001welcome everyone to the january 13th 2021 meeting of the hillsborough city school district uh we begin with a call to order um regular session roll call uh kim olaf president gilbert y here greg dennis president and chen here uh next 2.2 salute to the flag trustees if you could mute yourselves and uh tracy if you could begin the salute please rise place your hand over your heart and i will lead you in the flag salute please follow me i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all you may take your seats all right item 2.3 approval of the agenda i actually like to make a comment before we approve this agenda which is
002um i believe that we might have some members of the public attending tonight that wish to perhaps make a public comment about the subject of uh crocker's return to school in person i'm currently scheduled for next tuesday that is not an item that is on the agenda tonight and we we won't be adding it at this time but there is an opportunity for public comment so i just wanted to outline uh where that is and when it will take place um in section three of the agenda the regular reports i believe uh that hta president mary tarello may make some comments on that subject and superintendent luanne carlomano may make some comments at the end of all the regular reports after 3.5 as usual i'll ask for trustee comments and questions and after that i
003will ask as usual for public comment that is one opportunity that members of the public can comment on that topic during tonight's agenda the trustees will not be able to respond to any of those comments but you can enter them in the record the second opportunity is item five public hearing for items not on the agenda if anyone uh wishes to make a comment for an item not on the agenda including this particular topic of crocker's return to school that uh that can happen on item five and once again the trustees be since it's not an agenda's item tonight the trustees will not be able to respond meaningfully to any of the comments but we appreciate all that input um that said uh do any trustees have any changes to the to the agenda in
004that case i move to approve the agenda as as stated is there a second second second by anne uh roll call vote kim olaf hi gilbert y hi greg dennis hi ann chen hi and don goddess aye agenda is approved 2.4 approval of the minutes do any trustees have any corrections to the minutes i move to approve the minutes is there a second i'll second second by gilbert uh roll call vote kim olaf aye gilbert y aye craig dennis hi ann chen don guettis i minister approved moving on to regular reports uh 3.1 hillsboro teachers association mary torillo good evening um so i have two brief things tonight um one is on behalf of hta i want to publicly thank all of the many many people involved in our covid testing program um and to
005the parents and students for getting um the tests picking them up and taking them i'd like to make a plea to parents to please please please get your children tested we are so fortunate to have this program available um for our staff and students in hillsborough please let's take good care of each other and work to keep everyone safe second um yesterday the crocker staff and superintendent carla mono board president getting principal brady and assistant principal miller met to discuss the return to school next week of all grades at crocker during the meeting teachers expressed a variety of concerns the teachers were professional articulate and their concerns were heartfelt some of our crocker teachers may speak during public comment later in the meeting tonight thank you as always for your support your care and your
006collaboration thank you very much mary uh that brings us to 3.2 uh cse d mooring hi we as classified staff would also like to thank everyone for the testing program that is available in this district and makes education in person one of the things that makes education in person possible we are looking at all of these other districts and all of the trouble they're having and and feel so grateful that everybody can participate and we really appreciate the parents working to help keep the teachers and the staff safe so thank you very very much to everybody and we're about to be back thanks very much steve 3.3 uh apg lynette kapos well there's a theme because top on my agenda is also to thank uh stephanie cantwell and laura hansen who are heading up our
007covid cares hcsd cares um committee and team and i just want to thank them for their incredible amount of work that they've done um around the testing and just the incredible amount of parents who have um come to help put the test kits together and to pass them out it is it's really um a joy to see so many people involved and people coming together to to do this for our schools and as dee just said you know i believe that we're the only public school that i know of that is offering um this testing so i just am so incredibly grateful um that all that is happening and i in starting this year you know i've been filled with gratitude um and i just want to take a moment to again appreciate on behalf
008of all of the parents in our community that just an incredible amount of work that has gone into our schools from the from the this summer them so many hours of planning um specifically i want to thank the specialists who um went out of their comfort zones and took on uh uh teaching classes in order to get our cohort sizes down incredible thankfulness for them to do that i had somebody told me the other day that their child was in a class outside of our district of 36 students in their class and they said simply we have absolutely no way to come back to school because the cohort sizes are too small and again i was so appreciative for all the work and the planning and the shifting and the teachers for doing um allowing
009us to have small cohort sizes i'm thankful for our virtual program and i want to thank all the teachers doing that and maureen for leading that um to be able to offer our parents in this district a choice is just absolutely incredible and we are so grateful for that um i'm thankful for um luanne posting our weekly covent updates being so transparent it is something that has given a lot of the parents just great comfort um seeing all that we've done in order to get our kids back to school and it's just incredible so thank you for putting in the work for that um and uh and we're just we're very just grateful it's above and beyond and so important for our kids so thank you for all of the measures that we've taken and
010i just want to also say um apg gave margie a beautiful a bouquet of flowers she was gone last month during this meeting so we weren't able to deliver her her bouquet to thank her for her nine years of service on the board but we did that um so i just wanted to give you that update so again at the bottom of my heart on behalf of all the families thank you to everything that has gone on in our district to get our kids um either back to school or in a virtual program that have been stellar so thank you thank you thank you thank you lynette and thank you very much for honoring margaret as well that's very kind i'm sure she appreciated it 3.4 hillsboro schools foundation lee roselansky thanks dawn welcome back
011everyone i hope that you enjoyed a well-deserved break as everybody really needed it as we look to the new year hsf is excited about some of our virtual events which will be taking place instead of the classic and the dinner dance this year this month we have a pizza delfina pizza kitten class a ladies wine night and scotch tasting for dads by attending these events you are not only supporting our great school community but you're also supporting our schools another way to support our schools is by donating to hsf if you haven't already done so or increasing your donation as there will be no fund and need this year instead hsf has decided to increase the amount we're giving to the district from 3.4 to 3.6 million and like lynette mentioned these funds have allowed
012for so many of the things that we have enjoyed and it's given our families choice between virtual learning or to safely return to in-person learning with smaller class sizes because of the additional teachers hired and the redeployment of specialists additionally hsf has partnered with the district to pay for multiple rounds of cova testing which we know is really unique and special to our district and not only that but to pay for additional tech requested by teachers in order to aid in virtual learning um we've currently raised 3.1 million dollars which is something to be extremely proud of but to give the district what they need this year we need to get to 3.6 so we're short we we need to get everyone involved to make sure that we're able to achieve that as our district
013continues to navigate this very difficult time they need everyone's support more than ever every donation matters every dollar counts and it ensures that hsf can continue to help the district with the challenges they face this year so on behalf of hsf i really want to extend a huge thank you to luanne and the board of trustees for all the work that you've done to to make this a successful school year so far um and i really want to thank our families for their continuous support thank you thank you lee and thanks of course to hsf for the uh uh support of the district the getting the kids back to school in the fall when we first did it the testing for all the students was something that only hsf made possible so really appreciate that
014thank you dawn uh 3.5 superintendent report luanne cardemono thank you i'm trustee gettis um so i want to start by just um giving a shout out to um both csea and hta and dee and and mary they do a tremendous job and our relationship with our labor partners is just critical right it's what allowed us to to open our schools and i'm thankful beyond words and appreciative of everything that they have done so far as well as our site leaders and our parents um but the day in and day out in-person instruction um is is intense and so i just i want to thank them for those efforts um we are trying to strategically think about how we can support our crocker educators who are concerned who have um shared concerns um especially at a
015meeting um that trustee gettys and i attended just on two days maybe it was yesterday yesterday and trying to think about how to alleviate those concerns so that they feel confident um in coming back to school next week and we've already been in direct contact with some teachers who are having some serious concerns about coming back and coming up with solutions um to make it work for them and to make it work for the students in their class so um stay tuned on that i also want to share that i had a great opportunity this week to visit classrooms virtually of course and it was a blast and i'm just gonna say that today uh principal mata and i did a pe lesson with mr chris and i thought i was gonna have a heart
016attack i did it right here in my office uh 30 minutes no wasn't it felt like 30 minutes it was like maybe 15 minutes of aerobic exercises and i even did burpees right here in my office so um just want to do a shout out to our virtual teachers and then we saw a little bit of music with miss gramet and miss miller and did a little dance routine with them so it's been quite a few days and i just want to say it was lovely being in the classroom with our teachers and really getting a feel for the challenge to teach kids remotely it's hard especially the little ones right because they got a million things going on besides what's going on on the screen so um just want to do a shout out
017to those teachers and visiting i want to talk a little bit about the covid testing thank you to all our partners who shared um just their gratitude and i i feel the exact same way um last week on working with grace so we'll update our hcsd uh covet data sheet as soon as grace lee young who's our main covid testing program person has the numbers from last week and this week so it looks like last week so there's families who test outside of the district too and so um getting those numbers it looks like we had maybe about 720 tests given last week got an update from the team this week and it looks like it's over a thousand and that is exactly what we are hoping for i think we're looking at um i
