1/19/2022 Board of Education Meeting

001here b okay this is the beginning of the [Music] chico unified board of education meeting for january 19th we will begin with closed session and if there's public comment on closed session and we have received none at this point after closed session we will start the open board meeting at six o'clock and if the closed session is not completed before that time it will resume immediately following the regular meeting if if it does resume at the end of the meeting any actions taken will be posted on the website and will be available in the board meeting minutes so with that i'm going to close the mic and adjourn to closed session all right i am calling the school board meeting for january the 19th into sessions we did have closed session earlier and action was

002taken that action was to approve five to zero the case number 19 c v in butte county that involved chico country day and a construction company so that was the only action taken so with that i'd like to have everyone stand for 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're going to have student reports are the students here so madam president with your permission i would like to switch those two items and if we can start with the superintendent's report and recognition our students are on their way here in the van but they're not quite here yet so um we can just flip those two

003around so everyone's okay with that okay so we will then move to the superintendent's report and recognition and i hope some of those beautiful flowers are for me i'm sure people will share so as the board is well aware we like to recognize both certificated and classified staff that have done an outstanding job at each of our regular board meetings and i would like it this time to ask marigold where we are sitting principal shawnee's heath to step to the podium hello board we're excited to recognize one of our most amazing teachers this is assistant principal margie starkey and we are here to recognize trish morgan who we tricked into getting here but when she saw her former students and current students we thought that might be a tip-off you can come on up if

004you don't mind you want to stand here i can kind of talk to you you're so sweet and tricky [Laughter] i let margie do a little lying this afternoon trish loves her job she loves the kids she loves the families and she's passionate about helping each child achieve great things she's a solid mentor which was how we tricked her into getting here to her peers and she loves to share her many years of knowledge and advice to help others learn and grow she feels deeply and it drives her to work hard to provide differentiated growth experiences for each student she really looks at what each child needs and finds ways to meet their individual needs she is so patient and has compassion and compassionate and unique ways of working with students that struggle to attend

005or follow classroom expectations she is clear and loving in her guidance for each student her communication with families is extensive and reliable the families know she is there for them and their child now that you're running carl young famous psychiatrist once said one looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings a few examples of how trish morgan is a teacher who has touched our human feelings she differentiates her students spelling tests each of them each student has his or her own list that they work on based on the assessments mrs morgan has given to her class and which spelling stage they are in this is an amazing way she meets her students needs mrs morgan makes home visits of all the coveted home quarantines mrs

006morgan regularly drops off work on her students doorsteps so her students don't return to school having fallen behind lastly mrs morgan was under a tight deadline to complete her district assessments and she was not able to get some of them done based on their home quarantines so she made home visits with precautions in place brought her own lawn chair to test her students in their front yards amazing mrs morgan goes above and beyond in all areas around the school including serving on multiple committees mentoring new teachers and acting as an ambassador to our school's campus whatever we ask of her she does it with gladness in her heart and a joyful smile clearly with the families here tonight supporting her she has touched their human feelings as well mrs morgan is most deserving of this

007award and is our honor to bestow it upon her thank you [Applause] and we also mr morgan would you like to come up and be part of the picture okay she has to also keep him in line yeah yeah come on up yay come on you guys are awesome thank you for being here this is great look at all these goodies you guys are spicy cake former and current students yes thank you so much thank you everyone [Applause] okay trish i have one regret where were you when i was taking spelling so to move on to our classified recognition i'd like to invite john carver our maintenance and operations director to the podium good evening board i stand before you on a false pretense that i needed to address the board for an assembly bill

008and as you know this is not true if i come up missing tomorrow you will now know who to look at the next person that will receive the superintendent's award has no clue that i'm doing this but i must say that she is very deserving of this and many more accolades for all that she does for not only maintenance and operations but the entire district and here are just a few of her duties that she performs reviews custodial unit loads for each site along with custodial site mapping state of california department pesticide regulations reporting butte county ag department reporting manages the sirs program which stands for the california environmental reporting system for hazardous materials and related data as mandated by the california health and safety code manages reports for the butte county air quality management

009district hazardous waste generator reporting for the manifest and environmental protection agency verification monitors are fire inspections and nissag inspections creates manages and distributes site inspection binders for the custodial monthly site inspections monitors are at best monitors are as best as surveillance survey six month reporting in our tri-annual reporting monitors our yearly backflow inspections for cal water helps with budget development maintain summer project spreadsheet spreadsheets and the cost of each of those projects she does our eminent payroll schedules ems and personnel for facilities use during the weekend on weekends manages our emergency response trailer and keeps an updated inventory of needed supplies she's also our incident reporter and recorder during an emergency as in the wall fire oroville dam failure and the campfire so basically i receive a call from the office emergency services for our

010help and my first call is to darcy to start an incident log she answers many many phone calls to mno from all the sites maintains monthly covet quality control logs and just recently as in last week darcy took it upon herself to become certified as a kova tester with the butte county department of health these are just a sample of what she does for mno and the district and i could spend a good hour talking about how much more she does for everyone like always remembering our birthdays and bringing us goodies to eat on that day but i'll stop here and leave you with this you ready did you hear that she said i'm dead darcy valuable is the work you do outstanding is how you always come through loyal sincere and full of good

011cheer untiring in your efforts efforts throughout the year notable are the contributions you make trustworthy in every project you take eager to reach your every goal effective in the way you fulfill your role ready with a smile like a shining star special and wonderful that's all you are and i cannot do what i do without you here you go miss darcy thank you certificate how many years coming up on 20 well 20 out in the courtyard and 11 years at jay partridge tomorrow so congratulations to both of our superintendent award winners and our students have arrived and they are our guest of honor this evening so i'd like to introduce diane olson to introduce our student program good evening board i'm very excited to present to you one of the outcomes of our adult students

012most of these students have been through all of our programs in chico unified and they learn to work within the community and one of their roles is a recycling program that they do and so the teacher for this program is ruth testar and then her assistant who likes to fly under the radar so he might hide behind the tv there is dana matlin over there and i'm going to let ruth introduce the students thanks diane yeah i just want to give a big thank you and a shout out to all my fabulous female leaders who helped support us continuing this program with all of the struggles we had over the last couple years and moving campuses so they've been a big help with helping us keeping this going um i had i asked the students

013the other day i was like i think we're going to go to the meeting and talk about the recycling program does anyone want to go and all three of their hands boom we're ready and this is very typical of these three we have addison geraldine who is 21 and we'll be exiting next fall miracle trailer who is will be 21 in march and she attended butte college last year independently and we have allison fcf who is exiting the program this june and we're excited to talk about her future yeah they've been practicing all day and you got you all have some questions so they are ready to answer i think we're very happy that you guys are here and so what would you like to tell us about your recycling program can you guys hear

014me yeah we hear you well thank you we grew up from business and homes all over town we grade and thanks for our customers and soap buy bottles grass cans at pv um and we we um take it to oroville to um to cash in and that's what we started with all right very good [Applause] yes if you don't mind so what kind of things do you spend the money on we spend all my food trips like art supplies like like you can name pretty much anything like cooking coffee cars like pretty much like fun stuff for like like math skills and stuff i have other questions you mentioned field trips what kind of field trips do you go on we we go to animal sanctuaries ice skating and a lot of other stuff great

015thank you who's the better ice skater [Laughter] there's a couple other things we spend the money on yeah and we also spend money on for like other food trips like go on like lunches and like to the bowling alley can you guys hear me okay um we also spend our money on the mall and the movies and then we also go to the museum i've got a couple of questions one is what kind of businesses do you collect from recycling and then how much money do you guys make when you when you take all that stuff in in oroville so we go to like little way hand um go to like homes like different type of homes like and we'll also go to like um non-stop mills like over by downtown yeah we go to

016like um boto bordeaux on skyway or acosta refunds clubs and we go to almond tree that's some of the places we go to how about the money how much money do you guys make in oroville okay oh it depends uh over oh under to 300 dollars one last question how many times per month do you do you do this one to two times a month okay so this program has been running for many years kovid shut it down for one year so they're a little bit behind on what they would normally have collected because they couldn't come out to the sites but they are also well known at the district office in all of our offices they come through they always shake our hands they always greet us with a good greeting and so it's

017a great opportunity for them to learn those skills within the program also so this is something that has been happening i i know since you've been here even before when jeff carr was here right so it's a long long-standing program that we have had did you have any more questions for dana or ruth i'd like to know how you think we could help you yes thank you so much so a big problem that we had in the past when we were at pv where people stealing our supplies stealing bottles and cans and our tarp that we use to keep the rain and the sun out a lot of the students in our program take medications and they're really sensitive to heat so having a shade structure over our sorting area would be really helpful and

018we have a couple of ideas how that could work we just need the okay to attach some items to buildings and fences out there right dana so we can get a tarp so we're protected for the weather and then also having a container to keep the bottles and cans in as a safe space before we take them into oroville because right now we're just kind of having to sort through go go and drive to oroville and we're doing that two or three times a month which is not the best way to do it but we need a place to store the cans and bottles do you want to say anything else sure why not one of the things i was going to say is that we this this group takes in quite a bit of

019recycling we have if you want to pass out the calendars you can see the amount of customers we take care of each month um it's quite a few and they love to donate they tell their friends about us and so we do we you know we're out in the community they're very sociable it really works out well we collect a lot it would be nice to have some containment units if we can the lock boxes that we have at pv have been broken into numerous times we've had to constantly repair them with recycling money and still they're broken into so this has been kind of an issue we've actually had to store a lot of our recycling off-site so that no one can get to it the room we do have there is limited if

020we could get something that'd be great the shade structure that's the first priority numerous classes use the sorting area we have at least three different classes that will come in any time during the day five days a week to use this area during the heat sometimes during the rain it would be wonderful if we could have some sort of shade structure that could you know at least protect them from the from the inclement weather anyways thank you so much and i think we can help with some of that we can i think our m o director just left unfortunately but we can have some conversations with him about this but i did want to address the students i want to thank you so much for presenting this evening it is hard to talk to an

021audience especially when you're using a microphone and answer questions and you guys were so well prepared so articulate and i'm really proud of you for doing this thank you so much [Applause] thank you guys really that was great and with that i will turn it back over to you dr kaiser okay so next we have announcements is anyone have an announcement no okay okay then we move to items from the floor just as a reminder items from the floor are not on the current agenda and so they can't be responded to by board members they are taken note of and some activity or action may result based on that so i have one name that was submitted for items from the floor and that's robert keane i don't know if it's i don't believe i

022see him here what'd you say he's not here he's not here oh okay and he didn't call in okay okay so i guess we're done with that does anyone else in the audience have an item from the floor again not on the agenda okay come on up and give your oh okay have to be not on the agenda okay all right thank you so with that we'll move to the consent calendar is there anyone on the board that wants to pull an item on the consent calendar yes eileen yes madam president thank you i'd like to poll 8.1.1 81.1 okay anybody else i'm going to pull a 2 4. okay anything else all right with those two exceptions may i have a motion so moved okay second okay second moved in seconded um so this

023will be our first vote so it'll be a vote by name um all those in favor of approving the consent calendar with the exception of eight point one point one and eight point two point four please answer with your name robinson i landed i kaiser i dolby aye tennis eye okay five to nothing all right eileen the one that you pulled yes uh thank you madam president um this this is the minutes of the regular meeting of december 15 21. i just have a question madam president we did move to table to the january meeting a discussion we were having on putting times on agenda items and um i just wanted to know if you have with your discretion moved it to a different month kelly that is on this agenda it's under item 5.1

024a second from the last on the discussion actions under agenda layout 9.5.1 discussion action agenda layout ah it was hiding thank you my mistake i move approval of uh 8.1.1 all right uh do i get a second second all right uh any discussion okay seeing none so uh this can be a voice vote so we are moving the approval of the minutes of the regular board meeting on 12 15 21. all those in favor please say bye aye hi hi hi okay five to nothing all right thank you i pulled 8.2.4 which is the approval of a field trip request for the chico high wrestlers to attend a tournament in hollis but it's the girls wrestling team and this is relatively new in wrestling and the girls team have been doing exceptional so i just

025wanted to recognize a sport that we don't normally identify with our female athletes but they have been excelling so with that i'd like to move the approval of the field request field trip request i'll second that motion okay all those in favor say by answering i i okay 5-0 all right thank you so with that we now move to the action and discussion calendar and we do have uh five people on that [Music] issue and so but we will go in sequence i don't know what aspect they want to discuss so if you're one of those five people paula warren uh we're going to do a point of order okay because we need to follow our procedures and go through our presentation first before we open it up to publish okay yeah all right thank

026you so the first item before the board is the california voting rights act draft maps in the sequence of bi-district elections and we have both our attorney paul gant here and we have our demographers as well representing so paul are you going first okay thank you good evening board president kaiser members of the board superintendent staley thank you for taking a few minutes or allowing me to give you a few minutes of time uh just in introducing this item i uh only want to make a few remarks maybe to review some of the history before we turn to king and associates to really get into what i think is the central uh meet of the meeting which is to get into potential maps that that will be considered tonight you'll have an opportunity to look

027at detailed maps that set forth the trustee areas that are potentially up for approval obviously asked questions detailed questions of the demographer and also talk about a related issues such as the order of election uh because all seats are not before the electors at the same time and there are some options with regard to that that have to be explored by the board as well i did want to just briefly talk about how we got here um this this uh whole process was launched some time ago uh of course the california voting rights act has been around for many years and uh the last time before the current cycle that we had a really a lot of action in this area was 10 years before in 2010 and that's uh because we do tend to

028see a lot of interest around the california voting rights act at the time as we approach the decennial uh election because at that point in time is when um the uh there is uh that they have the new demographic studies come out and um and the voters across the nation are counted in the census and that census has a big impact on how districts are drawn and so we see a lot of interest out in the uh in the community we see a lot of interest statewide with interest groups stakeholders who want to talk about the nature of local elections um when that approached uh for the 2020 cycle your district along with a lot of other municipalities local agencies statewide began to receive letters and those letters come from interested parties often in the

029form of attorneys who have a great deal of background interest and they wish to serve as advocates for changes in electoral systems at the local level the california voting rights act provides a uh let's just say um it encourages the move it is designed to encourage the move for local agencies to what we call trusty areas away from at large areas it's not required but it's encouraged and it is very easy for an advocate to come in and make that demand and then boards are or municipalities such as whether the city of chico or whether that's chico unified school district have a hard decision to make should we stay with our large system or should we acquiesce to this demand should we do we see a reason to do this and so without going into

030a great deal of detail your ward did consider that demand and ultimately decided uh in early 2020 that that you would support and pass a resolution to move to these trusty areas so um i think it's important though to kind of cast our minds back to that time frame because some of you are new and we're not here uh certainly members of the public may not have been as focused on it at that time as they are now the i think it's fair to say there was a certain skepticism on the board some board members felt like why are we doing this this uh hue and cry for changing to these new this new election system is not coming from our public we're not hearing from members of the parents we're not hearing from local

031stakeholders members of the board didn't bring this forward what brought it forward was a demand by an attorney okay admittedly as experienced attorney one with a great deal of interest in elections and certainly had a right to be heard um but in fact the process was driven to a great deal and again if we're honest we know it was driven in part by this concern about litigation and the board had to weigh a decision should we maintain our system go through litigation fight for to stay in an at-large system or is it more appropriate to preserve the resources of the district go ahead and follow the cvra which encourages trustee area elections is there any real harm to doing that and ultimately the board said there's no great harm to doing it that way it's

032a different way we're going to have to adjust to that but as compared to trying to hold on to the older way go through litigation deal with high legal fees that's not what we wish to do and the board voted and then decided to move to the trustee areas okay out of that process then you were ready to move forward early spring of 2020 came you'd just really gotten into the process your consultant was beginning to provide information about how that process would go what do we start to do when we develop these trusty areas and covet came and basically what happened at that point of course is the state is shutting down the emergency order came in from the governor and said timelines can be suspended we understand that this is not the first

033order of business because the public is going to have a hard time focusing on this providing input so you're allowed to suspend those timelines and quite frankly your district just like a lot of other districts and municipalities said we're going to shelve it we're not going to focus on this we've got other things that require attention so it essentially went on the shelf and it went on the shelf until last year in the summer when the governor and the state of california said okay we're going to pass some we're going to pass a law we're going to allow the timeline to restart we're going to make some adjustments to the brown act we're going to make some adjustments to this process to make it a little more streamlined but you're going to start the timelines

