September 17, 2024 - 10am Committee of the Whole

001e e e hello hello good morning this is Aso interpreter yes your name is Paula Paula all right we're waiting for two of your other co uh co-workers to log in um I was told that you're not e e e starting momentarily everybody good morning everyone and welcome to the first Committee of the whole meeting for the 2425 school year I'm scottson and I have the honor of chairing this committee for this academic year before we begin the presentation I have a few announcements and housekeeping items to share for those of you who are not familiar with what the committee of the whole is and its purpose let me tell you the committee of the whole is a committee composed of all seven board members of the board including the superintendent and it's meant to

002provide an open Forum discussion and exposition of topics of importance to the district which would otherwise be limited by the strict business meeting nature of the regular board meetings unless otherwise specifically stated in our rules or in board resolutions the committee of the whole does not typically take action on items I've also consulted with my colleagues and all the topics that we discuss in these meetings have been suggested by them as usual we will be taking public comment towards the end of the meeting additionally to comply with the brown act we will not discuss any items that have not been properly agendized for today's meeting before starting our presentations we will return sorry we will turn to any labor partners that wish to address the board do we have any labor Partners who would like

003to speak labor Partners no labor Partners okay uh let's see so uh before we get started with our first item let's say that uh in La USD it's crucial that our students and our families feel connected to their school site and that they have all the necessary resources and tools to succeed and that is why we at La USD will always support our divisions that provide direct support to our families because when they Thrive we all thrive today we have the pleasure of hearing from Mr Antonio Placencia senior director engagement and Partnerships at the division of communications engagement and collaboration as well as Miss Megan Guerrero region East family and Community engagement administrator they will provide us with an overview of how their department has been supporting our students our families and schools and with

004that Mr Placencia please introduce yourself and get us started on oh there we go greetings board member uh board vice president scharon uh board president Goldberg um board member superintendent carvalo and colleagues uh thank you for the opportunity to present today and feature the systems and procedures that have positioned Los Angeles Unified as a state and national leader and family engagement you're correct in Sharing when families are informed and empowered our students Thrive and we prepare them to be ready for the world the content we arrang for you today uh will feature the infrastructure arranged over um the last four years to invest in the hearts and minds of personnel who serve our families daily we will show you how we organize state and federal family engagement policy we will highlight areas of innovation and

005also provide to you highlights of data and technology that are supporting our movement for families I'm presenting today with my colleague and it will offer feature insights from our central office team um and the leaders in the office of student family and Community engagement along with the contributions of our region teams and to represent that perspective um I'm very proud to be standing here with Miss Megan gerero our administrative coordinator of family community engagement for region East the presentation prepared for us today has the title that of a reference that is in our strategic plan which states strong relationsships between family students and their schools to improve student achievement and this is a case because we know that family engagement is a strategy that supports our district goals for our agenda today let see there

006we go thank you uh for our agenda today um we were going to will be highlighting the areas of the Strategic plan our pillars and priorities we will transition to our family engagement organization to highlight that relationship between our parent and family centers our schools the region and central office how the Strategic plan makes connections with families our school volunteer program and U we'll also highlight opportunities that Miss GTO will um be speaking to us on about how we align our work with the region um support and how we're building what we call the knowhow in the research we hear about it being capacity building but what is that knowhow of how we help both our students and families and our school communities engage with one another let's begin with the Strategic plan pillars and

007priorities the program highlights we are presenting are largely due to the coherence fostered by our strategic plan this plan has enabled our family engagement and empowerment experts to focus sharply on how we provide learning and leadership development training from the parent and family centers and engagement experiences hosted at the school site to our region and Central offices during the Strategic plan key focused areas were identified through focus groups and surveys completed by families our practice um is aligned to the family engagement research and are arranged to help our schools create a a welcoming environment improve home to- School communication Foster engagement that builds strong relationships and honors the perspectives of parents and families we recognize that in day to School parent interactions there may be situations where parents feel upset about a school site um

008interaction or experience our Collective efforts when those do happen is to form strong bonds repair those relations ships and help our school sites stay focused and rooted in building that partnership with our families our family engagement teams are and school sites are continuously working to respond to family needs identifying root causes and focusing on cultivating relational trust the following slides will specifically demonstrate how the priorities of our strategic plan are organized to support families and schools featuring strong relationships accessible information and honoring perspectives additionally we're thankful to the district divisions leading other areas of the Strategic plan why family engagement is woven into every pillar of our strategic plan from academic Excellence to Joy and wellness to investing in staff behind the scenes you will find our family engagement colleagues collaborating with other divisions and

009departments focus on linking our families to to student learning and wellness these efforts are helping us link families to resources and helping cultivate family capacity to build Family Partnership with school sites the next section will feature how we are currently organized to support School sites and Families Our central office continues to utilize what we call the triple track focused to build our central office and region capacity to serve the School site leadership our services training and engagement are focused on building the knowhow to engage and improve the practices at school events workshops and most notably the supports offered through our parent and family Centers before diving into how we organize for Success it is important to knowe how family engagement research has informed our practice over 50 years of research shows that family engagement is

010a critical strategy for supporting student achievement and preparing students for the future many of our School site practitioners are found are aware of foundational texts from research such as Anthony Anthony BR who writes about relational trust Anne Henderson and her widely known beyond the B beyond the B cell book today's leading expert Dr Karen map has also contributed significantly with the dual capacity framework teaching us that engagement require requires investment both in families and our school Personnel when we refer to This research we learn key Concepts that serve as a foundation for fostering home to School connections these include respecting honoring and valuing family contributions when families feel respected valued they're more comfortable with communicating what they may need building trusting reciprocal relationship the families teamwork we see this in our councils and committees we

011see this in the teacher and parent relation ship focusing on capacity building how to support and communicate effectively when we talk about capacity building our investment as Regional and central office teams are focused in doing that helping cultivate what is working well and taking our practices to the next level and the research speaks to how do we co-construct learning opportunities with families it meaning finding ways for families to co-present and inform the engagement offered at the district and in their school communities found engagement organization our found engagement team operates in a cyclical process always reviewing data reviewing practice and thinking about how we improve our overall practice reflecting on continuous Improvement overall the office of student family and Community engagement sface are aligns initiatives and procedures with state requirements and the district's strategic plan it

012also develops content that is used by our region teams as well as our school sites as you will see in this presentation the region family and Community engagement teams conduct parent and Family Center trainings organize professional development and Summits provide customized what we call our tier 2 our tier three supports for schoolside assistance and engage with the region Family Academy and ambassadors to offer two-way engagement opportunities in an in poron format this also includes arranging data informed clinics and hosting office hours to offer tier three support for school sites to help improve um data outcomes at the school level the heart of our school communities administrators and coordinators work together to organize family engagement workshops events activities that align with the school's initiatives and the district strategic plan they serve as models by setting expectations

013for how we engage and honor diverse family perspective Ives as parents we're grateful to for the time and Leadership they dedicate to supporting our communities the parent and Family Center staff at each School site are a vital link between families and the school Community they play a key role in creating a welcoming environment in the parent and Family Center organizing a calendar of events and advancing the Strategic plan including initiatives like Parent Portal volunteer efforts and the Family Academy they play a key role in creating a welcoming environment in the parent family center organizing a calar of events and they're a key link to helping families Champion how they're served and welcomed at their school community so how are we connecting with families and how is this informed by our data learning and leadership development

014we oftentimes refer to this as professional development through our strategic plan we're very proud to have put in place um valuable research um showing us that as we compare ourselves to neighboring Urban school districts we're finding that our supports in the area of professional leading uh learning and leadership development is a leader in the region and in the state this is an area where Los Angeles Unified stands out both in California nationally in the professional development infrastructure that we have embedded in our in our school system now entering in its third year you'll see here that we have been offering Summits to guide School administrators and coordinators office personnel and parent and Family Center Personnel through learning about online platforms practices and procedures including Parent Portal the school volunteer program The Family Guide to the

015Strategic plan councils and committees welcoming environment initiatives and how to conduct budget consultations with families and the school Community our evaluations from our professional development Summits for family engagement reveal that 80% of our participants value the time dedicated by School administration and family engagement experts from the school site um coming together to reflect and improve practices for engaging communicating with and serving families Los Angeles Unified is also the first district in the United States to introduce a family engagement micr credential for teachers coordinators and coaches the initiative launch in partnership with human resources is now in its second cohort with applications closing soon this is the first micro credential for family engagement developed by a school system in the US I'd like to take this opportunity for our School site leaders that may know teachers

016coordinators Community School coordinators that may be interested to learn more about our Michael credential by visiting lusd.org g/m cred additionally our team offers Consulting and program implementation assistance to the divisions and offer offices reference on this slide we also benefit from content expertise and collaboration with Partners from the division of instruction division of special education the multi-lingual Multicultural education department and business offices to name a few Parent Portal we have walked the journey with Parent Portal the parent portal has significant ific L increased usage especially in meeting strategic plan goals of linking student information to parent Accounts at the start of the 2121 school year approximately 50% of students were linked to a parent account the Strategic plan set annual growth targets of 4% and while we were slightly under the Target by the end

017of the 23 school year we exceeded the goal in the most recent year reaching 84.5% we continue to focus on introducing new ways for families to engage with the parent portal and to increase the frequency of its use the Family Academy the Family Academy is a new initiative included in our strategic plan we are now in our third year and now the region and central office teams continuously measure customer satisfaction through alcer surveys and participant polls each year families help identify topics using the thought exchange tool and the team uh curate course cataloges featuring subjects in the areas of academics joy and wellness Civic engagement College and Career for students and parents and honoring diverse perspectives through our Council and committee work this initiative has encourage us to innovate in how we engage families and

018organize translation services utilizing both traditional inpersonal events and newer models like hybrid and webinar formats we aim to increase participation by at least 10% each year and average an audience of approximately 500 participants per webinar two highlights of events featured in this slide um in front of you include our beloved segment on science of reading and language in person events which Drew over 150 parents and their kiddos um at s Pula Middle School families learned about the brain and how leaders develop into leaders additionally we are very excited because we are hosting TV screening for our applicants of the school volunteer program to assist our Volunteers in completing this task the fourth session of the season is scheduled on September 26 at Webster Middle School the holistic course catalog is available for families we text

019this and send it out to our students through schoolly and it is also sent out to families through social media Blackboard messages and through our school sites in coordination with our region leadership including directors the course catalog for the fall semester is available at lausd.org slamily Academy September is a month when we assist School sites in forming School site Council and the English learner advisory committee each year 100% of our school sites aim to establish these councils and committees and members are invited to attend both webinar and in-person training session scheduled for October beginning on October 5th we will be hosting both training in webinar and in-person formats the webinar provides information on the roles of the councils and committees while the in-person sessions offer additional support through interactive application we know that inperson experience

020Fosters that two-way interactive application and that is exactly what we're going to be offering as we enter the month of October the office of student family and Community engagement provides parents with mileage reimbursement in child care that is permitted to facilitate participation last year 96% of school sites successfully formed their committees our Target for this year is 98% meaning that the Committees are fully formed and have completed their responsibilities assigned to them by the state examples of school sites that may not fulfill all requirements include option schools and schools with a low number of English Learners nonetheless we are resilient and we do our best to help continue the engagement and the learning that is made available to our Council and committee members each year there are instances where families may not agree with their

021procedures and with our region and central office teams we make ourselves available to collect documents and assist schools in improving their practice ongoing training is also offered beyond our October um trainings for s and elac members Beyond October the Family Academy offers workshops where we help members learn about the topics and information that we experience as members along the year the schedule is available at lausd.org Family Academy at the central level the three District level committees that are supported um are supported by our family engagement teams and the expert offices that facilitate the training the office of student family and Community engagement assists with the logistics the planning and provides training in the areas of parliamentary procedures and green act understanding data smart comments hosting committees and subcommittees and members are also invited to inform

022our practice through focus groups when whenever another division or department is requesting focused group participation to improve the LA or to inform the launch of an initiative we invite our committee members to be thought Partners in the conversations the following offices provide the training content and materials requested by committee members and officers for the community advisory committee the division of special education offers training focused on the special education local plan area for the district English learner advisory committee they're provided additional respon responsibility by the state the multilingual and Multicultural education department does an excellent job of really thinking about listening and responding with the training that is offered around English learner topics whereas the local control and accountability plan content is arranged by the Strategic initiatives office and our title three Consolidated application is Guided

023by our partners at federal state education programs office the parent advisory committee the third of our committees is T um identified by the state to learn be trained and offer comments or recommendations on the local control and accountability plan um that is and that training and that content is curated by our colleagues in the Strategic initiative office each year our office at esface consults with officers and members to develop a training syllabus that is available to the public at lusd.org committees these three committees are advisory and provide comments and recommendations and together we've developed the topics and the learning plan as we move forward in the academic year last year our office facilitated a comparison by reaching out to Urban school districts to identify practice uh for engaging District level committees in the state of

024California and we found out that Los Angeles Unified invests greater number of meeting time planning time and also learned our bulletins our agendas and bylaws are replicated by other school systems in California I will not transition to talk about our school volunteer program this is a unique initiative that has undergone significant enhancements and improvements in partnership with multiple offices divisions and the recommendations that have been captured by also our Volunteers in the field the schol volunteer program has continued to grow surpassing measures outlin in our strategic Plan before adopting the Strategic plan approximately 12,000 volunteers were approved and 10,000 applications were often left unattended by the end of the 2223 school year the number of volunteers peaked to 15,000 to 181 and close this last school year with 36,960 23 school year this measure was

02543.4% and we knew we needed to do better and we did we observed significant improvements last year with a percentage increasing to 7 7% that alone is an increase of 77% in the processing with existing resources currently for the um 2425 school year we're at 81% and we're working to our way to get to 84% I want to pause here and send a note of gratitude to our school sites region and central office teams for working together to process our volunteer applications as we increase the number of approved applications by 136% with existing resources we also significantly improve the processing time of volunteers one example of a Family Academy segment we hosted this year um is uh projected here for us and it's an example of our TV screenings this is a picture at Monroe

026High School where we invited through the Family Academy our families to join in forces in partnering with the office of the chief medical director and we arranged a very efficient DM like environment where families came in our school nurses were able to provide the TV screening facilitate administered and our volunteers were on their way to getting their applications processed and approved the other area of excitement includes our enhancements to the actual volunteer management system when I get phone calls from volunteers asking where is my application in the process we log on with them in real time and we show them exactly where it is are enhancements have improved transparency for all users regarding the status of applications in the approval process applications highlighted in yellow indicate that they are incomplete and require additional information from

027the applicant or a School site design a green code signifies that the application is currently under review by the central office while a purple code denotes that application has been approved once approved volunteers receive an automatic approval letter along with a temporary Badge of service we share this information with you because it shows our commitment to helping our school sites and this year for the first time we started taking applications in the month of May the school year previous to the start of of the new FIS school year it was a recommendation made by school community members we made it happen and by the first day of school there were 6,000 active volunteers ready to serve at their school campuses these are examples of the resources we make available for our volunteers including our TV

028screening which is highlighted here our guide to volunteering our blueprint for fingerprint process for tier three volunteers which includes individuals that are volunteering in the you know lunch area overnight field trips volunteering with activities that are pupil enrichment activities they do require Liv scan and we provide that at no cost to our Volunteers in collaboration with staff relations at this moment uh to close our our presentation I invite my colleague Miss Megan GLE that will give you highlights of our work from the perspective of the region Anon good morning esteemed board members superintendent and colleagues my name is Megan Guerrero following 13 amazing years as an elementary school principal I am starting my third year serving as face family and Community engagement administrative coordinator at far region East schools and families um I'm going to

029go ahead and go um our region face team aligns our efforts to the district strategic plan um following key datab based actions and strategies as outlined by esface in addition we are an integral part of the fabric of our region leaders and staff supporting both instructional and operational priorities throughout the region providing timely and relevant professional development to our region family engagement teams is a key part of our work we constantly seek to elevate family engagement as an essential part of our school strategies for improving student achievement our annual family engagement Summit you can see the flyer here on the slide um was held at elac last December included almost 400 School leaders and parent and Family Center staff digging into family engagement topics such as honoring perspectives on our school councils and committees uh

030volunteer programs Parent Portal welcoming environment and then expanding into how to share I ready with families or how to create Better Community Partnerships the summit has also reinforced the idea that family engagement is a team effort is not the sole responsibility of the community representative on a monthly basis we also at the region have the opportunity to elevate family engagement goals strategies strategies and actions to principles uh tsp and Title One coordinators uh even our saas to talk about welcoming environment and our monthly parent and family staff professional development which I'll talk about next for our parent and family centers um we target these um parent and Family Center or PFC professional development for Community Representatives um it includes recurring topics of Parent Portal developing compliant and effective volunteer program supporting their schools elac and

031SSE and creating welcoming environments for all of our families we have shifted to in-person PD sessions for these groups of finding that bringing our PFC staff together to share promising practices and ensure that they have access to key uh platforms and data is the most efficient and effective way to create more coherence and Alignment to the district goals now when we're not providing training and PD our parent education support assistant at the region and our region Community representatives are out in our schools across the region to provide individual support to school staff that is on a daily basis often we tear these supports where there might be say a new community representative or data indicates a need for some additional support um there's a staffing issue or a school with new leadership our team distributes

