001Good evening. It's 5 o'clock p.m. and I'd like to call the November 5th, 2025 regular board of education meeting of the Englewood Unified School District to order. Uh, next we'll move to roll call. Miss Sbrano, would you please call the role? >> Board President, Miss Margaret Turner Evans, >> present. >> Board vice president, Dr. Carlos McGee, >> present. Board member Miss Joyce Randall. >> Board member Mr. Brandon Myers, >> present. >> Board member Mr. Ernesto Castillo. >> Student board member Amaya Hazard. >> Dr. James Morris, >> present. >> Dr. Bernard Lucas, >> present. >> Dr. Brian Coffee, >> present. >> Mr. Rafael Guzman, >> present. >> Please be informed the Spanish language interpretation is available during this meeting. Thank you very much, Miss Embrano. And now I would like to ask our Los Angeles County
002Superintendent Advisory Council representative, City Honors Star, Student, Mr. Patrick Cruz, to lead us in the pledge of allegiance. All right. Can we please stand, please? Put our right hands over our heart. Ready? Begin. I pledge allegiance to the flag of United States of America and to [snorts] the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. You may be seated. >> Thank you very much, Mr. Cruz. I hereby approve the agenda with no modifications. Moving on to reports from close session. In close session this evening, the county administrator took action and approved one settlement case. OAH case number 2025060568. Also in close session, the county administrator rejected the following claims. A skip claim number 2311659. A skip claim number 2513954. We'll now transition to reports and presentations. Our
003first presentation this evening will be by board of education vice president Dr. Carlos McGee who will share some information about the child development center parent collaborative committee. Dr. McGee. This is always um a great opportunity for me to um talk about the CDC center. Well, the community food distribution took place from July to October, but I'm also happy to say that we're extending it um from November to December. Um they served a few hundred families. Um and the food distribution was well received by the community and our families. The summer activities outside of the water play and plan uh spirit week was enjoyed. The firemen field trip, the truck and the tank came to the students and they had a fabulous time. The literacy highlights um they had outside reading and music. Latino Heritage Month.
004The tooth fairy came to visit the children to teach them all about dental hygiins and the staffs and students dressed in green, red, and white and other Latin heritage clothing. And they listen to music and they dance. We are currently um because this was last month's report but I'm sharing it with you this month but they also uh celebrated uh Pinktober and fall spirit week and the fall spirit week they came in pajamas crazy hair mismatch day and much much more. They had a basket of love and a ministry gayla and they did a cancer outreach um at the beginning and they're ending care and they're re-engaging families in the parent advisory council beginning November the 19th and the plant classes for the families rethink education series 1 will begin on December the 9th. That
005is my report. >> Thank you very very much Dr. McGee. Uh, Miss Evans, if there are any board member questions or comments. >> Well, I'd like to say thank you for that report and I'm so happy to hear that they've extended the food giveaway to our families during this uh country shutdown. I heard about the kind of food that they get. And I mean, you'd never know it was shut down with the food that we are giving away because we give away very, very good food to the families. It's not leftover stuff. It's really good food. So, thank you for that report. Thank you for sharing, Mr. Meyers. >> Thank you. Thank you, Vice President. Um, and just just uh just want to echo um what you said, Madam President. You know, going uh back
006prior to um the government shutdown. Uh vice president has been um involved in that in you know, feeding our community and making sure that that that need is met. So I definitely want to take my hats off in that area for always uh keeping the community in mind in that aspect prior to this shutdown and after. So great job. >> Thank thank you so much. And next we'll hear the monthly cash flow presentation from Mr. Raphael Guzman, assistant superintendent of business services and chief business official. Mr. Guzman. Thank you, Dr. Morris. Um, and so we'll go ahead and get started. Uh, and good evening, Dr. Morris, board president Evans, Vice President, Dr. McGee, and our board members, community members. Thank you so much for this opportunity to present the cash flow today. As you know,
007this is a regular presentation, so I'm going to go pretty quickly through it. Our cash flow is an analysis that should not be confused with our budget and our fund balance. This is the actual cash that is available in the bank. And so it's important to monitor cash though because the moment that you run out of cash is is a terrible moment. Uh because then you won't be able to meet payroll or your expenses. Uh the good thing for Unified is that we have large cash reserve balances right now. Um and so that's something that's good. Uh some of these uh things though that we look at in the cash flow is just looking at what's coming in every month and what's going out every month. Um, now the majority of our funds are coming
008through LCFF funding which is local revenue. So we get local revenue taxes, EPA which is the education protection account and state aid. Those are the three main buckets that comprise the majority of our funds. Every month we get an LCFF aortionment that comes in. Um and then we also uh periodically quarterly we often get taxes more so towards the end of the year and that is off that offsets whatever we receive from the from the state on LCFF funding. But as you can see here uh these are uh to after September. The rest of these are projections but as you can see we ended the month of September at about 126 million in cash. uh which means we started October and you can see that cash balance doesn't really drop too much. You see like
009there's a big increase in January. That's because we get like a nice amount of property taxes that come in that month and then that starts to get spent down. Um like I said, they come in quarterly. So that's just typically how you're seeing um the the revenues come in. just so you kind of understand the bar graphs here because I think it's important to see like the the uh blue is the beginning cash like the light blue the total receipts means the revenues that came in the total dispersements is the other one and then that's basically telling you your net increase or decrease and then your ending balances here is a more uh kind of elaborate view of the cash flow that kind of breaks it down month by month um and what actually came
010in and what we actually spent the money on. So as you can see the biggest uh uh in regards to salaries we have certificated salaries followed by classified salaries and benefits those are if you add all these up that's the majority of the expenses and then we also have services that are expended throughout the the months and as you can see that is then a trend line is created as to what we think is going to be every month which is reasonable with what we have right now. If you kind of just see that we've been like at 3.4 four kind of makes sense that that number would kind of stay pretty consistent throughout the rest of the year. Uh same thing goes for classified salaries. So it's important to just look at this to
011make sure that things are coming in and out as they're supposed to. Uh we also look at cash flow in the multi-year projection. And so when I come here uh next month um you're going to have a c you're going to see in the first interim report a cash flow report for not only the current year but also the subsequent year to make sure that we have sufficient cash in 2526 and 2627 if we ever run into a cash flow issue that's where that my cash flow is important because we'd be able to tell hey we may need to go out for a tran in 2627 if we don't have enough cash and that planning would have to start now so that we could engage in that luckily we don't have that issue. Uh there's
012also talks about deferrals again in the future um based off our cash reserve. Right now we don't have that issue but that could easily turn around if things change. So that's why we have to monitor our cash flow. It's important to remember that cash is critical for operations and um that's what we need to really pay a lot of attention to. So that about wraps up the cash flow presentation. I'll turn it back over to you Dr. Morris uh and our board for any questions. Thank you very much, Mrs. Evans. >> I have no questions. You have questions? >> Thank you, Mr. Guzman. We have no questions. It's quite clear. Mr. >> Oh, Brandon. >> Thank you. Um, so when I'm looking at it and thank you for your presentation, wonderful presentation, Raphael. Um I'm
013looking at the cash flow uh spreadsheet and I see that we'll be we'll be under >> am I correct? We'll be under 25. Uh we'll be spending at a deficit of 25 million. >> Um according to where you're looking at yes you're looking at revenues minus expenses is where where we're looking at deficit spending. But know that some of that is intentional spending down of reserves, funds that expire, things of that nature. >> Gotcha. >> This is looking at all of our funds as far as unrestricted and restricted in the general fund. Um, it doesn't include bond funds though or anything like that. >> Okay. Okay. So, what and I'm I I doubt you'll be able to share it off the top of your head. You might be able to. You're smart enough. Uh what
014um what's the approximate number that you're thinking we might be at? as far as the deficit for that year or for this year >> for the current year. Yes. Somewhere around 14, I believe is 14. >> Yeah. Is when I was when I was last looking at it, but I'll have a better number for you at first interum. >> We'll we'll have the exact number. Um so, you know, we did um we we do often look at where we can move things into the restricted side. So, that will change that number. So, um we'll make that analysis as soon as this payroll closes, which is in a couple days. Okay, good. And I I know you'll find a way. Okay. But but 25 uh compared to 14 sounds a lot better, but it's still somewhere
015we need to cut. Um I'll defer, you know, my comments as to where those cuts will happen and we'll share them during our uh audit and finance meeting. >> Thank you. Great job, ma'am. >> Thank you. >> And Mr. Goodman, we are um happy to um defer our payment to help bring the budget down. the board. >> Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. McGee. >> Our our next presentation this evening will cover deferred maintenance and the technology plan presented by Mr. Guzman, assistant superintendent of business services and chief business official. >> Thank you, Dr. Morris. And if you could pull up the next presentation, deferred maintenance. Um, I'm really excited actually about this presentation because um, it's something that the district uh, has done quote unquote in the past uh, but not to this level
016and I'm just really excited about where we are. It's a Figmat requirement and it's going to help us towards checking that mark with FICMAT. So, deferred maintenance and technology plan, we're really looking at combining both of these. And just to kind of go over uh what deferred maintenance is, it's, you know, we're we're really looking at the needs of the district uh in regards to where where we are in our facilities. And when we look at deferred maintenance, we're really looking at a document to manage facility repairs and replacements that can't be done specifically right now. And so we defer some of this work to the future as we build enough of a budget to pay for some of these significant changes. Um for instance, in your own home, right? Like you can you can
