001b good evening everyone this is the march 3rd regular meeting of the chico unified school district board of education we are going to go into closed session and i'm asking if there is any public comment on closed session items there is no closed session comment request so we will we will adjourn to closed session greetings this is the re adjourned or re anyway we're back from closed session and there's nothing to announce um so we should have a flag salute here shall we yes 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 as i mentioned we were in closed session and there are no items to an uh report announcements good evening my
002name is tina keen and i am here to announce an upcoming community event i think board members might have a flyer there next to you chico unified is represented on the butte county nicotina action alliance through two grants that we have the tupe grant and the tobacco grant so chico unified has partnered with this alliance and duke county office of education to put on a community event sunday march 7th and that community event um you can see on your on your flyer there is a family movie night at marion park it starts at 6 p.m and uh there will be some tobacco education there beforehand there will be some kind of some cool swag given out to those who are participating and then a free showing of spider-man into the spider verse so this does
003give information on how to reserve a ticket and also more information can be found by contacting the person at the bottom of the flyer thank you tina do we have any other announcements okay see none we'll move on to items from the floor and these are items that people can comment on that are not on tonight's agenda we have six speakers signed up for items from the floor um are we going to take summer first yes i'm going to give her a try she initially signed up for the later items from the floor but i'm just going to see if she wants to speak now she is a student so we'll take her first hello is this summer hi summer do you would you like to speak to the school board hello okay we're gonna
004are you ready to go i'm gonna put you on the speakerphone okay no you're good you're just the second go ahead summer yeah hi so my name is summersun and um i'm the soft sophomore and i am in the club at chico high school called that stands for student advocacy association and okay thank you okay i'm calling patrice jackson okay those voicemails i'm calling jordan colby hello this is jordan i'm gonna put you on speakerphone you'll have um three minutes to speak you'll hear a bill at 30 seconds that means you just have that many 30 seconds left okay okay go ahead jordan good evening my name is jordan colby and i'm a father of three kids uh junior high and younger and i'm speaking in support of returning our children to full-time in-person instruction
005everyone on this board is already aware of the preponderance of evidence that it can be done safely and the reasons for not doing so are steadily being broken down and disproven every day on february 3rd i watched the board spend the majority of the meeting discussing how to spend 20 million dollars in cares act funding for learning loss mitigation while the school board continues to allow the learning loss to go on certainly when the next bill consisting of two billion dollars to reopen california schools makes its way through the legislature there will be more money pouring into schools which makes me happy our schools absolutely need this money it is well spent but watching that february third meeting it felt like we were on a sinking ship and all discussing ideas for different ways to
006bail the water out but wouldn't consider plugging the hole in the bottom of the boat i don't understand how any board meeting since march of 2020 can move forward without discussion of returning to full-time instructions using these funds acknowledges that the current system is failing us they're earmarked to provide release from learning loss which continues to occur every day that a child in this district receives two hours of instruction instead of six you the chico unified school board have the ability to mitigate this further by returning the students of full-time instruction if you want to focus on the barriers just consult the california teachers association website which shows their layered approach to safely reopening where every layer represents another reason they will cite as not being good enough to return to full-time the barriers they
007can provide are numerous and ever-changing and you can continue to focus on every piece of regulation standing in the way i think we all know that if it isn't death space hitting requirements the next time it'll be community transmission rates or regular testing of healthy students and staff all with their own set of logistical hurdles there will always be reasons why it's unsafe to do so according to the california teachers association august 17th is a long way off let's not wait until then to start giving our children the education they deserve let's stop making excuses and figure out how to get it done now small and large schools from elementary to high school in california and around the nation have all figured out how to do it and are doing it safely the decision to
008close chico schools was made with one emergency meeting providing the board authority to unilaterally make decisions effective immediately why is it so difficult to return to the mission and values of the district which is to ensure that all students achieve high levels of academic and personal success are we really doing that right now thank you okay i'm calling amber camber okay i went to voicemail i'm calling kim lange thank you i'm going to put you on speakerphone you'll be addressing the school board if you hear a bell it means you have 30 seconds left okay okay left correct okay thank you go ahead kim hi yes i'm this is kim lang and i'm a local children's dentist and i just i'm calling as a concerned parent and actually a concerned person in town with what's
009been going on with the um school system here in chico for the k through 12 12 year old grades um considering it seems like the majority of this board is taking no steps in the right direction to bring back full-time education can even considering the number of people that have been vaccinated which is very high for most areas even in our state and their kids are going back to full-time education we would like to ask this board to please start considering the majority of the people and having options for us the everyday people who want their kids back in full-time education we don't want any more alternative um this and that programs that suit just a couple categories of people all of our kids deserve a full-time education and that's why we pay taxes we
010are not getting what we are paying for so we would like to ask this board and to reconsider their options especially on this four-foot rule and you know quit making excuses for this it's time to start moving forward and this needs to end thank you okay and lastly i'm calling gina backs actually i'll call summer back again as well in a second okay there's voicemail so i'm calling summer sun back and hopefully she has a better connection hey summer it's um we're calling from the chico unified school board again are you are you in a you have a better connection now how you doing are you ready to talk to the board no you're good we just want to hear from you so i'm going to put i'm going to put you on speakerphone you'll
011do great and if you hear a bell that means you only have about 30 seconds left okay so i'm gonna put you on speakerphone i'll let you know when to start okay okay go ahead summer hi okay so my name is summer sun and i'm a sophomore at chico high school and i'm part of a club at chico high called saa which stands for student advocacy association and our mission is to amplify student voice on campus and practice speaking up to things that we care about in our lives as well as in school and one of the things that we would really love to do is actually it was recommended by one of the board members is to um bring back a representative system where a representative from the high school could go to the
012board meetings and present on you know how their school is doing and we think that this is really needed right now because everything is changing and it would just be such good practice to have these schools speak up and have student voice at the board meeting okay summer do you have anything else that you want to tell us um no we would just saa is really excited we would love to work with the board in any way any way that we can to bring student voice um to these board meetings okay so the board can't respond to the to your statements but they're we're definitely taking notes okay thank you so much of course thank you so much thank you for doing this and have a great rest of your evening thank you summer yes
013i've been in contact with summer um and i've turned it over to um the superintendent to continue the dialogue okay next is a negotiations update mr hanlon okay we met last week with cuta we spent a considerable amount of time on the ibb which is interest-based bargaining regarding compensation um it's very early early stages but things were very constructive we had a lot of good ideas that were generated within that meeting so i look forward to to reporting on those things as we progress through that conversation um over the next few months we also spent some time on one of the items that is later in the agenda regarding voluntary full return of students to classroom for teachers that volunteer to do so and we'll have a more detailed report on that later and it's
014a and then uh several smaller items junior high stipend for coaching we clarified some language on the all-day kindergarten as you may recall next year we'll have all of our kindergartens doing all day historically they've been a half a day instructional day only and so our final schools will be implementing that full day all all next year and then um we did some marine numbering of the contract because it's um after 30 or 40 years there's so many numbers and letters and big capital and capital letters that it's very difficult to navigate through there so we did a renumbering a full renumbering of the contract which has taken quite a bit of effort and time and we've agreed on that so we look look forward to continuing to work with cta we have some dates
015that we're working on with csca thank you mr hanlon board members do you have any questions on mr hanlon's report okay we'll move on we have the consent calendar next are there any items that a board member would like to pull from the consent calendar seeing none i need a motion kathy has something yes i move the passing of the consent calendar point of order we need to wait for the president to ask for our emotions on the floor i i i think i almost did thank you right is there a motion to approve i move to approve the consent calendar is there a second i'll second thank you is there any further board discussion okay i'm going to call for the vote um members will have a roll call vote dr kaiser bye dalby
016aye eye lando eye robinson eye that's unanimous okay let me get through the consent calendar okay discussion action calendar our first item is educational services we have an athletics update mr shepard thank you madam president just wanted to give the board an update um all the work that the board has has been observing has come to fruition we have currently our alpine sports and our tennis teams and cross country and even field hockey started today pv versus chico i don't have the results but i just want the board to know that we have kids out there and improving their their social wellness we're really excited to have those students out there we have some upcoming sports that we're looking forward to as mr hanlon mentioned we're excited about being able to offer middle school cross
017country and we haven't had that happen from a from a district level in a while it's been happening from a club level but we're really excited the estimates range from 50 to 100 kids on each school site so we're really excited about that golf golf starts next week football as you probably noticed when you walked in tonight they're out there practicing in full gear and baseball and softball are also cleared to compete track and field will be starting soon so our outdoor sports are are amping up so we're pretty excited about that we are establishing our contest protocols and just want to make sure the community understands that we are under really strict guidance for spectators and unfortunately we the we have to limit the spectators to immediate household members so the policy that's been
018created is to provide four vouchers to each participant and they can pass those out obviously if we have extenuating circumstances we can we can work with the families so we're excited about that there's a some criteria from the california department of public health that the parents need to sign an informed consent document and fortunately we had already addressed that back in november so we're we're covered there if we are in the purple there have been some questions about testing football players and if we are in the purple with a adjusted case rate of seven or higher we are required to test our football players two days prior to competition so it's my understanding that our first competition won't be until march 26th hopefully by then we'll have an adjusted case rate of of six or
019lower that's that's our goal and that's my update any questions for me caitlyn um yeah i just had a question about um uh maybe clarification on how we pay our officials when it comes time for that because if we have if there if there are sports that we have to have paid officials for in my past experiences outside of the district it usually comes from the admission fees so families that are getting vouchers are they still going to pay an admission fee are we paying for officials a different way we are still planning to charge for spectators although we only charge for for four sports basketball and boys and girls basketball and girls volleyball and football so the only sport that we'll be charging for will be football and the the district has agreements with
020the officials associations for all of our sports so those those agreements were finalized last summer for this year so they're still in effect okay so i just i guess i just wanted to make sure that we're going to be able to pay the officials and it's not going to impact our families too much or you know put out a call to action to like donate to the athletics clubs if necessary or something like that so okay yep thank you thanks thank you yes mr baltimore yes i'm actually one of the items that's listed under the s or two dollars is athletics and um a portion of those dollars the intent would be used to supplement our programs that have lost the gate revenue and help pay for officials and other items so that's one of
021the items on the ester dollars that we'll talk about in a bit because as you know without the athletics that their gate is substantially down thank you any other board discussion questions of mr shepard okay this is a information only item so we don't need to take any action okay our next item is again information only this is on the overview of school site survey on safe routes to school mr sullivan yeah good evening we were asked to check in with our site administrators and just get a little sense and get some data to look at what's happening with students and safety coming to and from school so we surveyed them and we broke it out i think you guys have a google doc available to you in the agenda we broke it out into
022areas where they're hearing of concerns it related to student concerns they're hearing it related to parent concerns they're hearing and also related to staff concerns that they were hearing so if they were hearing concerns at any of those areas they mark that indicated it so we look through the results and generally speaking once again what we're seeing is a lot of the uh the the safety issues related to it have to do with kind of the drop drop-off and pick-up times at school sites and students getting to that drop-off and pick-up area and exiting from that drop-off and pick-up area so there were a couple other sub-areas some of them expressed some concern feeling that there may be some folks in the community are in homeless status that maybe are putting some concern into some
023of our folks coming coming from or going to school but i think about 20 plus of the areas really were around drop-off pickup kind of traffic flow issues during that portion of the day and that was hands down the strongest uh what the most represented concern area that came out with those things and i will say having been elementary principal for a long time the drop-off and pickup portion of the school day is definitely a fraught with lots of concerns and issues at any given time and trying to get all of our community members to follow all the traffic rules and procedures and laws as they should be can be difficult at times as well so i certainly understand why that came up in that capacity so i'm not sure if there's any questions about
024anything at that point also mr sullivan i have a question i noticed that there's a check on marigold regarding playground equipment is the replacement of playground equipment part of the um upgrade at marigold that was part and i talked with the principal there work orders go in if those things are happening and it's in process okay thank you any questions from the board that's it this is the whole present okay so yeah i guess i i do um first question is um we didn't actually get this spreadsheet until pretty late right um in fact i don't think i've saw it today when did it get posted on the agenda so it probably did get uh posted today so thanks for that opening when we get items at late on a wednesday night i think in
025this case it was about 10 o'clock so then to go back and put together a survey distribute that survey explain it get principals to be involved and then have it back by the deadline of tuesday is impossible to do so uh we had to work all this week getting the information back and as a result it doesn't it doesn't allow the board much time to see it until the presentation itself and that's going to be true on another item that was put on the agenda on last wednesday as well so mr sullivan um thank you for conducting the survey sure um the check marks in the boxes in some cases don't give us a lot of information in terms of you know whether it's a you know considered by this the respondents as being a
026really serious threat or just kind of a i mean there's no rating at all or descriptions in here um with respect to the the constituent constituents i can say who who brought this issue to my attention that caused me to want to get out on the agenda were concerned about um children walking past um you know homeless encampments essentially i can relate to this a little bit because my family actually travels past homeless populations let's just say to and from school every single day and i'm happy to say by and large we've never had any adverse experience in that at all i myself have witnessed disturbing things you know like acts of vandalism going on sort of in broad daylight in front of people sometimes aggressive obviously this is this is anecdotal but um you
027know when you have an increase or a concentration in in an area let's say you had i mean we've got populations right now in in the town moving around um settling here settling there um you know i could see a scenario where if a population got so large in one area that you would just see an increase in that sort of you know maybe i could just call it lawless behavior one case in particular i saw this this act of vandalism was somebody who had a probably a 15 or 20 pound boulder in their hands and they were banging on the side of the freeway essentially as we came by not the end of the world you know destruction of public property but it's not the sort of thing i would want my child to
028come around the corner and confront a person like that if they're willing to be kind of spending time doing that they might you know also not have a problem having maybe an inappropriate conversation with a child that could scare the child so this is something that i think we should just be on our radar screen on an ongoing basis i'm a little disappointed that there's not any kind of anecdotal uh descriptions i i mean we can happily share those anecdotal the kind of the comments with you also okay but but i'll certainly add if anything rises up to the level of kind of legal or the concerns you're talking about also administration's going to be in touch with law enforcement and make sure that they're following up in that capacity as well so kind of
