December 17, 2025 - RVSD Board of Trustees Regular Meeting

001Instructions for accessing subtitles in a language other than English are included on our board meetings web page as well as in the description below. Good evening and welcome to the Ross Valley School District Board of Trustees regular meeting. Today is December 17th, 2025 and I am calling our meeting to order at 5:03 p.m. We have four trustees present in person at the Ross Valley School District office at 100 Shaw Drive in Sano. Myself, Rachel Litwac, Chris Landles Cobb, Daniel Cassidy, and Shelley Hamilton. Trustee Anna Marsh will be joining us later. We also have uh cabinet members present, superintendent Tyler Graph and our CBO Chris Carson. Our meeting is being live streamed via YouTube and the link is on our website and on the agenda. There will be a 60-second delay between the meeting and the

002YouTube live stream. The recording of the meeting will be made available to the public on our district YouTube website. Um just for reference throughout the meeting, public comment regarding items on closed session agenda. Public comments on closed session item agenda items will be heard prior to the board meeting recessing into close session. Once the public comment period has ended for the close session agenda item, no more comments will be taken and we'll proceed to the agenda. Um and with that I will get on to our meeting. [snorts] So our first um agenda item is closed session. We have um public comment regarding item on close session agenda. We have no public here to comment. So I will um move this on. I'm going to identify the close session topics. Um the first one is public

003employee performance evaluation title superintendent pursuant to government code section 54957. Um we have conference with legal counsel anticipated litigation consideration of settlement agreement government code 54956.9 and we have conference with legal counsel anticipated litigation significant exposure to litigation pursuant to government code 54956.9 subdivision D2 or three special education program dispute three cases student SSIDs 3740832178 SSID 6459 9662261 and SSID 5217377-477. And with all of that and no public comment, I will recess us to closed session at 50:05. All right, welcome back. Um, we are reconvening at 6:04 from closed session. I'm going to report out from closed session. Um item four is there's no report. Um item five there is conference with legal counsel um anticipated litigation consideration of settlement agreement. Um the board voted four to zero to approve the staff's recommendation for item

004number six the conference with legal counsel anticipated litigation significant exposure to litigation pursuant to government code 54956.9 subdivision D2 or3 special education program dispute three cases. Um in all three cases listed there um student SSID um 645-9662261 and 5217377477. Um we voted 4 to zero um to approve staff recommendations. And moving on with our agenda, we have procedural items. The first one is the pledge of allegiance and the democratic reflections. If you'd like to join me, please do. I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America [clears throat] and to the republic for it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all our next item is to adopt our agenda and time allocations. I know it looks kind of it's going to be a longer meeting. Do we

005have any questions on the agenda? Any changes that we wanted to make? Anybody? >> Oh, not here. >> Okay. All right. Um, I'm just going to We don't need you >> on the >> adopting agenda as procedural. >> No. >> We have somebody who'd like to make a motion on our agenda. >> I make a motion to approve the agenda as written. >> Great. Do I have a second? >> I'll second that. >> Thank you, Shel. I >> I >> Daniel >> I >> Rachel I Okay, we have our agenda for the evening. Um the next item is communication. Uh first one here is public comment regarding items not on the open session agenda. Okay. >> Do we have any public who would like to comment on something that is not on our agenda? >>

006So um please take a seat. You have three minutes. At 2 and 1/2 minutes you'll hear a ding just to give you a warning that there's 30 seconds. >> Not anymore. >> It will countdown. >> Oh, it'll count down. >> Sorry. Why is it not 3 minutes? >> No, it's 3 minutes. You get a warning at two and a half. So, you know, you have 30 seconds left. No, you get the full 30 minutes. >> And my husband's going to yield his >> I'm going to yield my time >> time to me. >> Um, >> yeah, she can do that, right? >> Yeah. Okay. [clears throat] >> Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Is it Are we starting? >> Yeah. >> Okay. Is this on? >> Is this on? >> Yeah. >> Hello. >> It's just for

007the record. >> Sorry. Okay. Got it. Okay. Uh Tyler, congratulations on your uh Thank you. >> Okay. So, good evening. Last month, our family made the difficult decision to withdraw our daughter from this school district. This was not a choice we took lightly. Our daughter felt comp felt deeply connected to her friends, teachers, and school community. However, over time, it became clear that the values and priorities of the district no longer aligned with those of our family, particularly around age appropriate instruction, transparency, and educational priorities. The district's focus away from academic rigor to social justice initiatives, as best illustrated by Wayade Thomas' principal, quote unquote, cultivating activists remarks, is disheartening. We were shocked when our daughter, a second grader at Hidden Valley, came home and told us her pronouns following a class discussion on gender