018think we were planning for 1100 tests but i'm that's maybe more than we even needed but again i just got a text message saying that um at least a thousand bags were given out so cheers to our parents and that was after there was a delay in tests and we had to figure out a game plan so some of you have been getting communications throughout the day just figuring out how we're going to do that but it happened and we did it so parents like mary was sharing we need you all to have your children tested that's what keeps our educators sane in in coming to in-person education and we know that testing isn't the total solution but it's a big part of the solution um also so and i need to just do a
019little shout out to our site people so linda willy and debbie chris and we have um bessie uh sebold and nicole salama and steve juno and of course stephanie cantwell and laura hansen so cheers to you guys for making this happen okay so let's talk a little bit about the vaccine for our educators which is critical i've been working with the county office of education as have all superintendents in the county to try to develop a vaccination program for our educators i think all of you are aware at least i hope our educators are that we are on tier 1b and uh we are first in that tier we are hoping that testing will take place excuse me vaccinations will take place in the next two weeks we'll start we'll start right now our educators
020received a survey just maybe two hours ago from the county office of education and public health um asking about their status if they're in person that kind of information so a strategy can be developed for testing so right now we're working on priorities um for educators who will be receiving um the vaccination and right now that is looking generally like we're going to vaccinate the people who are in person at school instructing students second would be educators who are actually on campus doing work and the third would be our educators working remotely i am hopeful that this whole process is going to be very succinct so we can get all educators vaccinated as soon as possible and that it's not going to be strung out over some amount of time i actually feel i feel
021pretty good about that um just with what's going on in the county and what really motivated us as a small group of superintendents to talk to nancy mcgee is the vaccinations that were happening in marin county and some of you may have seen there was an article about ucsf the doctors there recommending that students come back to school and the districts that they were really emphasizing were in marin county because they have gone back k-12 and they've had very very very low transmission of the virus and so they're really pushing to get their educators vaccinated because so many of them are back in person um so that's what's happening with vaccinations it's a really important topic for us um and i i think that i think it's fair to say that we all feel like
022we will breathe a sigh of relief when we can be vaccinated of course the governor's budget so that came out this week there's not a ton for me to report here i know a lot has been in the press and i know that everyone understands that one of his top priorities is covet 19 relief um and getting kids back to school and so i don't know how well received his actual plan was probably not super well received but there is grant funding for students who do have uh children back on campus and we would be able to apply for that so joyce jen our cbo is on top of it and looking at what we have to do i know that we have some documentation that's due by uh february 1st so joyce is on
023top of that our state finances just in general are doing well we have a 15 billion dollar surplus and i can't imagine that that's not going to get eaten up by everything that this state needs to do to take care of coveted relief so um stay tuned on that there's also one-time funding for learning loss um i'm not sure if that is actually a grant process or if that will just be coming to every school site and another highlight of his budget is he's has a lot of initiatives aimed at strengthening expanding student mental health services and we're working with some mental health providers right here in the county uh leilani bell actually was in a meeting today with an uh organization called care solus and you may have seen something in the daily news
024about that um so i'll be reporting when we have a little bit more information on that um in terms of assessed property values it's um they're down and they're down significantly in the county so last year at this time in the county the assessed property values were 7.52 this year they're 3.42 and for our district which of course we're much more concerned about um it is uh 3.43 and i'm apologize i don't have a graph for you this week this this month i'll be on that next month um but that is down from 4.02 last month and 4.59 last year so um perhaps there's fewer transactions happening so we're keeping an eye on that but again joyce always budgets conservatively so i feel that our our budget is in good stead even with this lower
025assessed property value and i i think that's it thank you superintendent uh trustees any questions or comments on any of the regular reports we've heard so far tonight i see no questions or comments for trustees so i'll open it up to public comment on any of the regular reports again if i believe some members of the public may be interested in commenting on crocker and in-person education uh if if you have any comments that are relevant to what you've heard on the regular reports tonight you can make public comment now and there will also be a second opportunity at item 5 after the current business if you wish to speak then but if anyone uh wants to make public comment uh you can look at the participants tab and click on the blue raise hand
026feature and we'll give you an opportunity for a three-minute public comment at this time so i'll wait for a moment to see if anybody is interested in that so i'm seeing no public comments at this time for the regular reports so we'll move on to item 4 current business 4.1 educational services update from matthew lindner hello there hi share my screen so you can see all right you can see my screen yes wonderful thank you all right so um i'm here tonight to give a number of educational services updates i know we we missed um me giving multiple reports in december so no worries i gotcha um that's not gonna work okay so just to call out our district priorities as we begin so the first one our health safety and well-being of our community
027number two diversity equity and inclusion practices and number three instructional practices for remote and in-person learning so these are our focus areas for this year that fit underneath our goals and as part of our coherence document i'll be going through a number of items many of which i've reported on in the past one thing to know i do have an additional slide that i've added in on the california school dashboard and that i had missed getting that into the presentation before it was uploaded um i'll give you the spoiler there's really not much to know so not going to surprise you with anything but just to know i'm going to i'll just talk a couple points about that when we get to it so the k5 report card revision we have been working on revising
028that report card based on feedback from families and from staff we started that work back in the fall of 2019 what a different time that felt like um and we continued that over last spring even as we moved into covid and we've been working on that uh we even met in april for quite a while and then we've met periodically since then we've done a number of iterations right now and we're getting a lot closer there's still some more work to do um uh maureen and uh my admin assistant linda hum and i actually met with a powerschool rep today and uh got a little bit more information about some of the specific parameters that we can operate within and receive some uh good news along those lines too that there's a couple of things
029that we weren't really sure could happen um in the formatting and how it could look um that we actually can do so i'm excited to uh share that with our committee the next time that we're able to meet our hope right now for some next steps are to really work to get this finalized or get a really good draft finalized that we can share with the board and that we can then actually pilot and i'm going to kind of say that generally with a few of the teachers who are on the committee um take the opportunity to share that to to kind of run through and trial run a new report card with some of their classes so we'll have them um that has come up as a discussion topic and a possibility to to
030see sort of what that felt like it's kind of like you know trying on the clothes um see what that feels like and then also share that with families in some of those classes to see what the response is and to see what else we need to do with the very solid goal of having a new revised report card to roll out in the fall so we're getting getting a lot closer on that feeling better but again still some more work to do tightening up language getting rid of a little bit of the redundancy that we're noticing in some of the language really with the goal of making sure that it is more clear um for families and that the things we're reporting on um are the the most important the most important things the
031california healthy kids survey uh it is our year last year actually was our year to do it and then kovid disrupted that and we got an extension for a year so we'll plan to do this in february uh or march of this coming school year we'll do it for grades three through eight so uh typically it's required in grades five and seven and um but you can give it in all grades and the last time we were looking at the data it was discussed that it could be helpful more helpful to actually be able to get some grade level breakdowns and see how kids are progressing over time versus just sort of getting a read on just fifth and eighth graders every other year so we we will plan to do that i'll be sending
032out more information to families including um the um consent notices for families to to fill out so that we can um give the survey to our students the difference between this and the learning from home survey there are there are many questions that are similar but there are some questions on the healthy kids survey that are related to tobacco and drug use and alcohol use which is where the consent is needed and so you'll those questions will be on that along with many of the same questions that were asked on the learn from home survey which conveniently will allow us at least in those domain areas to look at progress over uh the last number of months so when we gave the learn from home survey in the spring we gave it this fall and
033then giving the healthy kids um in february march we'll be able to look at those across across time so next steps communicating with families and then getting that scheduled uh to be given to students while they're in class or in their virtual classrooms the k5 team has also been working on a materials adoption for science again the running theme disrupted by kovid but um we will be picking that back up so we were able to pilot twig science back before covet started then we took a pause and the plan was oh when we're back this fall in our in our typical school like we'll pick it up well you know it's january and it's not like what we're used to um so i'm working now with that committee to determine when would be when do
034we feel like is the right time to really come back to this and to pick it up whether it's later this spring uh pending um vaccines roll outs and kind of how things are are going um and when we can kind of do things a little bit more and really engage with the material in the way that it's really meant to be so that we can get a real true experience um or if that is uh next fall so we want to make sure that we're doing a really good job of selecting material and so we don't want to have a covert disruption disrupt it further so we did purchase mystery science which we've been using as bridge curriculum a number of years back and then we've continued to keep that so we've had that
