilized by the facilities department it is primarily to look at the future to plan for the future for how many students we may have and provide the facilities that are needed so with that i'm going to hand it over here with to rob thank you yes all right thank you julie and good evening superintendent and board i know it's been a while since you've seen me for this annual update so like introduce myself so i'm rob murray the director of demographics and planning with king consulting uh but uh unlike the uh many other times that you've seen me recently this time we are going to specifically be really drilling into more of these student demographics

188and the community demographics that affect how we are prognosticating about the students that you're going to have a few years down the road and what that means for the adequacy of these school facilities that you have and the planning framework that you have in place so as julie said the full report has a whole lot more information than what we're going to be getting into tonight i am happy to field questions or discuss anything that's in the report that i don't happen to mention tonight but i'm just going to focus on the elements that i think are the most pertinent and the most interesting so first things first just an overview when i was here last year to talk about things in the middle of that now infamous 2020-21 school year the big question that

189we had was you had been growing for a few years running at that point and you like many many other districts regardless of whether they were in a growth or a decreasing enrollment pattern saw a substantial uh drop in enrollment in 2020 and that question was is this the start of a new trend or is this just a one year blip and you'll get back to that growth pattern that you had been exhibiting and what we're seeing based on this year and i'll get into a number of those reasons is that those students that you lost last year for the most part are gone and have left and that kind of reset your baseline at this lower level but all those other factors that were causing you to grow before the pandemic are still in

190place and you are still growing in enrollment and expected to continue to do so a big part of that especially in the short term is residential development and a big part of that particularly coming up right now with this concentration in the next year or two is affordable housing that uh kind of the silver lining of what's happened with all of these states of emergency between both the campfire and now the pandemic is there was a lot of state and federal money for affordable housing that has gotten it loosened up and flowed into the system here and a lot of projects are already under construction or will be soon and we'll show you some details on that in just a little bit but that is a big significant reason for the growth another big one

191in the short term and i'll again be going into some more detail on this but universal transitional kindergarten it is not common for the state of california to add a grade level and you're getting students enrolled in your district that just weren't eligible to enroll previous to this happening and then you have just the demographic trends that kind of form the baseline that we're looking at big picture and overall uh particularly at the elementary school level enrollment is going to be increasing to the point where your previous facilities master plan target capacity for your elementaries uh you will actually exceed during this projection period now that we're factoring in this much more aggressive residential development pattern and the addition of all those tk students rob yeah my family alone is kicking out babies like crazy

192and i call it the coveted litter so isn't the birth rate jumping nope it's been actually a lot of people and i because i'm doing this for districts up and down the state and i'll show you your particular areas local birth trends some people anticipated we might see that we're actually tending to see that 2020 was a particularly down birth year and the 2021 in a lot of places is not as low as 2020 but hasn't returned to pre-pandemic levels in chico it's uh you 2020 was that down year again but you are back up i'll show you a nice chart that uh just kind of demonstrates that but got a spoiler for some of the material coming up that it's kind of unique here in that even other districts that i see with enrollment

193increases uh this is one of the only districts that i can think of where that birth rate has been actually steady over most of the last decade and so if well that you know it may not be a boom it's at least not a decrease and i think that's really the significant takeaway i just want my family to get credit okay there we go four babies i mean come on you want me to put that we can talk about it okay so here then uh but your enrollment trends so uh so you see starting from that uh period around 2014 2015 uh the last recent relative low point then up to 2019 had been seeing steady increasing enrollments uh definitely again we were standing here last year looking at that big drop that kind of

194in one year had kind of reversed about four years worth of enrollment gains and what was this going to mean and now we're back to that steady growth and i uh you know i'll just go ahead and jump ahead you all might have already looked ahead anyway uh we're seeing uh actually more robust growth coming and again that's largely on the backs of those two big external factors uh but we'll get into that so here kindergarten and transitional kindergarten enrollment again this is the tk as it has been for the last decade uh which covers uh when the kindergarten enrollment date was rolled back from december 2nd to september 2nd the students who used to be eligible for kindergarten but no longer were was the original target for tk and that's been what tk has

195been up through this year and i'll give you some details in just a few slides on how that's changing and expanding now over the next four years but what you see here is again the biggest driver for enrollment change for a school district is when you start getting a pattern of the number of students that you have coming in at kindergarten is substantially different from the students who are older cohorts who are in the district who are either moving out of elementary into junior high or just moving out of the district entirely because when you have uh and as is common for a lot of districts right now a small number of students coming in and a larger older group of students coming out it's really hard not to go down an enrollment for you

