001changes in laws governing our meetings to confirm the following. Would you confirm that you are present? President Darling Hammond. Yes, I am present. >> Would you confirm that there is no other adult in the room from where you are participating remotely? >> That is correct. I confirm it. >> Thank you, President Darling Hammond. Member McQuillin, can you hear me? I'm going to go to Member Rodriguez. Member Rodriguez, can you hear me? >> Yes. Good morning. I can hear you. >> Good morning. Would you confirm that you are present? >> Yes, I am present. >> And would you confirm that there are no other there is no other adult in the room you are participating from remotely? >> Yes, that is correct. Am I I'm alone in my office? >> Thank you, Member Rodriguez. Um I'll
002go back to Member McQuillin just in case he is able to hear us at this time. Okay, I I will go back to those questions when member McQuillin is available for us. So, seeing that all board members are now present, I hereby call the January 2026 meeting of the state board of education to order at 8:39 a.m. I'd like to commence by saluting the flag. Member Orosco Gonzalez, will you please lead us in the pledge of allegiance? member or Rosco Gonzalez and myself to the state board of education and I'd like to move forward by ceremonial ceremonially swearing in member or Rosco Gonzalez. Would you please join me here? Please raise your right hand and repeat after me. I Gabriella Rosco Gonzalez that I will support and defend the United States against all enemies, foreign
003and domestic. That I will bear true faith and allegiance to the of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California that I take this obligation without any mental reservation or purpose and that I will well Congratulations. >> So at this time I invite uh executive director Allen to deliver the oath to me since I will not do it to myself. [laughter] I doly support and defend the Constitution of the United States. >> That I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States >> against all enemies, foreign and domestic. >> That I will bear true faith and allegiance >> that I will bear true faith and allegiance >> of the United States >> to the Constitution of the United States. of the state of California. >> I take this obligation freely
004>> that I take this obligation freely >> without any reservation >> without any mental reservation or purpose of >> I will wellfully >> and that I will well and faithfully >> discharge the duties which I'm about to enter. Thank you very much. election of officers. We will hold an election for the position of president for 2026. The bylaws require that the state superintendent preside over the election of the president and such other business as the state board may direct. I'll turn the gavl over to state superintendent Thurman. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you, Madam Vice President, Madam Chair, um to the members of the board, and to those who are here and those who are following. Um in keeping with article 4 of the state board's bylaws, I'd like to call for nominations for the
005office of president. No member may nominate or second the nomination for themselves. Six votes are necessary to elect an officer and each officer elected shall serve for one year or until their successor is elected. I will now open the floor for nominations for the office of president. Are there nominations uh for the office of president? >> Member Glover Wood. >> I nominate uh President Darling Hammond. >> Thank you. All right. Is there a second to the nomination? >> Second that. >> The motion has been made. The nomination has been made and seconded. Dr. Linda Darling Hammond has been nominated for the office of president. Um are there any other nominations? Seeing none, uh we shall move forward. Uh is there any public comment um on the nomination for Dr. Linda Darling Hammond to serve as
006president? There is no public comment in the room. >> Thank you. Do we have the line open if there is any public comment in the queue? >> There is no public comment in the queue. >> Thank you. There's no public comment in the room and there's no public comment online. Uh at this time, I would ask uh Mr. Allen if you would please call the role. >> Member Yoshimo. >> Yes. >> Member Rodriguez. Yes, >> member Patil Bronson. >> Yes, >> member Rosco Gonzalez. >> Yes, >> member Olen. >> Yes, >> member McQuillin. >> Member audio. Um, >> yes. >> Um, member Glover Woods, >> yes. >> Member Esco, >> yes. Member Darling Hammond, >> yes. Motion carries. Congratulations. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> It's my pleasure to announce that Dr. Linda Darling Hammond
007has been elected for the office of president. Congratulations, Dr. Darling Hammond. I guess we should have asked you if you accepted the nomination, but um the vote has taken place and it's unanimous. So, thank you. [laughter] >> Thank you. It it is my honor and privilege to serve another year. >> Thank you, Dr. Darlingham. And now we turn to the election for vice president. Um Madame President, would you like to take over? >> Yes. Thank you. Um I will uh in keeping with article four of the state board's bylaws, I'd like to call for nominations for the office of the vice president. No member may nominate or second the nomination for him or herself. Six votes are necessary to elect an officer and each officer elected shall serve for one year until his or her
008successor is elected. And I'll now open the floor for nominations for the office of vice president. >> Like to nominate Cynthia Glover Woods as vice president. >> All right. Thank you so much. Is there a second? Yes, I would like to second that. >> Um, so, uh, Vice President Cynthia Glover Woods has been nominated for the office of vice president. We'll now open the phone line for the public comment queue. Members of the public wishing to provide comment on this item may do so by calling the telephone number and using the access code provided on the slide that is shown now. Are there any speakers signed up to provide public comment in person? There is no public comment in the room. And is there anyone on the uh phone? >> There are no there are
009no callers in the queue. >> All right. Uh with that, I think we need to turn to vice uh to um director Brooks Allen for uh uh roll call. >> Member Yoshari. >> Yes. >> Member Rodriguez. >> Yes. >> Member Patillo Brownson. >> Yes. >> Member Rosco Gonzalez. >> Yes. Member Olen, >> yes. >> Member McQuillin, >> yes. >> Uh, member Glover Woods, >> yes. >> Member Escoto, >> yes. President Darling Hammond, >> enthusiastically, yes. >> Member, congratulations. >> And I think with this, I will turn the gavl back over to Vice President Glover Woods. Hammond and uh thank you so much. I'm honored to be able to serve one more year uh as vice president for the board with these phenomenal colleagues that I work with. So, at this time, I'd like to welcome
010board members, staff, and members of the public who are attending this board meeting in person and those who are watching the live stream. Please note that for consent calendars, the proposed waiver consent items are W1 through W6 and the proposed regular consent items are items 4 through 12. We do have a couple of changes in the agenda. We will reopen item one, SBE priorities shortly to hear the reports from the state superintendent and from President Darling Hammond. We will reopen item one again later today to take action on the preliminary report of actions draft of the November 2025 meeting minutes and to report on our leasan assignments. A revision of item four was posted on January 6th. On page one of attachment one, a publisher content developer was removed from the recommended for approval of
011fee reduction table at the publisher content developers request. In the paragraph preceding the table, the count was changed from 18 to 17. A revision to attachment one of item 16, proposed regulations implementing the state grant program for supporting priority school districts was posted on January 6th. Attachment one has been revised on pages 1 and two to reflect that the date of the scheduled public hearing is April 2nd, 2026. As it relates to public comment, public comment will be accepted either in person or by phone. Members of the public wishing to call in for public comment should view the live stream of the meeting to know at what time the public comment will occur for each item. Public comment may be provided by dialing the phone number, entering a participant access code, and then following each
012of the operator's prompts. Upon dialing in, callers will be added to a caller queue. The operator will notify callers when it is their turn to provide public comment. And we will also ask callers to please turn down the speaker volume of their computers if they are following the live webcast to avoid an echoing effect. Members of the public wishing to provide public comment in person should sign in using the binder at the table just outside the room. The binder is on the table with separate pages for each item number. This will help ensure that the staff is able to track the in-person speakers for a particular item. Public comment will be limited to one minute for each speaker and where speakers require interpretation, two minutes will be provided. Item 17 is the general public comment
013item during which members of the public may provide comment on matters that are not specifically listed on the board agenda. Before we go back to the reopening of item one, I would like to uh ask the required questions of member McQuillin regarding his uh remote participation. Member McQuillin, can you hear me? >> Member McQuillin, >> I'm alone in the room here. >> Okay. Uh would you confirm that you are present? I believe you are. I see you. We heard you. Can you confirm it? >> Yes, I'm present. >> Thank you. And would you uh again confirm that there are no other adults in the room you are participating from remotely? I'm not sure that you heard me. Member McQuillin. Um, are there any other adults in the room with you? >> I'm alone in the
014room here. Thank you. >> Thank you, member McQuillin. Thank you so very much. So, we will now reopen item one and turn it over to State Superintendent Thurman to provide his report. Thank you, Vice President Woods, and thank you for convening the meeting. Um, I want to just start by saying congratulations to the officers. Um, it has been an honor to serve with you uh these last seven years and looking forward to an eighth year uh with great opportunities to support uh student achievement. Um, and as as a point of personal privilege, I would like to also acknowledge um how inspiring it is to serve with a president and vice president um who are incredible and phenomenal leaders and African-American women um in this time. It is an honor and as a point of personal
015privilege, I just want to acknowledge my appreciation to be able to serve with you both. Um it's an honor to serve with this entire board. Um and I'm inspired by the things that you all bring forward. uh for our youth. Um later today, you will meet um u fantastic uh members of our California uh Senate youth. You'll meet uh Cindy Chen and Gabrielle Listana who will be representatives uh for our Senate youth and their alternates Leanne Fan and Jerry Yang. I want to welcome back um all of you from um the holidays and hope that the new year is off to a good start for our students, for our educators, uh for our families, um for all um uh the new year brings excitement as we uh witness u the governor's proposed budget uh for
0162026 27. Um while uh the state continues to struggle with revenue, um what has been proposed for education again uh shows a deep commitment um to our schools and prioritizing um the resources for educating our kids. I'd note that this bud this proposed budget would bring some 22 billion new dollars uh to K12 education and to our community colleges. Um, I also would acknowledge that u this proposed budget has a billion dollars uh proposed for extending and expanding the community schools grants. Um, $2.8 billion uh for a a grant to support school districts that they can use at their discretion and $4.7 billion proposed to support expanded learning uh opportunities. Um I I want to also acknowledge that um we will continue to work on a number of proposals related to supporting student literacy. Um
017the budget um proposes additional funds for special education and for literacy programs including uh reading coaching uh specialist positions. Um, as many of you know, uh, we are launching at the Department of Education a five-year plan, uh, to ensure that California students learn to read by third grade. Um this plan will focus on making sure that there is additional dyslexia screening for our students. Uh highdosese tutoring um family engagement programs to support families and their students and in multiple languages and professional development uh for educators. Um in addition to that um we will be sponsoring legislation to make kindergarten a requirement in the state of California. Uh we believe it's very important as we talk about attaining literacy goals that students arrive in first grade having had some exposure um to school. This is not
018about drilling into students but it is about giving them access to u things that will help them that we now have fully funded transitional kindergarten is a momentous opportunity uh to support our students. We want to build on that and we hope that this year the legislature and the governor will see it that way as well and will approve our proposal, our bill to u provide uh kindergarten as a requirement for all California students. Um there are other uh pieces of legislation that you'll hear about uh sponsored by myself and the Department of Education AB673, a bill um that focuses on supporting homeless students. As many of you know, there are nearly 10,000 unaccompanied minor homeless youth in our state as students who continue to find a way to pursue their education. We want to
019provide them with subsidized housing and wraparound supports that help them as they move forward. Uh you'll hear about our pay it forward bill to make it possible for more California students to attend the CSU or a UC without debt. That's AB1241. We have 4 million Californians who are still struggling to manage debt from going to college. um that represents over $150 billion dollars in debt that we believe we with a pay it forward bill that allows students to attend um the university at almost no cost um and then pay it back when they get a job and that creates a pool of funds for other students. um AB1241 would uh study this issue, how to create a pay it forward system and create a pilot um for um a pay it forward system and we
020look forward uh to seeing uh that work uh move forward. Uh we'll continue to share with you updates on legislation um and other initiatives uh that we will uh be pursuing. I want to share with you a few uh upcoming uh dates uh for those who are interested. Um the department will be sponsoring um the next uh Holocaust uh education training program uh in March. Uh we call it um education to end hate and it is the second annual school leadership uh to end hate institute. uh registration is now open uh for those who would be interested in participating. We note that this training comes amid a time when we are seeing a rise nationwide in acts of anti-semitism and racism and hate. And we believe that we can use education to help counter hate.
021and we hope that you will participate um in this upcoming training u and help us use education to keep young people from being co-opted by those who would promote fear and hate in our nation. I I note that we continue our efforts to support our immigrant students and just want to acknowledge that during this difficult time when we have seen American citizens and others murdered uh by ICE. We recognize uh the impacts that those have on our students and our families, promoting fear and making our students afraid to come to school. Uh we will continue to work with our students and our districts so that they can feel that they can have a place to be safe. Bless you. Uh and to attain their education. Uh I'm proud that to say again that our sponsored
022legislation AB uh 48 and AB49 uh ensures that ICE has no place on our school campuses unless ICE has a specific judicial warrant um for someone to be detained. We've worked with our schools to educate them on how they can say no to ICE uh and keep our students safe and keep them learning. We will continue to raise our voices in support for our California students. I want to acknowledge that since our last meeting in November, the California school dashboard uh was released and that data shows that California students continue to make progress on key indicators in every category. an increase in graduation rates in college and career readiness um in A to G course requirements and u a reduction uh in our TK through 8 grades span in chronic absenteeism. We will continue to
023work on issues to reduce chronic absenteeism further. Um, and just note that every indicator on the dashboard was rated yellow or green, signaling improvement across every single outcome. Uh, and with that, uh, I want to say to the board members, thank you for your leadership. We look forward to a great year of continuing to push rigor for our students, providing them the mental health supports that they need, and providing them with a great pathway to learn about uh, career opportunities for their future. And with that, I will submit to any questions for the members of the board. This concludes my report. >> Thank you, Superintendent for him. >> Thank you so much for that uh wonderful report. Now, I'd like to uh invite President Darling Hammond to provide her president's report. >> Thank you. uh
024and thank you so much superintendent both for the report and all the work that has gone into those uh outcomes through the uh your efforts and that of the department. Um I'm sorry uh that I can't be there with you in person today. As many of you know uh my dear husband of 49 years uh passed away this past weekend uh after a long battle with Parkinson's disease. uh and I need to be here to support my family and deal with many pressing matters. I'll need to be in and out of the meeting at some junctures today, but I am uh pleased to be here and thrilled to congratulate my fellow board members Cynthia Glover Woods, Brenda Lewis, and Gabriella Rosco Gonzalez on their recent reappoints by Governor Nuomo to the board. I feel so
025privileged to work handinhand with vice president Glover Woods uh to lead the board through this year and with state superintendent Tony Thurman uh to support the efforts of the department. We have accomplished, as uh superintendent said, we have accomplished a great deal on this board and in the department in recent years to support a whole child approach to education to lean in on learning recovery throughout the pandemic. And since then, uh, even as our state has gone through so many traumatic events, including the major fires that reached epic proportions just a year ago, uh, we can see that these efforts are bearing fruit across the state. Later today, we will hear more of the details about the release of the dashboard, but as the state superintendent noted, our graduation rate has continued to make steady
026progress. It's now uh at nearly 88% at its highest level ever. Uh and graduation rates continue to show accelerated progress for many student groups uh that are narrowing the longstanding gaps in graduation. Uh college and career readiness is increasing. We'll look more at that topic in the meeting today about how we can acknowledge uh and understand more about what our uh students are um uh encountering and um mastering in terms of both career preparedness and college preparedness uh and pro and hopefully um civic preparedness as well. uh the rate of chronic absenteeism um has continued to improve at a faster pace than most other states in the country. Uh we are u well under the national average in terms of chronic absenteeism while we continue to have a lot of work to do and that
027work occurs in the context of climate events that are continuing to increase in number and severity and illness surges. Both of those things of course affect students abilities to um get to school and to be in school. Uh and we um both need to continue to make it possible for students to be educated uh remotely where that's necessary. uh and to um bring students into the school as we have seen uh more and more possible through the work of uh community schools and others that have been deepening connections to families. Um academic achievement improved in ELA math and science as you know for all student groups and all grade levels uh with black and latino students showing greater than average gains. So in short, you we are um supporting more students to come to school,
028be prepared for college and careers, graduate in greater numbers, and make stronger gains. There's still much work to do. It will be critically important to continue the forwardinking initiatives and investments that have been made in recent years so they'll continue to pay dividends in the coming years. Um and uh as state superintendent noted, the governor's proposed budget for 2026 27 um continues to grow the base of LCFF support for schools. Uh we would reach uh with this budget a record-breaking $27,400 per student, putting California above the national average in spending. Uh now of course with our cost high cost of living each dollar goes less far than in many other states uh but we uh were at the bottom of the the um rankings in school spending just 15 years ago. So we are are
029continuing to make progress there. Uh we will fully fund universal TK for the second full year of full implementation and uh continue to reduce class sizes to improve the quality of education for our youngest learners. Uh we continue to propose investments in our school meals program, our before and after learning programs which would become universal at every elementary school in the state. Uh there's also a the significant investment uh of over four $500 million to increase uh rates for special education. We continue in this budget to invest in our educator workforce through educator residencies which are proving to be incredibly successful in both diversifying the teacher workforce and the counselor workforce. uh to bring more people in to do that with uh high rates of effectiveness of those programs and high rates of retention for
030the teachers who enter the profession that way as well as uh the pupil personnel uh pupil services personnel. So uh that uh will continue to grow a very successful part of our teacher education uh and educator preparation uh infrastructure. The budget provides significant one-time discretionary funding for uh flexibility locally to address local priorities. And as the state superintendent noted, the budget proposes to um add a billion dollars to expand our community schools program and to integrate it into our ongoing commitments for education funding. So rather than one-time funding, uh the budget proposes ongoing funding for the very successful community schools initiative that we've begun. Um recent uh evidence shows that the community schools in the first cohort, which was the first one that could be studied, uh have significantly greater um improvements in chronic absenteeism
031uh and significant improvements in achievement above and beyond those of similar schools who are also improving in the state. But community schools have a multiplier effect on those positive outcomes. So, our commitment to uh education continues to be clear in this budget um from the governor. The proposed budget would continue the vital programs and initiatives that we know are accelerating learning for all of our students. The budget also includes a proposal to modernize the management of our educational system by unifying the state board and the department of education. Something that has been proposed many times over the last century. It was part of the master plan proposals in 2002. Uh although the subject of reports going back to the early 1900s uh and it is the subject of a recently released pace report. There'll be
032considerable discussion about how to conceptualize an integrated approach to governance over the coming months and more discussion on the fiscal side of the budget. As this is just the first step, we hope the state's financial picture continues to improve as we get closer to the annual May revision. Some of that will rest on federal decisions that strongly impact uh states abilities to meet their commitments to their people. And um if you're keeping up with all of the discourse about federal policy, um you know that there are a number of very very important uh votes coming up about how our federal resources will be allocated. Uh before we jump into our business, I do want to let you know that our work on the state board of education portrait of a learner and graduate is proceeding
033a pace. The state board staff in collaboration with those of the CCE, the [clears throat] California Collaborative for Excellence, Educational Excellence, is working to get feedback from the field through listening sessions and a survey. I encourage all of you to fill out the short survey. Uh it can be found on the CCE's website. Uh if you go in and sort of um search for the portrait of a graduate learner, you will find the survey there. I want to remind everyone that the purpose of the portrait is to provide a vision of what every California student should know, be like, and be able to do that can provide a northstar for our state board decision-making about curriculum, instruction, assessment, and accountability. Any portrait adopted by the state board would not create new requirements for local districts,
034many of whom have already adopted such a portrait, and we are building on the work that is going on in the field. it would give us our own um sort of compass for the work that we do. We'll hear more about the results of the feedback process in our March meeting. Our fearless leader, Vice President Glover Woods, will be steering this process over the coming months. And with that, I hand the gavl back over to Vice President Glover Woods to steer us through this meeting. Thank you. >> Thank you, President Darling Hammond. State Superintendent Thurman. Yes, please. >> Thank you, Madam Vice President. Uh, Madame President, we just want to on behalf of the California Department of Education acknowledge your loss. Um, you have our condolences and know and our prayers and our love and
035just know that uh for you and your family that uh um we're saddened but also um grateful for all that you and your family have contributed to the state of California. Um we have requested that the California State Senate um adjourn in memory for your husband Allen and uh we'll keep you posted as to when that will take place. And just as a point of personal privilege uh again I want to thank you for the seven years of incredible leadership that you have provided to this state to this board and to education. It's been an honor to work with you as a partner. Um, thank you for championing so many important initiatives like community schools and what we do in literacy, what we do in recruitment and retention of our educators. Um, just want to
036thank you for bilingual education, all the things that you've championed. Um, thanks for being uh America's greatest educational researcher. Um, I know this because I've copied all of your work and put it in all of my legislation. and um uh even in this difficult time just want to appreciate you and let you know that uh we send our love and our u prayers to you and your family uh at your time of loss. >> Thank you so much. It has been um especially wonderful to be able to be doing this work with you um with the shared values and the incredible energy that you have brought to getting our state moving forward uh in education. So I I appreciate that. I appreciate the kind thoughts. Uh many people have have um expressed their um support
037for my family and I greatly greatly appreciate that. Thank you. >> And President Darling Hammond, I also echo um on behalf of the board, we definitely miss having you here at the DES um and do know that our prayers are with you and your family at this time. Um Allan was a phenomenal man. uh anyone to read and learn of him um knows that it was just a life well-lived um of public service and just know our thoughts and prayers are with you. Um we're so appreciative of you just gracing us with your present during this time. Um and do understand when you do need to pop off and on um but just know you are missed here and our love, thoughts, and prayers go out to you and the Darling Hammond family at this
038time. >> Thank you so much. So we will um move forward to item number two. And so item two is the update on the implementation of the integrated local, state, federal accountability and continuous improvement system. And the board will uh engage in a study session on the college career indicator. Um just to kind of frame a little bit what we're going to engage in board members over this next uh period of time, the next hour or two uh just understand that our study session today is designed to really give us a holistic look at the college career indicator. Our goals are to deepen our understanding of the current CCI structure and to uh revisit the original goals of the indicator particularly its role in supporting the state's accountability system as the department will describe shortly.
039So we have a couple of presentations that will pre precede our discussion. Um, just know that the department will describe shortly the foundation of the CCI, sharing that it was built on research identifying coursework and assessments that predict post-secary success along with extensive input from education stakeholders and interest holders. And while the current CCI measures do a strong job of predicting college success, uh we know from our public comment and conversations in the field that far less is known in California about what predicts or leads to career success. And this in part is due to data limitations, particularly with an inability to link our K12 data with workforce outcomes for researching what indicators matter. So given those limitations, we're especially interested today in examining how the CCI measures career readiness. As the labor market and
040career pathways continue to evolve, an important question for us is what are the most accurate and meaningful ways to measure how well schools are providing opportunities for students to be career ready and are we fully capturing the range of student experiences and outcomes. So, as we listen to our presentations and engage in our reflection, I lift those up for your consideration when we get to our discussion point. In the most recent dashboard release, we did see gains across many areas, including a 3 percentage point increase in the CCI. At the same time, only 52% of students statewide are identified as prepared under that indicator. So this also raises some very important questions for us such as why are more students not being captured in the indicator. Are the accomplishments of our students not being currently
041reflected and does the indicator need to be modified to better align with our goals? So our study session today is an exploratory conversation. We will not make any decisions during our study session. we will engage in robust reflective conversation as we learn more and reflect more on the college career indicator. So um I'd like to bring forward the department of education who's going to lead us off today by grounding us in the current structure and evolution. I invite um Cindy Kazanis and Kim Mund from the CDE, our partners, to provide an overview of the CCI or historical context and all other important information related to this indicator. Good morning, Cindy. So great to see you. Please begin when you are ready. >> Good morning, uh Vice President Glover Woods, Cindy Kazanis with the California Department
042of Education. It's nice to see you as well. uh to begin this conversation um the cal the college career indicator is is very different than any other indicator. Um when we were talking about this study session uh it it doesn't act like suspension where there's not really a lot of noise and um things that you can add to suspension. You're either suspended or you're not suspended. Um for the college career indicator, it has become something that um we have explored 35 different components to put in this indicator. So, uh, hopefully you had a chance to look at the attachments, especially attachment one, which talks about really the history and some of this history predates yourself, um, member Gber Woods, President Darlene Hammond's time on the board, uh, as to what a college career indicator would
043mean for California. And you'll hear later from, um, our colleagues with the comprehensive center about how their other states have approached this. And when we think about the college career indicator and the work that has gone into this, we have presented over the course of the last 10 years 28 items memos and we've actually had a study session on this. We had a study session back in 2019. So this has been an indicator that has been I think difficult to land because it keeps growing because we're trying to keep shifting the needs of the indicator to meet all types of students. students enrolled in our juveninal court systems, students enrolled in charter schools, students who are severely cognitively disabled. So our our 1% of our population and this indicator still has opportunities to grow and
044we have presented uh those opportunities to you in the form of career measures over the last four years. And so one of the things we hope we can get out of this session to achieve is how to land those indicators. How do you want them to see show up on the dashboard? There is uh something within within the department. This is bigger than me. I actually have um our director of the college career transition division, Mindy Parsons, here today because she is uh partnering with us and this is a a big space in the of course for high schools. The other person that has been very helpful in this space is Mon'nique McQuain. She uh oversees of course our professional um learning support division and the state seal of civic engagement which President Darling Hammond
045has um really rallied behind. The other person that we couldn't do any of this work without is Liberty Van Madden and you very rarely get to see Liberty but Liberty is in charge of the education data management division. Everything with the college career indicator starts at the student level. If I don't have access to student level data we cannot put it into this indicator because it wouldn't be valid or reliable. And that is a standard that you have established for accountability. So with that in terms of uh what we are hoping again to get out of today is first um in case again um we want to make sure that everybody's on the same page in in terms of prior state board actions prior to many of you again being on this board talk a
046little bit about the overview of the CCI uh composition um how eleas and schools have demonstrated they're prepared. Some of these data you will see um through this year. There are other pieces of data we're going to bring to you later on. We're going to bring to you in March and if necessary um in May to help again for you to land those measures around um the career pieces. That's uh that that that second to last bullet additional career measures. And then we'll briefly um give you an overview to help set the tone uh for your conversation around performance since 2017. So looking historically at this measure and the gap that we had during COVID um especially because this measure is heavily dependent on our smarter balance assessments which of course um were not offered
047during um one of the years or offered and and not um taken by all students. So in terms of uh you know sort of what it is um the college career indicator does exist as a state indicator for our high schools. It was adopted again a decade ago and we first published it with performance levels in 2018. So it was really the last metric to be adopted by the board as we were developing that new accountability system a decade ago. The purpose of the indicator is to see how well schools and local educational agencies prepare students. I'm going to repeat that again. So it's schools and local educational agencies. We're not looking to see if a student, this is not about students themselves, it's how the schools are supporting those students to get access to
048certain programs to get access to opportunities within each cohort. So, we're looking at students who are in the graduating cohort. That's who is measured. It's not the ninth graders, it's not the tth graders, it's the graduating um supposedly graduating seniors. And if you don't graduate, then you're not, you know, you don't even pass um prepared. So, or have an opportunity to demonstrate prepared. So it also uh captures you know for those um schools especially an alternative school setting this higher much higher um standard to get across because first we have to see the student graduated um with a high school graduated from from um from high school. We are also looking um through each of these um measures uh how you know like we we're viewing it from two different sides. We're viewing it from
049an assessment side. So we've tried to make this um presentation a little bit more user friendly. So we have assessments and then we have course completion and that is again dependent on the collection of the data. So for our assessment results, our testing contractor of course provides um us access to the smarter balance results. For course completion um we are picking that up from our student level data system which we are dependent on local educational agencies to give us accurate and current information about their students. In terms of um further assessment results, we are uh dependent on uh for example on the ASVAB for schools to report that. We are unable to get that from the federal government. That is there is not um access to that that piece of data. We also have data
050sharing agreements um free of cost to us uh from uh the college board for advanced placement and then um international balora. So in terms of the development um and intended purpose uh this is a slide that I know um this one and the one forward uh we've used uh we used back in 2019 during the study session. So I'm just historically reflecting on um what that purpose was back then if the board is looking to expand the purpose like this would be a great opportunity to have that conversation as well. But really uh what is was intended from the original um design was looking at a complete picture beyond graduation rates of how well eleas and high schools are preparing students for success after college. We are looking to emphasize that a high school diploma
051represents a broad and rigorous course of study and prepares again students for success after high school. Also um looking to make sure that um high schools provide provide students access to that rigorous and broad of study and then finally represents good policy and reflects the priority of California educators and stakeholder groups. So again, [clears throat] this has been an area where there's been lots of interest. We've had vendor interests as well. So you will see that um in the letters that we've received um time and time again around this indicator. In terms of the early development of the CCI, we began this well in advance of um the accountability system uh being um restarted or or or reshaped and and uh the new system that you see today. So back in 2014 when we were
052still reporting out on the API, remember those days um when we had this goal of 800 um and there back back at that time it was actually prior to my tenure there was um continues and we do this continues to this to the date is this focus on making sure that we have input from our education stakeholders from researchers to make sure that what we are putting in um to the extent possible is grounded um in not only good polic um that it um is available to you know most students in California and uh that we also um uh try to make sure that um you know it is is technically sound as well that is definitely a standard in the development of that um like like anything that we're doing around accountability we held
053webinars regional meetings um we had a statewide survey um we also relied on research findings from um educational scholars one of which has been um you've already heard from today Dr. Linda Darling Hammond by Dr. David Connley um from Oregon and then McCall Kurlander just down the road from UC Davis um absolutely helped inform um what you see today in the college career indicator in terms of how we became um more than just test taking in this model um really uh because of the the work by espec especially by um Dr. Kinder looking at course taking behavior um as a predictor of college success. Um so looking again at UCCCSU requirements um we have absolutely dependent on our career and technical education courses um and also making sure that um we were incorporating where where
054we could um assessment measures and so that's where the advanced placement and international black boy exams have come in and then of course we'll be talking a little bit today about the Cambridge um assessments as well. We also have um definitely focused on uh looking at college career courses, college credit courses um as a as a way to um making sure that we can look at again things that will help students be prepared um prepared for college. The other um component that is very important that I've already mentioned today is the reliance on um data that is submitted by local educational agencies about every single student and that is through our student level data system. And so we are dependent on um these collections um to make sure that we can uh report out about
055students who have completed A throughG. We can report out about students who are enrolled in a college credit course. The other piece is this um reliance on thirdparty vendors uh advanced placement through college board international balorate um to receive exam scores. We do know what courses they are taking through cowpad. So that is not something that we're relying on those vendors for. Uh and then finally, we have stood up a separate system because um the decisions have not yet been made around whether or not some of these measures will be included in the accountability system. So we don't want to bring it into CalPADS um with uh not knowing that for sure. So we have a separate system called the California um CDE education data collection system um which uh we collect information such as
056the state seal of civic engagement. that's where we've been collecting the ASVAB scores. Um, so those are just, you know, the data burden for for the LEAs is significant for this metric. Um, and they are stepping up, but I think that there's still this wondering about who may not be submitting data. And so you'll see um through the lens of when we we uh walk through each of these metrics, Kim's going to walk through how many students are actually prepared um based on these metrics. So we'll be able to see a little bit of a flavor, but we will be providing you again more information about how many LEAs, for example, are offering the state of civic engagement because we're still not at 100%. Just to give you a heads up, we've still got a
057ways to go. Um, and so why are why are we not there yet? What what is the adoption rate, right? It's not something um that um is is as widespread as something like advanced placement, which has had, you know, there's a lot of history with that um uh curriculum in California. So, we're gonna just take a quick uh run through in in I think it's five slides or less on this um history and just um the decision points, right? So, knowing that we had 24 items, memos, and one study session, um this was not done in a day. This took um you know, meetings every single year to get us to the point that we're at. So back in 2016 when we adopted almost all of the other metrics and indicators for the dashboard um
058we started off with the basics. We looked at smarter balance summit of assessments. We looked at advanced placement exams. We looked at IB exams and then UC um CSU requirements as well as um CTE pathways. The board also uh during that time adopted what status performance levels were for the CCI uh in 2018. Um we arrived with the state seal of civic uh state seal of biiteracy. So uh thrilled to have um a lot of our students are or a significant amount of our students um earning that uh and then leadership military science. So there was um definitely a interest in there from the schools and the areas of the state because I think that there are pockets in the state where we have more participation than others um in that in that space. The
059board also approved performance levels and colors as well as status and change cut scores in 2018, which is why the first time you see the the CCI arrive on the dashboard with a color was with the 2018 dashboard. In 2020, even though we were all um after March meeting remotely, um we uh still made progress. The board adopted four career measures for inclusion which was registered pre-apprenticeships, non-registered pre-apprenticeships, our state and federal jobs programs, transition workbased learning experiences, and transition um classroombased learning experiences. And I can tell you from experience, these metrics really were at the core of a CCI work group that the department supported over several years. They met um on a frequent basis. it was a serious amount of of of time and effort that was put in not only by um
060our local educational agencies and those stakeholders that were interested but also by department staff. And so uh I I don't want to um you know dismiss any of this of this work. Some of this work we've we've realized um you know we we've had you walk back from because we had to make make sure there was a right fit. Um but it is something that um came with a lot of stakeholder input. And then in 2023 with this uh current board um the non-registered pre-apprentichips were removed from the CCI. Uh and again because we we've learned more from each of these pieces and so we've tried to make sure when um information is no longer relevant or um reliable that we are advising you um accordingly and that hopefully you're taking action um to remove
061things. The same thing with our regional um occupational centers and programs and our state and federal jobs programs. um there was a removal in 2025 and then um we successfully added in 2025 uh the completion of the advanced placement courses. So that is something that is um really a highlight for us. I know Superintendent Thurman talked about it in his opening remarks. Um so we are just delighted to be um in this space. I'm going to turn it over for the remainder of this presentation to Kimberly Mhank and she will introduce herself in just a moment. Good morning board members. Kimberly Montank, administrator of the accountability development and policy analysis unit. Um I am here to demystify the CCI and I hope that I do a good job with this today. Um that is um
062my charge and I'm hoping that we look at things um in a way that helps us communicate clearer and easier around it. Um and how the pieces that we feel are missing, right, where they go in and how we can add them. Um and as Cindy referred to um how we can assist identifying what schools and eleas are doing across the state, right, and add those to the CCI to additionally measure, you know, things that we are not currently measuring in our current system. Um so to ground us all, um I want to um first off start by clarifying what we do measure, the data points that we gather within um the college career indicator. Um and the first most important one is the number of students that are prepared. And what we mean by
063that is that an LEA or school has prepared a high school graduate right for college or career per the measures that the board has adopted. We also gather additional information and report out on that on an annual basis. Um and the confusing level um that comes through is approaching prepared. Um and the original CCI and most of the measures adopted prior to um 2019 included an approaching prepared level which was a signal to eleas and schools right that not nothing was done right something was done but it wasn't enough to get to the prepared level so we wanted to acknowledge right work being happening and being done right um and then also providing a signal that perhaps there is just a little bit more to go with the next cohort Right. So you're building upon
064blocks to move forward. Um we have not adopted approaching prepared measures um any with anything since 20 uh 2020. So we haven't continued that um trajectory moving forward. Um so those signaling um device isn't there with our newest and most modern measures. So I just want to um when you look through those you'll be like why do we have some of the you know some are approaching and some don't. um it was simply a a a device of the first iterations of the CCI and moving forward we um since approaching wasn't meaning anything we centered our 28 items right on the meat of things for prepared um and providing that within accountability and additionally we do pro um report out on those students who are not prepared and that is either again through a student
065who either did not graduate or did not meet any of the measures available either through prepared or approaching prepared. Um this pretty little graphic um is what we share on our flyers for um our accountability um web pages and our flyers um showing that the CCI rate calculation is simply the number of students who graduate prepared divided by the total number of students in the four-year graduation rate and we add in any prepared students from the fifthear graduation rate. So it's a different cohort which confuses everyone um because it's not the same number you see in the cohort graduation rate for our five four five-year graduation rate. Right? So that's all students who were in the four and fiveyear graduation rate. We just give a positive um addition to the denominator for the students who
066graduate prepared. So we do not punish schools um by adding in all of those additional fifth rate students in the graduation rate. So it's not it's similar to the CCI um denominator but or to the graduation rate denominator but is not the same. So those are um parallel but not um not exactly the same. And here is where um I would like us to focus today and we'll walk through all of these different components one by one. Um but the adopted CCI measures as Cindy described are a um series of measures either through measuring assessment results from students measuring course taking um by students as reported to the CDE or a combination of assessment and course taking measures. So everything you see in the CCI is one of these things and everything that we receive
067is either directly through a testing vendor for those assessment results um or through Calpads through uh you know results delivered directly from us uh the eleas um and through course taking measures. So we'll walk through the results of 202425 cohort for each one of these and walk through the elements and at the end of these if you have any questions we'll save those and I can go back and we can explain anything. So our first one obviously are smarter balance summit of assessments and a score of a level three or four on both ELA and math will earn prepared for an LEA or school. Um and in the 202425 cohort one,2 112,044 students or 22.5% of the cohort was prepared through this metric. For our IB courses, international balorette um receiving a score of four
068uh five, six or seven on two IB exams would earn prepared. Um and there were 3,719 students across the state or um 710en of a percent of our cohort that were prepared under that mechanism for our courses for college credit courses. So students who complete two courses where college credits are awarded with a C minus or better um as reported in CalPADS we had 59,977 students in the cohort or 12% um uh receive prepared through that mechanism registered pre-apprenticeship um for prepared um that is just simply completing that registered pre-apprenticeship through our career measures and metrics um 2460 students students or five ten of a percent of our cohort completed that measure. Um transition classroom and work-based learning experiences. This measure is limited to students who receive the alternative pathway diploma. Um and that is
069completing at least 100 hours of work experience. um as well as the equivalent of four semesters of courses of college or career exploration uh prepared to design a student for an with an IEP for employment or independent learning. Um and 23 students completed that in the 202425 cohort for our advanced placement or AP which is a combination thanks to your motions um and action last year of both assessments and courses. Um that metric looks like either completing two AP courses, receiving a score of three, four or five on two AP exams or completing a course and getting a score of 3, four or five on one AP exam. And last year we had 142,431 or 28.6% of our cohort complete the measures that way. Our most robust measure by far and our assessment and course