034again so at that point district staff advising the board said okay we need to start this again we bring them back to consultants let's consult with the attorney let's get going so we pick it back up but in part with a new board we have we have two new board members that were not present during the last round so we then start the process and then we get into the substance of considering these new trusty areas and just briefly as mr murray and and ms king will go into greater detail but we we end up with a system of four public hearings two are somewhat informational and then we have two meetings which we're now into to actually consider those maps that are very detailed they have a lot of demographic information and the board

035is presented with a lot a lot of information quite frankly and the goal as as the consultants both legal and demographic working for you and i would say staff too is to provide the board with a set of lawful options it is not to try to encourage or suggest the board should go with any options that's what's important to understand the options that we try to bring before the board for consideration both consultants and staff are those that we either have received information might have an interest because there have been comments from board members or members of the public that have raised issues that may need to be considered in the adoption process so we put together a series of options and then the board and the board alone decides which is the best option

036our goal is to present you with options that are lawful that meet the fundamental requirements of the cvra but within that context you're going to have a lot of different possibilities to look at there are a lot of stakeholder interests and they differ from map to map there are a lot of public considerations to be considered and so the debate may be vigorous and sometimes it is and that's understandable and there's nothing wrong with that the public may well have strong views and they may come in through this process hopefully they will give you input through their through their uh both written and verbal comments because that's how the process is supposed to work so at the end of the day the board will vote on what is the best trustee arrangement what are the

037best district arrangements for this district so i've taken probably more time than i should so far i will also be available for questions but i thought if you know subject to your direction i might turn it over to mr murray to present his his presentation and then we would both be available to to answer questions um yes board member tennis um thank you um mr gantt before we move on to uh king consulting i want after two years of i mean i was only have only been here for just over a year but after two years of this process we were surprised on friday afternoon i had some confidential information as a board member prior to that that this was coming but we were introduced to two brand new maps the orange maps a and

038b can you please describe your involvement if there was any in the creation of orange a and orange b well first of all as as the attorney in consulting and providing advice to staff for the board i don't i don't create it's it's outside my area of expertise to create proposed maps however what you're referring to i did review and did some research legal research to say if these possible maps that you're referring to the orange maps were to be adopted are they fundamentally lawful in other words do they comply with my best understanding of how the cvra has been interpreted and if the board were to choose one of these maps would it be unlawful that's really my legal analysis what i will say about the maps in terms of the information that's included

039in the maps the cons your consultants receive information typically through the district that has come through a number of different sources it may have come from board members who have said well i would like you to consider where schools or elementary schools are located uh in considering where the trustee areas should be i would like you to consider where high schools are located i would like to consider you to consider communities of interest and various other items that have been brought forward since the prior meeting it was brought forward to us as consultants that a question had arisen about the order of election and what the election process would look like if one of the different maps or some other map was adopted and so there was focus uh by members of the public as

040i understand it uh suggestions or questions that came to staff that said who's gonna be elect who's gonna be able to be elected depending on the different maps it became i think maybe for the first time really in anyone's mind a clear question as to whether as we go through this redistricting process is that going to impact how is it going to impact on choices for board members both in the current cycle 2022 and 2024. so out of that process and understanding that yes depending on choosing one of the existing options yes it could very much impact on the public's opportunity to consider or elect even current members of the board out of that process then it was requested and we did create the orange maps which unlike the other options that were developed and

041by the way these maps have been developed only in recent months they haven't been under development for two years because the the process was started and then stopped and then since that time we've had the census which provided all new data that had to be reviewed and so really it's only been a few months that the current set of maps and options have been under consideration but with these questions we at the request of staff did provide an option under the orange maps that would not present some of the elect election complexities that the other three maps were presenting in terms of having several board members in overlapping and trustee areas so you say that it was staff that expressed a concern about having multiple trustees in in the same area no that information the

042question was we generally receive our direction or request to perform work at the request of staff but the information came through staff i don't know the exact source uh but i know some of it as i understand came from public questions you say there was some kind of sorry contact from the communication from the public that said something along the lines of were concerned about multiple board members being in the same trustee areas well i wasn't subject i didn't receive the communications mr tennis so i don't want to characterize them specifically i didn't either i didn't see those either so i'm surprised that we're taking this step now well the other thing i want to mention about the process and discuss about the process and again i'm happy to field more questions i i want

043to make sure that i give the opportunity to mr murray and his team to to present the information that he has in his uh presentation because i think a lot of that will fit into some of the questions that you and other board members may have on this topic about order of elections but it is typical in fact in my experience it's not unusual at all that during the process of considering maps this part of the process questions arise the questions arise from members of the public they might arise from board members stakeholders in the community letters from interest groups they can come from any source but when those questions arise they may result in a request for another map option these are just options and it is typical for the process that as we

044zero in on those maps and some of the specific effects that those maps will have that new map options come to the fore but aren't those supposed to be policy driven you know demographically driven are they supposed to be politically driven are you supposed to make a map you know based on somebody's political wishes you know are we are we here to create districts for for incumbents so that you know when we have to run for office we can we can have a nice clear field and we get to put that incumbent on the ballot is that why we draw a new map for the process well i think that the decision-making for how to choose a map is the board's decision so you have the opportunity to consider any number of considerations and and

045in my experience it is not unusual for the impact on the distribution of board members and how they are placed in various districts to be a consideration you're write that the fundamental requirements of the cvra require that they meet certain guidelines to be considered lawful and that means they cannot impair the voting strength of protected groups they they must be within a certain range balanced uh demographically within a certain percentage between the different trustee areas and there are other general rules like they have to be the the the uh each each trusty air has to be contiguous what we call contiguous they can't be isolated dots on a map and there's also what we call the compactness i want to say guideline it is a somewhat vague guideline but it does discourage the creation of

046bizarre shapes such as a dragon or you know there are other examples out there but in order to simply develop a map in order to satisfy a political party interest for example so what you're referring to i believe would be the issue of gerrymandering what we often call gerrymandering is it appropriate or is it proper to try to structure your trusty areas in order to satisfy the political interest of one group to the detriment of another group and i would suggest at a certain level that is not proper and so it would be a proper consideration for the board to look at if that if that were the case if for example a map was structured in order to encourage one particular political point of view over another and any and a detriment to a

047group of stakeholders who had a different view that would be something legitimately that the board would want to think about and even ask questions um i mean what sort of conclusions might a you know the the majority members of a political entity draw along those lines you know don't you think it's possible they might uh think about that and think yeah yeah i kind of like the idea of drawing a map that's gonna you know keep us in in a position of strength that we're in right now so um there are a lot of impacts uh of various sorts in this process and i think it often it comes to to light as you get late in the process i think it comes to light both for the public to stakeholders and to you as

048board members just how complex this can be and how many different impacts there can be and that's why you're the board you know that's why they they put you in the position where you can ask hard questions gather information look i don't like any excuse me i'm sorry about that i i don't like any of the maps you've provided we would like to see a different map you can do that you can say there's too many maps here we need to simplify this process let's cut it back and often there is a narrowing process as you get late there's often a narrowing process where you're saying okay it seems clear the board's most interested in these two maps tell us more about these and you can narrow them you can expand them at the end

049of the day you can ask questions of your consultants you can listen to public comment you can consult your own conscious you can have a vigorous discussion amongst yourselves ultimately you have to make a decision as to what is the map that's going to best serve this community and if you're addressing a question to me at that process at that point in the process it's often counsel is this we've we thought a lot about this we're kind of interested in this map is there anything unlawful about this map is this going to be south uh reasonably subject to legal challenge and then i'm i'm happy to address that but i think that there are a lot of issues that are not necessarily going to end up in the courts that nonetheless have a major impact

050on your community that you i would suggest should yeah address could i ask you and you can come back and say we are talking about maps that we haven't had our experts present with what they saw as the option so i was going to suggest we moved to them is your question more appropriately to it's exactly what we're talking about right now but i can wait if you would like to madam president you are you okay with going to the maps is happening no i find it frustrating actually frankly that i can't ask my question while i've been waiting to ask myself okay well then go ahead so my direct question for you is actually to repeat that right back at you you jumped my my line actually um is it unlawful for us to

051consider a map that that takes into consideration where current incumbents currently preside and and my and i will tell you that based on my analysis and research it is not unlawful for you to consider those as possible options would it be unlawful for us to consider maps that um let's just say in a in a future scenario we're drawn to put two or three incumbents in one district knowing that they fall in one realm you know on you know in their in their political leanings or however we want to be in politicking and favors another one or two to be in their own district so we know that some are going to definitely have to go up against each other and it's going to put that you know political arena at a disadvantage and and

052put other people at an advantage to maintain their seats potentially depending on the will of the voters without seeing the actual maps that you're talking about and without having a record in order to review both the backup information that came to the board and the board's discussion itself at that juncture i really i can't speculate as to what the legal answer would be you have a lot of leeway you have a lot of discretion in this area that we do know there are certain guidelines that must be followed and if those are violated the law the map would become unlawful if uh communities of interest and particularly ethnic or racial minorities voting strength is impaired as a result of the maps you choose that would that would likely raise legal issues if the if the

053demographic balance is out of alignment with what the cvra requires that would be a legal issue so just to be clear under your our current maps that are in consideration um it's it's not your position that we are considering any maps that are unlawful i would not i would i am consulted one of the reasons i'm consulted in this process is certainly neither your consultants and i would hazard yes your staff does not want to waste your time to have you considering maps that if you were to adopt them would be unlawful that that would not be a good use of your time and be very frustrating so yes i did look at the the orange maps toward with an eye toward not advocating for them or any other map we're not here to advocate

054for the result just to present options these presented additional options and based on my analysis they could be adopted within the law thank you the same is true of the other options by the way that have been presented all right so um if we can have our demographics experts from king's associate come on up thank you and reintroduce yourself yes thank you so thank you board president kaiser members of the board superintendents daily and staff so my name is rob murray i am the director of demographics and planning for king consulting i have been working with chico unified school district throughout this process again as mr gantt referenced some of the early public hearings just soliciting more general input developing the initial map options presenting those options and then adding some additional requested data so

055that those options could be assessed against other metrics and then here tonight to review again our initial options uh with some additional context that has not yet been presented as well as to present two new map options i do have with me jamie king eisemann the president of king consulting but she's had a busy week i'm gonna try to give her the night off as much as i can and see if i can uh answer your questions on their own but if jamie trust me if she feels like she has something to contribute she will be up here to let you hear about it uh so with that uh yeah so our agenda you've seen variations on this quite a bit uh we're just going to do a quick review of that timeline the criteria

056i do want to spend a little bit of time focusing on some new feedback that we've received in between our last meeting in person november and now uh and then again reviewing those original area maps with some additional contacts with electric election sequencing uh we are gonna just do a more uh thorough walkthrough of some scenarios that can come up under different combinations of trustees and different trustee areas just so that everyone understands all of the potential uh things that can happen and then get into the new map options that have been developed and then going into we have all of that criteria data and we just now have two additional map options to join those ranks of numbers uh so again we won't read off every number on every table but we'll just show

057you what you have to look at so on that timeline so again we were last here in november it's now january 19th and we have the additional map options to present and this is an informational meeting and you get with a again i know we have some members of the public who are going to speak after we've wrapped up and then at february 2nd we'll again if depending on what else we hear tonight come back with any additional requests for information but any at that point any map option that has been publicly presented for at least seven days the board can choose to adopt at that time or we can just come back again on february 16th but again tonight is really about presenting the information that we have and the board will not be

058making any decisions to adopt any maps tonight so again i think mr gantt has covered a lot of this but really undersea vra two of the big things we're looking at it is most particularly the district's hispanic and latino population uh that represents the largest protected class minority that we have looked at and we will be seeing the concentration relative to the total district population of that group in all the maps in all the areas and of course keeping in mind with your total population uh the equal representation each trustee should represent about the same number of people so we do have a range for each area that we need to stick within to make sure that there is balance in terms of how many people each of you is representing a quick uh reminder

059of that background kind of on the nuts and bolts level how this works is that we have the census data that from the 2020 census with population totals and broken out by ethnicity and by over under 18. uh per census block you see the map here kind of zoomed in on chico and you even from here can see there are different sizes and shapes and they have very different populations some of your census blocks don't have a single person living in them your most populated one has more than 1400 and it's again by the population total is the letter of the law that has the the balance especially if this were zoomed out you wouldn't be able to even see these smallest blocks but you have some very large census blocks in the northern and

060eastern portions of your district but again some of them don't have any people in them some of them have maybe a single digit number of people in them so again it's we're adding up all the census block populations that form these trustee areas yes so just to clarify square mileage is just not something that's considered under legal requirements um no the size of the areas and you'll see as we go through the original blue green and purple maps you will see that none of the maps have equal sized areas it is equal population that we're considering and all of the maps fall within all of the maps have all the districts falling within that twenty two thousand eight hundred to twenty three and twenty five thousand two hundred twenty five population rates right that is

061one of those legal requirements that as mr gan referenced uh we would not bring forward any maps that didn't meet that requirement in an earlier presentation of this board you said that um your firm that districts should be as compact as possible so what's the i guess legal basis or tradition or custom associated with that nope and i think uh and that is a good question and as mr gantt said it is not a rigidly uh defined term and for me uh it does sort of hit on that you know it when you see it but when you have kind of tendrils of areas leading off to something kind of dumbbell shaped things where you might have two blobs that are just connected by the width of a street in between them you know where

062you have you know just anything that you know it doesn't mean it has to be a perfectly square or circle circle shaped area and i'll actually point out some examples of this with some of the earlier maps and on the orange maps uh what some of the thinking is because for example on the blue map where one of the guiding principles was using the high school boundary which happened to have enough population for two trustee areas and the pv area and three trustee areas and the chico high attendance area you were kind of working with uh dividing those shapes up of two areas in the pv zone three areas in the chico high zone and that led to the shape of one of those chico high areas where and the two up north where when

063you look at them in isolation some of the shapes might be a bit odd but when you consider that you're just looking at the two areas in the pb high and then you're dividing them into two then they are both as compact as i think they can be while meeting the population standards under that and then same for the three below so it's a there's not going to be a short simple answer to that question unfortunately so if one district was five square miles and then another district was over 150 square miles would that be a little lopsided possibly for for trying to fulfill that goal i would say not necessarily in this case i think compactness really refers to the shape of just not having particularly odd looking shapes not necessarily to a compact

064geographical extent so moving into we have the criteria that we oh yeah i know mr again yeah i'm going to let you speak to that on the legal side on this because i think it is a very important question obviously and you do have different shapes this is a legitimate and an important question that the board needs to consider i don't care about the shape the consider the issue is for compactness is often what is the driving what what are the driving considerations is there an is there appear to be an unlawful consideration that is impacting on that shape is what it comes down to and that is generally what the courts are going to be looking at in helping them decide whether the compactness principle has been uh denied they'll look at a number

065of things they will say where where are the dividing lines between these trustee areas are they are they for example major thoroughfares are they recognize dividing lines or are they you know cutting across fields are they reaching out to small areas to try to drag them in in order to increase the voting strength of a particular group to the detriment of another group which is why a focus on that that's the kinds of considerations uh when the court would weigh whether there's a compactness violation i hope that that's helpful and then one other uh point is in a district like chico usd where as i was kind of referencing with some of those census blocks you have uh some areas that are much less densely populated than others uh you it is almost inevitable that

066you will have whatever areas include your more rural populations are going to have to be larger in order to have the same number of people in them as an area that is within you know the core city of chico especially because with how many people live in the core city of chico compared to the outlying areas it's just not feasible to uh you know have those be really the same size two years ago when you first present i mean i think it was maybe your second presentation um you said that um you were asked by somebody who was on the board at that time and is still on the board somebody who i respect and like um that they didn't want residences of incumbents to be a factor or they wanted it to be a

067factor of last resort um criterion of last resort um and there were non-verbal cues from other members of the board at that time that they agreed and now you've gone off and you've drawn a map that has and to my analysis the top criteria is to honor the locations of incumbents and where they live and i believe that the reason why the orange map has such a huge area over 150 square miles for district 5 and such a small area by contrast for a different district that it was in order to achieve that putting those incumbents in those in those desirable locations for them i.e where they live currently okay are we getting when i uh go through the orange map we'll certainly get into some of that and as far as uh and something

