001[Music] Heat. Heat up here. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. N. Heat. [Music] Heat. Yeah. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Hey, heat. Hey, heat. Heat [Music] up here. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Roll call. Mr. Nisha E here. Vice President Mr. Nyola, clerk, Mrs. Yokiyama Buui, board member, Mrs. McCaten, here. Board member Mrs. Mendoza present. Board member Dr. Rios. Board member Mrs. U. Here. This evening, we'll be discussing the following items in close session. Public employee discipline dismissal release evaluation for matters. Government code section 54957. Conference with labor negotiator. Update on negotiations with
002ABCFT, AB, AFS, CME, and CSEA government code section 54957.6. Existing litigation. The board will be going into close session pursuant to government code section 54956.9D1 to discuss eight matters, but has determined that specifically identifying the matter would jeopardize its ability to conclude existing settlement negotiations to its advantage. And these case numbers are Los Angeles Superior Court cases 22 NWCV01445 22 NWCV STCV1 9569 23 NWCV 01964 22 NWCV 00507 22 STCV V 1 9567 22 NWCV CX 00505 and 22 NWCV 00505. Um, are there any public comments on close session items? I don't see anything. So, can I have a motion to move to close session? So, move. Mendoza. Second. All in favor say I. I. All right, we're in close session. [Music] Nat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Heat. [Music]
003Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Hey, Heat. [Music] Ah, hey. [Music] Hey, hey, hey. Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Hey, heat. Hey, [Music] heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Hey, hey, hey. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] [Applause] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Hey. Hey. Hey. [Applause] [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Hey, Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Hey, hey, hey. [Music] Heat. Hey, Heat. [Music] [Laughter] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Heat. Heat.
004[Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat up here. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Hey, hey, hey. [Music] Hey. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Hey, heat. Hey, heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Yeah. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Yeah. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Drive. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. N. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. N. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat up [Music] here. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music]
005Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat up [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat up here. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat [Music] up here. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] In close session tonight, the board discussed existing settlement uh existing litigation improved You need a motion. Oh, I uh need a motion to be back into open session. So moved. Second. All in favor
006say I. I. Great. Please silence your cell phones. There we go. If anyone's in need of those translation services, there is somebody in the back uh in the room for supports. Close session report on today. In closed session, the board discussed public public employee discipline dismissal release evaluation formatterers government code section 54957 conference with labor negotiator update on negotiations with ABCFT AFSME and CSEA government code section 54957.6. We discussed existing litigation. Uh the board discussed in close session pursuant to government code section 54956.9D1 to discuss eight matters but has determined that specifically identifying the matters would jeopardize its ability to conclude successful settlement negotiations to its advantage. Los Angeles Superior Court court cases 22 NWCV01445 22 NWCV STCV 1 9569 uh 23 NWCV01964 22 NWCV 00507 22 STCV19 9567 22 NWCX 00505 22 NWCV 00505.
007In close session tonight, the board discussed existing settlement and approved a settlement agreement relating to the AB218 claim with the Los Angeles Superior Court case number 22NWCV01445, which occurred in 198788 in the amount of $ 1.5 million. $1 million will be paid by district insurance and 500,000 will be paid from the district's general fund. Tonight, the pledge of allegiance will be led by the students from Whitman Elementary School, who are accompanied by the principal, Mr. Miguel Marco. flag. 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, for liberty and justice for all. Please remain standing for the peaceuilder pledge. I am a peaceuilder. I pledge to praise people, to give it put down, to seek wise people, to notice
008and speak about hurts our cause, to write wrongs, to help others. I'll build peace at home, at school, and in my community. Good evening, President Nishi, Vice President Niola, Clerk Miss Yakoya Maboui, members of the board, Superintendent Zitlo, and members of the executive cabinet. My name is Olivia Abraham, and I'm and I'm proudly a student of Helen Whitman Elementary School. I love Whitman. All the people are so kind, compassionate, and respectful, the Whitman way. But what surprises me most is the activities. One fun activity that we had was Susical Jr. It was a musical that you could choose to participate and we performed at Cerrito's High School. It was a great opportunity. We also have fun competitions like reading Olympics that won first place, mathematics that also came in first place, STEM, robotics, and more.
009Women always tries their best even if they don't win. This year was the 50th anniversary, so we had a special party for that. Thank you for [Applause] listening. One primary after school robotics program is our Lego Spike Prime program. We have had many advancement, many advancements in this program. One of which being how we had to how we had the abilities to restructure and recode our robots with the help of another robotic group in order to play on the one on the spot program which led to us getting the first place trophy with the other group's help. [Applause] Hi, my name is Olivia Vega and I'm a proud student of Helen Whitman Elementary School. I have been included in the Susicle Junior Musical and Student Council. Today I want to talk about how amazing this
010school is. Everyone here is so kind and polite that you could always trust them. The teachers are amazing and don't be afraid to ask them questions. They will boost up your confidence both academically and how you see yourself as a person. Rotations are also great. For me, rotations are every Friday. Basically, rotations is tech lab, library, and one rotating rotation, which is dance, art, and digital arts. Talking about digital arts, we made these amazing cookbooks that um we made it by everybody got a blank piece uh a template on a Chromebook and we got to decorate it our own ways. We got to put what we what our recipe was at the very top of it. For example, pasta. And then you got to put the ingredients um and the step by step of what
011they were. Then you got to decorate it any way that you wanted. Thank you for listening. [Applause] Okay. Oh, we're ready. Do we have any board comments? Uh, well, I'll make Okay, we have one. Um, you can go first, Mr. President. Mr. Nyola. Vice President Nyola. Thank you, President Nishi. Uh, thank you, Whitman Warriors. Uh, thank you for first off for the cookbooks for sharing us sharing with us uh, you know, what makes Whitman great in such a special place. I you guys talked about kindness. You guys reminded us to do the peace pledge. So, I just want to thank you guys again for for always reminding us to to be kinder and peaceful. So, appreciate it. Have a great summer, Whitman. Thank you, board member Mendoza. Thank you, Mr. President. Oh my god, this
012is so cute. I want to go cook. Have you guys made the Have you guys actually made Yeah. the recipes. Which one was your favorite? Yours? Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking at the yummy apple slices. Adobo. Oh my gosh. Garlic bread. That's like one I want to try. This is an awesome project. I'm I'm impressed with all the work that you guys are doing at at Whitman. Um do you guys know who Helen Whitman was? Do you guys know any history about her? No. Okay. So, I'm going to give you homework. Um, every month we have different schools visit us. And I was thinking the other day like who are our schools named after? I don't know anything about them. So, can I give you homework for the next time you come to our board meeting?
013Can you give us a little bit of background on who your school is named after? Yes. Okay. If you guys do that, then I'll give you these really cool stickers that you can only get here at the schoolboard meeting. Um, it says ABC school district student leader 2025. You can get another one next year. You can trade them. You can put them on your water bottles. Don't put them on your school supplies cuz I don't think your principal will appreciate that or your teachers. But you can have these. And then next time you come, I I'm I'm hoping to learn a little bit more about who Helen Whitman was. Okay. Can you send somebody to come get your stickers? Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you. All right. Really quick, um this
014is a great book. Um I'll be there when you guys are actually cooking these though, right? You gonna invite me? Yes. All right. Um, and is are there any parents here? Okay, parents of these kids, though. Okay, please stand up. Thank you for uh having these great kids and and uh um really being leaders and and helping them become the great citizens that are going to be. Very much appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, next we will have recognition of the Whitman Elementary math team. Thank you so much. And we're happy to be here tonight. So, um I they I should have let them dial a friend, by the way, on that question about Helen Whitman. Yeah. Okay. Oh, sorry. Um but the comment I was going to make is Helen Whitman. Actually, I did a
015little research on her. What an incredible person. Educator, special education teacher. Uh, and that's one of the reasons she ended up being named uh the school being named after her is the great work she did. Yeah. Huh. Yeah. So, this evening, um, Mr. Marco is going to introduce the students who were on the first place county fourth grade math team and beat all of the other schools in the county for their first place win. All right, so quite an accomplishment. Uh this is a great team. By the way, this happened over spring break. So they actually came in over spring break to compete um in Lake Math Field Day um um with an incredible coach. So, starting things off, and she's not here tonight, but is Claire Cho. Um, she's out of the country right
016now, so we'll we'll hold on to hers. Also we have Oliver Fernando, Summer Kamesh, Vietnista, Alan Ruan, and Alan brought the trophy. and their coach, Miss Megan Den. [Applause] ask questions. We have board comment from Miss Suyu. Okay, Whitman Warriors, congratulations. I have uh two daughters who went through Whitman Elementary School and uh where are your parents? Oo, congratulations. You know, we are so thankful and grateful that our district continues to attract families who value hard work and who value excelling. And uh wow, what a what an honor. You guys won first place in the county. I hope you guys can continue that momentum in fifth grade, sixth grade and continue on because math is a very important factor. It's a foundation for all the the good good career and good jobs out there, you
017know, as well as making a difference in the world. So, keep up the good work. Okay, Warriors. [Applause] Board member in Manhattan. Congratulations. Can one of you tell us about the competition at the county office? What did it What did you have to do? So, we had to um answer an answer. There were two rounds. So, we had to answer a sense making exercise and a conceptual understanding. The sense making involved writing and the conceptual understanding one we had to it was mostly multiplechoice. So the combined score, we won the combined score um overall. So you were working as individuals and then they combined your score or you were working as a team? We were working as a team and there were two rounds. Okay. Well, congratulations. You guys did a great job. [Applause] So
018math was not my strong suit. Uh it was it was scary for me and it was not easy and I'm so glad that you as students will are adept at this and found your passion and able to compete and you know math gets us to the moon. It builds the biggest skyscrapers. It's it's building this very room that we're in right now and someday you guys will be uh contributing to that and it's all because of the math skills that you have. So, thank you very much for becoming future leaders and building our future country. Thank you. Oh, we I guess we have one more comment, another comment from Dr. M. Can we uh also hear from the long-term s sub who led this team and another comment I wanted to make was uh you
019know we can have this team in all the schools in our uh elementary school in our throughout our district. This will be very helpful and I hope that we can work towards having this math competition and math you know teams all in all the elementary schools. Yeah. Can we hear from you? What did you do and how how how often did you guys meet? Um a weekly and how long and yeah I got to take over um one of my colleagues rooms. Um, he is on paternity leave and I had the pleasure of taking over his room and I got to take over his adjunct duty too, which was a great opportunity because I just got out of college just not too long ago. So, this was a great opportunity to take over his classroom
020and take over mathletics. Um, I've always loved math. So, when Mr. Marco asked me to take over, I was more than happy to do it. I think it's a great experience and get to lead these great group of kids. I'm primarily a lower grade teacher, so it was really great to work with these upper graders. Um, we practiced twice a week at first, and then once it got closer, I kind of consolidated the teams into different grade levels, only only meeting one day for fourth, only meeting one day for fifth, only meeting one day for sixth. And I think that really helped um us focus as a team on teamwork and also the academic um portion of it itself. I also used um practice books to help them with the conceptual understanding and sense making
021so that we can target each areas itself. So they did a great job too. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Good job. We'll now have recognition of the Ross Middle School indoor percussion. Dr. Zilo. Thank you. Um this evening we are going to recognize Ross Middle School's um drum line for winning the 2025 WG AGC percussion scholastic uh junior high championship. Wow. Wow. So let's move you all in here. [Applause] I'm thinking maybe coach could talk a little bit about what it's like. We could take comments and then we'll do pictures. Hello, my name is David Lopez and I'm the band director at Ross Middle School. With me I have the talented members of the Ross indoor percussion, our amazing instructors and our best principal in the world, Miss Silvis, right over
022there. I'd like to thank the board and Dr. Zilo for this recognition and support to our music program. I'd also like like to thank our amazing parents, dedicated staff, and the incredible Ross administration. We'd like to give a heartfelt thank you to the best principal in the world, Mrs. Silvas. She continuually puts our students first and is always seeking more ways to support our music program. This was our first year starting the indoor percussion and are proud of the great accomplishment of receiving the gold medal in the percussion junior high division. Prop 28 helped start this program and provided a new experience for our students. We are the only middle school indoor percussion in our district and we take pride in representing ABC. Thank you for the recognition. [Applause] All right, let's get start with
023comments. Uh board member Mendoza. Thank you, Mr. President. Well, I just want to say congratulations and I'm glad to see that I see girls, too, cuz I know usually it's a lot of boys, but I'm glad to see that there's girls, too. And I just want to acknowledge you guys because I know how much work it goes into this. You you're you're doing your whole school day and then you got practice after school. You got practice on the weekends and your parents are supporting you because you can't drive to school right afterwards. So, I want to just appreciate you guys. Um I I I love music. I my my son was at Ross and he did the the the drums and I know do Dr. Rio said where where's all the equipment? Where's the instruments?
024We thought you were gonna come here like I thought I was waiting for it. Next time, Mr. Lopez, bring the drums, please. I I'll make sure they're in my car. Okay. Thank you. But again, congratulations. Um continue it. Don't stop now but just continue because I think music is a great subject a great um it helps in every other area right have you guys noticed that that it's math right it's reading um it's discipline so I think it it's going to support you in whatever you guys decide to do going on in high school and afterwards okay so congratulations board member Mchaten well congratulations I am glad to see that The Ross band is growing, growing. My grandson went there and God, how many years ago was that? I don't even know. Too many. But
025um I just I've seen you this year and the numbers have grown. So I am so proud of you. Uh keep up your hard work, especially in percussion. Congratulations. Thank you. So I get the last word. Um, I remember when they he started uh doing the uh we got some nice new um band uniforms and he had this really cool video, but it set off all the alarms, but it was worth it cuz at the very end it looked like it looks like you've really improved and gotten a lot more people to be part of this. I have one question. What is indoor percussion as opposed to other kinds of percussion? So pretty much uh this activity involves marching percussion the the drums that they put with a harness on and then we also have
026uh pitched instruments. So mima xylophone we have them in the front and within this activity too it's we have a piano that controls these big speakers and you get this very thematic program and the students are constantly working on making a theme show. So like this year it was called under the under the big top and it was a circus show and they got to be you know clowns. They're always clowns, but you know, we were a little extra clownish today. And uh they just get to learn how to dance and do movement while still playing music. So someday I'd like to see that. I'll come visit very s shortly. Thank you very much. Oh, and now we're going to have pictures. So thank you. Where are we going? Turn around. You're good. I got
027it. Sorry. Turn. fault right here. Right. [Music] [Applause] Yes. Okay. Ah, you got it. Got here. Thank you. Our next item is uh the 2024 2025 student board representatives. Dr. Zilo. Thank you. At this time, um I'm going to move to the podium with President Nishi. We'll recognize our student board reps and then we can do a picture and have comments from the board. So every year um all of our high schools and the adult school select student board representatives to come and be part of the process. They are part of a committee where they listen to all of the items on agendas. They have opportunity to give input. they have opportunity to cast a preferential vote if they would like to and so um we want to recognize them for their time this year
028and the work they also do when they come and share what's happening at their school. So, our first recognition for Artisia High School, Alisa Bautista and Jasmine [Applause] Limiac from Cerritos High School. We have Dia Bashand and Nikita Gupali. From Gar High School, we have Chenarum Ubun Nilo and Malik Maniago. From Tracy High School, we have David Hong and Esparansa [Applause] Ramirez. From Whitney High School, we have Andrew Dwag and William Kang. And finally, from ABC Adult School, we have Chris Kemp and Sharon Song. All right. [Music] All right. Right here. Okay. Board comments. All right. Uh, Vice President Nyola. Uh, thank you, President Nishi. Um, well, student body representatives, I just wanted to thank you guys. Uh, seeing you guys all here tonight. You guys are the dream team of all our schools. You
029guys represent the students, their experiences, their ideas, their thoughts, and you guys have done it all year. And I want to thank you guys for being here, being that voice for your for your classmates, for your fellow students, and also representing the best our schools have to offer. I appreciate you guys. Have a great summer. Uh hope to see you guys in future leadership roles representing, you know, larger groups of people. You guys have what it takes. Thank you. Thank you, Vice [Applause] President. Dr. Rios, thank you. Same thing. Just a little gratitude. We really appreciate the fact that you guys let us know what's happening at your schools and you're able to talk about your events and share with us those highlights because, you know, sometimes it's hard enough to make it to one
030event, let alone all of your high school events. And it's also really nice to see you. A lot of you have come through the entire system at ABC and it's really nice to see what the end product looks like, right? A lot of you end up having really promising futures. Some of you are seniors. I know some of you are not. Um, but really congratulations and you know, you're off to an excellent start. Thank you. Finish board member. U, thank you President Nishi. Uh, first of all, thank you so much for you guys for your uh, time. I mean coming to the board meeting it's like two three hours minimum and uh you know that's a very precious time that you guys have to take out and um it's easy to criticize and uh complain
031but it it takes the the spirit of volunteerism to step forward and to lead the community and you guys have done that. So again, thank you very much and I hope that you guys can use this experience to continue your efforts in serving the community because that's what our nation is about. It's about serving and you know all the elected are called to public service, public servants because we serve our community, our neighborhood and it's people like you guys. So continue the good work, okay? And God bless you. Board member Mendoza. Thank you, Mr. President. I just want to echo my colleagues and thanking you. I know you guys put a lot of time into your board reports. Can I ask who's a high school senior? Oh, a lot of you. Okay. Well, thank you
032cuz hopefully you'll come back and visit us and maybe even one of you, maybe two or three or four of you will come back and serve on the board cuz you already know how it goes, right? So, thank you guys a lot for your service. Enjoy your summer and we'll see some of you back here. Yes. Okay. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you. So, yes, you are our replacements. You are our bench and you can probably do even better job in the future because you've seen what we're doing. You it's it's uh you've seen and you've been here for hours and listening and you know the questions that I asked you in terms of uh how can we help you and your connection with the students. That's that's the key, right? Knowing your audience, knowing
033the people that are out there and your comments and are critical to our decision-m because you live the experience and that's going to be something that you carry throughout your life that uh uh this experience that you have here and how you translate it to other people and how you lead other people. It's uh uh an important part of that. So, thank you. We will see you very shortly after you graduate and uh maybe yes you will take this our seats and and make the tough decisions that are necessary. Uh not always going to be the most popular thing to do but I know you have the moral character to do the right thing when you see it because you you've seen what our board does. So thank you. All right. Thank you. Spotlight in
034teaching and learning. We now have presentation by NES sixth grade migrant education financial literacy group. Dr. Castro. Thank you, President Nishi. I'd like to introduce the director of special programs, Dr. Evelyn Ha, and her team who are going to share with you the information of the migrant edet students and the project that they completed. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. [Music] [Applause] Good evening, board president Nishi, Vice President Nyola, board clerk, um, Yokoyama Buouie, board members, superintendent Dr. Zitlo, cabinet, and ABC community. I have the great pleasure of introducing our migrant education program this time to highlight some phenomenal work happening at Neimus Elementary with our migrant ed students. With me tonight, our interim migrant education coordinator, Mrs. Nera Armenta, she can wave. We also have principal of Neimus, Heather Durant, Neimas teacher, Mrs. Moren Baky, and
035of course, our wonderful students from Neimus Elementary. So, under Mrs. Baky's leadership, our sixth grade students were able to successfully participate in the migrant ed financial literacy class. Mrs. Baky and some of her students will be sharing about their experience. I'm going to go ahead and have them take the mic. Good evening. My name is Camila Cano, Camila Martinez, Camila Olazaba, Isabel Islas, Cesar Perez, David Rekenna. We are excited to tell you about something really special we've been doing at our school. Miss Baky, who teaches fourth grade at Nemesis Elementary, leads a financial literacy class just for us sixth grade students. This class has taught us so many important things like what money is, how to make a budget, the difference between needs and wants, saving, credit and debt, even how interest works, including compound
036interest. We also talked about college and careers, starting a business, and investing. We also got to go on a field trip to school's first federal credit union to the end of our program. We host a financial family literacy night where we shared everything we learned with our families and guests. One of the most exciting parts of our year was participating in the Capitol Hill Challenge sponsored by the Charles Schwab Foundation. We studied the SNP 500 companies, individual stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, and bonds. Each week we would research companies based on our current events, price history, and our own interest. Then we would meet with our teams and talk about which stocks to buy. We were given $100,000 per team to build a virtual portfolio and had to decide when to buy and sell our investments.