029the game plan if if a family and there are some who are listening to this or may hear about it or read about it that we're to encounter some you know again i'll just say lawless behavior for lack of a better characterization right now we could be talking about any number of things from drug use to you know violent behaviors or um something like that um they should report it to their administration and then their administration will bring it to the attention of the proper authorities and and they can work through the school system in that way absolutely if there's something that rises that level of kind of illegal immoral whatever the kind of behavior you want to talk about art we have a good working relationship with our sros also and i know we
030definitely lean on them at times with these kinds of situations as they're rising as well and they're very um extremely prompt in responding i've learned over the years if we report to them that we have an issue that's related to a school student in particular um really prompt responses to make sure that things are okay at our school sites for our students thank you very much mr sullivan for conducting this and for answering my questions sure and we do have all of our principles that are online if there's any specific questions they're able to answer those but maybe the easiest thing to do would be share the anecdotal okay uh thank you mr sullivan any other board questions comments did we have uh no we didn't have a request card for speaking okay this is
031an informational only item thank you mr sullivan okay our next item is um uh under business services mr baltimore discussion action 2021 second interim budget uh yes we'll have marie hartman and jacqueline krueger will start off the presentation hello so we are presenting the second interim budget second interim is the third reporting that we do out in the budget cycle to you we present original budget in april first interim in december second interim tonight and then um our estimated actuals along with the original budget for 2122 will be presented in june so basically for second interim we take what we presented to you at first interim and update with all the new information that we've received since then okay major themes will show you the impact of one-time funding and carryover dollars the next couple
032slides will show you enrollment average daily attendance projections we will talk about the cares act federal funds sr1 is what we're currently spending and sr2 is the money that we will be receiving next for the next fiscal year and we'll be talking about priorities for spending those dollars pers and stirs annual cost increases are always the theme of our budgets okay a major factor is average daily attendance projections this slide has a lot of numbers on it but basically it shows historical data as well as projections for this year and the next two years enrollments taken at a point in time and p2 average daily attendance is typically about 95 to 0.5 to 96 of um enrollment and you can kind of see in the past that's that's really been true so when we project
033for future we use 95.5 of our projected enrollment so if you look down the the list historically chico unified has been increasing enrollment and increasing average daily attendance but for this year 2021 we did have a negative change in enrollment and so we're projecting a negative change in ada and because of that we're also projecting declining enrollment for the next two years but not as vast as 2021. next slide okay so this slide shows actual average daily attendance versus funded average daily attendance typically school districts are funded on the greater of current year ada or prior year ada and if you guys will recall due to covid right now there's a hold harmless provision where we are going to be funded on our 1920 average daily attendance for and 21 22. so on this graph
034the bar is actual average daily attendance and the line is funded so you can see 1920 21 2021 and 21 22 will be funded in that straight line but then when we get to 22 23 we'll be funded on again the basic greater of current year or prior year so we're projecting kind of a funding class at that next slide okay so our major assumptions on this budget like we said local control funding formula which is our main unrestricted revenue source it's based on the state adopted budget which is the same base funding as 1920 the cola was zero as we talked about the funded ada will be based on the prior year the unduplicated students identified in targeted subgroups which are free reduced meals foster homeless and english learners that percentage is 50.70 and
035salaries and benefits reflect physician control as of february 15th so the latest and greatest information we did have additional certificated full-time equivalents added those were charged to cares act because they were added due to coven and those were primarily online teachers for oak bridge academy and some teachers taking additional sections and secondary because of the scheduling changes okay so here are the numbers a few things to look at here it's another slide with a lot of numbers on the unrestricted side the very first line is local control funding formula like i said that's the vast amount of unrestricted revenue that we receive another thing on the unrestricted side the first line of expenditures you can see that most of our money is spent on people that's very typical and if you go down to the
036bottom line we are basically break even for our unrestricted budget on the restricted side we're showing a change in fund balance of almost 3 million just a note about the restricted side though it's a little different it tends to go negative just because of the timing of grants it doesn't mean that we overspent on that side it just means that we had carryover in prior year that was spent this year so i will turn it over to jacqueline thanks murray all right so in front of you is i think a great little pie chart to look at our budget in totality so as marie pointed out in the previous slide it's a lot of numbers sometimes can be challenging to go through so in front of you is a pie chart that shows our entire
037budget so restricted and unrestricted and restricted expenditures and basically what it's showing is 84 of our entire budget essentially goes towards people right it's the salary and benefits associated with that um and then the remaining percentage goes for books and supplies furniture services pg e that kind of thing but then what we want to do is break it down to look at the unrestricted side as well as the special ed contribution because a large percentage of special ed program is funded from unrestricted dollars so when you break it down differently and look at it from this angle our salaries and benefits actually take up 89 of the budget and i will comment on this that that's actually slightly lower than what we've brought to you in prior years and that is a result of just
038reduced expenditures on the unrestricted side because when we started the year there were some positions that were not filled or there were parent aids that weren't filled because they didn't need extra assistance for yard duty at the elementary school so normally it's in the low 90 range so we're maybe off one or two percent but i just want to bring that to your attention so the other components of the budget um include transfers in from other funds so we do have a on our books a fund 41 which is a redevelopment agency pass-through fund which we do have three million dollars there that is transferred yes jaclyn back to the pie chart yes [Music] special education contribution is that what's funded over what we receive it is basically the local dollars that are added to
039the special ed funding from the state and federal government to make the program whole okay that was my question so three million dollars comes from that redevelopment agency pass-through fund as well as we are able to take three percent of our developer fee collection revenue and move that to our general fund to cover some of the administrative processes of collecting those fees so it's just over three million dollars that's coming in from other funds that will go into our general fund we do have a transfer out which essentially is a contribution to our nutrition services program of 468 000 and then i lean to your point on contributions to restricted programs so we do have a 15.7 million dollar contribution to our special ed program this year in totality our special ed program is about
04027 million to give you a frame of reference we do we are required to contribute three percent of our total expenditures to our routine restricted maintenance account that's 4.5 million luckily three million of that is listed at the very top that we do get from for fund 41. so it's about 1.5 million of local dollars that are going towards that maintenance account um and then this year we did reserve we did receive a project serve grant um in a nominal amount about 8 400 that was to reimburse us for some extra extra hours worked by staff during the campfire so i think it's really important that when we present this budget to you for second interim that we compare it to what we presented in december for first interim so overall if you look to
041the very bottom line we got better by 1.7 million that bottom right corner 188 188 000 is related to revenue so our unduplicated percentage did get slightly better as we refined our data through calpads between first interim and second interim and we were notified by the state that the rate for lottery was increased as well on the expenditure side really the big piece is the classified salaries so there were positions that we had in the budget at first term because we were unsure of what the school schedule would look like second semester that we were able to either not fill or reduce or we've also had trouble filling positions too which has been a challenge in this covet era and then second to the bottom line transfers and contributions we were able to reduce our
042special ed program by about 500 000 from first interim and then our three because our overall budget is smaller we contribute less to our routine restricted maintenance account so that's decreased by 300 000. so that's why when we were here in december we said negative 1.4 million and now we're basically saying it's roughly break even at positive 250 000. so the other really important part is to plan ahead right so we're looking at our multi-year projection as marie noted earlier we are estimating a decline in the two out years as we move forward and related to that would be if there's less students overall we will reduce certificated full-time equivalents or ftes so 23 in 2122 and so 15 of those would be related to the fact that this year we lost 450 kids but
043we didn't reduce staffing and then eight for next year and then another six in the third year related to decrease in enrollment the other thing we do take into account is we have staff who are who are moving across the salary schedule via step and column we take into account the person stirs changes and then certain any inflationary factors related to fuel pg e any utilities of that nature we also do though take into account that as employees are moving across the salary schedule some retire and so we do take in that into account as well knowing that we have staff who retire at the upper end of the salary schedule and are typically replaced with staff who have lesser experience so we do take into account 20 certificated retirements each year in the multi-year
044projection and then the last piece of information is as we build in revenues for future years we did use the school services of california estimates for cola versus the department of department of finance and there as you can see on the screen they are pretty different as far as forecasting the future in the two out years i don't have a question mr mr tennis yes sorry madam um president i have a question about enrollment who would be a good person to ask that too thank you kevin um i see enrollment down by about 4.5 percent over the past year and a half um and i want to get clarity on something and maybe i should have pulled this off of the consent calendar earlier but it relates to the enrollment question and we're using that
045to project our revenue and the out years so um there's an other category there's an elementary decrease and then there's an other decrease and so this elementary and secondary enrollment decreases then there's an other category that's actually gotten more students in it it's increased actually by 763 percent not elementary not secondary but other what are what is other other refers to schools that are neat that are both elements serve both elementary and secondary students so that would be oak bridge and loma vista okay okay we've seen a tremendous growth in oak bridge as you know this year yes all right thank you for that sorry that's okay that's a great question so in front of you is the actual multi-year projection with the values um calculated so you can see in the current year again
046about the fourth line down 250 000 dollar surplus going into 2122 it jumps to 5 million so what we see there is their total revenue increased is related to cola but we are still funded on our attendance from 1920 which when you compare 1920 to we're down we're estimating going into that year that we'll be down 650 students so we're being funded on a much larger amount than the actual students who are attending our school so additionally when you go out to the third year you can really see now we're down to 116 million in revenue that's that funding cliff that marie alluded to because at that year we will be funded on the prior year which is much closer to the students that we'd be serving and so as a result in the third
047year right now we're estimating negative change in fund balance of 2.4 million but i will say with all of this we have very healthy reserves so the very bottom line on the screen shows our reserves after our three percent requirement for the state of our reserve the additional board reserve as well as some one-time money that's been designated so we still have 15 million in the current year 22 million next year and 19 and a half in the following year and let me just stress how important the enrollment estimates are because quite frankly historically we used a historical trend to somewhat help us predict the future but first with campfire and now with covid the real the back data is not relevant quite frankly so we're projecting a decrease but quite frankly that can completely
048flip if our vaccinations are good students are coming back full students come back to our schools we could actually see more students but right now the prudent thing to do is based on the decline we've seen this year is to continue to look at decreases over the next two years in 21 22 and 22-23 kevin thank you okay i'll get caitlyn go ahead no i go second okay um just to speak on what you just mentioned kevin do we have um a better idea or a way to get a better idea of the of why the enrollment is declining i know that we have a snapshot of where they're going um but are there any is there any way to figure out what what the causes of that might be you know i don't know
049of one i certainly don't know of one that can be put into kind of a mathematical formula quite frankly so um in full transparency we really are looking at driving down some of those transitions for instance when we see a second grader matriculate to third grade historically we know that maybe that class gets a little bit larger but right now because of just the unknowns we're going into that cell and driving it down maybe 20 additional students to see this decrease in enrollment over the next couple years it's the fiscally prudent thing to do it's the conservative thing to do but to be fully transparent that could change we could actually have more students but i think it's still the right approach as we're building a budget to in essence plan for the worst and
050hope for the best yeah i think that this isn't necessarily the right frame to kind of put this question out but i do want to bring it up again about declining enrollment and really digging into the why and what is there that we can do about it or what is there that you know the community in general needs to do about it um and so i i do know like uh there was recently a housing element um report that was put out and that the a big portion of our lower income housing development has not happened it's only been like 1.5 and 1.3 percent 166 of our higher income housing you know the above median income housing has been built so i'm wondering if that might be part of the problem like i'm wondering if
051there's a way for us to to sort of dig into that a little bit better to um to be ready for for seeing those those those possible changes when we were looking through tracking where our students were going a lot of our students are leaving the state and for whatever reasons you know people are and when they came out with a state report normally we had 30 to 50 000 people leaving our state in the last three four years but this year we had 150 000 people leave our state students our ada's down statewide so it seems to be a trend people are leaving california at this point so again i don't know i know you're talking about the housing and how we can get involved but keeping people in our in our city and
052our state and every year we do a demographic study related to facilities and the intent there is to really take a look at all those types of factors that are behind the scenes that may drive future student enrollment so that we can make sure we have facilities to house them in so it's not a perfect science and it is different than funded student enrollment in ada but it does start to tweak kind of tweeze out some of those issues that you mentioned so we're not in the complete dark about what may be coming the problem with the covet impact is just the absolute unknown yeah i think i'm worried about the the exponential factor of of covet effects and you know job loss and those types of things trauma and then lack of available affordable
053housing in the community is possibly driving out our younger families that might not have a high enough income to stick around so if there's a way that we can kind of pursue that line of thinking and be part of the bigger conversation among the community to encourage you know a more family-friendly community as far as growth goes that might be beneficial to the district and for future enrollment so the information we get comes when students leave they don't necessarily tell us and in fact they often don't let us know they're leaving the only way we find out is when we get the request for records so that's how we track where they have gone but we don't really have a way to track why so on those that actually have communication with us you know
054we can do an exit interview and exit survey but those are that's not the majority so um i have to think about what's the best way to get the kind of information you're asking for what's your reason for leaving not just where did you go to it's not currently in our system i'll put it that way i i had um some additional um input question of you kevin we we did receive the king and associates um demographic study and recommendations for the next i think it's a five year and then a 10 year lookout if i remember correctly anyway some of the interesting stuff that they have analyzed along the lines of why why have we decreased and the covered uncertainties um they've recommended um taking a moderate approach to declining enrollment but one of
055the two of the things that i thought were extremely interesting was that because of covid and people being able to work from home that a lot of the pressure from the bay area where housing costs are so significant that people are coming to the chico area to relocate because they can work from home here with housing expenses that are far less than what they would find in the bay area and the birth rate decline has not happened uh the king and associates indicate that that even with covid that our butte county birth rate did not decline this last year so that all of the rationale in those first five pages of their demographic study this year provided some like you said some real interesting things to think about but there's no way of really predicting