196as you can see again last year was a little bit lower but your kindergarten cohort sizes you had a kind of a boost up several years ago and you've stayed at that level you've had this consistent uh cohort size coming in and so then that combined with some other factors is what's kind of leading to that steady moderate growth that you had been seeing because you didn't have anything really built in uh with just kind of automatic district-wide uh kind of ticks up and down in enrollment just based on the difference in size and cohorts here is another very big one if we're only going to focus on one thing from the census and i know you've all seen quite a bit of census data over the last little bit but this time we're looking

197at that total population but we want to do again we don't have detailed ages from 2020 yet but we do have uh that population over and under 18. and the big difference uh you see the total population that lives in the district has been going up but if you just look between 2000 and you essentially stayed at the same population under 18. what you know the population that you're really interested in serving this time between 2010 and 2020 you had more total population growth but this time you saw that population growth also translate to the year under 18 population which means again that you actually have younger families with school-age children moving here or those families having children once they're here and so that is the big difference and this is again not very few

198districts in the state are showing this usually it's the gold bar getting smaller and smaller for you you're actually seeing more uh children living in your district than you were 10 years ago and then just one more quick look uh we do also just look at what's going on not just with cusd enrollments but also your local charter schools and private schools so the charter school data we this only goes up to 2020 but what this really shows here is that when you did have that enrollment decrease in 2020 that was not a situation where cusd enrollment went down but the charters went up in the same year everyone lost enrollment in that year that was released so that shows it's indicative of there were just a lot of families who those circumstances moved them

199out of chico out of view county perhaps out of california entirely and as i said those students kind of reset your baseline as it did for a lot of the charters and private schools and now we're back to based on what we're seeing with the charters and cusb enrollment outside the private and cusd enrollment we're growing again we'll have that charter data in around april when cde publishes everything and i expect we'll see something similar there too but it's just handy to have that benchmark of looking at all enrollment of the schools who are you know physically exist in your district just to see what those trends look like so the first big external factor that we talked about your student generation rates and residential development so the student generation rates are important because this

200is how we look at that development that's in the pipeline and we can tell you how many students we think you're going to get out of it because we look at what's recently been built and we see how many students that you have this year live in new developments and on a per unit basis then give you an average and we look at that broken down by grade and broken down by different kinds of housing and that's important because particularly i mentioned there's a lot of affordable housing being built and you see that affordable housing is also what gives you far and away the most students so if we look at something that says 0.783 i mean it's you know technically for every unit you would get on average 0.78 students i like to think

201of it more for every 100 units that are built you can expect about 78 students to come out of that and you know that again you're looking at about a student out of every four units for single-family detached housing uh a little bit less for the single-family attached you know kind of condos which is very typical uh attempt your sharing walls you may not have a yard of any kind it's less attractive if you're buying out right for families with young kids in some situations and then the multi-family rentals that are market rate obviously much lower generation than what you get from the affordable that said across the board compared to last year all of these student generation rates were higher when we looked at it this year so that's just good information to keep

202in mind but that's then how we get on to the next slide this is just more illustrating uh just the number of projects that are going on and particularly when you look at that type and you look at all the ones that are the affordable multi-family projects not only are there quite a few of them they are a couple of them are under construction right now the ones that are not under construction are expected to be within the next year or so and they are pretty much all located in the same elementary school boundary uh somewhere along the bruce road corridor in the little chico creek boundary so that's the most significant thing there but uh what you're really getting at here is the map and again a lot of what we're looking at is

203in that southeast part of the district uh you also already have uh the uh miriam park you have a stone gate getting going there uh valley's edge is going to the city later this year uh yeah just to begin what would be a long-term process there but there's just a lot in that corner of the district your previous heavy growth sector was in the northwest up near the kind of shasta and emma wilson boundaries we had that boundary change there a few years ago to keep shasta from having more residents than its facility capacity was designed for and so kind of the next area of focus is really going to be on that southeast part of the district and then again lots of numbers we're not going to go through them all but this is

204just then showing you based on those student generation rates how many students we expect to be generated who would live in each school boundary again that doesn't mean that's where they're going to school but it's important to know again just where you're going to have more students living and you can just really see again little chico creek is far and away due to multiple affordable housing projects that are either definitely being built maybe not at this time of night but being built as we speak in the more general sense and uh that the city is very confident will be under construction within the next year or so so spatial analysis i'm not going to show you too many maps here but again this is uh numbers that we have referenced quite a bit uh in

205some of our discussion on the trustee areas and so this is just an example of that chart this is the one for the elementary schools and what you have is every column is where the students live and then every row across is where they go to school you can see the bold numbers kind of on the diagonal tends to be the majority of students do still attend the elementary school whose boundary they live in you also at the elementaries have hooker oak and rosedale that only receive students because they don't have boundaries and that's also why the out migration numbers are higher than in migration kind of across the board because out migration does include the two purely choice schools but that just gives you a look at what those and migration and outmigration numbers