070um combination is our met UC CSU requirements and we say plus here because it's not just meeting our A3G and completing that course sequence. It is also as you see a requirement to do something else. So there's assessments as well. So if you meet all of your A3G course requirements or as we refer to them UCCCSU for clarity sake for everyone, right? Um you also need to do one of the following. Either score a level three or four in one subject area for ELA and math and score a level two, three or four in the other area. A semester quarter, two quarters or two trimesters of a course of where college credits are awarded. So, one single college credit course with a C minus or better, a single AP course, a score of three, four
071or five on an AP exam, a score of four, five or six or seven on an IB exam, or completing a CTE pathway with a C minus or better. Any of those additional components, as well as completing your A throughG coursework, um will result in prepared and 42.6% of our um cohort was prepared through the CCI in that manner. for our state seal of bi literacy. Um you this includes including the state seal as well as having a score of level three four or four on the ELA and smarter balance. So you also need to receive a um that score on your test in your junior year as well. So 12.4% of the cohort or 61,639,000 students received that and received prepared through that mechanism. And then career technical education pathways plus um meaning that
072you completed a CTE pathway with a C minus or better throughout that pathway as well as scoring a level three or four in one subject area of ELA or math and a score of two, three or four in the other area or a semester, two quarters or two trimesters of a course where college credits are awarded. um and 68,288 students or 13.7% of our cohort completed the P uh CCI that way. Leadership military science plus also is two years of leadership military science as coursework and then scoring a level three or four in one subject area of ELA or math and a level two, three or four in the other area. And that includes um about 410 of a percent of our cohort or 1769 students. State and federal jobs programs plus complete one of
073the following jobs programs. So we have workforce initiative opportunity acts wea job core youth build or California conservation core and one semester two quarters or two trimesters of a CTE course over the C minus or better. This metric is limited only to our DAS schools and was one of those that were passed in um 2020 in order to expand access to our students um across all schools and 302 students were prepared this way or onetenth percent of our cohort. Here you see laid out all of those duplicative percentages and at this point you're like Kim that added up to way more than 100%. And you were right because we have students that are prepared across multiple of these ways, right? Um I do believe we had um students who are prepared in as many as
074eight of these different measures. Um and so across all of these when we add up and just one gets you in right, 51.7% of our cohort was prepared through the CCI in this past year. So you can see those you know across many of them right had a lot of the same components right mixed and matched in different ways. Um so uh the expansion of metrics sometimes does not add new students it's may just be counting additional students um in the same way. So you can look through this and see um and that's this is exactly what our results show, right? Um we have these um displayed in our additional reports in a um heat map that's uh very um fun to look at um but allows you to um see all of those in
075detail. Now when we go to our approaching prepared measures, this is just a small component again signaling that something happened, right? Not nothing happened. Um, so for our smarter balance assessments for approaching prepared, a score of a level two um on ELA and math will get you um to approaching prepared. So we had 18,711 students who showed approaching prepared that way. College credit courses, a single course and again these are students who did not meet prepared, right? So that these are, you know, these are excluded from any student who was in any of those percentages. So that's one single college credit course and that was what they did. So 9,77 students met the approaching prepared that way. Uh transition classroom and work-based learning experiences. Um this is an or instead of an and if you
076see that um lovely bold word there. So it's either the work experience or the coursework. 59 students completed that work. And then met UCSU requirements. This is simply completing the pathway without any of those additional measures um that we showed uh previously. So 22,39 students in the state um passed uh just the coursework component. Additionally, CTE pathways that on its own also does not rise to prepared. Um so 26,798 students met approaching prepared through that mechanism. Leadership military science same right on its own um 1,642 students um met approaching prepared and state and federal job programs again on its own 196 students um met that. So altogether 14.3% of students met approaching prepared in addition to our 51.7%. which leaves 33.9% of our of our cohort last year that either did not graduate or did
077not complete any of the measures that I have mentioned across all of those components. So even the minimum components of approaching prepared. So the we have 39 33.9% of students who in any of those metrics um have not been shown to be prepared by their LEA or um their schools at this time. So, that's what we're here to talk about, right? When we're talking about expanding is um thinking about those students um and thinking about um who are we not reaching or what are we not see, you know, is there something we're not measuring and that's why they're not showing up um and or somewhere we're not reaching and they're not showing up. So, that brings us to these additional measures that we've been working on for six years. Um and the first of those
078measures um near and dear to President Darling Hammond's heart is the seal of civic engagement. Um and that is a seal conferred by the state superintendent of public instruction through criteria adopted by the state board of education um to students in grades 11 and 12 right who demonstrate excellence in civics's education and participation as well as understanding the United States Constitution, California Constitution and a democratic system of government. Um in 2024 25 we had 19,893 students who earned a state seal. Um there are more students who got seals or requested seals. Um but in our student level data collection um we only have 19,000. So, we're off right now by about 3,000 students of who schools have asked for seals from, but we in receiving that data um only have 19,000, but we have two
079years of data. So, that's a great place to start for our career measures and courses that we're talking about internships. So, this is a work-based learning activity where stu which allows students to apply classroom learning in a workplace setting. Um the instructor and partner work together to ensure student safety and success and monitor student progress. Um they practice fair labor standards act when coordinating these internship programs. And most importantly, as we talked about first, right, these are eleas and schools offering courses to students. The internship opportunity is tied to an instructor course and or a CTE program. It's supervised by an industry expert and it can be paid or unpaid. So in 202425 we had 19,124 students who completed an internship um as reported to the state. We've also been completing data for the last
080uh five years on student led enterprises. So this is the development of an operation of a revenue generated business operating outside of the classroom. But student led enterprise can occur across all of the industry sectors and can also occur in nonCTE programs. It's tied to a course where students develop a business or marketing plan. It's operated and managed by students and it could it's revenue generating for-profit or nonprofit. Um and last year we had 8554 students completing a studentled enterprise. And then for simulated work-based learning, these are students that gain career experience while at school through an emulated workplace environment that is aligned to classroom curriculum. So, it's tied to a course in an instructor, tied to workplace experience within a school environment, um, in conjunction with a business or industry, and involves work-related and
081or technical skill development. And this one, I will tell you, is the most asked question. Everyone's like, what is a simulated work-based learning? So, I have my expert Mindy Parsons, to tell you um, exactly the conversation she's had with uh, districts across the state to what they are doing as simulated workbased learning. >> Thank you. Again, person's division director for the career and college transition division. I'm very excited. I um when I knew that they were going to be presenting on this, I wanted to come and and crash their presentation. So, thank you so much because I'm very excited about CCI and glad that we are talking about it today. So, I I do want to point out that high quality CTE programs include work-based learning. So, that's you know career exploration, um internships, um
082connecting uh uh connecting with employers, things like that. But simulated workbased learning is a little bit different in that um classrooms are are um eleas are trying to replicate the workplace environment into the classroom. So you see a lot of that with our health sciences pathways like certified nurse assistant, medical assisting. You know, you walk into a classroom, you'll see those hospital beds, hospital equipment. Um you may also see simulated workbased learning um within our culinary arts. A lot of the classrooms and kitchens have been retrofitted so they have state-of-the-art equipment because Again, we want our our students to be able to access this equipment as if they were in the real world into um a job in that pathway. You also may see this in automotive um where you walk into a classroom and
083students are actually doing oil changes. You know, you'll see engine hoist and students actually performing as if they were um working for an auto um auto body shop. So, those are a couple examples um of what's been happening in in regards to some of the workbased learning. But again, all high quality CTE programs offer work-based learning, and this is just another opportunity. If they can't go out and do that, we are simulating that into the classroom and and um and so we're replicating that workplace environment into the classroom. Hopefully, that's helpful. >> Thank you. Thank you so much, Mindy. It's so nice to have program experts right right there at the call. Right. Phone a friend. Um and so then um the other component that we've been um gathering information about for the last five
084years is our armed services vocational aptitude battery assessment. Um and this is the military entrance exam that's given to determine enlistment eligibility and drop training eligibility. Um it's administered students to students in grades 10 through 12 um in schools that offer a this non-mandatory exam. Um and the score is based on word knowledge, paragraph comprehension, um arithmetic reasoning and mathematics knowledge. Um and last year we had 4,229 students in the cohort um with eleas that submitted scores on their behalf. Um the additional piece um that uh the state board requested last year for us to look at which we currently don't have any information on you see coming in March um is Cambridge International. And Cambridge International offers um one-year AS level or two-year A-level courses across 50 plus subjects to students in their Cambridge
085advanced stage coursework. Um assessments are taken at the completion of those courses. Um and we will be able to provide numbers with you as far as um within the state as to the number of students who either took exams and or completed courses within the 2024-25 cohort. And then additionally the other request by the board um uh at the completion of um 2025 in our work plan was to look and add courses for international baloria similar to how we did for AP this year. So um IB exams as you saw were already included with throughout the CCI. Um but we would be adding a IB course completion of a C minus or better to the current CCI completion. Um and that would look like in 2024 25 9,563 students um or 1.9% of our cohort.
086So all of that to wrap up what has the CCI looked like over the past few years. So you have an in-depth look right exactly into the numbers right percentages across this past year um for 202425 but what does it look like since 2017? And I want to um raise everyone's tiny little eyes. Put your reader glasses on. I and fully acknowledge that this is not 508 compliant in any way, shape, or form. Um but on your phone, you can zoom in right on your screen. You can zoom in. Um but the expectations for the college career indicator for um very low for status, we have um it's 9.9% or lower, right? Um low is 10% to 34.9%. Medium is 35% to less than 54.9%. High is 55% to 69.9% and very high is 70%
087or greater. So those are the expectations that we're looking for and we have set since 2018 for standards across um the um uh the state. And as you can see, every year since 2018, the state has been medium. We started with a status of 42.2% and we are now at 51.7%. Our color has remained yellow except for this past year where it jumped to green and that is because we reached a threshold of change right that exceeded 3%. So um and we actually hit the increased column. So this is the first year that the state as a whole has increased year-over-year um in growth. So you can see that there's been a steady increase right in the display of um and the recognition of students and the preparedness of students across our LEAs and across
088the state as a whole. Um however it's been in a very similar neighborhood, right? And it will stay in that similar neighborhood until we exceed 55%. Right? So in order to get to high, we have to get to 55%. So that is the next threshold the state is looking to exceed to jump up to that next level. And with that, I will answer any clarifying questions anyone has either from Cindy or myself or our lovely content expert that just ran out the door to go out to her call. I had a timeline for her. So [laughter] >> Kim, thank you so much. uh definitely appreciate you demystifying the CCI for us and uh Cindy and Mindy as well. Um I I will pause before we go into the next portion or presentation that we will
089have just to see if there are any clarifying questions on this portion that you've heard. Looking to see for those participating remotely also I don't see any hands. So I think we're good for now Kim for now. uh but we reserve the right to go back and ask questions definitely. So uh board as you know um it's always important for us to understand and know the history behind the college career indicator within our own state but we also are able to glean a lot of good information from what other states in our country are doing. And so I'm excited that we have uh one of our partners here from American Institutes for Research that's going to share Hi there. Uh share some insights from other states. So I turn it over to you. >> Morning.
090Thank you all. Um we appreciate the opportunity to be here. And before I kick it off, I just want to stop and acknowledge all of the great work that has gone into the CCI indicators already. Right? That's a really robust area and um the growth and the continued exploration are often demonstrating the recognition of wanting to make sure that we have accurate data to support all of our students and that is commendable. So I just want to start with that it is hard always to follow Cindy and Kim's presentations. Um so I appreciate that. Um we do appreciate the opportunity to be here today. Um, and so I just want to kind of give a brief overview of what we're going to be doing because you just heard a tremendous amount about the specifics of
091here, what's happening in CCI for California. We're going to get into some kind of broader um, conversations focusing on four specific states, but some of what we're hearing nationally and then have the opportunity for considerations um, that may or may not um, be of interest. But I also am standing here hearing Cindy on my shoulder saying let's let's try to land um so that CDE knows where they're technical and It's always great when it's not me that's causing the technical aspects of it, but we all know that technology does its own thing. Um, so we want to make sure that we share um four states in terms of what they're doing. You'll see some similarities from what was just discussed, but then we also have the opportunity to talk about some considerations and discussions that
092may be of benefit um for the board. So, um, I just want to ground. We heard a lot about what's happening here in the state. And so, what my colleague and I are going to be talking about is more of what we're seeing across this country and other states. Um, we will be talking about both college and career readiness indicators, but we're really going to be focusing on that career readiness aspect. Um, that was what we were asked to really focus in on. Um, and that's really where we're going to be giving a lot of examples. Um, and that we were also charged in really recognizing that all of what we're trying to do and share in the information is still based on what's happening in school. If we're thinking about career readiness, that's often
093beyond K12, but we're trying to think about what can be measured in schools to be able to get us there. Um we also um are always going to stand and acknowledge there's a a very real concern about burdening districts with additional data uh and data collection. And sometimes that's easy, sometimes that's not and just that's the reality that we also um are aware of that kind of tension and and um that helped us frame some of our remarks today as well. And then um we also know that states are often collecting data that are not part of the accountability system. We're going to be focusing much more on the accountability systems in these other states, but we do know that there are other data that are getting collected that just aren't part of those accountability
094systems. Um and we heard loud and clear an interest in learning about how other states are measuring college and career readiness. And so the four states um just to uh preview them are Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia that we're going to be giving some highlights of. Um not going into great great depth on each of them. But before I do that, we wanted to share just a slide that discusses the most common career readiness indicators that are used across the states. Um because we thought that was just an important way of grounding the conversation that we're going to start today. So on the left of the screen um is dual enrollment success and so 32 states are using that as part of their accountability system. 26 states are doing attainment of an industry recognized
095credential. 21 states are doing achievement on an academic career readiness assessment and then 21 states are also doing CTE completion. 16 states are doing experiential or work-based learning as part of their accountability system. not on this slide, but something that we heard an interest in hearing a little bit more. Eight states are doing u military enlistment as part of their accountability system as well for college and care for readiness indicators. With that, I'm going to hand it over to my colleague Chrissy who's going to go more into depth on the four states we're highlighting. Thank you, Jenny, and good morning. I'm happy to be here. Um, so as Jenny mentioned, we are focusing on these four states. I will not read all of their definitions of college and career readiness, but you'll see a lot
096of similarities across the definitions referring to both uh entry into college as well as preparation for the workforce. Some references to responsible citizens um and uh also some uh training for the military, especially in Virginia where there is a long uh a lot of military bases where uh that may be a more um common pathway. Um so in Massachusetts their accountability measure um and I heard these words earlier today a broad and rigorous coursework offering um including advanced placement international baloria honors classes dual enrollment and chapter 74 which is what they uh call their career and technical education approved courses. Um this is the simplest of the four states. It's really just taking evidence that they have taken at least one of these courses and that is in their measure. However, I will let you
097know that if you look on their website into their reports, they do report on a lot of other outcomes such as uh enrollment in college after high school, graduation rates, uh participation in other types of programs like their early college high schools. So, there are a lot of other college and career readiness uh measures that are not included in the accountability measure. Um Pennsylvania is interesting. It was the most unique of the four states that uh I looked into. And here that students must demonstrate evidence by the uh end of grades five, eight, and 11. So really they're tracking students throughout their K12 career. Um in grade eight students create an individualized career plan so that by grade 11 they they have a portfolio of at least eight items including two items demonstrating implementation of
098that individualized career plan. Uh so it is really tying together their their full uh career. um school entities are responsible for reporting individual student data and assuring the quality of the evidence. And so that um similar to what Kimberly was describing is that data system uh where the schools are reporting up um from the the district level so that they can create this accountability measure. And a few examples of these pieces of evidence include research reports, oral presentations or performances, um the NACTI exams, the National Occupation Competency Testing Institute exams, and industry recognized credentials. Um and logs of experiences through internships. So those are some of the examples that districts would be pulling from. Um in New York, I will warn you, this is the much simplified version of New York. It's I did not
099put the full two-page sure on here. Um but that it's a weighted system so that there is higher priority given to more rigor such as the CTE endorsement or uh getting an exam score of three or four on AP or IB exams respectively. Uh whereas a lower weight of 1.5 is given for AP or IB course taking. So that's very similar to the um did you were you did you demonstrate um readiness or you um approaching. Um there are other levels um that that go down. I will mention that those NOPTI exams appeared again under the uh weight of 1.5. Uh so there are different levels of you know whether you are get the full CTE endorsement which involves a three-part assessment and uh workforce readiness and a um 4 plus one CTE course sequence
100um as opposed to maybe not get meeting the endorsement but uh accomplishing that um the uh industry recognized uh certification through the NOCDI assessment. Um, Virginia also has a weighted system. Again, this is the simplified version. Um, but here students can actually accumulate points across the enrollment, employment, and enlistment outcomes. Um, with like, for example, a 1.25 25 weight associated with earning an associate degree during high school as well as CTE completers who both um earn an IND uh state approved industry recognized credential in a high demand field and complete a high quality work-based learning experience. I wanted to read that word for word because if they get the uh state approved industry recognized credential but it's not in a high demand field, it's given a lower weight. Um and you can see under the
101one point uh earning a three or more credit bearing courses in AP, IB, um or other exams, the dual credit courses. Um and here for the CTE completers who either get the credential or do the workbased learning experience gets a lower weight. So different tiers um of readiness. Um so in key takeaways although we saw that those definitions across states were very similar the accountability measures were very different across these states um states often combined college and career readiness indicators into a single measure um not really giving priority to one over the other. Um there states often on their websites and report cards report on student outcomes outside of or in addition to those accountability measures and some states have schools and districts determine the readiness. So as we saw in Pennsylvania, it's really up
102to the districts to determine whether or not students have demonstrated readiness. And I apologize on the previous slide I should have mentioned Virginia is one of those states that does have the ASVAB test scores with different cut points um on that test in terms of the different tiers of readiness. And with that, I'm going to hand it back to my colleague Jen. Thanks Chrissy. So, as we think about um those four states and those examples, um as we're looking through things, we wanted to just highlight some common barriers that um will probably not surprise anybody here. Um but when we're thinking about meeting college readiness, um I've done a lot of work in high schools and I feel like the first barrier that always comes up is a commitment to the class schedule and how
103that really frames so many other things. And so, um, making sure that there's allowing time for technical courses, other opportunities, um, career readiness aspects, like that takes, um, obviously time, um, but so much of high schools is really anchored around what the the schedule allows. So, we've heard that a lot as one of the barriers. um credentialed teachers and teacher shortages um not only for multiple advanced placement classes and dual enrollment but also those internship um based and related classes that work based uh learning aspect as well that was discussed as well. Um we know that those can be um having access to credentialed teachers um is a potential barrier. Um some of these indicators that we were talking about um require multiple semesters of engagement. So, if students um realize later on in their
104high school experience that they want to shift to something else, that can be a potential challenge. Um I'm not saying it shouldn't happen. I'm just saying that that is a potential challenge that we heard. And then we also know this last one around the variation of accessibility, affordability, availability of both student opportunities and data. It varies. Um, and one of the things that I think is really great about what what um, Kimberly presented in terms of trying to come up with different opportunities reflecting the regional diversity within California so that it is um, equal in terms of what students have access to regardless of where they are in the state. Um, we know that's important in thinking about potential next steps. This was something that we were asked to put together. Um, I'm going to
105start with the third one. after listening to the prior conversation too, one of the things that might be really um interesting outside of accountability is to think about having um a broader co coalition to help define career readiness that would include the California Workforce Development Board and also being clear about where CTE and Perkins falls into that and then with that kind of common understanding then be able to take that definition and figure out who's responsible for what aspects of it. Having that common goal becomes helpful in terms of what we're then measuring towards. Um so that is something that um is a potential idea um for consideration. We also know we heard earlier today that the portrait of a graduate work is happening and ongoing. Um there might be information from those listening sessions
106and the survey that get into what career readiness aspects might already be included that need to be bolstered. There's a connection point there. Some of the states that we highlighted um do have um portrait of a graduate connections in their career and college readiness indicators, some don't. Um and so that could be something that gets revisited when we have more information from the outcome of the work um that's happening currently around portrait of a graduate and learner. That could also include talking with states uh excuse me with schools and districts and other key organizations that already engaged in this. This work has been done. this work has already um it continues to evolve based off of the needs in the field. And so recognizing that those conversations at least around the portrait are happening right
107now, one of the things we think is really important is to think about how to braid these things rather than thinking about them as silos. And so really making sure that that braided opportunity happens as you all have more information. And then we also recognize that there is a tension and between appropriate measures in terms of accountability um and also just collecting additional data that might be helpful and what is part of accountability and what isn't is a continuous um tension that I feel like we have heard um and just acknowledging that and trying to figure that out. Um so those were some potential kind of things for considering and next steps for you all and we can take some questions if anybody has any. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jenny, and
108also Chrissy, uh, for, uh, sharing again what's happening in other states around our country. Um, I just want to see if we have any clarifying questions from the board before we go into our leazison comments and then into public comment. Any clarifying questions at this time? I know you guys are chomping at the bit to like just dive right into the discussion. And before we go to public comment, um I do want to turn it back over to President Darling Hammond to provide some framing comments for us as we uh get ready to engage in the discussion. President Darling Hammond, >> thank you and thanks to um Cindy and Kim and our colleagues from AIR for those very helpful presentations. This is complex as we can all see uh as we uh understand the components.
109Uh I I have several um thoughts about how we may want to be thinking about this. First of all, um it's a great thing that we have a college and career ready index. I think the board has also uh indicated its interest in getting to a college career and civic ready index. And so the seal of civic engagement and how it might communicate the importance of uh students being prepared in that way is uh one of the things that we want to be thinking about along with career and college being much more integrated there. We're at a moment in the state where we're really trying to think in a more holistic way and where in our schools we're uh undoing the old idea that you know you're early on slated to go to college or
110slated to go to work after high school and that those should be two separate sort of vocational tracks. And so this index is also a place where those kinds of aspirations need to be um supported uh and we'll need to be thinking about that. Uh the point that was made about scheduling issues in high schools to get access to certain kinds of opportunities is a really important one in California. So while it is something we might think of as separate from the index, in fact it interacts with what kids get opportunities to do, which is the point of the index. Uh and so we have a very very constrained high school schedule at this point between A throughG expectations which have been uh accumulating uh over time. uh the added um financial literacy course that
111the legislature added the um ethnic studies um expectation that most districts are stepping up to although it is not at the moment a requirement uh and the ways in which we've structured you know college coursework and career separately. So there are schools uh linked learning schools that I visited recently are good examples of this where they're blending college and career and where a throughg courses can also be enabled to be productive of CTE intentions and where um the opportunities for dual credit are baked in and that's a major agenda in the state right now. uh but we do have some constraints and we should be thinking about those as we're thinking about both this indicator and about policy. So for example in our schools um the um uh opportunity to count a dual credit course
112for both college and high school credit can only be undertaken if there's already been 240 instructional minutes that have occurred. they're like barriers like that that even in our indicator uh dual credit courses can count only if they're not CTE courses. Uh so we need to think about how can we help in the way we approach the C uh the college and career ready hopefully civic ready indicator and the way we approach our other work with schools uh to get to a place that's a more integrated uh approach that really allows students uh to undertake a holistic set of opportunities uh that are available to them and that we can then understand uh as we um look at the indicators. Uh the final thing I'd note is that I hope that our goal will become
113uh 100% of our students prepared. Uh and we should be sure that we understand the metrics such that those are appropriate for that goal. uh and then really lean in because that is ultimately the main point of our education system is to be sure that uh everyone comes out prepared for a future that is a good future for them in terms of their own not only livelihood but their uh civic engagement in the communities that they live in. So with that pass it back to you Vice President Glover Woods. Thank you, President Darling Hammond. And um as a leazison, I'll also just add a couple of comments to that. Um and I can just say ditto ditto uh to what President Darling Hammond has said. I also encourage us as a board to again anchor
114back into this idea of the braiding, how all of these really work hand inand. We're not talking about distinct pockets or or pots of of activities or measures for students. We're really looking at again how do how do we ensure that this indicator reflects the braiding that is indeed necessary. A lot of times we use the term college career um as if one is distinct from the other and I think really if we even look at our intended outcome the goal is postsecary readiness um for postsecary life for our students. So that is inclusive whether it is a direct career path directly out of high school or whether that career path goes through a college or university before they get to a career. That is one of the aspects and then of course the civic
115engagement as well. How how um our young people are able to be adults to engage effectively in our government system. So um again I just lift up for our consideration in our conversation that lens and um We have again have been having conversations about we have a lot of college measures in this particular indicator and we need more career measures. Um let's try not to think about it as two different tracks that students would be put on but more so um how these can actually help to inform each other. Uh, one other piece I just want to underscore from President Darling Hammond's comments is how we can utilize the indicator and the measures and uh, whatever decisions we make outside of today that um, it encourages our um, our eleas and our campuses to really
116provide a rigorous broad course of study for students. Um, in some instances um, there are a lot of barriers as has been articulated. How can we in our conversation and policy help to remove those barriers? Especially when we think about high school redesign and really looking at how high school can be a lot more relevant for students in this 21st century and all of the things we know will need to happen for them outside of high school. So, I just kind of lift that up for our consideration. We're going to engage in conversation directly after public comment. So, at this time, uh we're going to open the phone line for the public comment queue. Thank you for putting that slide up. Just as a reminder, members of the public wishing to provide comment on this
117item may do so by calling the telephone number and using the access code provided on the slide that you see before you. Uh before we go to our on the phone public comment, I'd like to ask if we have any speakers signed up to provide public comment in person. There are four there are four people signed up at for inperson public comment. Will the following people please line up at the microphone in the back of the room. Steve McDougall, Lucy Celsius Carter, Rachel Murphy, Lindseay Tornatori. Please remember to state your name and affiliation for the record. When it's your turn to speak, please begin. >> Good morning, members of the board, staff. Steve McDougall with CTF and a union of educators and classified professionals. Regarding item number two and the uh the indicator, um CFT
118believes that um including data regarding both seals of biiteracy and civic engagement are indeed indicators of both college and career readiness. and um regarding um applying that uh the the uh CCI to uh juvenile court schools and community day schools for students that are um um justice system involved or school district justice system involved. Um you really got to rethink about that because it's not like these um students have the ability to be completers. That's not reality. We we need equity multiplier money aside, it's not enough to provide programs for this population. We really need to think about how we um assess those schools and programs. And lastly, we welcome the attention to long-term English learners on the dashboard moving forward. Thank you for listening. >> Good morning. Lucy Salceto Carter with the Alama County
119Office of Education. Thank you for your attention to the CCI and its effectiveness as part of the 2026 accountability work plan. I'd like to highlight just a few points from our written comments. Um, from our perspective as an administrator of court and community schools, the current CCI presents unique challenges for COE's. Many of our court and community school students are with us for only a short period of time, which makes long career pathways difficult for them to complete. While they are with us, we ask that the board consider incorporating CCI measures such as single CTE course completion, industry mini certifications, and short-term place uh workplace learning opportunities like the internships that were mentioned uh by CDE staff today. Incorporation of these measures would ensure the CCI better serves all students. Thank you for your consideration
120of this request. Good morning, Rachel Murphy with Public Advocates and the LCFF Equity Coalition. We appreciate the board engaging in this study session and would like to highlight a few recommendations from our letter. First, similar to Vice President Gloverwood's comments, the indicator should measure student preparedness for both college and career, not one or the other. At a minimum, it should separately report on the number and percentage of students who met the college readiness requirements, the number and percentage who met the career readiness requirements, and the number and percentage who met uh requirements in both categories. Second, schools and districts must not foreclose either college or career pathways prematurely. Students and families should have sufficient information about the trade-offs and trajectories of these different tracks in order to make the most informed decisions while students are
121still in high school. Finally, we recommend strengthening the measures used to assess student readiness. For example, the college readiness measure of earning a C minus in college level coursework doesn't suggest a strong grasp of the material studied, and we would recommend raising this requirement to a higher grade. These changes can help accomplish the state's goal for all students to have equal opportunities to succeed in either college or a career after high school graduation. Thank you. >> Good morning, Lindsay. On behalf of the California County Superintendent, thank you Cindy and Kim for demystifying the CCI as we continue in our clarified understanding. We know we will stay in close communication and partnership with you. In our letter, we lifted up challenges our county offices are experiencing in supporting our students enrolled in juvenile court and community
122school programs to meet the criteria of the CCI, specifically the CT pathways. After listening to today's presentation, want to clarify our two concerns that may or may not belong in this discussion which are students in JCCS are making great progress in CTE while enrolled in their county office. However, their ability to complete a full pathway is inequitable, not due to lack of ability, but because of systemic logistics, and any progress that might be made is most likely not included in the COECCI because of the use of the four and five-year cohort as the denominator as opposed to the one-year cohort, which is the most meaningful metric for our county office programs. Thank you. >> Thank you very much. Um I don't see any more public comment in the room. So at this time I'd like
123to find out do we have any public comment uh on the phone. >> Uh we do there are seven callers in the queue. I will open the phone line now. Caller with the last four digits 1046. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Good morning President Darling Hammond and members of the state board of education. My name is Dr. Fabi Bula. I am the superintendent of San Diego Unified School District. Thank you for your leadership and consideration of the college and career indicator. The CCI indicator plays a critical role in California's accountability system, offering statewide comparable measure of how well high schools prepare students for life after graduation. As preparation for college and career continues to evolve, so do the ways students demonstrate readiness. Increasingly, that includes industry
124recognized certifications which are not currently reflected in the CCI or visible on the California school dashboard. In 2025 alone, the San Diego Unified students earned certifications such as CPR and first aid, OSHA 10, visual communications, electronics manufacturing, EMT, app development, and many more. As you can see, all of these reflect career. These certifications represent real skills that are aligned with labor market demands and have immediate post-secondary value. We recognize the importance of clear guard rails including data reliability, external validation, and equity protections. I do want to speak a little bit about equity protection. I am I'm very interested. >> Thank you. Uh next caller with the last four digits 2051. >> You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Hello, my name is Amber Reman on behalf of Californians
125Together. We appreciate the updates and improvements to the college career indicator. As the board delves into the study session, we request that you revisit both the description of the criteria for the seal of literacy and that it be added to the flyer showing the elements of the career as well as college. Since the initial inclusion of the SB SSB into the college career indicator, new criteria for demonstrating proficiency in English have been adopted. The new language offers the rigorous options that are outlined in our letter. We also request that the language in these measures of college readiness be updated to just say receive the SSB and delete and a score of level three or higher in ELA on the smarter bounce summit of assessment. Additionally, we request the attainment of the SSB included in the
126measures for career readiness as the demand for biiterate employees continues to grow across those sectors. Thank you for your consideration. >> Thank you. Uh next caller with the last four digits 8256. You are now live. Please state your public comment. You have one minute. >> Hi, this is Robert Manoring from Children. Now, I wanted to start off by giving my condolences to Dr. Darling Hammond. Um, in terms of the college and career readiness indicator, uh, the research is clear from link learning, AIR, and many others that both college and career is the gold standard we're searching for. So I I echo our equity colleagues as suggesting that we should report similar to how we report approaching prepared on the percent college, the percent career and the percent both. Uh in addition, we'd like to recognize
127that the state has made a massive investment in the cradleto career data system uh that provides a lot of wonderful information and we believe there's an opportunity to uh connect the data from the CCI with that uh college to cradle to career data system including attendance and and graduation earnings after graduation so that we could really validate the CCI and connect the CCI indic indicators to actually be in college and or career prepared uh data. Thanks so much. >> Thank you. Uh next caller with the last four digits 8937. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Good. Good morning. This is Christina Salasar with the Riverside Superintendent of Schools. We greatly appreciate the background and history of CCI and we look forward to landing the various topics that
128fall under this umbrella. We would like to align our comments with those of the Alama County and the county superintendent. In the letter, we focus on what we call at promise youth. And these are our students who are at our county operated juvenile and uh court community schools who have a differences because it's more meaningful and better represents this population of students. As we move forward with these conversations, we should consider uh their unique needs and we look forward to this conversation. Thank you. >> Thank you. Uh next caller with the last four digits. Um 0493, you are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Good even Good morning. This is Shelley Spiegel Coleman from Californians together. And I just want to uh reinforce the comments that Amber from our
129organization made. I want to explain a little bit the additional options that we have for receiving the seal of biiteracy in terms of English proficiency are advanced placement, IB assessments, SAT results and those are some of our students qualify in those three areas. So if we only say receiving the seal with the uh at met standards or above on our cast assessments, students who really received the seal through the other um options would not be counted and would not the schools would not and the districts would not be credited for their achievement of the seal of biiteracy. And these new options came about through recent legislation over the last year. And so we think we need to update it here so that we can get a full picture of all the students who are receiving
130the seal of bi literacy. We appreciate it inclusion in the CCI and we're grateful for all your work. Thank you. >> Thank you. Uh next caller with the last four digits 30004. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Uh good morning. This is Carlos Mashado with California School Board Association. GSBA urges the board to consider how the college and career indicate ind indicator can be better um guide uh targeting a well-resourced strategies to close persistent uh readiness gaps. We appreciate President Darling Hammond's comments about the need for holistic view. Students deserve a coherent statewide approach that strengthens and supports the work already happening in districts and counties offices of education. In thinking about the constraints pres uh President Darling Hammond referenced, we asked the board to consider the
131unique barriers faced by students in county court and uh county community schools which are noted in our letter. Uh their time in these programs is uh uh transitional which means that they may not complete a CTA pathway or other programs the CCI measures. As a result, their true potential is undercounted and the efforts of educators working hard to re-engage them are obscured. When accountability measures don't account for these structural challenges, they are uh unintentionally penalizing eleas serving the highest need students. It is important to recognize these barriers as you consider future measures, design and accountability consequences. The CCI highlights critical readiness gaps. We >> Thank you, caller. Uh, next caller with the last four digits, 0952. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Hi, my name is Jonathan
132Lucas. I currently have two students currently at the Tahoe Truckucky Unified School District, one graduating also last year. We moved our family to North Tahoe in n uh two 2019. And after youth sports restarted post pandemic, my daughter who's currently in April found her. >> Could you please call back during general public comment? We are currently taking a public comment for item two only. Thank you. >> My >> uh that concludes public comment for item number two. >> Thank you. Thank you very much. At this time, um, I would like to open up for board discussion on this particular item. And board members, just to lift up a couple of guiding questions as we go into our discussion and a reminder that we are having dialogue, if you will, we are not making any specific
133decisions. However, it is it will be helpful in our conversation. If there are certain things that uh we would like to look into a little deeper, questions that have been raised that we'd like to have more information about or more data about, this would be an appropriate time to be able to lift that up um for for our colleagues at the department. And um just a couple of guiding questions. One being again remembering the goals and the principles of the CCI and I point you to the uh intended purpose slide that Cindy shared with us at the very beginning of the presentation. Um and also what kind of things should we keep in mind as we consider adding measures to the CCI? What uh what uh considerations should we contemplate in that space? and uh
134should there be additional measures included in the CCI and what additional information might we need to uh make decisions around that and including uh that additional measures as a consideration as we think about accountability items. So just a couple of pieces but you guys let's go wherever it is that we want to go. We have about 20 minutes or so that for the discussion so um I I open it up. Is there anyone who would like to start? Okay. I'm going to start with uh member Rosco Gonzalez and um also checking for those of you who are participating remotely. Just uh raise your hand or your zoom hand and I'll be sure to get to you as well. Yes, member Rosco Gonzalez. >> I really appreciate this presentation and how it walked just through the
135history of the evolution of the current college and career indicator. It just reminded me of the original intent of the CCI and to see how over time additional measures and pathways have been layered in it. One thing that really stood out to me strongly that the CCI um relies on sustained participation over time, multi-year course sequences, pathway completion, and long-term access to programs like CTE or college credit. For many students, that structure makes sense. But for others, especially those with high mobility, um highly mobile or interrupted educational experiences, readiness doesn't always show up neatly through timebased completion. So in those cases, the indicator can end up reflecting opportunity gaps rather than actual growth or effort. So I think this is where today's study session is especially valuable. It gives us space to think about how
136progress, participation, and skill development might be better understood across different student pathways without lowering expectations or losing rigor. As a teacher, I think that meaningful learning can happen in short windows of time and that students can demonstrate readiness to discrete accomplishments, applied skills, and real world experiences even when traditional sequences are not feasible. So I also appreciate the connection between the convers this conversation and the broader accountability system. How we design and interpret the CCI has real downstream implications particularly for systems that serve students facing mobility, credit disruption or limited access to full programs offerings. keeping those realities in mind as we continue to work with this important um will be important as we move towards the accountability uh work plan. So overall I just think this presentation has a strong foundation for continued discussion.