032posters and current information for our family centers to ensure that these spaces are set up as true classrooms for families to learn and support their children's achievement most importantly during these site visits our team members engage in goal setting and strategizing with parent and Family Center staff to achieve District benchmarks our region Family Academy seeks to provide timely and relevant topics to families focused on student achievement each month these topics are also aligned with space and strategic plan priorities uh the regions provide multiple hybrid learning sessions per month in the morning and late afternoon or evening seeking to find topics and schedules that align to our fam's needs and priorities in this photo at John Ley Middle School uh families are engaged in a Hands-On learning opportunity about creating a family budget uh for example

033needs versus wants led by the California Coalition for economic engagement our face team supports region and District events as well always seeking to lead with the lens of what do families need to know uh what role might families play in this initiative and how might we share this information better with our families um as we align our support to the region and District finally uh our region ambassador program offers learning opportunities for our families nine times throughout the year in three distinct areas English Learners elcap and students with disabilities uh these sessions are provided in a hybrid format to provide maximum accessibility for families uh with coordinate coordination with espace uh we collaborate with the various divisions to ensure that the quote experts are in the room to provide the most accurate information and support

034with questions families may have on the spot we encourage families to attend all three sessions in one area in order to culminate and receive an ambassador certificate um thank you at this Point Mr Placencia and I can support with any questions you may have and thank you so much for the presentation Mr Placencia and Miss Guerrero thank you so much I'll open up to questions from our panel Dr McKenna yeah thank you I appreciated that uh the entire presentation few questions um when you have your uh region Family Academy meetings three to four learning sessions per month what time of day do you conduct these we vary it so we have some that are from 9:00 to 10:30 to give P families enough time to drop off their children and come either in person or

035log on to the zoom because they're all hybrid um or we tend to start after 4:30 for 5 to 6:30 so we offer a variety of morning and evening you have a variety of of opportunities for parents to participate that's correct we also offer segments on Saturdays Saturday mornings to be available for our families that may have working CL sort of like you know class schedules or working Community schedules and one element that we're embedding into the Family Academy this year is that we've purchased um a tool that will curate all of our recorded content Our Family Academy webinars are from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. they're recorded and families will be able to review them in a channel like format um through the parent portal in the future um in general do we P how

036what are the ways we try to encourage people to be a volunteer as opposed to and that would be the opposite of their own poition and initiative because they have this urge to to volunteer but nobody tries to persuade them do we have a recruitment or persuasive model that says or I call it gentle aggravation uh to come in be be around your children while they're in in school or whatever they want to do it it seems to me that if we don't have something waiting on the already inspired to participate narrows it down from the others who may need to participate because the lack of participation is reflect less achievement how do you do that yeah um one effort that we're currently working on is for example everyone mentors La the beauty of our

037school volunteer program is that volunteerism on our school sites is you know opportunities to support the parent and Family Center the playground the campus facilities support programming on the school sites a program like everyone mentors La invites members of our school Community to sign up uh and become a mentor of a student so we're utilizing programs such as um everyone mentors LA to help entice members to be of service as a professional as an expert someone that wants to give back to a student and be able to engage with our students at the school site is every school required or expected to have a parent C parent and Family Center on campus the parent and family centers we have uh we completed a survey of parent and family centers and approximately 97% of our schools

038have a parent and Family Center or a space that is identified as a meeting space where families can engage it all depends on um sort of space availability but when one ex exciting data point is that 100% of our Title One schools do have a parent and Family Center but no it's not required not required okay thank you let me just follow through with one of your questions um does your division have any funding available this year for schools that don't have a parent Center or have an inadequate parent Center and uh you know in my schools we try to make sure the parent Center is as close to the front of the school as possible so people don't have to go searching for the parent Center number one number two it has to look

039nice you don't want to see a room full of mismatched furniture and broken computers you don't want to see that you want to see a really nice nice parent Center room so there's funding it used to be funding for that is there still funding for that the um the bond funded parent and family set a renovation project I believe modernized close to 50% of our parent and family centers uh that was funding that specifically was arranged to to modernize our parent and family centers with The Branding furniture and Technology last year with erer funds that we were able to utilize we invested in our priority schools and priority schools were invited to request updated technology laptop carts for example translation equipment because we know it's popular for our families um or Furniture uh so those

040were funds that were available with that period of time at the moment we don't have a set budget designated for that one area of investment we did make was to purchase uh posters and branding materials and we are going to be working this year with our parent and family centers to ensure all of our parent centers have relevant strategic plan aligned and program service aligned messaging in their centers but we do not have that funding at the moment good to hear good to hear questions Jackie from time to time this is to the region Miss Guerrero uh from time to time our office gets complaints from parents that say I wanted to be a volunteer but the principal says oh we're not having volunteers this year if they call the Region and complain about that

041what happens that's a great question so first we would look in the system and see if they have any registered volunteers waiting to be processed if they're just sitting there waiting um and then we would reach out to the community representatives to see what sort of programs and opportunities um and also as administrators we would reach out to the principal and let them know that it is a right of our families to volunteer on their campuses whether they have at home opportunities like they take work home to work on or whether they are um providing opportunities within the School site there are always opportunities so we would talk to them about what those might be look at their programs see where families that have the time and availability might be able to assist and then

042help them get going with processing those volunteer applications so uh I'm really talking about some resistance to this by some Administration not much but we get those complaints from time to time should my office say call your region absolutely okay absolutely we can come we've been coming out and supporting um the volunteer orientations this year as well which are required and um we want to make sure that we're hearing about those opportunities that there's a system for it to be organized so that families know when and where they can assist there's training and support for them and um and then we can assist our fellow administrators with how to get that program started in their schools as well similarly yes and again from a small number but nonetheless a number we will get complaints that

043the people on the Committees the school committees are large the parents are largely quote selected by the administration as friendly people to their point of view and that they have sort of rigged the system so if a parent feels like I've been trying to get on one of these councils but it seems like it's already done before I get there again do they call the Region yes and we also feel those calls we follow up um so we can look at the compliance angle right all the paperwork that the elections were held in a fair and compliant manner also timeliness of those um and then we would follow up also on the side of you know how how was this messaged out to families um was this done fairly um what's been the process have

044folks had okay you said that on October the 5th there was going to be training on councils and committees how does how do parents know that that exists how do you tell them here's a train you want to do this here's a training on October the 5th how's how you sign up for it great question uh so for the once you become elected this is right now we are in in key schools side Council formation season elac formation season Once our school sites complete their formation process they upload to your question about monitoring of election all School sites upload their documents to the principal portal those principal portals include collection of minutes sign-in sheets documentation Zoom usage reports to verify that the school sites are following required procedures and that the elections take place for

045the purpose of the trainings once our school sites upload their School site counil on elac member information and principal portal we send them direct invitations so they received a paper invitation to attend either a webinar and or in person we encourage both especially for our parents and high school students because the webinar trains on the general procedures the in-person is practitioner applicable in the practice of being a member so they do get messaging in Blackboard um text messages email and they also receive a personal invitation which is why we ask our schools to help us informing by September 27th so that in turn we can start to send out messaging targeted to our membership so this training isn't on how to get onto a CS this is how after you've gotten on a council correct

046so when do we tell parents how to get onto a council the orientation so the orientation is held prior to the election process at at and how is that or orientation is that in Li alive is it is it hybrid is it it's hybrid so both the orientations on elections must be hybrid according to the policy and how do parents know about it to sign on to it if they want to know so they our requirements around posting with the 72 hours for the both the orientations and elections so those are posted physically at the school site as well as on websites and other messaging applications that the school use or um ins Blackboard connect as well I would I would urge you to figure out a way to actually send it whether they ask

047for it or not because a lot of what I find out is is that parents not a lot of times but sometimes find out that there were elections after they were concluded and they thought oh well I thought maybe I would do that this year but it's too late now and I think rather than I I was excited down this October 5th training but I thought it was training on how to get on to it I'd love to see a training on how to get onto a council before not just uh 72 hours but a week or two before that actual formation starts because what we hear is well I don't have time to look every day to see what notices I've got so can they call me can they send me can there be

048something that tells me we're about to form committees if you're interested we're going to give you a quick training on how to apply to be on one because I hear a lot after the fact oh gee I missed that and they they tell me it was their own fault that there was something sent but they didn't see it in time so I'm wondering if we could be more aggressive in letting people know about it so that we have fewer people calling up and saying gee it's a shame I I wanted to do it and I didn't notice this until it was after the elections were over absolutely we can add that to our August course catalog for the new year to promote the formation of School site Council in elac and do note that the

049evidence of posting and messaging to families is collected because every second year um we are audited by the state this is an an auditing year for federal program monitoring and they do collect all the documentation but I love the idea and we will put that into practice well the reason I say that is is that parents are busy they're working sometimes more than one job they have kids not in one school but maybe two or three schools and they're busy and if we don't kind of encourage them to sign up if they're if they're interested a lot of them find out after it's too late not because of anybody's fault but because they sort of it did it got away from them because they got a lot on their plate it happened so early in

050the school year as well and I know many um School sites are strategic about including the announce anoun ment within their back to school night if they do that early including it in the orientations for new students if they have kindergarten I'm just anxious that we do everything possible to let people know this is coming here's how you do it here's what you need to do here are the deadlines for things because if more people know about how to do it I think more people will take advantage of the opportunity thank you I'm done let me just follow through and a couple of Jackie's comments and I'll get to you Kelly okay um Blackboard connect so easy to use my goodness uh I mean I can't think of a simpler way to inform our parents

051about what's happening as Blackboard connect but getting back to Jackie's question can you um provide us with the current membership list for the uh the three Central committees by Board District because I think we'd all like to know who's on our Central committees uh by Board District and also I remember the timeline you mentioned like for volunteers 30 days I think you're hoping to get it all done by 30 days so um from the time a parent applies to when they're finally cleared and they're given an assignment how do they find out if they're cleared well you showed me that list of um processing and accepted um so who who looks that up for them uh wonderful question suppose I don't have a computer at home I don't have internet yeah each School site has

052a volunteer program design so the administrator of the school site I designates a coordinator AP or parent and Family Center to follow the application the application um system will show the School site design what are the missing items so it might be the TV screening that is missing it might be the Life Scan that is pending those are the two items that are the big delays our 30-day countdown begins when the volunteer completes their side of the process meaning they've completed the Life Scan and the TV screening process um the TV the School site can see exactly where the application is and when they move it it comes to the central office and I'm very proud to say that for this year we have been processing every application the week it comes in right now

053we're averaging about 2,800 applications every Monday that we download and process and we have been processing those by the following weekend so today we have for example process applications um through this um uh Monday I know that's a wonderful system and I know it's working and I'll tell you how I know it's working is because I don't have these calls and emails constantly about where is my application so it is working so I thank you Kelly thank you um well thank you both for the presentation and I think there's a lot of great work that you all are leading so it's wonderful to have an opportunity to highlight it um one is the the familyies I know as an L parent myself I've participated in some of them and I just wanted to compliment you

054all on the just the breath of topics that are covered there are so many um different and important areas that are being highlighted for our families and um I think that that work is really to be commended I think there was also a component that was the equity Pathways as part of the familyies I didn't see anything on in the presentation was wondering if you could speak to it that is family empowerment take it to the next level one uh key area of thought that superintendent carvalo brought to us when uh we started the Family Academy was about how are we linking families to opportunities that build generate wealth that builds higher skills abilities to navigate and succeed in the workforce and so we partnered with the division of adult and Career Education and there

055are four courses that are branded as family engagement but it's a hook to get our parents to think about a vocational pathway beyond that seven class experience we have four courses that start off with our youngest Learners if you are a parent preschool AED how to navigate the system of public education is complex we developed curriculum with the division of early childhood education and we are now in our U second year of the equity course Pathways um and it's a small cohort experience of about 25 students and they go through the process they culminate and then at the end we working with um with uh reny n in the division of adult um education their ambassadors or their Outreach sort of um you know leads in days call the parents to to help them enroll

056in ESL classes possibly a high school diploma pathway or another vocational pathway the second one is um English learner um Equity core pathway and that is for families to understand the journey they're going to experience to help their child to reach their dreams and be ready for the world the third one which was one we heard so consistently from our families was around the topic of special education fam saying we want to build community um as parents who might have a child with a special need and that course pathway was developed with the division of special education and the fourth one which is also one requested by families is around black student ex Excellence how do we build community within African-American uh families to understand how Bap and other supports are arranged to assist them

057families um if they go to the lusd.org Family Academy there's a flyer there um we also survey families um we text them we ask them to sign our rec um sort of their interest form and then our our D colleagues will call them to say we're starting a new cohort would you like to jump back on thank you that's fantastic yeah no I know that as I was participating I saw those being advertised um and I think it really just speaks to the the spectrum of offerings that were offering families you know light dose help or you can kind of intensify and really grow your leadership and um and a vocation at that so thank you so much um I also wanted to ask about uh the school team family engagement Summits that were highlighted

058kind of what what are the intended outcomes intended and actual outcomes that we saw from those experiences from a central perspective we completed uh almost like an accident needs assessment to look at root causes for the school volunteer program Parent Portal the school experience survey we're looking at our data and we're noticing that we're trying to get it and push it up to increase we're like in the mid to high 80s so to do that we realized that we had to engage our schools side teams in meaningful dialogue around how do we fulfill that void or that need that families have especially when it comes down to completing that school experience survey with that we've identified topics that we know are essential to both School administrators parent and Family Center personnel and our offices to

059be knowledgeable about so we have a segment on welcoming environment and um in the past we've focused on what are the practices the habits the physical space the curbside appeal how to build that this year we're going to take the conversation a little more about how are we engaging the diverse demographic of multilingual Learners of the ethnic and sort of the racial representation of our school system Parent Portal there were a lot of questions many practitioners didn't really know the ins and outs of Parent Portal I would say the jump in our data is because of our we're now in our third year of having a professional development structure that was not previously there school volunteer program the difference between the tiers that we've simplified to align to the requirements of the State of California

060we have to say that our school sites are knowledgeable about and now are maintaining a wonderful Cadence of processing volunteers um so right right now we're focusing on those areas of the Strategic plan around the school experience survey and we hope that as we think about these particular touch points of making every interaction with a parent golden that we will take ourselves to the '90s when it comes to families communicating that they receive resources from their school and is my school environment welcoming so those are the objectives of the Summits and we are now in our third year great it's good to hear that they're very action oriented and that we're pointing to different data that we think has moved because of those um speaking of the parent portal since you mentioned it um I'm

061pleased to see the the progress there just in terms of the what 18% um of families that are still not connected um what more do you think we can do to help reach those um maybe hardest to reach families but the ones who maybe need that linkage to school the most um how are we being Innovative and how we approach that and reaching families where they are that is about humanizing the connections it doesn't matter how large we are it's about humanizing and making direct connections making those phone calls with families we have um one of our team members that was brought on to support our priority school network and etto and the education transformation office um her name is Dr Brenda Regalado uh Dr Regal is our point on tier three supports School sites

062where data is seen whether it be through data dig conversations or where we're observing the data not moving in the the pro Progressive sort of a process that we want to see realized that aligns with District sort of uh average we offer and designate Personnel I myself and members of our Administration team will go to school sites we'll identify root causes there was one high school in region South where we came together because they were like in the mid-50s this year they're now in the 75% range because we have been phone banking talking to families interacting with them so those are some of the factors where when the data is not moving in the right place we have supports coordinating with the priority school team to ensure that we're dispatching supports from our teams to

063offer not the you should do but rather let's do it together if that makes sense can I add one please and also just also digging into the purpose of Parent Portal as we start to deepen the understanding of why have parent portal it also helps to connect families oh I can see my child's assignments in schooly through Parent Portal my child's in middle school or high school so also providing trainings and familyies on the why what you can do with Parent Portal and schoy I can see my child's IEP that's a motivation right um requesting a device was a motivation and that increased our numbers greatly so once there's more connectivity to the purpose and why this is important to understand how my child's doing in school that also increases our numbers so we've tried

064to focus there as well absolutely we can't assume that our families know why this is important we've got to be clear and upfront about about the why um I have a couple more but I'll I'll stop there and I just want to thank Miss GTO I actually sat in on a session you L at the PLC on family engagement for our administrators and um I think going back to some of Miss Goldberg's questions like making sure that our administrators have the the right mindset um positive asset based thinking about our families and um are really thinking about that partnership for the very beginning is so important and I just wanted I I thought I was only there for a few minutes but I thought it was an excellent session so just want to give you

065some Kudos thank you and we will get to everybody on round one let me just get to one of Kelly's questions which I think is important to me also can you provide data by um Schoolboard District on the percent of parents that are active on the parent portal I'd love to know by School District Schoolboard district and uh for those parents who are not active on the parent portal do we know the reason that they're not active that would be my question to you guys um some of the data would would suggest that we do have a a significant um newcomer population and we you know and we know that we have Dr Miranda that will be coming up next uh but just the state of California in which in I guess in in the

066manner in which it makes data available it's for the legal guardian um so there are uh instances where um you know specific U caretakers do not have the access to to you know educational records so that is one factor of why some students might not uh be linked but I know that its is working with um other other departments like such as a division of of instruction to think about what would be that student facing tool that can complement to link um populations that might not be able to access Parent Portal um the other factor is as Megan highlighted is what is the value of parent portal so when we do make those personal phone calls we explain not only how to link to it but we also guide them to learn how to use