206are the net migration at the bottom just for those curious that sums up to zero and that is just among your ten schools with boundaries uh which ones have net students in or out and a lot of that is driven by the special programs that you have at parkview and sierra view because you'll see the very highly positive net migrations at those two sites and so there's a whole lot more maps and analysis of all kinds of things in the study but i want to kind of get into your enrollment projections now and here's as promised the slide talking about births that you really see you actually did have between 2011 and an increase in your local births which i mean anything that wasn't a noticeable decrease is already bucking state trends and then you

207had as was very common a drop in 2020 and now uh full year 2021 births are in you know have been released by cdph so we can confirm that you are back up very close to previous levels and given that 2021 was still a down year uh due to some hesitancy around the pandemic in a lot of places uh the california department of finance and i agree that births in view county and in chico usd are likely to i think still go up a little bit from where they were now but that's one of the key things to check in on year in and year out yes um what's considered local birth so in this case that's a great question so cdph releases this data by the zip code of residence for the mother so

208regardless of where the birth occurred it's based on the address of the mother that was collected at the time of birth and so we have the three zip codes the nine five six two six two eight and seven three i believe there should be more than that because it also includes forest ranch for example so i live in forest ranch and that's a different zip code than those three so wouldn't that also be considered so let me double check on that because i know part of it is the zip codes don't always align very well with the school district boundary and if the majority of the population in a zip code is not in the school boundary but let me ours is for sure okay then they'd let me double check on that i just

209then my kid's not counted on there so yeah just know that then i definitely want to make sure that i am not it didn't happen she doesn't exist i guess i can just not not have to go home tonight no so that i was actually curious because i i gave birth to her in yolo county and so i just didn't know if that counted here or yeah it's tracked both ways by place of birth and by but we always track them by residents but now that we've brought up that let me absolutely just make sure that we're accounting for yeah what are all the zip codes that fall in a majority and cusd boundaries i mean that's a question for the universe i'm not asking for an answer right now yeah but well well certainly

210uh we'll get back through staff on that and if we you know definitely want to if we can show something that's a little bit more accurate then we'll definitely do that and then another key part though is we don't just look at the raw birth numbers we also then want to see what that means for how that translates into consistent kindergarten enrollment for you and as i already mentioned your kindergarten has been pretty stable and steady for a few years and as have your birth so it shouldn't be a surprise that the after that initial increase that you had a few years ago uh you know you can call it a capture rate you can call it a birth to kindergarten ratio but what we're really kind of looking at is when you look at

211the births from five years previously how many kindergarten students do you get the next year and for your chico usd it's just uh lately a little under 80 it was a little lower last year especially since kindergarten is not compulsory uh certainly we've already talked about that last year that a lot of families might have opted to set out kindergarten and still come back this year for first grade and that's exactly what seems to have happened in some cases uh but that pretty much between we already showed you the chart you know you have some of those students who are going the charters or to private schools and pretty consistently you're getting somewhere in the high 70s uh percent of those students enrolling with you as kindergartners uh transitional kindergarten has been also fairly steady

212uh but you know getting close to about 15 there but the big thing is transitional kindergarten as i alluded to is about to look completely different in a few years so we are expanding uh that eligible birth dates for the last decade or so it has been kids born between september 2nd and december 2nd so essentially your september october november birthdays we're adding december and january as of this upcoming fall and then adding on two more months each of the next two years then all those summer birthdays by 25 26 at which point every four-year-old they could not turn five until september 1st of the next year but they are eligible for tk if their families want them to at that time and effectively this is now year one of a two-year kindergarten program and

213this is i and something i've been telling people that i believe will happen is by 2526 the word and the awareness will kind of be out that uh you go see chico unified you're enrolling school at four years old that's when public school starts it's not the perception now of tk's only a special thing that's only for some people and it's only at you know it's not at every site uh but in general uh what that is one of our assumptions that uh outside of a couple of sites where there are some uh you know particular reasons with facilities uh why but we're our projections on the school by school level are assuming that we're adding tkn to the couple of sites that don't have them this year but they would in a couple of

214years and then district wide again it's not going to be quite as many tk's kindergarten there will always be some families who just for whatever reason don't put their four-year-olds in and i think especially some of those very youngest ones but again that's what will be very important over the next couple of years before we're fully implemented to track how that's going as the program rolls out so that's how we get to how many kindergartners you think we'll have and as i said that's kind of the biggest engine that can drive that enrollment decrease or increase but in your case we've established you are going to actually have fairly consistently sized cohorts so the next part is what happens it takes 13 years for these cohorts to move all the way through grades k to

21512 it'll be 14 years of tk to 12 soon and if you were living in that magic bubble where nobody once they got in school nobody left nobody came in that would be very easy you would just track those kids as they moved through but in reality you have a lot of people moving in and out every year but on net what we see is aside from 2020 that's going to be a very common thing you'll hear in this report for the next few years but aside from 2020 you see you have pretty consistent net growth which means on the whole more kids are moving in than moving out so you expect once that cohort comes in as kindergarteners by the time they graduate out as seniors there's going to be more kids than there