008identity. To give the school benefit of the doubt, we assumed it was just to be inclusive. Then in third grade, the school librarian read to the class the book My Rainbow, a story about transgender girl choosing wigs. Our daughter came to us confused and asked for guidance. We shared the with the principal our concerns about the content not being age appropriate and hoped it would not happen again. In fourth grade, without advanced notice to parents, the class discussed pronouns. The principal did not recall our conversation from the year prior and also had no plan to inform parents about non-curricular sensitive or identity based lessons in the future. My son, a way Thomas alum, shared with us that he often felt uncomfortable with the school's constant presentations of racial and identity themes. He described feeling guilty

009about being white and heterosexual, feeling less adequate and worthy than others. We want our children to learn about the world, be respectful and mindful of our diverse community. But as parents in our children's education, we demand transparency, age appropriateness, and parental engagement. All of which was clearly all of which are clearly protected by the California Ed Code, but painfully lacking in RSVD. Particularly, the district-wide focus on pushing identity based narratives and biases towards certain races and selective religions is divisive and unnecessary. This year at back to school night, Principal Harris emphasized social justice activism woven both into curricula via grades 3rd through fifth activist classes and including references to the new ELA materials. Despite all the talk about inclusivity and being seen, my daughter found zero representation of herself or her minority group despite prior

010conversations with this district. The district is asking the community to approve a new parcel tax to increase teacher pay, a measure I wholeheartedly support. Yet, transparency, trust, and partnership are required to win our votes. We want our wonderful teachers to be well compensated to focus on student success and core academics. The funds allocated to consultants on social programs must be allocated and prioritized with transparency and alignment with parents wishes. It is difficult for parents and voters to reconcile this request when resources appear to be directed toward consultants and programs unrelated to core academics or student achievement. Families want to see a district that is wholly focused on educational excellence, reading, writing, mathematicians, science, critical thinking before being asked to support increased funding. This is of utmost importance given our history of declining test scores. Additionally,

011several elements of the district's programming and classroom materials gave us sense of school was promoting a specific worldview rather than teaching students how to think, including posters elevating political and activist figures, and activist programs incorporating incorporating political undertones. Workshops brought into the district that seemed designed to shape beliefs rather than building skills, the newly adopted school ELA curricula, which intertwines nouns and verbs with social justice. What's more, a curricula theme includes human rights, yet features a country which denies such rights and is downright hostile to women, the LGBTQ community, and the US and Western democracies. As a refugee from a communist country, this is alarming and clearly anti-American. Perhaps the most troubling part of this experience has been hearing from other families who share our concerns but feel afraid to speak up, worried that they

012will be labeled, dismissed, or attacked socially. Many would consider leaving the district for the above reasons if financial circumstances allowed it. In closing, our decision to leave RSVD is heartbreaking. We loved many of the teachers and we believe the vast majority truly care about children. But we could not continue in this district that promotes age inappropriate non-cor curricula being taught without transparency, identity based material that overshadows academics and there where ideological interpretation is prioritized over critical thinking and educational fundamentals. Schools should help students develop critical thinking, not shape their political, racial or social identities for them. We believe believe this emphasis ultimately limits students ability to reason independently and understand diverse viewpoints. Turning out social justice activists who cannot read, add or write is not progressive. We hope the district will reflect on these concerns

013and reenter its mission on academic and excellence, transparency, partnership with families, and the well-being of all students. Thank you so much for your time and happy holidays. >> Thank you. Any [clears throat] other additional public comment on items that are not on our agenda? >> So, uh, the next item is correspondence and communication to the board. Assuming all my fellow trustees have had a moment to read all those. So, [snorts] moving on. Sorry, it's a new agenda format. It's a little bit different looking here. Um so our next item is announcements by labor unions. Is that right? >> Yes. >> Okay. Sorry. Do we have anyone from uh RBTA or CSA here? No. >> Okay. >> So they are not here today. So I will move on to e presentation andor action items. The first

014one is presentation [clears throat] and discussion on the parcel tax feasibility survey results by Godby research. >> Great. So, we're going to have uh Brian Godby from Godby Research call in. Um and he's going to basically give us an overview of the polling that he did. Um there's no action here. It's just a review of the polling. Um and there is a uh the polling was done around a specific uh structure of a parcel tax, but that does not mean this is the parcel tax structure that we end up going with. that'll be voted on by the board um on uh February 11th, I believe. >> Do just [clears throat and cough] >> Hi, Brian. This is Tyler Graph, superintendent at Ross Valley. You are live with the uh board of education. >> Yeah. Great.