067it um it begins at times with helping the parents set up an email address which is like step one um I don't have an email address and guiding them through the process and then inviting our School site Community reps and others to continue that guidance of helping the parent become comfortable with the online applications so we understand that while we're thinking very globally centrally we're also very mindful about how we coordinate to help those families um develop those foundational skills thank you so we'll continue with round one Miss Ortiz Franklin thank you and sorry I missed physically most of the presentation but my team and I had a chance to look through and they were taking notes throughout um some of my questions have been asked but I have one quick uh follow-up to ask

068and then kind of a deeper question and the follow-up I think you've heard some questions about numbers Parent Portal usage uh participation in the familyies you know the feedback on theis I don't know if it's the best to put it in executive dashboard or like a quarterly board informative but I feel like this kind of data would be helpful for us to receive regularly if the team can kind of figure out the right Cadence for that I know my team would love to see it for our Board District but maybe there are particular schools that are doing phenomenally we'd love to visit and learn from so the request is you know given all of the data points how can the board get it more regularly you will be getting a board informative very Su soon

069um one has already been arranged with that information okay and and then then like the regularity of it too if it's you know once a quarter once a semester or something would be would' be helpful um and I guess my deeper question is you know it seems like we're doing a lot in a lot of different spaces and yet you know given our public meetings we are often hearing about the challenges of like meaningful authentic you know Family Partnership and and I get the spirit of you know co-constructing agendas um this like reciprocal feedback I guess I'm curious you know what the team has thought about is like a root cause for some of those concerns that we keep hearing um and like how widespread that is and and I can anticipate you know the

070louder voices come to board meetings um given their roles or their ability to come here more often um but you know we we hear similar voices over and over and you know it' be nice to know um and even for ourselves to Think Through you know what what's at the root of that and is there anything we can do on um really helping our our families feel like Partners in the work when you know we hear some of the same concerns and yet we're doing so so much you know we develop our syllabus with our district level committees annually this year we are facilitating an AET an need assessment uh with a third party partner to help gauge and see where we are doing really well and where we can improve um to help hear

071and collect that voice um that's one element that we're going to be embedding this year as we get the school year started the second component is that we do develop the syllabus with our three committees it's not a matter of this is what we're doing in the year there is required topics that we have to cover the state of California says the special the CAC has to cover the local plan area deac as I highlighted has very targeted assigned responsibilities and so does the pack what oftentimes happens is that there are requests for information that they bring to our the family engagement side of the house that we cannot outright just say I will provide to you so we are good Advocates and stewards of trying to do our best of getting um real-time information

072one example of information that they've been um requesting from the district level committee perspective is real time um you know budgets that show realtime expenditures so what we've done is that we say we cannot do that for you in a real-time tool at the moment but our teams have worked toward finding ways to give them an Excel file or document to let them know that we're working in good faith some of the advocacy you may oftentimes hear is around areas of compensating persons um stiens we have written proposals um scenarios of how we might do that but we're told that the purpose of a committee for example at the district level is to serve in a volunteer capacity so that they're truly providing us a parent perspective um without compensation however the what the state

073does allow us to do is to provide partial child care reimbursement 1 hour before the meeting the three hours are with us and the hour they head home and we're also able to provide um mileage um so those are items that we're able to work on but I would say our Central offices we have very direct conversations and saying these are the items our parents are requesting of us on our Central committees and one commitment that I know I'm very grateful to the Strategic initiatives office multilingual Multicultural education department and division of special education is that we're again we're going to keep going back to review the data information resources am MOD and we'll codify that we build the syllabus not as a tool to sort of um for to be a sort of a

074nice document to have but it's the arrangements that we agree to between the district and our officers for example to identify and line up the trainers that are going to be coming in but we're constantly doing better we're trying to hear and listen and um bring into our committee members what they would want from the district if that makes sense yeah I appreciate that and I know um you know bearing degrees of levels of satisfaction and and desires of information um so I appreciate the team you know for continuing to work on those things um and if you have tips for how board offices can can be helpful in fostering those relationships or um you know getting to underneath some of those needs you know we'd be happy to be better Partners in that as

075well so thanks for your team's leadership round one continues any questions no okay let's go to Kelly for round two I was just hoping you could expand a little bit on the micr credentialing program um that was actually news to me and I think that's really exciting um if you could share more about the number of participants and um how we hope that our Educators participating in this might also grow more Educators at their site who are really focused and skilled at Family engagement we started the dream of establishing a micr credential you know the the Summits were the level of organization to engage our school teams but the area that we can't really come into as with great frequency as a classroom right because our teachers are um in classroom spaces um and what

076was done with human resources we started to develop the curriculum using the model that is followed by human resources for micr credentialing uh we develop curriculum that is aligned both to our district practice the national competencies for family engagement and also state and federal policy um so we have a full curriculum that has been developed and fully implemented we had about um 10 participants um engaged in the first year of the micr credential um we recruit our school sites through the webinars presentations flyering that is arrange with human resources to be synchronized and aligned um and this year um we're hoping to double our number of participants um they meet um in our family engagement office it's an in-person experience and by the time they culminate with us they know the basics of the literature

077and practice they learn about the mindset and the adult androgogy of serving adult Learners um and we uh go into the practice um the program Ends by each participant completing a problem album of practice where they host a family engagement activity at their School site um and we're looking forward to getting started with cohort 2 great thank you and if we can help spread the word so that we can hit that doubling goal uh please let us know Miss Goldberg I want to go back to region ambassadors a minute so um host three sessions per topic per year when you become a region Ambassador then what or is that just a title and a certificate or does that require you or encourage you to do other things or is it just well we know you've

078at least had topics of choice about disabilities and elap and English Learners great question we leverage our ambassador work to help expand the the reach of families to want to learn more about how they can support their child and also how to inform other parents about District resources available at La unified we see that as a venue to recruit for our district level committees to encourage the participation in our volunteer program to just communicate the basics of Parent Portal it is a space where you can come in and understand the services available through special education for English Learners and the lcap based on topics that we know are very rooted in family excitement or passion because it's connected to their child and that's where we bring them in to say join School site Council join

079the English learner advisory committee become an active parent join our parent organizations it is a hook to helping capture a larger mass of families closer to their neighborhoods so that is one um L it says you have uh hosted over 1500 participants uh all across regions in the current school year 2425 once you've uh hosted them how how what happens next I'm I'm just trying to see what the pattern is of how you get to be an ambassador and then what we're urging you to do once you've become one right when we begin the Ambassador effort we um they complete three sessions throughout the year and who is the they um our parents our parents how did they know about this to do this yeah our parents are um provided information it's included in our

080course catalog for the Family Academy it's provided to our school sites for distribution we also um email directly and we forward to our families directly we use another tool it's an online voter I me um an online um registration tool and we send that information out to families and it allows them to request additional reminders Beyond Blackboard we know our families oftentimes get upset by feeling they're getting too many Blackboard messages so what we've done is that we've purchased a tool that allows parents um to get additional frequency such as an email text message letting them know your session is starting you might want to log on now so we do ACC utilize all of our access points for messaging and engagement but like I shared our families attend three sessions throughout the year they

081meet they gather three times a year either online or in person and then at the end of the year we talk to them about additional leadership opportunities that they can engage in as they get ready for the new new school year all right all right that's that's the key I was looking for is okay so I've done this I've gone to the sessions and then what so you have a list of these people right now we do yes we do have a roster of our participants that um engage with and I did you request that by region I'd like to see just how many per region are are are region ambassadors not by region by Board District so we can see should we be doing more to encourage them to become region ambassadors because we

082got a low number over a high number so rock on you know whatever okay we we we do collect our participation numbers and we can send that to you as well I think I had one more question uh oh in terms of the academy is it in bilingual is are these courses in Spanish as well as in English um for actually going back to the regional Ambassador often times we have presented the one that's focused on English Learners our presenters we've done it in Spanish and then had the simultaneous District translation in English so that's and then most of our sessions are presented in English with simult translation in the in the languages requested but if I go to the uh Family Academy are the courses in English and Spanish or just in English we

083offer for all of our family Academy sessions we offer them in with in um English Spanish uh interpretation and for our webinars we also do schedule um ASL interpretation okay you anticipated my next question all right I think that's all I had thank you hey thank you Jackie second round U Miss Ortiz Franklin no go ahead Kelly just one last Quick data request since there were a few like this um on the school volunteer piece if we could also get that um by by Board District it would be helpful to know if the increase was felt you know universally districtwide or in more in certain areas more than others but I do think that that's a great Improvement opening it up in May and I heard a lot of enthusiasm about that so again congratulations

084thank you and what you heard is what I hear all the time by Board District by Board District by Board District it's much more helpful for us as board members than getting a gigantic amount I like well I like that too but I want to see how my own district is doing in comparison to others George second round I don't want to use up all the time because there's so many things that I'd like to know I ask too quick do do you have a budget for Refreshments for participants we do uh for our district level committees because we do meet for a period of about 3 to 4 hours um we follow our district bulletin and we provide like a general protein so yes we do have a budget for refreshments and we also

085have one for our inperson family Acy segments have a a simul budget for child care yes we offer partial child care reimbursement that is permitted it's in our district bulletin as well as for mileage reimbursement has this budget been adequate and I'm not being a Critic I'm just being a curiosity I'm curious because we invite and then we can't always meet the needs of those who show we have met with what has we've met and we've fulfilled um the demand of what is requested of us with what we have currently so yes it is appropriate and we maximize the resources we're mindful of other costs but we always ensure that um we provide a basic refreshment for our families as they engage with us in person give you a uh scenario quick one when I

086was a local district superintendent I encourage my schools Implement a program it's called parents helping parents and I established it to identify the parents whose children do well and encourage them to volunteer to help parents who want help from a parent perspective and then tried to do the matching of what whom parents do whose children do well and why are they more affluent is there a different kind of family structure and it was generally women mothers few men showed up but rarely and I understood why it's not a criticism it's just a reality of it and some beautiful relationships were built people who didn't even know each other but because we and only because the principles of some schools really took it to heart and went with it others said it was too much and

087it is a lot I know that so many of the things that I do and thought about and did do took a lot of work I would talk to people all over this country about what it takes and I said this is hard to do I'm going to tell you and you can give me a stand in ovation and then they they can't do it I'll check with them five or six weeks later they go back to doing the same thing things that they can do comfortable with but going the distance and going Beyond and trying to include more people especially the parents of the children who don't do well they're not always the most enthusiastic people they can sometimes be less agreeable they can sometimes be less willing to even return your phone calls

088etc etc etc it takes a certain kind of people in the parent Center if you have a parent Center to be persistent in the face of resistance and understandably so they never nobody ever did it for them so why should I try to do this but it does build an opportunity for people to help other people and in your own neighborhood we shop at the same supermarket attend same church just a concept I can talk about it conceptually to do it takes a lot of work and only some people can do all of this stuff that I talk about everybody do want to work seven days a week but uh there just a thought but thank you for what you are doing I appreciate it thank you Scott you're welcome George let me just mention

089something that George said also about Refreshments they're very important they are very important they set the tone for a meeting I'm not saying you have to have a full course meal but the idea of having coffee and a little snack for people coming to meetings it makes a big difference it really and I know that because I experienced that myself at my own school it really is a a way to make people feel welcome so thank you anything Rosio okay uh superintendent thank you very much I'll be very brief this was an important conversation and one was that was uh actually uh uh important to have at this point I want to go back to a question that board member Franklin asked every time we present on on family engagement or the perspectives that the

090district brings in terms of offerings whether they are the Family Academy the school volunteer program or others uh there is some degree of push back and I want to assert uh one important truth the efforts of the district particularly associated with the family Academy which by all measures has been extremely successful in drawing attention subscription membership and information to the stakeholders who participate does not stand in competition or attempt to replace other very important wellestablished uh elements that support the school system particularly the work of uh of parent committees and and uh and uh organizations uh whether they are directly Associated by formation by the school system or not for-profit organizations and sometimes we have this Dynamic that appears that the narrative evolves into one of competition it is not uh it is complimentary nature

091and we will redouble our efforts and bringing those enti entities in for them to better understand why these these initiatives exist and how they better can partner uh with with our school system secondly I I appreciate the board's remarks particularly uh in support and recognition of the real uh Improvement that the district is seeing in terms of um approval rate of applications for for volunteers under the volunteer management system uh when we go from 43% roughly uh of those applications being processed within 30 days to uh over 77% that is uh true progress the same can be said for the fact that uh we achieved that when we saw a 136% increase right in the number of applications processed from 15,300 roughly to an excess of 36,000 um I would like to end again on

092the on the Family Academy this is you know it's a it's an approach that does not replace anything it relies on a set set of methodologies that are in person via webinar but also Hybrid models in more than one language and it is for the benefit primarily of our parents and Guardians the more informed they are the more demanding they can be of our school system which usually translates into a higher uh level of progress in in our schools uh with that said we stand to listen and to learn from our stakeholders every every single time so I want to join the board and thanking uh our speakers today for the great work that's being done across Los Angeles Unified in terms of community engagement parental engagement and volunteer participation thank you very much and

093I thank you both Mr Placencia Miss Guerrero what a great presentation thank you thank you so much we appreciate it thank you okay we're going to get ready for our next presentation okay and sure sorry sorry sorry okay um the second presentation will focus uh on supports for our homeless and Foster Youth and today we have the pleasure of honoring Miss Denise Miranda with her presence here with us thank you so much and uh I'm going to have Mr uh carv say something first but afterwards can you please introduce yourself and get us started go ahead Mr carvalo thank you very much um look this is uh probably one of the most U touching heartbreaking uh but also at the same time Noble bodies of work that this school system does on behalf of one

094of the most fragile school student populations in our community and I say this within the context of recognizing that um over the past year or so despite what has been reported as a decrease in the number of individuals in our community uh experiencing unhealth conditions the number and percentage of students um served by Los Angeles Unified who contined to experience uh homelessness actually increased during the 23 24 school year um not just uh a small increase actually a 26% increase that's a staggering increase in the uh homeless student population that we serve uh one could uh one could recognize that obviously uh rising cost of living EXP es in a postco uh reality in our community has exacerbated this issue loss of employment uh um as well as many other conditions unaffordability of housing in

095our community you put all those elements together and obviously families feel the impact and when families become homeless their children follow that is the harsh reality with that said I believe that this is just the uh the tip of the iceberg I think that there's a this disconnect between the real data for number of students experiencing homelessness and the real number why there are many kids many families who double back in a single family's home in an apartment living in a uh in a garage uh living in substandard conditions but they're not necessarily reported so we have pretty decent data but I believe it is not universally inclusive data that would reveal the true tragedy that many of our kids uh face every single day this is a system that values the support systems we

096have in place for uh students experiencing homelessness and their families when we approach the child we provide holistic services and support to the entire family uh whether it is to students uh living in other people's homes sometimes in garages or those who live in shelters I deeply appreciate the commitment of this board and deeply appreciate the commitment that Denise and her team bring to the table of need every single day we've knocked on many doors we visited shelters together and we respond very quickly when we uh one time found literally dozens of students who were not previously enrolled in Los Angeles Unified in a shelter and immediately provide those services and what is provided uh is no small feat anything from the school supplies to the toiletries uh to emergency housing assistance to nutrition to

097the child and the family everything and anything preparation for college additional support in terms of counseling mental health support social emotional support there is something for everyone when it comes uh to caring for children who experience homelessness so uh with that said I close by saying that a lot more needs to be done across the country um the mcken vento protections and the funding available for these students is still inadequate and the nation needs to do more uh in protection of kids who face these challenges every single day thank you very much and thank you for those uh kind words Mr Cavo Denise really I am honored because you are the one who is going to make sure that our kids get everything that they need to get a good education and a good living

098condition too so go ahead introduce yourself thank you good morning everyone my name is Denise mirand I'm the director of student support programs and I'm here to share with you not only the supports for our students experience exp in homelessness but also our students in foster care so um with that I'll go ahead and get started specifically looking at our organizational chart just to give you some context the student support programs is now falling under the student support and attendance Services branch and today we're going to specifically address the highlights of two of our programs specifically our homeless education office as well as our specialized student services and the work that the counselors do on a daily basis is really the educational advocacy for these uh populations but in addition we want to share with

099you not only the programs that we've had in place but the expansion specifically for this school year highlighting our alignment to the Strategic plan we are focused primarily on pillar two joy and Wellness and we are looking at ensuring that our students have welcome learning environments and because a majority of our staff are pupil service and attendance counselors they have the lens of child welfare and attendance so outstanding attendance is another one of our areas of focus I'm going to First share with you the direct supports that we have for students experiencing homelessness I will then share with you the specific supports for students in foster care and then I'll finally conclude with the supports that benefit both of our populations so to get us started we wanted to provide for you uh the definition

100in terms of mckin vento and the federal law where students and families are able to identify themselves as experiencing homelessness on an annual basis particularly at the time of enrollment families will comp complete a student housing questionnaire and on that questionnaire families are asked to identify their nighttime residents if one of the nighttime residence that they select does not meet the definition of McKinny vento they will be deemed as experiencing homelessness meaning the family is living in a nighttime residence that is not fixed regular or adequate then they would qualify as a family experiencing homelessness and we are then able to provide the Direct Services supports I me I just on that point what type of language would would the answer to the question be that would trigger you to know that it's not adequate

101so uh for example if you look at regular residence right a regular residence is one that's used on a normal or standard or consistent basis if a family is doubled up and there's the potential that that family may ask them to leave that that nighttime residence is not considered regular uh similar adequate if a family is living in let's say their car or their garage they don't have access to running water electricity that nighttime residence is also considered not adequate and they would then qualify and these are responses that you get from an adult that says this is the way we live or you get it from the student correct it's from the adult the adult would complete the housing questionnaire and identify the nighttime residence thank you we wanted to provide for you an