216were when they started and so we factor that in when we project your enrollment and so what that actually means with everything we're looking at so you see that again that one-year drop uh aberrational event with the copen 19 pandemic all of the economic uncertainty that followed that and a lot of people with that big push factor entirely moving out of the area and out of the state that said we've already have our year of growth in and now on the back of adding in these new tk students and the substantial amount of i think what we have with just general multi-family housing that's been built in the last year is already higher than what it was but i think between what's under construction now and what's approved basically and you're going to be happening

217soon is you're around 900 something units just of the multifamily including those affordable units i mean the city's average had been about 300 a year of the multifamily uh over the last several years so again we're just seeing especially with just kind of the stars aligning with the funding that enables these affordable projects to happen quite a bit of that and just housing scarcity housing need is a thing and we fully anticipate that those units will be filled up a lot of them with families with school-age kids so that's what's going to really drive that growth at a sharper angle than what you've been seeing those two factors in combination for the next few years and then you kind of level out back to that baseline growth and then towards the end of the projection

218period which by that point i mean that's just really a uh that you know we're talking about kids that haven't been born yet enrolling in kindergarten so uh yeah but you know kind of step kind of leveling out assuming nothing else uh you know would change demographically or with development patterns between now and then but that's why we'll definitely be updating uh this look in the meantime i think what you really want to focus on is that growth that we see happening uh pretty realistically and pretty dependably for the next few years and then just the full numbers that you have there again we don't need to go through all of them i think the big ones that you have here is really looking across that very top row just seeing how the tk enrollment

219is going to grow and then just looking at those subtotals at the bottom of what that really does for your tk5 populations because then we compare that to your capacities that were identified in your facilities master plan you have kind of target and maximum capacities that were identified in that study and when we look at the elementary schools that is the one level where again utk was not even something that was considered at the time that those capacities uh were developed and that master plan was done quite a few years ago now so at this point now we are showing a projection where again you're within your maximum capacity but the target capacity for those sites you're going to have more kids than that in your elementary schools within the next few years so those

220key recommendations again just continue to update this study this is especially with the early rollout of utk with continuing development uh you know everyone's updating their housing cycles for those county and city general plans yes i'm sorry on the last slide that you had up here it's different than the powerpoint slide that was linked in my presentation what's the the difference is that those the maximum capacity and target capacity on your slides are showing like no change um relative to each other but on the one i'm looking at it's showing um like for elementary schools that the target capacity is being overtaken by the most likely enrolled capacity at the elementary school level in 2024 oh is it okay i don't have bars on mine i only have a line graph yeah sorry i i

221was interpreting the line graph a lot better than i can interpret the bar graph i'm not a fan of bar graphs unless like they're absolutely necessary so okay well i will keep that in mind keep the bar graphs please if it helps matt keep the keep the paragraphs yeah yeah so in this case yeah sorry so just yeah so in the case the bar graphs uh like we've been showing other enrollment bar graphs is the projected enrollment and then we have those steady lines of where that capacity level is and you can see the year when the enrollment goes up to and exceeds that capacity level okay and then uh and then one uh specific recommendation we have from this one then is again in light of there being a new grade level essentially that

222is being served now uh kind of probably a good time to reapproach that facility's master plan uh in just light of uh just kind of new conditions on the ground since that one was developed uh and then of course to continue working uh closely with the city of chico particularly with a lot of just what developments are in the pipeline what's being approved what's under construction uh just so that again one thing you know when things get moving again if there is some uh movement with valley's edge where anything gets formalized with that and we have a build out uh you know that can certainly also begin and that's it and again it gets all in that's that same part of the city in the same elementary school boundary and so as we did a

223few years ago uh you know at least start with that conversation start with that consideration of uh how those boundaries and those uh where you have the classroom space is lining up with where your students are going to be so that is what i have prepared from the study and again i'm happy to talk about any and all of it we've certainly no shortage of things in there but i think that covers the big things that we wanted to make sure that you i just had presented to you i think i'm interested to hear what julie has to say about recommendations for timeline changes and and such more specific than before 2025. great question we have been meeting um with the district leadership regarding the transitional kindergarten universal transitional kindergarten so conversations have been ongoing

224at this point we think we have a good plan for the first year for next fall but obviously it's something that we need to all put our heads together and you know develop maybe changes to our facilities master plan adding a whole new grade level to our to you know every school in the state of california is going to make big changes obviously the facilities needed for utk are very much different than a regular you know 960 square foot math classroom so there is going to need to be a lot of careful thought put forward for that dealing with the residential growth in the city i think we have proven to be very nimble with changing the the roll out of our master plan when necessary to make sure that we are providing capacity in