015>> All right. I I just I just gave the uh intro and we will hand it over to you. We have uh the slide deck on slide one. >> All right. Great. Uh so slide one, not the cover slide. >> The cover slide. We have it at the cover slide. >> Okay. So let's go ahead to the next slide. Uh the overall overview research objectives. Uh, as you know, we conducted a survey. The purpose was to look at potential voter support for renewing the current parcel tax. Uh, we wanted to look at not only the renewal but also different rates and uh, annual adjustments. Uh, and then of course there's a wide variety of demographics that um, we also look at and we use that to both stratify the sample initially and to weight it

016on the back end to make sure it is representative of uh, the Roth Valley community. Uh next slide please give you a methodology overview. Uh so as this summarizes briefly we landline uh cell phone uh text online and emails online surveys. The majority of the respondents come from online surveys. That's the world we live in. Uh we looked at likely uh November 2026 voters. We had a subset of June 26 uh and were in the field in mid November after the election. Uh the average survey was 15 minutes on the phone. We completed 418 interviews. Uh and that all gives us a margin of error for the November universe of 4.72 plus or minus or plus or minus 5.71. Uh next slide actually in the next slide uh which is titled capability rating. Got it.

017>> Okay. Thank you. Uh so this slide shows you of the responses to our question that we asked both in the current survey but is also in the survey uh that we conducted for the district last summer in 2024. The first bar is the November 2024 likely universe from last year. And if you add the uh the very favorable and somewhat favorable together, you see that 66% in round numbers had a favorable opinion of the job the district is doing to provide a quality education. In the current survey, it's slightly higher. Statistically, it's probably not a significant difference, but it is certainly higher. Uh and you can see that if again adding the varian somewhat together, we're at 73%. So certainly an encouraging increase. Uh next slide please. >> Okay, >> this is the f

018favorability of the district's management of public funds. Similar question. Uh this always has lower totals and that's because the uh the don't know category goes up uh substantially and this is obviously about finances. Uh so again adding the vary and somewhat together in the 2024 survey we were at 43% in this survey we're at 56% in round numbers of people that have a favorable view uh of the district's management of public funds. There's still, you know, a big chunk almost 25% uh in the current uh universe about the same in the uh 24 survey that don't know which means that there is work to be done to explain what what you've been up to. Next slide. >> Okay. So, now you're looking at the uh initial support for the proposed measure. Uh, and the slide

019breaks it down by the November 2026 universe as well as the June 26 universe. Uh, and of course, June is a subset of November. So, this measure uh was designed to renew the $749 parcel tax and add $540. Uh, the state law requires us to say how much that raises annually, which is about 8.6 million. Uh and you can see in the June universe for next year, we're at 65% when we add the definitely yes and probably yes together. Uh in November we're at 65.6. So slightly higher really, you know, almost identical um between the two election universes. Difference probably is, you know, just there's a political and economic risk the longer you go. Surveys are a snapshot in time. So the further out you could try to predict the harder it is. Uh so

020they're they're really the same now would sort of suggest at this initial stage to go in for June is the way to look at this. >> And next slide please. >> Okay. So this is a quick summary of the top features the things we might spend the money on. Uh and as you can see here uh the top item without getting into the methodology the ranking which is sort of complicated but uh attract and retain highly qualified teachers is 77% at least somewhat more likely to support the measure. Uh maintaining core academic programs in science and technology is virtually at the same level uh statistically as is maintaining core uh academic programs in reading and writing. So uh science, technology, reading, writing and uh retaining highly qualified teachers. Uh next slide please. >> Okay. >>

021Uh the next slide is uh similar looks similar anyway. It's slightly different. The the first set of items were things you would put in a ballot question. Uh so they're kind of the nuts and bolts of how you're going to spend the money. These are kind of the why you would do that. Uh and so at the top of this list again having a great teacher in the classroom is the most important element. Uh providing quality education the measure will help the school district which currently has among the lowest salaries in the county uh to retain the best teachers. That's 77% at least somewhat more likely to support the measure. So well above threshold. Uh the next item is Ros Valley School District is losing some of the best teachers and employees to nearby districts.