035consistency of mystery science for the elementary teachers to use and so i will plan to continue that should we decide that we want to push push this um into the fall and then a recommendation would come to the board after we've had a chance to pilot and debrief and really get some some good information we did a math pathways study with the san mateo county office of education in coordination with all of the elementary districts that are in our learning community and our learning community sometimes it used to be referred to as elementaries were the feeder districts but we're trying to shift that language of being the feeder districts into the larger district but we're learning community and we're districts that are partner districts with one another so we partner with the high school district
036this study was looking at a cohort of students so it looked at our eighth grade students from the 14-15 school year and then looked at how what math courses they started at when they went to san mateo union high school district so again only students that went to the public school district would have been part of that it looked at what courses they took and what their course sequence was and whether or not they met hg requirements and so that was really what the point of the the survey was and then we also had an opportunity to do ethnic breakdown to see if we were seeing any any information there um a couple of sort of big takeaways and i'd be happy to come back perhaps at a special session and speak more about this
037and show some of the graphs but a few big takeaways most of our students were able to meet their a through g requirements um students that had come from hillsborough schools not all students did but most so in the like 87 range met a through g but about 13 of that group of students that were there for four years also so if they were there for ninth grade but then left they're not counted in that data set so it's only students that came from hillsborough went there and then were in the high school district all four years um that group of students would actually now be in their second year of uh college should they have chosen to go to a two or four year school right after high school the ethnicity data was mixed
038i had uh some clarification on that about why we had a large group that fell under the category of missing and missing meaning that that field hadn't been filled in in the data set and we figured out that it actually came from of the cap from some of the calpads reporting so how the california longitudinal pupil data system was holding some of that information at that time and they've since cleaned up a lot of that so we're also looking at down in the next steps what that might look like if we were to continue to do this with other cohorts of students that have been going through our schools to be able to look at what what the math experience looks like another takeaway that i received from that in looking at it was our
039students there were certain pathways where students pretty much took all four years and then there were other pathways where they took their required three years met a through g but then chose not to take a fourth year so there are things for us to look at there and to think about nothing that we can come back in the point to like oh this decision that was made x number of years ago must have been like that's not at all what we can do with that information but it can help us to question some things or to dig in a little bit further and to wonder about sort of how how some of our how some of the things are are set up for our students as a as an entire system thinking about high school
040as well and that's partly some of the work that i've been doing with them about monthly for the last couple of years where we've been trying to work together um we also are looking at this and taking another step and looking at developing a math attitudes survey that we would give to students so there's a lot of question there's a lot of research out there discussion from people who know far far more than i do about mathematics and mathematics learning about the attitudes that students have about their abilities in mathematics and then their actual achievement levels and so looking at perhaps starting to do something where we are asking students about their perceptions of themselves as mathematicians over time and to see if we notice any patterns there so that's sort of our next steps
041with the math pathway study we as part of our giftedness screening and assessment program we typically give the olsat 8 assessment to all students in grades k and 2 every year last year we were able to do that before covid so we had that done this year we will be planning to also do it for all students that are in person in grades k and 2. parents of course can opt their child out of that but we will be we will be giving that to all students who are in person any student in k or 2 who's in a virtual classroom i'll be reaching out to those families to find out if they would prefer to just not take it or if they feel comfortable coming in if we could arrange a way for them
042to come in just for that assessment just to sit for that or if they would prefer to defer a year and have their student take it in first or third grade depending on their grade right now we will also be looking at all new students so we started doing that a couple of years ago any new students who are enrolled into hillsborough would be given the opportunity to also take it and we are looking at our new students as those who enrolled after the l the olsat was given in the spring so students who enrolled in april or may or even march or february honestly too um that weren't caught and given that opportunity um that they'll also be offered that as part of next steps we are looking at how do we um rethink
043a little bit of how we're um how we're defining or how we're understanding who is gifted and what that actually means before covid we had a group that had been meeting a couple of times to start to redefine that or to try to understand how we were um how we were determining who was um who was gifted and how we can help support them and so we do have questions around how do we expand that and how do we use more than just uh one measure that has to do with a specific kind of achievement and how we identify because we also know that that giftedness does not fall along any specific sort of line it is equally distributed in the population and our data doesn't actually show that it doesn't match so we want
044to also look at how we're disrupting that and if we've created some inequities in how we determine giftedness for students we also purchased renzoli learning last for this school year we have it also for next year and they have a really great profiler that can help us to get some more information about students and their areas of interest the the ways they prefer to express themselves and their some of their other preferred characteristics for learning that can also help us as we're thinking about instruction so we want to also start looking at what could we learn from that and how could we help all students to be enriched in their learning through through that tool and program i'll call it a tool it's a support it can be very student directed or it can be
045um teachers can also have a more interaction with it for students but it can be completely student driven clicking on things uh casper administration so that's a big question i know that's on a lot of people's minds so as of right now uh we will be planning to give the casp assessment so that's the smarter balanced assessment and the california science assessment as long as the california alternate assessment um for most for some of our most exceptional learners um typically those who are in our learning centers they'll take the the caa or the call that only goes to third through 8th graders it is being adjusted for this year to be able to be done in virtual remote or hybrid settings some of the adjustments that they've made is they've narrowed the question set so
046that once we've done this if we do it in a in a virtual setting um there's there's an exposure level that can't be contained like it can be if it's in schools and so uh smarter balance knows that and so they've also reduced the number of questions that would be on the computer adaptive portion so the performance task part for ela and math would remain the same but the computer adaptive portion would be in half so they would have half as many ela questions half as many math questions the statisticians have determined that doing that would be able to give us some information that they think could be helpful there will be strong caution about using that information and comparing it to two years ago's information though um so that's that's a big thing to
047know so right now we are planning that we will do it part of that also had to do with um federal government and the requirement on states to do it last year there was a reprieve this year there is not uh there is definitely speculation that that may change in the coming weeks and months and that districts and schools and states may not have to give it and so if that were to come out then we will address it and we'll and i'll make sure to update the board but as of now we have been told to plan and prepare and so i'm we're doing a little bit of that and we'll do heavier march-ish so we'll see what what the world looks like then and then determine how much time to spend to preparing
048for this assessment or not uh quickly on our k5 specialists um just so the board knows our k5 specialists have been doing an amazing job um uh making sure that all 850-ish of our elementary k through 5 students are being able to have an experience in music ilab pe and then getting some connection to library mostly through their teachers and through some asynchronous activities our really big goal during this period is then to be able to help students maintain that connection and to hopefully help them continue some of their enjoyment of those activities and make sure that when we're able to be back we can pick up and keep going and we haven't left them with a big gap in their arts learning and their physical education in music they've been doing a lot of
049thematic work and really trying to help connect the music appreciation and some of their learning to the work that's been going on in class they've also been using an online tool uh called quaver which we purchased for them and has been very very helpful and allows students to compose music and to really engage in in ways that they hadn't been able to before uh physical education has been doing a synchronous and asynchronous work as his music um been really utilizing flip grid videos to to get a sense of what students are able to do and to be able to comment on those and share and then also to do a lot of character building through physical education as you can imagine both music and physical education are really restricted in in how they can actually
050operate with students um in school and at home so um there's different things that can be done in each setting and our our teachers are very cognizant and always staying up to date on what can happen and what do we need to to revise in ilab um we've been focusing on uh coding uh recently and then particularly using micro bits for our upper grade students so each student in generous support from hsf we were able to purchase a kit for every student they'll they will share it with you with other grades but they have their own kit for the time that they have it to work on they'll be gathered after the unit is over to be sanitized and taken care of before it goes to fourth grader so we're starting with fifth grade but
051this will allow students to also have some ilab learning and hands-on experience with micro bits even during the pandemic and our youngest students in k-2 many of them are uh are doing our take-home robot program so think about the take-home teddy bear that you might have experienced in kindergarten i know i did i had a week took the bear home and dressed every day wrote in the little notebook so this is similar in that it's the take-home robot so you get to take the robot home you get to work on some coding get to record some videos of of how you've coded the robot to do certain things and this is for our kinder first and second grade classes and then it will come back and then be taken care of before it goes to