017paint your home one year and then it the paint job could last maybe five 7 10 years somewhere around there but at some point you start saving away some money because you need to paint again right so that's kind of this idea of deferred maintenance there are some things that we know is going to need a replacement both and that's not only in maintenance like for example our HVAC units you know um but it also happens in technology so in technology we know that in the future we have to replace certain things because of useful life. So anyways, the deferred maintenance plan that addresses major systems such as HVAC, roofing, electrical infrastructure, and it's developed to aortion budget amounts and be able to strategically plan well we have this amount to spend in the next
018year. How are we going to spend it? What's the priority? And so that's what we do through a deferred maintenance plan to ensure our facilities are maintained. And we have to map that out so that we could do it and try our best to avoid unexpected costs. when you don't have a deferred maintenance plan, most likely you'll get those unexpected costs and even if you do have a deferred maintenance plan, sometimes things just break and so um yeah, that happens as well. So these are the critical elements that compose our plan that we looked at that are really critical uh when we look at electrical, fencing, flooring, HVAC, painting, roofing, and asphalt. Those are probably some of the most important areas uh that we have um in in you know for for our facilities and
019that we often look at uh to make sure that they are are repaired. And of course plumbing and gas is also a part of this. And so and we have to continuously look at all of these areas and make sure that we have enough of a analysis of what's going on in our sites to make sure that we can address any of these uh operational areas that that rely on uh just a certain amount of life. So for instance with electrical right uh in regards to bulbs and you know uh all of that. So we have to make sure that we understand what the life cycle is of that and how long that's going to take and so forth and so forth. Here's an example of a five-year deferred maintenance plan. Um, in the upper
020leftand corner here, and I'll highlight it on the screen so you can kind of see. We have the years going down here, 2526, which is this year, all the way through 2930. And we have the major areas, asphalt, electrical, fencing, flooring, HVAC, painting, roofing, plumbing, and gas. A total of $8.2 million that will be allocated for deferred maintenance uh over the next five years. strategically placed over these strategic areas. And you can see over the school sites, we kind of have it broken down of what we are suggesting. Mind you, this is us presenting kind of a summary to you. Now, we will bring this plan over to the facilities advisory committee tomorrow and they're actually going to also give some opinions on some of these things. But I want you to see like for
021instance with Bennett Q, we were suggesting about over the next five years. This is just in deferred maintenance, not con not construction. um about 571,000. So in in the breakdown, I know this is a little bit harder to see there, uh but this our plan would encompass not only the summary page, but also specific reasons why. So like we we know we have some asphalt work to do in 2526, we'll probably have to come back around in 2082. And so we break it down by major area on the left hand side. the reason what we think we need to do is in the corners there and then we allocate budgets towards that. This is the full page uh that you can see of how that's being allocated over those years. So we're really looking at
022the life u of all these items and trying our best to address what we can address. There are some things that are past deferred maintenance, past useful life and that really has to go towards construction. Um but that's kind of the example of a sight specific plan. But as I mentioned, we would take this plan back to the facilities advisory committee. Uh we wanted to bring it to the board to kind of hear if there's any feedback from the board of anything that you'd like for us to focus on or maybe one of these areas that you may say, you know what, I'd like for you to add X, Y, or Z so that we could actually add it. And then in December, we would bring it back to the board for approval um and
023have a spelled out different maintenance plan. Um we also have the technology portion. And for the technology portion, I have Mr. Julio Morales here, our executive director of technology, who's going to be going over that section. >> Thank you, Mr. Scoozman. Uh, good evening board members, Dr. Morrison, cabinet, and community. Uh, I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about technology uh, infrastructure. A lot of the time people don't understand what what that means. So, uh, you know, first of all, technology infrastructure, uh, plays a critical role in throughout our district on how we deliver our digital curriculum to our students, how our business systems talk, uh, to LEO, to the to the cloud. Um, it it's it's the backbone of all of the systems that we use here at the district. So, everything
024happens on the infrastructure uh, here at the district office and at the school sites. Uh so a lot of people say well what exactly is the infrastructure? So the infrastructure are all the switches are all the routers all the uh access points all of our servers. So everything that encompasses our communication systems to be able to uh have our students be able to use their Chromebooks to be able to have you know our staff to be able to get into Aries to take attendance for our staff to be able to use our our business systems. So this infrastructure is critical because everybody relies on it. So we need to make sure that uh we keep it up and running and uh that's what you know we're doing here. So most of our systems lie here
025at the district office. So in this slide you'll see that we've uh listed all of our switches, our routers, our wireless controllers, and our VoIP system. You'll see the date that we purchased it. You'll see the useful life. and you'll see the anticipated replacement of when we need to replace this equipment. Um, some of this equipment is really old. We've, you know, in the past, you know, we brought it up, but the budgeting was very, very difficult. Uh, I want to give a special thanks to Mr. Guzman because he understands the critical need for us to keep our systems. We've been really struggling with one one of our systems is our VoIP U telephone system. It's very very old and we've had to um keep it up with prayers and uh eBay parts, right? So
026that's that that's not sustainable. So we have to we have to make these replacements. We have to get these expenses uh budgeted into our into our budget. Um here is the list of a lot of our servers, right? All of our servers. You'll see the roles on the left. You'll see the type of server that it is. Uh at the bottom you'll see some of our uh nonserver systems like we'll have our surveillance system, our web filtering to keep our students safe and then our firewall that keeps all the bad guys out. Right? So that all these systems have to be in place for us to keep our students safe to keep our data secure and to uh function also in our business our business environment. Uh over here you'll see that the uh there's
027a smaller footprint for the school sites. So the school sites have their switches, the routers, and their voip gateways that talk back to the district office. Uh so that equipment also needs to be upgraded. So uh this is just one example. This is actually Bennett Cube. Uh but it's just a sample of one of the schools uh that also needs to be upgraded. Uh in this last slide, you're going to see uh the breakdown uh the costs and you you'll say, "Well, why is there so much cost in the first uh in that first area?" Well, the reason is we're going to be using - category 2 funding uh to upgrade the entire uh infrastructure of the switches and the routers. So, each school has a cost associated with it. You'll see the first column
028says -ate responsible and then the second column is district responsible. That means that -ate is going to pick up 90% of the cost and then the district has to match 10% of that cost. So if we add everything in here then that's where you see that totals on the bottom. Uh and is not unlimited. So every five years we get a bucket of money um depending on our ADA and our free and reduced lunches. So based on that number, there's a formula that calculates how much money we're going to get. So the money we're going to get this this uh period is going to be about $1.2 million. So as you can see, we're right at the cost uh at 1 point uh 1 is that seven.1 point I'm sorry. Yeah, 1.1. Yeah. So we're
029going to hit 1.2 million and we're at 1.1. And these are projected numbers, right? We're going to have to go out to RFP to make sure it once to get the actual numbers of the cost, but we did the calculation based on our last rate cycle and the percentages of the uh retail cost versus the cost that we got our previous switches on. So, we apply that formula to the new switches and that's the numbers we came up with. Uh so the next steps in our uh infrastructure uh upgrade plan uh the first thing we're going to do is we're going to deploy this new phone system. So if um everything goes as planned, we're planning to upgrade our phone system uh during the holiday uh winter break. Uh it's it's needed more than I
030can explain. It's uh I lose sleep sometimes because I don't know if this phone system goes down how we're going to get it back up. And it's critical for safety reasons. is critical for communications for our school sites to the parents. So, that's going to be our our number one next step. After that, we're going to create an RFP to go out for our category 2 - uh project, which is the switch refresh project. Uh the next step would be to award the RFP to the company and schedule the switch refresh, which should be happening in 2026. And finally, the uh the last step is going to be to back up all of our server infrastructure, back them up, and then replace them and restore all the data on the newer systems. Um, that's all
031I got. >> Thank you, Miss Evans. I'll turn it over to you for questions for Mr. Guzman or Mr. Morales. >> Mr. Where is this this all this system located? Is it in different places around the district? Do we have this one building? >> The technologies. >> Yeah. Technology. >> Yeah. All So there are different types of infrastructure components like the switches and and uh the different types of servers and so it's located around the district around the district. >> Um what we asked uh Mr. moral to do and I applaud him for this is just to be able to compile this and try to get as much money as we can from -ate and you know you have to have justifiable expenditures to be able to spend the money and so this is us
032taking advantage of that so by doing this type of item you're able to maximize those opportunities that you have like - spend as much get as much money as you can and do a refurbishment of these critical components so >> that's a big job questions board members Must you >> just quick comment you when I was a student uh we started school I think a little bit more later I think it was early September very very late August maybe it was a while back it was fall you know the weather was falling school now and the weather is summer and it's probably the hottest point of the summer so I know at the beginning of this school year that wasn't any different and we had hback issues in a lot of the school sites um
033and I appreciate your quick response to put a band-aid in that moment, but I really appreciate your presentation and allowing us to know how you plan to implement a plan for this not to be an issue moving forward. So, when it comes to a problem that we find in the district, you're always finding a way to look at the problem at the root of those problems and address it at that root. So, I think that needs to be taken uh into consideration that this is an ongoing issue, but not only you're addressing the issue at the moment, you're also addressing the issue uh at the root cause. So, I appreciate this presentation. I appreciate you agreeing this 5-year plan. >> Thank you. Thank you, Mr. CIL. >> Thank you. Um so, first of all, great