102overview of the cumulative numbers from year to year specifically in regards to our students experiencing homelessness so as superintendent carvalo had noted this last year the 2324 school year we saw a 26% increase in the number of families that identified themselves as experiencing homelessness so over 177,000 students in LAUSD were experiencing homelessness with that close to 60% of those families are what we call doubled or tripled up meaning they live with another uh family member it could be um not a family member it could be uh just someone they're renting a room from uh but close to about 60% of our families are doubled and tripled up to put it in uh a little bit more context the second largest District in California uh would be San Diego unified and they had for the 2324

103school year they reported 7,091 students experiencing homelessness the specific supports that we provide our students um experiencing homelessness are to remove those barriers not only to enrollment but to attendance uh so over the last few years we had the the pleasure of receiving the American Rescue plan funds and these funds were specifically targeted for our students experiencing homelessness and what we did is we identified the barriers to attendance often times uh School engagement families didn't have clean clothes for their students they may not have had backpacks or school supplies so we were able to utilize these funds to purchase uh prepaid store cards to be able to provide families with the opportunity to make these purchases oftentimes our families experiencing homelesses also face food insecurity so again we utilized our funding and we were able

104again to purchase prepaid store gift cards for families to be able to purchase food which would then allow students to be able to uh attend regularly we also had the ability to provide short-term from temporary housing that meant assessing families needs and providing families up to 5 days in local hotels or motels often times uh we were identifying hotels and motels that provided free breakfast may have had a pool especially uh getting into the uh warmer summer months but we were able to provide uh that that short-term housing all of our families that we connected to motels or hotels we also connected them to the coordinated entry system sites these are the centers throughout LA County where our counselors are co-located that would allow families to um enter the the permanent or interim housing pipeline

105so if a family received uh the hotel service they were automatically connected and referred to the CES and then finally transportation is also hearing from families a barrier to regular School attendance so we worked closely with our partners in division of transportation and provided a school bus route uh but often times our students experiencing homelessness may not have been living within the district boundaries they may have been living outside the district boundaries but wanting to remain at their school of origin and so for those purposes we were able to hire third-party vendors that would provide door-to-door transportation for our students experiencing homelessness mve moving forward this year we are able to continue spending our our ARP funding uh however the one project that we cannot continue providing is the short-term temporary housing the federal government

106will no longer allow us to utilize uh our funding for that service however we will be continuing the school engagement food and security and transportation Transportation though this year will look a little different we're no long longer going to be contracting with thirdparty vendors but we will be able to provide families with gas gift cards and gift cards that will allow families to make limited repairs on their car again in order to then transport their child or children to school in addition uh we utilize the ARP funding for the laundry truck again having clean clo is uh something that is is critical for students to be able to attend school regularly so last year we had the laundry truck of Los Angeles at Taft High School as well as 9th Street Taft and 9th Street

107were selected given the high number of students experiencing homelessness uh across the street from Taft High School there's a shelter that has over 150 students so we selected that as one of our Central locations and last uh year they were able to provide 350 families with laundry services on a weekly basis 9th Street again as superintendent carvalo had mentioned uh Ninth Street is close to one of our shelters one of our largest shelters and so again we partnered with the principal there to be able to provide the laundry truck on a weekly basis and specifically at 9th Street last year over 500 children were served and we were able to uh have a total of over a thousand loads of laundry washed with uh the laundry truck for this year the expansion is good news

108uh and I'm not sure if all of you are aware of this but uh we're hoping to make sure everyone is aware that we will be able to provide access to laundry truck services this year once a month at minimum within every region and every Board District and so our hope is that we will be starting those hopefully next month in October and we will be able to provide that service again to our students experiencing homelessness as I mentioned several of our fabulous staff members are PSA counselors so again attendance is a primary focus with the understanding that these two populations have some of the highest rates of chronic absenteeism last year we visited shelters and we recognized that most of shelters had very little space or um equipment and supplies to provide students uh

109a nice place to be able to do homework so we partnered with quite a few of our housing shelters and we were able to offer them La USD sponsored caling study areas so that included uh literature both in English and Spanish school supplies uh bean bags uh and you can see from the the pictures there they uh looked quite different depending on the shelter and the space that was provided and we're grateful for those uh specific Partnerships I went one okay so moving forward this year with the IAT 10 we are working in collaboration with our sister Department pupil services and attendance student support programs will be taking the lead uh next Monday actually for our I attend and we will be focusing on the grand opening of our clothing boutiques so we've utilized funding

110to establish a clothing boutique again in every region and last spring we had open houses it was a a soft launch but uh this next Monday we're happy to have official grand openings and ribbon cutting Ceremonies for students to be able to access the clothing boutiques the boutiques have everything from shoes to socks to underwear to uh clothing for all of the seasons that we have in Los Angeles and we're excited to provide a boutique experience for our students to go shopping and uh select what they would like all of the clothing that we have all of the inventory is new uh and we're excited to launch these these boutiques next Monday as of last year we had as I shared we had a open house back in May and from May to June we

111received 71 referrals so we are anxious to start uh receiving the referrals for the students and we hope that you all can join us next Monday at the I attend all right I'm going to move now on to students in foster care and again starting with a definition of students in foster care and how the state uh identifies those students so students who have an open case either in dependency or delinquency Court are considered WS of the Court those are the students that make up students in foster care these students if they are in the dependency Court they're supervised by the department of Children and Family Services if they are part of the delinquency Court they are supervised by probation just with the understanding that students in foster care can have a variety of living

112situations some may be in foster care homes some may be in group homes and some maybe with their biological parents so for LAUSD specifically you may or may not be aware but close to 50% of our students in foster care are still living with their biological parent they have not been removed or detained from the home but there is an open uh ongoing investigation and as we did with our students experiencing homelessness here is an overview of our five-year summary again these are cumulative year-end numbers of students in foster care I can share with you that typically a point in time count we have anywhere between 4 to 6,000 students in the district at any given time who are identified as students in foster care and the direct supports provided to our students in foster

113care are our leadership and empowerment councils these are councils that are conducted at the secondary level with over 600 participants we would also like to thank and recognize not only superintendent carvalo but the board members who have reached out specifically to ask in in terms of recruiting our students in foster care to serve on your uh student advisory Council so we do appreciate and acknowledge that you are providing a voice for our students in foster care this year our leadership and empowerment councils will be expanding and we will be offering this service and this Council on a monthly basis to all Secondary School sites we initially started uh the leadership and empowerment councils only at those high schools that had the highest numbers of students in foster care but again understanding the importance of providing

114student voice we will be expanding these to every Secondary School in the district this year and just to share with you some of the monthly topics that are provided to students in the leadership empowerment Council we share with them the IDE aide of growth mindset they're provided with college resources information on Independent Living their educational rights as well as what life looks like after high school again in this is in response to a board resolution so we are excited to conduct these monthly uh empowerment councils in addition we provide oneon-one inperson tutoring for students and Foster Care uh the tutoring is done by LAUSD teacher and it's done after school and uh specifically for last year we wanted to show you the outcome or the impact that the one-on-one in-person tutoring has and so last

115year students who received the one-on-one tutoring uh increase 79% from a pre-test to a post test and they either improved one or more grade levels in mathematics and then about half of the students again from a pre- to a post assessment increase 50% either one or more grade level in reading this year we are going to be expanding the tutoring to address elementary students and particularly we heard um I know as Mr Placencia had uh presented to you earlier we have a foster youth parent advisory Council it's a subcommittee of the pack and in that committee meeting our Foster and foster parents and caregivers really came to us with the understanding that they felt that we had to provide additional support and resources for elementary students in foster care uh quite a bit of the

116the supports and initiatives that we provide are for secondary students so this year we are going to provide that one-on-one individualized tutoring to TK through six students elementary students in foster care and we are um planning to braid that funding with some of our Extended Learning opportunities so we will provide not not only academic support but social emotional support for our elementary students in foster care we also have our Pathways to college celebration which is a yearin event I know we've invited all of you and and some of you have been able to join us at this celebration for students and Foster care who graduate um we did want to share with you that we are renaming the pathways to college celebration to Pathways to the Future because we know that not all of our

117students who graduate are planning to go to college so we've done h a rebranding of this celebration with that with the understanding that all students in foster care who are graduating will be invited to this year celebration and we are looking forward to being able to host this event uh hopefully at one of our secondary institutions and so our specialized student services counselors work all year to ensure that students are on track and ready to graduate and they are the ones who then would submit the the referral to uh have our students attend this particular event I'm going to now transition to the direct supports that actually support both populations and so this year we are excited to utilize Verizon funding to support both of our student populations and we are looking at providing many

118grants to our counselors on behalf of our students to be able to um support their needs I I will share with you the refreshments uh comes up during the leadership empowerment Council students um are asking for snacks so I we're anticipating that quite a few of the minig grants that are submitted on behalf of the the counselors will be for Refreshments for the leadership empowerment Council and counselors won't have to use their own funds to uh purchase those snacks so we're excited about that we're also again with the focus on elementary students looking to use some of the funding for cultural engagement activities and then finally utilizing buses for the college field trips as we know Transportation always seems to be a bit of a challenge in La so we're excited to be able to

119provide uh school buses for those College field trips and then speaking of the college field trips we have our Pathways to college tours so these are uh tours that we provide to both populations uh We've transitioned we were initially all inperson college tours then we uh through distance learning we we ended up doing mostly all virtual uh and then we are now back to in tours which I think the students appreciate um last year was our first year where we also had two HBCU virtual college tours and we had over 16 in-person college tours this year again as part of the expansion as I shared we are providing buses we're transitioning to Virtual to all in-person uh tours and then we're also asking that um panel student panels during these tours we're asking them to

120really address the strategies that they've used to overcome summer melt because we know often times our students are accepted into postsecondary institutions but over the summer uh something happens they melt uh and uh they don't quite make it in the fall so typically on these tours we have student panels of students who are either in foster care or experiencing homelessness or former foster care and we're asking them really to kind of uh connect with our students and share their most effective or best practices and how to avoid that summer melt the fasta challenge is also an annual event and initiative that again supports both of our populations and so uh we are looking to be able to meet our goal this year we've set a goal for oursel for 75% submission for the FASA uh

121last year there was a bit of a hiccup um because the the FASA had some challenges um so we're looking to reach back uh from the previous year where we did meet our our 75% submission rate um and so actually in 2223 we not only met our internal uh goal of 75% but we we also as a district out outpaced not only the county but the state submission uh goal of of fast specifically for foster students so we're hoping to get back up to that 75% submission rate this year and then the last resource or support direct service that we have is our resources for commercial sexual exploitation of children also known as CC and human trafficking with the understanding that our students in foster care and experiencing homelessness are particularly vulnerable for sexual exploit

122a so our uh Department takes a bit of a lead on some of the supports that we provide we have awareness materials we provide uh training we also have a Cadre that provides consultation um one of the resources that I would like to share with you that I'm not sure if you're all aware of is the dream court so the dream court is a specific court that is in collaboration with the Los Angeles Superior Court and the County Council as well as children's Law Center we have two of our district support counselors who go to dream court on a weekly basis uh and provide support for students who have been identified as victims of of CC or human trafficking and so our counselors who go to the weekly dream Court will be able to then

123connect our students back to school and work closely with those School sites and the individuals who best support those students to ensure that that child is is safe and able to attend regularly um we would ask that you visit our website because there's quite a bit of information including a newsletter um and our red sand project and the website is www. lausd.org forc and then last year we were able to work closely with the Los Angeles Unified Education Foundation to secure funding again for both of our populations to support College and Career Readiness uh we will continue to work closely with the Education Foundation to raise funds for our students in foster care as well as our students experiencing homelessness so I know oftentimes we get asked how can we donate how can we help

124we would direct anyone who is interested in supporting our students to the Education Foundation to be able to provide U monetary donations if that's something uh they're looking for and that concludes my presentation well thank you so much Dr Miranda that was just uh just fantastic um I just want to comment about the uh laundry service so important you know little things mean a lot but I know as a school principal when kids needed to change at my school because however they came to school you know they weren't feeling good about themselves and we gave them a uniform that we had in our clean closet it changed their attitude completely an angry student became Pleasant and nice because you really care about how you look and feel and smell and it's very very important that

125kids have the services of uh of a laundry for uh making them just just feel good about themselves and their academic achievements too so I think that's just beautiful and uh you said you're going to go around from different districts different uh local regions to correct the laundry truck will be in every region and every board how how do parents find out you know the truck is coming how do they going to find out so we will be sharing the information with um parents through Blackboard connect through text uh we will advertise it more than likely on the district's web page and clearly our our counselors work closely with families and they'll be able to share it as well the wonderful thing we we actually bought a washer and dryer at my school became uh

126too difficult to keep running to the laundromat all the time but we had a washer and dry it made a big difference it really did comments questions anyone go ahead Miss orti Franklin thanks and again the team is doing a lot and we celebrate and appreciate that um I guess a couple specific questions that we sometimes get from constituents if there's like an emergency situation and someone is like I need some help tonight or tomorrow um like where do we direct them and what kinds of things can we offer particularly you know as it relates to housing or Transportation um food SEC you know those kinds of immediate needs so if there's an immediate need specifically for families experiencing homelessness we have our homeless education office that has a counselor of the day every day

127uh they will again depending on the time of day they will work closely with our coordinated entry sites to determine if they have a bed available um often times we will utilize two on one we connect closely with DPSS to find uh support services but I would say more than likely if you can connect directly with our homeless Ed office somebody will be able to navigate that family uh through uh whatever the situation or circumstances and are they here 8 to four or what's there 8 to four okay that's helpful um have there been any uh like Trends or policy ideas that have come from I attend uh I know we spend a lot of time you know getting folks out talking to families but particularly as it relates to students experiencing homelessness or Foster

128youth um anything that we can do internally or that we can advocate for the State uh one of the trends that we're noticing and working closely with um LA County Office of Education is uh students in our short-term residential therapeutic programs formerly known as Foster uh group homes rather uh those students tend to have some of the higher rates of chronic absenteeism uh also the strps are the ones responsible for providing Transportation so we're working closely to identify funds through DCFS to be able to provide that Transportation uh but we're working closely with the office of child protection to develop some strategies around promoting attendance specifically for those students in the strps so um any advocacy we would love to be able to share our initial plans uh moving forward this year thanks yeah I'll

129also also add I think is part of the last year's ey attend um one of the areas that we identified where there was a gap was just coordination with our shelters um insurance with our shelters where there wasn't a constant communication between our homeless education program and other District services to ensure students were actually enrolled immunized and being supported at the shelters uh the superintendent and team uh got together to coordinate a meeting with region shelters and uh the county to ensure that there was just a open line of communication and that we set some clear expectations for those that are actually having day-to-day interactions with families and students that are experiencing homelessness or are newcomers to the district so that they're actually being connected with the school site and getting the appropriate services that

130they need um thanks and I guess my last question um is one that we continue to get from advocate kits is around like what shifted from when we had fap to what we're doing today um and I I think it's been a few years that we transitioned from the Foster youth achievement program to the model that we're doing today but if you could briefly help us remember um you know what was it before and what is it now in terms of the actual program deliverables or so uh five years ago we used to have the Foster youth achievement program and counselors were solely dedicated to just serving one population uh we then since uh move towards the specialized student services counselor those counselors continue to provide support for students in foster care but they're also

131now uh addressing the support and the needs for students experiencing homelessness as well as those students involved in the juvenile justice system so we maintain that um we are uh providing that same level of service to our students in foster care we for our students experiencing homelessness we triage uh based again on chronic absentee ISM um knowing that unfortunately we don't have um maybe we have more students than we have counselors uh but we continue to ensure that we're providing uh services to meet their needs on a on an immediate basis and is the ratio still pretty similar of counselor to students uh it's actually the number of counselors has increased because we were able to consolidate five programs into one that Mak sense okay thank you round one anyone else else Miss gones thank

132you thank you so much for the presentation and obviously a lot of wonderful work that you all are doing um I wanted to to touch on the population increase um first I don't know if we have a sense at all of the 24 25 numbers but um if we do does it look like the numbers of the population are relatively stable or do we expect increases in our number of students experiencing homelessness for students experiencing homelessness we anticipate will probably have an increase again what we've recognized is our ability to provide the services through our funding families speak with each other uh and they're more willing to disclose their status in addition I think overall the school sites have been better at building relationships and building trust with families that they're able to safely disclose

133their status so we anticipate if not 177,000 um more than that this this coming school year great I know that there's you know historically been a lot of stigma in in reporting um for families since this this is self-reported information so it's great to know that we're building that trust and that um that they're receiving Services um so that it feels like there there's a reason to to be clear on that form um and then on the uh the ARP funded Services I know you you noted on the short-term temporary housing that that is no longer being allowed to be funded can you speak more as to that that shift from the federal government sure so the funding actual ends uh September 30th uh but we were provided uh a liquidation extension uh up until

134January of 2025 we will then be applying for an extended liquidation that would carry us through if accepted through um March of 2026 uh we were informed that we can continue providing the same allowable Services except for the short-term temporary housing and the understanding was that uh there's federal dollars uh billions of dollars specifically to address the housing needs and so rather than utilizing educational funds to provide housing uh they wanted us to focus more on again the engagement the food in security the attendance uh with the understanding that we would connect families to HUD or HUD services to be able to provide the housing support yeah um well I can understand at a philosophical level why that would make sense the reality is that a lot of our students who are experiencing homelessness during