052the next family so aaron bautista our ilab teacher for all of our students in elementary has worked on protocols and processes for that messaging that out and then with library our library teacher sue morgan was half time and was working at all schools so her big focus was around making sure that resources to the extent possible were available to staff and then working on making sure that a good battle of the books experience could happen this year as well so next steps we'll be doing is gathering a little bit of feedback from staff around how that's been going in their classrooms and then the um specialist team and i will be looking over that to think about what adjustments if any does it make should we be making for for the rest of the year
053um as our diversity equity inclusion uh initiative and work has been well underway a couple of highlights we've got three different groups that are meeting to continue to work on this we have a teacher advisory group we have a parent advisory group and then we have a core team so the core team is made up of a couple of administrators um a few parents a few teachers and then apg president and tony giacomazi from hillsborough rec are part of that and then the teacher group is some teachers that have have joined that group to help advise me on some of the sort of work that we're doing and to give input and thoughts and feedback and been incredibly helpful and the parent advisory group as well working a lot on some of the community engagement
054and then offering resources and support and ideas and thoughts and perspectives so that's been incredibly helpful as well so it's been great to see the engagement from so many areas as we continue to move forward knowing that we'll continue learning and growing and figuring some of the things out as we go um our equity journey as i as i hear and as i would say and as i've learned from from different educators is an ongoing process and so there isn't really a you've gotten there um we would hope that there is but my experience uh and the experience that has been shared with me from those doing the work longer than i have far longer is that you continue to grow and you continue to learn and you continue to work on our your equity
055journey and making making things more whole for everybody we have four focus areas that we're looking at we've been calling them pillars but that really sort of unhelpfully meshes with the four pillars for safety so we're shifting to four focus areas those areas are hiring and training so looking at our hiring practices and then how we're training and providing professional learning to staff not only when they're new but also over time and ongoing uh with a long-term plan of how do we embed that as just part of the system and the fabric and fiber of what we do so we can call it out specifically but we can see it all also woven in really really clearly another area is really looking at our curriculum and so looking at the curriculum that we have with
056a careful equity lens and looking at any future curriculum such as the science adoption at elementary and any future adoptions with that lens and and really looking through that work or looking through the tools that we're using and making sure that what we have is helping to serve students of all backgrounds all and all life experiences and helping to give windows into those life experiences for our students so not just about seeing them reflected but also about helping to see the the experiences of others not only in hillsborough but in san mateo county and in our bay area and beyond so i think it helps to keep in mind that our students are citizens of our town they're also citizens of our wider community and of the world and so it's important for them to
057understand different perspectives and how different groups of people have experienced their histories and their lives and their futures student groups really focuses on making sure that our students are able to meet this is particularly around at crocker so student affinity groups and how we can help get some of that going so that students can meet um and continue to be together around com characteristics that they are feeling very tied to and then community engagement so um working closely with apg and apg has been doing a tremendous job and incredibly helpful and really working on ways that we can help support diversity equity and inclusion in our entire community and then we're doing extended professional learning so we've been looking at ways that we can be looking at the spring as a learning opportunity so we've
058got a three-part workshop that we'll be doing around enhancing it's called enhancing equity through understanding implicit bias and that is done through the los angeles county of education and so they'll be coming to us and helping us go through a process of just thinking and exploring and questioning and wondering um and and being confronted with some things that may be uncomfortable the goal of that really is to take it over time to connect it to the work that we're doing in our schools and to think about our own experiences and the experiences of others as a beginning place for us so not an end but a beginning and it's meant to be ongoing work so again like i had mentioned before about equity journeys and this is a piece of that this will then move
059into so the third part so there's two parts that sort of focus around that and then a third part that focuses on culturally responsive teaching and learning practices and that will be the third part this spring which will then springboard us into the fall well where we will plan to be doing over a two year period six different sessions at least at the elementary level around culturally responsive practices and then i'll be working and reaching out to crocker teachers on some subject area specific work that we can do over time with them so and we're looking at that as sort of the experience for everybody but we're also offering a lot of other um opportunities for museum of tolerance from other local organizations to continue learning for those that are also in a different place
060on their journey and are ready to dig into a specific area more and learn more so it is there are experiences for everybody and then we're differentiating experiences for those who are ready to go further or ready to learn more in other areas so our next steps we're continuing to develop the long-term plan continuing to listen to to thoughts and input and to think about how this continues to move forward but moving forward nonetheless so we will continue learning and growing and then i was watching a webinar from the cde uh the other day and one of the quotes in there from dr martin luther king that i felt like was helpful um is this at the bottom which i also added so that wasn't in there before um all meaningful and lasting change begins
061on the inside so i felt like that really sort of sat for us especially in the springtime right now where we're spending time learning it's about learning and beginning to understand and question and be curious almost there california school dashboard okay so i gave you the spoiler on it so the thing to know you can go to ca school dashboard.org you can look up hillsboro for the year and you will only see school contact information and some demographic information so school population uh the percent of socioeconomically disadvantaged percent foster youth and percent english learner that's the only metrics on for the 2020 year for 19 18 and 17 you can see the full set of all of the pretty color dials like the image at the bottom of the screen you can see the different
062student groups broken out where they were in those different color dials all that's there not for this year the plan as of now is that next year we will be able to have some of those color dials but again that is very much subject to change there's a lot of question about how they will be calculating that with this disrupted period of time so you can go there see prior years with lots of information or this year with not much but it's there and it's public and live so and last but not least that all of that leads us up to the lcap and the lcp so um my two favorite plans with the exact same acronym the learning continuity and attendance plan from the spring and the local control accountability plan which was the
063lcap from before so last spring we were not we did not need to give an update we did the learning continuity plan or worked on sort of our what we're going to do in the meantime this spring i will give an update on our august through february time um with the lcap and sort of where we ended there and i'll give another update on the learning continuity plan which the board approved in september and the focus of that will be on this is where we were this was our plan this is where we are now this is what we got to and we'll use both of those to plan for the 2021-24 version of the lcap so that will be the three-year period where we will have a few goals that we'll keep track of
064report out share and then be working toward those should be in alignment with the goals that we have as a district so that we have everything connecting together we are allowed to do different kinds of goals than we were prior so we can have maintenance of progress goals which is kind of like you know wherever we were we want to just keep going with a prior goal we can have focus goals that are very specific and narrowed in or we can have more broad goals so there will be more discussion as we go in the spring around those different kinds of goals and what ones make sense for us in our school district that's the next steps and then that's it thank you very much thank you matthew can you stop the sharing i certainly
065can uh a very impressive uh diverse list of uh reports up there on the educational cafes in the district so i really appreciate that i do have one quick question on the high school math pathways uh that that slide which i i love the study to follow one cohort through whatever seven years of education must must be really interesting i didn't quite understand not exactly the conclusion but maybe you could help clarify for me the um goal of the study so i saw something about access sort of access for students to math pathways early and how that determines what math they take later is kind of the vague uh my vague understanding of the purpose of the study i i guess maybe the way to ask the question is was this supposed to be useful
066within a single district or was this basically comparing districts so for example yeah right right i mean just to be clear here at crocker we offer a common core pathway and we offer an accelerated pathway and does that mean that every student that went to crocker had access to both pathways whatever they chose or was it looking at what an individual student chose and seeing how that related to what they chose later in high school oh great question thank you for asking i'll clarify that so the the information that we received back from that study was really looking at their high school experience so we have our students that went to san mateo union high school district and the first first section we saw was their ninth grade year then 10th and 11th and 12th
067so we could look at what was it looking like for course for courses so which courses like who is in algebra 2 versus geometry versus another course and then we could make assumptions about you know the kids that were in this group were likely this other group with a little bit of movement part of where this came from was some work that we've been doing with the san mateo union high school district and our surrounding districts around whether or not we're creating equitable pathways for all students to achieve at the highest levels at in high school but also starting in middle school so as our students are moving up we didn't gather how students did in sixth seventh and eighth um that i recall this we did this a couple of years ago and they've
068been working on putting it together we didn't pull all of that and then look at those pieces together um i do know at that time too at crocker there were also some changes in sort in some of the pathways there but it's looking at sort of across the districts so part of the challenge is that because we're two different districts there is sort of this like sinking of information which is where the county office lent a lot of their support we didn't compare districts um the high school district has some of that information about like kids that came from here but i don't have like san mateo um i don't have san mateos i don't have berlin games information i have hillsboro so i can only see the set of kids that came from hillsborough