037We also learned how to track our performance and most importantly, how to be patient and work together as a team. We were split into three equal teams to compete and we are proud to say we did really well, especially for sixth graders going up against high school students. 1424 schools from California participated, mostly middle and high school students. Team 1 placed 14th out of 1424 schools with a return of 11.67% 67% above the S&P 500 and a net equity of $7,36823. Team 2 placed 40th with a 9.53% return above the S&P 500 with a net equity of 5 $5,000 $5,226.90. Team 3 plays 400. Oh, we would like to thank Miss Baky for teaching us and making learning money. We would like to thank Miss Baky for helping us learn and making learning about money
038fun. Thank you to Principal Durant for her support this year. And we would also like to thank Narita Armena, coordinator of the migrant ed program for giving us this amazing opportunity. We feel more confident about our future because of this experience and we hope more students get to do this too. Thank you so much for listening. [Applause] So, I believe do we have Yeah. Okay. All right. board comments next. Uh, Miss Mc board member Mchaten closer. Thank you. Um, I wish every single one of our student, every single one of our schools had a financial literacy program. Um, I I can just tell that you guys learned so much. So, can you tell me what was the one stock that did the best? The one stock that did the best was mostly u essentials that
039people use in everyday life like gasoline, electricity, and much more. uh gasoline raised most because most people use gasoline to charge like use for their cars and daily life in in general. So that was the highest stock. So as teams did you have did you get to pick um stocks each of your teams? Uh yes. Um all of us were split it split it up into some groups and we all get to decided which which stock would make um the most use out of and gasoline. We all picked gasoline because we knew gasoline was an essential that people use in everyday life. Without gasoline we wouldn't have most of the things we have today. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you. And you did very well competing against 124 other schools. Thank you. Uh, board
040member Mendoza. Thank you, Mr. President. So, I uh Neimus is in my trusty area and I actually live across the street from Neimus and my my four kids attended Neimus and I'm very familiar with Miss Baky and when she invited me to your literacy night um your family your financial literacy night. I was in awe of you guys because you guys are so much smarter than I. I couldn't I couldn't do the answers to the cahoot game you guys were playing. It was like way above my head, but I thought how amazing that you guys are in sixth grade. You're competing against high school students and your financial literacy is like way above mine. Way above me probably a lot of people here. Um you guys got to play the stock market. You guys did
041you guys have fun? Yes. Yeah. You guys look like you were you guys were having fun. Um and I know uh is it First Financial Bank? First FIN Miss Pocky First. Schools First Schools First was was helping supporting you guys, right? that came he came out and he it was I think and I the reason I asked for you guys to be recognized is because I when I was on the board before I I don't remember ever having this program being recognized and I think um this is a program that should be in all of our schools all of our kids need to have financial literacy and so you guys are kind of like the trailblazers um of learning and then hopefully you guys when you do really really good in the stock market you
042guys come back and tell us how you guys did okay see Okay. Okay. So, are the parents here? Thank you to you guys, too. Yeah. So, much gracias. Thank you. Congratulations to to Nez, to all of you guys. [Music] Board member, you. Yeah. Thank you, President Nishi. Wow. I was so impressed. You guys mentioned about S&P 500 that I didn't really know about them until recently. Wow, impressive. I'm going to ask you guys a hard question. Did you guys also learn about the interest rates? Okay, great. Because I mean the stock market, it's, you know, kind of like a gambling. So, it's not really for everyone, you know, but uh hardworking people like your parents, like us, average American, your parents are the heroes when it comes to financial literacy because they put food on
043the table and, you know, buy clothes for you guys, the essential and uh did you guys realize that uh math is very important? Yes, that's right. Yeah. So, you know, for uh everyday Americans, it's very important not to go in debt, not to use credit card with uh above uh 5% interest rates, things like that, right? How to invest your money when you guys grow up. Yeah, those are very important thing, you know. So, so impressive. So impressive. So, keep up the good work and uh keep up studying for math in middle school. Okay. Thank you, board member U. So, thank you uh board member Mendoza for actually uh bringing this to our attention because I didn't know this about this program and I think it's amazing that we bring these pe u bring kids
044up here to to know about the practical things that they're going to need to know for the rest of their life in terms of how to build wealth. That's not something that uh um people think it's it's math, but what is that? What is the end of that? the end is to have security, to have families and college and and all the good things that you have there. 11% above the S&P 500. You know, I got to fire my broker and have them. Uh that was pretty amazing. And it's a thousand schools or how many schools was it? 1400 1,400 schools and they're middle and high school and you guys are elementary schools and you beat their Yeah, you beat them. That's just amazing. Uh congratulations. Uh you are well on your way and I
045someday I'll have to borrow that money from them at probably some high interest rate. Thank you very much. We're going to have a picture with you guys cuz we know that someday you'll be Warren Buffett or uh Bill Gates or something like that. Yes. Camila, you guys need a good picture. Oh, thank you. No, I'm I'm gonna take a picture. Take credit. Great job. [Applause] Thank you. Good job. Thank you. That was totally good. I like that. That was a great great presentation. I'm I'm very inspired by that. Makes me feel good. Um but the next item is to approve the agenda. So can I have a motion to approve the agenda for the regular meeting of May 20th, 2025? So moved. Second. Lyola. All in favor say I. I. Okay. The motion passes 6.
046Okay. I have a motion to approve the minutes of the regular meeting of May 6, 2025. Do a second. All right. All in favor say I. I. Motion passes. 6. Item 12, the student representative. Actually, we're here pretty not too bad. We'll hear from the student board represents from Artisia High School. Good evening board president, Mr. Nishi. Vice President Mr. Nyola, board clerk, Miss Mrs. Yokoyama Buouie, board members, Miss McCaden, Mrs. Mendoza, Dr. Rios, and Mrs. U, and esteemed cabinet members. I am Alyssa Bautista, ASV president from Artisia High School. And this is my counterpart, Jasmine Limak, um, Renaissance president of Artisia High School. Today we will be presenting the spring 2025 school report with the focus being on college preparations, awards ceremonies, and spring semester schoolwide events. On January 17th, Artisia had its third
047rally. This rally had was western themed and each class had a different western animal. There were performances from band, ACT, a dance team and cheer. The rally was very interactive by having a class game and sports game. All winter varsity sports teams were introduced as well. In February, Renaissance created their spring Renaissance cards, which are awards given to students with a 3.0 GPA or higher or who received a.5 GPA boost from the previous semester. These students are given monthly incentives, raffle prizes, and home room rallies. Over 700 students at Artisia High School received a Renaissance card this semester. In March, Renaissance hosted a March Madness r home room rally for Renaissance card holders to play a and enjoy games and receive a free t-shirt. Also in March, Artisia had its fourth and final rally which
048was Rio themed. Each class decorated the gym based off Rio movie characters. There are performances from ACT color guard and cheer. And the rally included a sports game and all spring varsity sports teams were introduced as well. In the month of April, Renaissance hosted an extravaganza home room rally where Renaissance tar holders were able to participate in a scavenger hunt and enjoy games. ASB also held cabinet elections for the Nets presidents and vice presidents for the upcoming 2025 through 2026 school year. The junior class also hosted prom at Cotto Valley Country Club. Our prompt theme was Tiana's Boier Adventure. And our juniors and seniors were able to enjoy their night filled with games, caricature artists, photo booth, horse carriage rides, and a dance floor. On May 2nd, Renaissance also hosted the academic achievement awards. Leadership
049spent the day decorating the gym, setting up chairs, and checking in award winners. Seniors were also able to receive their cap and gowns that day. This year we honored over 200 students on their academic accomplishments in their different subjects. We also included performances from our very own Artisia High School band, jazz band, and drum line. Also in May, our student union hosted a I am going to college night for our seniors. We had over 150 seniors recognized for pursuing their education in the upcoming school year. Renaissance also hosted staff appreciation week where leadership hunt posters hosted a spirit week specifically for our staff and had students vote for different superlatives such as most spirited and class clown. Seniors also had their very own honor wall filled with students who are earning a variety of awards
050for their hard work throughout their four years of high school. Furthermore, the class of 2025 hosted a senior sunset where seniors would watch the sunset while enjoying snacks, taking Polaroid pictures, and participating in games. Tomorrow, our school will host a senior awards night for seniors to recognize seniors for their achievements and scholarships earned. We are looking forward to the class of 2025 also hosting a field day this Friday for our seniors to enjoy and create unforgettable memories before graduation. Next week's next week, our senior will attend graduation practice and grad bash at Universal Studios Hollywood. And Artisia High School will also host the graduation ceremony on May 29th at 7:30 p.m. We will continue to push forward with more exciting events in the upcoming school year. We look forward to reporting more about our successes
051and improvements at Artisia High School. Thank you for your time. Are there any questions? I think there will be. Uh, board member Dr. Rios. Um, as I said earlier, thank you so much for giving us the updates. And I just want to shout out again the I'm going to college dinner. It's absolutely my favorite event of the year. I'm an advocate for college and career, but college because I know that it really changes not just your life, but your families, your communities, and generations on down. So, it's always really um I'm just filled with pride every time I attend our events. Um are you two are seniors? So, what where will you be off to in the fall if you don't mind sharing? Um we're both off to UC San Diego in the fall. So,
052yay. Good job. Congratulations, Dennis. Um, you know, that's actually an event that we presented like a team went to Atlanta, Georgia to talk about the I'm going to college dinner. I'm going to uh put out a a request. I know that the golden bell I think it's due. Maybe we can as a team consider CSBA's golden bell. I think it it really merits it because again, here's here's an example of how the power of an education again can can transform lives and lead people onto a path of hopefully success. So, very proud of you. Congratulations. And I'm sorry I won't be at the graduation this year. It's also another favorite event. Um we have multiple graduations on the same day which kind of makes it hard for us to attend um all of them. But
053again, congrats ahead of time. Thank you. Uh Vice President Noya. Uh thank you, President Nishi. Uh I just wanted to personally thank you guys for always coming and sharing all the exciting things happening at Artisia. Uh like again, like I said again, uh being that voice for the students. I know you guys are graduating. Um, is there any final ideas or thoughts or comments you want to leave as ASB and Renaissance leaders? internship. Um, we specifically wanted to ask for more internship opportunities for our students because we noticed that many students are looking for like different things so they can um for college applications and stuff. And I feel like it would benefit not only the school but our students if they were given more opportunities to have these experiences to help them for the
054future and stuff. Thank you guys and have a great summer again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That that was a great presentation and and nice I got to go to that uh uh dinner as well and I think it's it would be something that you know it encourages people to go forward and go to college and it's something to be celebrated. Uh miss the dinner part of it but uh I'm sure that'll happen next year too. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. All right. Um, board presence report. Um, I went to a lot of places, but I don't think that's going to be so relevant here. I think it's better for me to talk to uh the changes that we're going to be having here at
055the school district and some of the important things we have here. One thing is I'm great that uh grateful that we have such a great crowd here. We have a great community and people who care deeply about our schools. The worst thing would be is if this room is empty when we're talking about something so important as the future of education in ABC. So for the people who are out here, it is amazingly good that you're here to to provide input as to these things. You know, each school has a story, has a character, has a culture that's unique. You know, we saw the Whitman and their math elites and we saw the migrant ed and their money part uh literacy and we see Ross and their band and and each school. It's it's it's
056what we want to do. Um last year we had a vote to have an analysis and 70 we all selected uh to go through the analysis to make the hard decisions hopefully without with some balanced bases to to go forward. Um and they gave us a report and which everybody in this room has seen and probably uh there's an issue that it's not a perfect report. It doesn't have all the information that's that's out there. We have not every single thing has been has been worked out, but it it does have a lot of parts that I think that will be positive for our district. It will hurt me to see the issues with Ferguson. You know, my daughter initiated that mural that was there and you know, I said bilingualism my is my superpower
057and it will really hurt me about aloha because my daughter also helped build the back the last thing she did before COVID hit was to build the backdrop for a theater and and I saw this really wonderful biomes play. It was amazing. probably better than any other biome play even even le even um but yeah objectively speaking it was it's great and Star Wars has this most amazing strong and vibrant uh Mandarin dual immersion um has a strong and great principle under PA and they have a poetry programs and and all these other programs that every single one of our schools have in terms of the cultures that they bring in that are not really replaceable, right? You don't replace culture like that. Um, but I want us to see in terms of instead of
058seeing what we are losing, seeing what we potentially would be gaining. Um, you know, it's hard for us to see. We don't want change. No, none of us want change, but life is about change. We know that's going to happen. and our kids will eventually grow up and go to college and and and do things and every step of the way it's it's painful and it's different but it's also a growth right and I see that we don't like the change but sometimes it's necessary and I think sometimes we can grow through change so even though students may be going to other places maybe they're the ambassadors of the schools that they were at maybe they're the ambassadors of the culture that was there. So there's only uh there's a dual immersion at Ferguson. And
059wouldn't it be great if the kids at Hawaiian could also experience that culture as well to to be able to speak Spanish fluently and and uh have poetry and also the kids at Hawaiian could teach the kids at Ferguson um the kickball with the staff and and all those other fun things that they do. Um I met with Dr. Palena when she was talking about Mandarin at Huarez and it didn't quite get there. But uh um all these different places have different stories and we don't want to see any of it go. But we are one district. We are all part of the gains and losses here and we have to make hard decisions that it's going to be hard to for the community to understand. We need your input. We need your help. actually
060the community's help to make these decisions. Um, but please know that the seven of us up here are here to make a decision that's hopefully good for all of us. Um, we don't all know the future perfectly. That's for sure. But we're all here doing the best that we can to analyze the facts to feel the emotions and um empathize and and make the best for our future for our employees, for our stakeholders, the seniors because they have a stake in having a good school. Our entire community needs to be part of this plan to build the plan. We're not trying to destroy. we're trying to to build and and so our thought is that we need to make these uh we need to see this report understand it ask the questions and then make
061decisions from there so that is my report it's not about this not about what school I visited it's not about the awards that we're handing out it's about the people that are in this room that care deeply about the schools that we have and the help that we will need from you to move forward and be positive and grow as a community. That is my report. We will now have the superintendent report. Thank you. Um, in light of everything happening, um, my goal will be to communicate with our staff, our students and families, um, as the board moves in different directions. Tonight is just the acceptance of a report. If things were to change, um, that will be my goal to communicate that with families so that they're aware, so staff is aware. um we
062can't always avoid change, but we can work together and listen and we can make plans together. And so whatever comes, regardless of what happens, um my goal will be to communicate and make sure that we know what's happening and we do our best to move forward together. Um in light of that, I will forego all of the many things that I normally do. Thank you. Next, we need an employee representative report. Good uh good evening, President Nisha, uh trustee trustees, um superintendent Dr. Zitlo, administrative cabinet, teachers, nurses, and the ABC community members that are here tonight and out there in YouTube land. Thank you for tuning in for this very important meeting. So, um just uh two things. One, um Mr. Nishi wrote an excellent article for the community news um that is on page
063six. uh I would greatly uh motivate you to go see it and go and to read it because it really is a good summary of kind of where we are as a district. Um it's it's a worthwhile read. It'll take you two minutes to read it, but uh has great information. And so that's in the community news from last Friday. Dr. Zitlo's video that she released uh to the community and to the employees of ABC was also a very uh very good excellent doc excellent summary of where we are and why there are considerations to do uh things possibly different. I would also encourage you to read the consultants report on school closure uh school consolidation and reconfiguration. you know, I was on the, you know, the first committee that was done uh differently. And
064so I appreciate that the district um really listened during that first attempt at really talking about facilities and uh really appreciate you you had a professional consultant group look at this and and come back. Now, how does this play into my report? Um, I would like to thank the administration for really uh allowing us as employees of ABC to learn about uh the report last Friday, Thursday and Friday um along with the community and to hear it as one cuz we are a community. So, and what happens to one part of the community impacts other parts of the community. So, I appreciate that we were all able to um take a a gasp together. Um I was at Sters Elementary, but it also this uh there was a slideshow that was shown to the staffs
065at Ferguson, at Aloha, and at Wararez. And so as we kind of sat there and watched the slideshow uh we were stunned uh because that we all kind of saw for the first time. We all saw it for the first time and weren't sure how to react and um you know I I also went to Whitney and was heard you know what was going to be presented there too. you know, at Whitney, uh, they were stunned, too, and they got up and and, you know, walked out and went back and did their professional duties. Sters did the same thing, and I know the teachers at Ferguson and Aloha did the same thing, too. But that doesn't mean that it didn't hurt, you know. teachers and employees and families, they build a legacy. They share their
066they share birthdays, they share their families, uh experiences. So, each school is a really deep community. And so the district's got to do what it's got to do, but please be cognizant of the the hurt and the grief. That's all we ask. Thank you. Public comments. Persons wishing to address the board should fill out a card located on the table by the front door and submit the completed card to an administrator. Speakers will be called in sequence during the public comment section or prior to board discussion on an agenda item. The board shall provide one hour for speakers to address non-aggendaized items. Each speaker is limited to one presentation of five minutes or less. Those who have a group concern are encouraged to select a spokesperson to address the board. Should there be 15 to
06720 speakers for non-aggendaized items, individual speakers shall be allowed three minutes to address the board on the item. In order to ensure that non-English speakers receive the same opportunity to directly address the board, any member of the public who utilizes a translator shall be provided at least twice the allotted time to address the board. Please remember that the board is unable to directly respond to comments made during the public comment section. In addition, neither the board nor district staff verify the accuracy of the statements made during public comments. Persons wishing to address the board on a specific agenda item at the time the item is under discussion are limited to 5 minutes each and will be called to speak following the staff comments and prior to the board's discussion and taking action. The board shall