056with any certainty until we have a year under our belt and we don't yet that year's coming up well i'll pick up on the presentation and just bring up the impact of the pers and stirs costs we have a little bit of a reprieve going into the 2021 year where actually the percentage increase for the stirs rate went down so that's why you see that negative 347 542 number so in the 2021 year our pers and service costs actually went down in our multi-year projection the next year they go up again um really driven by the pers increase not so much the stirs and then in 2223 one of the factors that's driving that kind of increased negative change in fund balance is the 1.5 million dollars of additional 1.4 million dollars of additional costs
057related to pers and stirs and just for a note uh the state sets the rate for schools as compared to the city that is really has an actuarial report or analysis done within its own pool of employees so cash is still something we need to be aware of and as a reminder we're still having cash deferred and what that means is that the state is not paying us on time so typically we were supposed to get what we call a principal apportionment in the month of of april they're going to extend and not pay us that until next fiscal year now we can handle that without having to look at having an infusion of cash through like what they call a tax revenue anticipation note because as jacqueline mentioned we have very strong reserves and
058those reserves are cash balances that are maintained at the county treasury but even with that strong balance you can see that our cash goes down in june and continues to go down until we really get to november and december when we see those tax receipts come into us from our local taxes and then the apportionments keep coming through the rest of the year so just as a summary our interim reports we have to self-certify of whether we are positive qualified or negative and there are some definitions there positive being that we will be able to meet all our financial obligations in the current and subsequent two years and this report shows that we're able to meet all of our obligations over the next three years i'm not even going to talk about qualified or negative
059because we're nowhere near those as for the um the interim reports do need to be board approved and we do pass those on or actually turn those into butte county office of education where they do an um a review and then actually issue a letter to our president stating whether those financial statements or they agree or disagree with that certification and then kind of going forward you know really the the budget has improved greatly um compared to the prior year and and some of that as jacqueline mentioned was the delay in filling some of our classified positions as we were uncertain the level of service we'd be providing um in the multi-year projections um we really have now seen cost of living adjustments provided in the governor's latest budget and i will tell you it
060really has been a roller coaster for the finance people because less than a year ago we were thinking the sky was falling we were preparing for very dramatic cuts and a much different conversation but the state economy has actually performed well through this and has continued to grow and actually so we're looking at cost of living and adjustments that are increasing the amount of revenue and the out years and not expecting the cuts that we were just months ago frankly um just a couple notes we don't have settlements with compensation groups in the current year 2021 and that's for all of our groups um we are going to talk about the uh s or two dollars so we would like to get those into the budget because they can be spent in the current year
061and then certainly next year and then we want to certainly develop those programs related to addressing that learning loss that planning needs to happen now so we can have those programs in place not only to do that immediately but also for budgeting for next year and then just a note the state budget negotiations are ongoing and although we'll talk about the deal that the legislature and the governor have reached for one-time money the overall budget for 2122 has not been resolved and those negotiations are continuing so that's the second interim report i think it represents the district is is financially very healthy i am encouraged that our unrestricted balance uh fund balance is a positive 257 thousand dollars at this point in time and we do know we get a little better because we don't
062spend all the dollars that have been allocated in the budget that's typically almost near a million dollars every year so this is a good report i think it sets us up well for moving forward any yes thank you any additional board questions of mr baltimore okay hurry none we do need to approve the budget certification um that's on slide 14. i need a motion to approve budget yes mr tennis to approve the budget i have a motion for mr tenants to approve this budget certification is there a second sure i'll second that mr landau seconds thank you is there any further um board discussion okay hearing none all those in favor signify by saying aye aye thank you board it's unanimous oh dr kaiser are you muted um let's see if she responds it doesn't
063appear as though ms kaiser is um linked at the moment so we'll take a uh her position as um no vote absent okay so four to one thank you board okay our uh next time oh yes kathy we needed a vote to certify the um budget as possible yes on this the question was whether or not to certify the second interim as positive yes thank you so now we're five to one our five to nothing unanimous thank you kathy all right thanks okay our next item is um elementary and secondary schools emergency relief e-s-s-e-r sr2 one-time funded allocations mr baltimore okay so we are starting to receive a lot of one-time money um this is specifically related to the elementary and secondary school emergency relief funds this is the second round so we there has
064been an s or one the sr1 dollars were enacted by congress through the cares act the coronavirus aid relief and economic securities act however these dollars are s or two dollars and they have been enacted by congress related to the um corona virus response and relief supplemental appropriations act which was enacted on december 27th of 21 or i'm sorry 2020. so these dollars have been appropriated at this point in time we are projecting that we're going to receive over 10 million dollars these are one-time dollars as i mentioned um and they must be spent in totality by september 30th of 2023 so since this agenda was put together we've had a new piece of information and that is the action taken at the state level and i mentioned this because the state dollars are also
065one time in nature and we expect the governor to sign those by this friday which would allocate another 12 million dollars to the school district that would start to be appropriated in the next month so i quite frankly have never been quite in this position of having this much one-time money coming into an educational organization i do really stress that this is one time in nature and the state funds and this is important not only to the conversation we'll have tonight but we'll bring back a spending plan for the state dollars next month is that the state dollars must be spent by august 31st of 2022 so the state dollars have to be spent earlier than these federal dollars that we'll be talking about this evening a mantra that i've often lived by is that
066we can be anything related to the finances but we can't be everything because there's just not enough money to be everything we want to be i find myself in the very strange position of basically telling the board you pretty much can be everything you want to be in the remainder of this year and next year because you're looking at 22 more million dollars to spend exactly and it is one time in nature kevin please ms dalby sorry can uh i just make sure i wrote this down right that uh sr2 monies need to be spent by september of 22 and the state oh 23. i think that i just maybe wrote that down wrong i knew it was a bigger gap i was like okay august then september but okay got it so it's august
067of 22 is the state and on september of 23 is the is the sr2 got it thank you got it exactly so this evening what we're really asking the board to do is allocate the s or two dollars at this point in time that 10 point over 10 million dollars um and really we're looking for some kind of a motion or move that would allocate the s or two dollars in the following manners and then we provided a few examples and recommendations of how you might use those and we're going to walk through a couple descriptions because there's a couple that we really believe if the board wants every option to have students come back in a full traditional day at the start of next school year we really would like and need your action
068this evening so that we can put those dollars in the budget and can start spending them the first being furniture and we have estimated the amount of need for furniture at 1.85 million a couple notes the furniture examples are here these are the same furniture examples that we've placed in the schools that we've modernized or done new construction and what we're recommending is that we complete providing furniture to all the schools related to not just the schools that we've improved in our facility master plan but all of our elementary schools it also includes for our kindergarten students who tend to be more in pods and on the floor some portable kind of hard tops with almost like a bean bag underneath it kind of surface so that's included in this as well it would provide
069this is one time money the use of these this furniture would give us 20 to 30 years of benefit it's already needed to provide equity and equality across all of our schools and what we found on the facility side is furniture can have one of the largest impacts on the educational delivery model so by using these dollars we think we're really positioning ourselves well in the future if we don't spend out of these dollars more than likely at some point in the future we're going to spend them out of the bond dollars and so by doing this this evening or allocating dollars for furniture this evening we would have more bond dollars to use towards facility projects in the future as well i will also talk about the staff reducing class size to mitigate the
070learning loss and the four-foot social distancing we are currently overstaffed um we did not project that we were going to lose 450 students in the current year and so we currently are overstaffed anywhere from 15 to um 22 20 teachers at our elementary schools and so what we would like to propose is that we use these dollars to continue to maintain lower class sizes one to address learning loss and two to really maintain that social distancing requirement as we go into the future in each classroom for one year thank you and kelly can't say it enough this is one-time money so whatever we are choosing to do with these dollars really needs to be with the idea that this is not going to go on forever question what will a cl what would the class
071sizes be in this scenario well what we provided here um is that our class sizes at the elementary level would be maintained pretty much what they are now which is almost 20 i would say on average ted can answer that yeah our k-3 classes are running around 20 and typically we're up in the 23 range so you know it varies of course site by site and unique situation but but in general we're about three to four students less per class average and our intermediate classes are usually around 28 29 ish and i would say we're hovering closer to 25 26 right now on average we believe secondary probably around 30. so a secondary i used a loading number of 30 to come up with a calculation that basically means that we would need to hire
072additional 27 full-time equivalent teachers to meet that mark now that's compared to where we would be if we were loading to contract and at 35 to 1. but quite frankly i think that is very is pretty conservative because i think with the new rules because another change that's occurred is the definition of social distancing four feet which prior to last friday we were living under the assumption it was edge of chair to edge of chair we have a better definition now from the california department of public health which states it's four feet from the middle of the back of a chair to the middle of the back of the chair which really almost gives us another row in each class um so we think we can get more students in so i think we could
073load our secondaries higher than the 30 but to present an allocation i'm really kind of giving you the the worst case scenario or the most it would cost to accomplish that the only other item i'll mention and i'll kind of turn this over to ed services to talk about the other items is the air conditioning and climate quality one of the provisions of sr2 this was not true of s or 1 but of sr2 is that they allowed improvements to your hvac your heating ventilation air conditioning systems to improve air quality you could use s or 2 dollars to do that so we have an allocation here of a request of two million dollars related to improving air quality in classrooms dr kaiser has her hand up thank you caitlin dr kaiser yes i want
074to strongly support this initial designation of expenditure for the furniture and and the other component um and i'll i'll take mcmanus as just an example um we have had a number of schools that we've had to push back in our facilities planning because we had other schools that were growing so fast we couldn't uh delay but a lot of times then that creates the sense that this is a school that is not as excuse me not as desirable often has a higher percentage of ethnic groups in that school and so mcmanus is one but rosedale is another and so the sense is that these schools then become unattractive to parents even though they live in the neighborhood and they'll go to a different school because they don't think it's getting as much attention so besides
075the issue of allowing us to really take care of the safety health issues around distancing this is telling all of these schools in all of our neighborhoods that they are worthy of our attention and buildings take a long time but we can do furniture right away so i think it's a really critical expenditure we want to be back full time and fall this is a big part of that thank you dr kaiser kevin you were continuing i i do have a a quick question just to make sure that i've got my notes correct we're overstaffed at the elementary level by you said 16 to 20 teachers that's what's allowed us to keep those class sizes at 20 to 23. if we were staffing to the ratios that we had in in contract um those class
076sizes would be significantly higher correct correct thank you so there's just being a couple comments on the hvac and all and all in there is that um these are dollars that one can be used through s or dollars or s or two and we think would be prudent so one of the first items that we would spend out of that would be to upgrade our energy management system across the district to a non-proprietary system that would allow us to to actually remotely be able to see the amount of air coming into a classroom whether or not the filter's clean we get temperature dates we can actually see what's happening in each of those hvac systems that would be one of the first things we'd want to do and that's almost a million dollars in and
077of itself and we have the two million because then there's some old hvac systems that we would also like to replace so that's why you see that number there for air quality we also want to research options of air filter improving air filtration in the classrooms themselves mr lando thank you um i'm just looking through the line items here there's one or two that caught my eye since i know this is one time only money um but it looks like one of the suggestions was for an i.t support staff um do we see an increased need is it that then it's going to disappear are we going to creating a new position that we're going to be on the hook for recurring after that you know i'm kind of done with those three i was
078going to talk about i'll turn those over to ed services let them answer that component of it hey this is john vincent so i can answer that so um we're looking at bringing in a full-time position in a half-time position for 18 months to help us get us over the hump here with all these chromebooks we just have so many chromebooks right now that's going to really make a big difference for us so it's envisioned as a limited term position thank you okay okay i can go over um and again i'll go over them as quickly as you want me to and if you want to stop me and then ask me like try to break down some of those costs we clearly can do that for you the first one is the uh maintain
079internet connectivity for 75 thousand dollars that is to make again we have we're planning on coming back full time but we still want to make sure that we have our hot spots and our comcast available for our families which we have this year and so we want to continue to be able to do that next year for our families for their connectivities at home that cannot afford um internet at their homes so that was 75 000 um the next one uh the big one you see there is the tutoring uh for we have there for three million even if we are full-time am pm we want to continue the tutoring if we're back full time next year we would still like to do tutoring before school and after school and also offer more money on
080for saturdays to allow us to catch up for learning loss for these past years with the pandemics so we want to continue those if we're using the federal dollars we can continue those for two years um if we're doing state dollars which we can we're going to come back to next month we can continue to do that for all the way through next year so we're basically talking right now at the bare minimum two summers and one full school year of doing extra tutoring for our students miss dolby thank you um is the intention for having a a full tutoring program before school after school not during school time is part of the intention of that so that students who need more targeted intervention don't have to give up like an elective class yeah we
081have again if you you've seen this for years students would have to give up their elective in order to have an intervention class if we can offer these extended days for them then they would be able to keep their elective which is very important for our kids that want to come to school that's one of a good reason for them they love they're having their cte courses or their elective classes at the junior highs so we're looking for that go ahead mr tennis you're done answering her question um summer school is this a good time to talk about summer school sure okay um what if we just pile on summer school i mean if we boosted that i mean what are we looking at right here product wise with what we're looking at on this
082spreadsheet and what could it be if we were to take from other areas and and augment this can i i can tell you right now there's two different types of things we're going to offer during the summer one is a credit recovery summer school which we use right now title 1 funds and also our junior highs have other fundings that they use for for credit recovery so that's different funding than what we're talking about so we well typically we could have up to at the high school level that we run through um summer schools for the secondary for high schools we could have up to 300 kids trying to earn 10 credits and a four week span and we use title one dollars for that the junior highs also can earn up to 10 credits
083during their the summer um at their junior highs we're also going to be running summer academies and that's different and that's what we want to use these dollars for i think it's going to be a little less possibly than what we're showing here now because we we're going through our teacher groups and our principals we believe that three-week summer academies might be too long two three week ones because of families wanting to vacation and our teachers doing the same we at the very minimum we're going to run two two-week academies one that right after school ends we'll start up for two weeks from nine to twelve they'll get fed for two weeks and then we will run what we call early we're calling it early back we'll run a two week programs for right before