022uh and this would help us be competitive. And then finally, the measured will jobs and minimize layoffs in the community at 69%. Again, with the margin of error, they're technically tied and that's why we put them in the tier one that you see here. Um but there's numeric differences. So, you know, the the top argument is is the one that's probably the most important >> slide. [clears throat] So in addition to talking about what we would spend the money on and the positives, we also talked about some of the negatives because that's the world we live in. Also, uh the measure is a 70% increase which is doing the math um from that increase I talked about. Uh the measure would cost every homeowner and again doing the math $1,289 a year. uh and then

023third that tariffs and inflation and uh high prices are uh a reason not to do this at this particular time. Next slide. So after we had talked about the positives and the negatives and the um as well as what we would spend the money on more specifically we come back to our ballot questions uh a second time and what we've done is we've simulated what happened in uh the a real world campaign. Obviously, we have positives uh on our side, but the negatives do have an impact and they sort of keep us from going up. So, you see in the June initial test, we were at 65 and now we're at 652. You know, it's hard to say there's a difference because at.3 uh there there also it's hard to say there's a difference, but

024it is notable that uh in the final test the number of definitely yeses did go up. So there are some people that moved from probably to definitely uh and that's always encouraged. >> You there Brian? >> Hello >> Brian. Did we lose you? >> You're still here. Can you hear me now? >> Yeah, I can hear you now. >> Okay, great. So this next slide uh is the same question, same second test, but this is uh looking at the November voters. Uh the initial test was at 65.6. We're now at 66.6. So it's a onepoint increase. Uh and there is a decrease though in the definite yeses. Uh this is a slightly, you know, bigger universe. uh it's kind of less frequent voters than the June. So there's a appears to be a little bit

025of difference between June and November. Uh but again, while June is little bit less, we're still within the margin of error for the twothirds on both of these. And then November is just further away. So the further out we go, the you know, more likely there is to be some change in the environment or in politics that might impact that. Uh next slide, please. Okay. >> Uh so the next slide uh was a followup to that uh and it's support for renewing the measure with just a 3% uh annual adjustment. The original measure had it at 4%. Uh and for June, we're at 65% now. Uh you know, which takes us from that 64.7 again a very little increase, but certainly increase there. There's some impact. Uh and November it's even greater. Uh we've gone

026from 66.6 to 67. Again, you know, these are all at the margin. Um but there is some impact of reducing the uh annual adjustment. Uh and next slide. So in addition to looking at the rate uh for the annual adjustments on of the measure, we also looked at different tax rates. So instead of uh increasing it by 540, we said what if it was 490? Uh and here you see that at for June we're at 63. So that's actually a decrease as is November at 65.6. So that what that's saying is that we're really not getting uh any benefit by reducing the rate from 540 to 490. There is a little more intensity. We're up to 46 and 45% in a definitely category, but the total uh is not uh is not going up. Uh

027and next slide, please. So we did that one in one more increment. this was instead of 490, what if it was 440? And again, same same thing. Uh, you know, we're not getting a bump up. So, it's not suggesting that there's a big difference between 540, 490, or 440 um in terms of the level of the board. And that is the last slide that I've got for you this evening. Certainly happy to answer any questions that the board members might have. >> [snorts] >> Quick, just quick clarification if I get what you're saying. When you tested the 540, the 490, and you're actually seeing decreased support when you lower the increased amount. I mean, there's >> um very slightly. Yes, that's correct. >> And do you think that's because people understand uh the the need

028that the district were there any questions that gave you any insight into that? Well, I think that when we look back at the um the high level uh of the features uh the things we'd spend the money on and the positives, you know, in both cases were in the low 70s or a little higher than that. uh you know there is certainly support for uh the district's needs and you know reducing the amount uh doesn't really help the average voter that much um in comparison to what they've already told us with respect to teachers and science classes and reading and writing etc. >> Okay, thank you. Brian, can you talk at all about the the first two slides where there's some uh public perception about the district and public perception on the district's management of