069and then how did they do if they were in um cemetery union all four years so in looking at it there were a few things that we could notice um but it there was there were limitations on what we could get and it was our first time doing it so we learned some things about how we were doing this as well and the information we provided and if we were to do it again what questions would we have that we're really trying to answer that might change the data that we gather great thank you very much other trustees any questions or comments for matthew kim thanks thank you matthew i just had a quick question of just something you mentioned on the giftedness slide your comment was about how giftedness identifying giftedness and how it
070falls sort of an equal distribution through the population but that hcsd our data doesn't show that can you just speak to that the comment and what that what that yeah i i can so in the population giftedness doesn't fall along um uh racial backgrounds it doesn't fall along you know whether or not you have an identified um disability or a differing ability it doesn't fall along socioeconomic lines and yet when we look at some of the data that we have on how we've been identifying students what we see is in ethnicity we see some disproportionate numbers there so it doesn't really mirror our student population and so we're also looking at that it also doesn't mirror our students that we have identified to receive special education services proportionately it doesn't mirror that as well and
071we know that there are many students who are are twice exceptional and so we we want to make sure that we're that we're being inclusive and really identifying students for additional um support there in the in giftedness areas and by questioning the way that we're identifying have we created a discrepancy by how we identify thank you other trustee questions or comments i don't see any so uh members of the public anyone wish to make a comment from matthew can raise your hand and i don't see any so thank you very much matthew move on to 4.2 uh the academic calendar for next year leilani bell good evening sorry sorry about that took a minute to to get on um so this evening i am presenting or i'm um bringing forth our academic calendar for the
0722021-2022 school year for approval um and it's essentially a footprint of last year or the school year calendar that we wanted to have for this school year if covid hadn't um oh thank you tracy if if kovid hadn't um entered our lives or entered the world so you can see the first day of school that we're proposing for teachers or that we have proposed um for teachers is august 16th and then a workday for the 17th with the first day of school for students the 18th which would be a wednesday um the last day of school would be june 11th and you can see the breaks that we have in between right now um we don't have the high school calendar available to us it hasn't been made public i um and so we still
073want to make sure that we're aligned with their breaks um so there's a possibility that we're going to bring forth another calendar to you shortly once the high school releases their calendar just to make sure that our spring break and our winter break matches up with them but everything else you can see as far as the holidays and um our pd days that we have coming up also for our teachers so we would have one attached to labor day on september 7th another one on october 11th and one in march where it seems to march go march on forever so we have march 10th and then we're adding on also a holiday there a local holiday um it's not any it's not an official holiday but just to break it up for the students and
074teachers a little bit within the month of march um so this is what we're presenting right now we're seeking approval or requesting for approval for the first day and last day and like i said um the calendar will most likely essentially stay the same in the middle we just want to make sure we're aligned with the high school uh so leilani uh i guess i i i can ask about the status of this document um our union groups our teachers and uh classes yes so um we heard back it we had presented it to csea we um presented it to our hta calendar committee they sent it out to their union as well um and they had approved for the calendar as well and and the status so you've talked about you want to be
075aligned with the high schools uh which i understand but but that you might make a change so i'm trying to understand are you asking us to take action tonight and what would that action mean yes if you could take action on the first and last day of school um and then we can come forward again to to confirm that our dates are aligned with the high school for winter break and spring break uh luanne yes thank you trustee gattis so the high school is going to approve their calendar in the coming weeks but they have not made it public so um before even though in our bargaining agreement um we negotiate the first day and the end date we work collaboratively with our partners in looking at all the days in between and so once
076the high school puts out their calendar and approves it um i would want to connect with mary tarello i would want to connect with clover and see how it's in sync or not in sync and if we needed to change any dates i just think it's very important that we get to parents the first day of school um because it's it's right around the corner as strange as that sounds so again just asking for approval for first aid ending day and then we'll bring it back once we hear from the high school district okay and the high school district whatever you hear uh you i have no fear that that might change your first uh starting and ending date well generally they're we're not absolutely in sync in the starting date but we don't want
077to go any earlier and yeah so this is where we were this year and we'd like to stick with it and plus hta did run it by their members and they voted and they did approve it so um and again we just want to be sure that if the high school has a different spring break than what we have marked on here that we have a conversation with our partners and about that uh and your intent is to bring another calendar at a future meeting to to approve the middle of the calendar yeah we bring that to the february we bring that to the february meeting uh other trustees any questions or comments uh members of the public does anyone have any questions or comments on the calendar in particular the starting and ending date
078for next year i don't see any raised hands so i will move to approve the start and ending date as described in the document is there a second a second second by gilbert i'll go roll call vote kim olaf hi gilbert y aye right dennis hi and chad hi don guettis aye motion approves unanimously thank you leilani thank you uh we'll move on to 4.3 um the bond audit report for 2019 to 20 joycen or maybe sheldon yes uh thank you dom the district uh sold uh about 2.1 million dollars uh 2000 d measure b series d bond and then last year in 2019 20 we spend uh quite a bit and 1.21 million dollars and majority was spent at 900 about 960 000 was spent on cabling project and 75 000 on a cooling
079pilot project and then another 13 000 close to 14 000 on the remainder of the windows covering project and then the rest will be on the oversight um expenses that we paid to the consultants so as i said the total we spent about 1.2 million dollars and then tonight i have uh sheldon from our auditors here to um present a report and then answer any questions on the board and the public may have shorter than your own all right good evening can you hear me okay all right perfect so is this my second board meeting in a row or did i miss one in between two in a row you're seeing me way too much all right so this one's actually much simpler it's a a lot a smaller package to look at than your
080district's audited financials it does include similar opinion letters though so we actually do perform this audit under generally accepted auditing standards in the united states of america and we also follow the governmental auditing standards this one has one extra piece and that's the proposition 39 back in 2002 and also california government code actually it's beyond government code it's actually a specific article and actually i'll go ahead and make sure i say which assembly bill that was um we're following assembly assembly bill 1908 and head code section 15278 when we're performing this audit and those are specific to the performance and or compliance aspect of this audit so when you issue a bond and spend money under proposition 39 and article 13 a uh you are required to have not just the financial statement audit but
081a performance and or compliance audit now the funny thing with this and the reason i mention all this is one of there's two reasons one is that you know what our objective is is to issue an audit report with financial statements and tell you whether or not those financial statements are materially mistated or not and then secondly the definition of performance is a little bit ambiguous when it comes to a couple years ago though generally accepted governmental auditing standards actually defined what a performance audit is a little bit better um so there's there's a few different criteria that actually meet the definition of a performance audit now now when we do a bond audit that includes a performance component what we are doing is verifying that the district complied with the bond measure and the
082california code or assembly bill law and other regulations in law within california that the district is required to follow right um so that's really you know what what you have to understand when we do this audit so the other part of it the financial statement part of it's pretty straightforward we did not have any exceptions so the opinion is unmodified so therefore no qualifications right now keep in mind what we're issuing is a financial statement that's very specific to the bond measure right so it's a part of your building fund but we're only looking in these financial statements we're only looking at the balance sheet and the statement of revenues and expenditures and changes in fund balance for the 2002 general obligation bond series g right so it's very specific to just that nothing more
083when you're looking at these financial statements um let me make sure i got the right series sorry series d so 2002 general obligation bond series d um which is 2.118 million dollar issuance so a smaller issuance compared to the overall measure um so good results on the financial aspect the second part of the performance aspect we perform very specific procedures uh the the the bulk of the procedures we perform have to do with testing the expenditures right and making sure the expenditures are in compliance with the bond making sure there's internal controls in place over those expenditures it includes both payroll and contract expenses vendor expenses most of its construction and um we actually perform nine different procedures it seems so simple when you say it that way but it's more involved than that and
084really the bulk of it is the expenditure testing though and we actually tested 72 percent of the warrants that were issued during the year which is actually a really high sample size we typically tried to get about 66 or higher some firms sit around the 50 area we like to get around 66 percent if we can get it up to 80 we will um but we felt with your your uh previous audits that we've had with you that you're actually a low-risk client in this area um and it's a smaller broke bond program so it's actually relatively transparent and easy to see so we didn't really see any high risk factors when we put our audit plan together so we feel that 72 percent gives us the assurance and the level of confidence that we
085need to issue the financial statements and issue you know whether or not there are any findings related to performance with a good level of confidence and a reasonable assurance on that so with that said we did not have any findings or issues related to the performance aspect of the bond audit so i think that's pretty much all i wanted to discuss you already know what the financial main financial numbers were about with relation to the 1.2 million dollars in expenditures um there was about 650 000 left on the bond to be spent going forward so with that i'll leave it open to any questions oh i think don you're still on mute thanks sheldon uh thank you for the report uh trustees any questions or comments nope uh members of the public anyone have questions