068provide 30 minutes for speakers to address agendaized items. Should there be 6 to 10 speakers for agendaized items, individual speakers shall be allowed three minutes to address the board on the item. Adverse remarks about a person's race, ancestry, ethnic group identification, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender, mental or physical disability, or age may not be made. Please avoid remarks or charges which reflect upon the character, motives, qualifications, or ability of any school district employee regardless if the identification is by name, position, or other reference. Such comments may be presented through the proper administrative channels set forth in bylaw 9323. We have one uh public comment for non-aggenda items. Manny Fernando, please come up. Honorable Mr. President and uh honorable members of the board, Dr. Zitlo, thank you for accommodating me. uh I actually
069came here for a different reason and and then uh I found what what was going on. So I just wanted to say a few words. First of all uh I want to thank this board and Dr. Zitlo and Dr. Mary Sue Pri before that and all of the teachers and staff in this of this school district. We have an excellent excellent school district and it has performed well for a number of years. I have been a proud resident of Serritos and the school district for 48 years. Uh I am proud that all three of my children graduated from Whitney High School as well as one daughter-in-law. Uh all of my grandchildren, eight of them uh are from uh Wittman. Uh this coming school year, I'll have five of my grandchildren at Whitney Whitney and three
070more at Wittman. So this is a great school district. I specifically want to address uh Whitney which is very dear to my heart. Uh Whitney has been a uh hallmark uh u flagship I should say of this school district and uh Whitney's reputation uh brings newest uh parents, younger parents and students here. I I I know that our attendance is dropping but new students come into this district for uh coming to this area for the school district and also uh Whitney. Many of them are coming hoping to go to Whitney. So but I I don't know what your plans are actually. Uh I I am not familiar and I I I apologize for that. All I except for some rumors and I am hoping that none of your changes will adversely affect either Whitney High
071School or Whitney Middle School. Uh Whitney Middle School in particular, I think was rated number one in the state this year. Yeah, I'll be done pretty soon. That's all I really wanted to say uh about Whitney High School because I just heard some rumors and um the middle school again. And I'm sure you know how the middle school has performed and how the uh the the school itself has performed for many many years. Uh so again that's uh not just because of the students. uh is because what the boards over the last probably uh at least uh 50 or more years has provided and what the staff uh and the teachers principles they have provided excellent uh uh service to the district and uh Whitney High School itself is a flagship ship I'm just asking
072you if if it's part of the plan to not to disrupt uh this school that's been going on very successfully for many years. Again, I thank this board, Dr. Zitlo, um and all of those who came before us, before you, I'm sorry. Thank you. Thank you. [Applause] No further public comment. None. Thank you. Can I have a motion to approve the consent calendar? So move second. Second. Uh does anyone wish to remove any item from the consent calendar? Uh board member Mendoza. Um not I don't need to pull it. I just want to make a comment on it. It's um consent item 4.3C. It's on page 48. Okay, go ahead and make your comment. Um, so every time this comes up on the agenda, I always want to make a comment because I want to
073thank our our community for donating. And I especially just want to read out some of the money that's been donated to our schools. Um, we had Cerritos Elementary Educational Foundation donated $5,000 to support the strive the strive to thrive program at Critos Elementary School. Um, we had the Nixon PTA donated 6,000 over $6,000 to support field trips. They also donated another $6,000 to support the purchase of a portable stage. Um, we also had our former schoolboard member and now city of Cerrito's council woman Sophia say donate some medical textbooks um to our ABC adult school. We had Los Cerritos Center director of property management uh Dena Henry donated metal benches valued at over $5,000 to ABC adult school. And I especially wanted to thank Cerrito's Community College because they donated donated a GM 2016 Sierra
074and GM 2017 cruise valued at a total of $39,000 to the secondary curriculum CT department of to support the CT automotive pathway to car high school and the revenue is over $62,000 and I always want to make sure that we acknowledge them and I've always asked for this to be an action item and not just a consent because I think we really need to recogn recognize our and supporting our schools. Thank you. Thank you. So, let's call for a vote on the consent calendar. All in favor say I. I. Motion passes [Applause] 70. Okay. Can I have a motion to approve revised administer regulation 6158 independent study? Tatiana moves second. Niola. Thank you, Dr. Frasier. Sorry. Thank you. Uh Mr. President, um we're bringing this forward tonight AR, uh 6158 independent study. Um if you
075remember back in October of two, uh 2023, uh we brought together uh brought forward board policy 6158 independent study. Um at that time, we did not uh update the the AR, so we're just bringing it forward um with the updated per the latest CSBA recommendations to align with the board policy. Thank you. Is there any public comment on this item? I see none. Is there any board comment on this item? So, I'll call for a vote. All in favor say I. I. Eyes have it. 70. Thank you. 3.7A. Make a motion to approve a request to adopt the Amir's assessments as district's K2 risk of reading difficulty screener and contract with Amira Learning LLC to provide the assessment and professional learning for the 2025 2026 school year. So move. Tatiana seconds. Dr. Castro. Thank you.
076I'm very proud to present this item as a result of our union partnership with our director of elementary curriculum. We were able to work with a committee of teachers who are going to be using this screener starting next year for grades kindergarten through 2 grade. This is part of state bill 114 to ensure that each local educational agency has a screener to identify reading difficulties and help provide supports as needed to our students in those grade levels. Thank you. Are there any public comments on this item? I see none. Is there any board comment on this item? Looks like uh Dr. Rios. Thank you, Mr. President. I know that every school district was, you know, this was a big deal. Um, I'd like to know, sorry, something's in my mouth. Um, what were some of
077the highlights? What won this? I know there were a few programs out there. Um, can you just give me a concise version of like the process of selecting mirror? Yes. Some of the major highlights first are that this screener has the ability to be both online and in paper version, which is, you know, for kindergarten students, obviously, we want the paper version. Uh, another benefit for us as we think about supporting our English learners is that this uh, screener is also available in the Spanish language and I think that was one of the bigger highlights uh, the support and then uh, teachers definitely saw that the data assessments that were provided, the data reports as a result of the screeners were very helpful in identifying what the reading difficulties were for those specific students. So
078those were the major highlights that I can point out as to why this screener was prefer preferred over some of the other ones. Thank you. Um our initiative here is to have all our kids reading by third grade. I imagine this is going to help us in those efforts. Do we have a plan uh in place or in the works to address um students who we find out through the screener are not reading or having issues with their reading. Yes. Since the pandemic, once we um implemented our intervention teachers, we've been working on progress monitoring our students to identify those reading difficulties. This will just give us a consistent system starting in kindergarten to do that. And our team will continue working together with our teachers to develop a specific plan on the checkpoints like
079when the specific screeners will be given, what the data, what will happen with the data and how we use this data along with other components and other data to identify the best supports for that student and to identify whether students need tier 2 or tier three level supports as part of our multi-tered system of support. So to clarify, is that going to be different from what we already have in place? I imagine this is going to identify an even larger pool of students or groups. I like to think we have supports in place that are going to be in addition to what we have say this year. I think it'll just help us identify sooner especially for kindergarten some of the areas where we need to hone in on uh for support. So before we
080were using our star assessments which is broader and it does require some level of reading for our students and so now with this screener it could help identify even earlier that in conjunction with the UFly structured literacy supports that we've been providing all of this coming together in order to make sure that our students are receiving on-time supports. One more last question. Do we have a plan like when will this be administered? Like how early in the year? Yes, we're working on finalizing and developing that plan with our teachers. We like a I would like a report and I think that my colleagues would agree that you know we want to know what those numbers are like as early as possible so that we can make sure that supports are in place. Sure. Thank you.
081Um board member Mendoza. Thank you, Mr. President. So yeah, just going along with Dr. Rios's questions. So my understanding is this will be for all of our K through 2 students and that it will be all paper or will it be online? Well, there's options and I think the team is looking at what are the best options depending on the school site, what the students are comfortable with and what our teachers are comfortable with. Certainly, it'll be related to the site's needs and the uh age specific level needs. Okay. So I I you know I I teach kindergarten. And I was also a reading interventions um out of the classroom teacher and we at my school district we use um Amplify. We use Dibbles which I loved. Um I haven't gotten to know Amira yet.
082My only concern is with the smallest students um an online assessment doesn't really get to their f funological awareness. It doesn't get to their it might get their letter recognition but decoding skills and oral reading fluency. I my suggestion is that it should be a paper. It should be a pen and paper one-on-one which does give our teachers more work to do. Um and another question I would have is are we doing this beginning of the year, middle of the year, end of the year or is this just a one-time assessment that we're giving our students? This screener is administered three times a year. Three times a year with progress monitoring in between. Yes. Correct. Yes. I would like I would like that data to be shared with the with the board because I think
083it's very important to look and see how our students especially at these um early grade levels to see how their literacy is progressing because if we don't catch it now within these uh important early years by the time they get to third grade it's really hard to to support them. We're going to be do a a lot more work. So I yes if I can make a recommendation just like Dr. real I would like to see the data of each school year and also the progress monitoring to see how students are progressing and this is for the contract is for how many years for just one year. This is for one year. So after one year we can assess to see if it's going well and we can do it again or are we committed
084to it for Yes. Typically, we just try to contract with some of these screeners for one year as we're starting to learn about the implementation um looking at the pros and cons before the end of the year to continue the contract possibly in the following year. So, it's a one-year contract for now. One-year contract that includes training for staff? Yes, it does. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you. Um like to call for a vote. All in favor say I. I. I. Motion passes 70. Item 3.8. Can I motion to approve the request to contract with Nadian company LLC DBA the pink canvas and vital link education business consortium DBA vital link to provide career technical education enrichment programs for the students in grades 5 through 8 for the 2024 2025
085summer school doc so move second Tatiana thank you uh Dr. Castro. Thank you, President Nishi. This again, um, we're prov we're providing you this CTE experience for our students in grades 5 through 8. I'm very excited because typically we are only able to provide this experience to seventh and eighth graders. And so this year, trying to meet our LCAP goal number three, we are providing this experience to our elementary students who are attending the summer enrichment program. And you can see the various offerings for both fifth, sixth grade, seventh, and eighth grade. That includes things like creativity meets commerce which is an entrepreneur experience for some of our students. It includes steam engineering experiences as well as other uh various experiences like engineering drone um and hands-on activities to introduce students to various career pathways
086that they might be interested and can further explore in high school. Are there any public comments on this item? None. Are there any board comments on this item? Seems like a very creative program. Uh how did we select these particular schools? These are the schools that we have our summer enrichment program. So we usually alternate the different schools that we offer summer enrichment uh because we combine some of our schools together in order to provide those services. Thank you. Any board comment? Press the button. Um maden. Thank you. Um so if I have a student who doesn't attend one of these schools they can go to another school for summer school right so the summer school enrollment is uh regional in other words it may be for example hosted at one school site but other
087schools that are in that region we uh let the families know that they can attend the school at that school so it's not the summer school is not specific to that location rather that we bring number of schools together into one location it looks like a great program I the idea of um having CTE introduced really early to younger students, encourage our kids to get a job. All right. Um so I'll call for a vote. All in favor of this particular item say I. I. I. Motion passes 70. Thank you. Can I have a motion to approve the request for a new course entitled advanced placement AP African-American studies for the 2025 2026 school year? Dr. Castro, thank you. I'm excited to bring this item forward. The College Board has a new course called Advanced
088Placement for African-American Studies. Last year was the pilot year for the course and they had great success across uh the United Na the United States. Uh we are excited to begin the offering of this at Gar High School. Um it will meet UC history social science requirements as well as meet the ethnic studies requirement for the state of California. Thank you. Is there any board uh public comment? None. Is there any board comment? Yes. Uh board member Dr. Rios, I just like to speak in favor of this. I think it's great. We know ethnic studies, there's a lot of research behind it that when students um take classes like ethnic studies, they really find a lot of empowerment in them and it really um yields very positive outcomes. So, yay. Glad to see this. Thank
089you. Thank you. My only comment is that yes, this sounds like a great program to have. I didn't read the textbook, so I'll have to abstain on this. It's not a textbook. Oh, it's it's just the course, but there's also textbook here. We're not We're not approving a textbook. No, if I can add the textbook that we are using is one that was already previously approved by the board. Ah, okay. All right. Then I don't have to abstain. Okay. All in favor say I. I. I. Motion passes 70. Thank you. Thank you for the clarification. Okay. Item 4.7A. Can I have a motion to accept the recommendation report prepared by Schoolworks Incorporated? So moved. Tatiana seconds. Thank you. Um as a reminder, this report is requested from school works and we're only listening to their
090recommendation this evening. Uh it's not a public hearing currently and we're not taking any particular recommendation tonight. Uh Mr. win. Thank you, President Nishes. Um, tonight we have Mr. Kenneet Reynolds from uh Schoolworks Incorporated um to be to present to the board um the U school consolidations and reconfiguration report. Um it was done by them. the as a remember uh a reminder back in November of 20 2024, the board approved a contract with school works to assist the district in maximizing school facilities capacities and utilizations and make recommendation to the board regarding possible school consolidations. Tonight, the board will listen to the report and accept the report. Acceptance of the report only acknowledges the work that was done by school works. Acceptance of the report does not mean that you agree or disagree with any
091of the recommendations. Acceptance of this report doesn't mean that you will move forward with any of the recommendation. Should you wish to discuss any of the components of the recommendation further, it must be brought back in a future meeting. It's a public hearing and then after that as a separate meeting you can take an action item on the report. So after tonight after accepting the report the board will wish to bring back the item as a public hearing to hear from the public and then as as another separate meeting the the board can act on it. So I just want to make sure that the public understand that acceptance of the report does not mean you agree or disagree with it. Just just acknowledge their work. So with that, um, I will have Mr. Kenneet
092Reynolds to present the report to the board. U, Mr. Smith, that's not the right report. Yeah. Um, can I ask one question, President Nishi? Yes. Do we have extra uh, copies of this for the Yes. the public? Because where are they? They were out. Okay. Very good. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you so much. We'll pull up the right report. All right. Well, while he's bringing that up, I'd like to introduce myself. Ken Reynolds and president of Schoolworks. It was again a while ago I received a call asking if we would be interested in assisting the district with doing an analysis of the data. Uh and this is the end result of our analysis. I do want to acknowledge uh both your staff and the work that's been done prior to me uh be being
093involved. there was a lot of great resources uh that were very valuable in doing our analysis. All right, so now that we have our correct presentation up here, again, a lot of information here. This is just an overview of all the components that I'll be discussing. Uh I will try to get through this relatively quickly so we can hear uh from you and the public. Just if you wouldn't mind, can you hold the microphone? Um, I don't think it's picking you up and we want to make sure everyone hears you and we need to make sure that microphone is turned on. Please, Steph. All right. Is that better? That's better. All right. So, one of the first things we look at is the enrollment trends. Now, I am a demographer and I do our own
094demographics work for a lot of districts throughout California, but this is not our work. This is just me reviewing and sharing the work that's already been done for your district on this page. And so you've seen the numbers. It shows your historic enrollment and what your projected enrollment is. I did change the format on this slide. What I like to do when I'm presenting information is highlight the grade groupings of the data. So we are using the orange color to represent your elementary grade levels. The light green color represents your middle school grade levels and then the light blue color represents the high school grade levels. And so we we do see that the enrollment has been declining the last five or six years and is projected to continue decline. And that is really what
095sort of highlighted you know is change in our future. And so we'll be sharing our recommendations a little bit later. So, one of the key causes of decline, and we're seeing it throughout our state, is fewer number of children being born each year. And so, this here again is it's this is our format, but it's your data from your reports. That blue line shows the number of children born each year. And we can see that has been declining. It's based on your zip codes. And then those blue bars on the same chart represent how many children showed up in your kindergarten classes five years later. And so again, this I wasn't showing a projection here because I didn't have the detailed data, but you can see that as fewer children are being born, we're going
096to see fewer students enrolling just because there's fewer students in the community. And that's the key source of declining enrollments throughout the state. Now, this piece of information here is not in our report, but it's just again another way of looking at your data. This is straight from census information from both 2010 and 2020 in addition to what your enrollments were at those two time points. And so, the the key thing I'd like to point out here is in the bottom right hand corner, right? We show in 2010 how many school age children lived within your school district boundaries. And again, that's based on census data. And so when we compare that to the census, there was a drop of almost 2500 students that school age students living within your community. So over that 10-year
097span, that was a significant drop. However, in the box right above that, we looked at your enrollment at those two points in time and your enrollment only dropped about 400 students in that same time period. And so your district due to its success, right, has attracted a lot of families uh both living within the community but also those attending your schools from outside your community. And so you haven't seen the impacts of decline that other districts have because of the great work you are doing. But it still we are starting to see those impacts these last five years now. And again 2020 was obviously that census was done right before and during the pandemic and so any shifts after that are not reflected in these numbers. But again, it's just good looking at historic data,
098trying to understand the core uh background of information that we're analyzing. So now we're looking at a statewide trend. A as you know, the Department of Finance and Department of Education work closely on trying to predict where numbers are going. And that is very useful when this governor does his budgets. as I you know he just released his May revise recently and he relies on these types of information and so it's good for you to understand where the state has been and where it's going and where it's trending. So again you saw from your demographer your numbers are trending down. We look statewide and the numbers are also trending down. So there's nothing unique about your district that you're declining, right? Other districts are seeing very significant declines. So this is another piece of information.