137It reinforces the importance of clarity, purpose and equity which is I think the heart of the the future direction of the CCI. So I really appreciate the work that we're doing today. Thank you, Member Rosco Gonzalez. Member Rodriguez, I see you have your hand up in the remote space of our meeting. >> Thank you so much. Um, Vice Chair Glover Woods, and I'm sorry that I'm not with you in person. I uh got food poisoning yesterday, had the effects, and I was unable to travel. Uh, but I'm here today and making the best of it. Um so I want to thank um I want to thank you all and our um air colleagues for uh the presentation and reminding us of the purpose. Uh which brings me into purpose right as a high school teacher
138for over 25 years. Um I have seen the effects of work-based simulations in programs like mock trial uh programs like you know uh the truth and reconciliation hearings or um civic engagement at different levels and and also with our CT pathways uh and having students uh replicate um you know whether it's in like a robotics program or something of that nature. in them becoming uh the people who are mentoring them whether it's the attorneys or the engineers. Um and specifically with civic engagement um I've seen students who come to us start right you know in the high school setting um we have students that come into us feeling disempowered uh sometimes hopeless for things that are beyond their control and our control um with the best efforts of the elementary schools to prepare them sometimes
139Um there there are instances where you know it could be um a learning difference isn't caught in time or things that are happening at home and I have personally witnessed and I know that this is the case that with opportunities and that's a word that keeps uh popping out at me the opportunities that we provide as schools at the high school setting have created uh pathways for students um and have engaged them and motivated them in a way uh that is just is is always inspiring to me. Um I have seen students who have uh felt so disempowered by the system uh but they joined mock trial um you know at either my pressure the pressure of friends and now you know a few of them have graduated from UCLA law school or other law
140schools and so I I think that sometimes in the high school setting whether it's admin or teachers we feel discouraged in a traditional environment about um you know how we're going to engage students, how we're going to bring them on. And for us as as uh a state board to uh encourage civic engagement um and help our students who do feel powerless and like they have no control in their in their lives find their voice uh would be a tremendous opportunity. So, thank you. [snorts] >> Thank you, Member Rodriguez, member Oaken, and then uh Member Esco. >> Thank you. I also want to echo the thanks for the presentations this morning. Um they were it was really great to see all the work that's happened over time and the thoughtfulness of the approach and also
141to take on how much work it must be to put together this indicator. Um, so, um, and then seeing what's going on in other states was also super helpful. So, thank you. Huge applause and appreciation. Um, and my comments just as I'm thinking about, um, this indicator, um, to me, um, what I think is most important about this indicator is it it gets at what is really the purpose of school, um, which is to help young people grow up in a way that they're ready and excited about what comes next for them. Um, and of course that looks different for every young person. Um, because it has a lot to do with what they love, what they're good at, um, how they can make money doing those things, how they can impact the world doing
142those things. Um, and so, um, well, first of all, that's why I love this indicator. Um, I feel like we are on the right track in lots of ways in terms of trying to measure how well schools are giving students opportunity to figure all that out. Um, so that's exciting. Um, I think the conversation about what happens for students who are in who are whether they're highly mobile or they're in a school setting, they they move a lot. um that's the same as being mobile, but um they're they're in a um a non-traditional school setting. Thinking about they strike me in um in those schools, educators are working really hard to help students reconnect with or connect with what they care about, what they love, and how they can be productive in the future. And
143so figuring out ways we can measure that more effectively makes sense to me. So, I'm sort of resonating with those comments that I heard. Um, I'm also thinking about how much sort of college knowledge and career knowledge themselves, like how do you get into college? Why do you go to college? What are the types of careers out there? Do they require a four-year degree or not? And how does this impact your quality of life? and all those questions where you're learning generally about college and career, those strike me and so that students can figure out what they love. Those strike me as important parts of this measure. Um, and that might be where students, you can do that in less than three years, like a three-year CTE program. You could um that might be thinking
144about how we're measuring schools who are taking on the of helping kids learn that those knowledge bases. Um that might be a way we could sort of better capture the work in the field. Um okay, I think that's enough for now, but thank you. >> Thank you, member open. Member Esco, >> I just want to honor all the work and the thought of this indicator. It really has made a difference in the lives of many students and and looking at at their future potential. Um you know when you look at the workforce this indicator will it is expected that it will change because the workforce is changing dramatically. You know we we think of white collar work and blue collar work. Well actually it's becoming no more baby blue. Truly um you need both. It's
145not just one or the other. Um, I I recommend or uh NASB's this month's NASB's uh newsletter is all about this item. Amazing. And I want to uplift AIR's uh potential next step. Uh the the third bullet is creating a a broader coalition to define career readiness, including the California Workforce Board. is it really focuses on how important that it is because the workforce is changing so rapidly and really uh one of our callers from San Diego talked about industry recognized credentials micro credentials is huge people are getting these credentials through LinkedIn through um through Google uh space so we really need to broaden right what are those workforce needs needs and I I I just want to uplift AIR's um potential next steps and hopefully that can be some future indicators that we look
146at. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> I >> as I just point I'm sorry [laughter] I understood completely. Thank you very much. Um and thank you again. I'll reiterate my colleagues uh appreciation for all the work that's gone into this indicator. Um I I just have a comment about um in particular um our students in alternative settings, our court and community schools. Um and sometimes we saw some comments also about small and rural settings. uh and I just hope that as we progress in this indicator and we are able to uh expand our understanding and our coherence uh that we're able to um seek the input of those that are working closely with our students that are in those settings because I think about this CCI indicator a little differently than a lot of our
147dashboard accountability measures that have a certain bar to reach. Uh as a mother I think about this as also as a leader I think about this indicator more as are we prep are our schools and districts how well are we doing preparing students for multiple access points which could be very different um but to to member Oaken's point there are a variety of pathways that we take each in our own lives and we may end up in the same place but have started in a very different place so um I think if you So if if anything today I'm I'm really leaving this conversation with the importance of um ensuring that we're we're act we've got the right measures to to measure this how we're doing on CCI. And I just had a question for
148the AIR team. Um I know there's always a tension um on the and how many options we have in the CCI and how difficult it is to collect the data from an LEA perspective and the burden that we put on our LEA colleagues. So, I just wondered if there were any promising practices um in your scan of the other four district, other four states um that both provided a wide accessible option to demonstrate CCI readiness um or civic readiness as well as easing the burden on districts to provide that data. So, I don't know if that's a CDE question or an AI question. >> I'm happy to start that conversation. Um Cindy Kazanis with the California Department of Education. again. Um, one of the things to note, like I look at Massachusetts, they don't report
149on their cohort for until a year after. So, what's included in maybe included in their accountability system would be the class of 2024. And what you've asked us to do is to report on the kids that graduated the year that they graduated and to now identify or makes, you know, do our DA eligibility as of October 15th for this year. So we are really one of the first states in the nation that is reporting on all this data within you know a very short window of time. So just keep that in mind as you know there is absolutely all these opportunities but when you talk about a burden that's where the burden starts. We've asked districts to give us data now for the first time in July. July 31st is the last day they can
150provide us data with the exception of cohort which is August 15th. And you know and being from one of the large the largest district in the state like we always like use that as our bellweather like can Los Angeles unified do this then we can you know encourage the rest of and and they've all you know they they've all come to the table and they it's a huge burden for those local educational agencies but it's what a joy that we can actually talk about students who graduated and do your you know identify the most need um based on those students that are currently are just finished up at that school as opposed to waiting a year later to talk about those performance metrics. >> Thank you, Cindy. Chrissy, do I see you coming forward as
151well? >> Yes, thank you for that question. Um, so in terms of the data collection, um, we did not have a chance to speak with other representatives from other states to talk about that the logistics involved. Um, I will say that in terms of the I mentioned the NOCTI assessments, that was just another example of those test scores come from an external provider, an external credentiing service and so that would not be a requirement on districts that is an another um import of data. Um, I would be interested on the ASVAB especially um since it is included in like the Virginia measure. Um, I intend to reach out and find out how they are able to get such an inclusive measure. I am curious though um I really appreciated the conversation of the fact that
152uh students could earn up to eight of the indicators and if districts recognize like u maybe in the San Diego area where there may be more ASVAB test taking maybe that is a priority for them because they know that more students may be uh pursuing that pathway and for districts to be able to prioritize things that they would like to that they recognize are more um common among their students and maybe not blanketing all districts must report on ASVAB. Um, but having it as an a potential in areas where that is a way that students who are currently not being identified as prepared uh would be identified as prepared. >> Thank you. That that is very helpful. And member McQuillin, we're going to go to your comment in just a moment, but I want to
153underscore that particular piece because when I think of um the college career indicator and I'm going to kind of go back to something Linda said um in her framing comments about really 100% of students should be prepared for college career for post-secary readiness and success. So as we look at this particular indicator which is very different as many have mentioned than some of the others um there may be multiple ways that an LEA is able to show that they have students prepared um as it relates to this and I think one of our responsibilities is to look at how do we allow for eleas to report in those areas those multiple ways not lowering the bar and I'll I'll make a comment after member McQuillin on that particular piece but not lowering the bar but
154also recognizing there are a variety of different ways um that that students can show preparedness and eleas can show that they are preparing for students for life beyond their high schools. So, member McQuellin, let me go over to you. Thank you for that little letting me do that little commercial interruption there. >> Can you hear me? Okay. >> Yes, sir. >> Okay. Had some sound problems. Well, thank you and thank you for allowing me to participate remotely like that like this today. I appreciate this item on the U advisory committee for the California joint uh pathways uh workforce committee. We've discussed a lot of indicators also and data and we know students who have a plan who have a career or college plan they do better. They do better in terms of school attendance. their
155graduation rates are better and their test scores are better when they have a plan. And I was thinking of one of the states that was mentioned that also measures students that have a a plan who have completed a survey or a career uh indicator survey that they include that in their uh in their measurement. And going forward, I'd like to uh see the pros and cons of somehow including those students who have a a plan in place or who have completed a a survey on their career uh pathway. You know, that that could be useful. And uh thank you. Thank you much. >> Thank you, member McQuillin. uh member Patello Brownson and then member AK and uh board members just to let you know we have about maybe about five minutes or more um or
156five minutes or so not or more or five minutes or so uh for this particular discussion but I surely want to hear everything so member Patello Brownson please >> that means I will talk fast >> do not feel that you need to go right ahead >> um so I'll join the chorus of um thanks to um all of our presenters and it's a really impressive sweep over the course of many years really of including and considering multiple indicators um and also looking to have a level of inclusivity um which is about career and um postsecary readiness but also is about life readiness um and I appreciate the orientation of thinking uh beyond sort of just the the boundaries of the uh TK to2 school time. Um, I also really think it's important and um quite
157valuable um that we are including and just want to underscore uh the importance of civic readiness as part of what it means to be prepared for life after um school um and inclusion of uh the seal of um uh civics within that. Um two things that I just wanted to flag uh particularly from the pro crossstate comparison that I I just think are quite um intriguing and and um ones to sort of track as we move forward in this process. Um I believe it was Pennsylvania that had uh the threestep process almost of like a portfolio um of encouraging fifth, eighth, and 12th graders to reflect on what their potential postsecary pathways might be. I think there's a a level of um applied learning which I really appreciate about that approach um of enabling students
158to individualize um how they are thinking about their post-secondary pathways um that I I think is really exciting promising um and something that we we should consider emulating. Um the other um item that I thought was quite interesting was a waiting structure um around courses taken um be they AP courses, IB courses um versus um particular scores received I think in the AP context. um within the context of our five minutes remaining, I I'll just say I think it would be helpful in future conversations to have some sort of pushing on that concept to understand what are the purposes behind that. What are the trade-offs and implications? Um, obviously I think the the thing that I had in the back of my mind as you were describing that um is is the parallel literature around
159um how oftentimes uh it's not what college students get into but the sort of highest level college that they applied to that often is a predictor of sort of postsecary life success. And so I I think that course taking piece could be very important and I think understanding a little bit more about the trade-offs and implications of that waiting system uh could be really helpful for informing how we shape the system in the future. >> Thank you member Ake and then we'll go to President Darling Hammond. Is it on now? You're you're right. You're good. >> Okay. Sorry. Okay. Uh yeah, I just wanted >> Lights on. >> Okay. Sorry. I'll u briefly restart over but I just again wanted to thank the CDE for the very thorough presentation and I also wanted to briefly
160I know there was a public comment that briefly questioned um the adequate preparedness of the grade requirement of like the C minus which um I could see potentially being changed as according to college board um the college equivalent to an AP exam of score of a three would be at minimum of a C. So, I could see there being some potential benefits to um upping that just a little bit. Um, but I also just wanted to personally testify to the relevance of the the different stuff that are on the indicators like you know the the career related internships and the CTE pathways which for me as a student really helped me identify the things that I was interested in and the things that I maybe wasn't so interested in. And so I think that's just
161a great resource and um an incentive for students to um explore different career pathways. And so um once they graduate from high school, they're more prepared and they're um and they're able to do um things that they're passionate about. >> Thank you, member. President Darling Hammond, >> thank you. What a good discussion. Um, I did just want to underscore the utility of us examining further the ways in which court schools, uh, schools that, um, are, um, seeing students for short periods of time, alternative schools may need some some ways to measure uh, readiness that are and contributions toward readiness that are distinctive. So I did want to um just underscore that as an area of examination for us. Um to the point that several have made about the um Pennsylvania portfolios which are um I
162think a lovely way to have students sort of examine their interests and you know collect some evidence about what they care about and may be interested in so on. There could be some value to that. I do think we have to be cautious a little bit about not um assuming that students know in eighth grade or fifth grade what they will do when they grow up. Um and get getting them on a track that is sometimes um stratified both by self-stratification. what students have experienced and think is appropriate for them or might be accessible to them or um school stratified. So I think we should look at the ideas of developing interests and thinking about futures and so on in a way that's very careful to keep open the possibilities for young people um that
163might otherwise be um encouraged to close in too soon without enough you know information about what's really possible. Um thank you. Thank you, President Darling Hammond. And uh I I did have a couple of questions just to kind of lift up I think for future conversation. Um one was in relation to again thinking about the uh challenge and the barrier for our court and community schools. I kind of go back to the intended purpose bullet one and it says um provide a more complete picture beyond graduation rates of how well LEAs and high schools are preparing students for success after high school. So if that LEA or high school has certain structural barriers um such as we know is the case for our court and community schools um how might we be able to capture
164that and uh come on up Cindy come on up. Uh and one of the uh thoughts or ideas I believe I heard during public comment uh at different points was looking at a one-year graduation rate as opposed to the cohort, the four-year cohort for uh students in that particular setting. What would be the implications of something like that? Uh doing something different for one of the measures within the CCI? >> Uh absolutely. Again, Cindy Kazan is with the California Department of Education. Uh, with the our juvenile court schools, I mean, I've I've I've toured one in the last year as well, and I've seen um, you know, the experience that that those students have on a daily basis. The thing to keep in mind about this measure overall, it's who stayed with that cohort. So,
165at a juvenile court facility, you're usually not graduating from that facility. you're usually moving back to a court community or community school rather or you're moving you're transitioning into a traditional school or another school, right? And it's really those lost transfers or those dropouts that are counting against those juvenile court schools the most. And so we can we can dig into that and I bring you back some data that would be really helpful to enlighten you on this. We'll work with the county superintendents like like we always do. Uh but to to your point, the first thing that I would um that comes to mind is that we have a we have a requirement under federal law under the Every Student Succeeds Act to treat our students the same and our schools the same. And
166we ran into this very issue when we tried to have um an you know an alternate measure um for our our DAS um schools and we we actually put forward a waiver and went through the waiver process. was a very extensive um process with the federal government. So I think we would need to explore that again and and now that we have AIR on board and I think that's something that I know we've talked with Chief Deputy Superintendent Roersonson about is how do we engage um you know on a national perspective um what is doable the federal government has said that they're open to waiverss but I don't know that they're really open to these kinds of waivers um but you know that said like you know what what does it mean to um have
167our state system for state determinations I know you have before you uh through through statutory requirements to look at different differentiated assistance eligibility. So is it for our state system of eligibility that we use this separate metric. We have reported on we continue to report on this metric though please please be assured we actually just released those um in December with our supplemental release. So it is um available for our dashboard alternative school status schools which is all of our county run schools um receive that that that one-year rate. So, it is something that we've continued even though we're not able to use it for accountability purposes in the sense of um [clears throat] uh eligibility for uh differentiated assistance or the um federal requirements for schools. >> Thank you, Cindy. And yes, I think
168it would be helpful for us to in in a future meeting have more information about what this looks like for uh students that are attending those schools in short periods of time. And um uh so thank you. Thank you for lifting that up. I'll I'll look forward to that. Um also just as we get ready to close this item um also would be interested in knowing uh more of the industry recognized credentials, what that might look like. Um how would we collect data around those areas and um also the revisiting of the seal of bi literacy measure. um if there have been additional um aspects to that to the seal of biiteracy that were added after we added it to the CCI, it would be helpful to know um as we look at the seal
169of biiteracy and the additional measures that are necessary to show preparedness just to be sure that there's still alignment with that. >> We can bring back what you've what you approved back um when that was originally adopted. [laughter] Thank you for pointing that out, Cindy, that we approve that. >> I mean, nothing around accountability is done uh in isolation. It is absolutely approved in a by in a public setting, you know, by this board. So, >> yes. Well, I I we appreciate that and um appreciate ongoing conversation in this space. So before we close the item, I'm looking to be sure that all have had an opportunity to to jive not jive don't jive but jump into the uh study session discussion uh before we get ready to move on to the next. Yes, member
170please go right ahead. I just want to say one thing which is um I feel like per usual um we came up with all sorts of interesting important maybe plausible new ideas um but also I think part of what was the hope of this was to look at those proposed measures that that we've been um that we've been collecting data on for years without actually adding into the accountability system. Um, and so I just wanted to say that at least what I heard in the discussion was several people um, raised up the the state seal of civic engagement as something that feels like it fits. Um, and I would concur. Um, I I certainly heard um, member GK said your name right? >> Yes. >> Um, talk about internships as something that has made a
171difference. Um and um I'm just looking through the list. We had a speaker talk we the student led enterprises. I think we got some further clarification on about what those where those exist and what they entail. Um anyway, I don't need to go through all of them, but I that was part of the the hope of this. That's the landing the plane part. Um I just wanted to raise that back up as well. >> Thank you. Thank you, member Oaken. Thank you for raising that up. And u I know as we go into future meetings and future items on this, we will need to make some decisions um to really give guidance to the department on what things they should continue to uh collect data on and what things might not be necessary to do.
172So, thank you so much for raising that point up and not letting that go u get lost in our conversation. So at this time um we will conclude item two and thank you uh to everyone who provided public comment as well as all board members for participating in this discussion. We are now going to move to item three. And when we complete item three, we will take a a brief break uh so that we can grab our lunch. And I hate to break it to you all, but it's lunch at the day is today. We're Yeah. Uh we're we're continuing to move forward, but we will take a brief break so that we can uh take pictures. We're going to have a photo opportunity, and you'll find out why in just a moment, and grab
173our lunch and come right back. So, just to let you know, a break is a coming. Okay. All righty. So, we're going to move on to item three. Item three is the 2026 United States Senate Youth Program Recognition of California Selected Student Delegates and alternates. This is an information item and the CDE will be presenting the 2026 USSP delegates and alternates. So, we have delegates Cindy Chen and Gab Gabrielle Lasana and alternates Leanne Fan and Jerry Yang. This item will be presented by Dina Fong of the CDE. Dena, welcome. And you may begin. I think we need to to have your microphone turned on. Thank you. >> Good morning, Good morning, honorable board members. I'm Dina Fong, the United States Senate Youth Coordinator for California. Today is one of my favorite days and always a
174great way to kick off the new year as we honor students from our annual US Senate Youth Program. I'll provide a brief pro uh background of the program and then introduce each student who will say a few words. The US Senate Youth Program is sponsored by the US Senate and funded and administered by the William Randph Hurst Foundation. Now in its 64th year, this program provides students with a unique educational experience and especially geared for outstanding students who are interested in pursuing careers in public service. High school juniors and seniors are nominated by their principal to apply for this highly competitive merit-based program. To qualify, students must currently be serving in an elected or appointed leadership position in student government or a civic or educational organization representing a constituency and serving others for the entire
175school year. Our students have gone through a rigorous and competitive application process and were selected based upon their leadership qualities, academic achievement, school and community involvement, and commitment to public service. The last phase of the program is to formally present our 2026 US Senate youth delegates and alternates to the board. These extraordinary individuals are among the top students in their schools, serving their communities with passion and a desire to make a difference. Our two delegates will represent California and join delegates from other states in Washington DC from March 7th through 14th where they will get an in-depth view of federal government in action through meetings with senators, cabinet members, and other federal agencies. The delegates will each receive a $10,000 college scholarship for undergraduate studies with encouragement to study coursework in political science or history.
176Now, it's time to meet our students. So, please come forward when I call your name. Um, Cindy Chen is our first delegate. Cindy, our first delegate is Cindy Chen, a senior at Walnut High School in Walnut in Los Angeles County. Whoops. Um, from her letter of recommendation, she has been described as someone who leads with a unique mix of grace and determination. She does not seek power. She reshapes it to include others. She is the essence of public service and is fearless, empathetic, and transformative. Cindy serves as the district representative to the superintendent student advisory council for Los Angeles County Office of Education, representing over 14,000 students in her district and helping to shape policy decisions that impact more than 1.3 million students across the county. She is the founder and CEO of Ignite Her,
177the first organization dedicated to rhetorical feminism, empowering young women to reclaim their power and lead. A United Nations recognized and partnered organization, Ignite Her has established over a 100 chapters across 66 countries and mobilized 50,000 girls worldwide. She serves as the global United Nations ambassador for gender equality, representing the US and the UN foundation and peace dialogues, youth diplomacy forums, and global policy discussions. She's also the founder and executive director of the Evergreen Debate Institute, a national nonprofit expanding debate access for underserved youth and providing coaching to over 200 students. She is a National and Speech Debate Association academic all-American, an honor awarded to the top 1% of debate competitors nationwide, and the first student at her school to qualify for nationals. She plans to study public policy and gender and sexuality studies in college
178with the long-term aspiration of serving as a California legislator and one day a US United States senator and Supreme Court justice. Congratulations, Cindy. I'll turn it over to you to see a few words. >> Okay. Thank you so much. And good morning to honorable board members. So, just to start, before I received my notification for Senate Youth, my parents told each other there was no way I would get selected. Not because they were doubting me, but because they were doubting the system because I'm an immigrant and I'm not a citizen. So, that moment when I was able to prove them wrong and with all the support of all of you was able to prove them wrong encapsulates what public service means to me. Public service for me is all about hope. It's about empowering people,
179especially young women, people of color, non-citizens like myself, and other marginalized communities to heal from their trauma, to be able to reclaim their voice and recognize that they're not too small, too different, or too disenfranchised to matter. It's about equality and creating opportunities where none existed before. And it is about the communities that raised me and being able to give back to them with care. It is about feeling proud in my identity as an immigrant. and is about feeling proud in my identity as a woman and as a person of color. I hope to be able to dedicate my life to public service because I want to be able to undo these injustices within a role in elected office and global leadership because for me fulfillment has never been about chasing money or chasing a
180check. It's about being able to leave the world and leave the communities I'm I'm a part of a bit more just and a bit more hopeful than they were before me. So for all of you guys, thank you guys so much for giving me the opportunity to be heard, for giving me this platform to be able to influence so many more people and to be able to begin this journey. Thank you. [applause] >> Thank you, Cindy. Our second delegate is Gabrielle Listana, a senior at Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory in San Francisco. She's been described as a force for thoughtful change rooted in lived experience driven by a desire for equity and equipped with the intellect and resilience to make a global impact. Gabby is currently the chair and District 6 commissioner of the San Francisco
181Youth Commission, where she represents over 175,000 youth in the city and county to the mayor and board of supervisors, advising on youth policies, coordinating community engagement efforts, and tableabling at events. A district 6 commissioner since she was only 12 years old and now serving on her sixth consecutive term, Gabby has a deep commitment to addressing educational inequities and systemic barriers impacting San Francisco youth. She has published policy recommendations and numerous resolutions leading to free public transportation for youth, $4.2 million toward immigrant legal aid, and extended library hours. She is co-founder of Young Leaders in Climate Action, which seeks to close climate education gaps through workshops and events reaching 5,000 youth, and has developed m middle school curricula and secured funding through writing grant proposals. As co- captain of speech and debate at her school, she
182competed locally and nationally with original speeches on identity and politics and was a semi-finalist at the Cal Invitational Tournament. She has been a high school fellow for the University of California, Berkeley, sustainable internet lab where she researched the social, economic, and environmental impacts of illegal e-waste trade. An AP caller with an AP scholar with distinction, Gabrielle received the QuestBridge College Prep Scholar Humanities Award based on her writing, academic excellence, motivation, and desire to succeed. She desires to major in public policy and science, technology, and society, to learn how to develop equitable climate solutions for Californians through science and legislation, and eventually pursue a career in environmental policy and education at the local or state level. Congratulations, Gabby. [applause] >> Good morning, board members. I am extremely extremely grateful and honored to have the opportunity to
183speak to you all today. Growing up in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, I never imagined I would be in a space like this as a low-income girl from an immigrant family. The Tenderloin is often labeled the ghetto part of San Francisco and communities like mine are frequently overlooked in decision-making spaces like this. There's the galok saying is bakac rooted in the Filipino American farmworker movement. It means when one of us rises, we all rise. That belief shaped how I was raised. My dad, a community organizer, instilled in me the values of justice and collective responsibility, and that is what guides me in my journey of public service today. I've used my role on the youth commission to advocate for underserved youth from communities like mine, especially young people from the Tenderloin. from writing policy recommendations for
184immigrant protections and language access to championing equitable climate education policies in public schools. In the future, I am planning to major in political science and environmental studies as I hope to pursue a career in the intersection of environmental and education policy, giving back not only to the systems that shaped me, but the communities that shaped me in California as well. Thank you so much once again, and I am extremely honored to be California's second United States Senate Youth Delegate. >> [applause] >> Thank you, Gabby. If Cindy or Gabby should be unable to participate in Washington Week, then one of our alternates will take their place. Our first alternate is Leanne Fan. Lean, you want to come up? Leanne is a senior from Westview High School in San Diego. She's described as someone who embodies civic
185curiosity, integrity, and a collaborative spirit. Understanding that leadership is not only about excellence, but about service, about lifting others through informed action and shared vision. Leanne was elected to the superintendent student advisory council for Powe Unified School District where she has initiated several new programs from student input such as organizing a district-wide what I wish my parents knew panel and expanding unified physical education programs for inclusivity. She is the co-editor and chief of her high school newspaper, leading an award-winning newsroom and setting standards for sourcing, veric verification, and editorial civility. She was selected to represent US students at the COP 29 UN climate change conference in Azerbaijan, meeting policy makers and country de uh delegations on K12 climate education and environmental health. As a result of COP, she founded the semis sustainability youth network where
186she has built K12 climate literacy programs connecting students with industry experts to develop projects and hold local sustainability research policy competitions. Named America's top young scientist by 3M and Discovery Education, she invented a pair of headphones to detect and treat ear infections to prevent hearing loss in kids. She also received an award from NASA among a uh 1,600 finalists for her wound healing research. Leanne plans to major in molecular and sele cell cellular biology as well as global health and health policy. Someday she would like to become US surgeon general or lead the Centers for Disease Control. Her goal is to share the knowledge and skills needed to protect our most vulnerable citizens and advocate for the disenfranchised by listening to communities and building solutions with them. Congratulations to Lean. [applause] Thank you all for
187this incredible opportunity. And first, I wanted to express my gratitude for my teachers, board members, parents, and friends who have inspired me with their never-ending kindness and wisdom. Public service to me means using my skills to create meaningful positive change in people's lives, which is why I'm committed to serving in the public sector. I plan to continue educating the next generation about sustainability and the human cost of climate change through the organizations such as the semi sustainability youth network. We're starting a program this year in Manali, India, connecting students with local government and communities to reforest a mountain and deep pollute their river. And the goal in the next decade is to scale this model globally, cleaning up hundreds and protecting the health of more cities across the world. In college, I hope to continue
188my current biophetonics research to create lowcost chronic he wound healing interventions. And as research funding faces unprecedented cuts and public health agencies struggle with credibility, I feel that advocating for science and building interventions that people trust is the most important thing I can dedicate my life to. Ultimately, I plan to pursue a career in public health, making scientific knowledge accessible across cultural and ideological barriers while protecting our most vulnerable citizens by listening to communities and building solutions along with them. Thank you so much. [applause] >> Thank you, Leanne. Our second alternate is Jerry Yang. Jerry, you want to come forward? Jerry is a senior at North Hollywood Senior High School in North Hollywood, LA County. His recommendation letter describes him as someone who stands out as truly extraordinary, possessing a unique blend of intellect, empathy,
189and humor, making him a transformative force, and elevating the student voice. Jerry was elected as a student board member by 86 high schools to represent 500,000 students in Los Angeles Unified, the second largest school district in the US. He is actively shaping his district's future by expanding the climate literacy program and helping to develop LA Unifi's first comprehensive sustainability plan, ensuring student pers perspectives guide curriculum and facilities planning. He has an ability to connect across diverse communities and planned a young men's leadership conference creating powerful platform for underrepresented youth. He launched dream it achieve it to expand career paths, internships, dual enrollment and expanded busing buffers and support groups to address immigration fears. A strong advocate for youth development, Jerry is president of the Los Angeles Youth Council where he represents 1.2 2 million youth
190in LA and planned the LA city youth summit and LA Youth Expo for thousands of youth. In addition, he is also ASB president on the school site council, speech and debate captain and involved in the performing arts. His awards include a top five ranking in the nation with the National Speech and Debate Association and Coca-Cola Scholars semi- finalists top 1.15% out of 107,000. [clears throat] Um, he plans to study public policy and environmental science to understand how to build institutions that redress historic environmental justice issues and erase social economic barriers. Someday, Jerry would like to become California State Superintendent of Public Instruction and working in the intersection of education and social justice to ensure holistic coverage of student needs. Congratulations to Jerry. [applause] Good afternoon, California State Board of Educa. Good morning, California State Board
191of Education. First of all, I'd like to thank the California Department of Education for running the USSP process and this opportunity to speak before all of you. As the Los Angeles Unified School District Student Board member serving over 500,000 students, public service to me is driven by three core tenants: empathy, transparency, and optimism. Empathy for those students and community members who have untold stories, unaware of the decades of precedent designed to keep them down. Transparency for communities who have been advocating for years with no results, so they can finally see their voices acknowledged and issues resolved with minimal bureaucracy and optimism for all the future leaders that we cultivate in the present who see a future for them built upon trust and ambition. Above all else, above all else, public service to me is the
192people, the faces that I get to meet every day, the stories I get to hear, the relationships we build, and the change I get to make as a result. Thank you. [applause] >> Thank you to all our students. Aren't they impressive? What I've shared is just a small sampling of everything that they've done, and we would be here all day if I read you their entire bio. and I really don't know how they have time to sleep and eat. So, uh I just want to say congratulations again. These extraordinary youth are inspiring and shining examples of leadership. They give us a hope for a bright future uh through their dedication to public service. So, I will turn it back to the board members to offer congratulations and take photos and present certificates. Thank you. >>
193Thank you. Thank you so much, Dana. And uh let's give another round of applause uh to all four students. Uh absolutely phenomenal. Uh before we go into public comment, Chief Deputy Robersonson, uh would you like to say anything? >> Thank you for that. So on behalf of the state superintendent, I just once again want to offer my congratulations and just I have a lot of hope and inspiration listening to you all. And as I understand it, we have a future Supreme Court justice, a future surgeon general, and a future state superintendent of public instruction. Uh that is pretty incredible, and I think all of us can attest to just the difference that public service really makes for our students here in California and across the nation. Definitely also heard this theme of climate and sustainability.