084school starts for to get kids a boost before they go into school mr tennis i think it's important too to note that the proposals for those kinds of things are already starting to come in we realize that we're in a time crunch and so if we are allowed to move forward with those we you know we can't wait to just suddenly uh implement that in april or may because we need to survey and find out what kids would want to do it and then staff so we're starting to solicit applications for proposals for different types of summer academies in case we're able to run it we think it's really important to get that ball rolling plus we'll be sending out surveys again mr sullivan you can correct me but i will be sending out surveys
085to our teachers and our families and who are wanting to be part of those academies and they could be any student that want to go to those candidates we just want to get the number of students we have and how many employees that we have that are willing to work those academies that correct absolutely we actually our elementary principal meeting on tuesday we had kind of our first planning session and we have a survey ready to go out to staff and families to kind of gauge how much interest is out there for these kind of opportunities and we were talking about offering a third session during july with it also so we just kind of need to start getting a sense of you know are there a hundred families in one of these or there
086are 600 families that want to do this and then start trying to make sure we can hire enough staff to operate it then also with it so yes if i may continue um can you compare who would be the best person here to compare and contrast i've experienced like early back in the past and really liked it what was that about two weeks or so there or is that was that what it was so so our summer school experience quote unquote for the grade school kids was kind of a two weeks before school could i have done more than that um then i did or or and what i want to really understand is how much more than that are we looking at with this so let's let's ted let's talk let's separate out elementary
087from secondary so once you talk about elementary and then i'll talk about something elementary as mr marshawn was talking about we're talking about trying to run three two week sessions three hours a day uh we want to mix in academics absolutely but we also want to mix in some opportunities for some of those things that kids have been missing out on for the last year also and could you go to all three of them if you wanted to if interested yes and the money's there for that basically with what you've got in the spreadsheet with what's allocated here we think we could operate it pretty comfortably and kind of have spaces for as many people as we'd like to be attending as long as with the math and the reading we'll be doing a social
088emotional um curriculum during those three hours too and again we're going to want some enrichment time for those kids that they've missed out on also but we want to break it down so we'll make sure that we're hitting all of those so for secondary we would offer from june 7th i believe through july 3rd a four-week credit recovery summer school which is really focused on core academic areas and at the same time most likely after listening to our teacher groups we have meetings with them every monday as you've heard before we have our dlc input from all of the different sub dlc groups they believe that a two to three week window right after school ends and then possibly a two to three week window right before school starts to give kids a chunk of
089time in the middle so that's the that's the kind of application that that have been coming in from the teachers and i want to reinforce that the summer academies they could be anything the teachers think is academically and social emotionally relevant so for example if a teacher wanted to spend a few days with students working on their their art skills and possibly take a field trip to manca to reinforce the concepts that they're learning during during that academy that's something we would consider we also anticipate that we'll get more elementary families that are going to want to take advantage of these academies versus secondary we will offer obviously for everybody but we anticipate we'll have a larger amount with elementary and and i will say to re reiterate what mr shepard was talking about secondary
090is a little more specific in focus with maybe at art academy elementary would be a little bit more of a i don't call it a generic in a negative way but creating an experience that lots of schools could be using kind of that template to organize things and put put structures in place to make a good experience for students also it wouldn't be quite as individualized as secondary would some of those options has um for secondary has anyone thought of partnering with chico state like to do computer programs or something like that um yes these computer labs or maybe like a wall climbing sort of thing or something like that have we ever done that and would we consider doing something like that we have we have a strong relationship with the between the cte
091programs and chico unified and both butte college and chico state again it would just be a matter of teachers saying hey we want to do this we want to get kids involved get their brains engaged do some things that maybe we weren't able to do in the last you know the last year and there could we i was talking with some math teachers and they're having a conversation about having a for example an integrated management one math academy just to get the kids who might need a little more reinforcement get them re-engaged as they start the school year because even in a normal year we do have summer learning loss right from june and june to august so it'd be an opportunity to do that but we'll be talking also is the fact you know
092we could do a code academy you know somebody wants to learn coding we can do something like that we're hearing different things from our teachers that they want to offer that would be along the lines of not just straight math in english 9 english 10 but trying to get kids back the stuff that they've lost in other areas also i have uh dr kaiser you have your hand up you need to unmute yourself right so uh my appeal for this and support is we've been dealing with my grandson being in the hospital and missing school so at this point he's missed a week and he might miss two weeks and so i think this is really really critical uh especially with the issues around uh you know the concerns we have about kids being contagious
093or having to be quarantined and it's not coveted it's uh it's not that related but this is really really a critical asset to offer to the families who want their kids to be back on track thank you dr kaiser caitlin uh yeah um so for secondary okay let me just make sure i'm understanding first of all for elementary um the plan is to offer three two week sessions that's kind of like summer camp with some academics am i understanding that right correct initially we talked about more of uh i don't call it a recreation enrichment kind of academic focus in june but come july august it would gear more towards kind of some academic focus and re-teaching so that they're ready to come into the school year with some academic kind of grounding back in
094place for them and that's and that's dependent on teacher availability to work through the summer that would be part of it and part of it starts becoming if we have a huge demand from parents we will start going out and offering positions and seeing how we can fill those positions with credential teachers okay good and this is not to like speak speak poorly on anybody wanting to participate in in this because it's a great opportunity for us to make sure that our students are are growing um it's that i know a lot of staff needs a bit of a a social and emotional break as well absolutely i think a lot of them are gassed with with the last year it's been a full yeah it's been a full year of this like high octane
095trying to figure stuff out problem solve you know build a build an airplane while you're learning to fly it situation for everybody so i just wanted to acknowledge that you know the teachers who are able to you know who have the capacity to do that that's like above and beyond amazing and the teachers who don't don't feel bad about it you know like everybody needs some self-care at some point um and i'd just like to address that and also to um make sure that that there will be opportunities to um have other people step in to still fulfill the need if we don't have enough uh teacher interest for very legitimate reasons you're sharing that's where we start advertising and trying to recruit in people that we're willing to work in those capacities great so
096our goal is to rise to the demand absolutely absolutely even if a teacher wants let's say it's a two-week academy and they get a partner they're willing to do one week and the other one to do the second week we're willing to work around those types of things with teachers and again we're we're not sure about that middle that july one because we you know that's a lot of times where our families go on their vacations in the middle but we'll again we'll see what the surveys say to us and right now we'll pull the teachers all together i know we talked about wanting them on every campus which would be our ultimate goal but we're going to first see what we have for the need from our families at the school sites and the
097teachers and so we then we'll start placing them and they'll be able to cross over to other school sites if their school isn't providing that i'm assuming correct and then at the secondary level if i understood correctly there's a there's two different things happening one's the credit recovery program it's a four-week credit recovery program is the is that do we know that that is going to provide for all students who need credit recovery because i know like we said you know around 300 but what if there's more that need credit recovery are we going to be able to expand to meet the need of those students who need the credit recovery absolutely we know we have the capacity for that it's just a matter as you've said of finding staff you know to be sure
098that we can staff it um but we are the application process internal application process has begun we wanted to get a jump on this regardless of what happens tonight with the budget because we don't want to be caught right behind so we're prepared for that and then after it flies internally there's not enough people who sign up but it goes to external um advertisement okay and another thing we're trying to do to entice our teachers is normally we would pay them a summer school rate per hourly um now we're paying them per diem so whatever they normally would make during the school year on their hourly rate um that's what we're going to pay them so that'll be on an increase from a lot of our teachers to be paid so we're trying to entice
099them because we're anticipating more students wanting to do these academies and then so just my second half of the secondary question um so on top of the four week credit recovery program for that six through 12 right um is also it was two or three two two week sessions this is where the the proposals come in from the teachers so for example it may only be a week right it could be five days it could be ten days it could be in june or it could be in august i would imagine as mr marchand said we won't have too many in july that's just a chunk of time you know that people need the need to break but we're going to we've been soliciting proposals and reviewing those we have a standing agenda item each
100week to um to just you know to get to answer questions uh but again it comes back to if the money's there we can we can approve them and one of the things we haven't talked about is is the possibility of students getting some variable credit during those summer academies and if there's a credential teacher working with those students why not so is it so is it kind of like um and sorry if i'm simplifying this a lot but almost like a card type program where you know you'll have a there's a list of things that are being offered and students can sign up for you know this one week session of i don't even know like learn yeah learning ecosystems through gardening for example um you know for a for a one week session
101uh or you know i guess i'm kind of trying to wrap my head around what that looks like at the secondary level yeah and that's the difficulty as mr sullivan said there's such a a range of curricular topics i think what needs to be embedded in the what not i think i know what needs to be embedded in in the proposals or the applications is is ties to the standards we need to be sure that there's some connections to that connections to learning laws that were yes that's that's the key for it to be funded mr lando thanks um so on that note i see we've allocated um an estimated 650 000 for each of those um knowing the way you do money i assume that's uh like a ceiling that you don't ever expect
102to surpass but how solid are we on that number is our best estimate at this point in time but i think what's nice is that we're going to bring back another plan related to the state dollars which has again 12 million so even if you were to say we want to do everything on this list and we can only allocate 10 and you carried over every item that's only 6 million and we still have 12 coming so i guess to answer your question this is our best estimate right now based on some very broad assumptions as this gets tighter we'll bring this back to you so that it's roughly 1.3 between the two the elementary and secondary academies how many students does that assume you're going to be serving during those times i think we
103are trying to build in where it's as many as would like to i don't think we targeted a specific number i apologize to be vague with that but when we were talking about we're just talking about if we can have this many sessions happening at a school site um don't have a specific number i apologize let me put this in context a little bit we are looking at big broad range categories and that would be the maximum um although we could always come back and say you know what we had a lot more interest than we thought and and revised that number but as mr marchand and mr sheppard and mr sullivan all alluded to at this point we don't know what the demand is because we haven't surveyed students yet we don't know what
104particular areas and how long those courses would be especially at the secondary i think we have a very good feel for the elementary because we've done that we've done credit recovery before but doing the academies is brand new but i could envision let's say you know chico high ffa wanted to do three weeks of um you know some kind of animal and plant academies in the summer and get their kids in and they do a lot of work in the summer anyway this is an opportunity for them to come in and do that perhaps even with some credit and then the teachers be reimbursed for the time that they're spending there into the instead of the volunteer that they do it so many times so all of these um and i think it even says
105there we need to refine these more they need to be broken down more there's a lot of unknown built in that's why we're bringing them forward as big general categories i completely understand that and i'm not trying to put anybody on the spot um i'm trying to figure out what the assumptions were like for 650 are we planning on buying roughly 15 sessions roughly three sessions what does that look i mean three is clearly not real but what are we looking at do we know initially tom for elementary that we were thinking if each school had a session being offered for each grade level that was kind of our building point for what we think we want to put one second dollars for for grade level per se at least as a starting point thank
106you from there thank you that's our ultimate goal another one they were talking about is our ap teachers came to us and normally they assign work over the summer for them to come in and they right away that they have tests and quizzes on but they're thinking of doing ap academies to start at early back also and another one that's all that's on here is our kindergarten camp also when we identify our kindergarten fam our families are coming to us and said listen my child's never been in a preschool or have never been exposed or they've had some difficulties in their in their preschools we would like to see if we get them in for a few weeks to learn how how kindergarten works and so they're not doing that the first few weeks of
107school the kids are ready to go is that correct mr sullivan absolutely almost like a a training session really for students to kind of see what kindergarten's all about and we also see a lot of times like mr marchand said students that haven't had a preschool experience kindergarten is kind of difficult for them sometimes so we see sometimes those students have difficult behaviors also so this is a chance to kind of walk them through what to expect with kindergarten and also hopefully kind of give them some time to get behaviors where they're ready to go for kindergarten when it's time to start can i ask about two other uh line items here just while i've got the mic um one is similar to my previous question there's an mtss coordinator on there for a hundred
108and forty thousand dollars is that again what we like a short term just to kind of address uh social emotional needs or what is that yeah so we're excited to start to frame everything that we're doing underneath that multi-tiered system of support framework and ed services has been trying to figure out the most efficient and visionary approach to creating the across all sites the same approach for addressing our system of support to do so we need to have a coordinator we need to have somebody who is always focused on our multi-tiered system of support so we've come up with a staffing structure and the multi the mtss coordinator would be directly in charge of three other three another level of staff who then would be reaching out to each of the sites we realize there
109are so many things happening on all our sites that just fantastic work happening and sometimes we don't have an idea of everything that's happening in one document so our goal is to create this multi-tiered system of support package and we tie everything to that and the mtss coordinator initially funded through these one-time dollars would get us started and then we would start to figure out ways to continue to fund that that person ongoing we believe after this two years if this got funded to here the first two years so we could we have some funds available in one of our title funds title four we believe we can be using after that again this all depends a lot of this stuff depends on how the budget looks after these two years too and what we're
110doing with our budget and what we can keep and what we can't keep through our lcap and grants we'll be continue to use miss metzger and the person that's going to be replacing her to make sure that we can continue these programs after the two years but yeah right now this is kind of kickstarting us uh mr lando until um we can start using our other federal dollars to continue them okay then my last question right underneath that on the list is a kind of cryptic 20 times 2 000. what on earth we are we buying 20 after 2 000 so i believe we're talking here about our equity alliance uh cohort coordinators so right now as i've i think we described a couple of board meetings ago we've been partnering with chico state and
111humboldt state on a problem of practice and basically trying to address inequitable practices bias and even racism within our district so we've been working now for about four months to truly identify investigate and explore what that looks like in chico unified school district and we're having courageous conversations at every level from cabinet to all the way down to the site level what we're realizing is we need to have one person on each site who's responsible for continuing that work and so the norcal elc chico unified equity alliance cohorts are each stipended two thousand dollars to participate and that stipend is comes from the norcal elc grant and it seems fair to ask at each site that someone lead those equity alliance cohorts and also be stipended so that's where that two thousand dollars per person