068that we will cover is yes i was not even aware of the addresses of the current board members at the time those first maps were developed and then when i get into some of the election sequencing i think that will illustrate why there was some desire to provide an option that simplified uh the sequencing and minimized or even eliminated some of the complications that can arise and again as i think i will just reiterate mr gatt said this is my job is to provide you with an option that meets all other requirements and then how you then pick up that ball and move with those options uh it's out of my hands at that point go ahead with your presentation thank you so the the additional feedback since november there will be a few of

069these that i'm going to speak to very specifically on the maps and then some that i just want to speak to now just to answer some questions that came in through the website comments that i was able to read over these last couple of months and so one of them was that consideration for the next election election sequencing and uh just what might happen when current trustees are in the same area we'll go through some examples that really walk through all the permutations of this but that we have some new map options based on that concern and then and one other that i'll get to in just a minute uh some of the feedback that we got was just expressing support for one or another of the original three options all three of them did

070receive some comments that express support for that particular option uh there was a couple of specific questions on the purple map which i'll bring that one up with the elementary school boundary overlay to speak to a couple of those questions uh one just in general about how to find and use maps and so we will also add the orange maps to uh this capability but the just images of the maps are on the district's website page and we also have some what are called kmz files but a very small file that can be downloaded and then there are instructions on the web page for going on to google maps and it allows you to kind of drag that file in so you can display trustee area maps on top of you know anything on google

071maps you can search for your home or any other point of interest see what trustee area it would be in different maps and so just wanted to make sure that just people were aware that that was something that the district website does have available i did hear some feedback the identification of a neighborhood that was not shown on the neighborhood's map or analysis cal park so we have that shown now and we'll just uh see where that one falls on all the maps as we get to uh one that i think is very important to clarification on the district extent uh on all the maps when you see them just as a reminder we're zooming in so you can see more detail in streets within the city of chico but there is an inset that

072shows the full extent of the chico unified school district and yes everything shown on that inset is within the district so people in for example forest ranch and cohasset are in chico usd those kids go to chico usd schools and people who live in those areas can and are on the hold seats on the board of education and then finally uh speaking of those communities uh the uh comment referred to them as the mountain communities but the you know whether mountain foothill but the uh there was some uh expression of those as a community of common interest and disappointment that most of the original maps separated those two communities between two different trustee areas so that also informed some of what went into the orange map which we'll show you when we get to that

073but first those original draft trustee area maps again the blue green and purple unless people have questions i won't belabor all of the different reasons broadly the blue map was based on the high school boundary of having trustees entirely as much as possible within one or the other the green map the high school boundary but having every trustee area straddle both high school areas and then the purple map looking at a focus on elementary school boundaries so we're going to just quickly before i get into my election sequencing rundown here is that purple map with the overlay of the elementary school boundaries there was one comment wondering about a specific area that might have been included uh uh between areas three and four but that is that citrus and neo-dao boundary where the trustee areas

074do run right along and that is the expressed intention of this map to try to follow those boundaries as much as feasible however there was also a question of why parkview was split in this map and that's just unfortunately with the different population densities making every single elementary boundary fit in i just isn't feasible this one does have seven of the ten elementary school boundaries entirely or almost entirely within one trustee area but for people who are particularly interested in parkview unity the blue map actually does happen to actually place almost all of parkview within one trustee area so just wanted to point out those specific concerns and now i do want to spend the so definitely expect to get some questions perhaps during this part because the there are some perhaps complicated permutations from

075this but the next step uh yes i'm sorry just i wanted to ask a question of staff just for clarification on our school boundaries um off the top of our heads what's the percentage of our students that form 10 and don't actually attend school in their boundaries so over 40 percent of our students aren't actually going to the school which they reside in so those those boundaries aren't necessarily like representing who people will be voting for for the schools that their kids are necessarily going to correct and we show you one of the data points that we've had is showing you the full matrix that breaks down where the students are enrolled who live in each trustee area which showed that literally every area on every map had at least one student at every school

076in the district exactly i guess that was kind of the point is just to demonstrate that that we really are an at-large board regardless of if we are being put into districts for voting purposes that we have students no matter which district we're going to be in that are attending all the schools in every school district boundary thanks for clarifying that 40 is very high i mean that's that's a huge nod to chico unified for student choice and parent choice for for where students get to go to school which is really great does that include oak bridge and fairview okay yeah we have a rich history of choice within chico unified and that's something that we really tried to pride ourselves on and it started with sierra view and academics plus and hooker oak and

077rosedale in the two-way immersion program but then when parents have preferences of schools that they want to go to we do try to accommodate that and that is not the case in most districts and so i'm just going to jump back into this but so the the quick uh kind of the so first the 101 level so as as a parent just looking at the table there are five members of the chico unified board and there are staggered terms so any given uh election they'll be either thr either three or two members uh who are being elected and that will still be the case whether at large or with trustee areas so currently we have all of the current members listed and when their term ends there are three members uh president kaiser and members

078lando and robinson whose terms are up at with the election that will occur this fall and then the other two members dalby and tennis uh have their at-large terms through 2024 so all board members can complete their elected at large term for three of you that is that will uh be later this year and for the other two uh they're still two years away and so once we have trustee areas whatever map it is three of those areas will elect in 2022 and the other two will have to wait until 2024. you cannot have more than five members on the board and two of you uh will have the opportunity to remain here through 2024. there is no scenario where somebody who has already been elected it must end their term early so what happens

079next is let's say and some of these maps will show you this very thing happening but you have members a b and c who are all living in the same trustee area uh actually we'll simplify it first let's say it's just a and b the most simple variation of this is you have two members who both are on the same election cycle and in 2022 a and b are in the same area they both want to continue their term of service on the board and seek re-election so they along with anyone else who enters that contest will all run the voters of that trustee area will make their selections and whoever wins that election is has the seat on the board and no one else does but what this means is that whenever there are

080multiple board members now who are in the same trusty area know you know that for everyone beyond one that is a current member who definitely will not be back after the election now let's add in our member c there who's in who's elected at large can serve through 2024 but uh it's they have a couple people whose terms are up in 2022 and that trustee area is holding an election so if they don't run which they don't have to they finish out their term but when their term is up their trustee area is not doesn't have an open seat so they would have to wait until 2026 to run again so more likely member c there can go ahead and run for the trustee area seat and if they don't win it just reverts back

081to what we just talked about they still serve out their at large term but once that term expires uh unless they move to a different trustee area they need to wait until that the trustee seat in their area opens again yes did you just say that um a sitting board member in a newly created trusty area can not be scheduled for their term to expire for another two years but they can run for that newly opened seat in that new district did you say that that is correct because if they don't do that once their term expires then they would have to wait two years for the opportunity to run again so if they don't want to risk or rather if they want to have the opportunity not to have that lapse in their term

082they can run for the trustee area seat and what happens if they win is they won the trustee area seat they would then give up their at-large seat and because that was brought about because of the 2022 election that leaves a vacancy on the board and creates the need to fill that vacancy either by appointment or by holding a special election for a two-year term from one of the areas that does not have a trusty seat yet and i'll show when when we look at each individual map i can show you examples of this with real maps and real people and that might make it a little more concrete but these are some of the permutations that again when the question came up of what because actually backing up a second in addition to selecting

083a map you also select the sequence of which trustee areas elect in 2022 three of them have to and which two again two of them have to wait until 2024 and in putting potential election sequences up with these maps it turned into the exploring all of the potential outcomes when there are multiple trustees grouped together and again the one we just went to with the trustees that are on different election cycles in the same area all three of the original maps do present that and so present the potential again of either a member on the 2024 cycle either having a lapse in their term or winning a trustee seed and creating a board vacancy and so i think that was the impetus for is it feasible to have a map that meets other legal requirements

084but avoids those potential complications by having each current member in their own area so that it's very obvious which trustee areas are on 2022 or 2024 and avoids any possibility of having that board vacancy or having members who would like to remain on the board but are forced to wait for two years the other option that i haven't discussed yet is again with a b and c together if it's not going until 2024 then when a's or b's term expires even if they would like to run they're the ones now waiting for two years until they have that opportunity when that seat is contested again yes i have to tell you mr murray i think that you're a very competent professional i've heard you present on this topic a number of times i've watched footage

085of you presenting on this topic before i was here and i think that you did your job i think that you did what what people asked you to do you um at the outset of this process two years ago um asked it wasn't in the context of a formal vote but you were asked you know on on the record to please make residences of sitting board members a criterion of last resort you nodded your head you said you got it that's what i'm gonna do you then came back months later with three maps where you didn't think about that you were a machine about this and you didn't look at where people lived now we're doing a complete 180 from that with the introduction of the orange maps and we've got these two brand new

086new year's babies the orange maps a and b you know where did they come from why did you change your approach on this and again uh my approach is really to provide legally sound maps at uh the request of input that is coming in and so in this case it uh this is something that came through uh to me directly from district legal staff uh just again asking is it uh can we explore if it is if it is it feasible to have a map that does this and i looked into it and it was so i'm sorry i have to do this but this is why people put me here and that is to ask this this difficult question that i don't like asking because does every single person in this room i've gotten

087to know on on a level and i like them i like the people here at chico unified school district i like the consultants that we work with i think they're good people but i'm concerned that um we may have let our humanity get the better of us um somewhere in this process and so i need to know you said that it was legal staff that asked you to draft the orange maps legal staff has said in this meeting right here that they did not create the orange map so i've got a big question mark in my head and i need to know who created the orange maps a and b whose idea was this who asked you to build these maps good evening board member tennis for president kaiser superintendent staley i felt like it

088was probably time for me to stand up i understand your desire to point a finger and ask somebody where the maps came from but when we're working in our sacramento office it's a very organic process that rob and i go through when we're having conversations about public input history with the board history of this process so you know while there's a desire to point the finger at someone it really happened organically it was the culmination of rob and i having conversations with your legal about community input regarding wanting to see a new scenario that included the foothills as their own area in combination with the issues that we saw with the election sequencing and i will take ownership for that and i will absolutely stand here and say that rob and i looked at that

089together along with paul and we said what if there's an opportunity here based on community feedback and the issues we're seeing with election sequencing to present another completely fair and objective map you know we are working in our sacramento office we don't have any political stake in this game we have worked for this district since 2004 providing fair and objective data for things like boundary changes of schools and enrollment projections and we've done the same here so that that's my response is that this came naturally as part of the process through conversations that rob and i were having as we were developing the new scenario with the the foothills as its own neighborhood does that answer your question yeah i i don't think so so so you and your co-worker basically decided that we up

090here needed a choice where we could all have a district assigned to us and you produced a map that actually listed in the legend of the map who was going to be in each district each map because we have to deal with election sequencing each map is going to have that we are at that point in this process that has to be a consideration because you have to make a decision about how you're going to sequence your elections moving forward regardless of which map you choose but that doesn't really we did not make a choice mr tennis we took the public input that we received since the last meeting and created another map this is absolutely part of this process this is not uncommon this is not something that's new to this process if you'd

091like me to bring you forth at the next examples of other processes that other public agencies have gone through or new maps were introduced after they got into the election sequencing process i'm happy to do that but again this this came from public input following the last meeting and our analysis of your election sequencing and that public input was that public input was the desire to have a new map that made the foothill communities their own area who actually had their own trustee i haven't seen that email nobody asked nobody said i want the foothills to have their own community and so therefore i want a new map of the public input that we received through the website i believe since the last meeting and rob you can speak to that if you like and

092i can jump in here too i mean there's a lot of things that led to this um right off the bat when the maps came out and we had a phone call that said so which area is it going to be open under each map i'm like i have no idea i hadn't even thought about that i was still focused on which map are we going to use and so the the question about transitioning or election sequencing came up um there was a conversation with our director of community relations i want to know which areas will be open under each map frankly i hadn't even thought of that i asked legal counsel wow i don't even know how to answer this question and so mr gantt said let me work with rob on that let's

093see if we can put that together that's where we have these examples of sequencing and when you look at the examples of sequencing it becomes very clear that um you know none of these are ideal for a very oh here's a seamless transition it doesn't work that way with the ones that we have and so i did ask you know wow is there any way to make this sequencing better did i ask go draw an orange map no but through that conversation i think that's where you guys have conversations all right can we look at something that makes sequencing better while we also take into consideration public comment you know what so i do feel like you you want to point a finger at somebody but it's a it's a process and my job is

094to make sure the board has options if the board doesn't like the options don't vote for the options but you have it gives you more options i don't see a downside in having options to choose from so this and this will be my last comment for now and we can move on but but this whole discussion about this sequencing problem this sequencing crisis another way to say that is to say that wow we've got a problem because you know these maps don't treat everyone equally these maps don't guarantee that each incumbent is going to have their own district to run in and so this narrative of a sequencing problem has been created as a way to paper over the fact that we are basically doing the opposite of what you guys were told two years

095ago we wanted to make a bottom priority go ahead please so quick question uh in any organization this county the city whatever that switches from at large to district elections they all have to make some kind of a decision about who which seat is going to be open right there's no law that that covers that or is there and this is where again you have three seats that will open in 2022 so once you have made a map with five areas three of those areas need to hold elections but are there rules governing which districts no aside from that at the time that you adopt a map you also have to specify at the same time again what the sequence is basically which three areas are going to go first and which two are going

096to wait until the next election and we did ask that of the elections office and they said that is up to the board okay so this is not this issue of deciding who's going to be which districts are going to be up for vote when it's not some new and surprising thing this is a part of the process right this is always going to enter the conversation around this time once we were looking at maps and you uh again because at the time that you adopt a map uh you also at the same time so as you'll see when i get to the maps in a moment i have put a suggested sequence on and i can tell you on each one also really where you have the most uh you know not that it's

097arbitrary because they're uh you probably have the uh local expertise to say which ones might make the more sense but uh when you have multiple areas with no trustee and just say one of three areas needs to go in 2022 and the other two have to wait until 2024 uh that's where you have a lot of discretion okay in what might make the most sense for that and again we'll be showing you some specific examples of that uh but yes it really was that whole uh again i in reference to your point mr tennis i had no idea where any of you lived until the point where we went to start answering this question putting up what the sequences look like with the actual board members that we have and seeing that as was referenced

098in every single one of the original three maps you have not only board members together but board members presenting that unique uh or not it's not so unique situation of board members on different election cycles that creates the possibility of either lapses in service or vacancies on the board again depending on other criteria that could be weighted more heavily that is absolutely something that you can adopt and move forward just knowing what that's going to look like but i think maybe some of the language of criteria of last resort i think that might be what qualifies as that last resort in that uh this was not just making one that you had a couple of other options where things were kind of close but you wanted one that absolutely put everyone in their own area

099this was you had three options that all presented the same potential for having to conduct a special appointment or special election and making it an option that reduced or eliminated that potential so that it was an option i want to i want to note that this process is going on in the entire county wherever districts have been chosen or been in effect sort of legally coerced by threats to move to that and the butte county office of elections is so swamped with this that they aren't even able to publicly present at this time what the elections are going to look like eileen um thank you kathy i just for my for my own focusing i'd like to ask a couple of questions on what i need to consider to to cast my vote number one

100is the election laws say that once you are elected which two of our members have just been elected you are entitled to serve the entire term four years so that's that's a guarantee the law the law provides that you're not required to and that's why the option arises right but you are entitled entitled that i i thought that was the term i used but that's that was the understanding that i have yeah we do we do need that the other thing that the um that the law provides is that the protected class in this case we have identified our hispanic population even though it's not as concentrated as it was after the 2010 election there is still evidence that there is a protected class concentration so that we need to be careful when we are

101establishing our maps that we don't arbitrarily dilute the voting power of that protected class correct so if you introduced a new new criteria such as taking consideration of board member addresses and their placement in the areas and that were to diminish the voting strength of the hispanic population in this district that would very possibly generate a legal challenge that could be successful that's my understanding i it is also my understanding that we have the criteria of a balance by numbers of the number of people in each district being because of our total population of i believe 120 000 plus each district each new district has to have that between 000 where's the um anyway you divide it by five and you know it has to you can't put uh more people in one than you

102do in another that puts it out of balance beyond that requirement of dividing it equally as equally as possible the one person one votes down one exactly yes the other thing that i thought the law talked about even though it doesn't require is that the shapes be as organically reasonable as possible i believe that's the intent of what the law says that that you can't make you know an octopus with ten legs out so that you uh you'd try additionally if you did you'd have a mountain to climb but you might i mean it's it's all in comparison to the lawful and reasonable criteria that the board chooses to emphasize the the other thing that this board and by this board i'm going to include at whatever point we were first making the decisions had