194I think to the earlier conversation, we might even want to take a look at something like the seal of climate literacy. Actually, something that Colorado as a state just passed. Uh really heard that from you all and you just give inspiration for what we need to be able to do today to set up the kind of future that you're trying to lead for. So congratulations. >> Thank you. Thank you so very much. And uh yeah, I just got goosebumps when you read out that list of future positions. Outstanding. We'll now open the phone line for public comment. Um do we have uh let me say this first. Members of the public wishing to provide comment on this item may do so in person or by calling the telephone number and using the access code provided
195on the slide that is being shown right now. Do we have any speakers signed up to provide public comment in person? >> We do not. >> Is there anyone waiting to provide public comment on the phone? >> Uh there are no callers in the queue. >> Okay. Thank you. Uh do we have any brief comments from the board as we get ready to conclude this item and you will get a chance to meet the students because we will be taking a picture with them shortly. Member AK please. Um a humongous congratulations to the delegates and the alternates. You guys deserve so much and your resumes were just staggering. You guys not only inspire me but the thousands of students and the thousands of people that you guys are impacting through your activities and you guys
196are just truly trailblazers and I just want you to know that your work does not go unnoticed. Um to all the delegates who are going to Washington DC um I hope you guys have a blast and I'm sure that you guys will reinvest all that you learn back into your communities when you return back to California. And so again, thank you guys so much for sharing your stories. You guys are just so inspiring. up. Yay. Thank you, member AK. And I echo that. Yay. That is wonderful. So, I believe this will conclude our item at this time and we will take a quick break for lunch. Um, so board members, just a couple of points to let you know. Um, please first stay here so we can take pictures afterwards. Uh, please go and grab
197your lunch and come back to the deis. We will come back at let's say 11:45. We'll come back at 11:45 and resume the agenda. Thank you very much and uh enjoy the Everyone, uh, we are now going to go forward with the consent agenda. I'd like to reconvene the board and take up the regular consent items, items 4 through 12. We will now open the phone line for the queue for public comment on consent items 4 through 12. Members of the public wishing to provide comment on consent items 4 through 12 may do so in person or by calling the telephone number and using the access code provided on the slide that is shown now. Are there any speakers signed up to provide public comment in person? >> No speakers are signed up for inerson
198public comment. >> Thank you. Do we have anyone waiting to provide public comment on the phone? >> There are no callers in the queue. Thank you very much. Uh at this time I will ask for a motion on consent items 4 through 12. Uh do I have a motion to adopt the CDE recommendations on items 4 through 12? >> I motion to approve the consent items. >> Thank you. Member Esco. Do I have a second? Okay. Thank you. Member Oaken. Uh, Brooks, would you please call the role >> on the motion to approve consent items 4 through 12? Member Yoshimo Tari, >> yes. >> Member Rodriguez, >> yes. [snorts] >> Member Patilo Brownson, >> yes. >> Member Rosco Gonzalez, >> yes. >> Member Olen, >> yes. >> Member McQuillin, >> yes. >> Vice President Glover
199Woods, >> yes. Member of Scabo. >> Yes. >> President Darling He member. >> The motion carries. >> Thank you very much. We'll now move to item 13. Item 13 is the update on the implementation of integrated local, state, and federal accountability and continuous improvement system. the review of the 2025 California school dashboard and the 2024-25 data release and approval of the 2026 accountability work plan. The CDE recommendation is that the state board of education provide guidance and approve the 2026 accountability work plan. This item will be presented by Cindy Kazanis of the CDE. Welcome back, Cindy. Please begin. Oh, I'm sorry. >> Apologies. There were speakers signed up in the room for consent calendar items 5 and 12. Would um Lorraine Richards and Rachel Murphy please line up at the back and microphone? Good afternoon.
200Uh, thank you for calling us back up. Um, Rachel Murphy with Public Advocates and the LCFF Equity Coalition um, wanted to provide comments on item 12. We request that the board take this item off the consent calendar in order to enable a deeper discussion of concerns surrounding CSI plans. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, the board must approve school site improvement plans for CSI schools who represent the highest need school sites in the state and have not received the necessary attention and oversight from their eleas. However, the current state process lacks a thorough review and monitoring required under ESSA. We urge the board to update county office LCAP and federal addendum approval rules by one providing COE's with objective review and approval criteria and two requiring that COE's more directly review and recommend approval or
201denial by the board of CSI plans according to those criteria. As the board continues to consider updates to the DA performance criteria and the system of support, we also recommend considering how the state is meeting this federal education obligation to serve our highest need students. Thank you. Do we have any other any more public comment in the room? >> This concludes public comment in the room. >> We do have some callers that popped up in the queue. I'm not sure if it's for the consent, but I will open the phone line. >> Yes, thank you. >> Um caller with the last four digits 4369, you are now live. Please start your public comment. This is public comment for regular consent items 4 through 12. Caller with the last four digits 4369. You are now live.
202Please start your public comment. >> Hello, this is Sally Fox from San Diego on behalf of Cave, the California Association for Bilingual Education. Cave signed on to the LCF Equity Coalition letter for multiple agenda items, including this one. I would like to emphasize that we greatly appreciate the upcoming 2026 long-term English learner LEL work plan and are in strong support of a separate suspension. >> I'm sorry. I apologize for interrupting. Um, these are we're currently taking up public comment for the regular consent items if you don't mind calling back. >> I thought it was for >> No, no. Thank you. Uh, next caller with the last four digits, 8351. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Good morning. Uh, my name is Heather Calamies. On behalf of Ed
203Boyce, I'm calling in um for public comment item number five. Um, as the board appoints reviewers today, we want to acknowledge and appreciate the shared understanding. Um, also discussed with IQC that reviewers must have experience with effective evidence-based literacy instruction. Reviewers at this foundation are better positioned to engage meaningfully in the review process and uphold the intent of AB1454. At the same time, the most important lever available now is reviewer preparation and training. Strong training is what ensures reviewer expertise translates into consistent highquality evaluations. And we encourage the board to clearly signal that reviewer training should be grounded in California's literacy priorities. SBE adopted materials guidance and statutory criteria so that reviews are objective and evidence-based. Again, thank you for the board for your leadership and the opportunity to provide public comment. >> Thank you.
204Uh, next caller with the last four digits, um, 8256, you are now live. Please start your public comment. Your time starts now. >> Thank you. This is Robert Manorin from Children Now, uh, calling in about item 12 on approval of the CI CSI plans. So um currently the CSI is is providing uh substantial resources to the bottom 366 schools in the state. Um these schools are our lowest performing and need extra attention. Uh currently the plan approval is done very indirectly despite being required of the board to approve these plans. No one actually reviews these plans. County offices review a summary of these plans for the entire district and their LCAP. We believe that's insufficient oversight for the dire improvement needs that these schools have. Uh if you could include this discussion as part of
205your broader look at differentiated assistance, resetting those criteria, and thinking about your system of support, we'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks. >> Thank you. Uh next caller with the last four digits, 2250. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Good afternoon, Rico Morales with Ed Trust West um plus one. realign our comments with the um previous uh commenters from the equity coalition. For agenda item five, we urge to ensure that equitable representation of CK and multilingual learner expertise um is um experienced across all panel. Every panel should include an English learner and ECE experts. The materials are reviewed through the lens of the EO road map, the BTKS and California's diversity. For agenda item 12, as the board develops changes to the DA eligibility criteria and re-evaluates an improvement
206support structure that is more responsive to LEA and school needs, we urge you to reconsider the level of oversight that is necessary to understand CSI school improvement needs and how those needs can effectively be met by the state system of support. Thank you. >> Thank you. Uh, next caller with the last four digits, 4369, you are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. Hi, this is Sally Fox again from KABI and I did have a comment for item five uh about the ELA ELB instructional materials follow-up adoption. I'd like to emphasize based on my experience as a content review expert in the 2015 process the importance of ensuring that each review panel include reviewers with comprehensive knowledge and experience related to English learners. In addition, reviewer training should utilize helpful resources
207similar to the math benchmarks of quality from the English learner success forum used during the recent math adoption. And yes, they have ELA and Spanish language arts versions. Finally, districts need clear, detailed guidance to feel confident that newly adopted materials meet the needs of all their diverse student populations. Thank you. >> Thank you. Uh, next caller with the last four digits, 2051. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Hello, my name is Amber Ree on behalf of Californians Together. Speaking to item number five, we were thrilled to see the inclusion of English learner experts among these re the reviewers for the ELA ELP instructional materials follow-up adoption. As these new reviewers and expert begin to undergo training, we want to emphasize understanding the needs and diversity of students
208as well as the need for a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each new material. We kindly request EL experts be intentionally placed on each reviewer panel to ensure EEL student instruction representation. Additionally, as with the recent MAP instruction materials adoption, reviewer training should utilize helpful resources such as the ELA benchmarks of quality from the English learner success forum. In order to ensure materials are suited to support all students, including multilingual learners and EEL students, districts need clearer details and need to feel confident that the new materials meet the needs of their diverse student population. Thank you. >> Thank you. And we do have one more person for inperson public comment. >> Hello. I'm apologize for the um confusion on inperson public comment on consent, but my name is Lorraine Richards. I'm a
209classroom teacher representing California Teacher Association. CTA has significant concerns with the proposed list of reviewers for the ELA ELD instructional materials follow-up adoption and believes that the list is not in compliance with the California state regulations. California Code of Regulations, Title 5, Section 9512, states, "A majority of instructional material reviewers at the time of appointment shall be teachers who teach students in kindergarten or grades 1 through 12." CTA has engaged with state board of education and CDE staff on this important issue and we look forward to future opportunities to collaborate to increase teacher voice in the instructional material process. Thank you. >> Thank you. That concludes public comment for regular consent items. >> Thank you very much. Since we did have public comment, we will need to have a motion to adopt the recommendations. Uh
210and we will redo the vote, please. So, may I have a motion to adopt the recommendations on items 4 through 12? >> Motion to adopt the consent. >> Thank you, Member Esco. May I have a second? Thank you. Member Oaken Brooks, will you please call the role >> on the motion to adopt consent items 4 through 12? Member Yoshimo Tari. >> Yes. >> Member Rodriguez. >> Yes. >> Member Patilla Brownson. >> Yes. >> Member Rosco Gonzalez. >> Yes. >> Member Olen. >> Yes. >> Member McQuillin. >> Hi. Vice President Glover Woods. >> Yes. >> Member Scabedo. >> Yes. President Darling Hammond. >> Yes. >> Member GK. >> The motion carries. >> Thank you, Brooks. We now will go back to item 13, uh, which again is the review of the 2025 school dashboard, the 202425
211data release, and approval of the 2026 accountability work plan. Cindy, welcome back again. and uh please please begin when you are ready. >> Thank you. Uh good good afternoon. Uh I think we just hit that. Uh Cindy Kazan is with the um with the analysis measurement and accountability reporting division for the California Department of Education and uh very grateful to be up here uh talking about our regular accountability item. This one is um action. Uh we are going to cover um I think in 10 minutes or less our results from this last year. uh we'll go into the work plan and um talk about our outreach activities including some hot off the presses numbers that I think um we'll be able to share um as we hit the bottom uh piece of this uh about
212the presence of this this web um web tool uh that we call the California school dashboard. So again this is for action um that we are asking the board to adopt the work plan. Uh so let's get started with uh year and review. uh we released the dashboard um the earliest that we have ever released it which was November um 13th um with a great pleasure of um providing you first a couple of updates that you all adopted um so not only did we have um science present we had science present of course with colors and um we have a very colorful dashboard um this one has um very much resonated with with the field um and I know that you continue to receive um letters of support um for further inclusion from from this
213community. Um so this is something that was different on the dashboard this year for the first time. Um of course this is what the card looked like that you adopted uh and uh this uh points that uh the board adopted from zero to to 100. The other significant piece that we've talked about already is the addition of the advanced placement courses. And um we will be uh teasing out some of this data uh when we come this come back to you in in March so you have a full um understanding of of that addition um to the dashboard. So uh I'm just going to uh touch base on the um the cards itself uh and then uh you're going to see me move through some slides very quickly or or just skip over them all
214together. This slide deck is available in the public folder. It has been presented to the California petition advisory group. Um, so I'm very mindful of time and the people that are are after me that need um your attention as well and action on things. Uh, so first uh the graduation rate indicator uh super thrilled to have the um strongest graduation rate that we've had to date at 87.8% and of course for um the dashboard we are combining four and fiveyear graduates. So uh you know typically um when you see a press release it's usually reporting out on fouryear graduates but we are now in the green and it is um a delightful place uh to be um for for um for the class of 2025. Uh moving over to college career indicator um we've always
215we've obviously talked about this also being in the green and the fact that we have um a little over half of our students now in the prepared category uh which is an increase from the prior year. Chronic absenteeism has been one that's gotten a lot of news. It continues to get a lot of news and of course the state superintendent has um has made this part of his um agenda not only for this year but priority of him becoming state superintendent. Um we are continuing a downward decline um which is of course for this measure what we want to see. You don't want to see upwards um uh numbers on chronic absenteeism. We are of course measuring um transitional kindergarten through grade eight. We have a direct link on the dashboard to high school. So,
216we're able to talk about high school and have easy access um to that for for schools and for districts. Um as as a whole, we are still um a little bit above prepandemic levels at 17.1% which continues to have us be in the yellow. Um this was one that we've been in the yellow for I think now three years in a row. uh and hoping again that um some of the things that the department has done especially with kicking off the year um we were in um I think Fulsson Cordova district in August um doing a the superintendent did a press conference talking about chronic absenteeism at a elementary school and so hoping that um we've kicked off the year right and by the time we start this data collection in in May and um
217start calculating it for release in October that we'll see some um further declines. Moving over to suspension rate. Um this is another one that we want to see low numbers. We do not want to see high suspension rates. Uh and as a state we have um now um gone over gone under the threshold of of 3%. So we're at 2.9%. And of course um the dashboard is something that um for this we look at our full complement of grades. So this is the one indicated where we get to we have the ability to look at um not only our transitional kindergarteners who hopefully are not being suspended to our high school students. Um and and for suspension rate I just this is another one where data quest provides such a wealth of data. The dashboard
218is looking at school and district performance. When you get over to data quest we can look at it by grad spans. We can look at it by gender. we can look at it by much more things that are measured because uh it is you know it's it's in a place where it doesn't have um this uh color value to it. It's just it's just data and then of course we always make all of these things available through downloadable data files and we know that those files are used. We see them quoted in the press um uh you know clips that we get. we see them quoted in research studies and so suspension rate is just one I would um you know again say that we are really um excited as a state to see that
219drop under the 3% um piece for English learner um progress indicator. This is one where we just have the two student groups of course our English learners and then our long-term English learners. So, as a whole, since long-term English learners are a subset of English learners, we are at a yellow for the state with just under half of our um English learners making progress and our long-term English learners are actually making um better progress than our English learners and they are in the green. So, that is something to be um noted as well. And then um concluding with um our academic indicators, our English language arts um being in the yellow with um eight points above standard, which is an increase from the prior year of the five point 5.1 points. And with our mathematics
220um also in the yellow um with a increase of five uh point 2 points, but uh the 42.4 points um below standard. [clears throat] So uh science as a whole just to give you a perspective on um how uh this is uh this looks um we are at a yellow for the state again there is not um a color at the top of that baseball card and that is by design to show that this is not being used for accountability for eligibility purposes for um for differentiated assistance or for the um every student succeeds act uh school eligibility. So that is the the nuance um there. This is one where I'm going to show off our student group performance. This is very um uh accessible not only on the dashboard, through our additional reports, through
221a lot of different um pieces within this tool, but this is one where our long-term English learners really um uh you know shows shows that they they need um improvement. They're the ones that are only student group that is that is in the red. And keep in mind that science is only offered fifth grade, seventh grade, and then of course once in high school. And so our English our long-term English learners are typically only going to take it as um excuse me, I think I have my my days wrong. It's not seventh, it's eighth grade. Um and the ones in high school because you're not you shouldn't be um hopefully you're not a long-term English learner by fifth grade unless you were you know retained or something because of the definition of being um you
222know at least uh seven years as as an English learner. So just again something to think about the nuances um to each of these indicators how they apply um based on um what has been adopted as as the methodology and what what the data that is available. Okay. So as a summary um we are a mix of um yellows and greens and uh of course we we talked about science being forformational purposes. The other thing that has been put out since um since this was put together was our growth our growth information. So, I'd encourage you to get on the dashboard, look at your local high school, look at your district, um look at your neighborhood schools um to see uh what um what is on there and what we've been able to add since
223we've released the actual dashboard. Uh in terms of our local our um differentiated assistance, uh not only our criteria, but those that are eligible, um you know the criteria because you've adopted it. You may have to read something at some point this year. Um but we will move quickly through this criteria and to this multi-year look. So uh in terms of the criteria, of course, county offices of education and districts have the same eligibility criteria. So we um lump that information together. So we are on a downward trend again from our high point in 2022 of 617 down to 418 districts and counties eligible for differentiated assistance. And what does this mean in terms of who who was able to maybe exit or no longer eligible? 164, you know, made gains that they are no
224longer eligible, but we did have an entry of 69 new county offices and districts. In terms of our charter schools, which of course have a little slight difference in their eligibility criteria, we see as well a downward trend from 173 in the prior year to 135 in the current year. And in terms of looking at who's no longer eligible, 94 were no longer eligible and we had an entry of 67 charter schools. So again, making gains um in in the right in the right direction. We also um started to tease out and and I know this is isn't in the memorandum that we provided you um back in November on the 13th is how many um districts are now eligible for geographic lead agency um support and that is 78 districts. and that um that
225that support is provided by county offices of education. Our direct technical assistance criteria um is one where we start to see um the uh the the CCE the the uh bring come into the space to provide the assistance. And while there's a slight um decrease for um county houses and districts from 67 to 60 64, we do see this um dramatic rise in eligibility for our charter schools from 11 to 39. So just again wanted to make that um known. Uh it is in in the memorandum that we provided you. Uh we also, you know, know that there's a backdrop of this um legislation um that requires the board to update the performance criteria no later than July 15th. And while that's not part of your agenda today, um we would be remiss if we
226didn't mention that that will obviously impact potentially impact um determinations for this year. So we look forward to your conversations um as to where this heads. In December, uh we released the Every Student Succeeds Act school eligibility determination. And this is something that we do uh in um in collaboration with our title one division uh and they're fantastic in providing um support and resources as is um the same division that provides that support and resources for differentiated assistance. So there's a team of um staff that that support this outside of my division and just want to recognize recognize them and right now they're under the leadership of Erica Torres. So um for federal support eligibility um of course we have a bunch of acronyms so let me just explain comprehensive support and improvement CSI additional
227targeted support and improvement ATSI and then what is relevant for this year is targeted support and improvement. The thing to keep in mind about CSI is there is funding available to schools to support improvement. So we are in this multi-year identification cycle and we are in year three. So, um, year three means that schools can exit CSI or ATSI. They can also become eligible for TSI. So, that's something to keep in mind. We'll start a new cycle, uh, in 2026 and look forward to, um, conversations with you around that. So in terms of the actual numbers um we saw a significant amount of schools um exit our low performing category which is of course our title one schools who are um uh not not meeting um the criteria. And then for low graduation rate just
228just a slight number at 19 that's of course our schools that are under the 68% graduation rate. And for ATSI uh we had uh 366. So over half of the schools met the um ability to exit uh that designation. Uh in terms of um uh you know the overall look and looking at those that are now eligible for TSI that did increase um we almost we we doubled the amount of of schools that were eligible for TSI. So a school may exit for example out of low performing CSI and they may immediately be eligible for TSI. So just that's how this criteria works. It can be confusing with all the acronyms. Um but overall as a state really the the line to keep in mind is this no status. So just above the total school
229line um we have gone from uh you know really uh highs um of 685 52 rather in 202425. Um and again we want to see that number increase. That's a number we want to see increase because they have no status. Now we're at 88 um 8,877 schools. So um you know a overwhelming majority of our schools are no longer um eligible under the federal criteria. All right. So I'm happy to take a quick pause for questions. Um you know that piece of it is there's no action. It was a reflection um of of the year um and student outcomes for the class of 2025. >> Thank you Cindy. Are there any questions for Cindy on the uh data that we just had a chance to see? Okay, hearing none, Cindy, please continue. >> Great. So,
230we're going to switch over to the 2026 accountability work plan. Uh this is our chance to touch base with you ahead of um beginning work. Um some of this work, although is a continuation from 2025, as you've already heard today, um and making sure that we're on the right track. So, uh, we know that there was a lot of, um, correspondence on the work plan. I think there's a lot of excitement around it, um, and trying to land some things that we haven't yet been able to. So, with that in mind, um, I am not going to list these individually, but we have about 10 items that we're going to cover. Kim's going to join me in just a moment. Um, but let me get started with um, our principles. And the dashboard principles are
231something that the board adopted in 2022. um they do serve as an anchor for decisions um future decisions around the dashboard um to help guide your work. Um some of those things are for the for example um the accountability system doesn't have a summitive rating. There is no way to get to I don't know purple or golden rod I mean they right like what what are we achieving um as a as a summitive but which is unusual for other states and I know that AR is is very aware of this. We also do not weight our indicators. So that is a value that you've um adopted um through the principles u that that you've put forward. Other states do weight um indicators. They may have a student group that um represents an oversized proportion of
232the actual students. Um and we treat our student groups all the same. So I'm just looking at Kim to see where where we're are we changing now. We're changing now. Excuse me. All right. We have an intricate little dance. Kimberly Montank, administrator of the accountability development and policy analysis unit. It's just so you don't get bored, right? We just switch back, right? Keep your eyes up. Um so we're starting off with growth. Um and um the consideration in this year's work plan is for English language arts and mathematics growth to be considered as state indicators. Um starting with the 2026 dashboard. Now, full indicator status um refers to adding the indicator to state and/or federal support determination criteria. That's what we're talking about with this action. So, this work aligns with the following dashboard principles.
233Um reporting opportunity and performance gaps among student groups through the equity report. Valuing each indicator equally. Um valuing high performance and growth equally. Um reflecting technical quality through measures that are valid and reliable and is subject to continuous revision and improvement. Um I will um briefly walk us back through again this long timeline of growth um and um where we started again with grow talking about growth as we talked about redoing our accountability system in 2016. Um and that's when the work began um concurrently with between CDE, the state board of education along with our testing vendor, the Educational Testing Service, ETSS, to develop this student growth model based on our brand new assessments back in those days, right? Um the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, CASSP. And I will remind everyone, this
234is only applicable to the CASP um assessments and specifically smarter balanced. we do not include the alternative assessments within the growth scores. Um, in July of 2018, we paused adoption because we noticed technical issues within the growth measures that had been adopted across the country by other states. um I can um help uh uh uplift that those states are realizing those technical issues and revisiting their growth models um as present as this year um since it has been um well known and documented by our friends in ETSs around those issues. But in 2021, um, ETSs came up with a technical solution to, um, allow us to present, um, a model that solved the instability issues um, by adding an additional third year of test scores. Um, and with the adoption of that by the state
235board in May of 2021, we were able to predict and be able to release test scores um, with the uh, following the administration of the 2023 24 CASP. So, in January of 2025, we updated the 2024 dashboard with growth score data um for the purposes of assisting you in setting performance standards for growth. Um that release was also supported with a additional web page on the CDU's website to explain with resources on the student level growth model as well as frequently asked questions which gets updates all the time as soon as new questions pop up from the field. And then we came back to you last May um and you approved the growth performance categories. So taking those growth scores, right? And as we have done with all of our indicators, right? Indicating specifically what
236we saw as um the lowest performance and what we saw as the highest performance for growth and setting those growth performance categories and labels. You also agreed to um what would be displayed on the dashboard um and the visual representation of growth for the 2025 dashboard which was different than 2024. Um and then in December we were able to release the English language arts and growth performance levels. Um and that was reflective of scores from eleas and schools from 2022 23 23 24 and 202425. um and it was available not only on the dashboard but the highly requested downloadable data file. So all of that information is posted on our website and available for everyone for all eleas schools and student groups. So this year the task ahead um we see as follows um obviously
237speaking about it today then speaking again with a CPAG in March that's a special CPAG meeting um that we can um that we've uh decided to hold in order to preempt all of the decisions that you may have in May and or July. So um we will discuss it there and then bring it back to you in May um to consider full indicator status for ELA growth and math growth. And then at the July meeting, you would incorporate any of those decisions that were made into revised criteria for state assistance determinations. I will pause if there are any clarifying questions around growth. Looking at my screen for my friends, too. [laughter] I miss seeing them. Their eyes, right? All right. With that, we'll move on to science indicator and it's going to look very familiar
238as well because we are also going to be considering science for full indicator status um on the 2026 dashboard in the same way. Um this work plan is um represented by principles 5, 8 and 11. So similar to our growth measures and as you know for science it's an equally long journey, right? maybe not as long, but pretty much just as long. Um, with our first operational test of the CAST being administered in 2018. So, we know the development of that was long before, right, to get that out to into our students hands. Um, and then proceeding with um working through a timeline to add that to the dashboard, which began at the March 2020 meeting for the state board of education. [snorts] Um in 2022 um we provided an update on the feasibility of
239this given the constraints of our COVID era testing um and the revised blueprints that the state board um had adopted with regards to the science test and how we wanted to incorporate that on the dashboard. Um and then in September 2022, the board adopted our first outside linkage to anything on the dashboard. That was our first link. Um and it linked back directly to the CASP results um on the CASP website so that folks while there was no science indicator being displayed folks could link directly to those results from the dashboard as a signal that science was being valued by the board. We did that again in December of 2022 obviously on that dashboard as well as 2023. And then in July of 2024, you adopted a metric to measure science on the dashboard, including
240um a participation rate as well as how to measure our high school performance um when students take the test once in high school. So, we discussed all of those different ways and you adopted um the metric of that measurement. And then in November of 2024, we debuted the science indicator with that beautiful little teal card. Um, and which showed status and change forformational purposes only with no color displayed. And then just last March, you approved the following pieces for the science indicator, allowing us to publish it on the 2025 dashboard inclusive of science cut points, change cut points, as well as the balanced color scheme for the 5x5 color grid, which enabled the dashboard, the science indicator not to have teal this year, but to have a color. However, it still was not utilized for
241differentiated assistance purposes and/or federal support determinations. Therefore, that's the decision ahead this year. So, we will do the same thing as we did with the growth model, right? We're going to take it to CPAG. We'll we'll hear what they have to say. We will bring it to May for your decision and discussion there. And then in July, if a decision is made, it is up to you to incorporate those decisions into the revised criteria for state assistance determinations. At this time, it cannot go into federal assistance determinations unless the estate plan is opened up. So, that's another piece to consider. So that is why we note that there. Any questions about our science indicator work plan. All right. Check for all the eyes. I'm glad they're there. I can see them. And then for college
242career indicator work plan, this one, there's a lot of things we just talked about. I just told you them, so we don't need to go through everything. Um we just held a study session in January 2026 um for a holistic review on the CCI um and heard your goals for the indicator, right? Um took lots of notes on those and the future path for adding additional measures. Um and so if there's any comments additionally into the work plan directly of the months that we're bringing things to you, please be vocal and um you know and sharing those um during your discussion today. Um our plan is to break provide an analysis for the international balorate courses um to identify possible courses for inclusion to the CCI. Additionally for Cambridge international our plan is to consider
243options for adding both courses as well as exams as a measure to the CCI. For the scale of civic engagement we will consider those options as well. And then for our new career measures, we will be evaluating those potential measures using the five years of data that we have presently as well. How we include all of the career measures available, internships, studentled enterprise, simulated workbased learning as well as ASFAB. Um and and then addition um you had indicated previously, right, to examine how other career measures such as apprenticeships may be addressed within the CCI and how to include those students with extensive support needs. We will add to those obviously the comments brought forth in the study session as well to address those needs during the year. The CCI work plan is um reflective of
244principle two reporting opportunity and performance gaps. Um reporting each uh indicator separately valuing each indicator equally reflecting technical quality through measures that are valid and reliable and is subject to continuous revision and improvement. We know what the CCI is. We know how it was developed. We just walked through all of these, but for our friends who, you know, need to reflect on that, that's no worries. And we just held that study session. So, [laughter] um, we're going to look at, um, you know, you adopted last year the successful completion of advanced placement courses within the CCI. So, obviously this year we will add in course completion for international balorate or Cambridge international for your consideration as an additional measure for the state seal. We will consider those options again for the additional career measures. We
245will evaluate all of those and this is when we will bring this work to you. So we are planning at the very next meeting to have you evaluate and consider for inclusion the state seal of civic engagement as well as the additional career measures for the CCI. So that will be in March as a decision. Then we will bring additional information on those other coursework to CPAG and then bring that information to you for decision and discussion in May along with additional context and information that you've requested. So that is where we would be with the CCI work plan. Any clarifying questions I can help with on the work plan? Just wondering since we already had a study session on it then I would hope the work plan would include items that we brought up.