034job uh from both of you guys. Um I actually think that this um phone technology uh enhancement is long overdue. Uh so I want to take my hats off to you guys with the uh forward vision. But I want to kind of backtrack um on the five-year plan. If we're looking at uh let's say I guess this popped up um the roofs, what type of warranty are we looking at? >> So, uh you have different types of warranty for roofing. Um I've seen so depending on what you do, if it's a full roof replacement, like sometimes you have a 20-year warranty or a 10-year warranty. But that's an important point, Mr. Myers because based off of what we do with the roofing, we would want to make sure we understand our warranty period and keep
035track of it in a spreadsheet like we have here so that in the future we know when we have to hit that roof up again or if there's a failure of the roof, then we could come back to our spreadsheet, see, well, wait, this one is still under warranty, and we could go out and get that covered so that we don't have to pay for an expense that's under warranty. >> Thank you for the explanation. Um, just to delve a little bit deeper um with that, just I guess clear my understanding of um what's the purpose of putting $5,000 away a year? Um if if and and I'm and I guess my my thinking is if we have a if we have a 15 10 15 30 year warranty on a roof um minor repairs
036and maintenance should already be encumbered in that warranty and that should be already a part of that RFQ process when we're looking for that vendor. But trying to understand what's you know if this is a fiveyear spread and $25,000 that's tucked away. Who's to say like who in a sense who's watching this money? Because that's $25 that's supposed to be put in account, you know, and used for deferred maintenance, but ultimately it's it's it's not accounted for. >> Well, yeah. So, so the thing about that is that's why we have the the plan that would be reviewed through the facilities advisory committee. Um because and I mentioned it on the uh next steps that this is a living document. So if there are some other things that happen that take priority, we could readjust. Uh
037but we would have a report uh regarding our progress for deferred maintenance on a yearly basis. It's just that the district hasn't really done that in the past. Um and so a good practice is to have a plan, report back to the board about the progress you made throughout the year. To your point, is the money being spent? If there has to be an adjustment, right, talk to the appropriate committees to make the adjustments. Um so yeah that's that's something this is new for the district in that sense uh that we're uh implementing it. We have a brand new facilities advisory committee that didn't exist before. Um and that's going to be one point of discussion that we'll have with them tomorrow as well. Um and mind you these monies are monies that are typically
038not allowed to be expended in salaries and benefits. Mhm. Uh so that's another important point that we try to use only monies that are only a portion for uh additional items outside of salaries and benefits when we can although they're items that sometimes we have to use general fund monies for. So >> no I totally understand that. I just just think that a lot of these um expenses encumbered here um they can be deferred to you know perhaps three to four years. Um, if we're looking at an electrical system, I mean, if I mean, if we're looking at a Mickey Mouse job, yes, it's going to take you $10,000 a year to get that Mickey Mouse job patched up and fixed. >> Yeah. >> But if we're putting the, you know, right folks on the
039job to to to complete the job, then that electrical um should be >> up to seven >> and it should last for pro over a decade. So, my thing is that it doesn't make any sense to me, and maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't make any sense in certain aspects. The asphalt, um, that's something that should be maybe every two years or something like that. But I think the 40,000 for every 3 years for slurry in just a quick coat, it doesn't suit a whole, you know, and I think if we defer certain amounts to actually repave certain parking lots, it's just seems like things are not >> Yeah. >> And forgive me lack of better term, but things are not fully kind of thought out with this process. >> And that's and and this
040is all with respect. And this is because I'm I'm a new homeowner. Okay. I but I I'm I'm kind of obsessed with certain things on here and I just don't think having a a cost for a roof every year is responsible and it's um yeah you're you're being fiscally responsible. I don't I just don't think that >> well the thing that you have to kind of understand with this one is this site specific example for instance this was Ben Q. Yeah. Um so every site is going to look different. Some sites have some really large needs in roofing and some of them you can't really do them all in one year because mind you this isn't like we have a pot of money right now that we're going to spend this over the next five.
041We're trying to spread it out. We're getting monies coming in. So there's budgeting of the money coming in and this is expenses going out. Um and so so that's a portion of this but one site is going to look different from another school site depending on its needs. So some site that we just did asphalt under like to your point, we might not need to touch that. If we just did the roofing at one of our school sites, we might not need to touch it. So it really is. And so that that's why with the facilities advisory committee, we have this sheet here where it has like a detailed breakdown of what is at each site. So how we got to these numbers, our director of maintenance sat down and uh we looked at uh
042with our director of construction. We kind of saw what's been done recently. Where would we need to uh foresee that we're going to have some issues, but let's say for example in 20 2829 we get to your point where it says asphalt is $40,000 that we're budgeting there in 20 in uh 2820 sorry 2829. Well, what if we go out there in, you know, 26 20 in 27 28 and the outset looks good and it has another two years, then that money could then be spread out and allocated over in other projects that we might need. So, it's this is a that's why I say it's a living document where we're forecasting where we think the needs are going to be based off what we have today. And every school site will look different based
043off because every school site is at has different needs. >> Thank you. And I'm I'm not I'm not like suggesting that you defer that. um is is just having a vision, having a plan. >> Yeah. >> Um if if we know typically uh this parking lot has been driven with maybe 50 cars a day, um so it's typically going to, you know, have that wear and tear uh rather than the the parking lot that's driven with with 20 cars a day. That's that's just a clear plan. So maybe, you know, just having that down on paper to say this is when we're going to replace it. This is it's it's just being clear because right now it's just it looks like numbers being thrown at the wall. >> Okay, >> that's all. >> Thank you
044for that. I appreciate it. >> No worries. Thank you for your presentation. Amazing. >> Oh, I I thought it was my turn. >> You want to turn? Go on. >> Okay. Um I hear what uh uh Mr. Myers is saying I may maybe this is another area for facil for facilities and construction, but I I have some concerns about um something that's not on this maintenance. Um I run out and raised a lot of money for Coleman Field. A lot of money. And that track is cracking. So, I'm wondering what kind of um agreement did we have with the company that a track would crack? That kind of rhymes. I love it. Um that track would crack within a five-year period. So, I'm just wondering if if it's possible that we have an agreement that
045that asphalt is not supposed to crack within a five-year period. Um, so you might want to help me look into that because I did not hire the company that uh was responsible for putting that track down, but I was certainly responsible for raising a lot of that money that went towards Coleman Field. And for it to look the way it does now is um doesn't make me happy. And for the things that we do have, I think um we should have some kind of agreement with those that are responsible for its maintenance and its upkeep. We raised a lot of money for that um wait room and every time I go over there, I'm not happy. And so a lot of the wear and tear that we incur is because we have not been um
046physically responsible. Um so we need to look into that because if they're if they don't want the wait room, you know, we can shut it down and have it used for another purpose, but they need to take care of it. when I go on that track feel who's ever responsible for being there, they need to be responsible for the upkeep because not only do things um wear and tear on its own, but we have a responsibility to make sure that we are are responsible for keeping it up. So, I just wanted to put that on your little nogget. Okie dokie. >> Thank you, Dr. McGee. I will for sure look into all of those things. Thank you for your comments. Um, as a homeowner also, like I have a 40-year guarantee on my roof and
047I haven't been there 40 years yet, >> but it's always good to have some money in the pot. Like you said, who's watching the money? It's still good to have cuz I had to buy a washing machine. I wasn't expecting to buy a washing machine, but it started breaking down, making noise. I had to buy a washing machine. If I hadn't had that money in the pot, could have bought a washing machine. So, I understand what you're talking about. You know, we need to have some money put aside, although it's covered under a warranty, but maybe that won't happen, but something else will. So, we need to have make sure we have some backup money for that something else that just might happen. >> That was just my comment today. >> I like that. >>
048Thank you. >> And thank you, Mrs. Evans, for ending on a very practical, very real note. Um, our next presentation, final presentation this evening, we'll receive an update on the facilities and construction, also presented by Mr. Raphael Guzman. Mr. Guzman, >> thank you, Dr. Morris, and our board members. Uh, I thank you, uh, for this opportunity to present on this. I'm going to go pretty quickly through some of these slides because I know you've seen some of them, uh, although we tried to kind of put them up a little bit differently. The purpose is really for anyone to be able to see kind of the progress we've made, uh, to date and where we're going. So, we're going to talk today about the projects we completed so far in 2526, what our ongoing projects are
049currently in 2526, the upcoming projects in the future, as well as what we're doing for community outreach, strategic planning, and the look ahead. Um, so start off by you can see here we've done we did quite a bit of work over the summer. Uh, this is probably one of the busiest summers that we've had in this district as it pertains to construction. Um I mean it if not the busiest we every single school had some sort of maintenance project or sort of construction project that that it went through. Um and really it's us being to your point earlier looking at the funds that we have and spending those in the right way in the places that we need to spend them instead of them just sitting in an account. Um so that's what we were
050looking to do. Um so at Kelso for instance I'm sure you've all been to Kelso and there's been a lot of great upgrades there. It looks beautiful. Um, and so we modernized classrooms. We had new furniture, a new new turf field, new digital marquee. Every single classroom was redone. Uh, and when I say redone, I'm talking about the flooring, the the the painting of the walls, the redoing of the boards, new sonics in the classrooms, um, new furniture, state-of-the-art furniture as well. Every single one of those rooms were redone at at the new council site. Um, and so and then they have a brand new beautiful turf field. Uh, that's just it looks it looks great. And we also did a lot of ADA accessibility upgrades as well as a lot of green area upgrades.