103two different members on because incumbents did not get reelected so we have different board members making the continuing the process when the governor took the the timeline bar away so we have um we have criteria for population criteria for ethnic and then the boards have said we also want to take a look at socioeconomic balance we want to take a look at home ownership versus home rentals and i believe one of the other uh well not one that we had things like different high schools being either represented by one or two or by we had some things that this board at this time in the process which is the second shot at this gave to the demographers and i believe every single one of our requests including several that came from an audience member that

104was here have been met and those options that's the goal let me say that when we understand that it is often difficult for people to participate in this process and that when one board member speaks with an interest or member of the public has the courage if you will to get up and speak in front of the audience like this and they state an interest the process believes and i think it's designed to look at that is they're probably speaking for more than one person that includes board members we recognize that but it also means members of the public so to the extent that it's practical to do so and that those criteria appear lawful and not inconsistent with the legal criteria we must meet then your demographers do attempt to take that into account

105unless the board as a whole orders them not to see how that process works it is designed to be inclusive it's designed to generate options and only remove options that either clearly don't have the board has no interest in that are unlawful unpractical unreasonable and or conflict with higher purposes but that's how you go through this process that's why you have multiple hearings you have multiple meetings for this process i got up to address a question that was still outstanding and it dovetails with your question which was the question of we were here i'm not me personally but your demographers were here and there was a discussion that took place in march of 2020 under a different board different members under a different census different numbers at a different time in the process in which

106possibly one member outwardly and there's maybe some non-verbal i don't know i didn't see it but at least one member suggested that's not a criteria i would like to see used and unless it's a last resort that we are now at an entirely different place and information came forward to the democracy legal council that there was an interest and concern in this issue it is a legitimate issue we're not here to make the board's decisions if a issue comes to light that's a legitimate issue that could cause some substantial concern and it's lawful to address it by bringing you an option that's our job we don't make the decision but we don't want to leave you hanging we don't want to get to the fourth meeting only to find all the light bulbs go on

107and people say wait a minute we're gonna have to we're essentially going to have to have board members make a decision to step either step off the board or to to not have an opportunity to serve on this board every one of you was chosen by members of this community every one of you and the process was delivered upon you essentially through a threat of litigation the community didn't come forward and say we're not really happy with the makeup of this board in fact they said the opposite they voted all of you on to the board okay so if this issue is coming up and is saying we're going to force us into some very difficult positions in fact it may even force us to go have to go out and assign somebody who hasn't

108even been elected to cover part of a term or we may have to go through the expense of an election a special election i haven't priced that lately it's expensive okay so it's a legitimate concern if staff leaves out off the table if consultants don't address it when asked to do so we're doing you a disservice all we're doing is bringing you this option along with the others what you do with it is within your authority mr gant every argument you just made could be used to argue in favor of gerrymandering on behalf of a board majority except that gerrymandering involves the disenfranchisement of one group in favor of another it's it's a legal term illegal gerrymandering is in by definition unlawful i mean i don't know how somebody would go about proving that okay

109you know i mean you basically are like laying out some version of a legal case as to why we should all just vote to basically feather our own nests and keep ourselves in power i'm not arguing for you to adopt any particular approach mr tennis i'm explaining to you at your request and then the request of other board members pointed questions why did we bring an additional option to you and we've tried to explain that we can i think seeing some of the actual information in the presentation may help clarify questions but that's it in a nutshell that's why we did bring you an additional option i'm feeling very strongly we need to let our consultants continue so that we have a clarification uh on the maps and um and then more questions can occur

110and we do have members of the public who wanted to speak to this item as well thank you so yeah let's see uh going on to the maps now so your blue option is that we are now showing this with a summary of the board members that reside in each area and a suggested sequence and so my suggested sequences uh lean towards uh if there is a trustee who is on the 2024 election cycle and they're the only trustee in an area that is an obvious match for a 2024 same for a single trustee or even multiple trustees who were all in 2022 but when there are multiple trustees in different election cycles which as i said is the case in all three original maps my suggested sequence is to put that one in 2022

111again that is something that's ultimately at your discretion but just for this example and that would be because it at least provides every member the opportunity to run it does not force some anyone who is on the board to wait two years for the chance to seek re-election so that is the rationale for putting forward uh two three and uh five and 2022 and one and four in 2024 again with uh areas one and three that is entirely your discretion which one of those would kind of get to go first with the opportunity to elect its resident trustee and which one would need to wait until 2024 but one of it's going to be one or the other if you uh put area 5 going first but what this means specifically is that so by

112the end of the full 2024 cycle there would be guaranteed two board members who are not among the five of you now it also means that after 2022 uh at least one between kaiser and lando uh should they both seek re-election would not win uh if member dobby wanted the opportunity to continue serving on the board in the long term and not risk a two-year gap until the next opportunity to run in 2026 uh should member dalby win that election then both uh president kaiser and member lando uh would be off the board and again that would then your seat would then be a the trustee seat not the at large seat you can't hold them both simultaneously that would create a vacancy on the board uh you would have just had elections in this

113sequence with two member robinson may or may not have won that race against any other new uh candidates and then area three would already have elected someone in this case then that would leave the vacancy uh probably in area one uh to again either by appointment or by a special election to fill that fifth seat on the board so again there's some permutations that can happen there you've already looked at some of the other merits of this map but just knowing how that would actually play out with elections is now becomes a consideration at this phase on the green map we now move to three areas with no current board members residing in them in this case both of the areas with board members have that split of 2022 and 2024. so going ahead and

114resolving those in 2022 and then i've picked area one again that is at the board's discretion of the other three areas uh one of them would need to go ahead and elect in 2022 with the other two waiting until 2024 and then same thing except this time if you could have the possibility of either kaiser orlando winning that election in which case mr tennis would serve out his at-large term but then wait two years for the opportunity to run again or if mr tennis were to win uh that would then again create a vacancy on the board as he cannot hold both an at large and the trustee area seat remember dalby could do the same thing in area five and this would potentially have two vacancies on the board following the november 2022 election

115which would then be resolved in the same way in this case area one would have elected its own trustee so areas two and three would need to either hold special elections for a two-year term or have a member appointed and then on the purple map uh very similar and that you also have the three areas with no trustees but now you have four of the current board members in one trustee area which means that at the guaranteed uh turnover over the next two elections of at least three of the current board uh this time the there was at least only potential for one uh vacancy should either uh member tennis or member dalby uh enter and win the election for trustee area five in 2022 so if um if i'm correct that would mean that

116assuming either tennis or dalby won the um the other person who was elected to serve until 2024 would have to then be an at-large representative correct they'd yeah because no one's term ends early so right yes right if either tennis or delby one the other would still be a not large trustee but when that term expired unless they moved to a different trustee area uh there would be no way for them to run from their current residence until that particular trustee area came around again in 2026. so i think we've been over that but then given that each of those maps introduces the potential for some complexity and potential extra expense for the district was it feasible to create a map that met all the other legal requirements but also took into consideration for the

117first time current board member addresses to create those areas and i was able to determine that that is something that was doable and this was the now called orange a map and so you see current members are one per area that makes the sequence very straightforward with the three areas that contain a current board member whose term expires in 2022 would hold their elections in 2022 the other two areas would hold elections in 2024. again you could do something different you get to select pick the election sequence but that would be certainly the most straightforward way to approach that one and then the orange one thing that was pointed out again i know that uh board members had an opportunity to as mr tennis said to see these maps prior to when they were published

118and one feedback that came in was in this first orange map and while again we've acknowledged that the allocation of school sites or even of school boundaries is not indicative of which students or which schools the students who live in those areas are attending uh there was only one school site located within trustee area five but with uh pv high marigold and loma vista were very near the border of four and five and the populations worked such that shifting just the area containing those schools and a little bit to the north of pb high out of four and into five still kept all of the populations and ethnic concentrations balanced and legal and so that was the option b so again areas one two and three are identical between the two maps and areas four

119and five just make one small change and so we'll quickly kind of go through this criteria criteria data there's no brand new data there are just two new maps showing the same data and for the neighborhood's analysis a new neighborhood that we've included so again total population by race and ethnicity lots of numbers but again on your blue green and purple this has not changed showing both for total population and for the population of voting age and comparing it with in the white at the top what the averages are across the entire school district uh and seeing that with particular focus on the hispanic or latino population the ability of some trustee areas to concentrate that population and therefore the strength of that vote to some extent and then that same information shown for the

120orange maps which again all the numbers for areas one two and three will be the same between both orange maps you should just see some small differences between areas four and five uh and again seeing a very comparable splits of the population and then the socio-economic and tenure data again we're showing you the median income based on the most recent american community survey from 2019 the percent of the students living there participating officially in the free and reduced lunch program and then again based on that american community survey data the percent of owners and renters uh the neighborhoods we have now added cal park to the map per feedback received through the district website as it turns out uh cal park is entirely within a single trustee area in all five of the map options

121and then for the orange maps seeing for the first time uh also applying the neighborhood criteria and keeping all neighborhoods within a single trustee area and that one as well and then again that student analysis that we've looked at or that we referenced a couple of times tonight but what you're seeing on each column just for those uh as a refresher is the percent of the students at the elementary level the junior high level or the high school level uh who buys who are attending which school so every column within each type of school adds up to 100 and then you can just see that there's no zeros anywhere in there and the same holds true when we get to orange a and orange b and then information that was requested kind of independent of

122the trustee areas but just looking at frpm by school and then finally the point of the registered voter analysis looking at the number of registered voters per view county elections in 2020 versus that 2020 census data with the population of voting age to see how much of a difference there is between those two totals so that brings us to the next steps as we said at the beginning uh tonight's meeting is really about presenting this information answering questions hearing additional input the next meeting is when the board has an opportunity to select any map that has been published to that point for at least seven days uh but if the board is not wanting to make that decision in february 2nd then we can come back again on the 16th of february at which point

123it would be ideal uh to have the process uh to meet timelines to get this onto the 2022 election because there are a number of other layers of the state and county that mr ghan can speak to as uh as needed but that is where we are so i will conclude my presentation and um uh here for additional questions very briefly um can you comment on the the medium income breakdown on the two orange maps as compared to the other three existing maps it's possible to pull that up again apologies for the it's just this is on slide 23. okay let's just get there as quickly as we can oopsie there was a few too many clicks there we go and so yes you do see uh so uh it was probably uh even more

124so than the blue map which had previously had the area with the highest uh you know median income uh you do have uh just with area five uh all the areas that it covers uh does wind up with the highest uh uh in area five uh again it's slightly lower uh with the tweak that was made in orange b but under both orange maps yes you do have a very high median household and common area trustee area five so just for the listening audience i mean i'll read off on orange a the median income is 98 000 a year and in area 2 trustee area 2 the median income is 46 000 a year so that's you know just a little more than half um i just wanted to point that out for people yes

125no yeah every yeah you're absolutely correct in all those numbers okay i'm going to be available if any more questions come up but i think we do have uh some public who are speaking on this as well yes we do um so unless there's a a very specific question that somebody wants to ask i would like to move to the public um who had registered so the first person i had is under the classification of a parent paula n warren oh gav okay so we're going to the i'm sorry thank you public hearing yes and so just to remind you uh it's three minutes and you'll hear a little bell when you have 30 seconds left okay perfect my name is paula warren and i am a local parent um can you speak into the

126microphone please yeah paula warren and i'm a local parent can hear me now yes um i'll add that this is pretty new to me and i don't know anything about politics so i'm speaking based on just reviewing the data as i saw tonight um and as a parent i would oppose the two orange maps i i like the idea that the first three maps were more about the district and our community at large and looked at it that way and there are some areas in the orange maps under socioeconomic and tenure data where they are disproportionate among the areas while legally they likely meet the compact and continuous like their attorney said here it also says as possible i don't believe those are the most compact and continuous when viewing it that way also they

127were not in front of the public for the for input so just understanding now we have two weeks to review that and how to get our input that would be a question after i'm done and then i i understand that this adds complexity with an election and cost but i doubt that what we're doing here tonight doesn't cost the district an enormous amount of money as well and if we're going to do this once expensively let's do it right for future generations and not so much on the board at large now and where they live because they could move as well as students and parents also move so looking at this is more of a future generation as well if we're going to make this move once it's probably best to do it for future

128generations not just what we're doing today and i believe those were all my comments for tonight i just want to clarify that whenever the census is done there is a reassessment every 10 years yes if the reassessment comes back and it's balanced nothing is done correct you can just move forward though or do you the population areas have to be relatively equal yes but if the census aligns with what we have currently then we wouldn't have to make changes is that correct there would always be some tweaks okay but minimal okay thank you ma'am i would like to con the reason why this is so huge is that we were at large elections after the last census this this is an all you know a new process and so there's a considerable amount of things

129to consider and i'm i'm thrilled that there has been as much comment as there has apparently the fact that there were things created after the last meeting public did notice and have responded and that's that was the whole purpose of having all of these informational meetings was to make sure that we were hearing from the public and hi public and i'm glad you're here thank you ms robinson i appreciate that all right our next speaker is gina bax good evening thank you for having me here i would like to thank first of all the king consulting firm because i did give them a call i have a couple questions and they kindly call me back and they answer all my questions um i also want to make a comment that was not on my speech

130for the school district attorney you kept saying community input input public input for desired maps i'm the co-chair for chico parents we have a group of almost a thousand parents in that group i know they're not it's not that big compared to other cities but we stay in touch with other parents and we're very active and i never heard anything about wanting another map i think we were all you know not happy but at least we decided that three maps were good enough so i don't know where the community input or public input for desire maps came from but anyway so i'm also very concerned um about the unnecessary private and very last minute edition of these two orange maps i'm an immigrant i'm a latina i'm a minority and i don't think these orange

131maps will work or benefit my community it definitely looks like they were drawn to accommodate certain members of the board and given the fact most of this board leans towards one side i'm definitely concerned that these two maps were created to support certain board members and who could support unnecessary mandates while ignoring parents and their right of our kids to have a quality in-person education and it also minimizes the possibility of change in the upcoming elections in addition these orange maps disregard all the demographic work that has been performed those far in the creation of the original maps the blue the green the purple and they also show size discrepancy in terms of geography neighborhoods and elementary school districts should be kept together maps are supposed to be representing us equally there's there's no need

132to add more maps when no one have ever complained about these three original choices so i'm here today to ask you to remove these two last-minute options the maps a b orange maps and keep the originals one thank you okay so next i have julie treat okay oh my gosh i don't even know where to begin um so yeah um i decided this year that because we had all this redistricting going on at the county and then with you all and then the city of chico i was going to be involved with all of them from the get-go and i'm part of the one chico facebook group and so i kind of was representing that group and getting a lot of communications out so i learned a lot with the county very interesting process um

133and then so coming here the one thing that i really appreciated was it was like a consistent process for five months we were going through you know getting additional information you know expanding the um the renters versus the homeowners and then every time i could look at where you know i lived and adjust things and i added to cal park so i appreciate that um and the uh and then the question about the elementary schools so for me i was really focused on the philosophy i don't know you all and i and i was really focused on it's a democratic process for 10 years i don't care where you live but you know here's here's here's where we are so the philosophies i thought were really sound do you want to have one high school

134per trustee i thought that was wonderful and even though we have a lot of and i do appreciate you guys have the interdistricting you know you're not so hard like i was in my high school but at least i knew that i could call one of you just like my city council member reynolds or my county um uh supervisor rick ritter and go here's my deal here's my issue i need you to help me fix it and i know that you live in my area and you know and you appreciate what that issue is and i love that you know kids are coming and going but for me it's you live in my area and you appreciate this the schools that are there because i do expect all of you to represent all of chico

135um the how many do we know the percentage of kids that are outside that the city limits so i was surprised to see such a full um district map how many live like outside the city limits are there a lot there coming in from forest ranch or durham or wherever okay because that would be that'd be interesting to know um because like right now i think the orange map has me in the foothills i think we're calling it so i'm like i'm not the foothills but it's okay um fair map sac so i learned all about that so i guess for me this you know why wasn't any of this i did not see one public comment at all i looked at them every single time i was putting them in every single time so

136i don't know if there were phone calls that were coming in that we don't have logged as a public comment but there was not one single comment and in fact the comments that i saw yesterday i mean they're like this is a huge problem these types of actions the board are being noticed the people are tired of these ridiculous political games so i just think you need to like look at those comments because again i didn't see one single one about where y'all live or the am i done oh three seconds uh so organic i didn't know this legend sequencing i didn't understand anything at all i think if you just take the orange maps do put your guys's names up there tell me when you're going to be elected when you can run and