246>> Yes. In so >> so in May per again per um the what we can explore for this year right we will most definitely be able to provide an update right on on what's available um and the requests that you've made um at the May meeting. So that's when we can um I cannot promise that for March. I'm you know I have fast fingers but you know we need a lot of friends to come in um to be able to assist us with answering all of the questions that have been brought up. So we would like to take some thoughtful work um to bring that back. Anything else? All right. Cindy's back. Okay. So for the Cindy Kazanis California Department of Education, um for the applicationbased dashboard alternative school status, this is a limited number
247of schools that don't automatically qualify for the alternative school status under education code, which is where the bulk of our um county and um county run schools um exist. Uh so one of the things that we had started working on uh in 2025 was trying to um narrow the burden on um lessen the burden rather on these application-based alternative school status or DAS schools. And one of the ways um in which we were uh trying to do that is to shift the burden of um demonstrating that they were eligible for this status to data they were already giving us right through the California long pupil achievement data system or cowpads. So the focus that um is left for this group is rather for this uh this criteria is our credit deficient students uh [snorts] and
248um trying to to figure out a way we can um if we're not collecting the data how can we make sure that that we can um provide um again relief to to the application based um mainly charter schools. Um these are the principles uh dashboard principles that um this indicator or rather this um piece of the work plan reflects. Uh and then just as way of background um most of you um may already have this committed to memory especially member Olen um but there is provision and education code that allows um the state [snorts] superintendent with the board's approval to develop this alternative accountability system for schools that serve high-risisk students. [snorts] Um and that um definition has been um defined by by this board on several occasions. Uh and for uh so we commonly
249refer to this as DAS, but again as I' I've already mentioned um the bulk of these schools are are automatically in that are run by county offices. So our juvenile court schools, our county um community um day schools and and and such. Um we have been operating an applicationbased system uh since 2018 I believe um for uh the remaining schools that aren't part of this that want to demonstrate that they are serving high-risisk students. Uh and so what what we have um been [clears throat] collecting uh to date is um schools have affirmed that they support high-risisk groups such as students who are expelled, suspended, wards of the court, parenting, pregnant or andor parenting, recovered dropouts, um habitually, truent or habitually insubordinate, disorderly and retained. So our students that are um retained uh you the
250board in 2017 so the prior board adopted um these metrics that that we see on the screen for our DAS meeting our DAS schools rather and then in 2025 um the criteria was updated and I just want to note that my note in here um I was um uh somebody a friendly um uh person said that's not exactly true. So, uh, words of the court, yes, they are definitely served by our juvenile court schools, but once they exit that juvenile court setting, they may still be, um, awarded the court because it's defined as a student on formal probation. What I can tell you all is that we do not collect this information in CalPATs. And there is a great hesitation from um, the community that supports um, students who are words of the court, who
251are um, you know, justice involved or juvenile um, justice involved students of even bringing that into a state system. And so um one of the things that we are again trying to make sure that the measures that are included for the criteria are things that we can can affirm and that is why um the board we had recommended you take action on this back back in July. We do know that these students typically though are are falling into one of the other categories right and so we are able to capture them and and provide credit to those schools for um serving high-risisk students. So, our work plan um for this year is to bring this back in March to um bring back the specifics around what this would mean for the credit division students. We've
252been having conversations with um various um stakeholders and and those um those that represent um especially some of these charter schools. And so, we'll continue that conversation. We'll bring you back a formal proposal in March. If there's any clarifying questions, I'm happy to keep moving along. um member Cleverwoods. Okay. So, our next um topic is around um priority one and the teacher assignment data. This was one that you've taken up um in 2025 and so some of this um should not be uh a surprise to you because you actually directed uh this action for the 2026 work plan. that is to align um to look at the ability to align teacher assignment um data terminology. Um so those uh things that the board um has oversight of is the dashboard and the school accountability report
253card. Um the teacher assignment monitoring outcomes report is something that is published on data quest but there is um interest in making sure that those terms are aligned um and accessible to the public. There is also um a move from the board uh staff to uh obtain additional uh interest holder feedback and we have a couple sessions scheduled for the end of the month to seek that information including um the what's before you uh for action this year which is interd district comparison intradist comparison data and then also um really how the data that now that there's information on every single school's dashboard has been used um right this information's been out now for nearly two months um how are um schools and districts and um interest holders using the data. So these are the
254metrics that um the work plan um pieces for the teacher data align with for our dashboard principles. And then just historically um this has been something that um the board um you know adopted originally uh in 2023 with using um the teacher outcome uh teacher assignment monitoring outcome data or or TAMO um as part of um displaying on the dashboard priority one in 2025. Um this information was uh adopted for use on the school um dashboard pages and um there is uh this is displayed more prominently with the percent of um teachers who are in the clear. So this is our work plan. Um again those those meetings are at towards the end of January. Uh I'm not sure if you're aware, but of course we have to the board has to publish this um
255your agenda always 10 days in advance and we have to get information to the board about a month before then. So we are always working six to eight weeks ahead of a board meeting. Um so in terms of of March um we will see what we can put in there for um those modifications. um and then uh bring forward uh the SIM information for CPAC with uh intended adoption uh as needed um in May. Okay. Uh onto our our 14th student group um our beloved long-term English learner uh students and uh just what what a change this group has made um in conversation. So, just want to acknowledge we continue to see the fruits of um adding them to the to the accountability system to the dashboard and sunshining the data set. Um for the
256first time, uh districts are able to see those long-term English learners um with a click of a button in the student level data system. So, at the state level, we have added reports for this student group uh which is uh just it's phenomenal. It takes a couple years to do that. So I just want to recognize um our our colleagues in the CalPADS team that have um supported us in this effort. So we have a couple of things left to do. The first was the suspension indicator and looking at modifications for this student group um especially the 5x5 grid and which one should apply um based on the fact that these students uh cannot become eligible um to be in this student group until they've been in long-term an English learner rather for for seven
257years. The other piece um which you directed us to add to our plan was this inclusion of recently reclassified students or what we call AREPS in the English learner progress indicator. So um we are working um as we speak on some of this uh as a team so we can start to deliver um these items to you early. So in terms of the dashboard principles that this reflects um you see those on the screen and then uh just to re to make sure that we're all on the same page for for ELTELS um although I have said this out out loud but I'll I'll give you the full definition um our long-term English learners are defined as a pupil who has not obtained English language proficiency within seven years of initial classification as an English
258learner. So, we see our long-term English learners in every single measure on the dashboard. Of course, in 2024, they were added to all of the state indicators, including the English learner um progress indicator. And then in 2025, when our science and growth model um were added, we do see that information in there as well. So, they are treated like any other in terms of a data display, but of course, um they are not included in our Every Student Succeeds Act state plan. So they're not used for um those determination those school eligibility determinations diff just for differentiated assistance determinations. So for 2026 um again looking at the suspension rate indicator to determine whether or not a modified application of the 5x5 grid is warranted um because we have been using um uh the elementary piece
259of it for pieces of the student group. And then um looking at the English under progress indicator to include students who have recently reclassified to fluent English proficient status. And this is a throwback for those of you that weren't um here which is all of you back to 2017 I believe when we did this whole waiver process um around um pieces of this. And so uh some of this is picking up some older work but it's also um bringing it present to to today. Um so we're we're excited to be working on this as well. So this is our anticipated work plan um is to get suspension I think because it's it was a a holdover from from July when we had an overwhelming number of decisions for you all to make um that we
260can uh have you make uh adopt the proposed changes to those at the March meeting. Um and then uh Kim's already mentioned that we've added a CPAG meeting. So we'll take that to them. The pieces around reclassification in late March um with action from you all in May. So trying to land some of these things um by May. All right, getting getting closer to the end. Um the participation rate for academic indicators and science um we see uh for this particular thing particular piece um is exploring the removal of um participation rate grace periods for academic indicators. Um this is something that um we uh were starting to work on last year and uh there was so many other competing priorities that we had to um take a pause. So in terms of our dashboard
261priorities or principles rather we see those reflected on the screen and in terms of um participation rate rules just to acquaint you to this um we of course uh assessments reports out on all students who have taken the test. when we start to look at these requirements in um in federal law about uh having every student group have at least 95% of students test that's where that um those requirements come in is through the accountability system. So if student groups district or or schools fall below that 95% um we do have to per um put put a penalty in place for uh the absence of those scores until we reach 95%. So in 2018 when we were still getting used to computer based testing right that was year four we started in 20134 um there
262was a a business rule so that was something the department put in place um to help um uh local educational agencies um you know not get wrapped up in the 95% piece when they had a student show up potentially during the testing window or without without little notice. Um, so we have been thinking about like how can we streamline some of these processes and is this still relevant? And now that we're well over a decade into computer-based testing, some of the concerns about why these pieces were put in place um we find are are no longer um are no longer true. And and it is so amazing that we are actually in a state where um we do see a lot of students test. We don't see the optouts that some of the other states
263experience. So there is um there is high rates of participation so that um you know we don't have as many um schools, districts or student groups having this penalty applied to them. So we will bring this um back we'll give you an update in in March um around those proposed changes. Okay. So in moving um forward on on the next item around modification of academic um our academic indicator the language that we use and information on on the dashboard um we uh are uh responding to actually a concern from the accountability leaison. So, this is not something that that you all discussed um in 2025, but this concern around um the use of the word standard. Um and so there's been a request to add this to the work plan um to modify language and
264information around academic indicators to address this concern. Uh specifically as we were getting ready to release the dashboard um we responded to um this this concern from uh from the liaison and we did update some of the language um that was being used um specifically meeting grade level standards was updated to meeting proficiency standards um and uh standard met was updated to level three and proficient and I think there was um some um uh misunderstanding that the work that had been done in the assessment space because you saw MA and others up here talking about um that work. It it didn't automatically translate into changes on the dashboard. So, we are now um trying to uh see if we can align some of the work um that has been done on the student score reports
265and in the assessment space um to have that reflected in the accountability system. in terms of what that looks like. Uh we would uh bring forward u explore requests um in in March potentially um having uh what is what we're capable of doing um to make changes to in 2026. We bring that back for action in May and that's our um initial uh pieces around that. So um I think I have just a couple more pieces and then I'll turn it back over to you. Um >> Cindy, I just had a quick clarification question as it related to the participation rate. Uh we're looking at considering whether to uh keep or eliminate the grace period, not the penalty. Correct. >> That's correct. We can we can >> I just just wanted to be sure that
266I understood that correctly. Thank you. >> I said something that made you think differently. I apologize. [laughter] Okay. So, this is uh the one that um for me is near and dear to uh uh my staff and and my uh uh maybe my stress level is the fact that we are um moving up the dashboard by by a month. Um you know, this is this is not a surprise to us. Of course, this is legislation that has been in place um since 2023. Um that said, you've already heard my remarks this morning um that we had to also move up our collection uh of data. So the the the the weight of um this is shared by local educational agencies to an extent. We've moved up to really just about a three-week window um for
267them because we were we were traditionally um closing our collections around u prior to Labor Day at least over the last five years I would say. Um, so we hope that um the state will be free of any natural disasters come July 31. Um, and and no joking aside, we did keep our our collection open last year um, as a result of the wildfires in Southern California and we wanted to see everybody get across the finish line. That was for enrollment. We're talking about student outcomes data and um, you know, course completion and and information around um, suspensions and absenteeism that takes place um, in July. A lot of schools have moved up, districts have moved up their windows. So we know um for example that Los Angeles Unified I think is in early early
268early June. Um I think San Diego is the same time frame if not end of end of May. So that is you know is a change in um not only closing the school year but then starting the school year. We see folks starting the school year you know in mid mid July um definitely by the first or second week of August. And so having a collection still open from the prior year um didn't also make sense. So we've we've made this is um you know resulted in as I mentioned a lot of changes on the collection side. Um we we do believe that the October 15th date can can be met but I want to also um just give you a preview of what that means. Um it means releasing uh the accountability um what
269we're calling the October 15th release. We'll be releasing the updated California school dashboard tools so that with with all the state indicators and also releasing the LCFF differentiated assistance files. So we always do the data files around um uh our LEA eligibility. The supplemental items that would be released at a later date and somebody's already asked me I don't know what that date is. We need to get to October 15th. um would be the dashboard, additional reports, our growth data and those data files, our federal supports terminations, our school accountability report card files, and that DAS one-year graduation rate. Those are all pieces that are not made up um in the differentiated assistance criteria. So, that's the um that's the thought behind that. It's also just uh we want to make sure that um anything
270we put out I think just as you can all appreciate um has gone through the necessary rigor of quality control that we've um been able to check things um and so we are we are trudging ahead um that we will be ready for that um in uh well whenever we release the rest of those data pieces but October 15th is definitely um the bright spot um moving forward. Uh and then um finally we um we're never dormant. I don't know if folks think that accountability like we slack off we take off the holidays. Um we were trying to put this agenda together and this item um prior to um taking Christmas and and New Year's off. Um so just a glimpse of um what we were working on in the fall as we were putting
271on the dashboard is we had a policy workg group meeting. We had six in-person presentations. We had 12 virtual presentations and all of those, you know, hitting at almost 2,000 individuals. The day that we released the dashboard, 100,000, 200,000, we had 100,000 unique hits on the dashboard. So, I'm sure that was the superintendent's press release along with President Darling Hammond, but then the governor weighed in on his own press release. And so, there is um a thirst for knowledge, and this is one of the authoritative sources. um I don't ever see um 100,000 hits on the same day on data quest for example and that's okay right it has different purposes but I just want you to know the reach of your decisions is significant and it is it is out there and um and
272folks are using it and folks are replicating it they're creating their own dashboards they're taking the data and they're um making it useful to their their own audiences because we make available our downloadable files so um that's sort of a a treat to be um to be imitated. Uh but it's also there's a responsibility there when we have to say well that's not that's not our dashboard that's somebody else's creation of a dashboard. So that's uh just as an aside. But um Kim's team and then of course Ryan Lamb's team who does all the data processing um they're responding to hundreds if not um thousands of emails a year from um not only districts but parents from concerned community members. Um and so just know that um we take that that role really really seriously
273in offering not only technical assistance but support for how to use this tool. So with that I'm happy to turn it back to um member Glover Woods. Thank you so much, Cindy. And uh let me say as we uh prepare for public comment, just uh the phenomenal work that you, Kim, and your team do. And each year as that deadline has gotten pushed up, uh you guys have always just rose to the occasion and did what needed to be done. Um so just again appreciate all that happens behind the scenes to make that data and make the information available and then the outstanding way you reach out across the field. Um I think you guys know your your team is held in very high regard um by the board but also throughout the state of
274California and it's just due to the way that you work with everyone and your customer service and the quality that you produce. So thank you so much for doing that. uh as as we continue to look at more things to do. Um thank thank you for hanging in with us Cindy. [laughter] So we are going to open the phone line for public the public comment queue and just a reminder members of the public wishing to provide comment on this item may do so in person or by calling the phone number using the number and access code that you see in front of you. So, while we uh are waiting for members of the public to call in and getting prepared for our in-person comments, I'd like to turn uh things over to President Darling Hammond
275to give us just some framing con comments from the leazison perspective. President Darling Hammond, >> thank you. Well, I want to add my gratitude to what you've already expressed to the CDE team. It is an enormous amount of work. It's also work that takes a lot of knowledge and expertise which we are fortunate to have and a lot of problem solving. So just kudos and I particularly appreciated also the explanation of the complexities of the timing in terms of you know when schools uh are able to provide data and how it then has to be processed so expeditiously. So really appreciate all of that. Um I think it's a very um well uh conceptualized and well explained work plan. It's a lot to do clearly. I really also think we are appreciative of the fact
276that we will be getting some of these decisions along the way in um sort of a bite-sized manner rather than um having to make them all in July. Uh so we appreciate all of the staging and so on. uh the um fact that we'll be getting advice from CPAG along the way as well. Uh just a couple of things that I think we may want to take up in discussion um in addition to all that's been presented. Uh one is um just being sure the board um thinks through what it means to be a full indicator. That terminology is used. Um and of course we are exploring uh changes in the differentiated assistance criteria. So those two things will sort of intersect in new ways uh in the in the coming year. Uh and then
277the other thing that I think we'll want to explore a little further is uh how um having uh looked at the uh ways to communicate with the field the performance levels on the assessments particularly the math and the ELA assessments. um how we can be sure that in the in the representation of the performance of students on the dashboard, we're able to show the various levels of performance uh and consider the ways in which um we bring that knowledge base and that information to uh those who are using the dashboard. as Cindy mentioned, you know, 100,000 people looked on it, looked at it um as it was being released this year and then probably several times that look at it over the course of the year. So as we're thinking about this, we want to
278think about both the components, what it means for them to go into different statuses like full indicator and then how we can think about the um uh representation of students performance across the levels. And with that, I'll pass it back to you, Vice President Gloverwoods, for public comment and for um our further discussion. >> Thank you, President Darling Hammond. So at this time I I don't have any additional comments as Leia is on to add to this. I'll save my comments for our discussion. Uh so um at this time let's find out if we have any speakers signed up to provide public comment in person. We have five speakers signed up for in-person public comment. Please remember to state your name and affiliation for the record when it's your turn to speak. Will the following
279people please line up with the microphone in the back of the room. Steve McDougall, Lucy Salceto Carter, Rachel Murphy, Lindseay Tornator, and Diana Buu. >> Members of the board, Steve McDougall with CFT, a union of educators and classified professionals. Couple of comments regarding item 13. Number one, in the end, the accountability system should optimally align with the LCAP three-year cycles. Um, you know, school improvement, continuous improvement is long-term work. Tacoma miracles aren't real. They've always been disproven. It takes time. We need to be aligned with our resources in order to improve. And secondly, when it comes Secondly, and when it comes to teacher monitoring, labeling folks as ineffective sounds evaluative, judgmental, when in fact they're working on credentials or trying to get their credentials because of a staffing shortage or some barriers in the way
280that are systemic. Not a good way to label folks. We need to narrow down and drill down on labeling folks. Think about being a parent. Wouldn't you be alarmed if you got notice that your child's teacher is been deemed ineffective? Thank you. >> Good afternoon, Lucy Salceto Carter with the Alama County Office of Education. Um, we appreciate the board and uh, CDE staff for your work in developing the 2026 accountability work plan and look forward to engaging on the activities it outlines. We do however want to echo some of the concerns um, of our partners at AXA and CTF and and other organizations surrounding the continued use of the term ineffective teachers. This term encompasses a wide range of teachers, including appropriately permitted early career educators who are in the process of earning their full
281credential. Using the term ineffective is unfair to those individuals and is confusing to parents and other members of our communities. We support access requests that the board consider disagregating teacher assignment data by the permit or authorization held when reporting these data. To do so would ensure greater clarity among educators and our communities and better support individuals entering the teaching profession as well as the districts who employ them. Thank you for your consideration of this request. >> Good afternoon. Rachel Murphy with Public Advocates and the LCFF Equity Coalition. We'd like to address a few topics discussed under this item. First, for the priority one indicator, we are very glad to see the board adopt school live school level TEO data for the school's main page of the 2025 dashboard as required under the ED code. We
282strongly support adding intradist comparison data to the 2026 dashboard work plan to help identify gaps and disparities in fully prepared and properly assigned teachers. And we also look forward to the conversation on better aligning teacher quality terminology. Additionally, we continue to recommend that instead of simply noting whether a district's percentage of clear teachers is above or below the state average, the indicator should detail if the district is plus or minus 5%, well above, or well below. We appreciate the department's work to release growth data on the 2025 dashboard. However, we reiterate the concerns raised in our letter about the misleading growth indicator and the confusing data displays. We urge the board to consider revisions to this indicator that reflect prior public discussions and analysis. Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm Lindseay Tornator. On behalf of the
283California County Superintendent, we express broad support for the CD's proposed work plan. The inclusion of all items reflect a continued commitment to ensuring California's accountability system provides meaningful and actionable information. Um, and we believe warrants careful and thoughtful discussion. While we support the discussion and deliberation of each item, we might or might not end up supporting the implementation of each item. As stated in our letter, our positions on the individual items in the work plan will be informed by the board's revisions to the differentiated assistance criteria. The ongoing DA revision process will play a central role in shaping how these items are implemented and how they essentially uh affect eleas and students and recognizing this connection is essential to supporting a coherent and well-aligned accountability system. Thank you. >> Good. Good afternoon, state board members.
284Diana Vu on behalf of the Association of California School Administrators. AXA appreciates the work this that the SB and CD staff and board members have done on the continuous improvement of our accountability system. As this work continues, we asked the board to consider several things. First, AXA believes California's accountability system should be aligned to the established three-year LCAP cycle. Districts rely on the LCAP as their northstar and changes outside the cycle weakens the continuity needed for meaningful progress. Second, we appreciate the alignment of terminology across all California's education and accountability platforms, which provides a clear understanding for everyone. Further, as the board continues to work on the TAMO, we ask that the board consider disagregating the term ineffective by permit types on all CalFire platinums. As a point of clarity, we are not asking to
285change the definition of ineffective. Instead, we believe the display of permit types would provide a more clear and accurate understanding of teacher assignments for families without unfairly stigmatizing developing new teachers. Thank you. >> We will now move to public comment on the phone line. >> There are eight people in the queue for public comment. I will open the phone line now. Um caller with the last four digits 4369. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> I'm sorry. It looks like we still have people that are in here for inperson comment. Just to double check, do we still have some? We do. So, if the caller on the line can hold until we finish the in-person public comment, that would be wonderful. Thank you. Please, sir, go right ahead.
286>> Thank you. Um, good afternoon. I'm Carlos Mashado with the California School Board Association. CSBA urges the board to evaluate any accountability updates through the lens of a clear statewide operations and support plan. This has long been a priority, a CSBA priority, and we're advancing proposals to better connect programs and remove barriers that hinder eleas from closing achievement gaps. We stand ready to partner with this board and CDE to build a coherent, aligned, and accountability system that truly supports districts and county offices in education in helping every student succeed. We also appreciate the board's focus on long-term English language learners and the effort to strengthen English learner progress indicators. Adding ELTELS to the dashboard brings needed visibility to the group uh facing persistent challenges as governance teams work to close achievement gaps. We encourage a
287careful review of this indicator to ensure it accurately reflects disparities across student groups and drives meaningful improvements within the state system of support as the board reviews the criteria for differentiated assistance. Thank you. >> Good afternoon. Uh Cassie Mancini here on behalf of the California School Employees Association. I wanted to align our comments regarding the teacher assignment data with AXA and requesting that the board consider disagregating teacher assignment data by permit type. CSEA represents classified employees participating in the very important classified school employee teacher credential program who may be encapsulated under the term ineffective and it's important to us that eleas aren't dissuaded from participating in educator training programs for fear that could impact your their report data. data disagregation will help prevent uh present this important information in a more accurate and informative way.
288Thank you. >> Thank you. I believe that concludes the in-person comment. So, we are now ready to hear public comment from the phone. Thank you. >> Caller with the last four digits 4369. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. Hello, this is Sally Fox again from San Diego on behalf of Cababe, the California Association for Bilingual Education with a comment in addition to the LCFF Equity Coalition letter uh for the previously mentioned agenda items. I'd like to emphasize that we greatly appreciate the upcoming 2026 long-term English learner ELTEL work plan and are in strong support of a separate suspension rate computed for ELELLS in the middle and high school. We agree that reclassified fluent English proficient or RFP students should be included in the English learner progress indicator LP
289the middle of the school year in which they were reclassified. We would however like to first see an evaluation of the impact this change would have on the LP possibly creating a need to re-evaluate LP cut scores. Thank you very much. >> Thank you. Uh caller with the last four digits 8945. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Hi this is Suzanne Kooie from the Charter Schools Development Center. We want to thank the CDE for their hard work. We have two requests for the board. First, to restore ELA and math growth scores to the 2025 dashboard along with possible range. We did not understand from the CPAG or state board agendas or discussion a possibility that growth scores might disappear. We understood proposals to add new items to
290the growth display, but not to actually remove the actual board approved growth metric. We wonder if state board members may have also heard that as we did. Second, regarding DAS eligibility, we recommend broadening the item to review all changes that may impact DAS schools ability to maintain their status as some changes may inadvertently remove DAS status of some schools that are actually serving high-risk students well and under the non-BAS renewal rules could end up closing. Thanks so much for your attention to these items. >> Thank you. Uh, next caller with the last four digits 2250. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Good afternoon. Rick Camales with Ed Trust West. We are align our comments to those expressed in the equity coalition letter and urge the board to
291create a plan to address persistent inequities and dashboard outcomes, address the need to make student groups with small and sizes more visible, and make science a state indicator. We also urge you to take the necessary steps to maximize the benefits of the student growth measures by ensuring that the display of the growth indicators are not misleading and align to actual growth outcomes. We also strongly urge the board to move forward with the growth measures state indicators for the purpose of DA identification. Growth is one of the strongest indicators of student academic progress over time and can reveal both academic successes and inequities hidden by considering proficiency alone. Our account accountability system will significantly benefit from including growth as a state indicator. You as you move forward um towards growth as state indicators, we urge you
292to consider changing the math and ELA indicators to reflect only proficiency status rather than both status and change. >> Um the current change component of the academic indicators do little to meaningfully reflect student learning over time as it compares different cohorts and students from year to year. Thank you. >> Thank you. Uh, next caller with the last four digits. Um, 2051. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. Caller with the last four digits. 6075. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Good afternoon, President Darling Hammond and Superintendent Thurman and the state board members. My name is Melissa Maruchi and I'm speaking today as president of the California Association of Science Educators and as a high school science teacher in the Central Valley.