099What I looked at here, again, this is all historic, no projections here. And so by going to the Department of Education's data quest website, we can look at information by county in addition to by district. And so those gray bars are showing the county enrollment. And so we can see how that's declined and correlated to that I show that golden bar uh line and that represents your enrollment. Now they're on different scales on the right and left hand side of that chart, but they're scaled to they have the same starting point. And so what I'm illustrating here is again due to the successful district you run, your numbers have outperformed the overall county averages. All right. So the one of the key components we want to talk about is right what the causes of declining
100enrollment are. Again, some of these are more just typical comments, but some do apply to your district also. And I will comment on those differences and then also what the impacts of those declines have been. Again, a lot of these are statewide things that we're seeing. So, the first one, right, is the demographic shifts and declining bursts. Again, we're seeing that in most areas. There are a few towns uh in our state that have seen relatively stable bursts, but that's because there's been so much new development in those small communities that the development has been able to displace the fact that the family size is getting smaller. Uh so that and that's a key one that again you're experiencing and most of LA County is experiencing. Uh the second item is economic factors. One thing
101that we've noticed and especially in areas where there's a lot of new housing being built is that as housing gets more expensive, we get fewer and fewer children out of those housing units. Right? Back in the day you when I started in the business, right, 30 something years ago, when you built a home, we would expect to see seven children. So if you built a hundred homes, we would get 70 students out of that development. Uh nowadays, it's much smaller numbers. And again, it's just there's been a lot of change over the last 30 years. And in the last 5 to 10 years, we've really tracked as home prices go up for about every 100,000 increase in housing prices, those yield rates are continuing to drop, right? The more expensive housing just the families get
102smaller. Uh obviously unless there's a lot of development in your community the economic factors do not have as significant of an impact. The only impact is that right when someone retires and leaves the community then a new family buys that home uh based on the price point we are seeing the families coming in being smaller. Then thirdly we have the Final issue being competition and alternative education. Again, this one we've seen in a lot of communities, especially once COVID hit. Families started looking at different options because, right, we we were we were dealing with a lot of change at that point in time. So, we've seen a lot of school districts get smaller because there was more competition with home schools, with charter schools, with private schools, and other options. We haven't seen those same
103challenges in your district uh simply because again, the great programs you offer and the great demand there are for your schools. And so, you're doing well and competing with the other educational options out there. And so what are the impacts of declining enrollment? Uh and again these are just uh typical impacts right it doesn't mean that any of these have impacted your schools or facilities but combination classes is a very common one right we get smaller and smaller populations and sometimes we end up with combo classes. Another one is loss of specialized programs. Uh again, that's a very common loss and of in fact a lot of districts are dealing with that challenge just because of the end of the COVID era resources. Um as resources shrink, right? Budget cuts typically end up impacting special
104programs. So, a lot of districts are grappling with that in this new budget cycle. So reduced collaboration and morale. Again, as you're shrinking, there's there's always that fear, right? Are we going to lose our jobs? And um there's fewer second graders, teachers in our school, so fewer people to collaborate with. All those types of issues arise. Again, I really enjoyed the superintendent's message saying, right, that the purpose of this study is not to try to create any layoffs, right? So that's that that should not be a significant issue, but again the the shrinking enrollment is still something that we're going to be facing. Obviously budget cuts, right? For most school districts, your revenues are based on the number of students and how many are in their seats. Next we have underutilization of facilities. So, as
105the population shrinks at a campus, it becomes underutilized. And that's great in some regards and not so great in other regards, right? We're we're not going to have to be worried about being overcrowded and not enough parking or a line at the restrooms and things like that. But underutilization creates its challenges, too, because there are a lot of overhead costs in operating facilities. Then finally, staff reductions, right? As funds are reduced, there's less money for staff. So again, those are the typical challenges districts are facing as enrollment declines. So next, I want to acknowledge the work of your committee that looked at all these issues. I received a binder with all their information that I read through and had a lot of great information in there. And in fact, it helped me to really expedite
106and have to be able to generate some focus on the recommendations instead of having to make sure I collect enough data to be able to generate recommendations. And so this is just a highlight of some of those pieces of data that I was able to garnish from their reports. Again, I'll talk about some of the other items later, but the reason I had this slide up here was just I was highlighting in blue the schools that are underutilized either now or in the projections that were done. And then the tan color is saying we're just being slightly underutilized. we're in that 70% utilization range. And then of course any of the ones that weren't highlighted are in that 80 or 90%. And so they're either well utilized or maybe even slightly impacted if they're running
107that at a higher in the higher 90s. So next, what are our reasons for the school closures or consolidations? And please, the key one that we're focusing on is our first item here, the academic enhancement. We want to make sure right we can offer the programs and have great collaboration and if we get down to populations that are you know only a hundred or 200 students on a campus it gets very challenging to have a robust program and we've seen a lot of great uh presentations this evening from your students and again a lot of that is a lot easier to do with a school that has a healthy enrollment. uh reallocation of resources. I have a lot of districts that are working with me to figure out if maybe we should do some consolidations
108in order to preserve our resources for our facilities. And again, this is more of a facilities issue. For example, I was just out in Morango recently. they had passed a bond, but the bond's not enough to do all the facility works they need to do. If they consolidate a few campuses, they have fewer sites they have to allocate those bond resources to. So again, lots of different issues arise from all sorts of different perspectives. And so we're just trying to highlight all the different types of issues that come into account when we're doing our analysis. uh long-term sustainability and cost efficiency. Those are really more related to uh the the staffing and budget issues that school districts can face as enrollments decline. So after this slide, we're actually going to go uh one by one
109by our through our recommendations. But prior to that, I sort of wanted to highlight what we did and how we did it. And so again, we start by looking at the enrollment, the projections, the capacity, and trying to understand right where do we have space available uh for considering any consolidations. I do like to group it by high school attendance area so we can look at different regions within the district. And so when I went through and looked at that, the most Excess capacity was in the Artisia High attendance area. Uh Garh High also had space available but not nearly as much as Artisia and Cerritos High had the least amount of space available but still did have a little bit of space available. Now another component I looked at was where are we projected
110to decline the most? And so the actual when we look at the number of students were declining uh the large at the elementary schools the largest was in the gar attendance area then cerritos and then artisia. So it seems a little counterproductive. Why is artisia having the least amount of decline? Um it's because it has the fewest number of students currently in that attendance area. So from a number perspective it is dropping the least. However, the next bullet point actually illustrates when we look at any of the three attendance areas, we are right in that 11 to 12% uh decline over the next five years. And so again, we're seeing a consistent pattern across the district, right? It's not all in one area. Uh it's very evenly impacting the entire region. And again, that's based
111on the data I reviewed from your Davis demographics report. And uh but I did review that. Again, being a demographer myself, I believe that their findings and projections seem to be uh very reasonable and reliable data that I felt comfortable using them for our analysis. And then final note on this page as we go through these recommendations and options you can consider, uh change is very difficult. I we're going to hear a lot of that this evening and into the future. Uh take your time. Any changes you might want to make definitely wouldn't start till at least the 202627 school year. If you take time to do the planning and all the appropriate steps in the process, it makes embracing that change a little bit easier. It's still going to be difficult though. All right.
112So as I said I think most of you have seen this already. Uh recommendation one was looking at closing Aloha Elementary and for each of these I am highlighting I mentioning which high school attendance area they're in. And so this is in the Artisia High area. Uh for the school I have a chart there that shows their historic enrollment. And so we can see they've had a drop in enrollment. Uh they've been relatively stable the last few years. Uh actually up a little bit compared to their lowest point. Um but it's also I'd like to share again you're probably very familiar with this type of information already but where their enrollment comes from. And so out of the 300 students enrolled 244 are residences of their community their boundary. and the other there's 40 that
113come from other school boundaries within your school district and 16 that come in from outside your school district. So the reason we highlight that that is because on the following page, right, if you're going to consider a consolidation, where do those students end up going to school? And so again, I'd like to thank your IT team for helping do these analysis as we developed the recommendations. they helped illustrate right what the busing impact is and the number of students impacted and uh our best options on where they could be housed. So for here at Aloha we again these are just general recommendations. If again you can throw this report out at the end of the day and that's fine. If you decide to go through a boundary committee process and actually develop true boundaries on
114how best to uh redistribute these areas, you know, that's a great process to go through too. Uh but this is just highlighting the fact that it is possible. And so in in this one, we had most of the areas go to Willow and area D is the only area we sent over to Melbourne. And so that would add 60 students to Melbourne and 184 to Willow. So the next recommendation, this was also in the Artisia High boundary. So here we're looking at Ferguson. Again, we can see they've had a significant drop in enrollment and it's just been continuing to decline in the last several years have been relatively stable. Again, the total enrollment is right around that 300 mark. They're at 293 with 225 within their residence boundary. 58 coming in from other schools within
115the district and 10 from outside the district. So when looking at the neighborhood schools that these children could go to, we would have some go to Melbourne and the others to Hawaiian. So areas A and B we assign to Melbourne and areas C, D, and E on the map we assign to Hawaiian. And so that that splits the population pretty evenly. 116 students going to Hawaiian and 109 to Melbourne. Recommendation number three. Now we're in the GAR high attendance area and looking at Wararez. Again, they've seen a significant decline over time and their enrollment is down to also nearly 300. They're at 296 with 182 of those in their own boundary, 73 coming from other school areas within the district and 41 from outside the school district. And so our example of how those students
116could be redistributed between Burbank and Kennedy areas D and E or D and F go to Burbank and A, B, C, and E over to Kennedy. And so we end up with 68 students being added to Burbank. and 114 to Kennedy. Now, one thing I haven't mentioned is right, all the students that attending these schools from outside of that school's boundary, right? The normal process would be to allow those children to choose a different school to enroll at. And so, they could go with their classmates to the two schools uh in these examples um or pick a different school. Again, a lot of times those options are based on space available. So those were the three initial recommendations we made uh based on just the capacity available and what our enrollment projections were looking at.