225those growth areas and that is also something that's going to need to be discussed we do have a facilities committee meeting scheduled for next week dr kaiser and trustee robinson are board represented representation for that committee so we are digging in immediately you're welcome i think uh probably the best we can do is to i don't know if it's a rocket yet but it's definitely a ship taking off and looking as far as we can is you know the best we can do i still like the term covet litter because that's how i am experiencing my family okay so anything else any other yes thank you dr kaiser i um you know i know where our henshaw property is can we move it i'm actually glad you brought that up because the valley's edge development

226that is east of bruce road i sweat it's east of bruce road in the general vicinity of little chico creek and we have property reserved there for a future elementary school so that would have to be something that we look at possibly for you know a down the road need if it's needed we do have room to grow there one of those good news bad news situations where we've got good news that we are on a projection for continuing to increase because i know what it's like when it goes the other way um but yeah it means you know when you've got only five years basically to make a decision [Music] put the shovels in the ground and put the walls up it's you have to be on top of it well it's great news

227and it's what we do so we're we're excited to accept that challenge so thank you for your patience tonight and going through this information with us i was asking for an adoption of this uh study this evening do i have a motion so moved all right i have a motion second did we have public comment did we have public comment oh um is there any public comment thank you okay so we have are you seconding yes to the microphone i'm sorry okay so we have a motion by uh matt tennis in a second by tom lando and um any further discussion by the board all right i'll call for a vote matt i'll start with you aye dolby aye kaiser aye lando i robinson i 5 0. thank you okay rob you're so persuasive thanks

228again everybody thanks rob all right okay we have the budget jacqueline yes good evening board so before you this evening we have the fiscal team here to present our second interim budget presentation so these are changes that have happened to our current year budget um since we presented at the december regular board meeting so i'm going to have excuse me bless you my marie kick it off and then sharice will take over and then i'll wrap it up okay so major themes of the budget tonight um average daily attendance hold harmless provision for 2122 the effect of coven 19 on attendance percentage and projected enrollment covid relief funding and pers and stirs annual pension costs first major factor is ada projections this slide should look familiar to you you saw it at first interim um

229we you know we're funded on average daily attendance which is kids actually attending school and historically um average daily attendance is about 95.5 of enrolled kids on the highlighted line you can see that we are nowhere close to that 95.5 due to covid coveted illnesses copic quarantines so we're projecting quite the loss in ada this year on this slide you can see that even though we did dip an ada 2122 projected our funded ada is still at that 11 830 number that we earned back in 1920. that's the whole harmless provision that we're talking about so we won't feel the effects of that until next year but there is also a proposal on the table to allow three-year averaging which would really help us out jacqueline is going to talk about that later in the

230presentation this slide shows the covid relief funding that we were allocated it was a lot of money it came in many forms lots of different um lots of different requirements and one overarching message though that we should use it to prepare for respond to and mitigate the effects of coven 19. we're actively spending these dollars down some of the things we've used it for additional counseling elementary reading teachers high school block schedule class size reduction summer academies school buses and furniture to accommodate social distancing there's a lot more that we've used it for but those are highlights alrighty good evening um so some major assumptions a couple of these have stayed the same as they were when we brought the budget to you at first interim in december so those first two bullet points the

231local control funding formula the cost of living adjustments still that 5.07 that was a part of the state adopted budget hasn't changed and then as marie mentioned we were funded this year on that 11 000 830 average daily attendance unduplicated students went up just a tiny bit so it's 53.12 right now and then the salaries and benefits that we used to do our projections were as of february 15th this slide shows our income statement so that unrestricted funds the majority of that is our local control funding formula as you can see we're still having we still have a change in fund balance that is positive of 1.5 million um and then the restricted dollars even though it looks we discussed this at first syndrome as well even though it looks like we're deficit spending those

232are grants so it's coveted funds uh federal grants like title 1 cte funding and more grants that we have those are self-balancing so a lot of that is carryover dollars that we're spending where we probably received the revenue last year and we're spending it this year this pie chart shows our expenses for the general fund for unrestricted and restricted as you can see we're still in the people business so most of our spending comes from people it's that certificated salaries the classified and employee benefits those three total out to 84 percent of our total budget um and that's all those green sections right there the larger sections this pie chart shows under unrestricted expenses as well as our special ed contribution so when we add the special ed contribution in there the total between the

233certificated salaries classified salaries employee benefits along with the special ed contribution we jump up to 87 percent of our total unrestricted uh expenditures alrighty um this slide shows our other funding sources um uses and contributions um so as we discussed at first interim those two numbers up the top haven't really changed they're the same as they were when we came back in or in december uh transfers out we're at zero still because our transfers out were for fun 13 our cafeteria dollars we still have free meals for all the contributions to restricted programs so those have changed just a little bit our special ed contribution went down just a tiny bit 90 000 that usually happens along the course of the year because we try to budget conservatively at the beginning of the year and