135under our education definition are may not be eligible for HUD Services because they wouldn't me the HUD definition of homelessness and I would Advocate that having a safe stable housing Arrangement is an educational investment for students experiencing homelessness so if we can um as a board be Advocates with the federal government around these critical supports it's I mean despite billions of dollars it's quite clear CLE that it's not enough and that it's not reaching some of our students and families so um I hope that we can be helpful on that it's been an ongoing discussion at the federal level um knowing having been involved in early conversations since 2012 around trying to expand McKinley vento's definition into the HUD um definition requirements um I think what we've been able to do is at least bridge

136that with a close relationship with hacka and L Lassa at county level to make sure that they're actually coordinating with us on vouches and what's available as well as other alternative housing opportunities and vouches that they have available at the county level um through their County um grants or Community Based grants um so we've been proactive on that front but to your point there needs to be continued advoc advocacy on that end right and we've made progress locally I man and I know a few years ago you know we successfully advocate for more Section 8 vouchers for our our homeless students and families but that doesn't mean that the Federal advocacy is not also needed um and then with regard to the ARP funded Services as well so the the plan until 2026 would be

137for an extended liquidation but um are there other is there another source of funding that we can tap into to provide these Services um more sustainably in the long term more systematically I mean t are these Title One eligible um Services since so we we do receive um we just receiv received the education of home home homeless children and youth Grant that's a three-year State Grant it's uh $250,000 per year over the next 3 years so we do utilize uh at least a majority of that funding we do utilize for um backpacks uh school supplies hygiene kits because the ARP funding is ending we were advised that the allowable activities for ARP are now going to be part of that ehcy Grant so we would be able to continue to provide similar Services prepaid gift

138cards uh food insecurity uh with our ecy with the understanding that it is a bit more limited because it is only 250,000 per year yeah that's pretty a pretty small number um well I I wonder if there's other sources of fund I mean again going back to the county piece um what we can do because again the I know the transportation you mentioned a shift there as well as with the short-term housing and those both seem like really foundational needs needs if we want to be able to get our kids to school on a regular basis um but but thank you for explaining that and great to hear about the laundry trucks as well um about the expansion I wonder like you know even at the regional level or at the board District level that's

139still a really large geographic area to cover once a month um maybe not right now but like what would it take for each community of schools to have access to a a laundry truck on a regular basis or at least the ones that have a significant enough um population of students experiencing homelessness um because ultimately I think we want to make sure that these services are accessible as accessible as possible um to our our families who most need it and then one last question for me on this round if you don't mind um just do we have a sense do we track um the numbers of students experiencing homelessness who are also unaccompanied minors or um new arrivals to the country and and how are we meeting their unique needs as well so uh we

140do track the number of unaccompanied youth that are experiencing homelessness uh we have seen a slight increase uh and again specifically utilizing the American Rescue plan funds we have a a segment of that budget specifically allocated for unaccompanied youth experiencing homelessness um oftentimes they're um needing clothes again uh Transportation we've offered um Uber gift cards to a handful of them um but yeah there is part particular uh particular set aside for our unaccompanied as well as our unaccompanied students experiencing homelessness and newcomers who are experiencing homelessness as well thank you okay first round George any more questions Dr Rivas thank you for your presentation and um also thank you for all the work that you do and everyone in your department I know they go Far and Beyond um in addressing all of the needs

141of our students and I have attended the uh graduation for on hous and that was just very moving and um the speakers that that are there they're really provide um just very a lot of inspiration motivation uh for our students to because they are so resilient and they've overcome so much so um I always enjoy and look forward to going to them so just um going back on the laundry truck and um and it's great that we have trucks but I've also um heard from some of our schools the one particularly those that um have high number of unhoused or International newcomers there so I know that they've um mentioned or actually want to have actual washers and dryers in their schools so how can we be able to help the particularly the schools that

142are asking how you know that they have because once a month is great but you know we clothe each other every day we need those needs um not just once a month but at least weekly so for those schools that welcome or have space for a washer and dryer how can we accommodate their provide that service so specifically again utilizing those uh ARP funds we uh will be reaching out to each Board District to provide uh one washer and one dryer and then uh based on you know your schools in your particular the areas of need uh we would be able to then furnish one washer and one dryer per board board District uh utilizing those funds again unfortunately the need is greater than the allocation that we've been given but um that is uh

143one of the the goals that we would like to do this year so we will be reaching out to you all um and just on that will apart from the federal funds are there other partners that we can reach out to or establish uh collaboration and helping us fund for another washer and dryer that the county level level or nonprofits that address the spefic specific needs of our our young un Foster or unhealth students so in working with the foundation I believe the foundation is working with some partners that were uh willing to provide um those types of services and so I would connect directly with the foundation okay that would be great um and also I also I'm wondering um in how we can help some of our schools particular high schools in um

144for showers for our students on how students stud and um Foster youth or International you know unaccompanied miners that's I've particularly from Belmont from the Belmont um High School complex that is one area that a lot of the you know a lot of the students have said they come in you know not having access to a shower or because they live in in sort of um homes that are you know a lot of families are in there and they don't have time to do a shower and they wish they could do it in school school is there a program or something that we can establish to provide showers at our schools for students so we currently don't have any programs that provide showers uh for our students at their particular School partially because we want

145to protect the confidentially confidentiality of our students however um that's something we can discuss to at least identify either Community Resources uh where the student would be able to um you know shower on a daily basis so those individual conversations we can have right no I understand keeping the privacy and I'm sure some students don't want to you know for others to know that they they don't have those those resources or access to even a shower but if there are cases that we able to provide that I know that in Belmont students have had no problems in saying hey I need a shower or because just the embarrassment of smelling or the odor that may come from not having a shower they would not mind so if I would love to connect with you in

146helping address some of um particularly in the Belmont complex district and um for my question then my next question has to do with trauma um particularly for a lot of foster Youth and um you know students who have you know unfortunately been you know part of a human trafficking situation or experience or expectation of that case how do we if you can let us know how do you or can we or do we address the trauma that comes from that um and how do we train our schools to be a bit sensitive or empathetic or knowing what to do when they you know know of a student that has been impacted by such trauma so specifically we have monthly professional development for our homeless liaison our School site homeless liaison every school designates a school

147site homeless liaison and during those monthly uh trainings we provide an overview in terms of trauma informed practices um having that con continuous conversation with our um liaison our specialized student services counselors also receive uh training and then we would connect with our our partners in school mental health also um I know they've come and presented to our team so uh I think it's ongoing uh awareness and the education uh to be able to ensure that we're able to address the particular needs of our students and our family Foster families or families brought into this into s of this training or do we work with with parents that or uh foster parents that um so we haven't probably reached out and done specific training enough for our our foster families again hearing from them at

148the pack uh their initial concern was to provide the supports to Elementary um but that's definitely something I know we've done in the past that we would have to revisit to be able to provide modules specifically for our um parents and Foster Care oftentimes we do refer um our foster care families to our partner agencies who have who have uh specific webinars that are intended for them but that's definitely something that we will um look at to be able to provide uh to our own parents thank you um I'm curious about the foster care difference between a kid or kids who are in a foster family and who are in a group home my experience is is that the kids in the group homes are not doing nearly as well as the kids are in

149families do we reach out differently to those kids who are in um group homes than we do to ones that are actually in a foster family and what how do we do differentiate that so we do uh our students who are living in our short-term temporary residential therapeutic residential programs have um we utilize our Title One neglected funds and so they have it's a small I could say it's a small But Mighty group of six counselors who support uh the direct day-to-day case management of those students we have about 50 Str strps within our our District boundary so um those counselors work directly with those students their educational rights holders and the Str strtp staff students who are in foster care in a traditional foster care system um have the specialized student services counselor who

150provides that service while they do work in tandem the strtp counselors uh their work does look a bit different because they are u in the most restrictive environment my experience personally when I was a children's services Deputy to a a County Supervisor was is that kids that that are in group homes often change group homes as many times as two or three times every year uh how do we deal with keeping up with where they go from one place to another do we have a relationship with the county that helps us track these changes so we do we receive a data match from DCFS alerting us of any changes um often times uh we'll hear from the educational specialist with a pending uh change of placement uh the counselor specifically as we know we want

151to stabilize the students so again School stability and school of origin is is Paramount our counselors will then work with the educational rights holder regardless of where the the replacement is at We would Advocate to allow the student to remain at their school of origin and then we coordinate Transportation so yes there is uh quite a bit of movement with the understanding that our counselors understand the importance of school stability and they advocate on behalf of the student for that um go ahead how how soon after they leave one foster home to another do we get the notification does it take a week does it take a month how does it take a day it varies yeah it could that's an important uh don't you think that's an important when did they leave yeah yeah

152often times our counselors will know prior to us receiving the data match okay so okay it varies yes I want to take a look at the arc uh ARP rather for a second you're saying that in Transportation uh we used to have door-to-door outside vendors which we no longer have my understanding is we still have those vendors on a bench contract but we um we will not continue to utilize them this year uh part of the reason was because we understood that the funding was going to end in September we would not have enough fund to continue the transportation throughout the entire year so we um as I said we have transitioned to provide families with Prepaid gas cards and supporting families with limited repairs on their car if they have a car if they

153have a car yeah so so I'm concerned about that because there are students that you were talking about who'd like to stay in the same school even though they aren't located where they were and I know that was a major source of them getting there there so what are we going to substitute to get them to their continuing School even though they don't live near it any longer so we first reach out to our uh fabulous Partners in transportation they've been able to establish bus rad routes specifically for our students um and if the bus route option if an LA USD school bus route isn't an option we provide not only the tap card to the student but our office pays for a TAP card for the parent as well that's a big issue because

154uh well you know I don't have to tell you uh also the next question I had in this same area was that uh if you don't have short-term temporary housing ability any longer when a family calls you and says we have no place to live tonight what happens next since we can't say oh well here's a voucher to go spend a few days somewhere until we can find you better than that so what happens instead so instead we would connect them to our counselor who's located co-located in the coordinated entry system that system has access to vouchers I see we would potentially work with our partners either 211 DPSS um to secure a voucher yeah because I remember when I was teaching in Compton not frequently but sometime every year I'd have a student say

155I don't know where I'm going to go home tonight to and I and we would then call the county and sometimes they'd get help and sometimes they wouldn't uh but that's still going to be the case correct and just um also we have relationships with Partners who provide safe parking so we would also if the family is living in the car often times they don't want to leave the car uh we would refer them to one of the local safe parking okay so now in terms of the shower issue I wonder if we're working with the city of Los Angeles or our other cities to provide showers in those kinds of things that you see sometimes in France where you can go in and take a shower wash up and so forth by having just

156a coin that's not money but you can get the coin from various service agencies and you can just go in and take a shower I'm wondering if we have reached out to the cities to put some of these up in areas where people could use them and to provide those coins by having a place where they can go get them because I don't think we're going to get there any other way a laundry truck once a month even if you had lots of them once a month is not enough as my colleagues have said so I think we ought to be exploring asking our cities to provide some type of arrangement for uh showers because I think they can and um I know there are some people who say oh well they go in there

157to use drugs or whatever they're only allowed in there for a few minutes anyway to take the shower so if they did something that they shouldn't have done in there I didn't seem to be a problem when I was traveling other PL in other countries so I think that we need to be trying to expand our ability to do these things and not think that L USD can provide all of that ourselves so I hope we'll we will'll ask them to do this now in terms of I attend and clothing boutiques we have a lot of lowincome families that actually still have a place to live but are short of food they food they they they eat only whatever they can bring home from school and that's about it or are short of clothing are

158these boutiques limited to just those kids that are currently uh unhoused and in foster care or can we expand that to very lowincome families so that they have an opportunity to get those kinds of supports as well so the boutiques are uh only available to students experiencing homelessness based on the funding however we are working with schools uh because some of our schools have established clothing closets that are open to the entire School population and so we've been able to utilize some of our ARP funds for those clothing closets with the understanding that those clothing closets are multi funded the the state has allowed us to utilize the funds um and open it up to any student as long as that um venue is multi- funded so that's what we've been able to do providing

159grants specifically to schools with clothing closets that are open up to all students yeah I I we have to expand that because there are so many children in our district that do not have family funds to provide new clothes or new particularly new shoes particularly new shoes so I I hope that we're figuring out ways not just to serve this very needy Community but we got folks that are this far from being unhappy housed and having ability them to get some funding for clothing or extra food that's going to make a big difference in keeping them housed because they don't have to spend their money for rent on those other things to keep their kids clean and and you you know what I'm saying so whatever we can do that's something that wor that I

160worry a lot about is because we have an awful lot of kids who are very very very low income and who really are staying housed because well when I was teaching I used to find when I visited parents homes there was a jar in the in the living room and every day everybody came home and put whatever they had in it and the hopes that by the end of the month it had enough to pay the rent um that's not an uncommon practice in our district and so I would love to see us do that the other issue I'm worried about is the on and off unhoused student okay we got enough money for rent first and last we move in with there for 6 months and then boom I'm unhoused because they tossed us

161out cuz I missed two rental payments often illegally by the way often illegally at least in the city of Los Angeles it's illegal but they don't know that do we help people understand that they have rights when they are being uh evicted do we help with keeping them housed is what I'm saying so in that sense we have community resource guides available that provide uh recommendations for um tenant services or legal services uh those Community guides are on our um homeless Education website uh so we typically would provide that resource to our families if they express a specific need around uh tenant rights or housing rights I think the big increase in unhoused students is largely due to the fact that the cities no longer uh prevent uh evictions so for that period during Co

162evictions were not allowed even though they happened anyway but they weren't allowed legally I think we had a lot fewer unhoused uh families I don't know what we can do to get back there um finally um on this dream Court which uh is on page 22 uh we have two counselors who attend on a weekly basis to find out what so they would attend it's a multi-disciplinary team meeting meeting uh and there students who are L USD who have been involved in uh seac or human trafficking and so our counselors are there to collaborate to facilitate enrollment to make that warm handoff to the school site to ensure that they understand the specific needs of that of that child and so they really are there to um coordinate Services uh for our children okay I'm

163going to join my colleagues in thanking you for this and also all the work that you're doing for these two groups of very fragile students thank you I don't want to overwork this but our schools middle schools and high schools have showers now they may not all work but you can certainly have a designated shower that works in the high school and in the middle school and I agree with Dr Rivas if a kid needs a shower he's not going to be embarrassed he's going to ask may I use the shower how you Planet you know uh when kids maybe are out in PE and the locker room is empty there's certain times you can do that but we have the showers lots of showers we just have to make sure that they're made available

164to the kids and let me ask you one more question if I may uh I used to participate in the um I ready I was just curious do you know do we know or does Mr carvalo know the number of students that have been recovered since uh I attend I said I ready I meant I attend since I 10 was uh initiated do we know the number of kids more or less idea anybody I know there's a lot recovered as a number of students that were homeless or Foster youth that were targeted and I would say brought back to school as a result of our I attend efforts is that what you're asking I wanted to know more or less how many students were brought back into school after we did our we can provide

165that update we don't have it on hand I think we need know to feel good about ourselves okay last call go ahead go ahead Miss gones just a couple of follow-ups um in in our resolution back in 2018 around increasing supports for our our homeless students and families one idea that was explored is play Spas support So utilizing um perhaps vacant or underutilized property that the district operates to provide like a drop-in center that has wraparound Services that's 247 for our homeless students and families there's an example from the Dallas Independent School scho District where they partnered with a nonprofit to provide a 24/7 dropin Center for unsheltered homeless students including meals showers laundry services so I think I know that there were conversations Miss Goldberg you were a part of them as well going

166back several years but I think that's an idea that we should continue to explore um is those place-based supports regionally um at at our school sites because we do we do have space in some instances that um could be used to meet these needs as well as continuing to look for how we could provide permanent or interim housing for our homeless students and families at underutilized District properties um ultimately housing is the solution that we need for our homeless students so I I hope those are conversations that we can continue to pursue um I also wanted to ask about the transportation for our our foster students again is transportation for students in foster care a title one eligible expense is that a funding stream that we can use to to cover for example like vendor

167door-to-door transportation for for foster youth who would qualify So currently students in out of home foster care do qualify for transportation with one of our thirdparty vendors to their school of origin to their school of origin correct and we uh partner with DCFS we split that cost uh between the two agencies so we are able to provide that door-to-door service for students in out of home foster care can you provide more um maybe information on how many of our students are qualifying and accessing that service I know that there's as a result of another resolution on Foster youth you know there are data that are reported on open data the data from 2223 indicates that about 500 um Foster youth were utilizing transportation out of a cumulative total of about 11,000 that school year so

168that's a fairly low percentage um I would just be curious of the students who need it how many are actually being able to access it um because as others have pointed out gasoline or cars are not necessarily always accessible as well as the time to take kids to and from school um so I think that these services are are just very essential and want to ensure that our families are accessing them um and getting what they are entitled to by by federal law and then just one more question for me is on the the title one part A tutoring program that's highlighted for our foster youth can you just share more around kind of the number of students who participated in these Services um and kind of the outcomes that I know there's some outcomes

169that we saw but in terms of students who were not meeting or exceeding standards who are now meeting or do you have any data that you can share on that front as far as the uh State standardized test I don't have that but we can get that okay um and for the title one uh tutoring program it's a couple hundred students that um make use of that inperson service thank you okay Dr oh one more go ahead sorry I wasn't going to ask this but miss gon has raised the question about the um smart smarter balanced or like some year end assessments and I know when we started the beginning of the year at the opening of School's address we mentioned it was the only student group that didn't make progress and so it would