112comes from we also have three other very large chunks and agency for professional development again that's very the top of the ceiling do i see us spending that much on each one of them no but we want things that we want to repair we think we have not been back to full time since last march so we want to again be able to give our teachers some professional development time when we go back to full time that they're ready to go and what that looks like to make up the review and everything to spill what we've been doing in these academies what they can do into their classrooms so we want to make sure if our teachers need some times to meet with their math or their english or their different departments to say okay
113this is what we got to attack that we didn't get in so we can blend it with what we got to do now so we just want to be able to put money aside if teachers come to us to say that they hey we need to get together to look at that we also have a big push for our social emotional learning curriculum that we want coming in so we're setting money aside again to make sure that we're training our counselors our teachers our target case managers our counseling assistants we want to make sure that they're ready to go with that curriculum because there's a lot more curriculum that is now available that we want to make sure that we're pushing out and i'm trying to see what the third one was mr tennis you
114had a question yes i had a question for you jay about the professional development items there's three items here a half a million each so all told that's more than the summer academies for elementary as a standalone or secondary as a standalone what are those what what is that exactly paint the picture for me i want to understand what that consists of again let's say the um i had one of our map department leads from one of our high schools come and said listen we got to really break down these math standards again with our with our group to make sure we're covering what to make sure they recovered previously what we want to cover this year and try to get caught up through the learning loss that we have so are we going to
115be able to sit down with my math department from my school and the other high school to develop with this um the adjustments we might have to make in our curriculum that that possibly that the students have lost over this past year so those that they would be getting together for a certain amount of hours developing a product telling us what they're going to do how many hours it would take to develop that product and and then move forward with that we also have brand new science curriculum uh ka we want to make sure that we give them time to because they didn't get it really any time during this pandemic to learn what this new amplified science curriculum is going to look like when into their classroom so we want to be able to
116have them break down with lessons start planning units together so they're ready to go when school starts um in the fall so those are types some of the types of things we're looking at do i think that we're going to spend 1.5 million uh i don't think so but we we just want to say again inside we don't know what that ceiling is we'll come back and say listen we only spent 500 000 out of those three pockets okay so what what can we do with this other million so we'll be bringing that back caitlin uh i i'm glad that you brought the summer time up again um because i i had a question about that earlier um before we moved on to the rest of the items and that uh is just the surveying
117that's happening um i know that uh mr sullivan said that it's happening at the at the elementary level right now right uh staff and and families are being surveyed it hasn't started yet we'll probably go out in the next week sorry my apologies um do we have an anticipated um time when that those results will be back and analyzed it will take us a good month plus to make sure we can start organizing everything so our hope is by early april mid-april we'll start having a good sense of like we think we can offer this many sessions we think we have this much staff so i'm going to guess a good month before summer comes we'd have a much better dollar kind of number to put forward and the same thing at secondary level well
118secondary is a little different in that these are going to these are really going to be choice sessions um so we're going to need to solicit input but we also need to solicit um applications from teachers so it's a little different process and you know we need to see what teachers are willing to provide and again we're not talking about credit recovery we're talking about the summer academies i don't want the public to think um we're different or that we're to confuse the two we are we are certain we already have applications coming in that there are some creative ideas we just need to get those in a queue make sure we we publish the menu that is available to kids and um as kids show up we'll serve their needs i i have two
119thoughts and the first one is starting to leave my brain and i don't know if i'm going to grab it um but my second thought just now is uh has there been any talk of soliciting ideas from students themselves from my understanding most of the ideas that have come to us from the teachers have been [Music] in from conversations with kids and and parents right yeah i can tell you that we about we started a little over a week ago we met with the money group we went over this budget with them told them this is just a draft plea we went with our dlc groups to talk to them about this and then we met with our principals at the elementary and the secondary this past week and said this is a draft budget
120we're going to be showing this draft budget to our board also we know we have some specific things on there that mr baltimore talked about that we're going to need some approval for immediately but a lot of this other stuff is stuff that we want to look at one of the things now that we know that we have the state funds it's because quite frankly for counseling time that we've talked about for for adding we're looking through grants we think that we can handle adding more counseling wellness counselors at the high school than junior highs through grant money that we have um that we're working on we were trying to figure out how we could do that at the elementary but now that we have the state money in we would most likely say when
121we come back in april hey we like to push some of this other stuff into state that's a one-time one-year thing but if we could add elementary so we could go full time that every elementary site right now they have if we can go full time we would like to use the federal dollars which is for two years so we could have to add the counseling on the elementary for two years we already know we have the money for the secondary to grants to do that but if we could then move on here it doesn't show that we'd come back in april say look we made some adjustments we would like to put i think we thought six hundred thousand dollars it would cost us to have counselors that correct mr sullivan yeah 600 per
122year per year for elementary to go full-time a counselor so we could do that for two years out of the federal so i'm just saying this is again a working document through us trying to figure out now that we have 11.7 or 12 million more of the state funds and how we can use the one-year money versus the two-year money so it'll be a little bit of a shell game i'd like to go back and address the question you had though about student input this time of the year we go around and we meet with students as part of our lcap process and we meet with our targeted students our most at risk populations representatives from those at each and every school site and the kids have wonderful ideas but one of the things we
123heard you know definitely at the secondary level was the opportunity for tutoring either built into the school day um or before or after school so that they have a place to go to get help or there's somebody there that can help them and and that's been consistent across the board didn't hear as much about summer although we did hear from a few students that they felt they needed the opportunity to make up credits that maybe they just didn't do because they weren't engaging in the online environment so i think credit recovery is something we offer every year but probably we'll have a little increased demand this year as a result of the the different environment that this year brought so we do get that input from students so on that note um i i did
124i did um hear loud and clear summer suns uh talked with us earlier today so maybe there's an avenue for a student-driven uh approach um since the the lcap meetings are very you know um administrative driven even though they come to the table and it's a good um representation of like the general population of students but maybe there's you know uh some more active advocacy type students who would want to come speak speak to us or present to us some ideas that they would have or or have some kind of bigger seat at the table um just just kind of i would like to see a lot more student input in these decisions that we're making for sure dr kaiser is waiting i still had one thing though okay my one thing that came back
125to me and it's a question for for kevin um and sorry dr kaiser um the uh the surveying that's happening hopefully we'll be able to hear about during our general april general meeting um is there an anticipation that we might be also discussing uh spending those state dollars at that april meeting so i'm hoping that are we going to be able to like do start to wrap this you know nice next to your present up yes i certainly hope so i think one we have to have a plan related how we're going to spend the state dollars and quite frankly you can definitely see the connections between some of the ideas here on the esser dollars and the the state dollars as well so um not to get too far eggs we want to hear
126dr kaiser but quite frankly the really only two items that i would say the board really needs to take action tonight to make sure that all options are available to you to have school fully open a traditional model are the first two we can bring back the rest of them and quite frankly we can do that in the form of both s or two and the state dollars so you can get a little more refinement of what we're talking about but we're also going to then want to talk about some flexibility to and jay mentioned it use the federal dollars over the two years and be strategic about how we use the state dollars over the really two summers and one full year that we have so that's an option that i might present to
127the board that the first two items we would really want you to take some action on tonight the other ones we can come back and and present a little more refinement for you they will still be broad in nature because they would be budget allocations but i think being able to answer your question related to surveys and the type of programs we want to offer would very would be prudent that would be great if we can get secondary and primary for primary feedback and some student input kind of presented to us while we make some more decisions about spending the state dollars if if there's enough time to put it all together by then that's that's my hope dr kaiser are you still there i am okay so the context of this is how many
128of you started your day with your five-year-old telling you that we're all composed of dna don't raise your hands but the other side of that is the brother that seven has been in the hospital and has missed you know over a week of school already so we always walk this type line between trying to offer credit recovery or makeup and loss of learning but we also have a number of families who are very concerned about their child's ability to leap forward and so not be bored so i'm hoping in these summer workshops that we are anticipating getting teachers presenting us with initiatives we just had the college connection that we passed we have a lot of career tech uh innovations in our uh curriculum so i'm hoping that there will be potential for parents and
129kids who are interested in jumping forward from where they are right now but we could also offer that in the summer so the critical part to me is we move forward tonight with the absolute concrete minimum of what we need to go with in terms of opening for fall the furniture and these uh recognitions of these summer institutes which i think are critically needed and allow ed services to come back with more explicit descriptions when they have the information available to them thank you dr kaiser okay um board um i i think i'd uh break in here we have two people that have signed up for public comment um before we start to take action so i'd like to take those two folks for public comment um john you have that information were we done
130with the presentation weird and i mean obviously there's a few things on there about cyber safety and a couple of our other programs like educlaimer and we can clearly answer those questions what those are if you like we're open to any of that the board members have you asked your questions on this list am i ahead of where you want to be okay let's just kind of coming up with my questions as they went through each item so i didn't really have um questions prepared for for ahead of time because i wanted to hear what they had clearly can go through some of the other ones that i have not i think that just my one of my biggest ones is just a little bit more expansion on on counseling and wellness maybe um i
131think and you touched on it but i don't know if you got to say like the fully what what that what that was all about i'm really sorry it's just really what we want to do again we want to the wellness counselors we want there at halftime at all of our junior highs and high schools we want to increase those to full time we'll use grant money for that but um as for two dollars we would like to the 600 000 use the federal dollars or we'll put on there for the april one but we're going to want to fly these it we will we can use it under probably that five million that we have for um if we're adding more staff but we're going to need to get some type of direction if
132you guys want us to move forward with the counseling which we add and another half time at each elementary school which would be you know again um what ten how many more counselors would we have to hire six six for elders six more for elementary roughly and that would be for each elementary to have a full-time counselor yep and then is there a support staff like wellness support staff on top of a full-time counselor there's like counseling assistance in elementary schools tcms those are all in place currently as well and how many at each site each site has at least a half-time person like a counseling assistant at least half time some augment with their own funds for it like each site has at least a half-time tcm also um i i think we're talking
133about the counseling position specifically because i just from what i hear from principals there's just a huge demand for a little bit deeper kind of therapeutic kind of option for some other people it's not the wrong term but at least that kind of site-specific kind of support i think jay has a good point sorry mr marchant has a good point about about making sure that that money that's being allocated is for of a good full two years because there's a lot of there's a lot of community trauma for all of our kiddos that we're trying to to handle here and i think one one year isn't enough for sure but i i know that i know that um you know elementary staff members that i've heard from are are also very supportive of of increasing
134our counseling and wellness staff and i would say they probably would would ask for at least a full-time counselor and a full-time um support you know support uh tcm um if not more uh so ideally we're kind of pushing towards that direction um and to have the goal of making it a permanent fixture um into the future you know obviously for the for the one time money is that is what it is but but to kind of come up with a longer term plan to keep that in place yeah because we clearly can make them temporary because we know that we if we use the federal dollars or two years we also we we believe our students need that support as you're talking about and it also would give us a higher level of candidate
135if we knew that they knew that they were getting at least a two-year ability to work on things instead of like a half year or one year so what's on this list here is for increasing our elementary accounts counselors to one full time at each site yeah we're going to want to add that on there for on so we can get started hiring in the hiring process for that yes all right that hiring process i'm sorry caitlyn the hiring process the being able to fly those positions what's the what's the drop dead date on being able to do that because kevin mentioned two actions that he specifically feels we need to make tonight to guarantee we're in place for full-time opening in august but it sounds like these positions also need to be flown now
136because hiring later in the year just doesn't work mr hanlon would you want to speak to that huh so we yeah the next meeting is until april 21st that's much too late to start hiring if we want to get quality people we need to be at the front of the line when we're competing with other districts and counselors there's there's not the quantity out there so we want to make sure we get the quality yeah so i'm looking at um the mtss coordinator funding and the uh 20 times for the stipends that was um and then down into the wellness counselors are those the positions that we're talking about needing to include in tonight's funding approval correct but we're gonna the um we would need to add the 1.2 for the counselors for on the
137federal dollars in here which is not on here again i didn't add it just because we were kind of waiting to see what the state was going to do and what the priorities but we would have to add that in to something along the lines of employees on this list of 1.2 million if we're gonna well we could go 600 000 right now before the one year but we it's going to be 1.2 over two years all right do you think before we go that route we probably should hear from the public before we start if we're if we're finished yes i would like to hear from the public and then be um i had one more too just yes before we move on to the public comments i'm sorry um i just got an
138email um so and i i think that it's timely um and i don't know where we're at and this is probably a good question for kevin um about the um the pool at chico junior um is that something that is is reparable or are we is it like it needs to go away when it comes to facilities um if you haven't been by there in a while that pool is completely raised filled and has been paved over and is now applied yeah i didn't dig it again right i was confused i was a little bit confused but you know also if there was you know a place that this something needed to be fixed or is it maybe i'm miss speaking is there a pool that needs to be fixed chica junior did i say
139bidwell no you said she could drink okay oh my gosh that's okay but there is yeah there is no pool of chico junior anymore okay um so there really is an opportunity to repair it sorry yeah funding to repair or rebuild the swimming pool at chico junior high it's gone okay uh yeah and and like i said i'm definitely not in the loop in any of those activities that was not my wheelhouse there so okay if i could ask admin to identify specifically which line items while we're receiving input from those that are waiting to provide input so that we can know what it is we want to include or not on the things that need to be in place so that we can fly positions and get the hiring process going so we're ready