086or comments on the bond audit report in which case i will move that the board accept the 2019-20 bond audit report is there a second second was that anne yes second by end uh roll call vote kim hi gilbert hi greg hi ann and don aye passage nano say thank you very much sheldon appreciate it all right you're welcome have a good night uh so that ends [Music] current business item four we're now item five public hearing for items not on the agenda if any members of the public have any comments for the board that are not on tonight's agenda now is the time to raise your hand to make such comments each person who wishes to speak will be given three minutes and the board is not able to respond to comments only to
087accept them so we can start with uh ryan carroll uh you should be able to talk can you hear me great thank you uh and don thank you so much for your time yesterday you and luanne were wonderful to work with and i really appreciate you giving the crockett teachers at forum uh yesterday um clearly i think as was said earlier you know crockett teachers are quite anxious about returning and yesterday was for some of them the first time to sort of express many of their concerns uh to um to you and luanne um you know for many of us it was you know an emotional and heartbreaking uh you know hearing how many of our colleagues are you know being personally impacted uh by the coronavirus uh and what was the hardest part for
088me to hear um was that you know some of my very dear colleagues uh saying that they are you know considered leaving teaching because it is so stressful and you know they're so anxious about all of this um you know i my concerns about uh coming back um i'll explain them you know one is i think you know putting crocker teachers in bubbles of about 60 people with some classes about 18 the size of 18 back when the county numbers are spiking like never before um you know some of our classrooms at crocker in the main building are not the greatest ventilated in all of hcsd and it just seems like an unnecessary risk at this time um you know if vaccines are on the horizon like we heard yesterday uh you know can we
089just i'm you know asking the board to take a little slower approach um now um you know i asked at the board consider changing our uh crocker schedule to one um one grade per week um for at least six weeks um you know i i i wrote to all of you kem i didn't write to you you weren't on the board yet um but i i wrote to all of you uh and on the very first day back and i said you know how uh how great it was to be back in class and i felt safe uh and i still do i i think that i think that one grade per uh week is the safest route it sort of gives teachers flexibility to uh sort of spread out outside as needed we don't
090have to worry about sort of passing classes and intermingling and making our bubbles bigger um the um i also think uh that's you know on the positive side it gets the kids out of their classroom or out of their bedrooms and into our classrooms which they so desperately need so i think the middle way is best here um the you know i think reducing the amount of people on campus as a sensible approach at this time and i hope the board will listen and some of the best advice i ever got about hillsborough was when i was uh doing student activities and they said hillsboro was so last minute like if you know anything about hillsboroughs hillsborough so last minute uh and i hope that hillsborough uh hillsborough board will sort of take this last
091minute request and consider changing our uh our return to school plan uh for a one grade per week for at least six weeks thank you very much and i'll take my answer off the air thank you ryan uh next arianna dumpus hi can everyone hear me okay yep awesome thank you i want to echo what ryan said um thank you dawn lewin for talking with yesterday i was one of the people who um you know expressed my concerns and i think what i realized was reflecting on this yesterday like i had i so much of a teaching you spend your time focusing on the now and getting your lesson plan ready and teaching your kids that i had kind of pushed aside of my mind all my fears and everything kind of came rushing forward
092yesterday um so i appreciate you giving us that space to talk um i thank you for taking the time tonight to listen to kind of a middle school teacher's perspective of what it's what it feels like to return and to in person school next week um i'm speaking here today to ask the board to consider slowing down the reopening plan at crocker uh with the current surge of covey cases it does not feel safe to reopen the entire school next tuesday um i wonder if it wasn't safe to reopen at the beginning of the school year when numbers weren't as bad as now why would it be safe to reopen now in january when things have gone much worse we've been told that vaccines for teachers could be ready for teachers soon with that information
093we ask you um we ask you what is the big deal waiting just a few more weeks till after the vaccine to reopen in person so why can't we wait to reopen until we have a vaccine where we maybe feel more secure if we had that vaccine crocker conducted a staff survey today and the results revealed that 56.3 of crocker staff which includes both teachers and aides would prefer that the crocker stay in full distance learning until two weeks after staff has received both vaccine doses with this info um i asked why is there a big push to reopen when clearly majority of teachers and aides are stressed or fearful or nervous about returning the stress anxiety that teachers and aides feel is very real it feels unnecessary to open so quickly when we still
094have another option i know distance learning isn't perfect but i feel like we are doing the best we can to teach our students in this manner and we've come such a long way from the spring i've been redesigning and creating new curriculum for teaching online all year and know that i can continue to teach students successfully online if given the opportunity to do so covet is real it's scary and it's spreading i've had several extended family members in los angeles get covered and they've been people of all different ages including two young children i've not seen these family members in over a year when i say that i'm worried about returning to school it's not just me i'm worried about in my own personal health i worry about my students and their families and maybe
095their relatives and their grandparents i worry about my colleagues and their families um my husband and his work colleagues would be impacted by me returning to school and my husband going to work my neighbors and my parents my parents are 70 and thankfully are in relatively good health however i worry that when i go back to in person without a vaccine i won't be able to help them my mom lives around the corner and will often ask me for help and i won't be able to help her i won't feel comfortable helping her knowing that i've been exposed and could have been exposed while at work so please i ask of you to consider our concerns um i know i'm not alone when i share that teachers and aides um are worried and would prefer
096a delayed reopening thank you so much for considering um our request thank you thank you very much ariana next is susan frankel thank you very much i'm busy crossing things off my list that were already said by ryan and ariana and uh forgive me i am emotional um over what ariana just said um and i'm joining you tonight coming directly from a zoom memorial service for a relative who died sunday from covid um it's not a theoretical threat it's it's real it's very real um and it feels incredibly real to those of us who are going to be facing it next tuesday crocker's return to school plan for all was made months ago before another coveted surge that currently continues to rise while our hospital space becomes scarce um and bringing hundreds of students and
097staff together on campus just is no longer a safe plan for your students and your staff um yesterday uh you know over 40 members of crocker staff met with luanne and and dawn and like my colleagues i thank you for for listening um and it was one of the most emotional and heart-wrenching meetings i've ever experienced in my professional career of 30 plus years multiple teachers while describing their fear and anxiety over returning next week broke down and cried they cried it was difficult for some to speak um the idea that we may lose teachers who are exceptionally talented because of the decisions like this is is just criminal um this is how strongly many of us feel the level of anxiety over this planned return is almost overwhelming um you know i love you
098all luanne i mean i just i really respect you so much but the response seems to imply that we're overreacting and that we will be safe and all will be fine um but all it will take is one one person getting seriously ill one person needing hospitalization one person with long-term effects some of which we we don't even know yet um or worse and will returning to school have been worth it then if that happens um in our survey today 75 of crocker's staff are not comfortable with the current plan i urge you in the strongest terms possible to please reconsider thank you for listening thank you susan next is michelle alec um again i want to reiterate what all of my colleagues have said um the compassion that you are all also sharing with
099us and saying i'm giving us time to speak meeting with us um we know you're listening and understanding um and taking it in in the daily way that we are when things are continuing to change and trying to work to pivot and i think everybody has kind of expressed already the where we are and again the heart rate the emotion that we are all feeling um i don't want to be fearful to leave my house and i want to be back with those kids even on our school site meeting today seeing kids in a classroom unmasked and being one-on-one and helping kids that's what we do and want to do we just want to do it in the safest way and if i'm not and or my teachers and our colleagues are not feeling safe
100we're not actually going to be able even to deliver a better curriculum for the kids in person i feel if i'm standing in the corner and afraid to walk through the room or something comes up i can't get outside and do my yoga with my kids i felt comfortable doing that when it was just one grade level and spontaneously let's get out of this room we've been in for 60 minutes or 50 minutes so we can breathe that air and if there's one group on campus i think that was my thing when we started really looking at this rotation and the evaluation that we thought would work to help alleviate congestion actually is going to create more congestion on the campus and not allow for that freedom to get outside and do those things i
101know people said we'd find the space but logistics of hallways and um keeping us all in the same frame of mind again i just want to implore for you to think about this and how many of us are here tonight talking to you um to say please reconsider this it's a pivot we're not asking to say most of us some people don't feel safe going back at all until after the vaccine i don't think that necessarily is i have to listen to what my colleagues say and and ben way the benefits of what's best for kids and what's what is best for all of us though if we're not there in person and we're not able to deliver that's not what's best for kids either so finding a balance of that um and thinking about
102a pivot and reconsidering the return to school for all thank you thank you michelle next is megan blake thank you all for listening um again i have so many concerns that are very similar to my colleagues and uh i just want to also reiterate some of the other things that we love the kids we want to be back at school that week that we came back like hearing them laugh in the clafter and in the classroom it was lightning it was lifting i think just the joy of being in the classroom we do we miss it so much so when we say these things i just really want you to know that it's not that we don't want to go back it's that we are we want to go back safely and i feel like