117So the the next thing we looked at is a little different. We were noticing that obviously the middle schools are also seeing a decline in enrollment and your middle schools currently serve seventh and eighth grade and so if we add sixth grade that is just I think something that you may want to consider. It is part of our recommendations but adding sixth grade again there's a lot of benefits and so we listed some of those benefits on this page. We I've helped a lot of districts study this issue. Uh some districts that I've worked with on some master planning and things like that. When we started the process, they said they would never add sixth graders to their middle schools and at the end of the process they end up doing it. Um a lot
118of times it was for educational reasons because of the great opportunities it provides. Other times it's because they had the space available. And so in your case, we do have the space available uh at least in the projections and it does provide some excellent opportunities. Uh so we we we again we list that here, right? Your sixth graders now have access to the wonderful programs offered at a middle school environment with uh teachers that are dedicated to the individual subjects. Uh, one of the and obviously the enhanced extracurricular act opportunities. One of the key things I've again I've been part of a lot of board meetings seeing a lot of testimony. One of the key advantages I've seen for being argued for implementing 68 versus 78, right, is your students get three years on the
119campus, right? instead of getting there one year and then next year as your last year there having three years gives you more connections with that campus. And so again, a lot of great things. There's there's again it's another difficult change because we'll also hear from families saying I don't think my sixth graders ready to be at a middle school. Um so again it's going to be wonderful to see what we hear from the your community on this topic. But as you can see, these enrollment projections for 2026 27 with the sixth grade added puts all of your middle schools right in that, you know, 600, 700, 800 range. Uh I think the smallest one there of course was Whitney. And so at that number, it's just sort of that one of again a lot of
120people's opinions. That's a great size for a middle school. The downside to that option, that recommendation, right, is that we see even more decline, a lower enrollments at our elementary schools. And so now they're getting even smaller. But it's it's not smaller from a perspective of now we have fewer second grade teachers on this campus, right? All we've done is we've moved those sixth graders to the middle schools. So we still have the same collaboration efforts that we'll be able to benefit from uh even though our overall enrollment is lower. All right. So the reason I listed Sters as recommendation number five is that our initial review of the Cerritos high attendance area did not show enough excess capacity to outright consider consolidation. If we want to do consolidation, right, we would have to wait
121a while until we've seen some declines in enrollment. Or if we choose to implement recommendation 4 and move the sixth graders to the middle schools, then we have a little more space available. And so this does become an option. And so again, Sters, unlike the other elementaryaries that we recommended, right, has 466 students in their projection, but only 188 of those are in their residence. So a common theme you saw is that the schools that we are recommending have the smaller enrollments in their residences. And the the really the key advantage of that is there's we're impacting fewer students. It's still an impact. It's still significant, but it does impact fewer students. And that is again always one of the goals is we want to minimize the challenges we create. Uh they do have a
122significant intradist and interdist population at Sters. So that does lend itself to the fact that there's more students impacted when you look at the grand total number. Um but again it's an option that if you since we wanted to study all of the attendance areas um this is the one we would recommend in the Cerritos high area but again most of these recommendations do stand alone. I said option five is really dependent on either waiting several years into the future or moving the sixth graders. Uh so in this option for sters uh we looked at assigning areas A and B and C over to Gonzalvas and area D over to Cerritos. Again, area A actually doesn't have any population there, but it is a part of their boundary. And so, this adds 101 to Cerritos
123and 87 students over to Consolvas. And again, wherever the other intradist and intist students would choose to go would impact uh campuses. in addition to those students. And that brings us to our final recommendation item here. We were looking at a possible reconfigure of Whitney High School. Now, currently it serves grades 7 through 12. If you choose to do 68 for your middle schools, it would make sense to make that campus a 612 so that after they finish the after the students finish elementary school, then they could move over to Whitney. And so, but the main reason I have this school on this list is because of some of the comments that we heard uh from the community and from the board and from the school closure committee. Can we increase our can we offset
124our declining enrollment by increasing our enrollment? And I I said I' I've already illustrated you've done a wonderful job at that, but it's I I think you've reached a maximum point where it's just it's not easy to bring in more students than you already are. But the one place, the one school that does not have students from outside your district for the most part is Whitney. And so, how can we expand extra grade level at Whitney, let alone add more space? And if we did add more space, does it make sense to bring those from outside the district or make it room for your existing parents? And so again, looking at all those issues, if we created a separate location for the middle school students and had a middle school program here, I use the
125example of Sters uh just because that was nearby and if we're going to close that campus, let's continue to use that facility uh for educational purposes. Uh but it could be another location. It doesn't have to be Sters. And so in this example, again, we ended up showing a goal of about 600 students as a middle school with the 525 being the current 175 per grade level you have and the other 25 per grade level perhaps coming from an interd district permit. And then at the high school, we ended up at 900. Now you have about 1,50 there currently. So this would make it less impacted on that site and it provides space for about 50 students per grade level. Basically 200 additional high school students. Now again if you still want to load it
126at about a thousand then we could bump that up to 75 per grade level. Um or you could expand it to being accessible to more of your parents. Again lots of choices there. I I was highlighting the fact that we could probably get more interd district because of the wonderful program you offer there and again it's a very desirable place to go to school. So again it's just thinking outside the box trying to address some of the issues and concerns we heard as we've read through all the different documentation. And so again just just an option uh for you to consider. Then finally I want to close out this with showing real quickly there we were asked to look at the AB1912 issues and there's nine factors identified in the state guidelines. Now, these guidelines
127don't apply to you because you're not facing bankruptcy. But school districts that are facing bankruptcy, right, those districts basically are dealing with a situation where the state comes in and starts closing schools to balance the budget. And these guidelines were to make sure there's a process involved for those in that dire situation. But it again I believe one of the board members asked us to take a look at these issues and so we did and again a lot of them didn't create a situation that would cause us to have a different recommendation than we've made. And so one is what are the condition of your school facilities? Right? if we're going to close a school, let's close one that's in in bad shape. And all your schools are in great shape. And so this was
128not something that could be utilized to say, "Hey, we should close this school." Uh the next category is operating costs associated savings. Again, in some districts, some sites are more expensive to operate than others. uh the information your school closure committee did says, you know what, it's about 850,000 per site in overhead costs. And so they didn't differentiate saying, oh, this one is way more expensive to operate, so maybe it's a better choice. So that really didn't apply here either. The next category is capacity to accommodate excess pupils. And again, that's the key category that we used in making our recommendations. Where can we find a consolidation that the kids are going to a nearby school, there's minimal impact, and there's space available in the neighborhood. We're not having to bust kids across town to
129find a school that with space available. The next category is special programs. Now, most of your schools have special programs. And so, we highlighted for the our four recommendations, uh, if they have a special ed program, if they have a Head Start. I just used Head Start there. It also references any state preschool, right? Those are early education opportunities. And then the other category was magnet programs. And so our recommendation that is if you consider any of these consolidations that those programs still be offered for their students in their new locations. And so that can create some challenges and some opportunities, but that would be what we would recommend. The next category was environmental or safety factors. And again, that's just probably just common sense. If you have a site that's you feel is unsafe,
130um that would be ideal for closing. You've got again wonderful schools. There's no environmental factors or safety factors. So that did not help guide us in making a decision. And then the balance of pupil demographics. What this is saying is right, let's not just close a school because it's underperforming because of its demographics. uh we looked at the enrollment and the capacity. We did not look at demographics trying to say this is the school we should focus on. There was a lot of times in the past where school districts focused on a particular campus and closing it because it was underperforming. Uh but that is not what we're doing here. We're trying to just say what change can we make with having the least amount of impact and impact the fewest number of children have
131the fewest impact on transportation. Uh we are not doing anything demographics based in terms of ethnicity or uh unduplicated counts things like that. Next one is transportation needs and we highlighted that in our recommendations. uh we identified you know students that would uh need transportation and again that information was provided by your IT department so thanks for their uh feedback and input for that information and again you do provide busing and so that would be again a minimal impact and we did highlight what those impacts would be and then aesthetics and impact on community. So, this one's pretty important. One of the guidelines and recommendations is if we do close a school, what's going to happen to that neighborhood school? And so, for example, uh you know, you could house your Whitney Middle School program,
132right? Here we listed some additional ideas, right? Some districts are looking at uh providing employee housing. Some are looking at using it to as community centers or sports complexes. So, right, make sure it improves the community and doesn't create, you know, blight in a certain neighborhood. So, that's the main focus here is we want to have a positive impact on our community. And then finally, I think our last category was the impact on our feeder school patterns. Again, that's one reason I sort of grouped everything. We're looking at elementary schools mainly here. We kept those students within their feeder patterns. So, we're not impacting and changing what high school they're going to go to. Obviously, they always have choices, but we tried not to impact our feeder patterns. Now, when we create the 68 middle
133schools, you you may need to make some minor adjustments. I I don't know that for sure. It just depends on if you decided to even look at that or if if you look at it, you know, three or four years down the road that probably the enrollment has dropped enough where it probably would not create any boundary impacts. Uh, next I just wanted to acknowledge the community and the staff. We did review the surveys that were done. There was a lot of great input there. We used a lot of that in developing our report. And again, some of the concerns the community and staff had were items like larger class sizes in a lot of school districts that are facing budget cuts, right, which is a different really situation than what we're facing here. Instead
134of closing schools, districts have elected to increase class size because that reduces the number of teachers needed. And so that's just a different type of solution. uh that's not the solution that we're advocating here. So I don't think that should be should be something the community or the teacher should be concerned about. But again, that's something you decide as you develop your budgets what your staffing ratios are. And so we did not assume any changes in staffing ratios as part of our report. Uh impacts on programs, that's another thing as I mentioned at the beginning. those programs, special programs often get cut uh when districts are facing budget challenges and we are not advocating for any changes in your programs but again that is something that you as a board control and then of course
135the social emotional impacts that's that is something that is pretty much unavoidable change is difficult and so if you do choose to make any changes uh we do this next slide talks about a transition plan and other considerations, right? We I've worked with a lot of districts that have made a lot of changes and there is better ways of doing it. Uh taking your time is one of them. Planning out the process. Um having a plan to welcome students and families at the receiving schools, a very important one. And again, we we deal with that just when we're doing boundary changes, let alone a consolidation issue. Uh develop a plan to support all the impacted teachers, administrators, and staff. Uh have a transition committee, right? Have a specific boundary committee if if you want to
136have more detail and feedback on what boundaries you create to make sure you have safe routes to schools. So again, we put all that in there just to help you guide you through the process. I'm sure you are very aware of most of these issues and will have a lot of great ideas on how best to help your community if you go through this process. And then so I just want to conclude by saying, you know, thank you for the opportunity to present this report. This is my least favorite job to do. I enjoy working with schools when they're building a new school and we get to create boundaries for that change. It's still change. It's still difficult. Not everyone gets to go to a new school. Um it's difficult when we change boundaries just
137because this school's overcrowded and this one has space available. So again, change is something I help districts with a lot. Um, and unfortunately I'm helping a lot of districts with the consolidation process at this point in our state just because of our state demographics. And so, um, I wish I could have been hired for a different topic, but uh, I hopefully this information is helpful and opens your mind as to some ideas that you may want to consider in your future. And with that, I think we'll take a break and go over to public comment and then we'll answer any questions you have. Thank you for your report. Uh before we begin public comment, just uh so that we have decorum in in the room. We don't uh allow clapping or or booing between comments
138because we want to make sure we respect the speaker's time and their ability to communicate the issues to the board because we can't hear over shouting. So, thank you. Um, ma madam clerk, do we have any public comments? Yes. I've been told we have 12 comments. Um, the speakers will come up um and we'll announce themselves. [Applause] If you're in the room and you have a comment card that has a number on it that you've already filled out, please come outside and we're going to bring you in in accordance to the uh order that you completed the card. So, it sounds like we're going to have more than 12. Yes, we have 12 comments now. And it looks like um Well, let's let's see how many you get. Okay. I think there's I think I
139think I believe there are 13 speakers. Should I just Has everybody turned in their card? They're doing it as they go. Okay. All right. If that's good, then uh we'll go on with the regular board comments. Go ahead. Good evening, board members. Uh President Nishi, I'm Jamie Castillo Solless. I am a mother of a third grader and an incoming kindergartener at um Sters Elementary. Um so I'll be very brief. I know I only have three minutes, so I'll be as fast as I can. Um, first you know I heard you know the person presenting saying it doesn't have it doesn't have to be sters and I agree and I'm here to say why sters is excuse me I I had just said that we need to respect the speaker's time and our ability to hear.
140So if we hear lots of clapping we'll have to ask you to leave the room because I need to hear her comment. Thank you. So I'm here to say that Star Wars is a is in fact a model of success and is not not a liability. Instead of closing Sters, it should be used and is example for other schools and how they can find success during these difficult times. Sters is not underperforming. It's thriving academically in enrollment and financially. as a magnet school of international studies. Its mission is to draw students beyond the neighborhood which it was also asked to do to help it you know to help keep it um you know to help keep it open and has succeeded with that with over 150 out of district students both IB and uh and
141uh Mandarin immersions that brings much neededed finan financial resources to the district. Um and these programs specifically immersion and IB are what program are the programs that attract families seeking high quality um and global focus education. So first I want to focus on out of district families, right? They choose ABCUSD um because it it provides a high quality education but also it helps them um provide their kids maybe the kind of education that's not available to their home district which benefits the families but it also let's remember it benefits ABCUSD because it's adding revenue it's adding value that normally ABCUSD would not receive. So as many others you know can see this you know the support here and um the families that are here support and find this program very important very um very desirable
142that's again immersion and that's IB it's going to scroll down um and related to popularity of both immersion and IB sour is growing unlike many of the schools in the district it's growing in fact our incoming kindergarten class has over aundred students that's four classes is it's and there's a growing weight list. Enrollment projections suggest four to five classes per grade and again ster should be an example of what success can look like if it closes on a financial level. If IB closes um and for example if it's moved to Cerritos IB will be gone and IB is the p one of the primary reasons that people use so that or families use so they can leave their home districts. Without IB, you will lose a large number of out of district students. Um, which
143is important again um to um to to finances of ABC. Then I just want to add just one last point. I know um someone that you know the the the presenter said that you know Whit Whitney can then offer you know Whitney um moving to um the Sters campus it can offer uh um additional spaces to out of district students. The issue there is that Whitney is not IB. it would be very very difficult for homeschools to release their students to Whitney and I don't think this is a consideration that's have been made um and so therefore you know I know you have a lot of very difficult decisions that you have to make um so you know I thank you for your consideration but we ask that Sters not be closed is not the
144right um school to close and I thank you for your time thank you next speaker Yes. Respected members of the board, good evening. I truly appreciate the opportunity to speak on the action item. My name is Hector Ruiz and I am a 28-year veteran teacher, having started at Birdbank for my fif first 15 years before moving to Starers Elementary where I currently teach third grade. I am also currently the ABCFT site rep and I'm here to proudly represent my fellow Sters teachers. I am here tonight on behalf of my colleagues to speak to this report on on school consolidations and reconfiguration. Having taught as long as I have and having started at Burbank, I know that Burbank itself began as one of the first schools in Artisia to accommodate the post-war growth in population. So,
145there's some irony in acknowledging that we are now on the opposite end of what once appeared to be unlimited schoolside growth. But this report presents to you a sterile set of numbers with the predicted outcomes based on a set of assumptions that we teachers have questions about. And as much as myself and my Star Wars colleagues want to point out the holes in the logic the report uses for its conclusions, nowhere on those pages or what these changes will mean to the communities surrounding the affected schools. Sure, it mentions students and applies its impact upon parental choices, but it overlooks a key group that also helps what make a school what it is, its teachers. That one key component is noticeably missing. At last week's meeting with the ster staff in which the potential closure
146was rolled out, we kept hearing that we'd all be okay. Forgive me for paraphrasing a m a famous movie line. Nah, man. The sters teachers are pretty far from okay. Sters teachers do not deny the reality of demographic shifts. We get it. We saw it coming and we wanted to do something about it. So when the district came to us with the idea of becoming a Mandarin immersion bilingual program to couple with our IB program to spur enrollment growth, we embraced it as a way forward because the district asked us to do it and as something important to the community. Again, we did it because the district asked us to. Now on the cusp of a large incoming Mandarin kindergarten group with the other Mandarin classes taking hold in the primary grades, we are being
147told thank you and left to watch as that hard work may be transferred to a new school site. And with the proposal that sters be repurposed as per this report, my teachers feel like airborne Charlie Brown after Lucy pulled the football away, even though we did what the district asked of us. There's also sadness at the thought that our Sters community disappearing in a little over a year this past Friday, the day after we had to hear this news. We had over,300 people attend our annual international festival. Starders teachers being the professionals that we are put on our brave face to make that happen because we do the things to make our schools our students school experience as complete as we possibly can. So while we can you know we can see the numbers we
148don't want to leave our school site but more actually more to the truth we want to stay with our kids wherever they are a school site is ultimately just a building. What truly forms the school experience is in the relationship that's built between ourselves and our kids. No one understands ster students better than sters teachers. Yet this report leaves our staff out of any equation. May I have like 20 seconds more? What I am suggesting is to make us part of this process. Last week at the report presented to us, we were talked at. Please don't talk at us. Talk to us about this. Please. We get the realities. We don't want to see Star Wars close. Sters teachers want to continue to help our Star Wars kids. And we're open. We're open to also
149be a we we're open and want to be a part of stakeholder to any decision going forward. So to sum up as Ron Barnes, my first ABC USD superintendent used to quip, let's keep the main thing the main thing. We sincerely hope that any plans going forward that involves our students involved teachers. We have done what you have asked of us. We hope that the district can see fit to allow us to ask this of you. Thank you. [Applause] Next speaker. Good evening board members. My name is Denise Saledto. I am a Sters alumni. I'm also a Whitney alumni and I'm now a proud uh I'm a proud parent of two inner district students at Sters Elementary. Um, I'd like to ask the board to exclude Stars from the recommendations being as reviewing the report,
150it didn't seem to me that there were any really rhyme or reason why chowers was being chosen. Um, in looking at the different schools that are being consolidated, the issue there was enrollment, which is not an issue for Sters. According to ED data, which is a website designed to offer educators, policy makers, and the legislature um public information regarding data for K uh from kindergarten to 12th grade, Star's enrollment has increased year-over-year from 2022 to 2023 and 2023 to 2024 by 6%. So enrollment is not an issue. And to the points of the speakers before me, um we have a successful IB pro uh IB program um as well as a Mandarin program. And I think what's most important um as to why to exclude Sters is the fact that um to your point Mr.