029funds, why you think that went up so much since uh a year and a half or two years ago? Yeah, I think I mean statistically speaking, you know, with the plus or minus margin of error, uh there isn't really a huge difference, but it is certainly noteworthy that both the quality of education perception went up as well as the um handling of taxpayer funds. I think primarily uh we're probably looking at the difference in the voting universe. November 24 is the largest voting group that we'll have. So, you've got a lot of one-time voters. uh November 26 is a higher propensity uh but smaller group of people who are more engaged. They vote more often. They're more plugged into what's going on locally. Uh and so they may have more of an opinion um about

030what the district is up to. Uh and that's also supported by the um the don't knows. Uh in November 24 for quality of education, the don't know was 15.6. It's down to 13.4. for uh so people are saying, you know, they're more knowledgeable in that smaller universe of the November 26th universe. Uh and they also seem to have more information at their disposal. >> Other questions for the board? So the different increases to the base parcel tax of 749 that we would have for next year. Do you have a recommendation on what number having looked at our data? >> Um I think that you can certainly go uh you know be talking about the highest number at this stage. Um you know I think that the next part of the process needs to be for

031the district to reach out to other stakeholders. Right? this is the average voter who doesn't necessarily show up at board meetings. Uh but that's not the only group um you know to represent in the community. So I think outreach to other stakeholders is important. And then obviously it's a decision the board needs to make needs to be the need and you know that's the ultimate uh key here is you have to say what is our need and you know can we uh can we justify um 540 or or something else. But I think you start at the 540 uh and go through that process in the next few months before you have to put a measure on the ballot which is the statutory deadline is first week in March. So you've got a little bit

032of time for that outreach >> and and that amount B this is Daniel brings us you know approximately $1,200 $1300 a year on our taxes and >> right >> what we're doing with our sanitary district for our sewer service charge is around the same exact amount every [clears throat] year that every Ross Valley resident is paying for sewer. So that's a a similar amount that people are already paying for sewers across Ross Valley. So that seems fair as a number to baseline for our teachers. >> That sort of seems like education's a great deal, right? >> Um so yeah, I think that's right. any uh this is Chris any any surprises in these numbers that you saw or or they pretty much a favorable outcome? >> No, I don't think there are any surprises. I

033mean what we're seeing uh across the board uh despite economic challenges that we're facing right those are all baked into these numbers. Um and you know I don't think that we somebody could say oh well the economy is going south so these numbers are not valid. I mean the economy is where it is now and it's probably going to be in similar form in June when the measures on the ballot. So I'm not worried about that particularly. Um you know science and technology and reading writing for elementary districts are almost always at the top of the list as are you know keeping highly qualified teachers. So that wasn't surprising um at all. Uh I think it's in context of what we're seeing elsewhere in the state. >> Thanks. >> Well, and I love seeing those

034first two slides around just the favorable rating that we're managing the public funds. >> You have questions? >> Oh, question. Sorry. >> Sorry. I'll get back to your comments. [laughter] >> Do we have any more questions for Brian? >> Uh this is Shel. the the when we did this uh survey, there was a slide that compared the last time we did the study and then this time we did the study. And just help me remember time frame wise. Last time you did the study was before economic turmoil. So that study correct I I think I'm remembering correctly that you did the study and we went out for the parcel tax kind of right when there was a whole lot of tariffs and turmoil like coincided with the parcel tax and which meant that our study

035had been done before that. That's right. >> And so the fact So what I'm seeing here is that if you take into account people's individual perception of the economy, the first time we did it and we got the numbers, there wasn't as much economic turmoil. Now we're doing it a second time, everybody is baking in all of the economic stuff going on and we're still getting better, at least the same, if not better numbers. Is that timing correct? Uh the timing is certainly correct. When we did the survey in 2024, it was uh the summer uh because we had a July deadline to put a measure on the ballot in November. That didn't happen. Put it on the ballot in the spring. But the survey what what we saw happen virtually everywhere. Um the economy

036was at its best pre- pandemic. April of 2020, it fell off cliffs. And so every survey we did uh registered the economies. [clears throat] Uh that worked its way back up uh throughout the pandemic and by the time we got to the summer of 2024 uh it was the best it had been in five years uh or four years, four and a half. Um and um then again in January of this year we fell off the cliff again. that cliff got even steeper and you can sort of track it if you look at the S&P as the indicator of the economy. I know that's not the only one, but obviously in March when the tariffs were announced was the low point for the year um on the economy. Uh unfortunately, people's attitudes while the S&P