170be helpful when the team has time to dig into um you know what led to Foster youth not making progress this year and what we're going to be able to do differently so that we're not experiencing that again this year and I know the academics team is focusing on it but it sounds like maybe some coordination with the um operations team which thank you for sharing the org chart I didn't quite realize that's how it fell um that could help us you know build some confidence as to what we're doing for some of our most vulnerable kids thanks anyone else okay well Dr Denise Miranda I am in awe I am absolutely in awe of this eye openening presentation I appreciate what you do for our vulnerable kids and it's uh I'm just so happy

171to have you here really at LAUSD thank you so much for the presentation okay get ready you guys because our last presentation will focus on supports for our Early Education and Kinder students and today we have two of my favorite people yes you are uh Miss Pia satat Mal interim chief of transitional programs and of course Dr Dean tagawa the executive director of early childhood education division so please introduce yourselves and explain some of your main roles in your position and get us started with the presentation right good morning and thank you board vice president Scott Schmelson my name is p aoic hotall chief of transitional programs and I'm here with Dr Dean tagawa to share how we are building Bright Futures through our early education programs here in Los Angeles Unified and really focusing

172on kindergarten success and Readiness so to begin with I'd like to really call out in our strategic plan we call out our commitment to eliminating opportunity gaps and one key strategy is really expansion of our Universal preschool and transitional kindergarten and the use of research-based curriculum highlighting the engaging play to our Young Learners that's really focused on our schools and our communities that are most in need let me Begin by showcasing this how we really build success in preschool what you see here are the early Ed programs that we offer here in Los Angeles Unified with 521 utk programs in our elementary schools 87 Early Education Centers serving 2 to four year olds California state preschool programs in 82 Elementary School serving 3 to four year olds and our collaborative classrooms with about 2,600 3

173to four year old students with special needs in a general education setting in addition we have four infant toddler centers serving students 6 weeks to 2 and a half years old here is how we've expanded our Early Education Program the green color in this graph shows our Universal transitional kindergarten programs and the blue indicates our early ad centers and state preschools our you our district has been focused on expanding our Early Education Program last year in the 2324 school year we have a total of 27,5 192 students who participated in early Ed programs this reflects an 11% increase from the prior year we attribute much of this growth in the increase in our utk programs it was 14,113 in 2223 school year and jumped to 16,720 students in the 2324 school year I'd like to

174further expand on the growth of our Universal transitional Kinder programs this slide shows the increase of enrollment from Norm day represented in the orange which is generally about the fifth Friday of every school year and the blue which reflects the enrollment at the end of the school year in the 2324 school year what you'll see here is an increase of 18% 2589 students from the prior year and the state as a reminder set a target for all elementary school schools to offer utk programs by the 25 26 school years and here in La unified beginning in the fall of last year we've opened up all fouryear old programs in elementary schools to have access to utk programs beating the state Target and mandate by two full school years and one of the key things also

175going back to this graph I wanted to show the increase from last year and this year as well we generally receive about 800 students or increase of 800 students from Norm Norm day to the end of the school year in the 23 24 school year this reflects a 5.5 increase and how have we done this so we are continuing to build upon the CU and school campaign what you see here is it's been in full swing since this summer you may have seen some bus ads some billboard s some delivery trucks with our with our ads and in fact I want to share with you Michael here who is an early ad student from Pinewood eec who stopped and really shared and said look it's me on that billboard so Mom was very proud and

176shared that with us and said look my student is up there and so um you know this has been really a successful campaign and we are going to continue to build upon this we've started during the summer with targeted Outdoor Advertising just like what you saw there earlier with select zip codes that we know have low enrollment in utk or transitional programs in collaboration with our Communications team and our office of data accountability this really allowed us to hone in on those key areas the next phase is really this weekend September 21st we are canvasing some key parks and location across the district which we know have fields and activities over the weekend to really continue to promote our early Ed programs the next phase is that direct marketing where we will make phone calls

177and text messages starting in October to really um like share our early Ed programs with our families and I'm excited to share the latest development here our new state guidelines really have expanded the enrollment based on the household income criteria so what this means is that our Early Education Centers are now able to expand their enrollment based on income criteria that wasn't there before so for example to illustrate this a family of four with a monthly household income of approximately 12,000 a month now qualifies this was not possible last year so this is new the monthly fee will be approximately $93 for the family and as you can see it varies based on the household income criteria we are asking families and District employees if they're interested they can call that 844 early ad number

178to find out their eligibility and the monthly fee that applies to them and this is really great and exciting because now our District employees may now have access to 87 early ad centers in fact we have one down the street over at Gratz early Ed Center so some of our Bodi employees can now access that early Ed Center for that particular program and now I introduce Dr Dean tagawa who will share a little bit more about the instructional programs that we offer in our early education programs well good afternoon everybody and it's it's great to be here and I say that because it's a lot of times we get welcome to the new school year and then we always tell every everybody we've been here since July 1 so um but it is great to

179be here we did a lot of summer training over the summer and I'm going to start there because we can provide all these services but if we don't provide a high quality instructional program then we're not doing a service to our families and so we spent over the summer you'll see some dates up there we spent six days with our Early Education Center teachers our state preschool program teachers in a couple different regions we spent four days with our utk teachers and four different regions each region probably had anywhere from 150 to 280 teachers during those two days of training or those four days of training we also spent nine days of dual language training with our early education teachers to make sure that they were I'm going to say ready to really support our

180students with dual language learning and I think what's really important here is that you're going to see this big 900 number 900 teachers have signed up for a schooly group around supporting our UT TK and in this Resource Group I'm going to say it's you see teachers sharing ideas you see teachers sharing songs you see teachers sharing pictures of how they've designed their classrooms you see instructional questions coming back to the division and US responding we also post a lot of our upcoming trainings there and they share it out it's a pretty exciting group and there's a lot of support there amongst teachers but also for the division itself so I think that's a really neat piece and then the last bullet point up there going to see that we probably have over we have

181over a 100 trainings planned out for the rest of the year and that includes both our teachers our AIDS our administrators our classified staff um because in our early end centers we know that everybody's kind of seen as a teacher so when we do the trainings we need to make sure our instructional AIDS are included as well this is new and this is exciting news for us because the last iteration of the preschool learning foundations was in 2008 so now there are new preschool transitional kindergarten learning foundations and so if you look at that column across the first row across the top that says revision of the age Continuum the old preschool learning foundations was designed only for 36 months and 48 months if you look at the next column over you'll see that the

182New Foundations which include transitional kindergarten go from 3 years to 5 and 1/2 years of age and that's to include our transitional kind Garten students to make sure they have a set of and I hate to use the term standards but a little bit better standards that are aligned to what's going to be expected of them in kindergarten in that second row you're going to see revised domains in the past it was only a social emotional domain and now we have what we call approaches to learning and that approaches to learning is really to kind of look at um executive function skills within the Early Education environment so what are those kids being able to learn as far as goal setting um resilience to a task staying focused on on a task working within a

183group so some of those other skills and we know that those are the skills that lead to long-term adult success so now they're started in Early Education and then that third row literacy domain it used to be in one literacy and language were together but we realize the importance that language plays within an the development of a young child so now they're separated out you'll see an English Foundation and you'll see a dual language or an English learner Foundation that's separated out and it really speaks to the specific specificity of the um of what's expected of kids at that age and then that last Road diversity equity and inclusion there was nothing really called out in the previous foundations but now it's called out so that includes children with special needs it includes children that

184are English Learners it includes diverse backgrounds different cultures different languages and then that last column on the very end the implications and I'm not going to read the whole thing but the implications are really around professional development making sure our teachers are prepared making sure our staff is prepared they have a deep understanding of what's in those New Foundations and the differences from the previous foundations and I like this I'm going to um speak to this because now for the first time ever we have one curriculum that is used across all of our four-year-old programs and um it's the creative curriculum but what's really key here is that it it helps align all of our four-year-old programs whether you're in an early ad Center a state preschool or a transitional kindergarten or one of our

185four-year-old uh um special education programs they're all aligned and so we can do a lot better job with the training and they're designed around these units of study questions of the day Mighty minutes and differentiated groupings and if you remember our previous units of study we have six of them we're expanding to nine but this is a big change from what we had many years ago which was a theme a week where we Wen able to go very deep into vocabulary very deep into comprehension or understanding so these units of study are are pretty exciting and you'll see it play out when you visit a classroom within a classroom you should be able to go in there you should be able to read the room and know what unit of study there on are they

186on the clothing unit are they on a tree unit are they on the reduce reuse recycle unit um and you should see questions of the day everywhere because we know that those questions when they're asked of kids develop those early problem solving skills that lead to better comprehension later on and then you should see these little transition activities called Mighty minutes and they're just little activities to kind of reinforce what the teacher was learning um and talking about that day and so if the word is Skip you know that was the new vocabulary where you may hear the teacher say something like okay today when we transition to the outside I'd like to see everybody skip to the line and so then it reinforces that that learning and then you should see all kinds of

187differentiated groupings you should see whole group small group individual and you should see Choice time and choice time is important because as we want our kids to become independent thinkers we want to make sure that they're being able to have an opportunity to exercise their own child rights to make choices and I like to think that these early choices lead to better student voices later on and so I think that's really a key piece in this and I'm going to say you know I've said this before but you should hear smiles when you go into our classrooms and you should hear and feel the joy of learning in these classrooms and so when you go into these rooms our classroom environments should say this is a good place to be I belong here you know

188I this is a place I can trust trust there are people here that I can trust there are places I can be by myself there's things that I can do on my own and this is a safe place to explore when you put all of these things and you create this safe learning Environ environment for kids and and I guess it would be kids at any age you know that kids will learn better I think what's key to is to know that our kids are making progress and so this piece up here you're going to see the three years across the timeline on the top that blue line is for our Early Education Centers in our state preschool programs as licensed programs they are required to complete the desired results developmental profile every year this

189will continue for our license programs in that next kind of column in that grd you're going to see the utk progress report and the progress report that we used in 2324 will continue for 2425 and and then you'll see in 2526 this revised progress report card and why is it being revised it's because those preschool transitional kindergarten learning foundations go into effect July 1st 2025 we want to make sure that we have a progress report card for our TK teachers and our families that mirrors that implementation and on the bottom you're going to see this big Arrow because we're pretty excited we're putting together a TK workg group um my first year here in 1516 that was the TK progress report card group that we put together to develop all of the initial utk or

190etk back then um um resources we're bringing a lot of them back together so we'll have teachers from TK teachers from early ad teachers from Early Childhood special ad we'll have uh principals we'll have central office administrators and the idea is to build a new progress report that's indicative or or representative of the new ptk lfs and so we're getting ready to start meeting next week and um I'm I'm pretty jazzed about that all right and family engagement and I know um um this is a key piece when we talk about and we talk to families about what it means to be kinder ready we wanted to develop something that was very I'm going to say for the parents and not necessarily for central office administrators so this is a quick pamphlet and a checklist

191to help families understand is my child ready for a lot of times parents worry like I'm not sure if he's ready I'm not sure if she's ready for kindergarten and this is a quick way for them to kind of check off to see how their child is doing and get ready for Kinder it's also a way for as parents enroll for Kinder we can give this to them early so they can start thinking about those things and if they have a few months over summer they can address some of those things that can help like T or knowing your address um or having a contact phone number and the last thing to continue to build and I know um Antonio mentioned it earlier but this is one of those systematic collaborations where early Ed worked

192with the division of adult and career Ed and um the families and Community engagement office to put this together so I know Miss gon as you had alluded to it earlier but this is one of those things this is an academy that's based on the understanding of young children um we've this is our third year of doing it the curriculum was developed if you want to call it that by the early Ed division face really helped us share it during the last couple years get it on their website and send it out to all parents and then we leaned on da to go ahead and deliver the content because they're really the experts in delivering adult content and so it's a pretty exciting thing we're looking forward to another full group this year um but

193again it's one of those collaborations that really took the the the skill and will of all three different groups and then I'm going to close with this because we have the cutest kids in the district and so there we [Music] go success begins on PR school learning is fun come and play with us meet new friends see school see you in [Music] [Applause] school and special thanks to Dolores early an Center for putting that together and working with us on that thank you so much a beautiful beautiful presentation um you know uh teachers in elementary school tell me they can tell which kids went to um early Ed because they are soal socialized they are they get along well they know their numbers their colors they're ready to learn and uh they tell right away

194let me just ask you uh well let me just tell you I will be looking for exploring the topic When I visit the schools now I never concentrated on that but I sure will now do that exploring the topic really important to know um I just want to start this time and since the numbers uh for uh enrollment increased by 2,7 47 where are we as far as reaching capacity for these programs any idea where we are for capacity I hope we keep opening more and more but go ahead go we're um our TK programs are pretty full and um our early ad centers they always lag a little bit behind because the kids who leave us transition into kindergarten and the parents kind of fill over the year but I think with the change

195in the family fee schedule and allowing I'm going to say you know what used to be a cap um now kind of goes all the way you know almost to Infinity of families that can qualify for these programs I think after this and when we start working with comms to message this out our programs are all going to be full wonderful that's wonderful in the past or possibly now there is a an income requirement how does that work can you tell us sure so if we go back to that one slide an example would be that family of four now that let's say makes $112,000 a month in previous years that family would not have been eligible for services it was it was what we call over income eligibility so because it's a state subsidize

196program there was no way to get that family enrolled with the new income guidelines um this family fee schedule I'm going to say extends past 500% of the state median income so whether you're very wealthy or you're middle class or you're at that kind of cusp where you wouldn't have been income eligible before you are now and you pay a very nominal fee to go to these programs and I think that's what's going to get us over the is really going to bring back full enrollment to the programs and I think um as we look forward to that that is something that is a huge change but it goes full in line with making sure every child in California has an opportunity to go in An Early Education Program any other requirement besides income no

197they would just have to the the way the law is written is we have to service all income eligible Families First you know those that have high needs and any seats after that we can open up to go ahead and enroll additional families the only thing that they still need to provide is they still need to provide um an income verification so we can verify it and make sure that we're charging the correct fee thank you thank you questions on this side go ahead Miss gones okay um thank you Mr shurson and thank you um thank you both I know you're en you know I'm enthusiastic about this topic and for anyone who wants to hear more we're having our first Early Education um committee meeting on Thursday so we invite you to tune in

198at that time um I am excited to see the growth in our enrollment numbers um I was wondering if you all could provide us a sense of um preco how how we are doing in terms of that comparison both um on the transitional kindergarten front but also in our Early Education Centers so on the transitional kindergarten front we've way exceeded the enrollment that was back in pre-co because it was such a finite group it was only um kids born between September and December but each year we've been able to expand so I'm going to say you know it's grown a lot with our early Ed Center programs we roughly run around right around 10,800 last year in our programs we finished at about 9800 so we were at about close to 96% full and I'm

199going to say that was a lot due to the marketing strategies and really differentiating our enrollment for what the needs of a parent of a three-year-old wanted and for what the needs of a four-year-old wanted so as our kids enrolled more into utk we had to kind of change our marketing strategies within our early Ed centers and create better spaces for three so um it was a combination of multiple things but again this year we're at about um I'm going to say the goal would be to hit the 10,000 and get back to about 95 to 96% enrollment because that's where we would run preo and our early centers you teed up my next question perfectly was on the marketing um I know that we've run um expanded marketing efforts we have the canvassing efforts

200um but are we are we thinking about other uh additional methods that we haven't tried in the past T like social media ads or direct mailing to families and then what can we do specifically around the Early Education Centers I know when I visit I hear from Principal sometimes you know they're small But Mighty teams and so additional support to ensure that um they can really get the word out to their local communities um would be would be much needed yeah so we tried something last year um which was to create these cycles of improvement and cycles of enrollment um Outreach we worked with 20 schools that had I'm going to say that struggled a little bit with enrollment so we provided a little additional funding we brought them together to talk about best practices

201where they shared ideas so we brought them back for a four-week cycle and So within those four weeks attendance at those 20 centers increased by 98 students so then we said they said hey we need a little bit more time because in that time some of them did create social media campaigns and they really um outreached through that way and So within all of those ideas we brought them back for another 6 weeks and so we in 6 weeks we had increased by over 227 centers in just those 20 centers so that was an increase of about 20 kids per Center we're replicating that this year the cycle of enrollment Improvement because it's really key to helping them and I'm going to say providing support between each other and um within the division so we're

202looking forward to that and we'll see what happens this year um but other things like direct mailing I know know that we're working on that we're also looking at when the data comes out around these targeted ZIP codes in this upcoming year do we need to shift you know are there do we hit these areas well and are there new zip codes that we need to start reaching out to so um multiple things happening on that front and then Park uh phase two the canvasing at parks has been so successful that we have phase um we have canvasing 2 and canvasing 3 scheduled for the um late fall and the early spring um because yeah we're just it's exciting to see all the families especially when you get out to those fields so definitely a

203lot of work there absolutely well and um I think just visibility is important at a lot of the sites as well some of the early Ed centers are kind of tucked away right next to an elementary school and families may not be aware that they offer a unique program for them um and then wanted to also check on the expanded eligibility for families um at our Early Education Centers how are we spreading the word are there direct um is there direct Outreach with our employees who have young children who might be able to now qualify for our programs so that is something we're working with the office of Communications on and how do we get this word out we've notified all of the early Ed Center principles so they're all aware of the new family