234then we have more information as we get closer to the end of the year sorry retrain restricted maintenance that's our required three percent so that's uh three percent of our total expenditures in the general fund and then this is just a budget comparison so you can see the difference in each section between we came to you in december with first interim and our second interim budget so the biggest differences is we received a bus grant so that local revenue increased quite a bit but then the expenditures show as well so the expenditures went up about 641 and some of that's also tied to sick pay so as marie mentioned we had a lot of sick time uh in the last few months since we came to you in december so a lot of that sick

235time as well but as you can see down at the bottom the change in front balance has actually increased a little bit so that means that we did a good job at first interim and guessing or not guessing but estimating and projecting our revenue and expenditures that we expected to get throughout the course of the year and now i'm going to hand it over to jaclyn thank you so the other piece of the budget is not only looking at current year but looking at future years as well and really i would say at this point in the year we need to start looking at the next school year and even the next two school years so tonight we'll have our multi-year projection or nyp for the out years we have increased ada in 2223 of

236only 46 and then we have a small decrease in 23.24 and that's largely driven um by the attendance percentages as i alluded to earlier we normally kind of have this 95.5 attendance rate this year we're looking at just over 91 and so in the future years that percentage will increase ideally getting back up to the 95.5 but conversely we did have a decrease in enrollment and so we do have four certificated fte related to declining enrollment in the two out years we do take into account that we have very seasoned staff and they have step and column we have changes in person stirs rate guidance from the state and inflation for utility expenses and insurance so as we build more buildings our insurance costs go up clearly fuel is a big one right now i

237actually heard from bob ontoberos and our diesel per gallon is up about a dollar 27 over the last couple weeks um so those are real costs we do take into account though that we have retirements and that there are certificated savings related to that so we are estimating 20 in 2223 as well as an additional 23 20 and 23 24. cola for next year at this point is 5.33 we are getting some inkling that might actually be closer to 6 percent um so we'll know more as the spring goes on and then 3.61 for 23.24 so as the big topic we talked about tonight is tk right so um we do have in the multi-year projection to add two tk classes in 2223 and an additional two classes in 23 24. um so the big

238the big issue with tk is the staffing requirement is 24 to 2 versus right now it's 24 to 1. so it would require one teacher and one classroom made for the duration of the of the class jacqueline um yes so on what basis are we estimating that it would just be two classes i mean this is a new mandate or a new i don't know about mandate but a new offering so i just wondered what framework of reference we're using to say so what we've done is we've said we have eight classes currently yeah um for the december second um cutoff and we're going we're adding two months and so we're extrapolating that out as of right now we will be adding a tk class at rosedale and then we will be doing a tk

239blended class for part gen ed part special ed and we still have 50 to 60 openings with our current existing classes right now so in the event that enrollment spikes over the summer obviously we'll have to add a class while tk isn't required it is required for the district to offer it so students may be eligible but they may not participate depending on their familial situation okay so this is the unrestricted side of the multi-year projection um so you can see in the first year here as as charisse had spoken about we're looking at a surplus of about 1.5 million that's that fourth line down the big thing i want to point out is in 2223 right now we are projecting a 3.8 million dollar deficit and that's that funding cliff that we've talked about

240multiple times but this is based on what is currently in statute which is the greater part of your cur your ada and so that's where um you know the several 7 800 kid difference between 1920 is really going to impact us but i am i am pleasantly happy to say that we do still have um undesignated fund balance so we can weather that storm because you can see in 2324 then we surplus about a million dollars which on a budget this size is about breakeven so what i do want to provide is this informational only for you related to the three-year averaging the only change between this slide here that's on the current year unrestricted and the informational only is the revenue in 2223 goes from 122 million and change about 20 122.5 million up

241to 128 million so by changing the district's ability to be funded on our ada at the state level it's a over a 5 million dollar impact for us so that 3.8 million deficit becomes a surplus of 1.5 million so it is a proposal it's going through the budget legislative committees at the state as we speak it is gaining momentum the state legislature from what we've seen from polling is not willing to do hold harmless which is what we have this year which is just pay us on 1920 but they do seem to be optimistic about the three-year averaging what we don't know at this point is if it's a one-year deal so in 2223 you can do that through your averaging or if it's going to be put in statute for perpetuity purposes so the

242other piece that we always talk about is the impact of person stirs and the rates we are you can see these are prior years it's been um definitely a financial burden for the district to pick this up next year will be an exceptionally large hit um the stirs rate's going up 2.18 percent and the pers rates going up 2.49 or almost 2.5 percent at this point the stirs right then will stay flat for 23.24 and right now a very small increase on the pers so for the district it's about 30 000 which is basically flat so we are optimistic that these are starting to level off but it really does depend on the investments of the person personsters agencies so cash flow is always the important one we need to have money in the bank