103we've been doing all of this for the last 10 months to flatten the curve and it seems like now hospitals are fuller than ever i look at the data i'm a math person i get the data so when we're talking about data i understand making decisions based on data but when i see there's two icu beds in the entire county right now and four acute care beds in the entire county right now there's oh there's close to 500 acute care beds in the county four of them are available there's not a hillsborough hospital if somebody gets sick we need to act as a community within the county and that's the data i'm looking at so when we say we're data driven i think it's really important to look at the entire thing and not just
104hillsboro um i think there's a lot of differences between when this plan was created versus what's going on now and we've already made some pivots we've taken extra days to go distance learning to help people quarantine and i think this again would be another pivot and i want to reiterate when everyone's saying when it seems like the vaccine is on the horizon when this plan was initially made we were looking into an abyss of just staying at home there was no vaccine on the horizon we didn't know when it was going to come and now hearing that we might be three weeks away from getting a vaccine and coming back safely and knowing that i'm not going to be transmitting this to my students or my co-workers and likewise them to us it's just it
105feels like there's a light at the end of the tunnel and we're blowing up the mountain right now with it being so so close and you know i think now seeing too that over 50 of my colleagues feel the same way with the vaccine that seems like the safest way 75 said they don't feel comfortable with the plan as is uh the differences in those numbers were from some people saying they felt comfortable with more of the hybrid but um just hearing that and that it's so many of us um feeling this way feels like i really were worth the consideration i think it's also worth considering the fact that at the beginning of the year elementary school teachers were given a choice to go virtual for the year and parents were given the choice
106to go virtual and middle school teachers because of the way crocker is and the way that the schedule was set up there was no choice for any of us um and and i appreciate the district reaching out to individual teachers to set up plans if they feel you know based on the concerns yesterday but hearing that you know 75 don't feel comfortable and don't feel comfortable going back at all like i don't know how individual plans can be made for that many people so i just urge you to think about you know the staff and and all of us and our well-being and the fact that it is so close to having just an unimaginably safer return so thank you thank you very much megan uh are there any other public comments for items not
107on the agenda and i just want to take a moment to uh i see there's one comment coming up and i want to thank the crocker teachers both for the meeting yesterday as well as coming back again tonight for the board meeting to share your thoughts with the rest of the board i see amy harris has a comment go ahead hi my name is amy harris i'm a pediatrician in st carlos with palo alto medical foundation um i just wanted to speak up tonight and just say i absolutely understand where the teachers are coming from um i understand their concern for their health and i understand kind of their concern for the kids i understand for their desire to kind of spread things out i guess my concern as far as being a parent of
108someone at crocker and two kids at south school is just to make sure that this bar isn't moved too far back as we see in many many other school districts whether it's la unified school district that's just saying no school will return until all are vaccinated et etc you know the the move for the vaccination at least as far as i'm was told by sutter is the teachers um are on the next list of those to be vaccinated and we're starting that that tear tier even on friday so i don't know all the ins and outs of the logistics you guys have come up with through the the county public health i can't begin to kind of begin to understand it but uh i i do think that the vaccine is on the horizon i
109just don't want it to be one of these things where there are logistics that push through and the kids aren't back in school for six weeks eight weeks as we're waiting for everyone to be vaccinated um i think i do not think it's unreasonable for you know you've got three weeks with one grade each and you know maybe the next three weeks it's two grades each or some graded way back and staggered way back because you know one of the one of the teachers had mentioned was the difference between at the beginning of the year and currently and i think you know what the difference is is a lot more data showing that um you know the kids are less likely to uh transmit the illness that there's there's data from the entire fall semester
110from schools in italy and schools in north carolina and schools in marin county even showing that the transmission risk in these classrooms from k to 12 from junior highs high schools is actually quite low um and the numbers are dramatically low for student to student transmission and from student to teacher the the transmission rates seem to come from teacher to teacher for the most part um and so i i just i know there's a lot of fear and a lot of paranoia that has been relayed and and i and i'm i'm sorry for mrs frankel's relative who who did pass away there is real risk to this illness but at the same point um as a pediatrician i'm seeing the risk to the kids who are dealing with anxiety and depression and eating disorders through
111the roof there is nobody out there that is capable of helping them right now because all of the counselors and all the psychiatrists and everyone is full packed to the rim i have turned into a psychiatrist in my last six months of practice as much as i am not prepared to be a psychiatrist that's what i've had to be because of the um skyrocketing mental health for our children and issues for our children and it is very disturbing to me uh and i think the little slice of normalcy that is and i recognize that school is far from normal right now and i do not want to not think the teachers not think that i'm not taking that into consideration you know their health but um i hope that our kids health is continuing to
112be taken into consideration and this respect their mental health because it is failing and this will be a lifelong problem for some of these kids um and i just i just wanted to reiterate that but i also like i said i i understand where the teachers are coming from i as a pediatrician just so you guys can hear this too um i see 60 new people every day that i go to work between the the patients and the parents i am in a room that is six feet by ten feet and i am in there longer than 15 minutes with every single patient so my my risk is you know tremendous now obviously that is a choice i have chosen to make but i will tell you out of the nine pediatricians in my office
113who are all doing the exact same thing not a single one of us have gotten coveted not a single one of us have you know had issues or you know been we've all worn our masks we've all washed our hands all the rooms have been washed down similar to the precautions that the school has made and the hoops that the superintendent and all of you teachers have done and all of the school has done and there you should have faith in that um because it works and i have been exposed to people with covet but because of the protections that we have had i have not gotten it um we don't have any transmissions from our office to anybody either and so and yes i'm dealing with a pediatric world but that's who you guys
114are dealing with too so um i just wanted to say that and put my two cents in as far as someone from the medical community but thank you very much thank you very much for your comment uh is there anyone else any other member of the public that would like to make a comment at this time i don't see any further comments so thank you everyone for coming and uh making your public comments we'll move on to item six the consent agenda do um oh i'm sorry lynette do you have a comment to make hi yes sorry thank you don um i just my heart is beating and so that tells me i need to raise my hand um i uh i just want to share um going off of what amy was saying uh
115talking to many families in the community that there really are kids and families who are struggling really really struggling so i just sorry sorry emotional but i just i i feel for the teachers and it breaks my heart hearing about that meeting yesterday and um so the situation is just overwhelming on so many levels i i empathize and can have compassion for the teachers but i also um know again echoing what amy just said it's really serious for some families um and what these kids are facing and going through and um just going back and thinking about everything that this district has done so many hours of putting in so much consideration of how to make this um going back you know safe um i'm i'm i'm confident we can work something out and um
116but i just i had to raise my hand on that to give support to what amy was saying um and as a voice of our hillsborough parent uh community i i needed to say that thank you thank you lynette uh and i see another hand has been raised so we are still on item five public hearing for items not on the agenda uh monique stewart you can already computer i'm trying to figure out how to unmute um so i i just want to say first of all i so appreciate the teachers coming forward and making their statements in fact i had no idea how they were feeling so from a parent it was incredibly important to hear now in full disclosure i'm also a physician i'm a hematologist i also have a background in public
117health i am currently a clinical researcher so i'm not practicing but my whole life has been around medicine and uh most of my friends are still practicing physicians and i think from the perspective of i really appreciate appreciate amy's perspective as a pediatrician but as an as an internist and hematologist i think i have a little bit of a different um perspective which is that you know we while we talk about the teachers and we talk about the children it's also the community at large and while while hillsboro in the past has not had the school district has not had a high rate of cases in fact it's been very low we don't live in a bubble everybody is out and about everybody is interacting with other individuals we're currently in a surge right now
118and as it has also been addressed the impact on our medical care uh not just the pediatricians everybody the the people on the front line seeing these patients we are getting to the point where the strain is becoming very large and so i just don't understand why we want to even consider contributing to this problem right now i i have an only child i can tell you yes there's been incredible psychosocial emotional issues in our house i mean of course he's also 13 going on 14 so the hormones add to the whole issue but nonetheless yes i totally appreciate it as a parent i mean the isolation has been tremendous um i as a parent in the medical field have been very careful and maybe maybe too careful at times trying to protect him because
119while yes the transmission rate may be lower in children i think we also have to appreciate these new strains and whether they're in san mateo right now they will be coming i mean we're we have so many people traveling between la and san francisco and throughout you know throughout all these areas for business and other reasons that i can't believe that the these strains will not be here at some point and so then the transmission will go up and i i guess my two questions are what is the plan right now we we've done testing last week and that looked good this week we're doing testing but what about once school starts what happens then are we going to go to weekly testing that hasn't if if that's the plan it hasn't been communicated widely