204fee schedule um we've worked with all the office managers so by chance if somebody was to hear about this they're all ready to start enrolling those families um the other part of it is in working with the office of communications it is something that we want to put out even here at bodri you know we you know Miss aot Mall mentioned that Gratz early Ed Center is literally a one minute to two-minute drive and five and a half blocks of walking so that is a place where now if you're a district employee here at bodri that might be a great opportunity for you so um more to come on that but definitely I would start looking for all of those um that next level marketing um to get to get the word out to our

205our District employees and we'll talk about again on the Thursday Early Education and families committee because that is something that all of them need to know absolutely thank you Miss Goldberg um do we have enough early ad teachers and Tas so yeah we're fully staffed at our early aded programs um we're always looking to hire more but now we have a teacher waiting list of 90 90s something teachers and I have to command our our early ad HR department because they've been at every event every Community College Institute for higher education they even went to the California Association for the Early Education of young children and set up booths there to recruit both teachers and AIDS because um it's you know a lot of folks are looking to come over so we've done a and

206and again kudos to our HR and and early Ed for doing that we have a few schools that at Norm Day this year are thinking they have to close utk classes because they're short some kids are we trying to make sure they don't have to do that so they can keep open or is that yeah so um we work a lot with the principles directly when they have these concerns and these questions and our budget Services has been really helpful so when they are questioning if they're going to be close if they're going to do they qualify for an extra teacher are they going to lose a teacher are they going to gain TK instructional Aid so we've been really working very closely with our budget services to make sure that every program that needs

207to be open is open and every position that they have is filled and um as of today even on our TK programs every teaching position is filled and then with uh opening of the new programs and even shifting of displacement or upping and closing a program all of our TK instructional Aid positions are going to be filled as well so in terms of Market uh Southgate and Huntington Park have big parades at Christmas with thousands of little tiny children watching with Mommy and Daddy are we going to be having people walking those parades and signing them up we have the big Martin Luther King uh parade which almost all of us participate in do we see hundreds and hundreds of little babies and twoy olds and three year olds are we going to do parades

208as well as the uh canvasing and uh targeted marketing okay I said yes yes and yes in fact in many of our district events such as College fairs the different divisions are hosting we're ensuring that our early Ed team and our division of adult ed teams are there to really bring the enrollment in and look for staff because as you know our division of adult ed also is a pipeline for Workforce for our district and we want to make sure that our communities are very much aware of the programs that we have good good um as to student progress monitoring tell me a little bit more about the DB drdp so that so the drdp is the desired results developmental profile and it's 43 measures and it looks at everything from social emotional to math

209to skill-based things to physical and social emotional development and it looks at students across not whether they met it or didn't meet it it's really looking at are they improving on it are they progressing are they developing along that way so it might start with beginning and then a student moves to a developing level to a building level to an integrating level and so when we similarly to the drdp when we designed the TK progress report we also didn't give it a past fail nobody wants to hear that their four-year-old is not succeeding in school or not doing well we really built it so that it had those same kind of levels to make sure that as you held your parent conference with the parent the parent could see how their child was progressing along

210the way so um that's a big piece for both of those is that really we're looking at progress over the course of a year um the desired results we have to upload those results every year to the state to make sure that um our students are progressing and we have to write a plan to make sure that we have a plan in place for areas of weakness so if area of weakness last year was measurement then as a division what are we doing to provide teachers with training on to increase that area of weakness is it a test no it's uh based on observation so it's a combination of so this is not the test that I got a th emails about saying please don't do that to my four-year-old okay I just want to

211make sure because I that was the biggest number last year was in the spring was all these emails from parents saying don't do that to my baby okay so we're not doing that to the baby let me let me let me say one thing that I think long term we should be looking at right now we get fined for every utk class that's over even by one student for a short period of time we get charged for everything we're not going to change that that law will not change because that whole thing was based on the women's uh committee uh which is bipartisan in Sacramento and they're not going to change that because they're trying to protect the small individual daycare centers that maybe have four kids your grandkid and three others and so forth

212at some point I would like us to develop maybe with the Department of Education some kind of plan that says if you are a parent that or a grandparent or a person not even related and have a small number of kids and you're in SEIU because you've got your that they're they're the organizer of the union for those folks and a lot of folks are part of that we need in my opinion to be developing a path for those people if they choose not required if they choose to bring their children to utk and come with them because we're going to train them to be the teachers or the AIDS that they now get a real salary instead of the pittance they usually are able to collect when they have three or four kids they

213have a real career path and those kids will be getting I believe in most cases more things than they would get in a small home with three or four kids which my son was in for example he got very little out of it except he was safe and that may be able to work and I don't Mis understand me I don't put that down one bit but longterm we don't want to put those people out of work we want to employ those people so that they expand a system which gives them a real career real income the possibility of their full-time for retirement and yet also provides the students that they are helping to get more than to be safe and to learn how to play with each other without you know conflict I think

214that's the long term for early Ed but I think we're going to need to maybe sponsor legislation or we need to begin to talk to you the uh the union that represents most of these folks and begin saying we're not trying to put you out of work we're trying to change your work so that it's fulltime if you want it it's paid with health care and other benefits and those young and you are going to be trained in order to become an e teacher or a utk teacher or Aid your choice I wouldn't Force anybody to do that because I do know there are a number of people who want their kid only to be in a room of four three or four kids I'm not trying to put them out but a lot of

215these folks do it because they have one child that they care about and they take two or three others and they're doing the best they can and I know that my son was safe where he was so I could work but he didn't get what he could have gotten if he had had a person who had had this kind of training so I'm asking us to look longterm and to see how we can do this and engage people who because otherwise what we are in a situation is is that in Sacramento UT AK is almost seen as a competition and a killer of these families income as well as their ability to take care of a few kids every day and I hope we can begin to say you're not the enemy and we're not

216the enemy we want to build a bigger base for you as a provider and for those kids to have a perhaps a deeper uh educational component that's that's personally where I hope we can head and I hope we can get Sacramento and maybe even the feds to look at providing resources to begin to make that transition again voluntarily I wouldn't require it someone doesn't want to ever want to change what they're doing now God bless them they're taking care of a few kids those kids are safe and their families can work not talking about that but I hope we can look at this as a more long-term way of integrating systems so that there's a benefit for the provider as well as for the children thank you go ahead M Gomez you want to yeah

217I just wanted to jump in because um SEIU and actually uh a homebased child care provider do sit on our committee and it it is part of an ongoing discussion about how we can be a better create a multi-service delivery system here in Los Angeles recognizing that for example there are many more homebased providers that are providing support for ages three and under and that continues there many children in Los Angeles County especially from birth to Age 2 who don't have access to a pro like there are literally not seats for them um and we have been working together and discussing as well uh Sacramento based advocacy for example around an alternative reimbursement methodology so basically changing the way that the state funds um some of our early learning programs which would both impact our

218Early Education Centers um because they qualify as well as our homebased providers because currently the way those programs are funded is not based on the true cost of educating those young children and that's something that sure changes uh the district and the programs that we provide as well as our family homebased providers so we are already working on how can we lift all boats I I would never want to characterize that kids are getting less than at at homebased providers because we know that there are very I reasons why families may choose that option so what can we do to both strengthen those programs strengthen the pathway from those programs to our schools um and also advocate for a system that better supports all of us um because the reality is that early care and

219education has been short changed funding wise for many many years and has been really looked down upon and not funded at the same way probably because it's women and women of color who are mostly doing this work um so just so you know these are conversations that we have been having and um we look forward to to more actions on on that front as well didn't mean to cut you all off and then to add on to that we continue to work with office of government relations with Martha Alvarez and really looking at a host of priorities that we as a district want to um move forward with advocacy efforts so more to come on that as well Dr Rivas thank you for this uh presentation um just a few questions for the um infant

220toddler centers I know there's just four any plans on expanding or is that all based on funding or so a little bit is based on funding but um we are expanding uh working on expanding all of them to be year round so we have two of them that are now yearround with increased funding uh we're working on getting the next two expanded and we did get funding you know we wrote a um a z to2 year old expansion Grant or I'm G it's not a grant it's expansion funding so we are able to now serve more two-year-olds in our early ad centers so that's a big piece so not necessarily in the infant toddler space yet um but definitely working on it we will see at at Cleveland High Chatsworth High School we are opening

221up an infant toddler Center there so little by little we're kind of moving into that 0 to2 space because uh you know that is a space that we know that with all of the eligible seats we're still not serving there's still 85% of the public that wants a seat that qualifies for an income eligible seat don't have access to a program so you'll hear numbers being thrown around that you know there's 9,000 infants toddlers that qualify for a program but don't have a seat so definitely pushing on expanding those spaces where we can yeah good to know thank you for that and for the $93 fee uh for our E's is that per student or per family or for per month per family per month per family okay per month per family and for the

222U continuing on with the marketing campaign questions how long has this marketing campaign been taking place so this is our third year of the Strategic marketing campaign we run it um we run about four cycles per year uh usually two and we time them with enrollment um and when we know when our Peak services are you know our Peak enrollment is for Early Education as well as for utk and then we've also included in our choices catalog this year so um there have been little changes each year but definitely um has expanded over the year adding canvasing has been a big piece started last year and will continue through this year and do you know um in these past three years how this marketing has increased enrollment yeah so one of the ways you'll notice

223that 844 early Ed number and one of the reasons we use that number is because right after we do a even if it's a Blackboard connect like a week long of Blackboard connect messages we can look to see if our campaign was successful because we immediately notice the hits in the number of phone calls that are coming in so we may get 10 phone calls a day on an average but after these marketing campaigns we notice that we get these big spikes of you know 100 to 200 phone calls that are coming into the hotline so we kind of um and then we we've looked at the different efforts within those strategies and see which ones are most effective and so I can tell you the Blackboard connect messaging those six weeks where we do

224the Outdoor Advertising we always see a spike in the number of phone calls um so definitely we kind of um we use that as a way to measure it great Contin and um apart from um going uh to looking at zip codes with low enrollment are we are you also maybe focusing on um areas with high birth rates or recently you know looking at that and maybe targeting some hospitals or um maybe some libraries with Mommy and Me programs where we can go and start passing thing out I know when I was you know when I was with my son I used to go to Mommy and me and I know there was an area in the library where they had a lot of resources and um flyers and brochures and I would always grab

225them and then just it would help me get um information about what other researches in the community so just wanted to see thank you and I think those are those kinds of ideas are helpful um the public library idea is a great idea yeah especially the mommy and me programs they're very um a lot of families do take it particularly our uh Latino communities um I always saw a lot of uh Latino families and and uh there and let's see um for the PDS I had a question regarding the PDS um I'm glad that there's expansion in professional development um what feedback have you received from um our our um eec teachers and utk teachers about the professional development and what other do identify other areas that they would um would like some more um

226professional development in So at the end of each one we do kind of the evaluation and we get the feedback from the group and so uh we always get we want more and so I think that's a good thing because that they and then when we offer them they fill up so we know that the idea of them wanting more and then them um coming to attend is has been huge so we've offered it in a variety of ways Saturdays weekdays um and this year I think one of the big Keys is that we're going to really look at I'm going to say not just Saturdays but who's coming to these and can we cluster folks alike and we didn't mention it in the beginning of the thing but the reason why we differentiate or

227the reason why we held so many PDS for Early Education and California state preschool program teachers is we had a lot of new teachers so we wanted to differentiate the professional development so we had an introductory session for teachers that were fairly new and then we offered what we called a Mastery session so for those who've been using the curriculum for a few years what might what more could they pull out of it and so differentiating the instruction as a big piece and then kind of to the evaluations in the spring of this year we're really lining up a whole series and we're working with again kind of that collaboration with Leo but really looking at those California preschool instructional Network trainings um around the Arts we've heard over and over that they would like

228more information on the dramatic arts the visual arts and we have units that connect with it music and movement so we're going to put all those together and offer those in the starting in the spring great good to know I'm glad and um I know that our E's are being completely formed in their playground with the nature Explorer program so I wanted to know how is the uh creative curriculum um connected to the nature Explorer how are they how are they sort of aligning and coherence so they're very well aligned and I think the um over the summer at the summer Institute for the principles we did a whole s or a whole we did three sessions of training on aligning the creative curriculum to your outdoor environment and we say outdoor environment because not

229everybody has a nature explore Outdoor Classroom but we wanted to make sure that all principles knew that they can align their thing their indoor program with their outdoor program and then this Saturday the 21st we have uh five different trainings going on for early Ed Center teachers and a big piece of that I you're kind of mind reading but it's it's really around embedding the um the curriculum in the outdoor environment so yeah so that's this weekend too okay well thank you so much appreciate your present Miss Ortiz Franklin thanks so much and I'm excited to see you all again in a couple days um just quickly on the enrollment uh at the committee last year we saw the average was about 50% of capacity was actually filled um and I know there's a range

230across but maybe as a followup or an anticipation for Thursday too I'd be curious if we're around the same numbers if we're higher enrollment and um if you can do a school by school sorry on the early Ed side not on the TK side um you know we have so much space at some of these places and we want to make sure that to your point about marketing and all of that not just where the need is but also where there's a lot of vacancy or a lot of capacity to serve more families so I'm guessing we don't have that number today or if we do happy to hear it we're in about 63% capacity in our early end centers right now so definitely kind of thinking about those pdsa cycles of enrollment Improvement and

231which schools will be in that first round um because again and like we saw last year when we put the effort and the intentionality and really provided a support system for those Schools Enrollment went up and so that's the plan again for this year and again to pre-co we always ran around 95% to 96% capacity so that's our ultimate goal and we'd like to get over 90% this year back to that yeah great that's that's good to know we're we're on the up up and up though um and then my last question excited to see the change in state law around in income but I heard there was also a change in potty training um and I know that's there's some questions about families who do or don't like need to send their children their

232two-year-olds typically potty trained do you have an update on that or what can we expect um so I can I can tell you what you'd expect at a school site it's a lot of visits very often um and very a lot of visits at the beginning of the school year and helping get those kids body trained as far as the state law goes TK um is the first one to kind of say there are no toileting requirements for a child to be enrolled in TK so that's an important piece to know that no child can be denied enrollment based on not being toilet trained so we've done just for TK not for the two and three year olds at early end yeah so we're getting so in the early ad programs we know that that's

233coming along and that's something that Labor Relations is looking at because I think we need to prepare ourselves that that's going to also come down the pipe that all kids if they're not not going to do it for foury olds in TK they're probably not going to do it for two three and four year olds in our early Ed Center so that's something that we're looking at with labor relations to figure out how do we make sure that um if that's the rule then our staff is supported we know how to enroll kids and then we know how to work with them when they get enrolled if they're not toilet trained yeah okay Mr Carval thank you very much I want to thank uh Pia and uh and Dean for the extraordinary work that they

234do alongside their staffs and colleagues I think uh it cannot be denied that the 11 and 18% Improvement or increase uh in membership and enrollment uh in early education programs as well as utk respectively uh is a very signant significant Improvement we've been very deliberate in terms of making Investments to draw the attention of parents to our programs and we're now dealing with a a good problem to have which is at utk level we're now exper ing capacity issues so for the board's awareness uh we are working uh with facilities uh to attempt to make decisions because to house utk students you need different types of accommodations in a standard Elementary classroom so looking at demand looking at capacity looking at uh an enrollment and um planning for the diversification of the space that's available

235in our schools because this is our best chance to actually grow districtwide enrollment is to capture the ATT the attention of students at the earliest possible Age 2 to 4 because if we do that more than likely they will stay with us we are not going to be able to effectively recruit large numbers of secondary age students just not going to happen so it's about growing our own and I'm very pleased with the progress that we're making uh as we will explore ways to re-engage in a much more aggressive way those two three year olds into our eecs the last thing I will say is that um uh despite some bumps uh we made the right decision uh when we decided to extend utk two years in advance of the state mandate to do so

236we're seeing the dividends of that paying off handsomely uh lastly uh we are in a process of conducting studies that uh reveal the strong connection between writing this for kindergarten and participation in these programs which intuitively we know um we have National research regarding these programs but we want local uh data that really substantiates that early education programs effective Early Education programs are the most effective way of boosting graduation rates it will take a little while but the only effective way of boosting graduation rates it all starts there so thank you very much for your work and I really appreciate the board's courage and uh and deliberate actions that you've taken in direct support of of these programs one last thing I do think that marketing campaigns and PR campaigns to inform our communities in

237a multitude of languages of the availability of these programs are key as is the old tried and our board presid is the one I think we were riding in some vehicle doing a parade you know anytime and as we are approaching very very soon parade season celebration season uh we are geared up with iPads in hand ready to enroll people uh up and down those parade sites up and down these large convenings where we know the community comes together uh enrolling onsite passing out information but really enrolling folks uh real time uh as as possible thank you very much yeah and superintended I see a future Jackie in marketing for you just okay don't hold your breath uh I had one quick question suppose we're really overwhelmingly successful and we double the number of students

238in two three years do we have space I'll take that as I think when you stepped out that's exactly what I addressed we we're doing an internal assessment right now that looks at current enrollment capacity of facilities right and demand okay which is not equal across the board right and uh as we contemplate the passing of a bond referendum we may need to have a serious conversation about conversion of spaces to accommodate the Demand right which may not necessarily you know in a lot of schools we have a typical Elementary classroom which is inappropriate for the demands of of uh utk uh or uh how to best leverage space in areas where the demand uh is at a premium this is going to require I know you see Miss to sitting back there she's here