243to issue checks very similar pattern year over year over year and that's how our state and federal dollars come in as well as you can see in december and april that we get property taxes from the local counties so that also elevates it quite a bit we do have a substantial amount of covert relief dollars that we've received that were that we're actively spending down but that has helped our cash position so you can see the dotted line here is for the current year and we're projecting to end just over 40 million and our healthy reserves certainly help with our cash position as well so about its budget certification the district self-certifies um positive qualified or negative as you can see on the screen in front of you um we are self-certified and positive we

244have the ability to meet all of our obligations in the current year plus the two out years so pending board approval tonight we'll submit the documentation to butte county office of education by march 15th they will review and send a letter based on our assumptions and our budget so then going forward it says begin conversation in reality we've already started the conversation for 22 23 actively working with the ed services team um to talk about that program we've started the lcap meetings we had our first one last night we'll get feedback from that um continue to adjust our staffing according to enrollment and students registering at all levels kindergarten all the way up and then come may we'll get the the may revise or the budget the governor's revised budget he'll have property taxes from

245april so he's able to give better estimates at that point in time and then we'll be back a month later at june in conjunction with the lcap to give you an update on an estimated for the current year as well as our proposed budget for the following year in 2223 any questions this evening so the context for the action is for us to approve this as a positively certified approve the budget with the self-certification by administration that it's positive okay so we can send it off all right so any comments from the audience just thank you to the team for all the work you do to you know first of all nothing's a surprise you guys have been telling us where we were headed and there we go i love it when there aren't surprises

246all right discussion motions from the board i'll move to approve the second interim budget for 21-22 okay so katelyn's moved i'll second that and tom seconded okay any further discussion all right let's have a vote uh i'll start with eileen robinson i lando i kaiser ai dolby tennessee all right 5-0 i think that's pretty good math right jacqueline well done dr kaiser okay all right and so number three um is the resolution 1575-22 enter fund borrowing between funds charisse all right you're back me again alrighty this should be quite pretty quick guys um so the resolution before you tonight allows chico unified the capability to borrow between funds we have two programs our nutrition services program as well as our state-funded preschool program both of those are reimbursement based so edcode states that as of

247the fourth monday in april all funds have to stay cash positive and those two funds operate outside of our general operating fund so we come to you every year to make sure that we get approval to move money temporarily between our general fund and these two funds just to remain cash positive all right any comments from the public no any comments from the board all right can i have a motion i move approval of resolution 1575-22 okay eileen second i'll second okay katelyn all right so any further discussion all right so let's start with matt tennis eye dolby i kaiser i and i robinson i okay you're a perfect number again all right any items from the floor yes come on up to the mic introduce yourself elaine ward um so something that came to

248mind when the discussion of the three-course science model was going on and obviously jessica brought up concerns for sped and it was mentioned that they were contemplating co-teach i am all in favor of a co-teach program mr lando mrs robinson mr merchant and mrs olsen receive my email regarding co-teach programs in our district if some of you are unaware we do have a co-teach program that exists at parkview i wonder how many of you have actually been to parkview to observe the classrooms that participate in the co-teach program because they are amazing dr kaiser i know you mentioned that you have visited visited excuse me the cte classes if you have not had the chance to observe a co-teach classroom i strongly encourage you to do that i feel co-teach is something that really needs

249to be expanded throughout our whole district but i also know that it was original when it was originally discussed it was not received with open arms there was discussions of budget there were teachers against it because they didn't want a second teacher in the classroom and my fear is though they mention co-teach to help with this new science expansion that it will not be something that will be easily welcomed or something that will easily fall in place for these students where those educational concerns are i just kind of want to put it on your radar to do some research i have begun with the help of erica because some of the past minutes seemed very incomplete um seeing what those original arguments were against the the co-teach programs because i've seen the success for my

250son i have seen success for peers of his that we have known through the years since loma vista [Music] data or data whatever which whatever you say i feel it needs to be collected and from what i have been told nothing has been collected and nothing has been presented to the district to demonstrate the success the co-teach program has been you can't really make a decision on something if you haven't seen how successful it is diane encouraged me to also mention this at the lcap meeting which of course i will an additional in addition to other items that i have um concerns and strong opinions about as well but again just wanted to put it on your radar now when it will probably most likely eventually come up co-teach works and you need to start

251looking into it now thank you all right thank you okay do we have any board members who would like to agendize an item yes i don't know if it warrants an agenda item but i would like some follow-up either an open session or close whatever you think is appropriate madam superintendent about the issue raised by miss penny this uh at the beginning of our meeting she got up and described the scenario and where a student was uncomfortable oh and so i would like more information on that whether to make it an agenda item i don't know but kelly was that nod that that doesn't okay it does doesn't need to be a motion okay okay um i have i have one um i would like to move to direct staff to draft a resolution to