151President we have built a culture and a family um within our Sters community and it is extremely important to ensure that we continue to keep it that way. Um, as such, I ask that the board uh look at other alternatives other than closing hours because it is extremely important for each one of us and as you can see the support that we have as a community here tonight. Thank you. [Applause] Good evening board. I'm Katherine Pascal. I am a local mom and teacher and what I'm about to say will certainly make me a pariah at the baseball field this week and in this room tonight, but I feel like I need to say it. People are asking the question, why Sters? What is the data? And I just people like I have a lot of
152empathy for the fact that this seemingly came out of nowhere for that staff and that community. And I have a lot of friends who are impacted by this. But I do want to share that when the school list came out last year, I was upset. It was all title one schools. It was all minority schools. And when this report came out, there was a non-title one school on the list. I felt like that was a step in the equity direction. But not only that, before they had the Mandarin immersion program, which I acknowledge has brought up enrollment, but programs can move. So, I'm going to set that aside for the moment. When I looked at this data years ago, I had sters on my short list, too. Why did I have sters on my short
153list? It's because the families who live in that attendance area are choosing with their school of choice choices to go to the surrounding schools. They lose families to Cerritos and Gonzalez and Leel and Whitman in high numbers. And that tells me they lose almost 50% of the people who live in that area to those four schools that surround it. The northeast corner of our district can't maintain five schools. I live there. There's not kids running around the neighborhood. It's just not like it used to be. And so when I take all the students who live in that those attendance boundaries of those five schools, I get 1727 kids. And when I divide that by four, that's only 432 kids per site. I don't need to divide that by five. Heck, I could maybe even divide
154it by three, but it doesn't make sense to have five schools in this small area. It just doesn't make logical sense. And again, that's where I live. That's where my kids go to school. But it it doesn't it does it's not logical to keep five schools in this tiny area and then instead I teach at Artisia High School where the elementary schools my kids went to are on the chopping block. and then to overburden that side of the district with additional closures and where that it it just it just feels inequitable. So, I've got I've got a lot of conflicting um emotions about this, but four years ago, I would have put Sters on a short list and I still would and I know you guys have a really tough decision to make. I also
155fully support moving sixth grade. It's how the standards are set up in the state of California. And again, I'm sorry, guys. I know I did not say what you guys wanted to hear tonight to the room. Next speaker. Good [Music] evening. My name is Beatatric Furro. I am a mom of a sixth grader at Huarees Academy. She will be promoted this year and will be headed to middle school. So why am I here? If my child will no longer be at Huarees Academy. I am here to advocate to keep Horus Academy open for our future generations. Our amazing teachers, staff, and equally as important, our three special education classes. One of the many values that Horus has instilled in our community and students um has been inclusivity despite the physical and cognitive differences. For example,
156our three special education classes were always included in all of the performances and shows. There was never a dry eye um in the house during the Christmas performance. As the teachers walked alongside the special ed students while other teachers pushed the wheelchairs of the other students, adults and children's watch attentively for cues from our students as the students seemed overjoyed, smiling wide um ear to ear and laughing. We would cheer loudly for them or we would silently clap if we noticed the students seemed overwhelmed. It was beautiful to be part to be part of and see how our special special education students were included regardless of any physical and cognitive differences. So, um, uh, Ernie Nishi, you were right when you said, "Let's look at what our students will gain." Well, imagine how many more
157experiences our students, including our special educa, special education students will gain when their school, our school, Huarees Academy, remain open. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Robin Rico and I'm a proud parent. Oh, my name is Robin Rico and I'm a proud parent of two children that go to Ferguson Elementary, which you can see. And I'm sorry that the Ster's parents have to be here, but I'm grateful that you're alongside us to fight because I don't think we should be closing any of our schools. And I've spoken to you guys over the last year several times um on why Ferguson is so important and how Hawaiian Gardens and ABC um impact all of us. So, I'd like to remind you how devastating it would be to close any elementary school. Children thrive in their
158community and busting us all over simply will not do. I'd like to remind you of what happened in Belfflower Unified years ago. They consolidated middle schools and high schools and when the student count went back up they were landlocked and had nowhere to build schools. Uh Huntington Beach school district really recently they simply asked parents to put the kids back in their home schools and that allowed them to determine what schools should be closed. And we know that Hawaiian Gardens has the student count and our birth rate is up 7.2% when the state of California is 4.3%. So I'd like our, you know, auditor to maybe consider those things. um and the narrative that Cerrito schools are superior to Hawaii to Hawaiian Gardens or Artisia or even Lakewood and consider the educational impacts on the
159families of the kids that have to consolidate. The statistics say that it's detrimental to learning and let me see my notes are a little all over the place. The numbers that you are showing for Ferguson are misleading. We have enough children in our community to sustain our school. 29% of Hawaiian Gardens is under 18. 15% is 0 to9. And we all know that the money follows the kids. So when you take the kids from our communities and put them into Cerritos to buffer your schools, I will gladly send you the the charts that I have that show the ratio of kids who live in the communities to the kids in the schools. And you know, it's just it's not equitable. And it seems to be that the southside is taking a big hit. And it's
160where does that come from? Is it systemic racism? Is it socioeconomic privilege? I would love for you guys to truly consider that with your hearts because people in the southside don't have the advantages that others do. So, thank you for your time. All right, our number. If you have a card that is highlighted that has seven or eight, if you are in the room, it's your turn. If not, we will call the next four. Next speaker, please state your name. Thank you. You'll have three minutes. Good evening, um, school board members. My name is Carmen. I'm a grandparent. I'm just here to speak from my heart. um regarding possible closure of Star Wars. Um as you can see, I'm also wearing a Whitney High shirt. My oldest grandson is about to be a sophomore at
161the high school. He's been there since the seventh grade from Star Wars. Um I have three grandkids in Star Wars right now. Hopefully four soon if this doesn't, you know, the school closure doesn't happen. Um so I have a lot of fond memories there. It's a great school. Um, my granddaughter today, as a matter of fact, she's in TK. She came home singing um, Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes in Mandarin. That made me so happy, so proud. You know, that the programs they have there. It's just a lot that I see that I've seen throughout the years. You know, my obviously my oldest grandson is now 15. He started in kindergarten there at Sters and it's just something beautiful to see the community um I was going to speak regarding rising costs in the community
162but it's also in the rents that we see in the apartments nearby. Uh my daughter when she moved into the community um about I would say 13 years ago uh complex on Vicki Drive was something they could afford and unfortunately they had to move out because every year was a rent increase. every year. Every year was a rent increase because I understand a lot of parents want to get their students into Whitney High School and it that's a lot of the issues too is that people come from outside the area that can afford and pretty much, you know, they can pay cash for certain things that sometimes we cannot. But we're a community and we've been in these schools for years and we just we're having a hard time dealing with this. We just heard
163about it and it's just it's difficult. But I just want to state from a personal point of view why also maybe school enrollment could be down because maybe it's just a lot of high school students coming in for the Whitney High School, which is great. We we love, you know, everyone coming in, but then that affects enrollment for the younger kids because we're unable to afford those rents even in an apartment complex. So, that's part of the issue as well. But I thank you for hearing me tonight. Thank you. Next speaker. Hello. Good night. It doesn't get any easier. I think I'm a familiar face and I've stood up here and I've cried and I've told you how wonderful Ferguson Elementary is. So, I'm just going to speak a little bit about a school is
164not just a place of learning, but a community because it brings together a diverse group of people who share a common purpose. education and growth. Schools often engage with the community by hosting events like for our school the city fair, soccer games, summer nights, and the pow-ow just to name a few. Ferguson creates a symbolic relationship between the school and the community. In essence, Ferguson can be seen as a community because it provides the space to connect, learning, to connect, learn, grow, contribute to a shared purpose, fostering a sense of belonging and natural support. As our city says, our youth, our future, I want to I seen the slides and I did see that I want to correct on slide number 27 that stated that Ferguson didn't have a special ed class. We do have
165a special ed class. It's Miss Garcia's class and I can name you Luna, Ruthie, all the other names of the kids that do belong to that program. I also have a question. Where is the report about adverse impact of school of choice? The DI program is the reason why we have stable enrollment at Ferguson Elementary. intra and intrad district enrollment is because of our DI program. Changing or transferring our DLI program, how does that work? If we're transferring it to Melbourne, to Hawaiian, how does that work? Wouldn't it be easier to bring into Ferguson Elementary instead of taking out from Ferguson Elementary? It's just a train of thought. Also, the boundaries for Ferguson will impact the families as the parents grandparents walk their children to school. Mr. Nyola, I'm pretty sure you know how many
166of our parents walk to school. We have community essence where our neighbors pick up our children, where we have families, grandparents, you know, mothers. We have I can name you a few that can walk with five, six children to school. So with that in thought in mind, please keep us in consideration and keeping our community, our school together and upfront. Thank you. Good evening. I'm Celia Spitzer. Um, I'm pleased about the recommendation from school works to close some of our elementary schools and consolidate their students with nearby schools. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, three of those schools were ones being strongly considered by the declining enrollment ad hoc board advisory committee on which I served that met monthly from May 2023 through May 2024 in plus hosting two large town hall meetings in February of 2024.
167Although the number of schools to recommend for closure was not specified by the board in its direction to the committee, we thought the number was probably two or three. In its December 2023 meeting, using seven of the suggested criteria to initially narrow the number of schools for further consideration for closure, the committee first chose just three schools, Aloha, Ferguson, and Warz. After further discussion that night, it was decided to expand the list for further consideration using more of the suggested criteria. The added schools were Hawaiian, Kennedy, and Willow. After the two large town hall meetings where audience members expressed strong opposition to closing any of their schools, the committee subsequently voted at its next meeting to recommend to the board not to close any schools. I however was one of the committee members who wanted
168to proceed with further evaluation of the six schools using additional criteria to narrow the list of schools to recommend for closure from six to two or three. So tonight I asked the board to choose the schools they believe best meet the criteria for closure and the number that would sufficiently solve budgetary challenges for the foreseeable future. I also would like to briefly address the part of the report recommending changing the middle school grades span from 78 to 68 and in particular the potential disadvantages noted in the report in my family experiences experience those were not an issue when my daughter attended Tets many years ago she started in sixth grade I'm assuming most if not all of you do not realize that Tets for a number of years and I don't know when it started,
169but the last year was in 7980. They had a sixth grade. She did not experience any difficulties. Fast forward to the next generation. My granddaughters, now in their early 20s, each attended the same 68 middle school in the San Diego Unified District. And almost all middle schools in San Diego USD are 68s. After consulting with them yesterday, I wanted their perspective. They said they had no problems. Their sixth grade classes did not include seventh or eighth graders because the content of the curriculum is different for each of those grades. This should be the same for ABC. Oh, and I have some who do I give? I I sent uh Twan I went through with a fine tooth comb as many of you know I do when I see things and had some comments and then
170a few questions which I emailed off to Tuan today. So I wanted the board and uh Dr. Zitlo to have have copies of that. Some of them are very specific to the report where I think some corrections need to be made. Thank you. Next speaker please. Madam clerk, how many speakers do we have remaining? Mr. Smith. Good evening, board members, board president, superintendent, and administrators. My name is Michael Coup. I'm here with my wife. My name is Susan. Good good evening. Um I am a graduate of Concordia Lutheran School, Carmenita Middle School, and Whitney High School. I'm also the president of the um Sters Elementary Education Foundation that's newly minted since last month and we wanted to discuss some of the issues we saw with the report um in the Star Wars perspective. So, we're
171proud parents of a uh our a student in TK who will be advancing next year into the dual immersion program and we have two more stu kids that will be following in those footsteps as well. Uh we're strong supporters of Sourers Elementary and we are here to speak against the recommended recommended closure of Sters. Mainly the study does not account for actual recent trends and the local reasons why Sters is defying the enrollment decline but is instead one of the biggest growing elementary schools in ABC Unified if not the largest growth. That growth is in large part attributed to the Mandarin dual immersion program in conjunction with the international baloria status. The report's projection is estimating Star Wars next year TK TK class to be 47 students. The actual is 75. That's three classes. The
172report is estimating a kindergarten class of 75. The actual is 100. That's four classes. And there's more on the wait list. Why is that? And despite what the previous speaker voiced about the northeast schools not being able to support the enrollment, I urge you to come see at the school for yourself. Students and students students and parents speak with their feet. There's a reason why Star Wars numbers are so strong. The community is strong and active with engaged parents and staff who all want the success of the Star Wars program. As you can see with all the supporters here who've been here for over three hours as well as online. The program is just starting to get word of mouth and it's attracting even more interest as it grows. And the dual immersion program will
173build each year as the initial cohorts metriculate to first grade to second grade third grade and so on. The ster's name program collectively the community the staff the location is not something you can just pick up and move and expect the same success to be moved as suggested. It's not plugandplay. Our success has been built on the foundation of cultivation and dedication from staff, admin, parents and students. I think one of the shortcomings of the report is more work is needed to meet with actual schools and communities to understand what's driving the trends rather than just looking at a database from afar. Even the parent survey in the report the number one result top concern is specialized programs such as the Mandarin dual immersion. So why would you recommend to disrupt one of the most
174successful programs in the district? Is parent input not considered in the recommendation? When you found the golden goose, a program that is thriving and flourishing with enrollment, rather than slaughtering it, you should be growing the program, adding resources and supports, and hopefully replicating that success. Thank you. Thank you. Um, I was just going to say public sessions usually 30 minutes, but uh, um, I need a motion to extend that uh, to accommodate the violence of the speakers that I motions. Second. Second. All right. Thank you. Do you have time? You should say 10 minutes. Hi, I'm Jocelyn Barattro and I'm a fifth grader at Star Wars Elementary School. Today I'm talking about why I think we should keep Star Wars and not turn it into the middle school for Whitney. Although I will be leaving
175in a few years, I wanted to speak about this. I was in many activi activities this year which included reading Olympics, track and many other things. Star Wars has brought many opportunities for us as students. At our school, we have the Mandarin dual immersion program, which gives the students the opportunity to learn new languages and learn new culture we may not learn about. This year, we did the school play by William Shakespeare, A Midsummer's Tonight Dream, which was an amazing experience because I've seen other shows by Leora Whitman, and I wanted to be able to have that experience, too, which was able to happen this year. Star Wars isn't just an elementary school. It is a place where kids like me have grown up in. It's not just a place to learn, but a place
176to have experiences, make new friends, and grow. At our school, we have traditional kindergarten to sixth grade. Everyone at this school has made bonds, even if they are only four years old or 12 years old. Teachers and students go to school at Star Wars. Some love it here, and some kids just don't like school, but we are all connected in a way. I can't say this enough, but St. has a great foundation with lots of great themes, just like how a house needs a foundation. I am out of district and the only reason I am able to be at this school is because of the IB program. My personal experience is knowing that all my siblings have gone through the school. My younger sister are still going at the school and making more memories. Thank
177you for your time. Thank you. Go ahead. I am a I I'm Harper Chrojing Thong and I'm a sixth grader at Sters Elementary School. I'm I came here to address that um the board should not convert um Sters Elementary to Whit Whitney Junior High. Star Wars has a high high achievement academically academically and socially also and also has a diverse population of many races which is highly desired by many families. Stars of course is a magnet school which brings um people from different cultures altogether. I also believe that the presentation discriminates inter and intra district permits. Families chose Star Wars for the following location, work and schedule, and the pursuit of academic excellence. As a student out of district, I really enjoy join attending Star Wars, and it's it's I've made so many great memories
178there. Closing Star Wars will cause the closing stars will cause district cause the district to lower will decrease enrollment in the district. kids will go to other districts like competition schools which will not be good for our district. This is why I I believe that the board should not convert Sters Elementary to junior high school. Thank you for your time. Thank you. We have one more speaker. All right. Good evening guys. Good evening ladies and gentlemen of the board. Uh, President Nishi, Dr. Zitlu, thank you guys for everything. Uh, I know this means a lot because you guys put a lot of time and effort into these reports. Um, I'd like to point out uh on the special programs the report from the schoolworks. Uh, I said Aloha has no special ed. We're starting one
179actually soon. So, we're going to allocate resources for that. And then, uh, we're changing things around over there. I know I have a parent from a transfer student. She was supposed to go to Long Beach, but I prefer her to go to ABC school district because it's closer for me and my family to have my child there because my mother-in-law helps me uh with transportation. Takes her during the week and then I'll take her on my days off. But uh I know a lot of uh it is also transportation too. Um, did you guys make sure uh I know we only have one bus at Aloha, but I know once we guys cons if you do consolidate uh we're going to need more drivers and you guys are going to have to end up more
180uh logistics basically of moving the kids around which is uh hopefully accounted for soon. Um and not to mention that you guys all do good work here and thank you guys. I haven't been this much involved into school since I've been in school because of my kid. I've been in PTA now and I'm in everything now because of her. Um, so now I'm more tired cuz I have to go to work at 3:00 in the morning, but I'm here because I know we all got a voice and we all got to hear everybody out. Uh, thank you guys once again for your time. I I'm greatly grateful for you guys. Um, keep up the good work. Good night, guys. No further comment. Thank you. Let's take a five minute recess. I need to use the
181[Music] restroom. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. [Applause] [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Hey. Hey. [Music] Hey. Heat. Heat. [Music] Hey, hey, hey. [Music] Hey. Hey. Hey. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Hey, heat. Hey, heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Number of questions and or comments. And I'm sure there's going to be at least one comment. Thank you, board member McCaten. Um I just want to say I um really appreciate all the comments that we've heard tonight. Just um done very intelligently and professionally and um from the heart. So I appreciate um people being willing to get up and express their opinion to us. Um uh just very thankful for that. Okay. Uh board member you. Oh, it's my turn already. Okay. Thank
182you, President Nishi. Um, first of all, I I'm just so um moved by the parent involvement and the community, uh, the Star Wars community and the the Melbourne community that, wow, wow, we have such um concerned parents who really cares about their children's education, who's really concerned about the ABC district. So, thank you so much for coming out. I mean this is like three four hours is is long but thank you very much and I want to thank um our um school works consultant uh Kenneth Rainard uh the presentation and the the result and the proposal was um pretty shocking when we received it. It was pretty shocking. However, um this was not new because back in um 2021, I read in the LA Times that um that we are going to be faced with
183declining enrollment and it's going to continue to go down and by 2029 that we would California all the school districts will have 30% declining enrollment. So back in 2021 uh I was very concerned as serving as the president of the board that's when we gave direction to have ad hoc committee to look into the board advisory committee to review declining enrollment and the efficient use of school facilities. Um and the committee was formed and they did meet from May 2003 to 2024 which was very uh important but they did not submit a final report because of all the concerns and emotional you know ties and all that. So I totally understand many families in cons concerns your children. Children are most important and of course and all the teachers too really I want to thank
184the teachers at Stars who really have that ownership and passion you know about your school your what you teach and uh the question I have for you uh Mr. Rainos is um I know that you did a lot you poured in hundreds of hours into this with along with our staff and our um you know executive cabinet members. So thank you so much. But um can you explain why uh Stars was chosen instead of other elementary schools? What were the criteria because they already have such a thriving uh two programs? uh IV international baloria program and the Chinese immersion program which are two programs that are very important. [Music] So that that answer's a little complex. Um, first of all, I was looking at each high school attendance area independently. And so if you were
185looking to close a school in the Cerritos area, um, it is not possible right now with the current enrollment. U, but if you removed the sixth graders and put them at the middle schools, then that drops the enrollment immediately. what you know if you make that move and so at that point in time there could be space available and again we're we are seeing a continued decline and the only thing I learned during uh public comment here this evening also was that the information I was provided from your demographics consultant uh is about a year old I believe. And so the current enrollment trends that they were talking about and pro perhaps they're looking at what their projections are for next year based on who's uh enrolling uh during your enrollment period. That seems to