120um but i don't think that we can just rest our laurels on the fact that everything looks good right now because i can tell you in two weeks it's gonna change again we're we're just seeing we're just on the cusp of seeing what's happening with uh with the holidays on the christmas break we're just starting to see it it's going to get worse and it's not this is not a sense of paranoia this is a sense of looking at the data every single day from between march 16th to today not one single day has gone by where i haven't been exploring this data and it it's very clear what's happening you can see it around the country and while i appreciate the studies that have been done in the past in north carolina and marin
121at no point were they in that at the state that we're getting ready to go in so i personally as a parent as much as i hate to do it and as much as i know my son would love to be back with his uh colleagues i i just can't really understand why we would do this right now um and i guess my second question is we did sign something saying that we would bring our son back at the beginning of the trimester but that wasn't a very different situation and i don't know there's been no discussion about well if you want to if you don't feel comfortable as a parent anymore is there an option to change i appreciate your time thank you thank you for your comment uh so i see some more
122um comments have come uh elizabeth who's next hi can everyone hear me hi there um for the public listening my name is elizabeth strubel i am one of the crocker resource specialists and again uh don and luanne i'd like to reiterate our gratitude for meeting with all of us yesterday um ryan referenced and susan uh the survey that went out to teachers to all staff at crocker uh 25 of staff so just one fourth of us responded that we are comfortable returning with our current plan um and over 50 percent of staff who responded would like to wait until there's a vaccine and both shots have been administered to staff so um i just want to be clear that those of us who are comfortable are in the minority i i am concerned as a
123teacher who works with special education students about the mental health of our students who are not able to return in person i'm concerned about the the influx of referrals for mental health and what we're seeing also at the high school level where students as they get older are just having significant issues with the continued distance learning but i also respect that my colleagues are very concerned about everyone's physical safety and health and so my question is my request is that if you are cons going to consider a change to our return to school plan that you look at the science um the science from from that both the doctors who spoke um referenced and that also that we look to the elementary schools in hillsboro who've been back in school so that we can better
124understand uh what's happening at those locations i'm i'm just hoping that whatever decision it's made will be based on a little more research than hearing us speak tonight thank you thank you elizabeth next is kavita mishra hi there actually um is going to say a couple words hi this is this is anupam uh father of two who have absolutely loved their weeks back at crocker is a marvelous moment for both of them i just want to extend a comment that ryan made that kicked us off which is idea of staying in the staggered schedule maybe a few thoughts just to consider one at least to our understanding there's kind of nobody around us who has including those who have the same level of resources and are requiring mandatory testing that are coming back a hundred
125percent they're all remaining in hybrid so i'm i'm curious how we uh what we know that is uniquely different um the second is uh i think to ryan's point there's a question on on the risk reward of the marginal benefit of going from staggered to all in um versus the risk that i know our our teachers are feeling so just sort of curious if if we truly believe it's incrementally that much more important to be in for the three weeks verse the once every three weeks and maybe just the final thought uh ultimately our schools as we all know are our teachers they are our school um and i feel like society at this point has we talk a lot about valuing our teachers but it feels sometimes it feels like a punchline because i'm
126here we have a moment where i think they are loudly sharing their concern and i think the way we value them in this moment is hearing them um and understanding this appreciate and appreciating their concern especially the time when it's really not it's not unreasonable right this is not a uh a harsh you know union negotiation this is a bunch of humans who have a very human concern that uh you know most in our society have today so um that's the only thing i would share could be anything on that today um i think no i think that's well said you know obviously hearing that 75 percent of teachers today voted that they were not feeling safe we understand that i've obviously seen it in the hospitals as well staff are struggling with you know
127the context i think the other thing to realize is that we have learned a lot and we also know now that while children aren't necessarily the main vectors we do know that junior high kids are maybe a bit more than younger kids but the having all the adults on campus you know could put obviously increases the risk there are ways to mitigate it we obviously have some very good safety protocols at crocker which dave and others have done a great job with but i think the fact that the community transmission is as high as it is the hospital shortages and i just heard at the ucsf town hall that you know folks from other counties may be coming up to our counties because of shortages elsewhere in california um i think it's you know we
128hear both sides very clearly we didn't understand that the kids need to be back we also understand the teachers fears and i think the data and the hearing the teachers today obviously um is impactful just big thank you to all the teachers for what you do thank you anna palma and cathedral appreciate it next is linda willy hi everyone my name's linda willy can you hear me okay sorry i've got the air pods in make sure the kids don't hear me but i guess they can actually hear me it's you that they can't hear um so i am a co-president of crocker parent group and um i have to tell all the teachers i was so moved by everything that you said at the beginning of these comments and i i hear you i have
129you know three kids obviously in the hillsborough school district and i have a 76 year old mother that lives here who comes to see us daily and it's a huge consideration for me what my children do where they go how they affect my mother's life um we test regularly i take this very seriously and i am part of the cares team that has worked incredibly hard i have packed kits for testing i've stood out at crocker handing out kids we had a plan in place for a reason and it is to catch cases that are coming into the school district i understand that there was concern from last week that there was only 70 participation but i can tell you today we handed out close to eleven hundred kids we won't know the total numbers
130of participation by tomorrow but we are trying so hard to make sure that we not only protect our own kids the teachers our elderly our neighbors this is this is not last minute this is thought out we are i i i will i don't want to say that my kids can't handle more virtual they can um it would be upsetting to be able to tell them that they're not going to school on tuesday because this is something that they've been looking forward to um this is something our community has been looking forward to and i understand everyone's concerns let's figure this out how can we make everyone feel comfortable if we get a hundred percent participation i understand as a public school we can't say that you have to test but if parents are told
131if you don't test your child then the teachers don't want to teach your kid i don't know i don't know what the solution is but we have to work together and i trust me i get the concerns i wake up every morning thinking of my mom and now i wake up every morning and i think of crocker teachers north teachers i get it but let's let's find something that works let's find out a way that this can work for everyone and everyone to feel safe but personally i do feel as part of the cares team that we really tried our best to make sure that everyone felt comfortable with the testing and hopefully the results in time so that you know people can show up happy comfortable ready to learn on tuesday morning thank you
132thank you linda and next is grace leon hi it's grace young here head of the screening and testing program i just want to refer back to a comment a question that a parent made earlier about whether we were going to move to weekly testing and the answer is yes we are going to be offering that weekly to students at least through the time teachers are vaccinated if not longer that was a very recent decision and that's why it hasn't been communicated widely yet and we had to make sure that the program would be able to support weekly testing i'm sure you know we encounter a lot of learning curves and technical issues with learning a new program this is no different and so we had to make sure that the program was going to work
133first of all for the first couple of weeks uh in place before we could say that it could be offered weekly so i can say now that we are planning to do that thank you for that update grace um so are there any more public comments for items not on the agenda uh amy jasper oh hi bob jasmer amy's husband and physician here locally at mills peninsula hospital who unfortunately has been very involved in cobit from march um including today so um i think that you know i think the case rates are at least in our county right here in our local area leveling off and we certainly have abundant capacity at our local hospital i think um more importantly as i think a lot of people have commented the um you know kids fortunately
134tend to do well when they do get infected i understand this conversation is more about the concerns of the teachers but i do think having a staggered approach to reintroducing the kids there's minimal number of people on campus at one point in time would be preferable especially since when we did that before it seemed to work well and the case rate in the community now is a lot higher the number of positive tests the number of infected people is certainly higher than it was when we last did this so i think it makes sense to do a staggered approach if that's possible thank you for your comment bob are there any more public comments for items not on the agenda at this time i see no more comments so we appreciate um everyone taking the
135time to speak publicly and now we will move on to item six the consent agenda do any of the trustees uh have any items on the consent agenda they wish to pull from from consent seeing none i move to approve the consent agenda is there a second i'll second second by gilbert uh roll call vote kim olaf aye gilbert why i greg dennis hi ann jen hi don gaddis hi a consent agenda has this unanimously um item seven communications and board item discussions do any trustees have any uh communications or board item discussions to share with the rest of the board luanne has one yes i'm working on it okay i just want to share that um before the march board meeting so not february march and we want to have a study session i'm
136looking at the technology plan so that will be a 5 p.m session i was just trying to look at my calendar for the march board meeting date that i do not have in front of me so um trustees could one of you announce here when the march board meeting is mark tonight march 9th okay thank you very much um trustee chen so on march 9th we will have a 5 p.m um session before the board meeting that's going to be focused on our technology plan so i just wanted to share that and i'll message that out to everybody later on but just wanted that on your calendars oh thank you superintendent any other trustee comments communications scene none we move to item eight public address concerning items on the closed session agenda there's a closed
137session after this regular meeting do any members of the public have any comments on the closed session agenda if so you can raise your blue hand now and i don't see any comments on the closed session agenda so in that case we move to item nine adjourn the regular meeting at uh 7 54 p.m on wednesday january 13th thank you all for coming thank you to everyone who made public comment trustees we have a different link to go to for closed session tracy