252write a letter to our legislators legislatures too sorry my brain approve the use of the three-year average of ada as a third option in perpetuity with the budget update and seeing that that third option would really give us a boost i think it would be i should probably stop discussing but that's that's what i would like to move to do directly asking the legislators to what asking the legislators to approve the use of the three-year average of ada as a third option for um uh for our funding to double as a like to determine our funding so right now there's two sort two ways to determine our funding and that right now what was presented with the budget was is that there's a third a third way being proposed right now so you would either

253go with straight aid ada last year or hold harmless whichever is higher or you would look at three years and average it out okay thank you okay so just for clarification the three are averaging as a proposal in the governor's january budget and so it's going in front of the legislature over these next couple months through the budget subcommittees to determine if that would be a viable option moving forward so your suggestion is for us to draft a letter or to have staff draft a letter for us to approve to send to them in support of that three-year ada average as a third option in perpetuity okay second note and i'll bring that back all right okay i uh anybody else okay i would like to yes okay i would like to suggest that we

254no longer have oh i'm sorry okay we need to vote for agendizing the letter okay so the motion was to draft half staff draft a letter approving the use of a three-year average ada as an option for funding okay i think what our int i'm going to borrow your intent was currently it's a one-year three-year we want it to be an ongoing so that this three-year averaging slides forward the three is the three-year averaging even approved yet no no it's not even approved yet so we got a presentation of how much money it would actually help us save with if they approve that three-year average but that's not even approved yet no i'm saying that so it's right now that three-year average is being proposed as a one-year thing and i'm saying but it hasn't

255happened yeah but i'm but i'm saying that i want we we want to i would like us to draft a letter to ask for it not just for the one year but in perpetuity not three years but for forever okay are we in discussion on that yes what if it was like working again against us you know what if you would have made it it's an option it's an option so so it gives so right now there's two options for funding and it gives us a third option and we go with whatever is the best for us the district will always be funded on the maximum dollars of options available to us so right now there's two options available we will always be funded on the greater of the two if there's three options then

256whichever of the three options gives us the most money for funding purposes that's what would be funded and the two options that are available to us now are basic ada versus the current year apa or last year's aba whichever is greater and is that a covid thing or is that it's always been that's one statute that's been in in statute for a long time and so this would add the three-year average to your list of options so it's especially advantageous for districts that are declining in enrollment or at least had one or two years even if there's a v because it kind of softens that decrease so you can react better to making budget changes on the expenditure side if you have less revenue but we're gaining an enrollment so in theory it'd be i

257mean like right at this moment yeah for gaining an ada we would we would fund on the current year because that would be the greatest number [Music] and statewide though it would this policy would benefit districts that are declining it would benefit most districts because most districts in the state of california are declining yeah i would say probably the most um uh at-risk districts like especially rural areas where you know there's a lot of reasons that you know there might be struggling with their enrollment um well urban metropolitan districts are struggling with their enrollment right i mean they're shutting down schools in places like oakland and stuff like that yeah yeah so most districts it would help a lot on most districts okay so is everybody clear on the motion all right uh so uh

258i'll start with eileen robinson i landed high kaiser i dolby aye um tennis abstain and the reason is i just don't know how i feel about this from a standpoint of statewide policies we wouldn't have to approve the letter we don't i mean it's just a they will be bringing the letter to us and and then we vote on it this is just a vote to ask them to write the letter i'm just saying once i'm ambivalent about something i'm ambivalent about it for all all time past present or future it's a four two uh one one and it's an abstain okay so um what i'd like to request is that we no longer include the warrant payouts as part of the agenda we are required to bring those forth to the board we are

259per egg code yes i don't think we used to get them but they've been on the agenda since i've worked at chica unified yeah it was added i think two years three years ago something like that so i have another one yeah um i would also like to move to direct staff to present an update on the co-teach program including what is needed to expand it so i don't know because i wasn't at that but i'll ask jay is that part of the special ed presentation that's coming forward yeah it was very much it was one of the things yeah including the what it's gonna what it could take to expand it i just want to make sure that that gets hit as well yeah it was a lot is included but we want to

260add one more thing that's right in line with lots of the other stuff that is coming forward we just started developing the the presentation um and diane was going over to it with us today and it did include the co-teaching model so we'll have data on that for you and if there's more direction from that from that workshop then we can provide that i just want to slap some numbers on that program with jacqueline's assistance thanks so um did we get a second on that just for clarification from staff is that going to happen in the in the capacity that i asked for already so we don't need to vote for it or do we need to vote on my it's already part of the special ed workshop that is that's the first week of

261april as a significant part okay you feel good about that okay we'll keep following up yeah thank you so it's it's already going to be included then i i um withdraw my motion okay any other agendized items by the board all right [Music] we are adjourned god you