137then that just makes it a lot easier and if the public can't trust you on this process there's no way they're going to trust you when it comes to vaccine mandates and they're going to be like oh you say personal exemptions sure you're gonna turn this around you're gonna have some little language and they're not gonna be able to trust you on that so i think you better think about that with the election time so thank you carl oceaner i'm sorry carl delighted to be here good evening and thank you very much uh board members and wonderful staff and thank you for putting up with my frequent messages and occasional magazine subscriptions i'm going to speak on item 9-1-1 i'm a parent grandparent one of my three daughters graduated from chico high school in 2013

138she's now ironically an eighth grade history teacher in watsonville my granddaughter graduated from pleasant valley high school in 2018 and so i'm also the guy that goes around and restocks the little libraries as a community project our service club built those um like some other folks here i want to encourage you to look you know two decades down the road we're we're changing something here we're putting something in place that's that's going to benefit kids your seats are going to be occupied by people that we haven't even met yet somewhere down there so and incidentally i have an acre behind my house if any of you have a double wide and you need to quickly relocate uh for purposes of you know get a hold of me yeah look two decades into the future i

139may be a little naive but i have a vision of this new system allowing parents neighbors people that are clustered around one or more elementary schools being close in geographic proximity so that they can actually meet and they start to generate board members that actually come up from the communities themselves that aren't necessarily all educational professionals i would never be a board member because i receive a check from the state teacher's retirement system and we consider that a conflict of interest i'd like to see people coming into the board that are kind of coming up from the grounds well and and they're board members being able to go out and meet with them as cohesive groups in cohesive areas and i'm sure none of you plans on still being at this board sitting in your

140chairs 25 or 30 years from now so kind of remove yourselves from the here and now and let's not create a permanent solution to a temporary problem again look to the day when the board has retired and remember that you are not accountable to the staff and you're not accountable to yourselves you are accountable to the children the parents and the taxpayers you are the governing board and these folks are your subordinates and your supervisors are out here in the audience thank you very much okay and so the last i have is brent mcguire brent mcguire okay so all right so that's the end of the speakers list on that one um so this this is not um and well it it's an action item in terms of what because it's listed as an action

141item yes um thank you president kaiser i believe that actions that we can take tonight are we can decide to eliminate a map or two we can decide to narrow the options we can ask for more information that we may feel is missing like someone just asked the question of how many students are within the city of chico and that's you know that's not a concern of ours because we are much larger than the city of chico but nevertheless it was a question that we haven't thought about and asked before so the actions we can take tonight are quite varied if we feel we don't have you know enough information to move forward with the things that are put in front of us um we also i believe need to keep in mind the um

142date um uh schedule so that we have the ability to make a decision before the cutoff date where the county says if you don't get this information to us before x we're probably not going to be able to get it on for the november ballot we have two dates february 2nd and february 16th yes i just want to give a little bit of input on that because it did come up that that we are i want to just advocate for the elections office they they are handling an awful large load normally if it were a slow year uh they want to have uh all their data maps and all their information needs to be in by june my understanding is they'd like it sooner i also know that the county board of education that serves

143as the school district the committee on school district reorganization which has to first approve and sort of pass this on in form of a resolution has uh indicated a preference to receive it in march and to receive it in march that means that we would want to send up your decision in february in time to make their march agenda that's not a bright line rule but it's i i was hearing because i spoke i've spoken a couple times with the attorney that represents the county committee on school district organization and it's it's a strong request they want to have adequate time and and do a due diligence so that's that's that was the strong okay i also want to uh address some of the stipulations that people quote unquote didn't see these there is a

144two-week period here for public comments to come in on any of these maps this is just a it is a a second hearing in terms of the the three options that we already have presented and it would be the first hearing on the orange maps so there certainly is time for public comment and and and other i think in reference to other questions people may phone in comments and they're not that's not recorded so we do have people who make phone just as you indicated you called them and they answered your questions we do have people who do call in and present questions or ideas so that does happen as well well is there a motion to take a particular action okay uh caitlyn um i would move to eliminate the blue and orange b

145maps the blue and the orange do you need to close the public hearing oh i'm sorry all right closing the public hearing um and so you're going to you want to introduce the motion to eliminate the blue and both orange just the orange b blue and orange b b-max oh orange b okay is there a second for that i'm gonna second this just because i'm really curious about what your rationalism we can't discuss it until emotions on the floor okay so that's not indication of support i'm just super curious about where you're going okay sure so um the reason i want to eliminate the blue map specifically um as my top priority um is sticking strictly with the the top priority criteria of this entire process which is making sure that we are elevating the

146hispanic vote and the blue option map is the of all five maps is the lowest um the lowest map in regard to concentrating the hispanic vote into a specific district and so just for the purpose of narrowing some of our options down for our next discussion and and obtaining meaningful public comment on you know maybe just three maps moving forward um my that's my rationale behind wanting to eliminate the blue map because it is not hitting our top priority as well as the other four options are and the reason i want to eliminate the orange beam map is because i feel like having both options on the floor is unnecessary but i also would like to allow the opportunity for the public to provide two weeks worth of public comment on an orange option map

147and not to take that option away from the community at this point so that's my rationale behind moving those two maps forward to eliminate all right any other comments mr dennis i think it's crazy to eliminate the blue map since we've had more public comments in favor of the blue map than any other map yeah i mean my i i have seen people from a very wide variety of people who i know intimately who have a very broad swath ideologically who have commented in favor of the blue map i think it's totally nuts to eliminate the blue map um could you maybe elaborate on the um the reasoning behind the support that you've heard from for the blue map i'm curious to know what the like specific criteria that folks are using to evaluate the

148blue map as being the favorable map to move forward my neighbor avalonia washington is one of the people who i have in mind and i don't i mean i don't recall the details of her email at the time i'm very surprised by your suggestion you know i mean no sorry the open is closed so so i'm i'm very surprised by this suggestion so um i i one reason i like the blue map is that um the parkview school district is preserved as was previously noted by our consultant um and that is actually my kids school district so that's one reason i like the blue map but um no there have been other reasons cited i think that all the reasons i would say that are listed in our demographer's breakdown of um arguments you know

149just right out of the shoot it was designed to create two trustee areas in pv boundary and three in chico high the range of hispanic and latino population is 14.2 to 21.8 all areas are within the required population range most overall balanced option by median household income there you go that's a good reason and all identified neighborhoods are contained within a single trustee area so i guess those are some just really quick off the cuff reasons why i think we should keep the blue map in the conversation for now all right eileen yes thank you madam president um i i'd like to suggest that we or you agree to separate your emotion because there's two totally different issues involved with why eliminate blue versus why keep in one of the oranges and there's so that's

150what i'd like to speak to and and the the blue map um was was a problem with some of the um the criteria in the um where were we the little chico creek and um parkview areas parkview does stay all in one spot in in blue if i'm reading it correctly and the the biggest concern for me is that if we do blue there's no way to guarantee that um that a representative for each of the areas will be elected and we'd have the same problem that we had with the city council because it where a whole segment of the population didn't have a representative in their district because of this the sequencing of the election and i just that bothers me tremendously are you suggesting uh an amendment to split yes that the actions

151be take blue out um i i would be favor i mean i would accept an amendment to consider both each motion separately yes all right that's my suggestion so the is the amendment acceptable then to you and is that acceptable to the board okay so that's um agree okay so we'll just do it one at a time and so the first motion then is to eliminate the blue should we make sure that there's no more discussion i just don't know if anybody else has anything else to say or add to the discussion well i was going to separate it so we could talk about just one at a time oh i see i'm sorry i apologize okay so the agreement is to separate this and so the motion in front of us for discussion is

152to keep or eliminate the blue map yes the blue map does it not separate the foothill communities that was one of the things we were talking about right doesn't it uh put cohasset in one and uh fourth range or another so and that was one of the few pieces of feedback we got i also heard a lot of conversation about uh parkview being all in one and i'm generally in favor of elementary schools being inside of one a district but as you were saying there's a lot of back and forth and i believe parkview is one of the higher ones because of the stem program there right is you guys uh staff do you know parkview have a higher than average amount of students who form 10am that would be in our demographic study and

153um i can get the answer to that i do not have it but yes we do have a lot of people that want to form 10 or transfer in the park so i'm just not sure there's a huge correlation between i mean there's some correlation for sure but i don't know how big it is between people who live there people who actually go to that school um point of clarification oh i'm sorry that was that question not answered i apologize sorry that was fine i think i'm done okay um can i please have rock solid confirmation that cohasset and forest ranch are not in the same trusty area in the blue map i'm looking at the map right now and it doesn't go out that far and yes uh just because that's where the high

154school boundary runs is between those two communities and so the blue map follows the high school boundary it does split the two into different trusty areas and incidentally i'd love to see that email where somebody says it's really important to them that cohasset and forrest ranch be together jamie just really quick i wanted to respond to the question there was a question about the parkview elementary school and how many students transfer out and how many in yes uh so 50 sorry i had it right 54.7 of the students of the enrollment transferred in last year and 37.3 of the students picked another school so more than half of the students at parkview don't live in the parkview correct geographic boundary thank you very much all right are there any other comments around the motion to

155eliminate the blue option um well i'm in support of eliminating it and i i do believe that um cohasset foothill and forest ranch areas should be in the same trustee area and it looks as though that blue separates according to the secondary boundaries to our democrat demographers okay okay is there any other um points to be made around this all right i will make one point um we're eliminating the blue map based on the fact that ostensibly there's an email somewhere where somebody said they wanted it uh you know the the mountain communities that would be forest ranch and cohasset to be in the same trusty area i'm looking forward to seeing this email but i'm looking at 25 or 30 emails that have come in over the last two days that say they basically

156hate the orange map and we're not talking about that right now understanding about blue but you're also ignoring a bunch of comments and i haven't taken a tally because again you caught me off guard with this eliminating the blue map um people who like the blue map and so we're making all these changes because one person said ostensibly that they want cohasset and forest ranch in the same area but were throwing all these other people under the bus who said that they like the blue map madam president yes um just as a point of clarification if you go to the kiko unified website and click on the link about trustee area elections there's a section at the very bottom that has all it says view public input received and one of the emails there is

157the email in question it does exist the imputation that it does is a little strange i haven't seen it i just said i want to see can you do me a favor and read the email please uh okay let's see i believe it was i was looking at them a while ago i don't have it right in front of me give me a second here i think it was sent on 1-7 i want to say there it is let's see january 6 2022 says i like this map i don't know which one they're referring to because it is the only one that keeps the mountain communities of interest together if we learned anything from the board of supervisors it's that the two mountain communities want to stay in a single district keep us together we

158have similar needs for transportation and unique challenges that make us different from other chico neighborhoods or from chico neighborhoods and eileen thank you madam president my decision vote is based on my judgment of the things that have been presented i take responsibility for my decisions even though i do listen to input when i asked to eliminate the blue map it was because in my judgment there are too many things that that don't make it appealing including separating forest ranch and cohasset and that that's it all right so if there are no other comments on this motion the motion is to eliminate one more comment sorry i folders um i just want to reiterate that our goals in this process are to create districts that are um that concentrate uh traditionally uh underrepresented groups and secondarily

159to keep community of interests with common interests together and one of the things that bugs me at the blue map is it does neither of those things so i think it's i don't think there's any political game or you know worry about election in this case it's just the map doesn't meet the goals we set but it does keep the neighborhoods together which are those floors okay all right so uh we have a motion a second to eliminate the blue map um given the amount of discussion i think we should have a voice vote i mean by name excuse me all right so all those in favor of eliminating the blue map robinson i landed i kaiser eye dolby aye tennis nay okay so that um that passes so the second motion is to eliminate

160the orange b option so any discussion comment comments on that i've got a question uh will this vote here be analogous to accepting orange a will will this also will this you know be an acceptance of orange a eliminating orange b that was not brought up in the world somebody will have to specifically we'll be talking about that presumably all right comments on the motion to eliminate orange b madam president yes i i think i need to have some more information from the demographers um the orange a keeps that little arm of um there's a marigold loma vista in five and b takes a little bit more of four out and adds it to um five in in my analysis of where the it it's talking about a thousand students in that one little area

161so one yeah one clarification it's it's a little bit more it's hard to see just because the [Music] the shapes of the schools are kind of blocking it but i'm just going to come point on the big screen that are switching uh to address the concern that there was a trustee area that only contained one physical school site location which is in orange a shasta elementary is the only school that is physically located within trustee area 5. i just want to point out one of the reasons that the like between the two maps um i thought that orange b was just a little more imbalanced as far as the division of the population so trustee area five hat in this case in orange b has 24 918 people currently in it and the lowest um

162area um of population sizes is area three that has twenty three thousand so it's really close to two thousand uh dollars as you can see dollars i think we need a break close to a 2 000 person difference in population size whereas the orange a map spread is a little bit more balanced as far as just the population distribution goes so that was kind of one of my my bigger reasons of of of going with orange b in case anybody wanted other context of why i went that what that direction are there discussion or questions it's uh let me what uh what slide is the total population by race ethnicity contained on i'm looking for it and number 22 isn't what's up on screen and that population shift from four to five um correct it

163it is about a thousand total population but just to clarify i think when you first uh we're stating that you said the word students and so just to clarify we are looking at just total population there but a thousand people in those areas that were highlighted to the north of pve and then right immediately around pv marigold and loma vista the next column are columns are those student percentages where the first one is population yeah they're all so the everything under the so you have the header that says total population and so you have the wrong count and then yeah of those for example the trustee area uh five on orange b of those twenty four thousand nine hundred and eighteen people fourteen point seven of them are sorry fourteen point seven percent of them

164uh identified as hispanic or latino in the census uh 72.5 percent as non-hispanic white and then etc through the west and then you have the a separate tally for just the voting age population so again that which as we've seen doesn't necessarily mean people registered to vote but just people who are 18 years of age uh which leads to uh just demographically there'll be some slightly or sometimes more noticeable differences in those percentages by ethnicity when you're only looking at the 18 plus population as opposed to everybody i i'm going to oppose eliminating orange b because i think there are so many similarities that once we get to um narrowing uh options uh the the green and purple we may want to have orange a and b still on the table so that we can

165take a look at the the small differences between a and b so i'm going to oppose eliminating b orange b until we get further along with analyzing criteria for green and purple all right any other comments actually if you don't mind question for the demographers um do we have any idea how many um so i'm really familiar with okay i'm sorry you're prettier than i am and that's okay yeah that's all right the masters threw me off there your voices aren't even that similar but i think i think we're well mr king um [Laughter] so um next show at 11 all right um my concern is it um is about marigold and pleasant valley um this is mine this is where i grew up those schools um and they both are as opposed to parkview

166really kind of neighborhood school not pv but marigold is definitely a neighborhood school is there any way of extending uh that block of f if we take orange b it's a reasonable way to extend uh five south of marigold a little bit to capture more of the people who actually attend that school as well so uh it would involve a uh kind of yes and no and that i mean looking it but it wouldn't just be a straight extension it would have to be some kind of trade-off because as was pointed out with orange b uh the population range is already about at the most extreme that it can be yeah and so if you add any more population into trustee area five uh it has to give up some somewhere else to make you

167know to maintain that legal requirement so again so it's not a hard yes or no but it's a if we do that there has to be some kind of counter measure to keep everything in conjunction that needs to be you could almost do the opposite of that and extend the blue area out oh my gosh it's so small on my screen um trusty area 4 on like orange a out to that um wrote i can't i don't that yeah thank you eaton i can't read the tiny letters um and then and then you know displace that somewhere else for the district area five that would capture a little bit more of the neighborhood that's directly adjacent to marigold is what you're saying basically so you'd actually take away from um district five uh along that

168eaton road so it's just filling in that lube of eaten to be all four and then as needed and i would probably start looking at that uh kind of along the northern part of four if if there needed to be a counter uh yeah because i would have to i've talked in my head i can't tell you how many people live in that area but potentially if it's enough to lead to unbalance if we explored this as another variation then it would come back with showing that map that perhaps aligns that area around pv and marigold but uh then that would still as with orange a still lead to trustee area 5 at having just shasta elementary within the trustee area which was the original concern however that said that is the direction i'm happy