186be going in the opposite direction that the demographer showed that they were going, which is definitely possible given the fact that, you know, they've created an amazing program there. So it it is there's a there's new data that I did not have at the time I wrote the report. Um but still independent of that we know the region is declining and so that seemed to be the best candidate in terms of the geography and in terms of if you if you consolidate a school that's on the edge of your district boundary, right? then there's farther travel that those students have to do to get to the next school. When it's in the central part of a high school attendance area, you have a lot of neighboring schools so that students don't have to travel as
187far. And so that that was really one of the key considerations. Again, there was not an easy solution for the Cerritos high attendance area and but that seemed to be based on the geography and the spaces available in the neighboring schools a good solution. Again, it it's never an easy solution. But those were the key considerations. Mhm. I mean, I think the the brilliant proposal to increase the enrollment by increasing the admission in increasing the enrollment for Whitney High School, Whitney Middle School. I think that's really brilliant because that will attract families from outside the district for sure. It will. And I know that even I get postcards from other districts like Centriia, Buena Park because schools are doing a lot of promotion and our district uh Star Wars IB program, uh, Whitney High School
188and some of the special ed programs and the the Head Start, they also do attract outside, you know, outside the district in inter interdist students as well, right? So those those programs we all need to really continue to grow because we need students. We all know that and uh however uh business-wise, business sense, I mean the proposal, we need to definitely come to some kind of a decision and conclusion because this is not something that we just started, you know, a year ago, but this was in the making since 2021. And um we do need to be physically responsible for the next you know few years. Uh we don't know what's going to happen. There are things that we can't control is declining enrollment. Things that we can control is the cost of living. Those
189are some of the things that young people follow the job, young families follow the job. We can't control that and we got to do whatever whatever we can that is best to to long-term s sustenate. uh you know what is that word is sustainability as well as the welfare of our children and and the you know district. So uh last final question and the comment I wanted to ask you is this and the staff um this is very difficult for the family and the transition I mean this this is going to happen whatever you know the decision is the consolidation has to happen no matter what and transition I'm kind of concerned about what's going to happen to the students who are like in fifth and sixth grade ready to be promoted. I mean how
190are the transition going to happen and the committee be made? I think those things are very important too. So the families have the least impact experience the least impact. Yeah. As far as I know I don't think any decisions have been made on how that transition would work. If I may, um, we as a district cannot get ahead of where the board goes. So, um, once the board goes through process, if a decision is made, then we would begin a process and come up with a timeline and a time frame and make those plans where we would include our employee groups with that process. We would include our families and students, our teachers and staff. Um, we can't make a plan if we don't know what the board wants to do. Okay. Okay, that is
191all. Thank you, President Nishi. Thank you. Uh, Dr. Rios, thank you. I'm going to find a way to consolidate my ideas because I have a lot of them and um comments. Um, but I just want to say that I don't think any of us disagree with all the issues that were brought up, especially by the Star Wars community. I I know it's a very diverse school. I know that when even when I was looking at a school for my child, it was the ideal place to to to send him. Um, we have tough decisions to make. I want to focus my comments on um the school in my area and really talk about the disappointment that I feel um because well first of all in the report the numbers were not included about how many
192kids actually live in that area, right? right? It was just the kids that actually choose to go to the school and it was brought up that you know kids we don't use performance as a guide to close schools but we do I mean the fact that that school has low enrollment is absolutely tied to performance um and performance is absolutely tied to attendance and I feel sincere disappointment because like we got to own it like those schools should be better they should be performing better the scores should be a lot better and they're not And nobody wants to answer to that question as to why. Um Lakewood is not a low-income community. Homes in Lakewood cost about a million dollars. Um like I don't get it. I I I really don't. Um but it continues
193to be an issue. It's been an issue since I got on the board. Um funding, if I asked Twan, and I'm not, what the funding was 10 years ago, it was probably half of what it is today. So, yes, I get we're declining enrollment and I get that money is an issue, but we have more money than we've ever had in this district. And so, I think the question that we need to start discussing a lot is where is that money going and why isn't it giving us the results we want? I want to see in my trusty area six of Lakewood. Um, I have an immediate objection to the idea of closing a school and then sending these kids to neighboring schools who again we know also have an issue with performance. We need
194to get that performance question um figured out and we've wasted enough time doing it. These are kids' lives um at stake and and I know that people want to say, "Well, test scores are in everything." Really go to Leo and tell those parents that, right? But it they don't want us to focus on that. When you Sorry, I'm going to get a little nervous. I get nervous. But I'm very passionate about this. Um it's not okay. We need to do better. And I think it's time. We can I mean, you can talk to the moral imperative. You can talk to the fact that we're a global society. I less kids. I don't know about you, but it scares me that we're graduating kids that can't read at grade level. Who's going to take care of
195us? And our and and who's going to take care of our society? Who's going to be the next doctors? Who are going to be the next scientists? Like, we need to get this performance question issue addressed. And I'm just I'm I don't and I'm just tired of the excuses. I want to be part of the solution. I don't want to point fingers. Um but it's going to take all of us and we need to do better. So I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Uh board member Mendoza. Thank you, Mr. President. Um Sters's family, I hear you. I was on the facilities um declining enrollment uh committee, so I I heard all of the town hall meeting comments and we hear you. Um this is not easy for anybody especially us on the board because
196it comes down to us. Um I just have a couple questions um for staff. So from what I understand this action item today is just to accept the report and if if it is accepted then it goes to a public hearing where we will have um another meeting where the public can come out and give more input only if the board chooses to. you can accept the report, receive and file and there's no next step. Okay? Right? If the board choose to consider any of the recommendations, then you would go back and put it back on the future board meeting as an agenda as a public information uh as an information item and here you must conduct public hearing. Okay. I I think yeah, I think we need to have public hearing. I think our
197community needs to be heard. They need to be they need to be a part of this process. Um, so that that's my recommendation is that we we do get a our a chance for our public, our communities, our families, all of our all of our schools to come out and and voice their concerns, the opinions because the more information we have as schoolboard members, um, you know, the better the better choices we can make for our students. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you. Uh, board clerk Tatiana Yokoyama Buouie. Thank you, Mr. President. Um, so I also do want to thank our community members who have come out tonight. I want to thank our community members who have emailed us um this past week. Uh, we also found out around the same time about the report
198and the recommendation. um we meaning the board and so um uh learning and and kind of reviewing and the harsh reality hitting us um feel similar. My uh full transparency, my son is in fourth grade in elementary school here in ABC. uh potentially he could be affected depending on what the board decides to do and it's not a decision I'm entirely comfortable with at this time and it's something that potentially I I I will have to accept andor I have anticipate anticipatory grief about. Um so so I I with without without move without saying anything else because I know that we're just accepting the report today. Um I am completely empathetic to the change potentially that could happen to our schools and our district. I understand that there are some board members who are currently
199sitting on this dis who may have reviewed this change in the past a couple years ago because tough decisions were asked to be made at that time and here we are a couple years later still being asked to review these really really challenging decisions but I believe in the success of our district. I believe that administration will do everything that they will have to do to ensure this the the success of our district continues. As an ABC alum, as an ABC parent, I am fully invested in this community, in this district, and I want it to thrive for years to come. So, with that said, um you know, again, I I I am appreciative and grateful that we have such a strong community. Obviously, all of us being here today, um me as well, we
200have to be strong for our kids because our kids are going to be resilient and we're going to support them through whatever we have to. But I I I'm here today just to tell you I'm with you. We hear you. And thank you. Thank you, Vice President Noyella. Uh, thank you, President Nishi. I also wanted to thank uh the community for coming out and speaking on this issue. I also wanted to thank Mr. Reynolds for his report. I think something as a board member that we're trying to do is figure out the best decision to make. And with that we need as many ideas, many perspectives, many you know viewpoints and many people to give their give their voice to this issue because my very first uh meeting as a board member was a declining
201enrollment committee meeting and this has been in the back of my mind since then. Um and we've decided to hold off and receive and file and not make a decision. And that has, you know, come to fruition in some of the economic uncertainty that we have. Um some of the budgets have been very volatile. Um funding has changed dramatically. We've had to, you know, make a lot of payments for in settlements that we weren't anticipating. And now we have to make a decision. and all we're asking from the community, from everybody is we just want your ideas. We want your voice. So, thank you guys for coming out. Um I I concur that we need to have a public hearing. We need to accept this report. Uh thank you again. Um so, that is my
202my direction. Thank you. Uh board member U. Yes. Thank you, President. Um on the agenda, not the the presentation, but in the agenda, it's this is public. Um it does sh it does have the uh information on the financial impact on schools and maybe uh our CFO Tuan can share with us what is our um structural budget deficit and what we need to answer to LEO plus the declining enrollment. We had like what 9 million in fiscal year. Can you kind of share that a little bit? Thank you. Um member you um as we discussed at the last board meeting on the uh spending reduction plan uh as it was an information item for um for the board to get uh feedback and input from the board. Um we are uh currently uh for the
203current year uh due to decline enrollment uh the LCFF or the low control funding formula we lost $9 million in term in revenues. That's the top line. uh we have you know um rising costs such as health benefits. Uh so so we need to balance that and we need to come to reality with you know uh a budget every year that with less revenues and more expenditures with higher costs. So uh and and we work together to do the best we can but in the current year um the structural deficit I'm the structural deficit meaning that our expenditures um are higher than our revenues by 4.1 million that the county have asked us to have a budget reduction plan meaning a a cut of that of that much uh to balance the budget into the
204out years. Um, on top of that, we talk about, you know, AB218 and and the impact of that and what that is. When people hear AB 218, that is actually a law that would allow um claimants to go back and and and and and sue school districts for for past um um acts against them. uh uh that the district it could go back to 30 40 years or 50 years ago uh that we were not around and now that we are forced to um have to settle some of those claims uh high costs out of the current general fund. So that's also added a burden to the district um operating budget. Uh so declining enrollment is an issue that you know we have to deal with um not just ABC like you have seen but
205throughout the state and throughout the county. Mhm. So um at the end of the day uh we uh whatever decision the board make we will take that and we will uh make the proper recommendation to the board in terms of moving forward uh to be fiscally sound because we need to be fiscally sound. It is a requirement. It's not an option. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you Tuan. Um, and also to keep one school open, the operating cost regardless whether the students there's 200 or 500, the cost is like 850,000. Yes, ma'am. Okay. So, that's the the cost. So, um I would like to if there's no other comments to make a motion. Oh, Ernie, after you I would like to make a motion on bringing back to the um the public hearing. Thank you. That
206sounds uh great. I first need a motion to extend the meeting by 30 minutes so board members can have their board reports. Can I have second? Second. All in favor say I. I. Thank you. So I would like to ask a few questions. Um I actually would like to thank the audience that have been here for many many hours uh to go over this really important issue. The parents at Aloha, Ferguson, Sters, Huarez, all of these parents that um show their love for their schools. um about these really tough decisions and I agree with uh board member Rios uh or actually Dr. Rios that this should be about academic performance. How to forge a better future? How do we do better academically for all our kids? Um the recommendation is just to address certain issues
207but it needs to be inclusive of how do we make things better? we can continue along the same course that we're going right now. But as we know from other school districts, as an example, uh they decide not to do this and they're cutting teachers and they're cutting programs, more importantly, programs, things that the kids don't get anymore, mental health. Uh and I think that's a a bigger thing because school is I don't agree with that one person who said school is just a building. School is not a building. It's a it's a community but it's people. It is people. That is the critical element of what a school is. Um so I I'll ask you know in terms of the programs and the people the kids don't necessarily have to go to these particular
208areas that uh that are put forth in the the plan. his recommendation, his study is only regarding this closure, not necessarily the attendance areas. So as a way to address the educational issues, the kids should be able to select where they go and the money should follow the kids because they deserve it. Um they're the ones who are being directly affected. Um I have a couple questions though also the programs. So in your analysis there was special ed as part of the analysis as to where it's where it would fit. Is there any particular issue in terms of being able to move it to another school? Anybody can answer that question because there was one consideration I heard from uh some people saying, "Hey, did you guys consider special ed in terms of moving it
209to another school?" So I just wanted to make sure that was part of the analysis. Yes. So our special programs change every year. Some year we add more classes to another school as needed depends on you know um the the assessments and some year we close classes at some schools depends on the needs. So it changes every year. We review the needs uh every year and we add classes as needed and we um consolidate eliminate classes as needed. So with special ed um with the program uh that could be placed at any school like um in the coming year right if we have potentially need to add special ed classes overall we will look at you know the different facility to see if there's there's accommodation and we would add classes at the same time
210you know when they graduated or they move on if we don't need that certain class anymore uh then we would just consolidate that. So, it's an annual process that we will review where we place uh potential um uh special ed classes throughout the district. Some classes are pretty much permanent and it stays at that school for forever, you know, or I shouldn't say forever uh for for for a long time uh because of the sp stability, but depends on the needs, right? As you as you know um the assessment process and the IEP is an annual process and and uh some year we need more RSP classes some year we need more SDC classes and depends on the type of classes and where's the ideal location for that and where the students come from. So
211that's an annual evaluations uh that we are doing right now already in term of placing the program. So to answer your question Mr. president, we don't anticipate a problem or an issue with that. Just so those will be specifically considered. Yes. Um in terms of programs, um the Mandarin dual immersion is a very strong and uh vibrant program that we have at our in our district. I think there was 75 kids in the the kindergarten. Um this is something I know that this report isn't going to an analyze but um can that be accommodated in terms of the size and the number uh as a group or as a whole at another location? Yes. Um I think it's uh point out in the report if the board were to choose to um go with the
212six seven and eight configuration for the middle schools that basically free up grade level at all um elementary schools right and because of our declining enrollment our upper grades at elementary school are larger than the lower grade right you have a class of sixth grader about 13400 students leaving and only a thousand students coming in on the back end with kindergarten. So eventually if you place it out, if we only have a thousand students per grade level, you know, K to 12, that's 13,000 plus TK. TK would never be a full class because of the age. You know, theoretically, we could be down to 14,000 students, right, beyond the 2930 school year. So the answer is yes. If if the board were to choose to uh consolidate I mean reconfigure the middle school six seven
213and eight we believe the four schools within that that area of Cerritos uh namely Gonzaleves Cerritos Whitman and Leo do have the space to accommodate the programs and the students from Yes. Yes. Um and and of course the school of choice will play into that right as you need space for resident students then you would have less space for school of choice. So s resident students get priority to be placed to those schools. So the kids that are directly affected in the stars program would uh you would recommend that they would have a school of choice as their um they would have a first choice basically. That's correct. I think that's in the uh the transition plan and consideration of the report is that u consider giving all students that's impacted by by the consolidation
214the first try of school of choice. There was a speaker that talked about uh the IB program um can that be transferred from one school to another or uh I'm I'm asking yeah I'll ask Dr. Castro to help with that or what is the process for starting another uh IB program? Thank you for the question. There is a process to continuing the IB program. Uh there are specific requirements in order to become an IB program that we would have to work with the staff uh as they move to another school site to establish whether or not that would be appropriate to consider. Uh right now ABC Unified only has IB in elementary. There's no ongoing IB in the secondary schools, which is part of the issue as well that we would need to take a
215closer look at. But this is a program that we could potentially continue if we have the resources based upon the some of the savings that we would have. Correct. Thank you. All right. Um, question you might not have the answer to, but I'm going to ask. uh based upon the projections that you've done and you made a recommendation for approximately four based upon the the trends. How long would it be before we would potentially be at this juncture again? That's a tough question. Can you cl and that's and that's kind of speculation, right? Can you clarify? I don't understand. So, the issue is right now we're considering um well, we're not considering it yet. That's an issue, but I'm asking and you may not have the answer to this question, but I I would hate
216to be facing this question next year. Yeah, that's that's a great question. Um, basically what you'd want to take a look at is right is our let's say our elementary enrollment is dropping by about a hundred students per year. Right? Then you say, well, over five or six years, that's five or 600 students. That's the equivalent of one school. Um, however, it's not quite that simple. You know, if all those 500 600 students were from the same area, that'd be easy to do. But as we've seen, the current projections are showing the drop in enrollment is impacting all of your school areas. And so if it takes, you know, six years to lose 600 students, but we've only lost 200 from each of the three attendance areas, then it's not a significant enough of an
217impact. So you may not need to be back here for another 10 years before you need to close a school. But again, the further out we look, the less accurate our projections become. And so again, there's so if we do certain actions like maybe increase the people at Whitney, uh potentially that would delay the decisions uh or the delay some of the the problems that we have because we'd be pulling in people from the outside. Correct. So one of the things I was thinking about is that I always hear about how hard it is to get in Whitney for residents because it's hard to live here when you're really young. And if you want move to Hawaiian Gardens or Lakewood, it's a million dollars. And if you've got a young family, it's hard to do
218that. And so maybe we should consider increasing some of Whitney's population at the high school level. So that way it encourages property values, encourages people to move here because they now have a chance to go into that school. may not be a lot, but rather than just a statistical minuscule, something slightly more than uh a real chance for them to get into when say at the high school level and also enable a broader range of courses because I know my daughter went there and there's like hardly any classes because there's not enough kids and uh adding in the outage district kids will be good but that doesn't necessarily make our residents feel happy about that um because now we're serving the outside. We need to serve our community specifically. Um, and that may even bring
219more people to come to our area that have high school kids and reinvigorate all of our high schools with more kids. So, that's that's one thing I'm hoping that we consider. Um, that's the end of my comments here or questions. Um, so I'm I'm willing to entertain a motion. You want to make a motion? There was a motion and a second already. So I think uh she hasn't made the motion yet, but No, I'm going to make a motion to bring back You have to vote on accepting the report. Okay, we have to accept the report first. So first we need a motion to accept the report. You have that. We have a vote. Yes. Okay. Then all in favor of accepting the report say I. I. Okay. The motion passes 70. Do we have
220any subsequent motions? I'd like to make a motion to bring this back for at our next board meeting as a open uh hearing. Yeah. With uh our consultant, can you uh kind of update the programs too, the data? Sure. Thank you. With the you know the schools that has the special program and you know all that stuff. So thank you. So is your motion to call for a public hearing? Yes. Okay. I second that. Okay. I'm going to do this by roll call. Mr. President, may I? Yes. Go ahead. Dr. Rios, thank you. Can I also, it was brought up by um a community member, the numbers, and I actually had a question about that. Why weren't those included? So, if can we ask that they be included? the um resident students that could be
221attending that school, were they not choosing to attend others? It is in the report, but I'll add it to the not in the tables that were presented to us. Yeah, it was not in the presentation, but it was in the report. I'll I'll highlight it so it's more clearly uh noticeable. Thank you. Those tables would be really helpful. All right, Mr. President, if I may, can you explain to the community exactly what the public hearing is going to be so that they know they can come and what they how they can interact, how they can engage in the public hearing. Sure. I'll I'll let Dr. Zlo go. Thank you. So, if we have a public hearing, um it will be an information item. It won't be something where there's any decision that can be made.