293Thank you for your continued leadership and evaluating science on the California schools dashboard. As stated in our coalition letter, the full color indicator is an important signal that science matters. Now is the time to take the next step by granting science full indicator status and incorporating it into the state accountability system. We urge the board to include science as a statewide indicator under priority 4 and or 8 and to integrate science into the redesigned differentiated assistance process. When science remainsformational only, districts understandably prioritize other areas worsening inequities across in access to quality science instruction, especially for students who have been historically underserved. After 12 years of the California NGSS implementation, full inclusion of science would finally send a clear message. Science is essential, not optional. Strong science instruction supports student engagement, attendance, and learning across
294disciplines and aligns directly with the board's vision for a profile of a learner. California ready to partner with you to support districts and educators statewide. We appreciate your leadership and look forward to continuing this important work together. Thank you. >> Thank you. Uh next caller with the last four digits 5116. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Good afternoon. Jessica Sco uh statewide director of the California STEM network, a project of children. Now, uh want to thank the board and um uh CDE staff for the inclusion of science as an information item on the dashboard. It was very exciting to see a full color indicator on the dashboard uh this past fall and look forward to partnering with the department as they explore the options for upgrading science
295to a full state level indicator um on the dashboard in future years. also want to um uh align my uh concerns about the presentation of uh growth data and information in the more detailed view on this on the dashboard. Uh the text in the uh blue box specifically below the color bars is somewhat confusing and uh not related to the color bar information and would hope the board will reflect on um changing the presentation of that data. Thank you. Thank you. Uh, next caller with the last four digits A256. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Hi, this is Robert Van also from Children Now. Following up on my colleagues comments, um, we recommend uh making growth a full indicator on the 2026 dashboard. A focus on student
296growth is a focus on closing achievement gaps. And the system of support should identify districts with both low performance and low growth. uh sharing concerns about the disappointment on the indicator on the dashboard for growth. The indicator that's being reported is the percentage of students who improve their score. That means one scale score of improvement uh for a typical student moving from third to fourth grade. Their ELA score should go up by 41 points. Their math score should go up by 49 points. And yet one point scale score point improvement is deemed as making progress. That is highly misleading. And the graphic and the data displayed are no way aligned nor correlated. This new indicator has not been validated by the ETS or any other process. We would encourage you removing it from the dashboard
297and replacing it with data on the actual growth model. >> Thank you. Uh next caller with the last four digits 1385. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Good afternoon. This is Sarah Lilis with Teach Plus California. Uh I want to associate my comments with the LCFF equity coalition in the alliance for students around our concern uh around the current uh growth related uh measure on the dashboard. Um we also want to uh we're look forward to working with the department as it considers how to integrate growth um as a full indicator on the dashboard as well as exploring the intrad district equity component of the priority one data. We also wanted to just share our disappointment in reading the information memo in December that defers continued work
298on a more consistent school climate indicator. Um, this has been an issue that our teachers have been really uh interested in and committed to over the last several years. Um, we understand there's a lot on the agenda for this for the work plan this year, but as the board considers what uh a more robust differentiated assistance and statewide system of support looks like, we are uh uh we are disappointed that there won't continue to be work for a more objective measure of school climate because it really is a driver of school performance and what our students and communities need. Thank you. Thank you. Caller with the last four digits 7768. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Yeah. Hi. Uh Peter Ahern, former uh president of the California
299Association of Science Educators. Want to thank CDE for their hard work and the hard work they're going to do on the upcoming work plan and also thanking the board for their consistent support for science education. I'm going to echo previous callers. We love the uh the science on the dashboard in the full rainbow of colors. Um science is more important now than ever. Um for crying out loud, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the secretary of health and human services. Uh people think a Google search counts as research. We need scientifically literate students and access to science in California is now highly inequitable. It really depends on the school and the neighborhood and and largely on socioeconomics. um that can't be the case. So um you've got our letter, but we want science fully included um
300as a statewide indicator and also you know as DA gets rethought um science needs to be built into it from the start. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. Uh next caller with the last four digits 2051. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Hello, my name is Amber Reman on behalf of Californians Together. We greatly appreciate the upcoming ELTEL 2026 work plan and are in strong support of a separate suspension rate computed for ELELS in middle school and high school. We also support the move to include LTELs who were reclassified in the middle of the school year to remain in the LP. We agree that RFP students should be included in the LP but would like to see an evaluation of the impact this would have on
301the LP with a possible need to re-evaluate cut scores. We kindly request the disagregation of current ELELS from reclassified students in the growth models for English language arts and math. The stability of both groups is medicated with the inclusion of match scores in the calculation. This is essential in measuring EEL progress in assessing the effectiveness of reclassification criteria. Lastly, we offer our support in reviewing how student performance may be represented on the dashboard to provide greater information across all performance levels and hope to be engaged in this process. Thank you for your consideration. >> Thank you. Uh that concludes public comment for item number 13. >> Thank you very much and thank you to all who have provided public comment. Um at this time we're going to open for board discussion and uh just a
302reminder board uh what we are what our item is uh looking at right now is the approval of the actual accountability work plan. We appreciate all of the ideas and thoughts that came forward in public comment. And as was shared by Cindy in the presentation, we're going to have uh multiple opportunities over these next few months to really start to dive deeply into those uh particular areas. So, um again, opening up for board discussion. Is there Oh, and u we'll start President Darling Hammond with you on the screen. Thank you. >> Thank you. Um, lots of good public comment as well as um, all of the great um, information we've received to respond to. I just wanted to um, raise four things that occurred to me as I was listening to public comment that we
303may want to be um, engaging in our conversation. Uh, one is um, a number of people talked about that quote ineffective label on priority one, the teacher data. Uh and um for those of us who are old enough to remember it, that label comes from the federal government. They required all the states to classify teachers um with one classification being called ineffective. that that idea came about back in the days when they were also incentivizing uh attaching student test scores to teachers uh and um identifying teachers as effective to ineffective based on um student test score measures. Uh that of course has gone away from the federal government. The federal government is no longer allowed to require that kind of teacher evaluation system. uh but uh the labeling uh to my knowledge has not gone
304away. So that's how that label came to us. Um I do think the idea of uh breaking out the different authorizations for teachers, the different permits or authorizations that they have might make a lot of sense to clarify what is lurking under that label. So that may be something that we would want to uh consider evaluating. Um but just wanted to remind people where it came from to begin with. Um second thing I wanted to note is um that uh [clears throat] the um and I'd love Cindy to speak to this when she's available again to help us think through what it means to be a full indicator because that's one of the pieces of language. uh it has state accountability implications and we are of course doing some rethinking of some aspects of what
305for example differentiated assistance or uh DTDA DTA may mean. Uh it may also refer to the federal um designation of indicators or use of indicators and I would love for us to get some opportunity to clarify uh that relationship so that we know what we're um dealing with. Uh the the third thing that uh emerged in the comments was the conversation about the growth score and how it's presented. Um and uh apparently in the past there was it is true that in the past there was an actual numerical metric underneath the growth score saying that whether a um school was some number of points along a continuum. uh which was orchestrated from the average or the typical um I think we adopted the percentage of students who'd made gains uh as one of several options
306and that was one of the other options and we may not have realized that we were trading one for another. So exploring the possibility of using both metrics, the one that we adopted and the uh numerical metric may uh with respect to score may be something we want to talk further about. Um and then the last thing I'd like to put on our conversation agenda is how we can um uh clarify the um distance from the way we now uh look at the proficiency levels that students have achieved. And in our accountability system, we use uh we have used something called distance from standard. In earlier meetings, we uh really began a process of clarifying those terms because we learned people didn't really know what the standard was. It was being misunderstood as a grade
307level standard, which it is not. Uh it uh by it being the only metric we pay attention to on the dashboard uh and in many other conversations, it puts the attention on only the bubble kids who are close to a a cut point of three uh without showing the progress of kids at other levels along the continuum. So we did change the score reporting uh for students to use uh different um clear labels for the levels of performance to ensure that those levels of performance were all being uh designated and and evaluated. Uh we've done that in our reporting to the public. It would be great to uh clarify that on the dashboard as well so that we are uh no longer using the term distance from standard as though it is the only standard
308and so that we are making clear that that is the proficiency cut point and showing uh where students are progressing along the different cut points. So those are four four topics that I hope we can talk about. >> Thank you. Thank you very much. Um, any additional board comment from any of the board members? Well, I will I will piggy back off of uh some of the comments from President Darling Hammond and I appreciated the trying to get some clarification on that term ineffective and um having kind of that historical perspective of where it came from. Um and more importantly uh as we are going forward with looking at the priority one data um as part of our accountability work plan work um is that a term that we need to keep or are we
309able to do something different within our state accountability system with the language for that. So uh when we engage in conversations around that um I think it would be very helpful to um to definitely explore um others other thoughts and ideas comments around the accountability work plan it's quite robust um as you can see there are a lot of areas on there for us to explore again culminating with well I won't say culminating but knowing that in July we have a very important um decision decision to make um as it relates to the eligibility criteria for differentiated assistance as well. So, it's it's really I think in in my mind I'm looking at how we're braiding together. I keep going back to that word of braiding, how we're braiding together all of these decisions so
310that no decision is just sitting out by itself, but understanding the implications and domino effect um as we look at each of these areas here on the work plan and each of our indicators and how it plays in our accountability um system and also um how it overlays of course within that system for differentiated assistance support and direct technical assistance support as Well, member Essco. Yes. >> I just wonder if we could also look at how we bifrate communication to the federal government versus our own uh educational partners. >> So even though you know there's a federal antiquated mandate that this is how things need to be defined, can we communicate differently >> with the people that um we serve? and and that may be a really good this may be a very good time
311to have that conversation as well. I can recall way back when when we were moving away from API and NCLB and conversations that were taking place at the board level when I was a practitioner was really how do we create one system? So, we didn't have a state system and a federal system that um that the eleas were having to look at and that we were having to look at. um now we're multiple years down the road from that initial decision and we might find in our discussion and decision- making that maybe there are some places where we need to diverge if you will if you will. So um which also kind of necessitates something that I know I spoke very um very strongly about a couple of board meetings ago is like do not
312open the estate plan, do not open the S estate plan. um we might have to reopen the SS state plan uh based on what we look at during the accountability um work plan work this year. So that may actually have to happen and um if it provides a better system and I don't want to say a better system I would say um an even more robust effective system for the field then I think we need to keep all options on the table. Other thoughts and ideas? Yes, member Patello Brownson. >> I'll just um lift up maybe a point of interaction. I I certainly resonate to this um issue of thinking about how to unpack um a inherited term of ineffective teachers. Um and particularly thought um found it very helpful to hear um some of
313the public comment around a teacher who is early in tenure who is in process um and on their way having a different designation um not only for um the perspective of the school community, the teacher themselves, the principles but also the interaction point that was um sort of percolating as Cindy was talking about intra district um disparity data in terms of teacher assignment having parents and families actually have access to um descriptors that actually give them better information about whether it's a new teacher who's in process versus um a leftover term um from past administrations. >> Thank you. Thank you. Member Patella Brownson. Are there other comments? Looking on the screen as well. Didn't want to leave out member Rodriguez and member McQuillin if there are any ideas there. Yes, member Yoshimoto Towery. Notice how
314I didn't point this time. [laughter] Uh thank you. Just not not necessarily for discussion today, but I wanted to uplift the couple of comments made about the growth data as we're continuing to refine and learn um how to best uh do that work. I know we're excited that it's available. Um, just wanted to make sure that that gets into the conversation as we move forward. >> Thank you. Thank you. I don't believe I see any other comment and I uh want to move move into a motion. Um, we've had some additional conversation in relation to other ideas to explore within the accountability work plan. So, um, I'd like to take the opportunity to make a motion and then ask for a second on on this particular motion. I move that uh we approve the proposed
3152026 accountability work plan with adding uh the following clarifications to the plan. um ensuring that our October 2026 dashboard displays trends in student performance at all four performance levels. Um and a link to the LEA schools CASS page. Um, also ensuring that the October 2026 dashboard uh uses the term distance from proficiency standard rather than distance from standard and also examining how we might be able to move to a clearer metric uh than uh different from standard using a positive point scale on the 2027 dashboard. And lastly, kind of going back to the last point, we just talked about evaluating and um as needed, undertaking potential changes to California's Every Student Succeeds Act state plan. Okay. Thank you. There's a motion on the floor and I think we have a a hand. Just as a
316point of just as a point of um protocol, do we need a second before we go into any discussion? Oh, I'm sorry. Uh, President Darling Hammond, go right ahead. >> I was going to second your motion. >> Thank you, President Darling Hammond. You see, I I'm drunk with power over here. You just got to watch me. [laughter] All right, it has been moved and seconded. Is there any discussion? Okay, Brooks, would you please uh do the roll call vote? >> Member Yoshimoto, >> yes. >> Member Rodriguez, >> yes. >> Member Patilo Brownson, >> yes. >> Member Rosco Gonzalez, >> yes. >> Member Olen, >> yes. >> Member McQuillin, >> yes. >> Vice President Glover Woods, >> yes. >> Member Esco, >> yes. President Darling Hammond. >> Yes. >> Member Ake. Motion carries. >> Thank you,
317Brooks. And thank you very much. Um again, Cindy and team, thank you so much for uh all of this work uh for this particular item and all of the work that will come forward over the next few meetings. Uh at this time, board, we've earned a break. Yay. I'm just like, what? What's that? So, if we can reconvene, don't get too excited, but if we can reconvene at 1:40, 1:40. Oh, okay. Please take please take a very quick break. Thank you. Welcome back everyone. Now uh we'd like to reconvene um the board. As you can see we are all back and we're going to take up the waiver consent items W1 through W6. We will now open the phone line for public comment. Uh, do we have any public comment in person? >> There are
318no people signed up for in-person public comment. >> Thank you very much. We're going to wait just a moment to provide opportunity for anyone who may be calling in before we uh check on that. Again, uh this is for public comment related to waiver consent calendar items W1 through W6. Do we have any callers on the phone? >> There are no callers in the queue. Oh, I'm I apologize. Somebody just popped up. >> Wonderful. Thank [laughter] you. >> Um caller with the last four digits 6677, you are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Hello, Nick Sus County Office of Education. The support from system improvement leads and the CBE's uh updated multi-year STEM process have been game changers for our work. System improvement leads have been a transformational partner
319providing the coaching and consultation that we need. whether I apologize. >> We are currently taking public comment for the waiver consent items. Do you mind calling back in for general public comment >> or >> Sure. >> Sorry. >> I'm sorry. Item 15. Thank you. >> I'm so sorry. I thought we're on item four. >> Oh, no problem. Thank you. >> Okay. Um I believe that concludes public comment. Do I can I have a motion please to adopt the CDE recommendations for waiver one W1 through W6? >> Member Oaken. >> I move that we adopt the CDE recommendations for item one W1 through W6. >> Thank you. May I have a second? Thank you. Member G. It's been moved and seconded. Brooks, can you please call the role? >> Member Yoshima Motari. >> Yes. >> Member
320Rodriguez. >> Yes. Member Patilla Bronson. >> Yes. >> Member Rosco Gonzalez. >> Yes. >> Member Olen, >> yes. >> Member McQuillin, >> yes. >> Vice President Glover Woods, >> yes. >> Member Essco, >> yes. President Darren Hammond, >> yes. >> Member Aj. The motion carries. >> Thank you very much. We'll now move on to item 14. Item 14 is the California assessment of student performance and progress update on the curriculum embedded performance tasks in science bank. The CDE recommendation uh is there is no recommendation for this as an information item only. This item will be introduced by Mal Vang of the CDE with a presentation from the Los Angeles County Office of Education, Digital Promise and Education First. Mel, welcome. Good to see you again. Please begin. >> People are excited. I get the best
321item today. [laughter] Let me do a little something first. Um again, Mal Vang, uh director for the assessment development and administration division at the California Department of Education. Um very happy to be here. Again, this item before you is really an information item. Uh we are bringing to you an update on the curriculum embedded performance tasks in science bank that we've been working on. Uh we've called that the authentic task for learning and assessment in science or atlas uh which is one of the components related to our California science test or cast assessment and through our innovations initiatives. So, you may recall that in July of 2025, representatives from Los Angeles County Office of Education, Digital Promise, and Education First came to share with you the development work um at that time. And here they
322are again to share the launching of Atlas and then they're going to navigate the ATL Atlas to uh help us understand how it transforms science teaching and taking a closer look at the specific performance tasks and then discussing uh briefly the future of Atlas. But before I introduce our special guests um I just want to uh highlight that um Mike Dr. Mike Torres at CDE and his team also in the curriculum in and frameworks and instructional uh resources division did help out quite a bit with this project and this work as well. Just want to thank them for their leadership and coordination. And then now I will turn it over to Deborah Atwell from um Los Angeles County Office of Education, Josh Weisgrow I believe from Digital Promise, and Anisha Badrinarian from Education First. And
323they're going to take it away for you. Thank you. Good afternoon everyone. Um happy to be with you today this afternoon and excited to share that on January 1st 2026 the Los Angeles County Office of Education launched the authentic task for learning and assessment in science also known as the Atlas Task Bank. Um this bank represents a major advancement in California's commitment to providing NGSS aligned highquality curriculum embedded performance tasks to the state's science educators. The launch marks the completion of the grant's primary deliverable, which is creating a statewide repository of free, easily accessible K12 performance tests. The Atlas Bank is the foundation of the CAST uh innovations concept paper which was delivered to the state board of education in January 2024. One part of the conceptual approach to CAST innovation includes performance tasks embedded
324in learning for optional use by teachers organized in an online openly accessible task bank in alignment with the cast innovations paper. Should I be I think I just realized what I was doing wrong. Thank you. Oh, you got it. >> All apologies. Should I I don't want to start over. Do you want me to start over? >> Um apologies. So, we're here now at the role of um LA County. Um so, in in line with the CAST innovations concept paper, um Los Angeles County Office of Education received funding in 2024 to develop a statewide repository. And this bank enables educators and local educational agencies to easily search for and access uh science um task by grade phenomena standard and domain for use in classrooms across California. Funding was provided under the performance tasks embedded in
325learning for science or ptails grant which was authorized by Senate Bill 153. The Atlas Task Bank reflects a coordinated effort with the California Department of Education, including support from the CDE's assessment, development, and administration division and the curriculum frameworks and instructional resources division and the state board of education. With support from both the CDE and the SBE, Atlas will be managed by the Los Angeles County Office of Education. Um, just a quick word about our partners. The Atlas Task Bank uh was developed in partnership with Digital Promise, Education First, and the California NGSS Collaborative. Leica wants to express our sincere appreciation to the coalition of partners who expertise um develop the platform, the tasks, and the professional learning resources that comprise the Atlas Task Bank. But in in addition to our partner agencies, we want
326to especially thank the California educators who provided their expertise and insight in multiple ways. Atlas was developed using a p purposeful user- centered design approach grounded in direct educator input. So educators across California participated uh in the design and development of the taskbank through focus groups, usability testing, and educator review panels. Participants represented all uh regions of the state and diverse geographic context, urban, suburban, and uh rural. Educators brought experience serving students who represent California's diverse population. Our English learners, students with limited financial resources, students experiencing housing insecurity, recently arrived students, and gifted students. Educator insights directly shaped the task clarity and usability, semantic search, filtering options to support differentiated instructional needs, and task preview tools that enhance accessibility and classroom readiness. So, we'd like to leave you uh with some quotes from educators who've
327provided insights into the development of the task bank. um their excitement for Atlas mirrors much of the input we received we are receiving and have received from the field. I'll give you a minute to look at those quotes while I hand off to my colleague Josh Weiss of Digital Promise who will take us through the walkthrough of the Atlas task. Um, all right. Uh, thank you, Deb. Thank you, members of the board. Uh, I get to do the fun part, which is show you what this thing looks like. Um, I, um, for purposes of a slide deck, you'll see a lot of screenshots, but as, uh, Deb said, Atlas is live. If you'd like to follow along live, you can go to ngss-atlas.com and try your own search while I talk through it. I'll I'll
328raise the stakes a little bit. Um, all right. So, uh, as Deb mentioned, lots of educator input throughout. The most recent of which was was we did beta testing. Um, since since last we presented here, we did a a a full-scale in the field beta test with just under 50 teachers, about 47 teachers. um which you know yielded some changes from the the preview images I I I shared in advance um or in the in the prior meeting. Um for instance the the core search interface remains the same. Um this looks very similar to what we showed before. Um but based on the feedback we realized that you know there were different ways that teachers were searching and sometimes they were doing topical searches as we had originally designed it for and in some cases
329they had a really specific standardsbased uh objective and they needed more of a filtering function. And you'll see we added these buttons for filtering by NGSS dimensions. Um that's just as an example of one of the sort of many kinds of tweaks that came out of this beta testing process from our initial designs to what you'll see on the site today. Um in the kind of walkthrough example here you see in the in the search field uh we have a a hypothetical elementary science teacher who's typed in that they want an earth science task about changing land features. And you see they've also selected a drop-own menu that says for grades three to five. Um so they can search for their grade band on this page. Once they click that search button um they proceed
330to their search results page. Um and the search results page uh allows um first we'll show you ranked search results ranked by relevancy uh based on the the the search query. Um but then allows you to filter from there because u we have a bank of over 1300 tasks in it. Um uh typically uh a search will return a lot of results. Um and so teachers can then filter down by duration of task. They can revisit those standards. We have student activities, task highlights. Um in this case, our hypothetical teacher has has decided uh she wants a task that will fit in one class period. So she's like 30 to 60 minutes and narrowed her search that way. Um, another thing, uh, if, uh, teacher isn't seeing the results they want on this page, you'll
331see the search bar still persists on this page. So, they can go right in and edit their search directly, uh, right there without having to go back to the start. Um uh one of the one of the big things we did during beta was look at every single search that those 50 teachers were doing, replicate them, see the results they were getting, and fine-tune the search results to try to make sure that they could that we were going to continue um getting better. That's part of the power of this semantic search engine which has some some AI uh technology behind it. And so there's some tuning that we can do and there's some tuning that actually the machine learning does. And what's going to happen as the um as the site goes live and more
332people use it is it'll actually keep getting better. Uh and that's one of the really um exciting things about this. Um after they choose a task to review, we get to this task details page. Um and what we have here is is uh as succinctly as possible all the information that teachers generally want to know about a task. uh all in one place in a dashboard in a standardized format um that they can review and then decide whether to dive into these performance task documents as Anisha will share next. Right? Some of these tasks are very involved reviewing the full documentation for every task you might consider would take a long time and this is where I think a big piece uh in addition to the ease of finding a big piece of the sort
333of teacher time saving can come into play is being able to review at a high level uh task more quickly. Um, in this case, our our teacher is looking at this dynamic Earth task that asks students to model how land and water features evolve over a long period of time due to natural processes like erosion and sedimentation. So, she can review the details here. Um, what materials does she need? What standards are addressed? What are some key features uh including accessibility and student agency in the task? Um, and uh once at the bottom uh if she decides this looks like a task I might want to use, she can into the specific documents and really do the the deep dive and preparation to to teach with these uh materials. Um this was another place where
334beta tester feedback provided insights on how to tweak and and make this information as accessible and useful as possible to the teachers. Um one of the things uh we've added is this uh you'll see a blue bar at the top that allows you to jump through the sections of that page. So as sort of succinct as we tried to make it, you can now navigate it even faster if you know exactly what you're looking for. you can jump straight to the documents or those task highlights. Um and um that was a major requested feature. Um and the other major addition since the last time uh we presented and what even the beta testers were able to to see is uh the addition of opportunities for teachers to provide uh feedback. Um, this is where teachers,
335everything you've seen up to this point, any teacher can do on the site without creating a an account. In order to provide feedback on the tasks, teachers need to create an account. Um, and uh, accounts are created with an email and password um, setup. Uh, it doesn't require any sort of u shared centralized login or anything like that. Um the there's two ways teachers can provide feedbacks on tasks they've used. One is um on these three topics um uh that teachers are specifically looking for that again goes kind of into that dashboard um which have to do with essentially things that only teachers know. How much prep time did this take? How engaged were my students when I actually did it? Right? We get a a quick readout of these these ratings here. It's not
336just a one to five quality rating. to give us some specific feedback about uh the experience with the task. Um, and then you'll see at the bottom of this there's also an opportunity for a narrative comment um that can be uh uh added to the task to help inform for for future teachers how how things went um when when you did the task. So, we're really excited to see this grow as teachers begin to use it. Obviously, on day one, we won't see a lot of these present on the tasks, but as teachers begin to use it, these will get added. Um and then the last uh the last exciting feature we've added here is the ability to create groups. Um and we think this is going to be really powerful um for you know
337teams of teachers in a school, teams of teachers connected to a county office or other service provider uh toas you know would probably use this and within the platform it creates an opportunity for teachers to collaborate share discuss uh the tasks themselves. Lastly, we added a selection of resource pages that give everything from site walkthroughs to sort of more uh pedagogical information on on what does it mean to use a performance task, why use performance task, how to use a performance task. Um, and those pages um uh you can navigate to those in the using Atlas section on the the uh main header bar. Um, and I will wrap up there. I will also leave you with some quotes um while we transition these quotes a little bit more about from our beta testers about
338uh spec specificity of using the platform itself um and while you uh take a look at those I will hand over to Anisha Bajinarian. Thank you. >> Good afternoon. Um Josh said he had the most fun uh task here of telling you about the site, but I think I actually get to have the most fun by telling you about the tasks that are in the site. Um we are so excited um to be able to share um with all of the teachers in California um a platform that has nearly 1,400 tasks. Um, since the last time we were here, um, and gave you an update on this, we've added nearly 70 tasks that were developed in collaboration with California educators over the course of the last eight months, and we're really excited to see that
339contribute to the additional diversity. Um, here um, these tasks that are included in the library span um, all grades K through 12. They include tasks from each of the domains, life, physical, earth, and space, and engineering. that's included in the California NGSS as well as tasks that cross domains. So tasks that draw from biology and physics together to um really center real world authentic phenomena that students might be seeing in their their life recognizing that science doesn't stay siloed in the bars that we set. All eight science and engineering practices are represented in the library at all of those grade levels as well as the seven crosscutting concepts. And I think one of the things we are most excited about here is that there is a really wide diversity of format and approach to tasks
340represented in Atlas. We see everything from a quick 15minute task that can get you a really quick gauge of student understanding through deep performance all the way through tasks that might take four months of iterative ongoing research where students are really embedded in an authentic assessment. um and scientific process. We see tasks that look like everything from doing a a a science investigation and sort of the way we might all picture what sort of canonical science looks like to really practicing what being a good science communicator looks like in this day and age, making Tik Tok style videos or doing things like actually like in incorporating play into our tasks for our our youngest learners. And we have tasks that span all of the California NGSS, which was our goal, but also highlight the integration
341points with um other durable skills like communication, collaboration, and critical thinking, as well as other elements of learning goals for students that are specific to California and that are so important to our learners, things like the environmental principles and concepts um and things like that. We're excited for the library to be able to grow more that this foundation is here and that there's infrastructure um to support that broader growth moving forward. I want to give you a little bit of a taste of that diversity of tasks um and just show you a quick highlight of a few different tasks um that you might find that you could find in Atlas. And so for this first task, I wanted to highlight something that we're really proud of, which is the breath of tasks that we have
342for K2. Um, I've been working on science assessment for a really long time and perhaps the biggest complaint I have heard for ages is that there aren't enough supports for how we engage our youngest learners in showing what they know and supporting them in what they do next. So, this is one example of a task that does this. Um, in this task, students are introduced to an animal that is likely new to them. This is a first grade task, a beaver. and they spend time in 30 minutes um trying to really answer these two central questions. Why do beavers build homes for their families? And how do beaver body parts help them do that? What how how does the structure of how beavers are built actually support that function? This task engages students in both
343active learning with their peers and with their teachers as a form of assessment as learning as something that they're learning while they're showing what they know and can do. But it also gives them opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge and skills through things like storytelling and play. They actually get to practice skills like cutting and putting things together. They act out parts of the process here that um we're trying to assess their learning around. They get to practice writing, but their demonstration is not dependent on them being able to read and write because we know that the developmental um progressions at this age are so variable. And it offers opportunities for hands-on building. So, we think science is going to be really fun for these learners while demonstrating for um their teachers while supporting their teachers
344and sort of seeing what students know and can do. Um the joys of this task, one thing that we know in elementary is that there is a constant tension between how much time teachers have for the wide range of things that are going on in their classroom. This task includes a core set of activities that can be completed in under 30 minutes and then a broader set of activities that teachers can add on that can complement their other um instructional goals and support um other things that they might want to do with more time. know, building a dam, for example, um something like that. And um we're really we're excited to support our K2 students and teachers through tasks like this. In this example, this is a slightly longer um example in middle school um
345where students spend two to four class periods really investigating a technology um called a sonic cleaner that is claiming that you can use sound waves to clean up uh local reservoirs of water. Um, in this task, students get to engage with a realworld phenomenon that is something that they can engage with and sort of relate to in a wide range of geographic um circumstances. These the algolooms are something that are affecting everybody right now. It's affecting our drinking water. It's affecting our local ecosystems in urban areas as well as in other areas. And so all students can sort of engage from the place that they come to it from. In this task, students collaboratively investigate different kinds of sound waves to evaluate the company's claims. So, they're using their understanding of how what is a
346soundwave? Like, how what are the features of a soundwave? Is it possible that it could do this kind of thing? They have both individual and collaborative components of the task. So, we get to see both how they work together like real scientists do and what their individual contributions and thinking look like. In this example, students individually model how waves can selectively and physically disrupt parts of algal cells um and preventing them from doing some things but not um sort of interrupting other biological processes that are going on in the community. Um and then students independently use those their understanding that they've developed both collaboratively and by themselves to address community concerns, real concerns that have been raised by the community in response to this real technology. um and they can do that grounded in community
347context of their choice. So there are lots of concerns that are going to be more and less appropriate in different places. Students actually have choice around which ones are feeling most compelling to them in this task. Of course, you know, not any no task can do all of the things. But one of the things that I wanted to highlight in this task is that there are so many directions that this can go. Today we're talking about Atlas and the classroom performance tasks, but the board has um engaged in other conversations about other components of the CAST assessment system um that might have related tasks to the performance to these classroom performance tasks. And this is a great example where we could explore other questions about like is it safe for other animals and plants living
348in the area to engage with technology like this? Will this cause sound pollution? like we can explore those other ideas in related tasks such as those that might be in a mini performance task or in a common performance task. And the final example that I'm going to leave you with is a high school example. Um, one of the things that we often hear from high school educators is a concern that high school tasks are very long. They are the tasks that are going to they're going to be the ones that take two weeks of the classroom to do to really get to that depth of science understanding. And there are many of those in Atlas because it is true that we are expecting students to really engage at a deep level with some of those
349ideas. But there are also tasks that have been intentionally designed to take under 20 minutes um and still get at core competencies in science that we really want students to demonstrate. In this example, um students are evaluating solutions for rising energy usage in Fresno. So it's [snorts] based in a very particular place, but it's something that is actually relevant to not just communities in California, communities everywhere. Um, and in this example, what students are are sort of centered around is this question. What are the trade-offs amongst different solutions for electricity and power distribution in California? They're only concerned in this task with the trade-offs. They are not going to be sort of exploring one one solution in great detail. They're not going to be making a deep recommendation. You could expand the task to include
350something like that, but to stay within that goal of a 20-minute task, this one is like, let's figure out what's going on amongst these different trade-offs. Students use a computational model here to evaluate two possible solutions and make an argument that connects their science understandings and the evidence that they see in those computational models to economic, societal, and ethical considerations that are sort of presented to them as part of this. And they use that computational model in addition to sort of like using that argument to really consider the trade-offs to design their own solution and create a quick screencast that in two to five minutes asks them to communicate their model. And so this task doesn't take very long but really gets at the depth of some very core science and engineering principles um and
351practices and does so in a way that is centered in a really authentic context. And so we are so excited to be able to share these three tasks along with their 1390 friends in the library um to uh to support California educators um in their pursuit of performance-based teaching and learning. Um I too am going to leave you with some quotes, but I want to point out a couple of things before I before I actually leave you and handed this back off to Deb. Um, our beta testers, as Josh mentioned, have actually gone through the full process of finding a task and trying it out in their classroom. And when they told us what it looked like when they used those tasks to actually change their instruction, we were just so excited to share some
352of these things. We're hearing things like Atlas is fundamentally transforming not just current practice but long-term teaching practice by ensuring consistent and high level intellectual rigor in the classroom. We're hearing things like having access to these tasks is making teachers more likely to incorporate these like higher level thinking tasks into their science lessons on a more regular basis. um and to do so without feeling intimidated or overwhelmed, which we know is we we want this to be a real support. We're hearing that teachers want are seeing this as a way to make science more of a priority for their learners. And I think something that's really important to highlight here is that we're seeing teachers say this is something that can be useful for all of their learners, their highest achieving learners and their learners
353who have needed more support. And it's something that all of their learners are engaging with. and it's something that they are finding useful to be able to support each of those learners. So, we're really excited as this sort of launches more broadly to see where this goes. And with that, I'm going to hand this off to Deb to close this out. So very happy to close us out and before we leave you today, uh we want to share what the future of Atlas might look like um over the next six months, a year and beyond. So, as Atlas rolls out statewide, LEO and its partners will continued will continue our outreach um and communications to support educator awareness, access, and effective use of the task bank across local educational agencies in California. As the user
354base grows, educator feedback uh will be systematically gathered uh through platform platform analytics, user surveys, and uh communities of practice. This feedback will inform ongoing refinements to the Atlas Bank, including improvements to task quality and clarity, expansion of task collections, enhancements to search and tagging features, and the development of additional supporting resources such as annotated student work and implementation guidance. These continuous improvement efforts will ensure that Atlas remains a responsive teacher centered resource that evolves with classroom and teacher needs. And with that, oh, I forgot the slide again. I'm so sorry. I am so sorry. So, there we have a rundown of the five main uh objectives that we hope to support. Technical and social enhancement, expansion of tasks and task collections, instructional strategies and implementation guides, development of task resource, and connection to the
355statewide assess assessment system as well. Um, so we'll just open it up to questions if you have any. Um, but with that, thank you so much for your time. We're so excited to share this new resource for California teachers. >> Thank you very much. And we are so excited to hear of it. I remember our first presentation around this and I was very excited. Now I'm even more excited. Uh, we are going to get prepared for public comment before the board goes into discussion. So if we could display the public comment slide. Mal, you're up to I'm sorry, I just jumped right in. Is that okay? Okay. [laughter] So, the public comment slide is up uh for members of the public wishing to call in, please follow the direction on the screen. And while we're
356waiting for members of the public to call in, I'd like to ask our leazison member Rosco Gonzalez if she has any initial comments and then we'll give turn it over to President Darling Hammond for any comments as well. >> I do. I just want to thank the department and the partners who developed the Atlas Bank for the thoughtful work behind this effort. From a classroom perspective, what really stands out is how easily uh how easy intuitive this tool is to use. Teachers can quickly find tasks, organize them, and create groups based on grade level, standards, or student needs, which just makes it more practical for everyday use. There's even a feature which I love. It says copy task uh folder to your Google drive and then you can customize it and maybe change some of
357the constructed or selected responses which I think that differentiation just that ease alone and having maybe some changes that I personally have already made to some performance test but with the rubrics or so just having the ease not to have to cut and paste that alone is a huge win for me. Um, having access to high quality science performance tests that fit daily lessons gives students meaningful opportunities to show their thinking through inquiry and problem solving in line with is in line with NGSS. I also really value how intentionally educators have have been involved in shaping this work. Teachers from diverse contexts help inform the design and show in shows how classroom ready these tasks are. Pairing this with professional learning supports collaboration, builds confidence in teaching and assessing science and keeps the focus on
358student thinking. Overall, I mean, I cannot say enough about how much work I know went into this atlas from being a performer um item reviewer and creator of performance tasks. I know how meaningful this work is and how teacher informed step for um step towards a more coherent and meaningful approach to science assessment. And I can see exactly where all the educators gave their insight to this developing of these performance tasks because it is something that my grade level actually already looked at and I asked them just kind of a meaning focus group of what they thought about it and they were just so excited to be able to just download some of those performance tasks, put them into their Google Drive and get to work and get their students excited about learning science. So,
359thank you so much for this work. >> Thank you. Member Rosco Gonzalez, President Darling Hammond, would you like to had any comments before we go to public comment? >> Yes, thank you so much. Um, I'm also excited. Um, I just want to remind people that this is part of the larger system that we've been discussing over the last couple of years to really infuse um the science and engineering principles into into science and authentic work. So you'll remember the uh concept paper that we received from our colleagues at CDE and from ETSS um which outlined a new approach to the CAST assessment um and it is grounded in this bank of performance tasks that will give uh teachers from K through 12 opportunities to bring this kind of inquiry science inquiry into the classroom. Uh
360there will then be as part of the CAST assessment in the grades that we give it five and high school um a performance element that will be added just as we have performance tasks in our smarter balanced ELA and math um assessment but these will be classroombased performance tasks small something as um Anisha was talking about the range of tasks something on the order of 1 to two days rather than you know four months. Um and probably more in the order of you know 60 to 90 minutes or something like that. But um that will be used commonly across the state as part of the assessment and counted as part of what it means to demonstrate your knowledge of science. And then in addition there'll be what we've called a mini PT, a mini performance
361task on the assessment itself. um something that will be more in the order of I don't know 30 or 40 minutes perhaps but not um not as long and but also reinforcing the idea that understanding um manipulating the environment understanding the data uh bringing science knowledge to real world problems is part of uh doing science and it is part of what we want to develop as the um foundation in California. So um this is a a wonderful foundation, a a substantial foundation for building the instructional practice that we will be also um tapping and and assessing much more robustly in our system as a whole. >> Thank you, President Darling Hammond. At this time, we're going to go to public comment. And I'd first like to find out if we have any public comment in
362the room. >> There is one person signed up for in-person public comment. Please remember to state your name and affiliation for the record when it's your turn to speak. Will the following person please line up at the microphone in the back of the room? [laughter] Um, Angela Steagle. When you hear time Oh, that's that's my next line. Sorry. Sorry, all the people that were back here clamoring to get up here. Um, good [laughter] afternoon SPE members. My name is Angela Steagel and I'm a classroom teacher representing the California Teachers Association. CTA appreciates the update on the Atlas Task Bank. Curriculum embedded performance tasks allow for meaningful assessment of content throughout the year and can help students truly experience what science looks like and feels like. We believe that educators should be involved in the design
363and development of Atlas and we appreciate that teachers were engaged in multiple steps of the process. As the Los Angeles County Office of Education continues into the next phase of the Atlas Task Bank, we look forward to the continued engagement of professional educators. Thank you. >> Thank you. Do we have any more public comment in the room? >> Okay. Do we have any public comment on the phone? >> We do. There's one person in the queue. I will open the phone line now. Um, caller with the last four digits 6075, you are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Good afternoon again, President Darling Hammond, Superintendent Thurman, and the state board members. My name is Melissa Muchi, and I'm speaking today as president of the California Association of Science Educators
364and as a high school teacher in the Central Valley. On behalf of the science educators and partner organizations across California, I want to thank you for your sustained commitment to highquality science education and to the vision of the California Next Generation Science Standards. Because of your leadership, we have seen what is possible. When instruction is truly three-dimensional, students become curious, capable, and empowered learners. The launch of Atlas represents a pivotal moment. With over 1300 highquality performance tasks, this resource has the potential to transform science learning statewide. But access alone is not enough. Educators are asking clearly and urgently for sustained highquality professional learning to bring these tasks to life in classrooms. We urge the board to invest in ongoing support for Atlas and to leverage California's strong collaborative science education infrastructure to scale equitable performance-based
365instruction for all students. Thank you for your continued leadership and partnership. >> Thank you. Uh that concludes public comment for item number 14. >> Thank you very much. At this time, we'll open for board discussion. Board members, I day I'm sorry, member Rodriguez, uh please go right ahead. Thank you. >> Thank you. Yes. Um actually I had a question before we went to public comment and it was regarding the professional learning and what professional development would be uh what it would look like for teachers who haven't used performance tasks in the past. Is is there a plan for that? >> Would anyone like to come forward to Yes, we have someone coming to the podium right now. Member Rodriguez. Thank you for this question. Um I think this is one of the most important things
366we can do to help complement the task bank is work with teachers um and educational agencies um helping them develop their ability to um support uh student centered thinking in science in the classroom. So, um, Los Angeles County Office of Education is currently thinking about a two, um, a two professional development approach, um, in the next six months and the year following. Um, we'll be working with our partners at the collaborative, NGSS collaborative, um, to kind of refine what we do in the next six months to a year, um, in order to think about what works um, locally and how that can be used statewide. With regard to that, we're thinking first piece is a um entry level professional learning um two days uh where um educators would engage in what is a performance task,
367why are performance tasks important in the classroom, what types of data do they yield, and how does that data inform teaching and learning in the classroom? Um so that's kind of an entry level PD for those uh educators, science educators who have not yet worked uh with performance tasks. Um then there is a second um line of a professional learning that we're thinking about which relates directly to uh working in uh PLC's locally in districts at grade levels uh where they choose and select a performance assessment performance task to use in the classroom and they collaboratively plan that lesson deliver that lesson and um look at the data that's generated from that lesson. lesson the student artifacts and then use that as next steps to informing instruction in the classroom. Uh so those two lines
368of professional learning is what we're committing to for the next year and again working closely with our partners the California NGSS collaborative to ensure that what we do locally is scalable over time works in other local educational agencies across California. >> Thank you so much. Thank you very much, >> President Darling Hammond. >> Just wanted to add that uh support for this work is in the governor's budget for the professional development you learned about and for the ongoing support of the task bank. >> Thank you. That's exciting to hear. Thank you very much. Other uh comments from the board? Well, I I will say u again how exciting it is to hear um about Atlas and where it is right now. And I I really think uh part of the what makes it so exciting
369and makes it such a a useful tool is the authentic engagement of teachers in the development of these performance tasks. and um greatly appreciate the feedback loop that's embedded within this platform to allow for continual improvement as teachers utilize these tasks and for them to be able to give feedback that will help inform how to use them. You know, I put on my hat and lens as an elementary school teacher and an elementary school principal and uh just knowing uh for those who are teaching in the elementary setting uh we have a responsibility of teaching all subjects. So to be able to have a resource such as this, um I think one of the comments said, you know, I don't have to comb through the internet and try to pull all of these digital resources.