239because this is an important conversation uh regarding the question that you're asking okay now I visited many early Ed centers and at this time we should be playing the song when we have to leave and the kids all know that song when it's time to leave but I won't play that so um we have come to the end of this uh meeting and I'd like to thank my colleagues and our guest speakers for the wonderful presentation and I hope members of the public who tuned in today were able to learn as much from these presentations as we did we learned a lot today our next Committee of the whole meeting will be on October 15th at 10 a.m. and with that let's move on to public comment here we go we have uh 15 folks

240signed up I'll call on the folks who are here in person first and then we'll go to the remote caller so Matos cadan come on up you have two minutes to speak once you begin and uh please feel free to correct me on the pronunciation if I totally blew it um and then after that will be Juan mandhi and then jubin kazai good afternoon my name is matthus kidana with the stop LAPD spine Coalition a year ago our organization submitted a records request to expose the LA usd's new spying app Los Angeles schools Anonymous reporting the app allows students and community members to report youth straight to La school police encouraging a culture of Suspicion and enabling new forms of cyber bullying we know that this app will inevitably and disproportionately impact black brown immigrants

241Muslim trans queer and disabled youth the school district didn't provide any of the records in response to our request for over 9 months after we sued the school district uh until and even now the communications we've received haven't begun to meet the parameters of our request and the outside law firm in in Contra Costa County that La YY hired for this case has even said his office has had responsive records since July and he even agreed on a set of terms to facilitate their production and then he didn't produce the records at all he stopped communicating with our attorney for a month and a half and I wonder how much has he charged you since May since all this started the attorney made promises around creating a production schedule for records didn't provide a production

242schedule and ghosted us for a whole month preceding the court date and in fact when the court date arrived the attorney didn't show up our lawyer had to contact his attorney so that he could literally phone into court he literally phoned it in and so just to say the school district is wasting resources withholding these records and even wasting resources kind of developing this app and this is even getting the attention from national news outlets I've spoken to a reporter from The New York Times who's concerned with the premise of this app and we're unable to provide information about it and I just want to say sitting through this meeting of the committee of the whole it's surprising to hear how humanizing some of these Solutions are that you're putting forward but it it's especially

243kind of sad to try to reconcile that with the fact that the district poured over $2 million into a contract with cook solutions the company that developed this app and is even spending more money now on paying this attorney to withhold just basic records about it and we don't just want the records we want to dismantle the program but it's been really gross seeing how this has played out thank you for your time Juan Mandi come on up you have two minutes to speak once you begin Mr Mandi is going to speak in Spanish so if you'd like to hear what he's saying in English as he's speaking two two minutes please uh please put your hands up and we will get you the translation devices if you like he I will be quick because

244we need to take advantage I believe that the most important thing Martin Luther King said something about the the the damag is from the Hypocrites the elites that use the tokenism because of their privilege that they have and they would and the philanthropy they would see us as sadness but there's a symbolic area they take an African-American they say look poor guy we will help him and they take to success but 99.9% are living in poverty they take one person that is lgbtq and they take him to success but they forget that 99.9% and they take one Latino and they do the same and this is called cism and they've told us and I spoke with a teacher from UCLA University he said hey guess what the problem of the Latinos do you want me

245to tell you what it is is Latinos that's what he told me because he adopts African-Americans from Africa and he makes a big labor and bringing them here how nice but he says you the education that La USD has is a racism is a political against lowincome Latinos that's terrible it's terrible how they see us you know how many Millions Mr Placencia ways to divide to manipulate and damage parents so that a new leadership doesn't form I came here to tell you a story if he tells you a story of Disneyland and you buy it because you're with him he lies he has false documents this is why you're more lost than a singer Jose hose and he passed away Mr McKenna said something that we worked on a several years years ago and Mr

246Salo knows this he is an accomplice to this he we made a proposition how parents who had a different level of Education take others at a different level thank you for your time appreciate it uh Monica araza come on up you'll have two minutes to speak when you begin mon afternoon my name is Monica rasola I am here once again to talk about police because once again I'm concerned about what happened this weekend an 11-year-old in Miami from Miami that was threatened with or threatened with shootings because this is concerning it's an 11-year-old uh what kind of a mentality does one have to destroy the lives of others and this worries me because what is waiting for us in California we are not preparing ourselves for what is happening in California and I think something

247very harsh is happening and we're not prepared and I ask you that you please take action with school police we want them in the school sites we've had so many examples of States where there's so many shootings and these are pretty tranquil states where supposedly nothing happens and here in California we have this stress amongst parents of rent food so many many insecurities and we're worried about what will happen in California and lastly I ask you Mr Alberto if you can please support us with Hollywood High School we're in the fifth week and we still don't have a Spanish educator or PE teacher or or a science teacher and another one we're I think we only have four substitutes and we're asking if you can please assist us in getting the uh assistance we need

248and also if you have us help with the mayor uh because parents we leave our kids at the school and we've never been ticketed and this is the second time we've been uh talking about that because we're not able to to park there after 9:00 because of the buses un sensive but a lot of parents have been getting tickets for more than $200 this is something what but like where are we going to drop our kids off cuz orange is right around the corner from the drop off and there's we can't park there so on the other side we have a lot of the buses for the artist that arrive to Hollywood for different projects so please and thank you appreciate your time thank you juben kazai juben K come on up hello my name

249is juin kazai I'm here with the stop LAPD spying Coalition I'm here to discuss a letter that our Coalition along with organ organizations that demand the dismantling of the lasar app due to its possible harms organizations such as the ACLU of Southern California youth Justice Coalition inner city struggle brother Sons self Coalition um including students at LUSD schools such as Fairfax High School students and attendees of multiple town Halls including parents who have spoken to us about the very real dangers of this app including how it can be weaponized to promote bullying uh among students um and these students at Fairfax High School are educating others about the harms of this app um the lawsuit and this unjustifiable delay of lasar records that my colleague mentioned previously has allowed for potential harms of this app

250to go on check for over an entire Academic School year and it's clear that Tech companies. cook do not care about this extractive relationship they have with the district on August 2nd cook posted an image on Facebook with LBD officers after they sponsored the Department's La School Police Department annual Symposium and posted a photo with a hashtag called Anonymous reporting we still do not know the dangers potential dangers of this Anonymous reporting app and cooko is celebrating its use the laser app is itself a waste of educational resources I've sat here for over an hour and I've h multiple times um the topic of funding being raised and we're spending money on a app to spy on our students that anyone here can download you do not need to be a student or a member

251of an L USD uh campus to download this application this is a promotion of surveilling our young people and will without a doubt disproportionately affect black brown and Muslim youth thank you for your time thank you for your time di Guan di Guan come on up you'll have 2 minutes to speak once you begin and then after Miss Guan will be uh Miss Maria Daisy Ortiz come on up you'll have 2 minutes to speak once you begin good afternoon members of the board I'm a member of the parent group uh parents for school safety and I'm impressed by the amount of organizations that are regrouping to create this disorder in the school sites they don't want Lisa program they don't want police they don't want uh we don't want anything this that's what the streets

252are for right I think the school is an institution where there should be order and parents should be able to feel safe in these places these educational spaces where we need school police so that it can be a lever of support for the principles that are truly them who suffer or who have this responsibility and and Duty towards our students another thing I want to speak about is there's a campaign on behalf of teachers or groups of teachers that are saying they need AC's but I see that here they spend the money in clinics in a program to create trees and who knows what and they can't have an AC at minimum I want to know how this money is spent because the clinic should be a city thing you're not a city you're a

253school system that should assist students to study to have better academic results and Mr Antonio Blen I came here to speak about the he is more lost than Alice and wonder because he's talking about Wonderland and things that don't exist he's saying that he's empowering parents and speaking to parents of the different what did you learn what do you know they come and ask me I would like to ask them and this morning I went to the region South they had the pack elections I wanted to sign and Miss VMA Monon goes are you going to start Miss Ken and I said this is a public meeting right but they can't even educate their own employees but they want to educate the parents so I am grateful that Mr McKenna spoke about how parents need

254to educate parents because you truly don't understand us thanks Maria Daisy Ortiz come on up you have two minutes to speak when you begin good afternoon my name is Maria Daisy Ortiz and well I support all my parent colleagues who uh are fighting for uh better results not just in safety but the academic achievement of our students because I always start saying that there is no problem child but students with needs and this is the thing that you're not assisting with um they're not they don't they're not born a member of a of a gang or anything like that that everyone has a responsibility and that's why it's very important that when a district is excellent they also have to be transparent with the funds with the programs with the authentic voice of the parents

255The Parent Academy does not work because it is one way of communication but in order to have empowerment for parents we need parents to have an a strategy on how to assist their students with math with uh English with the four domains of of the English language because it's the only way our students are going to close these gaps these academic gaps also how is this money spent in the schools this is not what is happening I visited a meeting in the Franklin School for the elac committee and 50 plus 50% plus one is the criteria for English Learners well here they they met with the parents uh with English learners but six of us were members of the community including the the school coordinator for me this is a conflict of interest because the

256Personnel this is a parent committee for parents by parents so at what time are they're doing the meeting when they're working so that's supplanting and that's something we cannot tolerate right so we need to give the parents what is appropriate for parents and what is appropriate for administrators but you can't confuse oil with water so thank you have a great day thank you for your time Michelle Chang I see you're online Michelle Chang please press star six to unmute yourself and you'll have two minutes to speak once you begin Michelle Chang hello hi hi um I'm Michelle Chang calling in as a Clinical Psychology graduate student School mental health provider and a member of the stop LAPD spying coalition to Echo the demands of my colleagues in demanding the immediate end to the lasar app

257the lasar app is La USC's app for allowing anyone to anonymously report students for Stu mental health incidents drug use and quote unquote safety issues and these reports are going straight to the armed La school police LAUSD is unjustly withholding publicly requested records on the use and development of this app and we are now um suing the school district for these records um and as members of our Coalition have been up lifting um the negligence of La USD as well as its hired attorney in continuing to unjustly withhold these records is also um directly impacting students who are potentially being subject to the harms of these apps for now over one academic year I want to focus on the concerning mental health implications of lasar we know that healing is rooted in mutually constituted relationships

258of trust and safety and that overwhelmingly youth under 18 who are in need of mental health support are first attempting to access care at this stage of their lives and are only able to access care during um their time in school settings due to barriers such as stigma and Family Insurance this app is send setting a dangerous precedent for youth that mental health issues in La USD schools should be resolved through police encounters that can turn fatal especially for black youth as police continue to be delegitimized this app is an attempt to Outsource policing to community members the VAR teachers counselors administrators and peers who are tasked to make schools nurturing environments of learning are negating that mission when they're being deputized to surveil and criminalize students and forc encounters with school police to be

259clear we are not asking for reforms or changes to the laser app or a more trusting relationship with the LA school police we demand the immediate dismantling of this app and anyone concerned with students who have mental health challenges being put in the crosshairs of a death dealing police should be demanding the end of lasar as well thank you thank you for your time okay the next caller is Isabel agir I see you're on the line Isabelle agir please press star six to unmute yourself and you'll have two minutes to speak once you begin uh Mr gir is going to speak in Spanish I believe so if you would like to hear what she's saying in English as she's speaking please put on the headsets to experience simultaneous translation this good afternoon my name is

260isab just a comment about the family engagement it's true that the district uh gives these workshops but we can't really say that parents really participate since they do it in a webinar style uh we can ask questions only through the chat normally we're not responded to with information that is accurate and when we are responded to they're telling us they're going to followup or that they don't currently have it so we can't really say that us parents are having participation in that aspect because it's just not happening that way we would love to have more uh participation with administrators and more feedback as far as schools so so with the phones I'm in agreement that students and employees are being distracted by these devices but I think prohibiting them isn't particularly a solution we need

261to teach ourselves and them to to balance this and I think that would set an example for students also Miss Kelly and to the women next to ca that they were using their phones and many use them so it's important that we set an example to our students and that we have a balance between cell phone use so we're hoping to be uh considered regarding that and we hope you have a great dayita good afternoon I'm erinda Morita and today I was in a meeting for the policy to prohibit cell phone usage in my opinion I'm in agreement and in disagreement in an emergency when there's a crisis chaos they can notify us that they're okay and the Personnel if they're extremely busy at that moment we can obtain that information uh there if there's

262no official people in the school sites how do I how am I guaranteed their safety as a doc as a parent I can sign a document that they can have their cell phone in a specific place also we need to set the example as personel how we're going to deal with this this is a waste of money and staff and time and we need to educate ourselves this should be something that should have been done a long time ago other schools have been implementing this and theyve followed it so I need to know how you can assist us and we're also talking about academically and with the academic we have needs there's a lot of students that haven't had the appropriate people to help them with their academics so we' failed them and L USD

263as parents because you know what they should be teaching and we also need help uh for us parents because we're being intimidated in the schools when we want to express our voices so this is something necessary and we also need the policies for the Committees that we that we be given it because we need to know what can be done and what cannot be done so that we're not intimidated so we need help from you all so that our children can be graduates educated and conscious that they can be responsible in the decisions that they make thank you Akil gopal Akil believe you're on the line please press star six to unmute yourself and you'll have two minutes to speak once you begin hello can you hear me we sure can please go ahead you

264have two minutes hi my name is akill and I'm also calling on behalf of stop L LAPD spying Coalition uh to voice our uh uh concern about this lasar app this spying app that L USD is Distributing among its students and the community and also about the fact that we have to we've had to literally take the school district to court in order to get these supposedly public records so we submitted this records request a year ago before we even met with the lawyer they stopped responding to us and delaying and delaying delaying and we want to ask you know during this meeting we heard so much about how on how students definitely need resources students with disabilities and learning disabilities need resources and yet the the district is spending more and more money on

265this lawyer when we literally had to potentially wake him up in order to remind him about this court appearance so um uh now that we've had to take the organization to court around this app I want to tell everybody why we are so alarmed about it um this app is modeled on one that the LAPD had for their suspicious activity reporting program uh which is very similar based on getting Community to act as cops and report on suspicious behaviors um this it came with an app called IAT LA and finally when we pushed for an audit of this app it revealed that it was vastly disproportionately targeting black angelinos in fact among women targeted black women were 50% of them and this isn't a a city where I think it's around 9% black if if

266I remember correctly so um this is a a vehicle for racial profiling it's a vehicle for cyber bullying when we talked to youth at Fairfax High their first concern was that people could use it as a vehicle to get back at people for grudges or a bunch of friends could could Mass report another student parents we talk to teachers we talked to everybody's been alarmed about this app and when we asked for records in fact the type of information that La USD has used to promote this app as successful the attorney has been stal War thank you very much for your time blocking our access to it we appreciate your time thank you uh Marcel Garcia I see you're signed up to speak remotely and you are online Marcela Garcia please press star six to

267unmute yourself and you'll have two minutes to speak once you begin Marcela Garcia good afternoon members of the board my name is Marcel garciaa and I am here because when there are elections how do you motivate parents so that they can go to the schools how is it that you will guide the coordinators so that they can get to the schools and participate because there are no parents that are attending and another thing the English Learners need motivation every single time that they take exams when there is an issue at the school when a student gets into trouble or when somebody else gets him into trouble and a parent goes and say hey what happened why what they the principales do is that they have retaliation against the parents because they complain or because they

268just say the truth there's retaliation against the students as well and they don't have the um they they don't say that there's exam we have to motivate the the kids they just focus on problems they just focus on in retaliation against the student students and their self-esteem lowers in academic achievement where is is it for these children especially for Latino students also that about the webinars it is an issue because you it's like I'm here listening to you everything that you're saying without having being able to put input and that's a webinar for families and you don't even give us they don't give us the ability to unmute our mics you want us to write we parents looking at those webinars sometimes we're working but we can speak not necessarily do we have to be

269writing everything down so please unmute phones listen to us why don't you want to listen to our voice please listen to the parents listen to us about all the information aside from all the information that you g another thing thank you because you are putting uh police at Franklin but Franklin's not the only school that needs safety and why is it that things have happened at and Franklin that's why you've been placing police no areli uh Karina Lopez I see you're signed up and you are present online please press star six to unmute yourself and you'll have two minutes to speak once you begin Marcela Garcia hello I'm sorry Karina Karina Lopez Lopez I am Karina Lopez so good afternoon my name is Gina Lopez and I'm calling first of all above all to thank

270Mr hin for ensuring that when there was operations in the east of Los Angeles uh congratulations for all your work because the students that you are monitoring and making sure they're in the college now another thing that I want to thank or to thank is Mr Francisco wera and Mr GGO for special education Mr wera is from operations in East LA on the case of Nela Mendes for the student Nelly Mendes that um successfully it was a work completed in collaboration with myself and I uh helped the family and I appreciate the professionalism from the people in the East Los Angeles Mr Goos and Mr wera the other issue I wanted to say is that the police safety is needed it is urgent parent engagement it is needed because a radical control does not work

271we need to participate it is imperative all of this it is essential and the fact is that in East LA I again I feel so proud to be part of the East LA community and congratulations for this uh very effective Personnel it is very important that we continue in the effort for parent engagement thank you end up to speak remotely but I'm checking to see if you're in the room you are not here and irin mor Morales Irene Morales you're signed up to speak remotely but you also not signed in are you in the room she's not in the room this concludes public comment I suppose we're adjourned time is now [Music]