051Here's just to put it in perspective to your left here. This is how that same room looked uh before we started doing the renovations. And you can see now um the after and and a lot you might say, well, it's maybe you just had a different camera. No, it's just the lighting in the room got better as well. We replaced some of that lighting. Um, but it also you could see just the amount of work. The flooring looks different. Um, the window shades are there. Brand new windows. Just wanted to kind of show a picture of just the differences. Here's another example before and after um of like kind of what it looked like. Some of those windows had holes in them or just, you know, it just really looks significantly better to what we
052had before. Here's another example that throughout the site you had layer upon layer upon layer of bulletin boards and things of that nature. We were able to take all those things out and put in brand new bulletin boards as well. Uh that really makes the classroom state-of-the-art in Sentinel. So that was Kelso Sentinella. We did very much a very similar thing to what we could do. Mind you that I want to clarify there's only certain things that we can do uh without necessarily going out to DSA. uh like for so in this case we modernized all of the classrooms and what I mean by again is like we painted each one we we changed the flooring in each one of the classrooms uh we had new furniture in each one of those classrooms uh bonics
053as well everything got redone in each one of these classrooms we had sitewide asphalt replacement we would have loved to you know have put in some maybe some green areas but we can't with unless we go out to DSA and get formal plan approvals but we did try to do as much as we could in regards to the asphalt, new basketball courts provided by the Clippers uh that they helped us with and uh a new parking area for staff, which I know in the past parking was such a a difficult thing and we're hoping that the parking now in is is helping that uh issue. So, we did all of that work at Sentinella. Here are some just before and after pictures. So, you could, you know, for people to see this is how it
054looked like before. And you could see just on even the picture like these stains all over this this carpet the kind of beat up windows and you can see like this this window uh what's this called? Um blinds. Thank you. Uh that all over and the mismatched furniture like from different decades and stuff. And so and now we have like a classroom that looks like this with uniform furniture. Uh we did everything that we could without changing the actual structure. And again, that's all we could possibly do without DSA and like essentially regutting and and redoing the entire building. Um, here's the hallway. If anyone ever walked through these hallways, you know that it was like very you almost felt like you were going to kind of fall through the floor on some of these
055because the the subfloor was was in pretty bad shape. We went back in and replaced all of that. um and you know overlaid uh flooring and fixed some of the walls there and uh really just kind of painted uh it had like a different type of like kind of uh worn down white. I don't know how else to kind of describe the paint uh before, but now we've actually painted it in a nice vivid color um with uh colors that kind of match and make make it pop. Here's the NPR room at Sentinella. As you can see um it was again the stage was in pretty bad shape. Um, now you can see over here how it looks and it also has AB components to it. We didn't have that before where now it has
056incorporated speakers and everything's kind of aligned with its own microphone system so that it can make it easier for presentations. Inwood United went through a couple of modernization as well. We did 21 classrooms um new and we also had a new security camera system installed. We did some work in the auditorium as well. We replaced the carpet there and did everything that we could potentially do during that time frame. Uh districtwide, we had playground uh we went out and assessed the condition of all of our playgrounds across the district. We went and looked at what's red, what's yellow, what's what's green, and the majority uh we were able to go in and address all of the red items, meaning items that could be potentially hazardous or not safe. We went back in and we looked
057at what what playgrounds weren't safe, and we actually went and fixed all of those over the summer. We repair those areas and apparatuses as needed and um it's just um that that's every single school site. We assess those playgrounds for safety. Uh and in some cases we even remove certain components to make sure it continues to be safe. Um outdoor courts were uh thanks to the Clippers, they helped us with a lot of the outdoor basketball courts to make them look very nice as well as some of the other exterior uh play areas that that we had. Um, we also had some garden spaces that were installed uh at for instance at a similar garden space was built at Woodworth Monroe on October 30th just recently uh through LA Rams and Enrich LA. Um, so
058we had some of those garden spaces there. Maintenance-wise, we also had a lot of maintenance. Uh, we did repair quite a bit of HVAC. The problem with HVAC at our district, quite frankly, is our units are incredibly old. They we need a full entire HVAC replacement and that costs millions of dollars and we're going to have to figure out a way to do that. Um but that's really the reality. We can keep on trying to fix these, but they're going to break down. We went at Inglewood High School United, we tested every single HVAC unit to make sure it worked and then we when everyone came back on campus, it started breaking down. And so these are the problems when you have older units. Um so we're we have to really look at that. But
059anyways, we did replace a lot of the HVAC units and repaired a lot of the coils and a lot of did a lot of different things. Um, as well as utility and plumbing issues, electrical issues. Um, and then at Woods Row, we redid the gymnasium floor renovation. We had a leak that kind of tampered with the floor. So, we fixed that. At Frankie Parent, we applied a protective coating, sorry, say coating, uh, to all roofs on the campus and we there were some roofing issues there. And at Oak Street, we applied a the same thing to the uh roofs of all portable uh items. Here you can see a completed project summary. Every single one of our schools had something done to it over the summer or just recently. Every single one of our schools.
060Um so, you know, we've been very very active to try to really bring our schools to a standard that and bring our facilities up to to be them being uh in a good space and also safe for our staff and for our community and for our students. So, we've done a really good job of that. There's still a long way to go, but this is really all we can potentially do right now with the monies that we have and the approvals that we have to do work. Um, ongoing projects. We have a couple of exciting projects that are ongoing here. Every single school will have three brand new water bottle filling stations that are chilled cold water. Um, that's a really big deal. Uh, I know we installed the ones at Oak. Um, our kids
061were excited. I went out there to check how it went and our kids were very excited about it. Uh some of the staff was very excited because you know it's it's um it's a nice addition. Um so every single one of our schools will have this instead of like those older water fountains that we have now. Um and so we have already started at some of our schools by the end of November or I'm sorry by the end of December we will have installed three at least three water bottle filling station at each one of our school sites in the entire district. So, this is something new that we did. Uh, some of the money that we are using for this came from a grant, a very little amount, but we're looking for grants as
062well to fund this. Districtwide security is a big issue and safety and and one of the integral components in order to provide a safe environment is really having camera systems that enable you to track and monitor your facilities. Um, and so we had uh cameras installed at Wood Monroe and we also had cameras installed at Inglewood High School United. But now over the winter break, every single one of our school sites will have at least 10 cameras that have been strategically placed, those clam cameras are cloud-based monitoring as well. So we're able to also set up geo fencing and let's say hey like if you if you imagine this is a feed for example for a second and we say I if I if you see anybody in this corner over here in the camera
063feed I want you to email you know Dr. Morris and uh Dr. and Miss Miss Evans and you know you'll get the notification if the camera senses that person at that specific time. It also has technology for crowding. If it sees a crowd of people, it could tell it'll alert someone, hey, you have a crowd of people gathering or if you don't want people loitering around at a certain time, you could say, hey, like why is somebody there? So, you could set all this up with this camera systems. Uh each site will have 10. That's really like a starter pack. as we go forward, we really probably have to increase the amount of cameras. But that's one step that we're trying to take aggressively to really support our safety team to be able to monitor
064the school sites and address safety issues throughout the school district. Um, another uh area is the recking of the campuses as well to make sure that we address that. We're also planning on doing a lot of that work over winter break. So, winter break is going to be very busy for us. We have the finishing the water bottle filling stations, finishing the cameras, campus rekeying. So, all of that work is ongoing. And then we also have some other projects that that are ongoing like the city honors IYC uh conversion of the library to state-of-the-art media center. You can see some pictures there like previews. Uh but it doesn't really do justice to what it's going to look like here. It should be done here within the next couple days uh or week. Um so we're
065excited about that. CDC is also another project that's underway. You can see there it's a picture of just like everything being prepared for us to install the modular buildings that we're going to have. It's eight classrooms, an NPR room. Um all of that is underway and um we did run into a little bit of an issue with Edison and trying to get our transformer removed and everything. And uh so luckily we we've addressed that and uh uh and now we're moving the full speed ahead to have and so we're in we're on track to complete that in the summer of 2026. You can see there what the layout of the campus is going to look like. Um, and all of these rooms can be used for both general and special education uh, instruction. So that's
066really important in our scope of looking at construction. We not only look at general education, we are looking at special education. We know we don't want to be one of those, you know, places where, well, you all the students, all the general education students get the new classrooms and sped kids are going to be put in some portable somewhere. That's not what we're doing here in this district. And um and we are making sure that everything that we build has those components for our special education students as well. Here's a a a project completion date. You can see how we're kind of developing from the summer to uh summer. So by the summer of 2026, we should be done with CDC and hopefully get to see everybody out there at the ribbon cutting for that.