370It's almost like a a a one-stop shop to really get some very um strong performance-based tasks in science. I think it's just such again a great a great resource for our teachers. And uh one other comment as it relates to the professional learning. Again, exciting to hear that there is u money in the budget to support the professional learning. And I just encourage um all those who are working in this space to continue to tap into your county offices of education. uh most I believe almost all of them have uh dedicated professionals that are working to provide professional learning throughout their county in the area of science and uh those who have done a lot of work with um NGSS. So to leverage that I think back to our conversation when we were talking about
371differentiated assistance um in our November meeting and tier one support professional learning in this space it would be a definite tier one level support. So tapping into our county office partners and even the uh county superintendent CISK science subcommittee would be a really great resource to bring more light to the to this particular tool but also provide professional learning for those that would utilize it. Other thoughts and comments? Member Olen? I just want to say uh it was fun to follow along in the um online and on the website and definitely made me excited to do some science. So, thank you for that. [laughter] >> Wonderful. Well, if member Oaken is excited to do science, then we know this is a win-win for sure. Most definitely. So, I don't see any other >> Oh, sorry.
372Member Rodriguez, >> I thank you so very much. Member Rodriguez, please go right ahead. >> Yes, thank you again. Um so the first time I had my hand up it was for the question and now I just wanted to um thank the uh presenters in the collaboration for uh this phenomenal work and um you know with performance tasks uh I I know that my students uh you know feel that like it's something they're learning and it's something that they do versus information that we're just giving to them and they don't know what to do with it. And so it's it's empowering. Um, and I feel very fortunate that my teacher preparation was focused on performance tasks and project-based learning. And, uh, you know, we talked about NCLB a little earlier. And I remember that environment
373and the the testing and punishing uh and running into Professor Darling Hammond back then um in Washington DC at a teaching and learning conference and just breaking out into tears telling her I was ready to leave the profession and she said hang in there's some changes coming in California. So I believe these are the changes and I have to say how much joy the Beaver family um uh task brought me to listen to that and to imagine children working uh you know answering those questions and studying beaver anatomy and it took me back to one of the highest points that I've had as a teacher when I was teaching AP language and a possum wandered onto our campus. We're in the desert so we don't have a possums here. And so the student I mean
374it was like before Tik Tok gossip central and everybody was like all about the possum and I didn't have any science text for my AP uh language class. So what I did is I printed out some possum facts and then we had a press conference and so one of my students was a possum and then his attorney and then the other students were uh reporters and they asked questions related to what they learned as far as the science goes. So, you know, one some one of the possums had some red Gatorade because possums drink chicken blood. And so whenever they would ask him hard questions, he would just like play dad. And it was just it was so memorable. And every now and then I run into those students who are now in their 30s
375with their children and they always make a possum reference. And so that you know, it's just it's it's very memorable learning when they engage. It's something that they explore. So, I'm just uh really happy to see um us going in this direction. Thank you. >> Thank you, Member Rodriguez. Thank you. Do we have any other board comment on this item? Thank you so much for bringing that to life for us, Member Rodriguez. [laughter] I I don't see any other comments uh either in the room or remotely. And so, this will conclude this item. There's no action needed. Uh it is an information item. So thank you very much Mao and uh everyone who presented. Uh thank you so much. We got a lot of joy out of this particular item. Thank you so much and
376excited for again students to experience that joy as well through these tasks. So now we're going to move forward to item 15. And item 15 is the state annual performance report for part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 2004 covering program year 2024 through 2025. And uh board just know that there is a recommendation the CDE recommends. Thank you. The CDE uh recommends that the SVE review and approve the executive summary of the FFY 2024 APR for part B of the IDA covering the program year 24 as prepared by the special education division. This item will be presented by Rachel Henan and Shiloh Duncan Berserell. I hope I pronounced that correctly of the CDE. Please begin. >> Good afternoon. Can you hear me? Okay. I don't have any beaver stories or any
377other animals, so hopefully this will live up to those expectations. But good afternoon, President Darling Hammond, Vice President Glover Woods, esteemed board, Dr. Robersonson, and community. I'm Dr. Rachel Henan, the director for the special education division at CDE, and I'm here with my colleague Shiloh Duncan Besser Rio, the associate director of data monitoring and LEA support. We're here to present our annual performance report to the state um for the state of California, which is an annual requirement and an action item for the board. So as you mostly know the under IDA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act part B, California is required to maintain a state performance plan that establishes ta statewide targets to improve outcomes for students with disabilities. These targets were developed in collaboration with educational partners for the current six-year cycle that
378was adopted which was approved by the state board in November of 2021. Each year, California reports progress towards these targets through an annual performance report, which reflects statewide performance across multiple indicators and the collective work of our LEAs. The APR serves as California's primary public accountability report for the implementation of IDEIDA part B. So this work matters to the state board because it represents California's primary u mechanism for exercising statewide oversight, ensuring IDA compliance, and holding our systems accountable for improving outcomes for our students with disabilities. As we move into today's presentation, we want to highlight a few key areas of progress, identify priority areas for continued improvement, and share how these data are informing our statewide strate strategies. We'll then transition into our system improvement leads, our technical assistance providers who partner with LEAs
379to strengthen systems and translate efforts into improved outcomes for students with disabilities. And this year, as you know, is significant as we mark the 50th anniversary of the IDA. It's a milestone that reflects how far we've come in recognizing the rights, access, and potential of our students and persons with disabilities. And as you know, in 1975, President Ford signed into law the Education for All Handicapped Children's Act, and it guaranteed the right to a free and public um education for all students with disabilities. And before that enactment, the fate of many of our students with disabilities was quite dim. Many individuals lived in state institutions for disabilities and for mental illness. people with disabilities in those days, in those settings were merely accommodated, not assessed, and not educated. So, a big thank you to CDE
380Press as you walked in for that amazing um board on the right um that mural that represents our 50th anniversary celebration. So the data we're going to share today um is allows us to reflect on this legacy of IDA highlighting the progress we've made over the last decade while also underscoring the responsibility we continue to carry as a state. As we step back from technical requirements and accountabil and the accountability framework, it's important to remember these data represent students. They represent children, not just indicators and targets. They tell a story of every student with disabilities across California. With that in context, the next few slides, um, I will invite you to view the data not just as a measure again of compliance, but as a broader narrative of opportunity, equity, and con and continued commitment
381to students with disabilities in California. So our start our story starts here with our enrollment and I know we presented last year with a very similar situation. Our enrollment continues to look the same. While our general education enrollment continues to decrease, our identification of students with disabilities continues to increase. Right now, currently, we have over 876,000 students with disabilities in California that our system serves. That is approximately 14.3% of our population. Here's a vis another visual representation of the data from the previous slide. It just illustrates the steady increase that we continue to have for enrollment and growth of students with disabilities in our state. And we're consistently seeing this increase every single year. And just to put this into perspective, this is one of my favorite slides when I present throughout the state. Um,
382as California serves more than 870,000 students with disabilities, it's an enrollment that exceeds the entire population of multiple states in the United States, including Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, and we're creeping up on South Dakota as well. Our whole total population. So that scale makes California's idea oversight not just significant but it's unparalleled. So it demands strong coordination our coordinated systems and to drive meaningful outcomes. And again, our students with disabilities intersect significantly with California's LCFF priority groups, particularly our foster youth, where more than onethird of our foster youth have IEPs. It highlights and compounds the need facing some of our most vulnerable students. And these data reinforce why aligning our special ed system with LCFF and statewide systems of support is essential as students with disabilities are not a separate population but are deeply
383embedded within California's highest need student population. So as a reminder, students with disabilities are general education students first. So, with this context in mind, I'm going to hand it over to Shiloh, who walk us through some of our data story. We're going to highlight where California has made meaningful progress, where challenges remain, and how these data are guiding our continued improvement efforts by continuing to with support from our technical assistance providers in our state system of support. Shiloh. Good afternoon board members. Um I was reflecting on the fact that I believe this is now my 10th presentation of this item um before you all. And I never one time thought to bring a possum or a beaver story, but I will work on it for next year. Um I'm going to talk a little bit
384about the indicators themselves, some of the successes that we've really seen that we're really excited about and how we're weaving that into how we support districts as they move forward in their journey of improvement. This item is a required item for action that we'll talk about a little bit later, but it is we do require approval in order to submit our um annual performance report, which is required to continue to receive the 1.4 billion in federal funds that we receive to support students with disabilities in California. There are two types of indicators. There are compliance indicators and performance indicators. Compliance indicators um have a target of zero or 100%. Um and I'll talk about those in a minute. And performance indicators have targets that we set um a few years ago, I believe about four
385or five years ago. And we will get ready to set those targets again um shortly. Um so if you wonder where these targets came from, that's kind of how it works. Um the compliance indicators have a target of zero or 100%. Um, and I really want to point out how successful we have gotten in a number of these indicators to the point that we are not at 0% but 0.55% yet we're still not meeting the target which is unfortunate but it is the reality. Um, we are working really hard to get I think very close to the targets on many of these things but oftentimes it's a missed deadline or a missed date. Um, and even if you miss it by one day you miss it. So, um, it is something that we're working through
386in terms of our compliance portions, but we're excited how close we are on a lot of these indicators, including our disproportionality indicators. Our performance indicators, there's a lot of them. Um, I know it is late in the afternoon. I will not be force marching you through every single one. Please do not worry. Um, but I did want to take a moment to highlight in the item, I'm not going to be presenting it here today, that um, the real gains that we've made in our assessment indicators. If you look at in the item at the grade level assessment proficiency, we are meeting almost every indicator when it comes to reading um for our students with disabilities. And I'm not talking about a 1% change. We're seeing two, three, and 4% increases in our proficiency rates for
387both ELA and math against grade level proficiencies. So, not our alternate proficiencies, but our grade level proficiencies. That's really exciting to see the progress that we've been making over the last um four and five years. So, I'd encourage you all to look at that if you have time. There's a it's a lot of indicators, so we're not going to be going through them specifically today. Um, there's 17 total indicators. Um, but I did want to highlight two specific indicators that I think really tell the story of where we're at um in our work of improvement for our students. One is our um our preschool least restrictive environment. Um, least restrictive environment is about where students spend their time, is about who they interact with and how they access their education. Does that happen with their
388peers? Does that happen with um general education teachers? Does that happen in a setting that we would want every student to experience or does that happen separately? And so our goal at the state is for all students to have access in the least restrictive environment. Um, and that starts at preschool. And we are really excited about our preschool uh movement this year. We have increased the number of students who are attending a regular preschool program and receiving their services in a regular preschool program. So they're not being taken out of the program to receive their services. They're receiving them there in the classroom with their peers and their teachers. And that increase equals about 3,500 preschool students. And these are children ages three to five who are now accessing preschool education with their peers and
389receiving their supports and services there as well. Um I think that is transformative and really tells a story about how we're inclus increasing inclusion that impacts students with disabilities but also students without disabilities. Um and shows the sense of belonging that all children belong within a classroom. Um and you'll see that here. Um over the last several years, we've been truly increasing both the number of students who are accessing overall um preschool environments, which is exciting. We love to see that. Um but also in the last three years, how we've been getting students into environments where they are with their peers and with their teachers um for special education. And this story is continuing. Um what we are seeing in as students move into general um I'm sorry school age so the ages six through
39022 is an increased access of inclusion in the regular education classroom. Um I always come in here and say don't just look at the percentages because the percentages are more than that. They are the numbers of children and in California we are a big state. So when I say that we increase our percentage by 1%, we are talking about increasing the inclusion of students in California with disabilities in the regular classroom with their peers for 25,000 students last year. Um that is the equivalent of every student who attended San Jose Unified School District last year. That's how many students moved into more inclusive classrooms last year. So that is a really exciting story to tell. And when you start to match that with the gains that we are seeing in our assessment indicators, you really
391start to see the patterns come together of um movement for inclusion and improvement in our um assessment indicators achievement. So this is just the pattern that we're seeing. We are of of course seeing more students who are coming into special education, but that is matched with more students who are accessing special education within the regular education classroom, meaning they're receiving their supports and services. They are in with their regular education peers um and they're accessing those things. And we're seeing decreases across the board in both students who are in separate classrooms, that's that that third set of of numbers there. And then the number of students who are in separate schools or separate environments has also decreased uh um each year. So that's exciting to see as well. Um and a lot of that work
392that we're seeing we are contributing to the implementation of our monitoring process. I have said for years monitoring is the start of movement of districts. It's not the most exciting thing um that happens. When I say I monitor they're like oh that's not very fun. It's actually really exciting. It gets folks moving. Um uh but we have implemented the compliance and improvement monitoring process and that is a multi-year process, a three-year process where we help districts find a high lever activity and focus their efforts on that. We do not want districts to be focusing 10% on 10 things because they don't go anywhere. So we're really trying to get leas to focus on one area of need and try and address that area to have the largest impact for their students. Um and we are
393starting to see that happen um here in California. So between 2022 and 2025 um 70% of stu of eleas who participated in our monitoring process increased the number of students who were included in the general education. Um 65% of those eleas had more students who were proficient in ELA and 77% of those eleas who participated in our monitoring system were more proficient in math. Um and 98% of uh eleas who participated in our monitoring process reduced the number of students who were chronically absent. It's a big part of our story. We want students in the classroom. And students with disabilities often struggle with chronic absenteeism. And the more we can have students in the classroom in the right places with the right supports, we will begin to see a change in the movement in our
394um outcome indicators like assessment and graduation. Um, but we're not doing this alone. Uh, we've been, uh, blessed in multiple ways, both in, uh, federal funding and in state funding to support a special education system of support, um, across the board that has many partners in this, uh, work. I think the last time we were here, we had some of our, um, early ed partners come and talk about their supports, and we're going to have, um, uh, some folks talk about some of the work that they're doing as well. But we have a system of folks that help us help districts. Uh we know that we are not the end all beall of experts. We want to bring in expertise who can work directly with eleas to help them along their process. We often joke
395that they're often our quarterbacks um who are helping districts on a day-to-day basis support uh improvement. Um, and we're really excited to have a couple of those um, folks here today to talk about some of the work that they've been doing to really move districts forward in the compliance and improvement monitoring process. And so I'm going to have them come up now um, to talk a little bit about their work. Um, it's our folks from the system improvement leads um, and they're going to talk about some of the work that they've done um, working directly with eleas and some of our most significant needs leas. One day I'll come back and talk about the amazing work that they did in Sacramento City Unifi that is seeing progress movement and um we're really excited to see
396the work that's happening there. So I'm going to turn it over to them. Thank you so much. >> Well, good afternoon and um thank you state board for um welcoming welcoming us to talk a little bit about the work of the system improvement lead. Um, and thank you to our partners at the California Department of Education for including us in the presentation. So, I'm Leah Davis. I'm the executive director of Riverside County SULPA. Um, but more so, um, I am honored to be one of the partners in the system improvement lead project, one of the special education resource leads in California. I'm joined today by one of my colleagues. >> Good afternoon. Afternoon. My name is Heidi Hata. I serve as the director of the system improvement leads project. I'm based out of the Elorado
397County Office of Education and the Elorado County SULPA. Thank you for having us. The system improvement lead project is in its eighth year. Um it's hard to really imagine that. It feels like yesterday that we were applying for um our first grant opportunity. We're in our second grant cycle and as you can tell from each of our kind of local regions um it is a partnership between Riverside County SULPA, Elorado County SULPA and Elorado County Office of Education. Eight years ago, it was very much conceptual. We thought, you know, we have to move the needle for students with disabilities and how are we going to do that? um in the two grant cycles, we really have stuck true to our theory of action. And so, as we kick off today, just want to share that
398with you. Um we've known and we've been grounded in the belief that we have to move that needle for students with disabilities in California. We could not watch the gap continue to widen. And so truly believe that if in order to do that, we had to ensure that students with disabilities had access to cohesive and equitable school systems that were intentionally designed. um and not just intentionally designed but also intentionally implemented within each of our LEAs uh in the in the state. And so I always do our theory of action backwards because I like to start with what is our ultimate goal. Um but in order to do that we really believe that we had to bring folks together. Um we talk a lot about silos in special education and so we started with we
399have to bring folks from county office of ed offices of education from SULPASS from LEAs um include and include our state partners CCE CDE but we believe that if we brought all of those folks together and then started to build capacity in a number of very targeted areas that we would see that needle start to move. The areas that we have focused on um over the last years have been uh data use, data govern, govern governance, data implementation, all things around really data best practices as well as really um encouraging that belief around continuous improvement. So that that methodology and really ensuring that that's what we are grounded in. And then beyond that, um, what happens once you go through continuous improvement, we really needed folks in our eleas to have access to those high
400lever change ideas, strategies that work. All right, that's a pretty ambitious theory. And so in order to turn that theory into reality, we have some very targeted um areas of support that we work through in a tiered model. The first tier that we work on is universal support. So everything that is available at no cost to every educator in California. We know you've been here for a couple hours now, so I will not walk you through every single resource we have developed. I promise, but we'd like to highlight a few that are particularly relevant to this item number. One of the areas we've really focused on, as Leah said, is data use. And so we believe it's critical that folks have access to this data so that they are better informed to make decisions for
401their students. One of the areas we have worked on in our in our project is to make sure that these state performance plan indicators are accessible to every educator in California. So while you're currently reviewing the state level annual performance report data, every LEA also receives their version of this report that shows how they are doing on these indicators. One of the things that we have done is develop the improvement data center on our website. Eleas can log in, see their performance over time on every single one of these indicators that they are not having to put these displays together themselves. We're trying to figure out how are they doing on these important measures. Of course, indicators can be complicated. So, we also developed a suite of resources to help them understand what they're looking
402at. You have a screenshot here of the state performance plan summary series. These were developed in partnership with seeds, the partnership and the CDE and they are really meant to be accessible to the community. So what is that indicator in plain language? What does it mean? Why is it important? We also have a more technical guide, the state performance plan indicator guide for all of our data nerds who want to know exactly what goes into those calculations, what those sources are and how do they really understand where those are coming from. Those resources are all available on our website and we find them to be one of the most frequently accessed supports. Um, as of today, we have over 8,000 individual users in our data center and nearly 90% of eleas in the state of
403California are using this on a regular basis. For us, this is critical. If we're not looking at our data and using it, then we can't use it to make better choices for our students. So, we're thrilled that this is something that is becoming much more accessible, and we're committed to continuing this work. In addition to our data work, we also have a number of resources around root cause analysis because we know the data is one thing, but it can be tempting to chase different data points. And what we really want to do is make sure we're digging under those data points and seeing what's causing these outcomes. What's holding it in place? And what do we need to shift in order to get the outcomes we need? We have facilitator guides, protocols, resources, everything that
404our team uses all available on our website so that any LEA can grab that and use them themselves. In addition to those universal supports, we also offer targeted supports. And so at this level, we work directly with LEAs, county offices of education, and to make sure that we are partnering on areas that are important to them and their outcomes for students disabilities and helping them accelerate that improvement. We have a number of services that we provide here. So we we provide custom workshops. We also provide direct improvement coaching. And so we have a team of approximately 15 individuals on our SIL improvement team. They are statewide. They are all experts in both continuous improvement and special education so they can walk alongside districts as they face these significant challenges. We're currently supporting about 300 improvement
405initiatives all focused on students disabilities across the state. The collective impact here is approximately 200,000 students with disabilities. All of these areas are identified by the eleas themselves and then we walk alongside them until they reach their improved outcomes. One of the key ways that we do that is through our improvement networks. And so we believe that we learn better together, that we need to share ideas and make sure that we are moving towards that improvement for our students as fast as is humanly possible while making sure that we're actually is changing our systems and not just placing band-aids on things. So we wanted to share with you a couple of our current networks. um when we find that there are themes emerging across the state, what we do is we invite those eleas, county
406offices, and Zelpas to come together into an improvement network and work to solve that problem together so that they're not all doing it in isolation. We again provide them improvement coaching, data analysis, access to best practices, and then we make sure that we are all moving towards those outcomes together. Just a couple of the outcomes to highlight for you. Our attendance network in two years reduced chronic absenteeism for students with disabilities by 32%. And our graduation network again in two years all the participating districts increased their graduation rates for students with disabilities by 10%. And then in our original network, this network is really focused on IEP outcomes. In about three years, we have increased the percentage of goals met in their IEPs, so the heart of those IEP programs from 38% to 62%. We
407believe this is very strong evidence that learning together is more effective. We do not need every district to figure out what's working. And when we find those ideas, we help them spread them across the network so that we can all improve together. Of course, we also want to make sure these ideas and these strategies are accessible to everyone, not only to eleas that are working directly with us. And so what we started doing this fall was documenting all of the strategies that were getting results. We worked with the districts to gather their materials, make them all accessible, and then provide them on one-page handouts that we're referring to as strategies that work. We want to make sure that we're including the quantitative data, but also giving them the tools to actually do it so that
408any district working on this area can grab the handout and apply it in their context. We launched these just a couple months ago um this fall and they are already one of the most popular resources. We have over a thousand downloads per month on these strategies, which is a great indication that districts are picking up what's working and not trying to solve in isolation. And then the last level of our support we work very closely with the CDE is intensive supports. Here we work very closely with districts that have been identified as having the most concerning outcomes. So districts identified in that bottom 10% of outcomes for students with disabilities and we work with them until they see movement in those areas. So far we provided direct improvement coaching to 98 of these LEAs. And
409what we do here is each one of those districts is partnered with one of our improvement facilitators. We work with them directly to facilitate them through analyzing their data, conducting a root cause analysis, and as you heard earlier, then the particularly difficult challenge of identifying one area to focus on first, getting very clear on why that's occurring, and then implementing one to two strategies to make sure we see movement there. We find districts are far more effective when they're focused on one area and we're there to work alongside them. Once they accomplish that goal, we can move on to the next, but we want to be focused in our efforts. We also work with districts around their improvement planning and then as they move into the two-year implementation phase. They are transitioned based on their
410area of need. Many of those districts partner with other technical assistance providers in the system of support and the CDE makes those matches for them. Some of them do stay with us for the implementation period and so those eleas we work with them for an additional two years to make sure that they're reaching their student outcomes. So far we've worked with about 15 LEAs in this area. So we've completed all three years with them and we're proud to say that 100% of these districts have reached student level outcomes. We believe this is a testament to what happens when we walk alongside districts, when we have the time to engage in focused improvement instead of chasing different data points and we really enter with the humility. We do not have the answers to all of these
411challenges. If these problems were easy to fix, we would have already fixed them. What we do have is a skill set that we offer to districts and a commitment to walk with them, to learn with them until they reach the outcomes that they need for each and every one of their students, including those with disabilities. We're hopeful today to share with you a video that really spotlights and highlights this um intensive level of support in action. um we will ensure that you receive a link following this act this item today um to watch that on your own. But I did want to highlight what that video shows. That video highlights Anaheim Union High School District in Orange County. Uh Anaheim Union went through their full cycle of SIM. They were one of our first districts
412that we worked with. Um they were an intensive district and the area that they wanted to focus on was graduation rate for students with disabilities. Over the last two years through very intensive work and very um collaborative work amongst the the district they have seen a 16% increase in their graduation rate for their graduation class of 2025. They did this by looking at master scheduling as well as really um honing in on the on track to graduate monitoring that they as a group had developed. I want to highlight that 16% while that's a data point that for them meant 168 students graduated with their diploma. 168 more students. That was impressive. It was very exciting. And we would encourage you to watch that video because what that video gives is not just the administrator's perspective
413or the cell representatives perspective, but the perspective of the teachers, the the team members within the district, the parents and guardians of the families, and most importantly, the student perspective. It's really exciting to hear students that were not on track to graduate talk about what their college plans were. So with that, we hope that this portion at least left you um wanting a little bit more. So we would encourage you by all means to follow um the system improvement lead project. Um there is a lot going on in the state. We are absolutely honored to serve beside our partners at CCE and CDE in this work. Um and have leave you with our our social media and our website. Thank you so much, Sil, um the work they do and I hope you take some
414time to watch that video. It's very very powerful um from the student voice and the parent voice. Um so please um take some mo take some time when you have it. Um we just like to leave you with some um information. We're um having an idea celebration during our AXI meeting on February 18th during lunchtime. We're going to have um a lot of guest speakers um some really people who are changing the field, some some people with disabilities themselves. We invite you all to come. Um we'll have a potential of a proclamation being delivered at this time and um full celebration in the lobby. So, please come. There's some QR codes there for your information and would love to see you all there. So, just as a close out, this again is a request for
415action. California Department of Ed recommends the state board of education approve the federal fiscal year 2024 annual performance report um and the SSPI this state I want to use acronyms all the time state systemic improvement plans for the submission of the office of special educa education programs um but prior to that I'd like to see if there's any questions from the board >> thank you very much um and thank you for uh such a Great presentation. Do we have any uh clarifying questions before we go to comments? Board layers on comments and public comment. Any clarifying questions? Okay. Hearing none, we'll hold for just for a minute. And uh at this time, I'd like to ask that we put up the public comment slide so that anyone who would like to call in would be
416able to do so. And while we are waiting, I would like to ask member Yoshimoto Towerry if she has any initial comments and then we will follow with comments from Chief Deputy Superintendent Robersonson. >> Thank you. Um I want to begin by thanking Dr. Henan, uh Shiloh Duncan, uh Besserell, and our sister improvement leads Leah and Hyde for their presentation and for their more so for their continued partnership and leadership in this work. Um indeed was landmark legislation 50 years ago and much like the civil rights movement um we're continuing decades later to reach the ideal of what that legislation intended. Um I I don't I'm not going to repeat any of the the data points but I wanted to highlight that the gains that we see in what was presented also represent a change
417in practice uh most notably and u expand inclusive opportunities for students with disabilities. Uh this work doesn't happen in isolation. It really takes a village. Um collaboration between leas system improvement leads your county office of CDE the broader system of support uh which includes educators, administrators, um service providers and technical assistance providers. So it's encouraging to see that when we focus on something and we align our our work, it translates into measurable improvements for students. Um and I I do want to highlight one data point which is um the preschool LRE least restrictive environment um we saw 5% increase this year but it was on top of a 5% increase the previous year and so although we're still short of our target of 47% um reaching 30 over 30% is is a considerable gain and
418we're growing inclusive college pathways in California and we can't expect to reach our goals in college if we don't start with preschool. So, I just want to mark that um as as an important point and highlight that. So, thank you again for all of your work. >> Thank you. Uh Chief Deputy Superintendent Robersonson. >> Thank you for that. Um I just want to really commend our CDE staff, our special education division. They have been leading and navigating when there's been an incredible amount of change, particularly at the federal level. So, I just wanted to appreciate particularly Rachel and Shiloh and Noelia and Melissa just for all of your leadership for the 190 uh staff in our special education division that just really keep that stability in all that we do so we can realize these
419gains. Shiloh, you really named it that that 1% gain is 25,000 students. Uh and board member Yoshitari, you are talking about a richer experience, right? And that's what's happening for our students when we talk about universal design for learning. Um is really what I think what we're trying to get to for all of our students. But again, I just want to commend you for all that you've been doing. Um and just come and celebrate with us on February 18th. We'll be celebrating in this room the 50th anniversary. >> Thank you. Thank you so very much. And I do appreciate the um not just looking at the percentage but putting the actual numbers behind it. It tells a very different story. At this time, we'll go to public comment. Do we have any public comment in
420person here in the room? >> There's no inerson public comment. >> Thank you. Do we have any public comment callers online? >> We do. There are two callers in the queue. I will open the phone line now. >> Thank you. >> Um caller with the last four digits 8397, you are now live. Please state your public comment. You have one minute. >> Good afternoon everyone. My name is Lauren Klatsker and I'm the very proud uh director of special education for the Anaheim Median High School District in Orange County. Uh the district that's highlighted in the video that I hope you will all watch. And I just wanted to take this opportunity to really thank the Sill team. Um specifically, I'm going to take the opportunity to call out Ashley McGavin who was our specific SIL
421support person through our process. And just I wanted to share with you how important this work was to our district and ultimately to our students because it's our students who are benefiting from the work that we did on the back end. And we would not have been able to do that work as quickly as we were able to do that without the guidance and support and sometimes just the moral support of Ashley and her team and the SIL team in general. And so I just wanted to take this opportunity to share with you how important these people are to the work that we do on the ground every day in our district. So please watch this video and um please know how valuable this cell team is to the LEAs out there in California. >>
422Thank you. Uh next caller um please state your name and affiliation for the record. You have one minute. Your time starts now. >> Good afternoon. My name is Janet Keno and I am the executive director for the Whittier Area Cooperative Sappa in LA County. Um, I wanted to just add in my support and thank you and um, really commending both the special education division and the work that they've done for the continuous improvement monitoring plans. As a SULPA of seven districts with over 6,300 students with disabilities, it's really helped our districts focus in. It's really going to give the most improvement for our students. And all of my districts have seen improvement by those um by the work that they have done in their SIM plans. And I also wanted to um say thank you
423to our SIL teams and all the special education resource leads. When looking at the slide that lists them, all of my districts have been touched by each of those um resource leads in some way that provide resources and support so that we can all speak the same language. And as a director supporting seven districts, it's really fantastic that we can work together using the same language, the same resources, and the same data to work together to improve for our students. Thank you very much. >> Thank you. Uh, next caller with the last four digits 3595. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> My name is Jeremy Sautel. I'm the director of specialized student support for the Shasta County Office of Education. And I just wanted to really kind
424of highlight what's already been said of the level of student impact uh that we've seen through these cell networks in Northern California. Uh we support numerous counties and districts um all the way up to the Oregon border. And in all honesty, without a lot of these tools and methodologies that Sil has put together, it would be extremely difficult for us uh to selfcreate these. So we we are just uh very grateful for what's been created and how we can help implement them and scale them to new areas. >> Thank you. Uh that concludes public comment for item number 15. >> Thank you very much. At this time, I'd like to open the floor for board discussion. Are there any comments? Member Esco. Yes. >> Thank you so much for the presentation and the work you've
425been doing. I know that you shared um even though we're declining enrollment, special ed is increasing. Um, I'm very interested in knowing the numbers of districts who are disproportionate, especially significant and disproportionate because, you know, as I go to many of these special ed classrooms, I see more and more students of color being referred. And I think that's a big issue, especially I just finished reading a an article from Stanford uh examining a district in California where black students are referred five times more likely than any other students with pretty much the same grade. So, I I'm just I'm just really curious how we're monitoring disproportionality throughout the state and how many districts are moving out of that significant dis disproportionality. >> Sorry, there's a lot of buttons up here. Um, we have we identify
426about 175 districts who are disproportionate. That's just one year that they're disproportionate. Um, and then we identify um about 60 to 70 districts annually who are significantly disproportionate. So that means they've been disproportionate in the same area uh for three consecutive years. Um I think your assessment is relatively close. uh it is usually students with disabilities who are African-American who have a specific learning disability or who are in a more restrictive setting who are often identified um as the cause of the significant disproportionality um along with students who are also American Indian. So that's something that we are seeing. We are working we are bringing on a whole new set of technical assistance for significant disproportionality um that we are working to address that um and hopefully the um the we don't see any change
427at the federal level around the requirements because it is a real good when I say monitoring of districts it means it starts the movement um and without that um without the requirements in law around significant disproportionality it's hard to get that movement started Thank you. Thank you for responding to that and I'm excited to hear about technical assistance uh for eleas in that particular area. Uh because we know it's been a historical need and is still a need now even as we see again improvement numbers as was shared in our presentation. Are there other comments? Uh member Yoshimoati. Okay. Um let's see. Do we have any other comments? Yes. Member Patello Brownson. >> Just wanted to um register appreciation for some of the incredible gains that you all described. a 15 16% jump um in
428such a short period um for graduation rates and some of the chronic absenteeism rates that you described is so much a testament to how concretely this translates um into lived outcomes for students um and just very much appreciate that work. >> Thank you member McQuillin. >> Yes, thank you. I also wanted to share my appreciation for the great presentation, all the information. Um, I'm also wondering about um certain dis disabilities or if you're seeing a spike in any area of certain disabilities that's uh unusual with this 14% that you mentioned. So, thank you. Yeah, I think it's been mostly consistent in this area. Um, in terms of the 14% we, you know, we have been seeing and I showed the slide I think a couple years ago, happy to bring it back at some point,
429the increase in students with disabilities who are identified with autism, but that correlates with a decrease in the identification of students who have other health impairment or have specific learning disabilities. So, it has been kind of flip-flopping. I don't know that we've seen across the board a spec individual disability that's been identified. Um, I think we're just seeing more students who are being identified. Coupled with declining enrollment, it increases that percentage. >> Thank you. Thank you, Shiloh. Are there any other comments? Before I call for a motion, um, let me just say again, thank you so much for such a comprehensive presentation. uh you didn't just go through the data uh in the report that we're getting ready to take action on, but you brought in uh the support and the work and really that's
430where the emphasis is and again thank you so much to our system improvement leads Leo so good to see you again and um just quite excited and again appreciate the comprehensive nature of the presentation that you brought forward. So at this time uh if there is no further discussion I'd like to ask for a motion and the uh recommendation is on the slide in front of you member Yoshimoto. >> Before the motion I just wanted to say that the one of the callers referenced the sim process a continuous improvement and monitoring process. So a lot of our improvements that we're making is through this process. So to member Escoto's point um we can leverage that process to make continued improvements. Thank you. Um, so with no further ado, I move that the board approve the
431federal fiscal year 2024 annual performance report for part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act covering program year 202425 and the state systemic improvement plan for submission to the Office of Special Education Programs. Thank you. May I have a second? >> Second. >> Member Olen. It's been moved and seconded. Brooks, can you please call the role? Member Yoshima. >> Yes. >> Member Rodriguez. >> Yes. >> Member Pila Brownson. >> Yes. >> Member Orosco Gonzalez. >> Yes. >> Member Olen. >> Yes. >> Member McQuillin. >> Yes. >> Vice President Glover Woods. >> Yes. >> Member Escoto. >> Yes. >> Member Aj. >> Motion carries. >> Thank you so much. And thank you Rachel and Shiloh and Leah. And thank you >> [laughter] >> Alrighty. So, we're now going to move forward to item 16. Item
43216 is the supporting priority school districts program. Uh, approve the commencement of a 45day public comment period for proposed amendments to California code of regulations, title 5, chapter 1, subchapter 1.7, section 14050. The CDE recommends that the state board of education take the following actions. Approve the notice of proposed rulemaking. Approve the initial statement of reasons. Approve the proposed regulations. Direct the CDE to commence the rulemaking process. Authorize the CDE to take any necessary action to respond to any direction or concern expressed by the Office of Administrative Law during its review of those items. This item will be presented by Juan Morales of the CDE. Juan, please begin. Thank you. Can you can you hear me? >> Yeah. Let's see. >> Good afternoon, board members. Uh my name again is Juan Mirez. I'm the director
433of the school facilities and transportation services division here at CDE. Um here with me today also to present and Mr. Josh speaks who leads our facilities planning and policy team. We are very excited to be here today and present item 16 uh that includes a proposed uh regulation packet to implement a new program that was approved through AB247 and the passage of Proposition 2. Proposition 2 provided CDE with a $5 million grant over a five-year period to build capacity within CDE and to support school districts. uh but the money cannot be allocated directly to school districts. In order to implement this program, the department is required by law to adopt implementing regulations and we are here today to discuss those proposed regulations. Uh once again, our recommendation is that you approve the proposed regulations. Sorry.