140for our parent input thank you i'll be calling jeff martinec okay um left okay okay go ahead jeff all right thank you board for the the work you do that helps our children yes it's our fun discussion was lively and i think the money will be well spent however the school closure and returning to full-time in-person learning is without doubt the most significant issue the cusd board has ever had to deal with the mental anguish the learning laws an emotional injury the kids are suffering cannot be ignored the destruction to our local community and its families cannot be understated the disproportionate effect on the poor the minority and esl community is shocking this is possibly the most racist policy the cusd has ever enforced i applaud the board for admitting that their policy to not
141be in person full-time learning is actually at fault for the harm our kids teachers and community are suffering trying to fix the devastation your decision is caused without returning to full-time in-person learning is irrational and a waste of precious resources teacher effort and money the ess er funds are desperately needed the tutoring and mental programs that are being developed are also needed for the sound awesome for sure it has been a rough couple of years for our kids and staff to think these programs will have a meaningful impact of alleviating the harm your policy has caused and continues to cause without reversing the underlying policy is foolish spending this money and resources without returning to full-time in-person learning is like trying to save a bleeding patient in the or with more and more blood without
142stopping the bleeding so stop the bleeding like you said rise to the demand the evidence is overwhelming and has been for weeks full-time in-person learning safe for our kids and teachers anything less is knowingly and actively harming our kids the only group i am aware of campaigning to continue this policy to keep the kids out of the classroom is the teachers union it's clear the union is not disturbed by the suffering the harms policy is causing the kids and teachers the teachers reputation will be scarred for life from this policy you miss dalby mr lando ms kaiser and ms robinson you four are responsible for the harm and destruction occurring in our community the mental and emotional distress your decision is causing is terrible you must change your vote the decision is yours and ms
143robinson you are the leader you control the agenda do your job support our kids and teachers make the board vote return to full-time in-person learning i urge the board do the right thing bring all of our children k-12 back to school for full-time in-person learning we still have 11 weeks by the way the funding cliff that is undoubtedly coming in school year 22-23 from lower 88 is unnecessary the reason why his parents are leaving the district is because it's beautiful thank you very much okay i'm calling miss hernandez hello mrs i'm going to put you on speakerphone you'll be addressing the school board okay hello can you hear me hello you hello miss hernandez this is the chico unified school board of education calling you would you like to address the school board her her
144internet connection cell phone connection isn't isn't working she can't hear me thank you um remind you yeah i tried twice i'll yeah no problem i'll try again yeah if she uh has been listening to the meeting just a reminder hernandez that emailing the board and providing public comment we do get to hear that and and see it even if it is after tonight's meeting sorry about the connectivity issue okay thank you and um a reminder to to both of the callers and to the public that as was mentioned many of these items um will be continuing to return to us over the next um several meetings for adjustments so it's not a everything's not set in stone this this is a a process okay now we are to the point i'm going to ask the
145board if there are any motions associated with this agenda item mr landau thank you yes um and i hope this stuff after i make this motion well correct me if i'm getting the numbers wrong but i would like to move the immediate allocation of 8.2 million dollars 1.85 towards furniture five towards staffing with the aim of reducing class sizes uh 150 000 towards an mtss coordinator hiring and 1.2 towards the hiring of additional counselors and counseling staff i do have a spreadsheet whoa hi kathy yes thank you we heard your second okay uh uh ms dalby i just wanted to clarify that the extra amount of funding allocation for counselors at the elementary level is has been added to that total okay just double triple checking thank you okay any further discussion thank you guys
146you're on the ball mr tennis sorry the acronym mtss what is that multi-tiered system of support system of support so for us in chico unified we have a three backpack we call them a multi-tiered system of support we have academic backpack that has all kinds of policy procedure program in that backpack we have in the middle social emotional and then we have behavioral so that's the structure that we're using to encapsulate all the student support um i have a comment i guess along with my my um i vote which is what i'm going to be doing um i agree with our caller mr martinek i think that we should be back in school full-time and the funding for the extra staffing to facilitate smaller class sizes you know i i approve that i think that's
147very reasonable the counseling funding the extra funding for counseling um his points and points that have been made uh in a lot of our written correspondence and in previous meetings that a lot of the problems we're having we would not be having if we were doing our job as a school district and that is serving our community by being full-time in person so i'm not particularly enthusiastic about the um the extra funding toward counseling other than the fact that you know counseling is valuable and as we've been educated it is one-time money so it's not a particularly enthusiastic yes vote but i will be casting an eye vote for this item in this motion thank you mr dennis any other comments ms dalby yeah i just um would like to i think um hopefully uh
148i don't know if the word appeases is right but um mr tennis is concerned about um spending on counseling being maybe uh not necessarily necessary if we weren't in the situation to begin with and and that's that we've needed expanded counseling for years and years so this is something that that has been on the the ticket as needed um i can't remember the date or the year that the the study came out about trauma in our region um we are like six years ago yeah so we're our region and our in our school district and it's not just chico unified we have the highest percentage of students who experience trauma especially at the younger ages and in my opinion and don't take offense to this y'all um but i think that we have missed the
149boat on on um expanding our counseling staff at the elementary level to get ahead of the needs at the at the secondary level um i think the studies really emphasize that early intervention at the younger ages does does pay off in dividends you know at the older ages and so i i hope that um you'll come to see the value in that maybe dive into the into the research a little bit more i would just encourage you to understand um the need that we've had for a much longer period of time and not just this year i totally understand you know not not being totally engulfed in educating the field of education for the last you know decade um an outsider wouldn't necessarily know that and so um i know that you're you're coming up
150to speed with some of the the inner workings of that and it is something that we've needed for a really long time so i'm glad that you support support it even if it's a little tentative i think that you'll really see the payoff um in the long run as we sit on this board for the next several years you know just by way of quick response um i know we've got more items on the agenda but um i've been impressed with the level of counseling that i've had for my family my my my three kids who are have been in the school system chico unified and one who's on the way i've spent some time out in in the religious community uh in terms of schools and um i can tell you that in this
151regard the counseling i was thinking just in term in terms of overall availability of services i mean we're we're um for what it's worth we're we're blowing their doors off based on my limited experience i mean if you want somebody a responsible adult to be available when your kids having a you know an attitude problem or something like that i don't know what every school is like out there it's not a non-district school but but you know the level of service that we've gotten at um at parkview has been pretty doggone excellent you know there's been a number of meetings i've had where they've pulled together basically every relevant person in my kids education experience from the teacher the principal and then like two counselors and and and then in a classroom aid and more
152and they'll have a after hours meeting just about you and your kid and it makes you feel very special as a parent and as a family and you feel like people are paying attention to you we were getting that you know without this extra money which is one-time money and like i said i'm on i vote but thank you i appreciate your your comments and you know we just get so little time to talk to each other because of the brown act and all that so just thought i'd take the opportunity to respond to you thank you is there any further discussion or oh just miss kaiser do you have your hand up again no i thought we had a motion we do we have a motion we have a second we've had discussion and
153i'm about to call for the vote great all those in let's say we we had a unanimous last time so we're fine with the voice vote all those in favor of approving the what was the bottom line number again 8.2 million dollar expenditures on the um the spreadsheet that's presented tonight signify by saying aye aye thank you board madam president yes mr tennis i'd like to move that we approve the um the summer school funding as well the summer academies for both primary and secondary um we do there are monies here because we have 10 million and we've only allocated 8.2 my only response or concern or just item to bring up is that the air quality issue can't come out of the state dollars so if we allocate the rest of those dollars right
154now out of these esser dollars um then we would give up that opportunity to to kind of improve the air quality so um if there's a time issue with the summer school piece then you know absolutely i i would point that we could do that but if it's not a time issue mr tennis i just i would point out if we could wait till april on those to at least give the board some options of spending these escrow dollars for equality that's just an option that sounds great and i withdraw my motion thank you okay we're looks like we are ready to move on to our next item is the board in in need of a break i i see lots of yeses so we'll take a uh a ten minute break um thank you
155board patrice oh miss dolby snuck back in thank you caitlyn we're ending our 10 minute break and we're on now to discussion action item excuse me charter school facility agreement uh miss kissel is oh there's miss kissel hi julie it's all yours thank you good evening school board um just to go give you a little bit of background on inspire history with the district when inspire was created i think 10 years ago there was a large effort put forth to figure out where inspire was going to live and they eventually ended up as most of you all know that they share the campus with chico high school they're in the portables that are on the campus at the rear near the sports fields and it's from the start has been an inadequate facility for inspire
156and a difficult situation to share a campus with a comprehensive high school so it's very exciting that this school board took action back in december of 2019 to revise the facilities master plan and designate a portion of our canyon view high school site for the future home of inspire school of arts and sciences since the board took that action we've been working very hard to come up with a good plan for that campus to be constructed and we've applied for funding and we've luck been very lucky that the state is going to provide funding for the project luckily there were other schools that couldn't take them up on the offer of funding so inspire moved up the list and we were excited to hear that we had moved into a position where we were going
157to get funded as part of the charter school funding through proposition 51 the school inspire will have to enter a funding agreement which they have already done to pay for 50 of the project with a loan from the state and the other 50 they will have to come up with on their own uh through fundraising and through their measure k allocation that we have provided them so this facilities agreement that is in front of you tonight is a requirement by the state for them to get that funding and you all have a copy of it i'm here to answer any questions that you might have regarding it um uh julie i i did ask um you know for a brief clarification on um how the project selection process for the contractors was going to go
158could you run through just briefly again for the public as well as the board on that process absolutely we call the contract method in my world a construction delivery method and we have several construction delivery methods that are available to a unified school district in the state of california some of them i'll go through the the list there's a design bid build which is traditional public contract code that most of you are familiar with a low bid situation where you put plans and specs out on the street and everyone who has the appropriate license to perform the work can put in a bid and the district is required to go with the lowest responsive bidder another method is called a lease lease back and it is allowable through education code and in that situation the
159district is allowed to select a contractor through a process that's mandated by law and so it's not a competitive situation on dollars but it is a competitive situation for qualifications and experience when we select that contractor they're called the lease leaseback entity and it's basically the same as the general contractor on the project and we develop a committee within the district to perform the selection process contractors are asked to provide statements of qualifications references information about projects that they have performed and how they have performed on those projects and then they are interviewed by this committee and the committee makes a decision on which entity to select for the project and then the third method is the design bid design build sorry design build process which our district has not utilized but it is a
160selection of a team which is made up of contractor and architect and you evaluate teams of contractor architect groups in many different ways and there's lots of different criteria and then you go with the selected contractor architect team in the case of inspire school of arts and sciences my answer to the board's question was that we would like to utilize the lease lease back process however with the requirement of a skilled and trained workforce which has been integrated into lee slee's back law now it makes it very difficult for our district to utilize that construction method delivery method it has increased cost it has a very high union involvement which you all may know or you may not know that there isn't a lot of union uh local contractors in our area that cover all
161trades some trades have quite a bit and some have none and it makes it really difficult and it increases costs for us to try to comply with that skilled and trained workforce so for this project we will most likely be doing the design bid build which is the regular public contract code low bid situation where we will be going with the lowest responsive bidder once we put those plans and specifications out on the street does that help explain that thank you uh ms dalby if i could ask a follow-up question since i'm really new to this process um my philosophy in spending money besides on our students firsthand um is is what's going to support our community most immediately um so i i think what where my concern needs to be would need to be
162appeased is that whatever contractor is the lowest bidder um isn't coming from the city where those monies are going to the city you know i'm seeing the berry or sacramento and that those monies would be staying local in this community right unfortunately ms dalby we do not have control over that in the public contract code design bid build method and and we would have more control over that if we were doing the even though it's more costly the lease method lease lease back thank you we used to have more control with that method before some changes to the law cutting back to my description of lis lee spec and after the general contractor is selected and where we're working on the project the general contractor is then required to competitively bid all of the subcontractor
163trades now where they didn't used to have to do that now they are required to do that and we are required to accept the lowest responsive bidder there are some ways that that can be changed and it requires prior approval by the board of education and it's very specific so in general we cannot select based on uh you know contractors being in our local community which is very frustrating because we worked very hard to foster relationships with local contractors and trying to keep our local people working on our projects however it is not all dire because we do have a lot of local contractors who enjoy working for the school district we are one of their favorite customers and they do participate in these bids and they are competitive because they're right here they don't
164have to pay travel and subsistence you know coming from the bay area or coming from sacramento it gives them a bit more leverage on you know being that low bidder and we have enjoyed having a huge percentage of participation on local contractors on on most of our projects but we cannot mandate that they are local in the in the bidding documents if that helps and that's just is that in any of the bidding documents or just in the design bid build in any of them at this point so the lease lease back also we wouldn't be able to ensure that that this would all be done by regional contractors instead of you know out of county or out of region that is correct we used to be able to do that we no longer can
165yeah i just i guess it doesn't sit well with me the the thought that the lowest bidder gets the cake but you know they might be working for scraps but that's because they can afford it you know um so i don't i don't know how i'm gonna have to sit with this for for a minute really reflect on that thank you one thing i might that might help you when you're contemplating it is that all of the work that we do is public works and it all requires prevailing wage to be paid so all of the workers are making a prevailing wage for their work so someone can't come from out of town and pay their people less and beat out a local company if that helps uh it helps a little bit except if
166they bring their own workers from out of town then that's just that much more prevailing wage that's going out of our area not staying here in our local economy yeah so i just i i want to know if there's a way to be mindful of that these are you know um monies that are raised a lot from you know our property taxes and et cetera et cetera and and then also grants and and such but um i i know that the i know that the our construction community would would definitely benefit in our and our local economy would benefit if we could ensure that it was a local contractor or set of local contractors that were that were you know getting these contracts with the school district absolutely one other thing that i'll add is
167we work really closely with the valley contractors exchange here in chico and when we have a big project that we're going to put out for bid we do some outreach to local contractors so they know what's going on in advance they know we have a project coming out and are aware so they do get you know a little information to help motivate them to bid on our projects i will say just going right along with what you're saying miss dolby is um something the board felt very strongly about when we initially uh spent the bond dollars for the high schools those were able to be targeted locally and then when we went out for the bonds that was um you know what we wanted to be able to ensure our community we would do and