067Benet Q school is also underway. We have new construction there happening. six classrooms, a maker space, restrooms, landscaping upgrades, and removal of some of the existing portables there. Um, we also anticipate to be done by the summer of 2026. Uh, but work is currently ongoing there. Um, and so we're managing kind of, you know, that environment of work ongoing uh while we're doing uh construction. Um, and so at the conclusion of the project, BenQ will have 25 classrooms that are located in permanent buildings as well as 11 portable buildings. Um, we'd love to get rid of the other portable buildings, but I think for that you would need to have a significant amount of funds. Uh, again, all permanent rooms that we're uh placing there can be used for both general and special education instruction.
068And here's just a quick timeline again of how we're progressing. We're on pace uh literally we're uh demo, you know, getting everything ready at BenQ as we speak. Uh to go over England High School, I'm going to ask uh Mr. Miles if he could uh proceed from here uh forward. um and he's going to go and review just a little bit of where we are with Englewood High School. And while he comes up, I do want to acknowledge just real quickly um some people in the room here. Uh from Balfur Batty, we have um Mr. um Evan Rosie, if you could please stand. Uh he's uh one of our uh least contractors for England High School and the Oak Street Project. So, I just want you all to be familiar with the different people that
069are here. We also have our architect for CDC and Oak Street uh from uh DSK, Mr. Jeff Buller and Kim Johnson if they're here if they can stand. Just want you all to be familiar with our architects. You know, I asked them to try to come to these meetings in case there's any other questions and things of that nature, but they're doing a great job. And with that, I'll turn it over to Mr. Miles. >> Thank you so much, Mr. Guzman. Good evening, uh, members of the cabinet, members of the committee, uh, and members of the community. Uh I I know that back in September we provided an in-depth look at Ingwood High School and we'll be back here next month with another in-depth update, but just a quick uh overview on this project. Here's
070the scope again. So we're looking at a total of 50 new 53 new classrooms. Uh we'll have two additional buildings that are dedicated to our pathways and career tech education programs. You can see the rest of the scope there in terms of new construction. Uh at this point, the vast majority of the site is is scheduled to be torn down and then built a new. The two buildings that will will remain on campus are the gymnasium and the auditorium. And those will be receiving some modernization uh efforts. You can see here uh full construction is scheduled to start uh in early 2026. The work that we're doing right now is considered abatement. So we're removing uh some of the the hazardous materials on campus so that way we can further accelerate demolition work uh once
071once the project has fully been approved at the state level. And again, our our budget number has remained fixed at $232 million for some time now, and we're still on track to have this project done by the end of 2027. As a as a re uh as an overview, again, we have four total packages uh of design work that have gone to the state or will go to the state for review. Package one, that's the largest uh largest amount of work. That's all new construction. We submitted that to the state back in April. We expect to receive comments back uh ne uh believe tomorrow actually on the 6th uh which we'll begin addressing so we can receive approval quickly on that work. Package two, those are those two uh CTE buildings that we talked about
072in the middle of campus. Uh we're nearing completion of design work there. Uh we expect to submit that to the state in early 2026. I believe it's in February is our our submittal date. Package three, that's the modernization work at the gym in the auditorium. Uh that work is going to be submitted to the state uh later this month. We're nearing completion there. And then package four, that is all of our site development. So that's going to be our artificial turf, our basketball courts, tennis courts, exterior lighting, other additional outdoor elements. That's uh that work was completed and submitted uh to the state or the DSA division of the state architect uh last month. Here's an overview of uh what Ingwood High School will look like uh upon completion. again 53 new classrooms. See if
073we can get this going. And and I know we've talked about themies that we're building on site. So we have seven differentmies. Each one will include six uh classrooms. Each of thosemies will have a dedicated room for special education. So down here we have a two-story building that consists of admin on the first floor here and then classrooms on the second floor. And then over here we have two stories of classrooms. So, we'll have uh three special education classrooms in this building. One, one here, two, and three. And then over here in this two-story classroom building, uh we'll have a special education classroom on the first floor, an additional one here on the second floor. We have our art and science lab building here at the corner where the current administration building is located. And
074then here in the center of campus is where our new uh CTE building and our new music uh buildings will will be located and those will also be used for both uh general general purpose as well as special education instruction. Then just a similar timeline you can see the work that we've been doing again abatement this fall. Uh we do expect uh our our full design work to be wrapped up early 2026. Uh that's when we also expect to have approval from the state uh for that package one so that the bulk of the new construction work so we can start that work and demolition work in the spring. Uh and then we're still on pace to be complete by the end of 2027 to talk about uh our upcoming projects. I'm going to turn
075it back over to Mr. Guzman. >> Thank you Jordan. I'll fly by the rest of these as you all are familiar with them already. But we have city honors. for finalizing up some of the library, but we also have a project for the exterior and interior painting of the campus. We actually got some bids in uh recently and they came in kind of under the budget. So, that's great news. Um, but uh we're hoping we actually also are getting student engagement to see the coloring and and everything like that at the at the campus at Oak Street. Um, as you know, we have the new construction uh portion that we're planning for the preK and TK classrooms. Uh, it's going to have a nice field in the middle. Um, and we're phasing it out to
076make sure that we're able to uh not affect uh student learning in that time frame and to make sure that we can uh you know phase it so that a lot of the work gets done over the summer when students aren't there with the exception of of the area where there's a lot if you remember the layout of Oak there's this green area here right where um there's really not much going on there so we could actually seal that and that's where a lot of the buildings are going to go um and so we could start that in you um early next year. Um and so we're going to be trying our best to aggressively pursue this to finalize, but we still have that uh essentially happening um by the end of by summer of
0772027, but we're trying to see what we could do to push it further up so that we have it before. Um new classrooms, we have seven classrooms there uh that for designed for prek, TK, and K. Uh and three classrooms have been designed for some of the older grades. Uh there's going to be two new dedicated play areas, new restrooms, and removal of all the existing portable buildings. In le of the portable buildings, you'll have the classrooms on the other side and the field in the middle. Um here's a layout of how that would look at the conclusion of the project. Ocean will have this 29 classrooms, all of which will be located in permanent buildings, so no more of the portables. Um here's just again a schedule of what that will look like at
078Oak Street. Um and then to finalize, we are doing our part in regards to community outreach and strategic planning. We have our meetings with the CBOC and we also have this new committee, the the facilities advisory committee. We have a meeting tomorrow, by the way, if you'd like to come by um and uh comments on the deferred maintenance plan or other items. Um but we're getting engagement from them. One of the major things we're doing is the facilities master plan. So that's also something that we're looking forward to. Uh in conclusion, as we look ahead, we're going to continue our construction activities. We're going to look at getting the approvals from DSA for the other construction activities that we're planning. Continue to hold our CBOC and facilities advisory committee meetings. Um, and hold any milestone
079moments once we complete projects like we have had already in some of our projects and continue to provide the board of the community with regular updates on individual projects and the program as a whole. So, um, that is our update. Um, and I would like to turn it back to you. Thank you so much. That was a lot. But if we build it, they will come. That's what we're looking for. Everybody's going to want to come to Englewood when they see all these new buildings up. Uh but talking about a a new building, one of uh our community members asked me the other day like, "What are they doing to Inglewood High School? They're tearing it down." Balf Forbiddy, my question to you, there's a blue fence around that school. Everybody knows that Englewood is
080what color? >> Green. green. First thing they said, why isn't there a green something around the schools to let them know that Englewood's coming back? Put up a big sign to let them know we're not just tearing down Inglewood High School, but that Inglewood is coming back. This is going to be the new home of Englewood High. So, bidi, that's my question to you. Can we get something up there that says this is Inglewood, we're still here. We're not gone. >> So, MS, uh, thank you for bringing that up. We actually addressed that at our our uh construction our weekly construction meeting. And uh we do have a big banner that we if you recall in the groundbreaking uh of the new layout of the school. So we're going to put that up and we're