222And um similar to this evening, we'll have a setup where people can sign up um and we will go through a process of hearing their comments on um the report. Um we would then hear input and feedback from the board again. Um and so before it would just be an information item with a public hearing and just for time wise because sometimes our meetings go late. I know information is usually at the end. Can we make sure it comes at the beginning of the meeting? We would move it to a timed item right after consent. Thank you. Okay. So, let's uh have a roll call vote. Mrs. McCaten, yes. Mrs. Mendoza, yes. Dr. Rios, yes. Mrs. Yu, yes. Mrs. Yokoyama, yes. Mr. Nyola, yes. Mr. Nishi, yes. Motion passes 70. Thank you. Uh we're on
223to information items, results of site visits, reviews. Actually, I should call that the motion passes 70. Thank you. Results of site visits, reviews, and uniform complaint data for 2024, 2025, third quarter. Dr. Zitlo, thank you. Um, we received our report from LA County Office of Education in regard to the various um, Williams Act items. Um, there were no complaints in the areas of instructional materials, facilities, or teacher vacancies and mis assignments. Thank you, Dr. Zil. Uh, the last item on the agenda is board member reports. Uh, board member Mendoza. Thank you, Mr. President. I guess I get to go first. Um, so I attended the the musical Beetlejuice and I was there with board member Yokoy Yamaboui. We um got to watch an amazing performance by the students. It was it was awesome. Um and
224along with that I got to see my goddaughter cuz she was she was in the in the performance, the musical. Um I attended the Hispanic Latino Family Circle. Um, and at that meeting we recognized our graduating seniors and we had a panel of students um, from elementary to high school and I can't remember his name but there was a student from Hawaiian Elementary and he just stole the show like he had the best answers and I think one day he's going to be sitting here on the dasis because he was that good. Um, but it was a great meeting, very well attended. Um, and I look forward to attending the meetings next school year. I got to attend the the Oscars class of 2025 Candle Rose and Senior Worlds with um my fellow colleagues uh
225board member Jeannie Mccannon and Dr. Rios and um my son was a senior so we got to see him. That's going to be my last one that I attend as a parent. Um so it was bittersweet. Yeah, it was really nice. Um and then um Dr. Dr. Rios and I attended Assembly Women Sharon Kirk Servas um Latina leaders and they also had a panel of education and it was really interesting to meet um to meet people from the other side of the county from Orange County. I think we were the only ones from LA County, right? So, it was it was really nice to meet people and and just um listen to um the challenges that they to also have over in Orange County. And it's it's similar to ours, right? Their their um their
226challenges are are the same. So, you know, kind of it it gives me that idea of that districts really don't have boundaries. Our kids go from here to there and they're, you know, we have we don't have unique issues. It's it's it's countywide. It's statewide. It's, you know, all over. Um, just like we're dealing with, you know, low enrollment. Um, and then I want to make sure that I I I apologize to Burbank. I did attend their open house and I didn't do it in one of my board reports. So, I want to make sure I I do that. I got a chance to walk and visit all the schools at Burbank when they had their open house. And the one thing that I was really grateful to is all the work and that the
227students are doing and the parents were there and it was a great open house and at the very end and I can't remember her name. I'm really bad. I'm sorry. is that our um literacy interventionist um took time out of she was already wrapping up and she took time to show me her classroom and I was really grateful to see because uh they use you fly there and I'm really familiar with you fly and I'm just like that's awesome. So, I want to thank her. And then, um I I I don't know if this is is this is something we can do, but uh I know that we just went through this whole process and we're going to have a public hearing. And I think um I don't know if we can do this, but
228I was imagining maybe we could do it somewhere at a larger site because I think sometimes here um we have people out there, we have people in here, and it doesn't feel very inviting. It feels like we're separated. And I would love to have a a hearing where everybody's inclusive and then we can see everybody cuz um I don't think we got to see like how many people were outside of the the boardroom. So that would be my suggestion. I don't know if we can do that. I know it's part of our our our board meeting. Um but that's that's that's just me. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Vice President Nyola. Uh thank you, President Nishi. Um I actually got to visit uh nutrition services this month. I got to spend the mornings, you
229know, prepping all the school food and, you know, packaging. Uh, I just want to give my kudos to those nutrition service workers. They they make 16,000 meals a day and they they do it with five at $5 at cost. So, you know, it's just crazy to see how fast they, you know, get it out. They're shipping it out every morning. So, I want to thank them for all their hard work. And you know, they do their best to make his food as delicious and nutritious as possible. And and uh if you ever want to see how the sausage is made, you know, uh uh take a visit to the nutrition services. I also got to do a ride along with our Hawaiian Gardens uh bus route. So, I got to visit got to pick up
230some kids, you know. I I really appreciate uh that we have PAR educators there supporting the bus drivers. It's really important that we have somebody else to ensure kids are safe, kids have what they need to get to school ready and and just prepared. And our bus drivers do a really great job, you know, acknowledging the students, acknowledging their parents, and you know, communicate in real time that a kid is going to be late or isn't going to go to school today. So, you know, it's, you know, getting to peak behind the curtain is amazing at ABC. So, I appreciate all the staff here. So, that is my report. Actually, one more thing I I did want to invite the community. Uh me and Dr. are collaborating on a uh on a listening session with
231the community. We want to hear from the community on school safety and student achievement. So that will be uh May 27th and at Hawaiian Gardens uh recreation center at 6 pm. Thank you. Board member Maten. Um last Friday I was at Aloha for their biomes um grade two presentation with President um Nishi. Um very well done, very cute kids. very involved, very excited. Um, on Friday night, um, I did attend Candle Rose with two of our other board members. A beautiful ceremony at GAR, sending their seniors on their way, uh, recogning recognizing leadership awards. Um, on Saturday, I attended the Optimus Middle School track meet. Uh, Gina gave out the medals. I kept track of who came in for, second, and third. Um, an overall very nice event. Um, and then that night I went
232to the Optimus Gayla. Um, Scott Smith was the MC and, um, they do a great job of fundraising for ABC Cares, the STEM STEM Olympics, uh, speech contests and many more things in our district. So, uh, a pretty full weekend. It's a full job, right? It is a full job. Thank you, board clerk Tatiana Yokoyamabui. Thank you. Um, since the last meeting, I was invited and I attended the Black Family Circle student recognition event at Gar High School, uh, along with Dr. Castro. It was truly an inspirational event. They, um, recognized students moving up. So, sixth grade, eighth grade, and 12th grade were recognized. They had a keynote speaker, um, a former ABC graduate, uh, nurse practitioner. So, he was very inspiring and he he kind of just really broke it down for the kids
233at each of the levels they were at and and kind of gave his advice. Um, so seeing um I know it was on the on the report or in our agenda, but seeing the African-American studies course, you really see why that's important because that community really really thrives on that and needs that. So, um it it was really awesome to be there. I also attended uh Leo Elementary's TK and K Goldilocks and the Three Bears musical. And I'm I mean these kids are just they work so hard. And I think in that one day they performed the entirety of a 20 minute show four times. Two shows. So for there were four classes for each of the uh two classrooms, two classrooms for the parents and then two dress rehearsals because all the students in
234the school really wanted to see these little TK and K and they were they were adorable to the very end. So thank you so much to all the work that was done for that. Um I attended Whitman Elementary's 50th um celebration and warrior fest. I saw Dr. Zitlo and Mr. Smith. Um, I got to say a few words which was really inspiring because I am also a Whitman Whitman alum, but the Warrior Pride was was alive and strong there. Um, lastly, oh, I also did watch um, Beetlejuice and there was something else that I forgot but um, I will include in my next report. Oh, sorry. Club Ka Begon. So, Whitney High School Club Kai Begon's inaugural Philly Fest, Filipino Fest this past Saturday. Um, it was so awesome. It was just a community event.
235They had food. They had small businesses out there and um they invited local elementary school students to perform. Cerrito's high school bands were performing like literal like garage bands like they they are just singing. Um, so it was really cool and really awesome. I I believe it was Mr. Daryl David. Uh, David, he was the DJ the entire time. So, it was a 12 to 6 p.m. event. Um, it was really awesome and I hope it continues and I hope they get more support in future years. So, thank you. Thank you. And Dr. Rios, I want to start out by asking for two follow-ups from staff at the the Gopher holes. Were we able to address that issue at Gar? We did a followup last Thursday uh um to the board. So yes, we are
236having an aggressive plan to I don't want to say eradicate but to address the issues at Gar and Haskell. Yes, thank you. And I should have read my Thursday notes before asking somebody brought up with graduations coming up. There was a gentleman that spoke about graduation lights. Did we address that as well because I know that's happening next week. We did too. Yes. Um, and that was in there as well. A plan has been made. My apologies. Good job of reading notes. We'll put it in again. That's good. Okay. To my report. Um, I attended the Kendall ceremony and I got to say that it it forced me to be like, I got to attend more events because I usually am limited with time, but being there was so special. Uh, congrats to all the
237graduates and all the winners of the the many awards. Um, today was a bittersweet moment. I attended the Gars baseball second CIF game and were super excited to be at game two and then we lost. Uh but a congrats to all the athletes who really give it their all, my son included. Um for you know again just staying in it. Um I want to end with the Articia. I'm going to college dinner. Um, right now as an educator myself, I know the results again are like what we're all focusing on and we're looking to see, you know, did what we do give us the results we wanted here at ABC because I stand on this side of the podium. I want to again talk about how we need to be a team and and we
238need to know what supports we need to to provide as a school board um so that we do get those results we want. You know, I talked about being disappointed earlier and as a principal, like it would have been a dream to have a school of 300 students. As a teacher, it would have been a dream to have a class of 13, 14, 15, 15 students, you know, because I'd like to think that like there was so there would be so much potential for what you could do as opposed to a middle school teacher with 30 to 40 kids in the classroom. Um, but again, the questions that are going to be asked, are we getting the results we want? And if the answer is no, then why? like we really need to start looking
239at what is going on. Um the ch I don't know that this was made clear but in the report it's recommendations they won't take place until what is it 26 27. So that means we still have what we have for the next school year. Again opportunity, right? Um we want to make a case for smaller school sizes. We want to make a case for small class sizes. We need we need data that backs that up. It's hard to make arguments when we don't have it. It's just an opinion. Thank you. Thank you, board member. You Thank you, board president Mishi. Um, congratulations to all the graduates and especially the parents and the family for your support. I am looking forward to attending few graduation myself uh this coming two weeks throughout the district. Um, just
240like everyone else, I mean honestly when I read the reports from the consultant school works, I was pretty shocked and alarmed. But of course, this is not new to us, right? Um, the board did approve the contract with this consultant to study the enrollment trends across the district, school facility capacity and utilization and potential need for school consolidation. And I can see that many hours of hard work was put into this report. Thank you to school works as well as Dr. Zidlo, CFO Twan, uh Dr. Castro and president of teacher union, Ray Gar working with all the teachers too because teachers are impacted by all all of these uh you know changes and and the talks even though no action has been taken and I do want to ask the public to read the report
241carefully. It's all public now and it it has a lot of information from the past like four years and uh consider the causes of declining enrollment educational impact it has on our students and the financial impact on the district depending on what kind of decision and the direction we take and we are all responsible for this and the the most important goal is to put our students first and to ensure their academic needs are needs are met with least amount of disturbance. And while we are restructuring all of this and I really do hope that that we will also visit our uh curriculum, our program, our academics and the the the competitiveness of our math and language arts in all the schools because we want the success for all the students at you know throughout
242the district. Are we doing okay in math? Are we doing okay in reading? And I know our uh my colleague Dr. Rios talk about this all the time. So maybe this is a time also that we we should look into all those because our goal is to to also attract students from outside the district too, right? So this is all can be done together for uh all of our students in ABC district and all the employees and administrative staff for the long-term sustainability and the long-term well-being of students. Uh it's tough but this is something that we got to do right. So that is the end of my report. Thank you. I I don't get a board report but I just want to thank the board for being unanimous in moving forward to a positive
243future. I'm going to read the announcements. Next board regular board meeting is Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025 at 7 p.m. District office boardroom committee meetings is finance and audit board advisory committee. Thursday, May 22nd, 2025, 6 p.m. District conference room, citizens oversight committee. This is for the bond. Uh Tuesday, May 27th, 2025, 6 p.m. District conference room strategic planning at board advisory committee. In lie of the main meeting, the members are invited to a June 3rd board meeting. Uh 2025 226 local LCAP recommendations preliminary budget. Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025, 7 p.m. District office boardroom legis policy and legislative policy board advisory committee. Wednesday, August 27th, 2025, 6:30 p.m. at the district conference room. I'll be having a little coffee over here on the 23rd on Friday at about 7 p.m. Um, same location here. Second public
244comment section, clerk Yukamui. Yes, we have one speaker, Ray Gear. Good evening again. Uh, Ray Gar, president of the ABC Federation of Teachers. So, uh, I like how Ernie Oh, Mr. Nishi Nishi, sorry. It's okay. In the newspaper kind of pointed out that small schools are definitely not an academic advantage. And so, uh, you know, I I would hope that people would read the report in detail to to see that there are lots of limitations with small schools and the myth that they're classrooms with 14 kids. Uh, you know, that that's not happening at these small schools. We are having we're gonna have combo classes next year and the combo classes are just gonna they're gonna explode around this district over the next two years because there is no money and I hope that the
245public is aware that that's going to impact academics also. So you know we are at a crossroads small schools do not work. When you have a small staff, they cannot do all the extra activities that a school a school staff that's double their size. It's like having a baseball team with five members on the team instead of nine. They can play as hard as they can, but you're going to you're not going to be in the playoffs. Think about it. Thank you. Thank you. Can I have a motion for adjournment? Second. All in favor say I. I. Motion passes 70. Thank [Music] you. Heat. Heat.