168it was something we could do until we had some changes in laws that were you know driven largely by labor agreements so our hands are tied in that and and i cannot agree more it's very very frustrating and i know we've all looked for cracks in that um you know what are ways that we can get around it and we've been pretty handcuffed be happy to get some more um i know we've had facility attorneys come in and talk to us that at previous board meetings be happy to do that again because it is something i think it's hard to understand it's hard for me to wrap my brain around and so i'm sure it's really hard for the community as well the most basic mr tennis yes thing briefly to your comment is i
169think it uh helps prevent um like cronyism in awarding public contracts you know there's a long history and public contracting of um you know awarding public contracts to your friends and stuff like that and um lowest responsible bidder is a way to keep that from happening thank you do we have any requests for public comment yes i'm aware of that okay um dr kaiser um i'm going to call for a motion i understand you wish to be recognized i do and i would like to move the adoption of the charter facilities agreement and if i get a second then i'd speak to it a second we have a motion and a second dr kaiser so i have been at the state level and then at the chico unified level on facilities for over 14 years
170and the law that julie is addressing was really a law that was pushed by labor and ever since it was adopted i have gone to csba every year except this year of course because they didn't meet and challenge different union groups to come into our area and submit bids and they will not so i think that despite our our sincere interest in local groups being able to sort of gain an advantage they can only do it by the quality and the caliber of the bids they submit when you have to verify everybody is union and most people in our area are not it makes it very very difficult so i can attest that julian her professional group are very very conscientious about this and they will pick the best that's available to us thank you
171thank you dr kaiser any other input okay board i'm going to ask for a vote all those in favor signify by saying i i i it's unanimous thank you board okay our next item is a discussion action item on the citrus i e e e p preschool project bid julie kissel thank you tonight we bring forward the bid results for the project the project is to establish a a preschool building on the campus and the other grant dollars that are involved outside of construction are specifically to help support special ed and preschool correct ted yeah so that's what the project is all about and we received four bids last week the lowest responsive bidder is twin trees incorporated and i've also outlined the overall budget for the project for you you'll notice that the construction
172budget on the lead sheet is not the same number as the twin trees low bid because there's more construction that needs to occur outside of the contract with twin trees namely the relocation of the playground structure some data work that needs to occur and the moving of the buildings back and forth we will do that outside of that contract so the amount for the construction budget is up to 280 000. i will open it up to any questions that the board may have on this item board any questions uh uh so just so i'm julie i think that we're gonna be fast friends as i have questions about these things since i don't know very much about this arena um the question i have is uh that this twin trees company um they were the
173lowest bidder so that's the who who we will be moving forward with is that what we're we're discussing right now yes and um is this twin trees out of vina california yes they are awesome that's good to hear i think that that's regionally close enough for me to feel good about that that outcome thank you thank you any other questions board do we have any comments from okay thank you okay i'm going to um call for a motion i moved the adoption of the citrus ieeep preschool project bed thank you dr kaiser is there a second i'll second it since i've raised my hand kathy [Laughter] thank you i have emotions i can't see your hand i have a motion in a second any further discussion board okay all those in favor of approving the
174preschool project bid for citrus signify by saying aye aye aye thank you board real quick comment um this feels very anticlimactic but these are really exciting things like i'm really excited about these these two things we just approved for facilities so anyway i just wanted to be bubbly and express my my gratitude towards everybody's hard work on that thank you thank you i'd like to mention as well that all four of the bidders uh are local for this particular project okay next is one of our most popular items and that's a tree removal at chico high school again kev oh no kevin baltimore you get to yes it does come my way over i think julie's a little more articulate so i'm going to let her weigh in on this issue poor julie well thank
175you kevin okay so i unfortunately i'm sorry i didn't read the lead sheet that you were provided but i am aware of the situation with the tree at chico high school there is a tree uh it's it's behind and to the side of the varsity baseball uh black backstop and there's an issue with this tree that it is damaging its its roots are damaging the potable water that comes on the site you can see in the background there's a backflow preventer the potable water feeds the drinking fountains the restrooms and it will be damaged by this tree and we would like your permission this evening to remove this tree we will plant another tree in a in a more appropriate location to replace it and i would like to clarify to the board the lead
176sheet has one mistake i note that it is a raywood ash which is correct however it does not have the spiky seed pods those come from a sycamore tree so that was incorrect on my part the main focus here really is the root system in the main water line well i take all those awful things i said about the trees little balls back mr tennis i thought the spiky balls was a sweet gum tree you may be correct because i'm not an expert i was just told i got it wrong the first time and um i i move we um remove the offending tree is there a second oh second that's sure and a second any further discussion and do we have any public comment thank you okay board if we are ready all those
177in favor signify by saying aye aye passes five zero can i clarify one thing please miss robinson yes kevin's reference to the spiky balls is there are three sycamore trees that drop spiky balls on the south end of the track some of the board members who were here when we did the track and field work may remember that we removed other sycamore trees hoping to not cause damage to our new track and field and we will be coming back to you to ask to remove those three trees as well they didn't make it to this board agenda but just a heads up and that's where the confusion about the balls comes from because the balls land on the track they get stepped on damage the track cause discoloration and coll and make it difficult to
178clean keep clean and safe for our students and and kids fall and turn their ankles because of those yes little balls the trees were planted there to provide shade for the baseball spectators so we would want to replace the trees with something that will provide shade as well but those particular trees are are really detrimental to the track they've grown so large that they drop branches and those balls onto the track thank you thank you um while we're on the topic of trees um what's the procedure for um for getting trees planted on our on our different uh csd properties anyway i mean is there a need that's addressed for shade trees or any other purposes um certain species that are selected for any particular purposes uh yes there are there is a list of
179trees that are selected for our school sites that we can share with the board the process has been at least on in my part of the world that we plant a lot of new trees when we address a project at a school site we completely re-landscape a site and there's usually hundreds of new trees that are planted but my experience at the district has shown me that we work with other groups like the lions club and the local tree advocates and they donate trees to the district and work with our maintenance department to get those trees planted in appropriate locations so if so if like a student group wanted to plant a tree for arbor day for example that's something that can be organized either internally or with different organizations in the community city of
180chico non-profits etc yes that's that's true okay gotcha um how does that and does that require board approval for doing those kinds of tree plantings i don't believe we have ever had to get board approval for that but there are certain things to keep in mind the location where you're planting a tree you want it to be maintainable over time you don't want it to potentially damage drainage systems on our existing buildings you know dropping things into onto roofs that end up clogging drains that end up flooding rooftops oh sorry go ahead and then um you know having irrigation to to give the tree the water that they need has to be in a reasonable spot to get it irrigated sure i um i know that at least parkview is interested in doing a tree
181planting for arbor day or earth day sometime but um just to make sure that they have the the amount of time needed or maybe kevin kevin kevin wants to speak to me there's a process for putting in a project request it gets reviewed through our in this case maintenance department has a cse component to it that gets signed off on and then it gets approved and we send it back generally how long does that process take oh it's days yeah okay thank you board okay we're on to um our next item uh do we have a motion on the floor for that we i checked with eric and she said we voted we voted oh that all right okay okay sorry yeah i had the same thought so i had already checked with erica to
182make sure we hadn't skipped over something but very um very timely conversation thank you ms dalby okay next discussion on opportunities for teachers to return to full-time in-person instruction um mr hanlon and mr sullivan you want me to start jim so uh just leading in really the discussion about the opportunity for teachers to return to full-time instruction as we've been talking about it it really kind of came back to this is a discussion about teachers uh maybe being interested in volunteering to kind of expand their work their school day and their work day for students so we talked a lot about um just kind of how that would look and what how that may be but if you think of it we have teachers in chicago unified they've been volunteering for above and beyond experiences
183forever so this is really just another opportunity for them to kind of be volunteering expanding that opportunity for students i would say this one in particular if a teacher is willing to come back and kind of bring their class back in a full day experience i mean we would see some real positives to allowing that to happen we certainly know you know it's it could be enriched school experience for students certainly helps with uh looking at kind of extra time for academic support for them and also provides different social connection expanded social connection for those students so we really kind of see a lot of potential benefit in here if teachers are willing to do these kinds of things as we talked about it we weren't quite sure with how that would look within kind
184of the cuta contract discussion so i know jim we talked about it negotiations i think jim can kind of fill you in on the other perspective with it there as well thank you mr sullivan so as i mentioned last time i had some concerns about the possible change of working conditions and having those conversations with cota so we met last week with cota and after a lengthy conversation mutually decided that um a teacher volunteering to work beyond their the agreed contract which in this case was the am pm mou was not a change in working conditions so essentially we agreed that um a teacher could volunteer much like mr sullivan said like in the case of a of a field trip or a study group on a weekend for a test which happens in high
185schools or working with a group of students during lunch hour those are things that we don't negotiate and we decided mutually that we did not need to to do so under these conditions either there are some there are some issues that will need to be worked out at the site level for example supervision issues when the when the school as a whole is has set up their staff to work in an am pm schedule the teacher in this case may need to agree not to have a prep or possibly supervision duties that are unique to that schedule so but those are things that can be worked out at the site level because different resources exist at different sites so um so so so essentially it's not a negotiable item teachers could do this if they
186so choose and um the only the only challenge would be or or i guess obstacle is that it's not possible at the secondary level this is really an elementary issue because at the secondary level all six classes teachers would have to agree and and kids don't go from all six classes through the day so it's really in in reality it's more than six teachers so but the elementary it's fairly easy to in place to put in place if the teacher is is willing so with that we're open to any questions or and i will say as jim shared you know we kind of look at it like if a teacher is planning to take an overnight field trip as an example they're also working with their site administrator to kind of take care address kind
187of check off some of the logistics that go with that to make sure everything's organized prepared ready to go with it so we kind of see it in that same vein here if they're interested in doing this we want them to work with their site administrator kind of go through some of the things that jim said might be there as something to kind of resolve or work out together and make sure it's going to be something that can be taken care of and work for both parties here with as well mr sullivan did uh speak with principals and we did to just to kind of gauge if you want yeah we uh we talked to ddc we asked them to have conversations with their staff we certainly didn't want to make them feel as if
188they're being pressured to do this at all but if there's genuine interest out there we ask them to kind of have more informal conversations what i've heard from elementary principals there's two or three sites that have at least one and maybe even two people that are really really interested was kind of how they're describing it there's a high level of interest to do something like this and there's about four or five sites that have teachers that are medium interested curious kind of want to know more about what it may look like and how it may work for them also so there's definitely some interest out there to do something like this any discussion from the board mr dennis is this a good time to make a motion of some kind um i'm not sure we're
189looking for a motion all right the reality is is that we allow teachers to um volunteer to do things extra beyond the contract so in this case if um if there's no objection from the board um actually can proceed forward as it is yes we have public comment um john you want to proceed okay the first one does not have a name provided and it is listed as a parent hi james i'm going to put you on speakerphone to address the school board if you if you're a developer go ahead james hello i have a quick question for the board and if you could answer quickly because we are on strict time is what other members besides matt tennis possibly have considered or talked to another school district that has opened full time so james
190have any have you right they're unable to answer it yes um you know there are school districts like roseville that have opened up full time they've proven that it works they can do it you know chico unified is smaller than them so i don't see why we still continue to have this debate about you know not being able to get these kids back in school i mean i it's your duty to be working on this solution i haven't heard of one solution all i've heard is kicking the can down the road and it's heartbreaking for these students to not be in school i went to a restaurant right next to chico junior right after school you think you're protecting these kids by not having them in school right when that school got out at chico
191junior at the t-bar i had 20 20-plus young girls walk straight into that restaurant and congregate in that restaurant so you're not protecting them by not having them in class they're socializing they're gathering they're doing all this stuff on their own so please let's get them back into their education i beg you please take that into consideration and bring this back up this year and get these kids back in school now thank you next is amber brown go ahead amber in light of the clarification of the four-foot rule we want a vote to return our kids to full-time in-person learning tonight this is the opportunity to make rice the unfortunate february 3rd decision to keep our schools mostly close the science says it's safe the guidelines are reasonable to implement right away it's been done
192by other districts private and charter schools locally and nationally if the board refuses then you are refusing the facts and failing our students community and your governing responsibilities there is a youth mental health crisis it is it will be on your hands too if you are not willing to serve the students in the way they deserve return them to full-time in-person learning we have yet to see the full consequences of withholding this right from our students they are our future be adults they can be proud of be leaders do what's the right thing our children are watching and don't forget you are elected to serve the community our children deserve better than two hours of vegetation instruction a day it's safe probably safer than it's ever been no rational individual is disputing this anymore vote
193for open our schools full time the welcomed excuses are gone and that is right parents that can are pulling their kids from your school i've already pulled three of mine and i've got three more i'm working on getting out it's time the kids need to go back to school and you need to do what's right for this community thank you and have a great rest of your evening okay the last one here is amber cameron it's voicemail voicemail thank you okay those are our three people who had signed up um we don't uh need to take any action um the process is available for those that wish to participate as you've explained so we've had preliminary conversations with our principals and we'll follow up um with them um with teachers that are interested in moving
194forward thank you i'm sorry may i one question or quick clarification um if everything fell into place and principals talk to teachers and teachers want to do it what would be the earliest we would see a class or two return full time do we know i would say a week or two is not a like a unforeseeable timeline to do something like that mr lando thank you thank you okay next discussion is the resolution on the release of non-reelect i have temporary including probe zero and uh certificate probe zero certificated employees not and probationary okay so this each year i bring to you a resolution to release our temporary employees these are teachers that are hired on a one-year basis only they are aware of it when they sign their contract typically they are replacing
195a teacher or counselor or speech therapist or some other certificated person who is on some kind of a leave so they're aware that this is a temporary temporary placement we have an unusually large number this year primarily because we hired teachers for online learning that we don't normally have so the list is is longer than typical before we have a motion i want to remove three employees from it so i'll give the id numbers for erica to uh to strike from this it's one five four nine nine one five seven zero three one six zero nine five the first two are school nurses um who have indicated they're not returning to chica unified next year so we have two really awesome um temporary folks that we want to keep so we're gonna we we're we