434Our item is to approve the proposed regulations and the accompanying documentation to initiate the rule making process. Uh we're also requesting that you authorize CDE to work directly with the office of administrative law in answering any kind of questions that may come up as they go through and review our rulemaking package. Before we get into the specifics of our proposed regulations, we wanted to provide just a little bit of background uh on how we got here. Back in September of 2023, we presented an item uh to you asking for your ratification of our application uh to the US Department of Education. Um we were thrilled to receive approval for a $4.9 million grant uh over a 5-year period from the Supporting America School Infrastructure Program, also known as Sassy. That grant focuses on providing support
435to small school districts throughout the state because we know that some of these small school districts have greater challenges in maintaining, modernizing, and building their school facilities uh since they have less resources than some of the larger school districts. Through the Sassy grant, uh CD works to improve and maintain school facilities uh for California's party school districts. And we do this by going out to these schools and assessing the condition of their school facilities. Uh trying to identify what are the facility needs and then once we identify those then we develop a plan to help them address those specific needs. The program also creates a comprehensive system of support that includes districts, county offices of ed uh and other state agencies. Uh we're also developing online resources and we're increasing our internal uh expertise in
436school facilities. Following the approval of our Sassy grant, uh, Assembly Bill 247 was signed and the bill provided an additional $5 million augmentation to augment the work that we were doing in Sassy. Uh, this augmentation was subsequently authorized by the voters through the passage of Proposition 2 in November 2024. Now, there are significant similarities between the two programs, but there also some key differences that we're going to be um discussing uh shortly. One of them is the requirement to adopt regulations to implement this supporting priority school district program. And once again, both programs, both the federal sassy program and the state supporting priority school district program um is to build capacity within CDE. And we cannot allocate that directly to school districts. Now, we know that the regulatory process does provide um for public notice
437and comment, but we wanted to make sure that we provided key interest holders additional opportunities to comment on our proposal. This program exists under the governing statutes of the school facilities program, which is the state's funding program and uh administered by the office of public school construction. The OPSC has a wellestablished process to present proposed regulations to the school facilities community in order to receive input. We use the same process and network to present our proposed regulations uh to the school facilities interested parties on three separate occasions in April, September and October of last year. Uh once again, we want to make sure that we provided folks ample opportunities to provide comment on our regulations before we present them to you today. So far, we received no concerns or opposition to our proposed regulation. Uh
438however, we have received support such as the letters from both AXA and CSBA that you have all received. Uh, with that, I'm going to hand it over to Josh to discuss again the similarities and the differences between the programs and also the specifics of our proposed regulations. Josh, thank you. So um as Juan noted, one of the main differences between these two programs is that uh is around um eligibility for direct technical assistance. This slide illustrates those different eligibility requirements. And I'm not going to read them all to you. I hate when people read slides, but um I just like to point out that while they're very similar, you'll see that SPSD has the added criteria of low bonding capacity um and that under Sassy districts are required to meet all of the requirements whereas
439under SPSD they are only required to meet one out of the four. So, for example, if a district had uh enrollment of 2500 or less, um but they had previously applied for state allocation board funding, uh they would still be eligible uh to participate in this program. that is important to keep in mind for later. Um because since the barrier to application is is lower, um we we had to put some some regulations in place to prioritize schools for that direct technical assistance on the assumption that we will probably get more applicants than we have capacity for. Now, the legislation did not define what constitutes low gross spawning capacity or high unduplicated pupil counts. um as you'll you'll see those are two of the four uh categories for the SPSD program and um the legislation
440just referred to them as high and low uh without going into any detail as what that meant. So we took a very simple uh approach to determining uh what our thresholds would be for those categories. uh we took our statewide data and we identified uh the rough midpoint u for all districts in the state according to that data and uh anything above an unduplicated pupil count of 66% we defined as high um because that is that sort of statewide midpoint obviously we rounded a little bit but um and anything below a gross bonding capacity of 32,000 uh based on a a sampling that we got of district's uh gross bonding capacity is defined as low for purposes of this regulation. So, we also wanted to explain a little bit more um about what the the
441nuts and bolts of the program. Um both SPSD and Sassy are offering uh the same sort of assistance to districts. Once schools have been identified for services, uh the first thing that they will receive is that direct technical assistance. Uh that will consist of actual on-site visits as well as virtual meetings with each school. Um and that's when we do that assessment to determine exactly what sort of support they need. Um whether it's things like school site assessments, whether they are um needing help in navigating the state funding process. There's there's a variety of of different kinds of facility or maintenance needs that we see and they're obviously going to vary uh from district to district. And so that's where those um direct site visits and um those meetings with the the staff at the
442district are are key so that we're um differentiating that support um based on on the needs of of the districts involved. We will also be working to create um regional networks of support that will allow CDE to work with and through county and district partners to try to leverage the expertise of everyone involved in school facilities and maintenance work. Uh we will be holding meetings on a regular basis. Now, it's important to note that those meetings, those um those regional meetings will be open to any LEA that wants to participate. the direct technical assistance, we're obviously limited in our capacity. So, um that will only be for school districts that were selected um based on our application criteria, but for the portions of the assistance that aren't aren't specific to a a particular district, um
443they'll be open to everyone. So, those state and county uh meetings will be open to any districts um that choose to participate. Finally, uh we are through that process of direct technical assistance through engaging with our county and LEA partners. Uh one of the goals of the program is to build our internal expertise here at CDE um so that we can leverage that better to help districts all over the state. One of the very tangible ways that we'll be doing that is we'll be creating an online platform uh where again we're we're working with our partners to develop uh helpful content uh so that there's sort of a one-stop shop for eleas who need to know about how to address their facilities needs. Um, if you're at a district where you don't have dedicated facility
444staff, then you you would be able to hop on and say, "Okay, I I need to start filling out these forms uh for OPSC. How do I do that?" You know, I need to um do a a school site inventory. How do I go about doing that? Those those sorts of things. Um those would be resources that we'll be able to develop and share. And again, uh, that library of resources would be open to any LEA, not just those that have been selected for direct technical assistance. So, the regulations um have to address all four areas that are specifically required by the education code. uh and those are we need to create a process for determining recipients of direct technical assistance. Uh we need to create a framework for those state and county collaboration efforts.
445Addressing the development, maintenance and accessibility of our web resources and then finally recording and reporting and accountability measures to make sure that we're being effective in our use of these funds. Uh the regulation that we're presenting to you today does address all four of those areas. In our regulation, we've kept our application process as simple as possible. Again, these are districts that don't necessarily have dedicated facility staff. So, we are only requiring a letter. uh we will have a example letter that uh we can share as we're promoting this program but we are not requiring any uh specific formats any specific verbiage anything like that. Um it just uh has a minimum amount of required information. Um the basic information about the district like their CDS code uh that we need to identify them and
446then a signed commitment from the district superintendent or their design agreeing that they will provide additional information that we may require and that they will complete uh pre and post assistance surveys. And that's it. That's we're again trying to keep it very simple. because we have as we discussed earlier those lower uh eligibility requirements to qualify for the program. Remember they only have to meet one of the four criteria. We are assuming that we are going to or shouldn't say assuming we are um planning for the possibility that uh we will be overs subscribed that we will have more districts that are eligible than we are able to provide technical assistance to. To deal with that possibility we have included a prioritization process in the regulations. Um because we're trying to adhere as closely as
447we can to the intent of the legislature uh and the enabling statutes, we are sticking to those eligibility criteria that they gave us uh in the legislation. Um but what we are doing is we are assigning points values to each of them. Those points values are based on which categories we think provide the best uh proxies for a school district's need for facilities assistance. And so we are providing uh we we are assigning up to four points for low enrollment. A school district can uh receive up to eight points for low gross bonding capacity per enrollment. four points for high unduplicated pupil percentage and eight points if they have not previously submitted an application for the school facility funding program. and those points values um those are one of the things that we had extensive
448stakeholder conversations about um because we wanted to uh make sure that that the community that we're we're working with um was in agreement with us as to um whether those made sense those those points values and and those categories as as proxies for um facility maintenance capacity. So, a district who applies to the program will be assigned a points value uh based on, you know, their statistics in each of those categories. And then districts with the um highest scores uh indicating the most need will be prioritized for assistance first. The regulations again require us to develop a regional network in coordination with county offices of education. Um and that includes charter schools and eleas throughout the state. Um again I want to stress all eleas can participate whether or not they were selected for direct
449technical assistance. uh we are going to be convening meetings of that network at least quarterly and we will partner with uh the division of the state architect and the office of public school construction um in holding those meetings. Information about the meetings will be posted on CDE's website and uh made available to our partners for posting. Um, one of the the real value added components we think of of bringing county offices in is that they're so much closer to their districts. They understand their needs better and they understand how to communicate with them better. Then we also have some regulations around our web presence. Uh we're deliberately trying to keep that section of the regulations to a minimum um because we want uh maximum flexibility. We want this um web presence to be able to
450uh be something that we build up over time. And we also want uh flexibility to identify uh the best ways to serve our school districts. If we, you know, find that one type of resource is more useful than another. We want to be able to pivot quickly um you know to what's most useful for them. So, the regulations simply state that CDE will create a centralized location for online resources that will be accessible from CDE's main website and that we can partner with other state agencies, eleas, and other organizations that uh support um priority schools in order to create resources. Finally, on to reporting. The regulations will also allow us to collect specific data in order to assess the work. And that goes back to that agreement that um superintendents or their designates will sign
451saying that we can they'll provide information as we request it and that they'll participate in those surveys. So the data that we've specified in the regulations includes information about priority school districts, uh including things like the number of school sites served, number of buildings assessed, um program and operational data such as contractor costs and administrative costs, uh the amount spent on direct technical assistance and website design. Uh we'll also be designing those pre and post assessment surveys. Um, this this program will have a functional lifespan of about three years, an operational lifespan of about three years since we have to use the money by June 30th of 2030. And so that gives us a little bit of time as we're conducting those surveys um to incorporate feedback from the first districts that are receiving assistance
452into the assistance that we give to later districts. And uh the intent of this data collection is program assessment. So we'll be focusing on sort of data in the aggregate uh results in the aggregate not on um reporting out about specific school districts that we serve. So um just to sort of resummarize what we're hoping for today um today we're asking you to approve these proposed regulations. We also need approval of the attached rulemaking documents. And we're also uh asking you to direct CDE staff to initiate the rulemaking process and to respond uh appropriately to any directions or concerns um that are expressed by OA during their review of the package. And um with that, I will wrap things up, but we're happy to answer any questions. >> Thank you so very much. Uh Do
453we have any questions? Uh, we're going to get ready to open the public comment line. We can put up that slide. And while we're waiting for members of the public to call in. I don't see any questions, so I'm going to turn it over to uh, member Patello Brownson if you have any comments that you'd like to make on this item. >> Thank you. Um I want to start by thanking CDE um for the thoughtfulness of the presentation and structure um of both um anticipating sort of the demand that will come creating a a thoughtful prioritization process um and I'll also just name explicitly our our purview here is about student learning and so OPSC the office of public school construction has oftentimes sort of been described as over there and separate it. Uh there's
454a a growing body of literature around how school facilities and classroom environments very significantly impact student learning um and uh adult teaching. um it impacts students perception of themselves as valuable as invested in um and this is a exciting new grant that brings these worlds together and also I think that focuses on a um a part of the school district uh ecosystem where we know there have been few applications in the past despite great need. So excited for this coming together of worlds and appreciate uh the good work that's been done on this. Thank you. Thank you, member Patello Brownson. At this time, we'll move to public comment. Do we have any inperson public comment on this item? >> There is no inerson public comment. >> Do we have any public comment? Uh, callers on
455the phone. >> There are two callers in the queue. Um, caller with the last four digits 30004, you are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Thank you. Good afternoon. Carlos Mashado with the California School Boards Association. CSBA appreciates the thoughtful work on this item. CSBA has long called for strong state support to ensure every student uh learns in safe uh educationally appropriate facilities. These facilities are essential to effective school operations. Yet many small and rural districts face significant challenges often lacking the resources or capacity needed to access existing state programs like the state school facilities program. The proposed program is an important step toward addressing these inequities. It is designed to help prioriti uh priority school uh priority districts struggling with aging infrastructure, rising maintenance costs, limited administrative capacity,
456and the complexity of navigating state requirements. While it won't solve every facility challenge, it represents meaningful progress in supporting the districts that need it most. CSBA believes this program moves the state in the right direction. We urge support for this effort to ensure all students, regardless of zip code, have access to safe, functional learning environments. Thank you. >> Thank you. Uh, next caller with the last four digits 9364. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> I apologize. I had called in for the next agenda item. Apologies. >> No problem. Thank you. Uh, that concludes public comment for item number 16. >> Thank you. Do we have any further board discussion on this item? Seeing none, I will ask that we put up the recommendation slide and I'd like
457to ask for a motion on this item. Member Patillo Brownson. Uh, I'd like to move that we adopt the CDE recommendation to approve the proposed regulations, approve the notice of proposed rulemaking, approve the initial statement of reasons, and direct the CDE to commence the rulemaking process and authorize them to make any necessary actions in response to any directions or concerns expressed by the Office of Administrative Law. >> Thank you very much. May I have a second? Thank you. Seconded by member um Arosco Gonzalez. Uh, Brooks, will you please call the role? >> Member Yoshima Otari, >> yes. >> Member Rodriguez, >> yes. >> Member Bronson, >> yes. >> Member Rosco Gonzalez, >> yes. >> Member Olen, >> yes. >> Member McQuillin, >> yes. >> Vice President Clever Woods, >> yes. >> Member Esco, >> yes.
458>> Member. >> The motion carries. >> Thank you very much. And thank you uh to all who presented for this particular item. At this time, we're going to reopen item one to take action on the preliminary report of actions and our draft of the November 2025 meeting minutes and to report on our leases on assignments. So, first uh we're going to take up the preliminary report of actions and minutes of the November 2025 meeting. Do we have any uh speakers in the room signed up for public comment on this item? >> There is no inerson public comment. Is there anyone waiting to uh provide comment on the phone for this particular item? >> Uh there are two callers but however they might be for general public comment. I will open the phone line now though
459to check. Um caller with the last four digits 9364. You're now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> I have just general public comment. Is that acceptable at this time? >> Um that is the next item up. I apologize. >> Okay, I'll wait. >> Okay. Thank you. caller with the last four digits 3462. This is for um item 01 meeting minutes. Um if you are calling in for that, please stay on the line. If not, please call back for general public comment, which is the next item. Okay, they dropped. That concludes public comment. >> Thank you very much. If there is no further board discussion, may I have a motion to uh approve the report of action minutes for the November 2025 meeting? I move that we approve the minutes. >>
460Thank you. May I have a second? Thank you. Member Orosco Gonzalez. Um I don't see any further discussion. Brooks, would you please call the role? >> Member Yoshima Mottowi? >> Yes. >> Member Rodriguez? >> Yes. >> Member Patil Bronson? >> Yes. >> Member Rosco Gonzalez. >> Member Olen, >> yes. >> Member McQuillin, >> yes. >> President Glover Woods, >> yes. Member Esco. >> Yes. >> Member. >> The motion carries. >> Wonderful. Thank you so very much. Now, I want to invite uh members of the board to report on their lesson on activities that are not related to any items that were on our January agenda. And so I will start uh in reverse alphabetical order. First starting with member Yoshimoto. >> All right. Uh, I'll start with civic education and um the California Civic Learning
461Commemorative Summit is coming up on February 11th at the California Museum in Sacramento right here down the street and so that highlights the importance of civic engagement for California students and I know that came up briefly in different content concepts this morning. So, we're excited to continue to accelerate that work. Um the California Serves Grants program um continues uh with the fourth cohort. Please visit their website if you have want additional information there. And um on February 27th uh the deadline, I'm sorry, the application will be posted uh for the civic learning awards. Um and so we're excited. Again, that's the partnership between the power of democracy um in combination with CDE. And so we're continuing that. And we heard from our youth senate um program winners this morning. uh in addition for community schools
462and English learners, I I just wanted to highlight that I think it's it's important and encouraging that for example, Cababe is working with um the Monterey County Office of Education uh to host a community school program because we're beginning to see when we talk about braiding and blending initiatives uh that actually in practice. So not just community schools on its own and English learners on its own, but emerging of um leaders and a focus on on both. So, thank you. >> Thank you, member Rodriguez. >> Yes. Um, thank you so much. So, the December 2025 uh Commission on Teacher Credentiing meeting focused on how our state is preparing and supporting educators who work with students from early childhood through high school and beyond, which falls in line with what we've been discussing today. Uh the
463commission shared updates on improvements to the child development permit which helps uh guide the training of early childhood educators. More than 770 educators and community members across the state shared their feedback through a survey and over 95% agreed the expectations are important. These updates updates help clarify educator roles, support culturally responsive teaching, and strengthen preparation for those working with young children. Um, helping give students a strong start early in life. Um, the commission also reviewed the annual report of the committee on accredititation which showed major progress in meeting California's literacy requirements for teacher preparation programs. Nearly all programs that prepare teachers for elementary and special ed classrooms have now met these standards. While some regular reviews were delayed to focus on literacy, the commission continued to monitor quality by visiting programs, approving new ones, and
464providing support to help programs improve. Also, um the COA chair, Bob Freely, Dr. Bob Freely uh who is a was a music professor at Chapman um has now gone uh his he's turned out and uh I want to thank him for his dedication and service. Um he was really a phenomenal member of the COA board. Uh in addition, the commission received the title 2 teacher preparation report which includes required information about how teachers are being trained in California. The report shows more people entering teaching through alternative pathways, increasing diversity among teacher candidates, strong results um on required assessments, especially in high need areas like special education. So these efforts help ensure that California has well-prepared diverse educators in classrooms across the state uh who are supporting students from their earliest years through graduation and future
465careers. Thank you. Thank you. Member Patello Brownson. >> Um I wanted to call attention to the one-year anniversary um which now actually is one year and about one week um of the uh fires that happened in LA County. Um at all told that was almost 17,000 structures that were destroyed or severely damaged. 200,000 residents were forced to evacuate. 31 people died. And I want to lift up that schools and children faced unique impacts. Um, eight school campuses in Pasadena Unified and LA Unified uh were completely destroyed. Um, and when all was told about 12% of the state's public school population was impacted as a result just over a year ago. Um I also want to provide a mini update which is to say that there has been some headway in rebuilding um the Palisades schools
466um of Marquez Charter Elementary, Palisades Charter Elementary and Palisades Charter High School. Um it's estimated to cost about $600 million for the rebuilding effort. Um, and there are bond funds available and obviously this will be a multi-year process of both rebuilding and recovery. Um, in Pasadena Unified, five campuses were lost. Um, and Pasadena Unified is also experiencing its own budget cuts um, as well. Um the the silver lining I think that uh was highlighted was that 3,000 Palisades Charter High School students had uh been attending school in a uh renovated Sears building for the last couple of months. Um and at the end of this month they are set to return to portable classrooms um on campuses on their original campuses. All to say that um recovery and rebuilding is underway. Um for many of
467of the conversations and certainly having heard from some of the student leaders for the Senate competition earlier today, uh climate change um and climate literacy uh is all the more necessary uh in a place like California where uh the impacts on building, on learning, on science, um on everyday life, I think, are all the more relevant. Uh, and the rebuilding process continues. Thank you. >> Thank you, member Orosco Gonzalez. >> Well, we discussed the atlas um already, so I don't have anything else to report. >> Thank you, member Olen. >> Thank you. Um I'm I'm just going to start with a quick piggyback on the importance of um environmental literacy and um building that into all we do in schools. Um everything from um what students are learning and doing to how we think about
468supporting new buildings. Um we see again and again how important this is. Um, I loved earlier um, Chief Deputy Robersonson's um, comment about um, a state seal of climate literacy, climate literacy and engagement. Um and I have for the last many months um or year I guess years talked about the work of this um curriculum that is that was supported by the state called seeds to solutions um which is um units at every grade level supporting very similar to the work we saw with Atlas but where students are doing the work of um solving environmental problems in their communities. um that curriculum is now free and available um in a format similar to Atlas um and is getting great reviews from students. So just want to put in a plug for that as well. Um
469two other quick topics. Um, one is, um, I, um, just want to thank Brooks for, um, giving me the, um, responsibility of being the, uh, liaison for artificial intelligence. Um, when I first got that topic, it seemed like, we'll just take that right on. Um, and I would say the amount of learning and time I've spent trying to make sure I'm up to speed at least as much as the students in the classroom are is quite incredible. Um, I'm really thankful um for all the work that's going on in this state. um everything from um the the work group that's being led by Deputy Superintendent Nicely um where we just as of um January 1 posted updated um guidance for schools about how to safely and effectively um incorporate AI into schools. um to that
470continued work which is going to create um policy guidelines for eleas related to AI um to I've been continuing the work with the um National Association of State Boards of Education um looking at best practices, biggest concerns um and um other about how to um how to incorporate or what it means to have AI ready students. Um, so I'm doing I'm continuing that work. And then I just want to um I will be reporting in the future on um something new in California. Um Governor Nuome launched the California Innovation Council to help California develop and strengthen its technology policy. um related particularly to generative AI. The council will tackle issues ranging from empowering workers um to countering tech fraud, modernizing government um service delivery and protecting children online. Um you can imagine the part that
471I'm involved in is related to protecting children online. um particularly thinking about um image based image based abuse um and other harms that come as a result of the um wide availability of AI. Um so um I'll keep you up to date on that. Um and then the last area just talk briefly about is financial literacy. um in our consent um items today, we approved, as you know, a timeline revision for the um the next time we will see um the content guide for the new financial literacy course. Um that's coming to us in March. It was originally going to come in May. Um and the idea of moving that timeline up is so that it can be out um in the hands of those who are going to need to create new classes sooner.
472Um so that'll be coming to us soon and it's been through a whole bunch of it's been through a whole process of um revisions, public comment um and the IQC has been working hard on guiding that process. Thank you. >> Thank you. Uh member McQuillin. >> Right. Thank you. We heard the item on the college and career indicators. Following up on that, the California Workforce Pathways Joint Advisory Committee uh is a joint advisory committee that uh makes recommendations to the state board and the board of governors of California Community Colleges regarding career technical education programs and workforce pathways. Um the next meeting for that group is uh not until March 13th um right after our next board meeting. And one other item just want to bring to your attention there there's a policy summit happening
473the first week of February there east of Sacramento on the missing and murdered indigenous people. It's a policy summit that's being hosted by one of the local tribes there east of Sacramento. Just want to give a shout out to that group there. That's all I have. Thank you. >> Thank you. Uh member Esco >> just just briefly with uh we had a first meeting for NASBY last week and just want to share some events that they are um organized to again further improve our profession as state board members. One on January 28th is measuring is these are online webinars measuring school quality what multiple measures reveal about student success. Uh they're isolating places where they utili utilizing student surveys and test scores to create long-term success for students. There'll be there'll be a webinar on
474that. Another webinar that's interested I think will be interesting to all of us is on March 3rd 2026 is leveraging apprenticeships to rebuild the educator workforce. Be interesting. And then and then in October 26 of course is the annual conference which will be this time in Baltimore, Maryland. and you'll have more information on that. >> Thank you. uh member of GK. >> Sorry. Um I just wanted I'll try to make this really quick, but um this December I was fortunate to attend CSBA's annual education pre-conference and also the community engagement initiatives conference. And so I want to thank the SBE staff for supporting me and um helping me out with logistics to attend those conferences. I also as a member of um the CDE's black student achievement task force spoke um on a webinar addressing
475um literacy rates um for black and bolstering black student achievement. And so I also wanted to thank um deputy superintendent William Mickey for allowing me to be a speaker on that webinar. And I just an event I wanted to publicize. Um CASS is having their Sable Conference this Sunday where they'll be presenting proposals to the Senate Senate Education Committee. >> Thank you. And I will round out our leazison reports with an update on the IQC and also on CCE. Um, please note for the IQC, uh, the December meeting was the final meeting of three of the departing commissioners, Neil McGaffy, Nikki Rainera, and Marcy Winter, and their terms ended in November and December. Uh, we are we're quite sad to say goodbye to them. They have done a phenomenal job on the commission. And our
476next IQC meeting is actually next week and it will be a two-day meeting consisting of an annual orientation where uh CDE staff goes over all of the important information commissioners need to know, roles, responsibility, and whatnot. And then the second day will com will consist of a variety of business items. Um we will also be swearing in three of the new commissioners that the board approved at our one of our past meetings. Uh we're happy to welcome Rebecca Lewis who's a curriculum coordinator at Whitmore Elementary School District, Julie Goldman who's director San Diego County Office of Education, and Bonnie Sides who's a teacher on special assignment in Oxnard. Uh the commissioners will also conduct their annual elections for executive committee chairs, vice chairs, and members of the various subject specific subcommittees. My next report for
477you is regarding the CCE. Uh just again, we just have so many wonderful resources that are being developed in so many different areas. Uh the CCE will release its ecosystem toolkit in February. And this is a toolkit that was developed in collaboration with partner organizations to help county offices and community-based county agencies better integrate behavioral and mental health services for students, families, and communities. Uh you can go to the CCE website to uh join the list serve and find out more about that. You had a little bit of an update on the portrait of a learner when we had our CCI study session. Uh just know that again the portrait of a learner graduate survey was launched on November 6. So far we've had uh 1,700 responses from diverse stakeholders from students all the way
478parents and educators. And the survey is going to remain open until mid January. So um if you know of anyone please encourage them to complete the survey. We'll uh take up uh information regarding that in future meetings. Also uh professional learning CCE is hoping hosting an open door learning session called intentional systems of creating equitable outcomes for foster and black students. that's going to take place on February 4th at 100 pm. And the session is going to feature uh Victor Valley Union High School District's Thrive and Heritage program and how it supports improved outcomes for foster youth and for black students. And again you can go to the cce website to register for that event and also to stay informed of other uh activities moving forward at we'll conclude the leazison reports I believe and
479we should be at the point to get ready to move to our final item item 17 which is general public comment. So at this time we will take up general public comment for any items that were not included on this uh today's agenda. Do we have anyone in person for general public comment? >> No one is in person for public comment. >> Do we have anyone on the phone for general public comment? >> There are four callers in the queue. >> Thank you very much. >> Uh caller with the last four digits 9364. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Thank you very much. My name is Chris Brown and I'm the parent of a child at Tahoe Truckucky Unified School District. Our district is a mountain school
480district located on the other side of the Sierra Nevada Range from Sacramento, just a few miles from the border with Nevada. Because of our geography, our schools participate in the Nevada Athletic Association. Uh we have snow that reaches up to 20 to 15 to 20 feet in the winter. Um and it makes scheduling of sports and travel issues primarily uh pretty much impossible. Um from our location in the Tahoe Truckucky area over the hill over Interstate 80 and Don Pass down into the foothills. Um, the California Department of Education has ordered our district to leave the Nevada Athletic Association and join the CIF, California's Athletic Association, because of a rule change by the Nevada Athletic Association restricting participation in sports uh to to students based on their birth gender um rather than their gender identity.
481and that conflicts with California law and CIF rules that permit participation in sports to students based on their gender identity. Unfortunately, our school Okay. Unfortunately, our school district's been caught in the middle of this policy conflict. Um, I would really strongly urge for safety reason unbelievably dangerous. >> Thank you. Uh, next caller with the last four digits, 3462, you are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. Caller with the last four digits, 3462, you are now live. Please start your public comment. Okay, hearing none. Uh, moving on to the next caller. Um, caller with the last four digits 2880, you are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Thank you. Hello, president, members of the board. My name is Todd Winter. I'm a parent and coach
482of student athletes in the Truckucky Tahoe Unified School District. I would like to call your attention to case matter number 2025-0123 involving CDE's corrective action mandate issued to our district. If enforced, this mandate requires our district to move all athletics from NIAA to CIF by the fall of 2026 in a manner that creates foreseeable safety risks for student athletes, coaches, and families who will be forced to traverse the deadly Donner summit during winter months. It also effectively terminates multiple sports programs currently available to our student athletes. Equally concerning, this mandate will cause our district to violate California non-discrimination and disability laws by effectively denying safe and meaningful access to athletics for its students, particularly those with disabilities. So, this is not a question of whether nation laws apply. They most certainly do. It is a
483question of whether enforcement of TDE's mandate can occur without creating new preventable harms and new legal violations. It cannot. We in we encourage you to take note of TTUSD's next board meeting on the 21st. >> Uh next caller with the last four digits 63000. You are now live. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Hello. My name is Sean Bratcher. I'm the dad of two students at Truckucky High, part of the Tahoe Truckucky Unified School District. I'm asking the board to reconsider our district's request for a delay to integrate into the CIS Sports Federation. This request was denied a few weeks ago, throwing the future of sports in our small town into doubt. For more than 40 years, our district has competed in the Nevada State Sports League.
484The reasons for this is multiple. We cannot play or practice most sports during our winter season. We are closer to our competition in Nevada and most importantly any winter travel over the mountain path that connects us to the central valley is dangerous. This is no small point. By being compelled to join CIF immediately, we are foregoing serious competition for the next two years as CIF does not have a regional league for us to join. We would play as an independent unassociated school that would make our athletes ill illigible for playoffs, title play, and sportsbased scholarships. School sports is a community focus for our rural mountain town. The effects of this change will negatively ripple through our students, school, and community. I kindly ask you to grant our request for a delay so that we can
485join CIF well. >> Next caller with the last four digits 3458. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Hi, my name is Julie Shelene and I'm a parent of two students with Taho Truckucky Unified School District. I am formally here to formally challenge the CDE's mandate to require Tahoe Truckucky Unified School District to join the CIS. A move that is effectively dismantles our athletic programs and compromises student safety. By moving outdoor sports from the fall to the winter, you are eliminating our athletic programs like soccer and tennis due to our climate, denying our students the equitable access to athletics enjoyed by the rest of California students. Even more critical is the physical risk. The CDE is requiring student athletes to travel the 80s most eighth most dangerous interstate
486in the nation during peak peak winter months. This constitutes a clear and present danger and creates a massive liability for both the state and the district. The CDE has a statutory duty to ensure student safety. I call on the CDE to grant Taho a permanent geographical hardship >> wer with the last four digits 0952. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. >> Thank you for your attention. My name is Jonathan Lucas and I'm a parent in the Tahoe Truckucky Unified School District. My daughter, Bisa, an eighth grader at North Tahoe School, found her people on the soccer field year after year with many of the same girls. She's worked hard, set goals, built her identity around being a student athlete, and her team's aim is to play high school
487soccer together starting fall 2026. This mandate forcing our district in CIF ignores rural mountain realities like snowpack in no indoor fields in storm travels. That means missed class time and increased safety concerns. This change erases real opportunity, especially for girls. And when rules ignore geography and climate, rural kids lose out. This is a safety and yes, an equity issue. We're asking to sensibly grant TTUSD a permanent geographic hardship waiver or an a equivalent solution so our kids can access their full education and experience. Respectfully, this mandate isn't fair to my daughter. Please let our girls play. Thank you. Uh, next caller with the last four digits digits 8739. You are now live. Please start your public comment. You have one minute. My name is Aaron Shelene. I'm the parent of two students among hundreds of
488concerned parents in the Truckucky area that are extremely concerned about the mandate by the CDE to move our athletics program from a local league on the Nevada border into CIS. This change puts our children's safety at great risk, forcing them to travel over Donner Pass in the winter, recently reported as one of the deadliest stretches of highway in the nation, and exceptionally so during the winter. This change will also result in the eventual termination of many sports programs such as soccer and tennis, which are simply impossible to play with all the snow we receive in the winter. Fair and equal opportunity will be erased. Only wealthy families will be able to replace opportunities with club travel teams and hundreds of kids will lose the opportunity to play their sport. We ask that you reconsider the
489mandate, put student safety first and work with us to find a practical given our unique landscape. >> Thank you. >> One that is equitable with >> Next caller with the last four digits 0300. You are now live. Please state your public comment. You have one minute. >> My name is Megan Rose. I'm a 25-y year California educator and Tahoe Truckucky Unified School District parent. Thank you for the opportunity to share concerns regarding the mandate for Tahoe Truckucky Unified School District to move to the CIF for athletics. This decision has immense negative impact and causes harm to the 67% of North Tahoe High School students that are student athletes. Harm includes student safety. Traveling on Interstate 80 over Donner Summit is hazardous and the CDE should not be unnecessarily exposing students to this travel in order
490to compete in the CIF. The harm of loss in instructional minutes due to the increased travel time unfairly impacts our student athletes academic opportunities. Harmed by lack of access to sports that will no longer be feasible for our athletes to participate in due to winter conditions in Tahoe harms our students well-being and mental health. I urge members of the board to reconsider the forced move to the CIF and acknowledge the harm that this decision is causing students. Whereas remaining in the NIA. >> Thank you, Collie. Your time is up. >> Thank you. >> That concludes public comment for item number 17. Thank you very much and thank you to all who called in for general public comment. At this time, um I will hereby adjourn our January 2026 SBE meeting at 4:17 p.m. Thank you,
491and we look forward to seeing you at our March meeting. Have a wonderful evening.