169to come back and provide that map if it's feasible yeah and actually now that you mentioned that point i think that it's important just to say it out loud for the public that you know when we're saying oh there's only one school in you know trustee area five that's that's the physical brick and mortar location but of course as we've seen with all of the maps and overlap there's literally students from every dish in every district going to every school so the brick and mortar is one thing i don't think that that should necessarily be take a huge precedent over our concerns necessarily um but i mean i could understand it as being a concern um but anyway i just wanted to address that because we actually haven't said that out loud tonight um but

170that was part of the i think conversations behind making some adjustments between the two orange maps so anyway sorry thank you for letting me say that all right any other uh comments on this motion yeah just briefly i'll say that i think that both orange a and orange b are blatant examples of gerrymandering on the part of the board majority and so i'm happy to oppose both orange a and orange b so if there's discussion of eliminating one of those two i'm all in favor of it uh eileen um thank you madam president board member tennis can you give me an any kind of example of why you consider this not following all of the other criteria that we've been dealing with over the months for how to set up these trust i mean i

171hear the term i don't see the evidence well the top criteria on the map as evidenced by the legend of the map which is was on the initial draft simply assigns five districts according to incumbents and so it's perfectly apparent that the board is taking steps to ensure their own safety in future elections i would put another possibility out there is that that i'm trying to make sure that the lack of having a trustee whatever trustee it is in each thing it doesn't create a situation where the people are not able to vote for one trustee because of the conflicts with the the voting sequencing and so i see it as a more positive representative of constituency freedom by allowing for the sequencing to provide the opportunity for the public to elect one trustee for

172each area as the sequence comes up and at this point you know there nobody has declared for office i certainly haven't i have until august of next year to decide whether or not i you know want to run for re-election and that's going to be based on what's happening with the state budget a number of things it's not going to be based on anything political it's going to be based on what the school district is facing and so i'm i'm a bit miffed i guess at being accused of something nefarious when i don't believe that's at all the intent by any board member i mean we're uh making up frankly this concern we have um you know audible voices in this room generated a narrative that there's people out there concerned about not having their

173own representative in their district for two year period okay i've never read a single you know actually i think there was one pro gerrymandering email that came in today all the other of the 25 or so or more emails that came in today were strongly against both the orange maps okay i mean any intelligent person which all you are can sit and make up a narrative about why we should do this why we should sync the blue map which is the most reasonable map and come up with these maps that feather our own nest you keep using the term gerrymandering but but clearly our legal counsel has explained to us legally what gerrymandering means and that is no way what's happening here and i would also um just argue that that the orange maps in

174no way protect any of us because what it does is gives the decision to the voters period just as evidence from the last election where both of us usurped incumbents it is still just as likely as any of these three board members could also be voted out by the community but the other three maps take that choice away from voters the voters don't even have the opportunity to vote out the current incumbents with some of the other maps whereas the orange map gives the voters the opportunity to state whether they're in support of the standing board members or not it actually puts the choice into the voters hands and not based off of a map that we choose what you basically just said was that we need to protect incumbents at all costs it's not

175a protection for incumbents at all it is just a continuation of how we've always operated which is leave the decision of of reelecting an incumbent to the the voice of the voters period but you don't want to do that if no one up here at this dios is in that district you you don't want to create a level playing field you want to put an incumbent in there so that whenever that person runs for re-election whether it's in 2022 or 2024 they get to write incumbent yeah and you know what you and i ran against those kinds of people and we blew them out of the water so i don't understand how it's giving them an advantage when clearly there are people out there that could come in uh your name's gina right you have

176been on fire this entire time and you could totally come in and blow one of these constitution these incumbents out of the water because you're so popular like that is not something that is is is the orange map does not eliminate that possibility i think we are uh having our conversation reduce in quality to uh more of a personal conflict we the motion we had was to eliminate the orange b map that was the motion that was uh presented and seconded so that's what's in front of us is there anyone else who has an observation about the orange b map that they think needs to be introduced that hasn't been introduced yet all right so with that i would say we move to voting and again vote yes or no so those if you are

177in favor of eliminating the orange b map please say yes okay yeah rocco i am not in favor so my vote would be no okay tom yeah i'm working on it uh okay sorry i'm not gonna end up uh voting for the orange map i don't think in the end i don't but also it just doesn't matter to me i it's more choice but i don't think i'm going to go with in the end i guess i say yay i i guess okay i'm a no with ms robinson's arguments i'm actually going to vote no are you sure it wasn't my arguments to make you want to vote no um i will vote i in favor of eliminating that particular orange map okay so the motion fails three to two all right with that then

178[Music] i think we're done with this public hearing action and we're going to move to yes yeah i'm going to ask erica smith to address that she is our coordinator for community relations members of the public can submit their comments in writing via email to all of the board your name will be a part of the agenda packet if you email public comment at chicousd.org there is also a comment form on the chico usd website you can search cvra or you can pull it down from the drop down on the very front home page there's a big orange button you can submit your comments that way if you do not want your comments a part of the agenda packet you can also email each member of the board individually if their emails are available on

179the website each board member can be has a district email and you can also mail your comments there are items available in the back there are independent maps that you can choose to draw your own maps and submit that for review and those are available on the back table and can also be downloaded from our website and you can mail them to chico unified school district and the mailing address is listed on that cvra portion of the website which is available with the orange button from the home page did you want to add a comment well i would just ask maybe staff could actually uh put the cusd website up here for a second so we can see what you're talking about i'm not sure who's in charge of the uh gotcha you're also welcome

180to call the superintendent's office and talk to erica and she has taken in lots of questions answered lots of questions so you can email you can call you can do the written format and then there is the online portion here that has the california voters right on our website all right eileen related to this um related to our next meeting and this topic no related to the question of how do people make comments no all right so there's an orange button right there in the middle if you click on that and then scroll to the very bottom there's a box where you can just all the way down keep on going because all the the evidence all the the emails that have been referenced as public input are also there and at the very bottom

181there's this box where you can type in whatever comment you want and we will all get that of course okay so uh we are now moving to educational services informational update on kovid all right point of point of order yes um i know you moved us on but were there any other i mean i would like to back up a little bit and see if there were any other motions related to oh dr kaiser it's not a motion i we i believe and this is what i'm trying to clarify asked for information about how many students are within chico unified versus the city of chico i i just wanted to make sure that we wanted to have somebody do that work before they went charging off to do that and is there anything else that

182we want our support demographers to bring forward to the next meeting did we ask did we ask directly about making adjustments to the one of the orange maps okay anything else okay well with your permission i'm going to excuse paul and james jamie and rob because they have to drive home and it's been a long a long night thank you thank you very much for helping us i want to thank the board for your for your questions and your diligence in this area and the focus on it uh i think it says a lot for you and i and i would just say that everything i'm hearing is completely in alignment with how this process is supposed to work so i appreciate that all right appreciate the opportunity thank you thank you drive safe okay

183so um informational update on covet j marchand oh yeah for sure yeah actually find a privilege oh um can i well i guess that's motion really um whatever do you mind if we take a break for uh five minutes okay um not usually the guy who asked that question but okay 10 minute break we're back in session so we have uh before us uh the um update on covet this is just an informational um item to bring to the board to let you know the changes before we went on winter break and after winter break just to give you a quick snapshot on how things have changed and just to give you a quick update the three things i'm going to try to cover tonight is staff students cone extracurricular activities those are the three

184things and if there's any other questions i have michelle bunch who's our cover coordinator and tina and john here to help support and address my director team okay so what this first one is certificate staff absences so on the right you can see where we were for a four-day snapshot before we went on winter break we had 42 absences they were all filled to 40 to 42 and 43 on those four days and all of them were filled if you go to the left it's a four day snapshot of our teacher absences for january 10th 11th 12th and 13th we went from 54 absences and four of them unfilled which jim and i can kind of go over what that means and then they had on january 11th we had our highest which was 70

185absences and 11 unfilled and january 12 62 absences four unfilled and 68 with five on the field so when you get into the lower numbers of unfilled you're usually i'm taking care by teachers that are on prep we use them on prep or we'll pull a counselor or reading intervention specialist somebody or one of our administrators to go into that classroom that's what means we didn't have enough subs that means somebody on the campus went in that had a credential to go in and fill in those spots on today's i think yesterday's number that i got we had 57 uh teachers absent yesterday and we had only three of them three of them that were not filled okay so that was just that yes i just like to say that the increase in the subpay

186has helped greatly because other districts are struggling to get substitute teachers so um we're in pretty good shape next was confirm positive staff cases again you could see on the right the last four days before we went on winter break we had one staff one staff zero staff zero staff before we were gonna win a break when we came back the first day back at 13 january 11 20 january 12 18 and then january 13th we had uh 14 on staff that were um positive cases so again we've seen an uptick and we've seen that all in the whole state in the country when it comes to that confer positive student cases this is where you're going to see a pretty good increase we had to really again that week before we want to win

187a break we were all telling what a great job michelle was doing and getting keeping our kids from not getting covered so we had two student cases on the 13th zero then two then zero so that last four days before break we had only four student cases on january 10th we had 75 on its own january 11th we had 103 student cases that tested positive january 12 81 january 13 78 these are more cases each time yeah i'm just generally curious like to what extent does this correlate with the amount of tests that we're giving you know like um because we know how many the first time when they came back they came and reported that they were positive without the tests that we were giving they these are families and students and staff members

188that came without coming right off a break saying that they talk tested positive so when was that as i'm talking to the testers i can pull the number of tests and we have a lot of retesting so it's harder to get a really firm number but about 20 percent in the past week one in five tests are coming up positive at our district office site which is our symptomatic testing site so we're having a higher percentage of the district office testing site because that's where people can come for symptomatic testing how long has that site been there we opened it actually right after christmas break because we saw a need and it wasn't being filled in the community there was nowhere to go to get symptomatic testing done in a rapid test so we decided

189to make that move so my question is how many i'm not trying to be controversial here in any way i'm just genuinely curious like were we given like the same number of tests for this back in december increased in testing so so so the increase the surge in positive cases might have a lot to do with how many tests we're giving i mean if you didn't do a lot of tests you wouldn't have a lot of positive cases but also it's a percentage but also it's a percentage so you can give you know you can give ten tests and two out of ten would still be twenty percent when you give a hundred tests and twenty of them test positive it's still twenty percent so you would average what 300 tests to 400 tests a

190week before you know on our regular cycle and now we're well into the six seven eight hundred tests that we range yeah the first day we came back we had a line wrapped around the fence probably i would say over a hundred people waiting to test in the morning that first day back so it was they came in to ask to be tested because they felt that they were possibly positive but let's not lose sight of the fact that even if this is because of increased testing we're catching students who have coveted and keeping them away quantitating them so no it doesn't spread that's i mean that's a good thing about how you slice it yeah right to matt's point um you know if we did see the numbers divided out between asymptomatic testing where

191we're just you know doing regular testing like we were before and then the symptomatic testing you know we probably would see a different percentage to compare to pre-christmas break numbers if that was something that we would be interested in well according to the county data that got posted it was yesterday was one thousand one hundred and i think sixty uh positive they do that on confirmed confirmed yes confirmed tests that are sent to the valencia lab and other you know the pcr tests we're using rapids um because the pcrs are taking over a week so you know you're almost at a quarantine before you're getting any results all right so on some successes on co and extracurricular activities ban acquire performance performance vaccine and tested were happening currently offering all sports with all teams on

192track to complete league seasons and qualify for section playoffs in all varsity sports have testing protocols in place weekly testing tournament testing one of the examples i want to tell you we had a huge wrestling tournament over winter break um the joe rio rios we tested every student from every district that came in over 350 restaurants 350 rapid tests i believe we had 15 students test positive and only two of them were from chico unified so i'm just saying we got people out there because we didn't want we wanted to make sure everybody that was wrestling should be wrestling first of all and the people that michelle and the people that were doing the testing the kelly cereals of the world and everybody that chico high because it was their tournament it was an amazing

193thing to happen so that tournament can continue so that's a been a bit positive our kids know that they want in order to play they need to stay healthy and they're doing uh they're a lot more aware of coming back from winter break what they need to do to keep themselves healthy and so they can compete it hits us early right away when we are starting to play games and you can see we've had 22 games and matches that were canceled and our spectator expectations are still because we're still getting a lot of people showing up in in the gyms but i can tell you since then it's been a lot more effective with our with our teams that we really have we i think we've had to cancel one wrestling since then they're the

194initial when we came back that we got so those are the things that we wanted to cover just to show you yes we've had a a pretty big spike but we're able to keep our schools going got people covering classes kids going in uh one of the main things that if a kid does or a staff does test positive they can re-test five with after the fifth day and if they're not systematic and they test negative they can go back so that's one of the big changes we've seen in the testing so if anybody has any other questions about testing then i am going to pass it off to michelle at this point and i just wanted to say a big thank you to maintenance and operations because i put it out there hey we

195have a problem we need a place for positive or people that are presumptive positive to test what can we do and they had a trailer available and pulled it onto our district office site and daily they unlock it they lock it they get the generator going i mean they've just been instrumental in making that new testing location happen so it's made a huge difference and i could tell you our families are of our students because that's who we give the rapid test to as our students have been very appreciative because we've been telling the people with symptoms to come down to the district office trailer to get tested but we can go out there and actually hand them one with directions to what to do with it if they're touching negative or positive and it's

196made our line extremely a lot shorter and a lot of people more appreciative that they can do their own tests at home so i just wanted to add to you just to keep in perspective we certainly want to keep our numbers down as low as we possibly can and we've seen some spikes into the 70s 80s even the hundreds for students and up to 20s below 20s with with staff but combined we have 13 500 students and staff so we're talking about a hundred and some versus thirteen thousand 500 so even though the numbers have gone up a lot um just to keep it in perspective it's it's still a very small percentage but um but we have a lot of things in place to to keep it from spreading as mr lando said and

197i know we thanked michelle a lot but i'm going to tell you between the michelle and the nurses and the health assistants and everybody else getting all these students tested and our staff getting tested making sure that we're following all our protocol is extremely amazing because when we left we showed you that we have had maybe two kids or zero kids to maybe one staff member to now we're getting a hundred and then for them to handle it with such grace compared to when we first came out of the shoot at the beginning of the school year where we had schools trying to figure out how they were going to do all this it's amazing one with all the people that i mentioned and our administrations on each side have been able to take this

198on and and so it's been i don't want to say smooth but i'm going to say it's as many we had i am very um happy and how they've been able to handle the stress of all that i don't get to sit by michelle every day and i know what she has to go through debbie campos i want to thank also oh yeah our nursing staff's been amazing our nursing staff has been amazing they're working and they're in all of their support staff the health assistants and office staff have really pulled together to help them during this time and we've really focused on what can we do we pushed out n95 masks to all of our sites hand sanitizer reminded people about good mitigation techniques you know we're focusing on expanding testing if you don't

199feel well please test take all of the precautions because that's really key to you know keeping everybody healthy and and present as soon as we got those 24 000 just under twenty four thousand rapid tests um i wanna say well jacqueline and aaron who's in charge of our everything in our warehouse got them out to our school sites too to make sure we could give them to families that they were supposed to go to so they did a very good job of that also i i've heard from other districts of their staff and they just are stunned that we can go get a rapid test and i think it's really critical so wonderful yeah michelle is on it yeah yeah i do want to address the one public comment that says why don't we go

200online we're seeing this spike in cases why don't we move to online until this subsides and i do want to be very clear with the board and with the public that going on going to distance learning as a district really is a very complicated and almost impossible process at this point the legislature has made it very clear that they want kids in school and they have passed legislation that really limits the ability to get independent study dollars and even if we are in a staff crisis which some districts have faced where we don't have enough staff to cover classes we have to first consult with our county office and have the county office agreed that we don't have any other options but to close schools then we have to contact the california department of education

201and get their approval um in order for us to close if we want to receive any um dollars for being closed those days is that something sorry to interrupt you that was it cottonwood just went through correct cottonwood just closed i do believe there's was based on a lack of available staff i do not know whether or not they went through the process of asking their county and getting the state department approval but it we have been told over and over and over if we do not go through that process we will not receive funding they made base either not receiving funding for the days that they were not in school they may have to check those days on to the end of the school year and that's pretty much what i have for you