081going to also we're designing three other banners in green uh the green the Inglewood green color. Um and we're going to put that up around as well. So we're in the middle of that right now, but the bigger banner is going to go up I think within the next couple days, right? If if it hasn't. Yeah. So within the next couple days, you'll see that of and then we're going to put the other banners around. But to your point, we also have the work that's happening at BenQ and the work that's happening at CDC and so we're going to have some banners for those as well. So thank you for bringing that to our attention and we are addressing that currently. >> Thank you. That's all I wanted to know. Any any questions? >> Do
082you do you guys think about this stuff before we have to tell you? >> Yes. Yes, we we we do >> because it's important the the community shouldn't have to come to us and ask why. And so it's important to me that we you know we are intentional when we shut something down. We need to put something up and not in two days not when you know our president has to bring it to your attention. I'm just saying we we need to be mindful of what it looks like to the community that we live in. >> [snorts] >> Okay. And um what's the student population at Oak Street? >> How many students do they have there? >> Okay. >> There's 703, I believe. >> 7 and how many? >> Three. >> Yeah. I'm glad they
083have green space there cuz uh my school doesn't have any. And so I'm going to send them over there. Maybe you have room for them. Um, and I'm looking at the city honors project. You included IYC, but you're only including them based on the fact that you're going to do exterior and interior um, painting >> because I'm trying to figure out what's happening with that library and that's not on this report and we've gotten funding for it. And so people are asking me what's happening with that project. So, um we uh talked about it here. Um the uh city honorsyc the report uh it's showing we should be done uh within this month. There's some final touches that are doing uh with the furniture. So, it should be done within the next couple of days
084if not week. Uh so, we're in that kind of final stage. >> Okay. We're going to see >> Dr. I was I was over there today. >> They're still putting it they're still putting the furniture together, but everything is in the room. And >> what about that floor? What does it look like? Cuz it looked a hot mess when I saw it last. So, has it improved? >> Yes. >> Okay. So, it's not a hot mess no more. >> No hot mess. >> It's a style. It Some people will like it and some people won't. >> Well, I'm just concerned about the construction. you know that epoxy, you know, it is a style, but it has to be put down a certain way else it will bubble up. And the last time I saw it,
085it had bubbled up and it shouldn't be like that. So, I'm hoping we got a new vendor or the vendor that put it down make the corrections. >> Yes. Yes, they did. Or yes, I hear you. >> Yes, they made the corrections. >> Okay. >> All right. And and by the way, we our team is our team does our best to be as mindful as we can. Okay. >> With all of these projects, I just want that to be noted >> because, you know, we we do our best and um it it's it's important that people know that. >> Yeah. I I I agree. And I'm just saying that if we don't point certain things out and that's not a priority for you, but it's a priority for us coming from the community that you
086will be more mindful about it if we bring it up. like the next time some construction goes up, we will have a banner to put up during that time because they're not going to come to you, Mr. Cuzman. They're going to come to us what's happening. And so, we want to make sure that we are doing our part to circumvent situations that don't have to be. So, not blaming you, just, you know, this is a teachable moment. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. Thank you, Mr. Madam Board President. If I may, you >> have something. >> Yeah. Okay. >> I had a couple questions. Uh, well, first I want to highlight your endurance. I think you've been talking and standing there for the past hour straight. So, I appreciate that. Um, but I did have
087some questions about the security cameras. I know we had great hopes that this grant that we're applying for that would allow us to uh implement higher security measures. Is that the grant that we're using to pay for these security cameras or are they coming from the bond measures? some of that money um we did apply for a new grants uh with under that same fund. So so Monroe's cameras are paid for that grant from that grants but also we did um um access systems for our locks. Um so we did apply for a new grant. Some of that money is coming from that but other money is just coming from the general construction budget. >> Yeah. and the the latest round for that security grant because it is a federal grant and they were supposed
088to do notifications that office is closed down so we haven't received notification whether or not we got it because of the federal shutdown. >> So we got >> we're still hopeful but we just we haven't heard. >> Okay. Um and remind me is the backside of Oak Street is that a site area that we're going to put it a camera there or is that something we have to look into in the future? the back side of Oak Street. I'm sorry. >> I'm sorry. Closer to the the freeway. >> I believe we do have some cameras pointing that direction. I can double check. Uh we'll be uh sending out the layout of the cameras just so people know where they are. Um and uh we'll make sure to look at that and see if it's part
089of it. If not, we could look at redirecting some of that. But we did meet with with each principal to go over like what strategic areas would be best in their campus that they would want to know, what hotspots they were aware of in their campus. And uh we strategically placed the cameras to look at that as well as outdoor perimeters. >> Gotcha. Yeah, that that question was for uh staff and students, but I see the construction team got a little excited by the idea of having cameras there, too. So maybe they can help with uh keep an eye out in that area, too. Uh my other question is concerning the donations by the Clippers. I felt like I've asked this question before. I'm not sure been answered before, but what is the dollar amount
090for that Clipper donation for >> It was about $3 million. >> $3 million for all them. Okay, got you. Um, that's substantial for sure, but I do know that they do these type of like uh projects districtwide, citywide, countywide. Um, so I do hope that this will not be a minimal effort on their part to support our schools and I know uh they have supported our foundation and I know they haven't. Okay, I like to play fishing on the mic because you're going to defend them. I'm hoping you weren't going to do that. But I do know, yeah, I do know the Clippers um have and the owner of the Clippers is one of the richest men in the world. So, at this point, I just want to highlight that as board members, we we
091are active of trying to make sure that they do their due diligence and provide dignity for our students and our families because their impact in this community is is pretty prevalent. Um so hopefully that three million is just the beginning. >> Thank you. >> Along with that security, I just wanted to piggy back. Do we have a security plan? We can have all the cameras in the world, but do we have a security plan? you know, um, and I've been asking that from the first day of school starting. you know, we we've made a lot of changes and so cameras are cool, but if I don't know where they are, and then I do know where they are, and I'm still seeing things that, you know, affect our student body. Um, along with those cameras,
092I'm hoping that we we have a security plan and that it is a strategic plan because that's one of the biggest concerns that parents have is are my kids safe here? SO, [screaming] >> great presentation. Um, I would just say that I'm I'm this is long overdue, of course, the facilities and construction, but this is the community's money. This is the community's money being put to work. So, um, nothing I should pat anybody on the back. Um, thank you community for passing these bonds and getting this money into and and and into into the district. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> All right. Thank you. Thank you board members and thank you Mr. Guzman, Mr. Miles. >> Uh, now we're going to move on to public comments on agenda and non-aggendaized items. This
093is an opportunity for members of the public to address the county administrator and board of education. And a public comment card must be completed and submitted to the safety assistant who's stationed at the entrance to the meeting room before the beginning of the public comment period. Members of the public who wish to speak about an item on the posted agenda must indicate the item number on the public comment card. Three minutes will be allotted for public comment cards on agenda item. A total of 30 minutes will be allotted on agenda items. three minutes per speaker and 30 minutes on non-aggenda items. If the public comment cards exceed 10 cards per section, the time may be reduced to hear from more speakers. Speech that is disruptive, defamatory, or impedes the orderly conduct of the meeting is
094not allowed at the discretion of the presiding officer. Anyone who disrupts, disturbs, or impedes the orderly conduct of the meeting will be required to exit the meeting room. The guidelines for public comments are in accordance with board bylaw board bylaw 9323. The Brown Act does not permit the county administrator, board of education members or cabinet members to respond to public comments. Miss Zbrano, we'll turn it over to you for public comments. Thank you, Dr. Mars. We will start with public comments on non-aggenda items. The first public comment is from John Hughes. Mr. Hughes, please come to the podium to address your public comment on non-aggenda items. You can go. Come this way. >> You have three minutes. You may begin. >> Uh, good evening to Dr. Morris to the exe advisory board members to the
095cabinet um and to the mighty ITA in the community here. Um I'm here there today to uh speak on the respect and safety issue that you probably heard us um um speaking about um previous to the board meeting. Um I think we're beyond the point of uh discussion discussion. We're past um that engagement at this point. Um we began requesting many of these things last year um because um we have staff and students that are not feeling safe and that's something that we absolutely do not um tolerate. It was mentioned by um Dr. McGee, is there a comprehensive plan? We wanted to engage in that planning process. We have called for that planning process, but it was um passed along and in between um different entities, but um it has not happened and it's unacceptable.