196would like to make them probationary so we want to keep those nurses are very hard to find the last one is a counselor an elementary counselor who who is filled in in a temporary position where that person is not coming she works at two sites and both principals said please do not let her go so since it's a it's an open position we want to also make her probationary so those those three we want to take off at this point thank you mr hannan dr kaiser you have your hand up are you i'd like to move this motion thank you dr kaiser is there a second one thank you mr tennis we have a motion and a second to approve the um the list of of uh listed uh pro employees to temporary probe employees
197to be released any questions kaitlyn i have two things the first is it's really exciting that we have three folks that are going to stay on with us sounds like we have some solid people there so that's excellent my other point is i'm glad to see that dr kaiser is just as present with us while she's on zoom than as she is when she's here with us thank you and um you know i i know we've talked a lot tonight about the need for staffing at on different things up over the next so hopefully we'll be able to uh to utilize more than three of these people well i expect um many of these will come back because of the staffing issues that we talked about earlier for class size reduction for for another year
198so um and that will give us another year um to maybe accommodate some more of those folks and keep them on permanently because there are a lot of really good temps that we we have discovered this year so they'll get the opportunity thank you okay i uh we did uh did we vote erica we did not vote thank you mr landau okay if there is no further um discussion board all those in favor signify by saying aye aye thank you dr kaiser that's unanimous 5-0 okay we have reached the point for items from the floor do we have anyone waiting are we going to try summer again could we try with summer first we did hear from summer oh we got summer i'm sorry yes she did she did great she did explain her interest
199in student representation thank you okay i'm calling patrice jackson okay the next one is amber camburn voicemail and i'm calling gina backs hello is this gina hi dean i'm going to put you on speakerphone you'll be addressing the school board if you hear a bell it means you have about 30 seconds left okay go ahead gina oh hi how are you well thank you for having me here tonight and i just will tell you that again my name is gina back and i am a stay-home mom who has been through the whole virtual learning experience situation with my five girls ages 13 and under and i definitely have learned that teaching my own kids is incredibly challenging especially for immigrants whose first language is not english so i am here to advocate for them my
200hispanic community in chico has seen the devastating consequences of virtual learning hispanics working in the fields and performing household jobs do not have the opportunity of freedom to leave their jobs to pick up their kids just two hours after they have dropped them at the school this am pm schedule has left them with no other option but to leave their kids at home with someone with a good heart who can take care of their kids and guide them through the rest of their learning routine in most cases abuelitos and aguelitas are the ones who ended up carrying the responsibility of teaching our kids unfortunately the high demands of virtual learning leave both kids and caregivers frustrated and hopeless not to mention a lot of hispanic abuelitos durona speak the language making the process of learning
201even more challenging in my case my kids whose first language is english are losing the opportunity to improve their spanish at their spanish immersion school because two hours is not enough for them to fully get the experience and exposure they need to continue learning my native language those who are not blessed enough to have their loved ones around to help have no options but to leave their kids at the mercy of others a lot of hispanics living in low-income housing are surrounded by the secondary effects of living in a community that prioritized homeless over the safety of our own kids for a lot of these kids the school was their only safe place i'm not asking you to bring our babysitter's back but to put your personal political agendas and fears aside listen to the
202science and safely open our schools full time surrounding areas have managed to open their schools full time safely the clarification to the forfeit rules means we can safely feed our students in the classrooms other districts of similar size have done it we can do it too thank you thank you okay um number 10 board member request to agendize items mr tennis do you have something tom uh thank you madam president um i think that because of the clarification that we had from cdph on friday regarding the four-foot rule the diagrams that we that we saw we had extensive public comments um from people who were you know very various teachers and members of the public who were sympathetic to the concept of having to spread furniture way out and remove important furniture items from classrooms
203that was a big part of our conversation when we made our decision on february 3rd to continue with the am pm learning model to the end of the year also we have a continuing downward trend in the case rates it's now just one person out of 2000 in butte county who have an active case of covid we know that our kids are not highly vulnerable to covid and our teachers are largely vaccinated additionally we have had some research from staff over the past couple of days to indicate that the existing furniture that we have is adequate would be adequate in almost every single case to have full classrooms of kids right now so the combination of these factors the fact that we have the opportunity to go back um the fact that our commenters tonight
204are making clear that people want to go back the fact that we are in a mental health emergency right now and also in a learning loss emergency i think that we need to put together a emergency meeting to to consider opening schools full-time until the end of the 2021 school year and i would i would move that we actually establish an emergency meeting of that kind mr lando another issue oh yeah there has not been a second so emotion dies in that case uh on a completely different topic uh as uh we heard from a student earlier i would like to agendize a discussion about how we can incorporate student voices into these meetings is that a is that a action item requiring a second i'm sorry i'm not i don't think i followed completely
205yeah i'm sorry so if i was not glad we do it again um i move that we agendize uh a discussion at our next meeting about how to incorporate student feedback second all right now we can discuss it yes okay uh we have had this process before and um i've had discussions with the superintendent about incorporating this back into our meeting which probably doesn't take an agenda item um uh madam superintendent would you uh explain what sure we've had a standing item on our agenda that is student reports where we have students come and report at each board meeting we ceased that when we couldn't meet in person and the students weren't able to come but we have alternated that between different schools you know typically we our high schools will give a report and
206they can give either if it's not their turn to be here they provide a written report we highlight programs that are happening at our elementary schools we highlight science fairs we highlight art projects we get to see drumming so they're you know we do have a variety of student opportunities for input to share with us what they're doing at their school site in terms of student opportunities to share on agenda items uh specific to that that would be something that we should turn back to high schools and even junior highs for student government input on items we have elected student body governance bodies in place so if that's a desire we can certainly reach out and have input from those bodies as well that is not something that we have done in the past and
207you know certainly would be welcomed all that said and i appreciate it uh i think the motion stands i just would like to have a discussion as a board about what exactly that might look like there was a motion caitlyn you seconded matt's second did the motion any further discussion i'm just uh wondering because we already have a aspect where we can have comments from you know the public with two of them at least for students and then they can comment on individual items so i'm not quite sure what the difference is here we have an opportunity for student government groups to comment we have an opportunity for individual students to comment so i'm not sure what is really involved it seems a little bit vague um i'm going to jump in with my hand
208up the um the motion to discuss i think is very appropriate because there are so many different combinations of things we could do including you know formal involvement of the student governments at the different sites um and so i i think it's it's an appropriate um thing to discuss i mean that's what you're asking thomas to take a look at what our avenues are so i'm i'm in support any further discussion this dolby just to add to the conversation i i'm in support of the discussion too i am really interested in hearing firsthand especially from student advocates so not necessarily leadership because those are not always the same thing but maybe it's related to government and they have an advocacy committee um or club or group where you know so so it will be good
209to discuss what types of options would be possible um you know because this isn't just for now or just in this in this covet era but this is where we can be be hearing from directly from students um on agendized items you know where they could actually add an item to an agenda possibly on equity and inclusion and and uh other other ways the board could support students um so i'm in favor of this idea also mr landa i might speak briefly one more time on that note um after we take this vote i would really like to urge any teachers who may be still listening at this point in staff to put the word out i think seeing the number of students we get who are on this agenda item next time will give
210us a good temperature check of how uh how many people we have will prepare to be engaged in in that way and what kind of ideas they have so i'd really like to hear from them on this agenda item as when it comes forward next thank you okay there's no further discussion uh i'm gonna call for the vote all those in favor sigma sic signify by saying i i i those opposed dr kaiser i think she was dealing with a grandchild yeah not voting okay thank you yes 4-0 okay um i need a motion to adjourn oh do we have another board member yes ms dalby thank you i um i brought this up earlier and i'm not really sure if it's necessarily a motion i'm gonna try to make it real quick because i
211know we all want to go home but um the the issue of students leaving the district is is important for the future longevity of our of our district and so um i i would like us to in whatever capacity that anybody has right now with everything else going on to explore that a little bit from the report that we got a month or two ago about students leaving a large percentage of them small percentages to other butte county schools it was 20 of students leaving during the covid era have been leaving to butte county schools um that means about 80 percent are leaving the area or leaving the state in total so that's a really important point for everybody to be aware of that during the covid time the last year 20 of students have
212left the school but have gone to a another butte county school that could be oroville it could be a local chico charter school 80 percent and please correct me if i'm wrong but 80 percent have left the area meaning the county or the state um and so what i guess what my purpose is is to explore if there are if there is a seat at the table you know with the planning commission that we maybe um need to have a more active participation in to say um some of these decisions that our our community are making is affecting our school district operations or the future of our of our enrollment possibly or is it you know um so i'd be interested in in taking a deeper dive to that i don't know how to word
213my motion um but i i would move to explore the reasons um why students might be if sorry explore if um the lack of available housing or affordable housing might be driving our students to leave or our families to leave the area which is affecting our enrollment mr lando well i'm going to second that just because i wanted a chance to talk about a little more that's all so seconded thank you mr landau thanks long time no see um sorry i'm getting a little punchy as we get later one of the things that i heard in there is that we might not have a lot of data about why our students are leaving but other agencies might have information about where families and people are going in general so i think wrapped up in that
214motion is this idea of reaching out to our other governmental partners locally to see if they have any more data or a better picture of exactly what's happening where people are going and why is that along the gist of what you're saying all right i'm gonna chime in because i i think that through our central attendance personnel we do track where people go because we don't have contact information until their grades or their records are requested we we can't do exit interviews because we don't know how to contact them at this point i um i know that we have some information available through our own records and i'm hesitant to widen our lane of what we're involved in as a school district i do understand the you know the the need to um kind of
215monitor where our people are going but i think the um the underlying information we have from our realtor groups um does reflect that it it has to do with the economy and people are leaving because they can afford to be here but i don't know that if that's a an appropriate role for us that's my input i i am going to jump in here and just say at this point we really need to have some focus and um i will tell you from my perspective and what i've been working with staff on our focus has been on developing a plan to return to school in the fall and that's where our focus is i think once we get through that then but there's a lot of moving parts to that clearly that it keeps changing
216the funding pieces that go along with that so this might be a great topic to come up when we talk in july about board goals and board focuses at that point but i would say be hesitant to add another really big topic that is in no one area of expertise it's going to take a lot of getting up to speed unless it this is something where the board wants to ask one of our city government committees if there is room for a board appointee we have done that before we've asked if we can have board representation on different community committees if there is a committee that you would like me to reach out about i'm more than happy to do that um i let me just say this for the record and for anybody who's
217listening um i 100 agree that our top priority is doing everything that we can to be prepared to open fully in the fall absolutely 100 the reason i'm bringing this topic up now instead of this summer is because right now is when input on the um the housing element is is being taken um so that that is in the process right now of of those conversations are happening in the next you know six months so i would otherwise i wouldn't have even brought this up until further on down the road so that's that's the only thing is is a little bit timely i would be interested in somebody being able to sit at the table at some of these at these meetings as a representative for the district to be able to you know sleuth
218out some some information as to if there's a connection between families leaving the district or the area so our declining enrollment and our [Music] our communities housing plan um and how that and how development is happening and i think even just saying it here out loud is important hopefully there's some people that are listening to this because um it's it's an important point to look into um that you know 80 percent of the people that are leaving the the area are why our schools are really are really losing enrollment um yes the 20 to local schools is a part of it too and i'm i'm not discounting that at all but leaving the area is is pretty uh extreme um and and it speaks to a larger community issue i think than just the district
219itself yeah and again again i don't know that that is you know our area of expertise or even within our realm to be able to resolve that um but if there again if there's you know board interest in sitting on that committee there there has been reception in the past to having seats at the table so the um i believe at the the city council meeting tuesday night on the report on housing they are in the process like you say of doing the survey and i think they they kicked that can down the road another three months so staying in touch and they did list how to stay involved if you're interested you know which i think is it what i would support would would be you know any individual board member that wants to
220stay involved with responding to their things i did respond to their survey and keeping up on what their what their reporting does this is another one of the things that king and associates they do in fact interact with those types of planning issues before the city and with brendan vega and the other people in the department that are taking a look at where building and permits and things are being pulled for um i i just think you know that our our focus has to be on getting us open and um you know the next two years worth of getting ourselves healed sure i'm i'm definitely a fan of walking and chewing them at the same time so after two years we're looking at a sharp decrease in funding if we keep losing families to this
221community that's why that's why i'm saying this is so important right now in two years we might not have the ability to maintain some of the really important programs that we put in place if we lose enrollment if we continue to lose enrollment and if losing enrollment is not from any fault of our own as a district there's not that there was no control we have over it directly we should have an active seat at the table at these commissions if they will have us as district uh representatives at least somebody i i don't know if this is something that we need to like make a motion to approve on but i i it did i just need this to be a discussion to have for the longevity of our of our community and our
222in our school district mr landau well it sounds like uh superintendent staley was offering to reach out to perhaps the planning commission and see if we couldn't have i'm not sure that requires a motion but perhaps a perhaps we amend the original motion to ask you to uh report back on the status of those commissions and how we can be involved is that within in the spirit yeah i would accept that okay let's uh uh we have a a motion in a second and an amendment to the main motion and i'm going to call for the vote kathy do you first you have to vote on the amendment right um if it was accepted as a friendly amendment yeah we can vote it's it's part of of um yes all those in favor of the
223uh amendment to ask the superintendent to reach out to the city signify by saying aye aye dr kaiser are you are you available for voting or uh has your grandbabies needing to go to bed i don't think kathy's on oh kathy's not on anymore okay so we have a three to one in favor okay um so now the main motion um all those in favor of uh reaching out to the city through the superintendent to see if we can have some two-way input regarding um you know the issue of population shifts if somebody can tell me which commissions i'm asking about um i don't mean that right now yeah but deborah preston the city clerk she will be able to direct you to the correct people i'll go through mr followers yes also yeah there
224are several all those in favor signify by saying aye aye no okay we have a three to one in favor any other items for consideration board i'm open for a motion to adjourn so moved is there a second yes all those in favor yes yes please thank you we are adjourned you