202unless you have any other questions michelle thank you so much thank you all right so uh next we have our upcoming uh local control oh we had some public comment oh yes one did member see that um this is good information too so yeah i'm a big advocate for continuing to ask for as much information to come out about the pending mandate if it's going to come down the road any information you can push out there whether it's meetings with the county um with the new york or you know you've started to test things in terms of the systems and other things and i highly recommend that um you all go look at this sacramento city unified school district because they're up and running as of january one so they've got the whole kit and

203caboodle um set up and um from um you know because their vaccinations are doing the um the 12 and up and everybody that's five and up basically considered unvaccinated has to go through testing on a regular basis but they've got all their um their marketing materials and um you know take a selfie with your friend this is the one that was really interesting so this is the snapshot of the um the vaccinated versus unvaccinated and it's developed by um by microsoft but it's in their system and it shows by school i'm like i don't know if that's a good idea or not but so it shows you know this school over here is really highly vaccinated this one's not and you can you know flip on the seventh to eighth graders the ninth to twelve

204so i don't know if this is something that they're gonna push out to all of the school districts or if they're gonna you guys are gonna do it individually but there's a lot of this information on there and then the um the testing i don't know they are requiring the registration um by the kids and if you're 13 and over you don't have to go through your parents do you guys do that okay and then so if they get covered it just goes right to the person okay that's and then the exemptions is the other thing that's got a lot of people um you know kind of nervous or wanting to see information so this is their form and it um the thing that again throws people so they have a personal or religious exemption

205the personal has to be authorized by a healthcare practitioner that says you know they've provided the parent and the student with information about the responsibility of um getting the vaccine so that they have to go get a doctor's approval and then the religious one is the religious one and at the very end they have to sign everybody has to sign the affidavit saying you know i understand that an immunized student may be excluded from attending school or child care during the outbreak or after exposure to code for the protection of the student and others and so just again some of that language you know people want to see rather than okay we take a personal exemption but they kind of want to see this and then the um the california notify um is an interesting

206concept i think they're using this at view and this is where you downloaded your phone and gps tracks you and if you walk by somebody else that has coven it pings you and sends you a note you've got coded somebody walked by you to have it and then it starts pushing stuff around on gps so this is a little awkward but um and then the last thing on here says you know again it helps to notify you immediately that you might be exposed even if you've been fully vaccinated you can still potentially spread copenhagen so join millions and getting kind of connected with your neighbors um the last thing i was gonna say there's a lot of d3 in the vitamins i don't know there's a lot of information about the supplements and i don't

207know if your biology classes or your science classes or health classes are doing a lot to explore this d3 is fascinating just has something to do with the immunology as does zinc so that would be great and then the um sure that's my last three thought ding that bell um i did want to clarify with uh staff the um the 13 and over that's a state law ed code right about medical freedoms for students of a certain age right okay yeah so all right so thank you for that and thanks for the public comment and so diane olsen you have the extended year i skipped jay ilcat meeting no cap meeting oh yeah i didn't mean to do that okay all right okay again one of this is informational item only we wanted to come

208forward because we do have all the dates that again that the board can tell us to change but we wanted to bring forward because last year um there was concerns that we are not going out to the community enough to with the dates and be able to get the offer them ahead of time when we're going to be having all of our different lcap meetings so i just want to present those dates to you guys tonight so we can put them out publicly yeah okay so we start march 8th local um our elf cap family community meeting number one i just kind of want to again this all preference on what our cova numbers are and what we're allowed to do but what that first one will look like is we will still be holding

209them at each school site so parents can go to their own school site for these community meetings but we will also be holding them at holding the big meeting will at marsh so they have if they want to come to marsh where all the directors and everybody will be presenting to all the different school sites that's still available and i would imagine we'll have food and child care for their families but they also get their child care on their sites if they go there also they'll have food at their sites we just got a very positive feedback from our families that they felt comfortable going to their school sites so when we were presenting the lcap as a whole then they could discuss it with their principals then they got the information back to us

210can i just clarify for my own like visioning how this goes so for that first meeting you'll you'll be hosting the like district-wide presentation um from marsh and pushing it out to each school site and folks and folks will come to their school site unless they want to go to marsh and see that presentation that you're projecting from marsh and then be able to talk amongst themselves when there's time for breakout times to discuss certainly sometimes they'll talk about feedback money as a district but what also they're doing with their own lcap money during that time and so they can get more easier to talk to their principal or their target case manager that they know right there and not sit sometimes they felt it was better to be on their school site and they

211felt more comfortable to do we're giving them both options while i'm asking questions it's a little ahead of myself but it's still on the same page um for parents of a fifth grader would they you know maybe attend the school that they think that their kids can be going to next year or would it just be their school site this is in the past it would just go to their last year they went to their school that they were attending okay thanks um and then then we started doing our breakout meetings on again that's more changes our first one where we said how we spent the money in the past this is the money we have moving forward and to give them some more options march 22nd we will be meeting with our bipart families

212our black and indigenous people of color uh we will meet with those families our target case managers do a very good job of pushing out to those families we'll be meeting again at marsh and that's where we've done that in the past march 24th will be our foster homeless parent gardening input meeting march 29th are students with disabilities parent guardian input meeting and again march 29th and 31 elementary student input meetings so those are the ones that like the elementary ones kelly and i and ted go to different sites what we'll be doing we'll be splitting the the schools and the two groups this year so last year we went to each school but this year we're going half the elementaries will come one time and the other have their half so we have a

213set questions to ask them but then they have an open forum that thinks what's working and not working at their school sites how we spend our money do they the kids give us actual input on what they think that we should be doing with our money and then we will do the same thing with junior high and then the high schools um on another date i'll show you those too so kelly and i are on the road quite a bit um with with john and ted when it comes to those meetings april 5th will be the junior high student input meeting and then um then we will also that evening to a local control uh an elk cap english learner parent guardian input meeting we'll meet with our dlac parents and talk to them about

214how things are working with our lcap dollars april 7th will be our high school student input meeting april 12 will be our our big family and community meeting number two so again we will give them all the input that we what we spent in the past and what we are looking to spend in the future for the following year or if they had things that they gave us input on on the first one that we can bring back to okay this is the stuff that we heard through you through through community input we've made some adjustments and then we're going to bring back the lcap plan to you as families to take a look at to see if that's what they want we actually have the vote on it if they agree with the goals

215or not and how we're spending the money under those goals and then on june 22nd will be our first public hearing and board meeting with the lcap and then june 29th is when the board takes action yes uh just one more question sorry um uh the student input meetings will those be taking place during school during school hours we normally do some type of lunch thing or a snack thing and we meet with them during school hours they get brought over by their administrators and all of the target population meetings and family and community meetings in the evening and all offer food and child care cool got it great thank you and we may need to have some flex flexibility with our student meetings if college rates stay very high we probably won't want to

216bring large groups of kids together we may have to go back to going to each school site but we did want to meet with school kids from different schools if we could that's been really useful in the past as well so we'll be putting these dates out on the district website and each school will have these dates on their website but if i could get john to click on the english one first that's a flyer i'm not going to say that i made it but chrissy benson did a very good job of making this flyer that we will be sending it out to every family flyer about the upcoming meetings so that has that on it and then you can see one in spanish that's been done also so we can send it out um

217one's in spanish also not to be a nitpick i have a lot to say i'm sorry um not to be a nit picker but the um scroll back up please the other way uh thank you um the where it says has the location and the time underneath i feel like it's just a little small uh i don't know this is hard maybe it's a little hard to read especially if it's yeah in print well it's going to be printed right especially if it's in print like that would be i think that that would be really i design on canva every single day so in my opinion in my professional graphic design opinion it's small and i if i know chrissy banks and well enough she's probably listening to you right now and she's already changing

218that right i think you're great thank you for all your hard work you're better than me that flyer is that in our materials anywhere i'm not seeing it no it's just in our presentation um we can definitely you can click on it let's see here in the board packet that's on there that you can click on looking at that um this is the three page presentation it's on the very last one on the bottom thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you so again if you guys have any other suggestions on getting this information out again we'll be sending this out in our parent communications that we have to erica and our school sites and we will having them up again so we want to make sure anybody any community member can come

219um to those meetings and any board member obviously and will we be able to publish those through or do you like press release through our our local media as well i'm sure we can right erica erica will set it up that we push it out one of us will push it out to our media it will be going out to every family and we can also and i think eric already planned to do this put it on our social media as well as send it out to the print media yes i mean well i was just scrolling through it and i don't see a featuring of the the fact that there will be child care and food and and and stuff available and and i know as i sat at different tables during these meetings

220before that was one of the main reasons why some of the parents were able to make it to these meetings so i think highlighting that would be a good idea yeah we can highlight that on the flyer plus our target case managers do a very good job of calling out the families to let them know but on the community meetings we can clearly put make sure that's on those flyers and our administrators will let families know okay anything else all right so thank you for that jay and now let's move to discussion action the extended school year diane olson and this is discussion about the extended school year waiver and so i want to hand it over to dana feingold she is my principal for extended school year hi there um on a yearly basis

221we need to come to you to get a board approval so that we can get state approval to move our esy from 20 days to 15 days we do that by increasing our hours so students can come to school have more intense instruction on a longer period but for three weeks so we will um run esy this year from the 6th of june through the 24th of june and it'll be for five hours a day have any questions am glad this came out because i i will confess my ignorance i didn't really even realize that this program even existed so i'm glad to have an opportunity to hear a little bit about it um what i mean who are the students who are in involved in the students who are on ieps who qualify for

222coming to um and iep teams have that discussion every year and um so we have anywhere from 250 to 300 students attend where do they go we have them all over the district we try to keep them in their classrooms the district is really good about opening up schools and air conditioners on the kids are in their environment that they're used to we have at both high schools we have it at eight or nine ten elementary schools and one of the junior highs and you said it was to come over and see us oh and then also 200 and 250 to 300 i um we had about 320 last year all ages yeah we do it preschool to the adult program yeah adult program yeah the adult program how many adults are involved teachers and

223about about 100 paraprofessionals that work for us during the summer thank you yeah it's excellent um i'm move passage of this item all right move is there a second all right second section all right any other discussion all right um just to comment uh madam president that this extended year program is so important for most of these um the student population relies on patterning and relying on when things are going to happen and to not have that long break it's just it's an amazingly positive experience are very important thank you all right so any other comments queries all right so we have a motion and a second um our last vote was uh okay yeah and it's by name okay so um all those in favor indicate i all right uh lando i okay kaiser

224dolby i i'll vote for this but only if you let me bring all my four kids to it please no just kidding all right so uh now we go to the business services uh the adoption of resolution 1568-22 the accounting of developer fees for the fiscal year 2021. good evening board every year we're required to report on our developer fees and so this is just a resolution saying that we have done the report that we're required to do the report includes information as far as the type of fees that we collect how many we collected for the last five years and then also the expenditures the projects that we've paid for out of these different fees so if you have any questions i can answer them now but it's pretty straightforward and like i said

225every year we're required to bring this to you for resolution for passing all right so you have one no okay so seeing none motion i move passage of this item a second okay so tennis and dolby all right so all those in favor signify by saying aye aye hi all right five to nothing good thank you okay thank you so uh now we move to resolution 1566-22 the resolution of chico unified school board district board of education certifying compliance with section 17 289 of the ed code and authorizing the execution of exemption requests with the state allocation board jacqueline yes that was a mouthful it is exciting news as you know the district has been in negotiations to purchase the property at 1350 east last avenue that purchase has been closed escrow's been closed that

226happened on monday january 10th so we are officially owners of that property at this point currently as we speak this week teachers are moving in from chico marketplace into that property and then students will be returning next week so great progress for the staff they're very excited to have a location we do have to find an exemption with the state allocation board because this is not a dsa property right department of state architects approved property it is basically office space so we can't have more than 25 students at any given point on that property and staff is aware of that principle's aware of that so we just filed this exemption every year to allow us to have that independent study program at that location we did the same thing when we were at chico marketplace

227so just ask for your approval this evening for that resolution so we can send it off right any questions okay second okay so eileen and then uh tom so all those in favor aye aye all right five to nathan okay thank you okay state budget jacqueline yes so state budget um the governor comes out around january 10th january 15th and gives his or her in this case his proposal preliminary proposal for the state budget for the next fiscal year which will start july 1st so this is kind of the first blush what the governor's office is thinking as far as how they're going to fund not only education but the state budget and in totality so the state budget for next year assumes three things it's assuming increased labor force participation rate and lower unemployment

228so i know locally hopefully we will all see that as well continued job growth and reliance on high wage earners so the silicon valley is a huge piece to the economy of the state of california but some of the risks that he did point out in his press conference were related to a potential additional coveted surge persistent labor market instability sustained high inflation you'll see that with the cola this year as well as ongoing supply chain interruptions that were continually observing as we're purchasing items so there's essentially i break down the budget into two components we have ongoing money and we have one time money so in relation to the ongoing money because inflation is so high the cola for next year is projected at 5.33 percent so all of our ada funding or average

229daily attendance funding will go up 5.33 percent as proposed so the other great news i think for chico unified is the governor did provide a third option for funding related to our average daily attendance so current ed code says school districts get to choose the larger of last year's ada or current year ada so in our situation because we didn't report in 2021 we can for the current year we can we can still use 1920 but going forward into next year we would have to use this year's average daily attendance which because of so many students out on quarantine we are significantly lower than we have been in prior years so what the governor is proposing for at least the 22 22-23 year we're unclear about future years is to do a three-year average so

230what that would mean for chico unified is we would be able to count 1920 two times because we didn't report in 2021 and then which would be our current ada so what that allows for chico unified to do is soften that funding cliff that we've talked about when we've done the budgets right where we've got we've for three years in a row we're at this level and then a significant drop so what it'll allow us to do is kind of land a little bit softer on that so we'll bring back exact dollar values in march when we have our second interim budget the other ongoing funding is related to our expanded learning opportunities program which is money received this year that allows for a nine hour instructional day and then 30 non-school days to help

231students universal meals which i'm really excited about there's funding for that so we'll be able to continue to provide at least two meals breakfast and lunch to every student of chico unified regardless of the economic background the other money that is there is related to ada for tk expansion so the district will be changing the timeline per guidelines for all children turning five between september 2nd and february 2nd right now it's december so we're adding an extra two months but no students would be eligible for ada funding so that's been part of the calculation at the state level and then the last piece for ongoing funding is that cola is being applied to our special ed revenues so it's great to see that not only our general ed population getting the cola but also also

232our special ed population so there'll be more financial resources for that program on the one-time funding side the state budget they are putting money into basically what i call the education savings fund but it's basically the formal name is the public school system stabilization count it's basically a prop 98 reserve so when money goes in that it's a set aside for a future economic downturn and so for me there's two pieces to that there's one that we're putting money aside for an economic downturn so you have the savings account so that it would soften anything going forward but additionally those dollars aren't being used on ongoing programs you might have to cut as well so with the deposit for next year we will be close at the state level to 10 percent which is what

233the code says that once you hit that 10 threshold then they don't have to deposit any future monies into that there is some one-time money um to help advance our college and career pathways so as you've seen we have a pretty robust cte program i think that's the next workshop jay yeah so we have additional money coming that way there's also some competitive grants to secure more electric electric buses as you know we have several here in the district but there will be competitive grants to secure more and then they are using some state general fund money to support the school facilities program and i will say at first flush that is great however they're setting aside 1.3 billion which sounds like a lot but there's currently 3 billion in approved unfunded projects so it's

234really only going to hit about half of what's already been approved so there wouldn't really be any opportunity for new programs new for new buildings to be put in the queue so that's kind of the highlight of the state budget overall i think it's pretty strong i will say though will be budget subcommittees and trailer bill language coming out in the coming months and then there'll be a revision in may by the governor after um he's able to see revenues from our april property taxes um i'm sorry income taxes that are that are filed and then we will because the legislature wants a paycheck we'll have a state budget by june 15th that will then be signed by the governor by the 30th okay yes finally yes thank you jaclyn um question regarding that uh

235money that uh is the the one time only for the it's three billion rather than three million right three billion at the state level we will be put into the prop 98 reserve education savings fund okay is is that the same money that's available to help with facilities expansion for the uh moving the uh the kids into tk no so we're still facing issues with that problem the facility side yeah yes okay yes i think it's not legal to have a totally positive budget report i was just going to say i i sat through a budget um a government you know state budget update meeting like four days ago for my job and you did a much better concise beautiful positive presentation thank you okay any other uh questions on the update the budget all