096What you have there is data um of our surveys. We've we found out that the majority of um the schools have not gone over a safety plan which is something I asked in the beginning and it hasn't happened. We also found out that uh the majority of um our our uh staff members do not feel that they are on a safe campus for various reasons. So our issue again is is not a negotiable issue. This is a right. This is a fundamental right of everyone, every human being, uh, every student, every, uh, community member to know that their students and staff are on safe campuses. Cameras are not going to make your campus safe. That comes with people, that comes with training, that comes with a plan, that comes with dedication, that comes with caring.
097And the only question that we have to ask is would you put your child in this situation? That's the question. And what is the answer to that? It's absolutely not. So if you're not going to put your child in such a situation, what or how can you put the children of Inglewood in that or the staff in Englewood in that? It's a matter of respect. If you respect us, show it. Show that you respect us. Words are empty. deeds show your action and the deeds have been to pass it along, give it away, have somebody else do it, and it's everyone's responsibility. Dr. Morse, this is your responsibility. You sat at the table with us and then you passed it along. That's not acceptable. >> Thank you. Our second public comment is from Mario Sanchez.
098Mr. Sanchez, please come to the podium to address your public comments on non-aggenda items. You have >> just waiting for You have three minutes. You may begin. >> Uh, thank you. Um, board members, cabinet, my wonderful teachers back there. I I take my hat for you guys being here this late. Tomorrow, we got to get up and take care of our babies is is tough. So, I I gotta give it to you guys. I'm here to support. Um in here, I have a letter directed to Dr. Morris. Um and I'm just going to read a couple uh uh areas. Um Figma Bank provide us um with the standards. We're designed to physical accountability in governments, not to replace decisions making authority by our elected official board. members who are directly accountable to us, our community
099that they serve. Fig standards met by the district should [snorts] be under local control already and we have met a lot of those. They should be under in overseeing over our board members who listens to us, to the community, to our members. Um, that's everything I'm going to read for. We want local control. Allow our board members to go and see the reality is happening in our schools. Um regard regarding the technology uh I'm great you guys are using e-ray that is all um on the -9 this should be done or also we gave you uh measure I right um so this should be already been take long time already long we gave you how many millions you recall how many millions all right I'm just going to um again how many millions you came
100to our community. You ask for those millions, we give you, we can pay for those millions. You come back and you ask for money. Nothing has been done. What we going to say? All right, that's everything for tonight. Thank you very much for your time. >> Thank you. Our third public comment is from Noel Bautista. Mr. Bautista, please come to the podium to address your public comments and non-aggenda items. You have three minutes. You may begin. I'd like to address the board in a very simple manner, but there's one board member that I really need to talk to and I need you to listen. Also Castillo, pleasure to meet your Camarada. Pleasure to meet your Panto. Pleasure to meet you. Another Chico studies educator. A class was implemented in July that you app. You approved
101it. Cool. But here's my question to you. Why did the teacher find out two weeks before school started that she was teaching a CHO studies class if it was approved in July? No books have been provided for the CH studies class. You know whose books they are? Mine. You know which resources? Mine. You know what artifacts? Mine. I'm asking you, Mr. Gastillo, in your Instagram five weeks ago, you talked about leadership. When we get together, things get done in every possible way. It's kind of weird. The teacher was never invited. The one soldier who's been there with her has been Dr. Bonte. Do you even know who the teacher is? Did you even know where the class is at? Have you seen the classroom? How come when the students went in and they had the
102class, they didn't know what the class was? they were just assigned. Have you collaborated with the teacher? Students did speak up regarding the class, but to my understandings, the students that are in didn't know what the class was. We've been asking for a Chico's African-American Panaran-American class for years. And then we speak on these voices. Idor Lorent, Jackie Sparrow, Yanni Clay, Karina Toscano, Jennifer Collins, Miss Muhammed, and your public servant, myself. Why did the teacher get two weeks? Why did Dr. Pony get two weeks? Where are the books? How did it pass Williams? How dare you? We haven't had a class of this. And this is how you support teacher to the critics. We're going beyond the 60s, current events and politics. We're going to talk about cultura, mishika, po, and any other term that
103fits in that terminology in that class. The problem that I have with the Instagram messages is that you haven't given the teacher the flowers. That's what bothers me. They say thank you, but where's the teacher? You talk about leadership. Leadership reflects attitude. Attitude reflects leadership. That's just the truth. Why do I take it personal? That's my wife. So yeah, I know you haven't met with her. I know you haven't chat with her. Have a blessed day. >> Thank you. We're now going to transition to public comments for agenda items. We have one public comment for Mr. John Hughes. Mr. Hughes, please come to the podium to address your public comments on agenda items. You have three minutes. You may begin. >> Uh good evening. Um I was looking over the uhou regarding the substitute pay
104for um our retired teachers. And it also brought to mind that um when we offered the early um that golden handshake or the um package last year that um I started receiving calls that uh they hadn't they did not receive what was uh promised um in those meetings and um I was wondering how that could be. However, they they assured me that because they hadn't um because when we negotiated the uh raise um last year, it hadn't been a full year of service. So, they weren't given that amount uh credit when they um negotiated the um the handshake. So, in other words, they were told that they would be receiving a certain amount in retirement and that actually wasn't wasn't done. But what bothers me is that we didn't do that work. We did not
105do the um the homework that was required to know that that year of service um including the 8% would not be um included. So that affected their decision. Some would may not have made that decision had they known that. However, um, as usual, we keep taking what we've what we what we're given. And that seems to be a theme. You know, I I can't walk down um setting up today without um someone telling me how callous um they have been treated by payroll or or or the attitude. It's not the fact that mistakes are made. It is the attitude. And that attitude is not tolerable. And so when I come down on certain individuals about just doing their function and and I hear that they're breaking out in tears. Well, break out the tears when
106you have an attitude with anybody that comes in asking about their payment. That is what we say when we're talking about respect. There's a lack of respect. there's a condescending attitude towards uh employees inquiring about their money and then the employee is nine times out of 10 right but we have to go through a system we have to go through a new um HCM system we hear every excuse except excuse me we apologize we're going to get better that's not happening and it needs to happen thank Thank you. [applause] >> Thank you. That concludes our public comments for tonight. >> Thank you very much, Ma. Felina, do you have the card? >> Was it submitted after public? >> Oh, why don't you come forward, please? >> Can you state your name, please? Hold on just
107a minute. Okay, you may begin. Kita Gonzalez and I'm a resident of Englewood in Trusty Area 3 and alumni of the UN Englewood Unified School District. I am here to continue to voice my concerns around all the ICE raids and activity in Englewood. This cannot wait any longer as political landscape continues to get worse as we have now seen the ICE raids spread to other parts of the country. We need to take action now. This is not only an issue for immigrants given the US Supreme Court ruling that is now allowing for racial profiling and there have been cases where even US citizens have been also detained by ICE agents. IES is said to receive billions of dollars regardless of the ongoing government shutdown which will allow agent ICE agents to increase their activity and
108we need to prepare. That being said, we urge you all to stand alongside immigrants in Englewood and continue to revise and update board policy 5145.13, response to immigration enforcement to ensure that the district is complying with the new state legislation to that um provides more um existing mandated policy protections that are strengthened in response to the federal agencies and schools. Also, as you may know, LA County recently declared a state of emergency because of the ice raids. This means that the county has been has the power to assist residents that have been impacted financially by the ice raids. According to the LA County Supervisors, the ICE rates have caused widespread fear and led to decreased attendance at work and schools. Consequently, many have fallen behind on rent. The provisions in the declaration include rent relief
109for tenants who have been impacted by the ICE rates. Therefore, we urge you to work with county leaders to ensure that the immigrant community in Englewood is able to benefit from these resources and services that are that are meant to provide mutual aid support. Moreover, moreover, we also urge that you continue to meet with community leaders to establish ways for there to be a united front on this matter with the mayor and the city council as well. Finally, I urge you that you support that demands of the Englewood Teachers Association given that this is also a public safety matter. Thank you. That concludes our public comments. >> Thank you. And so now we're going to move on to approval of human resources division items 9A1 through 9 A10. I'll turn it over to you, Mrs.
110Evans. >> Are there any comments? >> 9A1 through 9 A10 are each approved. Moving on to educational services division 9B1 through 9B15. No comments. >> 9B1 through 9B15 are each approved. Moving on to business services division 9 C1 through 9 C10. 9C1 through 9C10 are each approved. Moving on to measure GGI and facilities 9D1 through 9D. >> They've been addressed. No. >> 9D1 through 9D8 are each approved. Moving on to county administrators 9E1 through 9E5. >> 9E1 through 95 are each approved. Moving on to approval of the minutes of the board of education meeting special board of education workshop study session on October the 28th, 2025. >> No comments. the minutes of the October 1st and October 28th board of education meetings are approved and uh moving on to board member remarks. Mrs. Evans, I'll
111turn it over to you. >> Board members, you want to start with Mr. Meyers. Any comments? >> Sure. Thank you for the community coming out tonight. Um I appreciate you guys. Thank you so much. I just want to say to um you know my my um my mission here on sitting sitting on his dis here is to make sure that um by the time I'm no longer up for election we are back to local control and even sooner than that. Um and for just the community purposes I will always advocate for you. Um, I'm sorry. I don't mind offending somebody if it's for the betterment of my community. Um, I believe in equity across the board. And when I travel to these schools, I see that there are great inequities um, in this district. And
112so my job is to bring attention and awareness to these matters and make sure that they get addressed. And if they don't get addressed and they get prolonged, then I'll keep agitating and making sure that these things get solved because I believe that every student in this district has the opportunity to succeed and be successful. The only challenge to that is we adults allowing that opportunity for them. And so by us having the ability to create the future Let's do a conscious job at it and a better job. And I digress right there. Have a good evening. >> Thank you, madam board president. Um first I want to just thank um Dr. Morris, Dr. Lucas for coming out to the first woman's mentorship uh women's law mentorship event. We had about a turnout about 20
113students and uh 12 mentors and we're going to have a follow-up meeting on November 8th at Oak Street. So, if there's anybody who knows any girls from 6th to 12th grade that are interested in being lawyers, we will meeting at Oak Street at 12:00. Um we're going to do some garden work. You know, the garden needs a lot of work. So, don't dress appropriately for that. We'll have water. We have food for y'all. And then the next event will be uh announced at that event as well. Um so, I just want to thank everybody involved. I want to thank Miss Tate especially because Miss Tate did an outstanding job to make sure that there was a safe uh and everything was going well for that event. She's just truly remarkable. I'm so happy for Latte
114Hero. I she she really is. And um and she speaks very highly of you, Dr. McGee. And um so I I did want to speak about my first board meeting. I came to this to this room 2012 when the district was falling under receiverhip. I remember the first two rows were all red shirts and I remember they expressed the frustration and anger that we felt as students and I remember thinking that there is those advocating for us that are speaking for us. They're saying what we're all feeling when the district was going on their receiverhip and every teacher got a pink slip and the future was bleak for this district. This is the reason why I give so much reference to what teachers say and what teachers do. They're the front line of what we're
115trying to do here in our education system and they deserve the respect and they deserve to get the most um and they deserve to have the dignity that much we could afford. And I do think that's the reason why each one of our our cabinet members were teachers before. It's it's a qualification that we take very seriously to understand what they're going through and what we need to do to support them. So I know through this leadership we will take care of that and we'll be able to address the needs that was presented today. Um, it's a reason why when I first ran for this seat, the only union endorsement I wanted was ITA and I got it. So, I'm always going to be there for them and I'm excited to see them here, but
116I hope it was for better circumstances. Um, and moving forward, I really hope that we could find an opportunity to close this divide that I'm starting to see between us as board members and and the staff. You know, we do class visits, we do site visits, there's so much we could do. Um, but there's anything more that we could be invited to or we could present oursel in, um, more than happy to do it. You know, obviously working full-time, it's it's it's a difficult occupation, but there's flexibility and everything I could do and I've always wanted available to anybody who wants to discuss anything regarding our work, uh, my mandate and anything dealing with the district. So, I appreciate you all for being here, for sitting through this, and I appreciate everyone. They're not here
117anymore, but there it was. There's a whole room that was crowded of individuals that were very passionate. They're all [laughter] gone just like that. But I hope they're watching this recording and I hope they know that we stand with them. Thank you. >> I I I agree with both of my colleagues. I think that um in speaking to the cabinet, there's such a resource along this line and when we hear certain things in the community, we pass them on to you because we're not in a position to really address them, but we are in a position to help you address them. So, we know what we have to do. We have made so many wonderful milestones and we don't want to go backwards. So we need to understand what's going on in the CHO studies.
118Uh we need to understand what we can do to actually because I've asked about this safety plan when Morning Side in Englewood was merging. You had to have one. I have not seen one. And without a plan, that's like without a vision, the people will perish. And so that it's not difficult. People are reaching out to us because they want to be included. They want to be seen. And we have the ability to do that. So we with our limited resources, we really try and do the best that we can. But if we work together on a lot of these um different situations, we all come with resources. And you'd be surprised how we can participate and help. So I implore you to call on us, send us an email. Do you know somebody that
119can do this? We just might because we're the first line of who they come to. You guys are the first line when the teachers come, but we're the first line them parents and they live down the street, up the street, and around the corner from me. And I I shouldn't have to do this. Like, oh lord, there they go. you know, but on a on a a positive note, the Dodgers won. And the only person that I know that sits on this dis that is a true Dodger fan is Marisella. I have been Well, I'm sorry, Brian. I always give you something, but today this is for Marisella. So, if you pass that down to her. I I did not know that about you. >> I I did not know that. But from day one
120when I met Maricella, she had Dodger stuff all over. >> So So go Dodgers. Well, thank you board members for your comments and about the Dodgers. I did sit through that 18 inning game the other night. >> So, I have I am a true Dodger fan as well, but I have a I have stuff already. >> Thank you very much. But, um, thank you for all the the comments. Uh, Raphael, thank you for your presentation. Like said, you did stand up for almost an hour giving you a presentation, but you had a lot to cover and we still have a long way to go, but I still stand by if we build it, they will come. We need students to get back into Englewood so that we can continue to do the things that we're
121doing and to make it better. And I just feel like, you know, the things that we're doing, I was impressed with the pictures that you showed of, you know, all the improvements that we've made. It's not like we haven't done anything cuz we have and I'm sure that those students I hope that they appreciate all the changes that we have made in this school district to make the buildings you know uh more appealing to want to come to and and like uh Dr. media said, but they have to appreciate what we've done and make sure that we are taking care of the things that we're doing. And you know that comes from the leadership in the schools, not just the kids. Because when I used to work at a school in LA Unified, it used
122to be that they answered the phone. This is beautiful berindo. Everybody had that in their head. This is a beautiful school and we're going to make sure that it stays beautiful. We've got to make sure that the people in this district feel like that in their classrooms and in on the football field. And I know we have lots of people who come and use our field, but still the leadership out there has to make sure that they're watching who's out there and to make sure that they take pride in what we have to offer them because there was a time they didn't have a decent field to run on. they were falling into holes and everything else, but we fixed it and we want to keep it looking the way that it was intended to
123be. So, um I thank you. It's been a long meeting. Uh thank you for your attention. I think we're we're satisfied with what we've done tonight. Thank you, Dr. Mars. >> Thank you. And I just have a couple of very very brief comments. Uh, I had the incredible honor that I am I'm on a high today because I had the incredible honor of being the substitute principal this morning at city honors. And you know, when you walk on a campus and I have 40 students address me by name. Uh there there is nothing like being able to have conversations with students. The associated student body president came to me with a problem. We were able to it. There's nothing like that connection with students and really helping them to see that we serve them. And
124you're right, we're not perfect, but we're here to serve kids and we have to give it our best every single day. I did want to mention just a couple of um uh incredible honors. I had an opportunity this past weekend with Mrs. Evans and Mr. Castillo to attend a Heads Up Foundation dinner and our two of our shining students um from City Honors. Patrick and Shawn both were given scholarships. The love of this community and encouraging students always makes my heart happy. I also just want to make a brief mention and honor our own Mr. Castillo who was uh named as Democrat of the year by Assembly Member McKiner and had a lovely event to honor him. With that, I'll say our next board of education meeting is scheduled for December the 10th. Um, and
125that will be our annual organization meeting. I do want to offer an adjourning moment, uh, adjourning motion this evening. Um, and adjourn our meeting in honor of two mothers. Um, we had two staff members who recently lost their mother. Sabrina Miller's mother, Marjgerie Robinson, passed away. and you know our thoughts and prayers are with Mrs. Miller and her family. Additionally, this morning u Melissa Williams the assistant principal at City Honors mother passed away. uh her mother Regina uh Williams um passed away and you know it's just it's it's it's a united community when we come together and we as a a leadership team can offer an adjourning motion in honor of uh Miss Robinson and Mrs. Williams. And so with that journing motion, we'll end our meeting at 6:41 p.m. with Izzy cells