236right so we'll move on thank you jacqueline and we're going to human resources the discussion action the appointment of the chico unified school district rep to the personnel committee okay so as you know we're a court-ordered merit district we have a personnel commission that has three members and each member serves three years and i bring to you every year one of the members to be approved by the board this year is it is our turn to select and approve our own member gloria bevers has has represented the district side since 2002 so she's been a long-term member of the commission the other two members one is selected by csea and then there's a neutral that is jointly selected and agreed to for a membership but this year i bring to you gloria bevers it's our

237recommendation to approve her for another three-year term she's agreed to continue to sit on the commission and uh she's done a really good job for on behalf of the district so that's it yes eileen yes it gives me a great deal of pleasure to continue to support gloria bevers as our district appointee to the personnel commission all right she's currently the chair correct yes yes she's currently the chair and she has been the chair as long as i've been in the district office it's my seventh year so she's she's well respected all right by the other two members okay any other comments or questions can i have a motion i did oh i'm sorry um that would be a point of order because we need to wait for madam president to call for a motion

238yes ma'am i'm going to get you okay so you are now saying you made a motion i'm now saying i moved to have miss gloria bevers serve as the district's appointee to the personnel commission okay do we have a second a second okay okay any other questions or discussion all right all those in favor of gloria bevers uh being our representative to the personnel commission indicate by saying aye hi hi okay unanimous okay so now we have the agenda layout so at the um december 15th board meeting the board voted to bring this back at tonight's meeting the board did not take action to approve the format for either the regular board meetings or the special board workshops so we're bringing it back for board discussion you do have in your packet draft agendas for

239both regular board meetings and for special board meetings the workshops there was the request that for the workshops only that we bring a timed agenda and you do have that in your packet turn it back over to the board for discussion madam president yes um i have some discussion on on this uh the um and i'm looking at the uh special meeting board workshop uh agenda i would be i'm sorry i have to just really quick jump in on a point of order again um so if we're gonna discuss i think we have to have emotion on the floor by that point so if you have a question for clarification from staff we're in that we're in that point in our order right now okay i'm not staff sorry i know you're more awake than

240i am caitlyn i don't think i'm going to go to bed for a while actually okay so um what we have are two illustrations of uh agenda formats one for the regular meeting and one for the special meeting that were included and does someone want to make a motion um tom go ahead if you've got a something and well i uh i would like to make a motion but i'd like to um have caitlyn make a judgment on whether or not i can um add the words um it's not estimated that's what on on the red time numbers if they could be headed by estimated time for talking about the board workshop yes the board workshop not the board meetings the board meetings are a total different ballgame but board workshops are a little bit

241more not dependable but you can anticipate because you have some control over the presenters but i don't want to do anything that lists it as a mandate just an estimate so people get some idea of how long it may be kind of sort of should take if we're on our horse as horses does that make sense well i think what you need to do if if that's your intent is to make a motion to add that and see if you get us i was asking caitlyn if i could make a motion to make an alteration in what's presented yes i think you would just put a motion on the floor with that suggested change okay and then we can you know do modifying motions on top of that that's that's what i'd like to do

242then is all right is there a second i'll second it so we can talk about it how's that okay all right motion to add the word estimated for the board workshops eileen and then caitlin seconded it so what's the discussion then we're under discussion just i think that we've demonstrated over and over again that um that we tend to follow the um [Music] the necessity to discuss and to alter that would be taking away full full disclosure not disclosure but discussion of our items i think we're a good enough judge of when we've said enough like me right now i'm done so you don't want a rigid grid that we have to follow oh how many years have we been not able to do a rigid grid as long as i've been is that emotion

243that she made she didn't make emotions okay i i want a second emotion you already did okay i i support i support this yeah i think that the intent behind this idea was just to really a try to keep us on track so for you know those workshop nights we we can make sure that we're getting staffed through and done and you know all that but also we do have occasionally really important topics come up like next meeting we'll be doing our districting discussion again and so we would like the public to have an idea of when that's when that will be coming up on the agenda so that they're not necessarily although we would like them to be here in the audience a lot of families have dinner to make and chores to do

244and things like that and if they want to come and make a public comment they'll know at 6 15 or 6 45 or 6 30 is when chica usd m is going to be starting to address that item that i want to make a public comment on okay board shop workshops remember right focused absolutely but my point being is we do sometimes have some topics especially our hot button topics that are timely that we have to make decisions about that's been kind of the life that we've been living since i've been on this board um so that's why the focus is on the workshop that's why the workshop comes first here but then we can let the public know um that that item is going to be and and i don't necessarily oppose saying estimated

245but i would like to really try to honor and be mindful and get on each other about like hey like these are important discussion items but like can we just move it along like are sometimes our feel good comments take a lot of time and it's like can we just like move this along i'm sorry like i know you want to praise that certain certain thing but like do it in 30 seconds instead of three minutes and that's not to be rude that's just to be frank like we can move our meetings along a little bit better i think i wanted to ask in the context of the consent calendar for the workshops let me talk about the workshops what is the function of the board being included as a topic this would be if

246we have board policies that come under the board the for the next board meeting the california voters right act would be under that not under consent of course but the items that are very specific to the board are ones that come forward to the board frankly there are very few consent agenda items that come forward for the board but that's just that's how we organize them when they come forward so that's that's just a just in case placeholder doesn't mean we'll have it every time in fact we try to keep those to a minimum and tom are you getting ready to you got to stop this conversation because it's off the topic of the motion at hand which is adding the word uh or the phrase estimated we're still in the middle of that right

247we are what do you call that call for a vote or something like that yeah but then that is another motion you need another vote to call the question i'm just politely asking can we do it okay we can call the question yes all right so the motion was made seconded to add the word estimated by the timelines for the workshops only um all those in favor signify by saying aye aye aye i'm gonna i'm gonna vote yes but i just really wanna emphasize that we wanna stick to what we publish as close as possible like getting off by you know more than 15 minutes i think would be a little out of line um for us um just because we don't want to tell the public about this time we're going to start this

248item and then they come and you know we're still drawing on you know for another 30 minutes and it gets stuff out of here if they're just here to present uh i was frowning at you because you are going on um so what is it about the regular uh meeting agenda that was changed other than what we already voted to eliminate negotiations that is correct you voted to eliminate negotiations but the board never voted to approve either agenda formats you just need to improve on the agenda formats um i would are you calling for a motion yeah okay i would like to move to approve this with um an alteration um following uh eileen's lead and um add just like we do on the other workshop in red just next to closed session 5 p.m

249and next to reconvene to regular section session 6 p.m i know it's at the top but that red those red numbers really draw people's attention just to re-remind people we won't be back in open session until six don't show up to our board meeting at five like six is when we will be back into open session just that's so yeah uh that's a motion i should have probably waited to explain myself until after it was um a second and sorry so i see erica offering information i thought so no i think you misheard me so i know it's at the top of this one but what i was saying on this example to have just on the side in red just like the workshop meeting to just have six five o'clock and six o'clock also

250listed in red on the side just like we do for the workshop just to be extra clear so on the printed yes on the printed version which is on the current ones it's just not on the example i i i mean it's on ours it's always on ours i'm talking about the what's published published for the public yep all right do i have a second for that motion okay and any discussion all right call for the vote all those in favor aye aye aye aye all right all those opposed well there were five yeses oh i didn't hear i didn't hear all of us yeah okay the other thing though is we now need a motion to approve this agenda as it is with the amendment oh so yes i i move approval um as

251amended second all right so eileen and matt okay all right any further discussion all those in favor aye aye okay all right so so um now we have uh the information that was people got at the csba it was suggested that it was written i have to confess i did not write mine i know eileen did hers would anybody like to present i think we had set aside five minutes or each four board up to five minutes you don't have to take the whole time for each board member to talk about uh what they had learned and certainly board members don't have to they can pass if they would like well since this was my idea again because this is one of the things that i've always encouraged after conference i'll start thank you president

252kaiser and i'm not going to be specific because i don't take notes like you do kathy but there were three messages that stood out for me at this year's conference the first was the recognition that the pandemic shut down and sub that the pandemic shutdown and subsequent move to distance learning created an emotional trauma for students staff and parents that will be long lasting but the supports to deal with those impacts will end before the need ends and that was one of the things that i heard in several different presentations the needs going to be there after our finances have gone how to finance those needs is going to take a deliberate plan during upcoming budget work the second message delivered by many speakers was the need to identify where your students are coming from

253socioeconomically racially sexual orientation living arrangements and other cultural and immigrant status conditions need to be recognized if our students and parents are going to find relevance in what our schools are offering i wish i could replay the part of the presentation that stressed that because it was significant it allows parents to feel supported by their school if these recognitions are in place the third major point i came away with was the need to keep all students receiving grade level instruction and use our mtss supports to work constantly to fill in the learning gaps and not allow the student to fall further behind in in the way of additional explanation of that that the presentation really stressed that you need to be instructing at the level where you were supposed to be instructing before any disruption

254or any that that if you don't you allow the student to f fall further behind and that what your responsibility is as educators is to use the mtss systems of support to help bring those students up and fill in the gaps while you're continuing to instruct beyond where they're currently possibly functioning dr rios demonstrated the importance of having a teacher believe in you just because mistakes had been made didn't mean we had a right to give up on a student just because they made they may present a bigger challenge than other students oh my goodness if if we don't adhere to that philosophy of not giving up on students no matter what we're doing a disservice to the individuals that are trying to survive to the students that are excelling in major areas that need

255continuing supports way beyond where others may be functioning and that just because the student is hard doesn't matter we don't give up on them ever that's it i'm done okay thank you amy uh tom did you have any sure um the two sessions that struck me the most are you know already kind of pet projects for me one was about um family resource centers on school sites uh aggregating uh services from outside community agencies uh something i wanted to see piloted for a long time the second one was similarly about a farm to table and i'll email this all to you in a lot more detail but again schools they use their garden not just on a small scale but on a big enough scale to provide food to their community i think that seeing

256schools is kind of the last bastion of social services in a lot of ways we need to kind of rethink what that looks like and how we can really meet the needs of our students on that note butte college is about to launch a similar program which is really cool which could also serve as a model if we wanted to push further into that concept okay is that all time okay uh caitlin sure um i would always suggest a board president's workshop it was incredibly helpful and enlightening especially when it comes to legal risks of board for board members in operating as a renegade where you can lose your actual liability coverage as an individual board member by um by not operating within the scope of of our limitations as as board members since we

257operate as a board and not as individuals so that was that was really interesting to kind of dive deeper into that there was a lot of culture talk about you know the board culture and you know trying to develop more which it always goes back to relationships but i think we did a really had a really great experience as a whole board in that in in that regard so it's kind of cool to watch it happen in real time just developing continuing to develop our relationships as a board so that you know we don't always have to agree but we always understand that everybody's bringing a perspective to the table that is valuable and does represent the the perspective of our community um the csba is developing a civility clause i think that that was

258what the name of it was which honestly like i just remember right now it was a really great idea um but it was just really establishing a board policy that discusses what it means to have a civil um a civil discourse in a board meeting um and then announcing that um frequently at but not frequently during a board meeting but at our board meetings um uh same same along the same lines and we have a little bit of this it touches on this in our own work on our own handbook um having a spokespeople or spokesperson especially for specific topics so we make sure that you know what is coming out to the public from the board um is typically being conveyed by an individual that understands the decisions that were being are being made

259and can speak to that and i know that most of our our most of our our public facing stuff comes from um from erica as far as like district specific things go but there is frequently the the happening of of this you know the um me local media reaching out to individual board members and so you know there's a certain times or certain place or certain people that that um you know developing the idea of having certain spokes people for certain topics could be beneficial um so if somebody were to reach out to me about a classified issue i could we know that you know eileen's the one that really can speak to policy regarding classified stuff and i'm going to deflect that interview to somebody else that's not like how it has to go

260but it's just something that was interest interesting to me in the president's workshop i attended a climate action naturally i attended a climate action student session and what struck me as really interesting was the concept of using students as paid interns so actually the district was providing paid jobs for students of the district to collect and analyze data as far as like their climate action plan was going and really looking into a lot of the things actually that it sounded like the m o person does that got the award tonight but utilizing students to obtain that data and analyze it and paying them for it i mean there's programs out there that do that so i thought that was really cool and just that concept of being able to provide jobs paid jobs to students

261and that extent work experience within the district i thought was a really cool idea um a couple of sessions clarifying clarifying what critical race theory is and isn't versus ethnic studies um not related to the board workshop but i did just see a teacher quote online recently that referred to learning history as our story instead of history so i thought that that was really cool that concept of of all encompassing perspectives of history is really what ethnic studies is about looking into increased cte and apprenticeship opportunities i'm looking forward to our boardwalk workshop basically to look more into those opportunities for students to get involved with local regional you know professionals to build trade skills um and then a side question um this is random staff question do we do year milestone awards for staff

262members like when they hit their 10 year mark and their 15-year mark and their 20-year work do we do anything like that that might be nice [Laughter] i think we should read off a list every meeting you know with the different benchmarks of people we'll do we'll do the the reading of people who have been here for 15 years and i shouldn't say we don't because i do believe it's recognized at some school sites but we could certainly publish it it would be a lot to read off with as many staff as well sure and i don't mean it school board meetings necessarily i just mean like i know some districts you know teachers get a 10-year pin and i'm like i didn't get a 10-year pin and we have done that for our administrative

263team you know recognize the years of surface just because it's a smaller group we have not done it with staff except for at retirement and then we do recognize the number of years of service of them yeah no i think it's a great idea okay and then i'm not going to talk anymore about it thank you okay matt my remarks are going to be closer to 15 or 20 minutes um [Laughter] throw something at you my emotions run the gamut following the the csba conference um you know i'm at the same time i'm loud i'm alarmed i'm impressed i'm enriched you know just i have a lot of reflections on the whole experience you know um the most noteworthy thing is you know getting closer to you all was positive you know um we're not

264bad people if we disagree you know uh any any worse than anyone else anyway um so just seeing the human side of each other was valuable to me um but uh one thing i'll tell you is that the world of education in california is a huge amazing powerful institution that is not going away anytime soon um it's just a it's a just a huge huge juggernaut that is um it's the product of problems and needs that exist in our society it also creates situations you know and so the policies that are enacted in the world of education are just hugely impactful to the future of our entire country and world so there you go that's it sorry i didn't use my full five minutes you're gonna give me a c plus okay so uh for

265me um definitely uh victor rios's uh i have his two books and my teacher believes in me he he really identifies that teacher that one teacher as helping him go from poverty and gangs to a phd in a very professional life but i stood behind him for 45 minutes while he was signing books and it's really interesting he does literally reach out to people on any kind of cultural connection that he thinks he can make with them so that was pretty interesting so he said i was his agent that's what he told people the other thing though that also made a real impact on me is we went to the one where the state attorney general was talking about the legal issues that boards were facing and a lot of boards are facing physical threats

266i mean literally physical threats and we had people riding very close to us because eileen gets to sit in the very front row who were expressing that their children had been verbally threatened their car windows had been broken just really horrendous physical actions against them because people got matted about a decision that they made as a board and attorney general was really clear you know you can have disagreements but you don't get to go to somebody's house and violate their privacy and their sanctity so i was kind of shocked at how many different board members in that session which was large were expressing a sense of having been threatened and to me that's a it is probably an after effect of the pandemic to some extent but it's also people using emotions and not their

267rational processing so that's what i saw is most powerful okay so um we don't have anybody here to do items from the floor uh does any board member have a request to agendize an item i do okay and i just came up with this so staff sorry for bringing this up right now but um without thinking of it earlier but that conversation that's going on about the um the degree the state seal for civic engagement um i'd like to have an opportunity to get some answers on that and maybe vote no on it because um i sent an email to staff this week and did not hear back and um i'm open-minded on on this this thing this this state seal of civic engagement but i think it needs to be objective you know i

268think that there's some like young republican person they ought to have just as much of a crack at getting a state seal for going out and hanging door hangers or something like that for something they believe in as somebody who's you know like you know a democrat or out competing against global warming or something like that i think that needs to be civic engagement comes in many different points of view so this thing needs to be uh taken that into consideration and and give opportunities to people from different walks of life and beliefs so it will be coming forward to the board as you will hear more about that um and and part of that presentation i will ask that we include what are the requirements that the state sets because it is a state

269seal and then are there uh variances that we as a local entity can add into that i appreciate that and it will be coming forward and if it could be um some version of an action item i would appreciate that madam president and madam superintendent i think it has to be okay thank you okay anything else all right seeing none um yep thank you you