037may have gone up uh since then. People's attitudes about the economy have not and now we're uh you know, obviously facing the holidays and gift buying season. uh and you know so people are again more concerned uh or they haven't their impression of the economy hasn't improved at least >> but these numbers didn't tank with people's trepidation >> that's right okay >> yeah I mean there's still work to do here I mean we need to underscore that because we're not you know at 75% we're at 65% uh which you know is a two-point loss but um but we're certainly within striking district distance and people seem to have baked in the economy that is just [cough] thank you more questions. >> Okay. Do you have any public comment on this item? [clears throat] We got

038three minutes and then we get we get more [snorts] Yeah, it's working again. Okay, there you go. [snorts] >> Okay. Uh, hi uh PJ Feffer Manor parent. Um, [clears throat] thanks uh for the survey. I think um the comparison against the results from the 624 survey against 1124 is the most promising thing. you're asking for more and you're still getting like a 20% increase in your approval rate from [snorts] like 50% to 60 something. Um, and nothing in those results indicates that you're being too aggressive. The setowns aren't a meaningful difference. And I worry that the district is not being um ambitious enough in asking for what will make a meaningful district to the budget. Um one of the things we talked about um in some of the parcel tax town halls that I did

039not see pled and obviously I understand there's a limit to how many questions you can ask was the difference in the sunset. Um, so all of the pled provisions were for 8 years. And we talked about who's really make or break yes or no on 8 versus 10 years, especially considering almost all the other districts nearby are 9 or 10 years sunsets. Um, and to that point, I'd be curious as to the consultant's opinion and thinking about how serious it hurts the ability to do a subsequent parcel tax um, increase should it be needed when if you're going so soon after an existing one? like it what is the hangover period be uh during which it's nearly impossible to get one approved because you know I appreciate we definitely need a parcel tax that can

040pass looking at the amounts being raised here and the um compensation offered by our neighboring districts assuming further increases for them this is still going to in two ers will probably be at the bottom or bottom three of uh of the districts in compensation again and [snorts] you know we won't be running a structural deficit but we'll still be um in this in the same position that that we've been in and want to get out of. Um, so I just, you know, like to ask the board to consider even increasing the sun the the period for the sunset or um, you know, leaning heavy on how high you think you can uh, put the ask for. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Do you have any further public comments? [clears throat] >> Hi, I'm also

041a man and parent. Um I guess I was a little disappointed with the survey in the sense that if we're talking about the 1250 tax is 1,210 versus 1250 do you did you really expect to make a lot of difference in that and versus another $50? I feel like from all the discussions we had at all the parcel tax town halls and meetings, it seemed like we should really should have really had us set the number that what we truly need and and pulled um a significant variation from that. I I I I have hard time understanding what kind of difference would there really be there 1250 versus 1210 uh for like I I don't even know why would you expect a meaningful difference I guess. Um and I think you know The error of

042the survey is 5%. So talking your difference between 64 and 64.5 and 65, it's all the same. Mathematically, all these numbers are exactly the same and they're basically the same as we got from the actual election in May. So I'm not really sure we learned a whole lot and we spent $30,000,000 on it. Bottom line here, we'll just have to make sure we get to more vote voters that don't know what's going on and make sure they vote. But really, I don't see what we really learned here that we didn't know already from from our efforts in May. Um, [clears throat] it's really I encourage everyone just to think what are the numbers of what we really truly need for the district to function if we justify that need. And then that's I think how

043we should be thinking about it. >> Thank you. >> Do you have any additional comments? this one over here. >> Okay. [clears throat] >> Hi, I'm um Amy Willard from the Coalition of Sensible Taxpayers. Um I think that the poll design uh [clears throat] it masks the conclusion that you should draw, which is that you um you really have no choice but to seek a lower parcel tax increase. On the face of it, all the scenarios come out slightly below the twothirds approval, but with a wide range of margin of error. But it's really illogical that the voters don't care whether you ask for less. It just doesn't make any sense. I have seen this many times before. In fact, most of the time that when you have a long poll that asks a lot

044of questions, by the time you get to the bottom and you say, "Well, could we make a little less? Could we do it this way? Could we do it that way?" the numbers don't change. Um, and I think that that's what you're seeing is people get fatigued by the time they get to the end of the poll and it's just kind of like I already told you what I think, don't ask me anymore. Um, and the other thing is that when I look at polls, I often see that the poll questions missed the most potent negative and hence the informed vote isn't informed. It's overly optimistic. In this case, what's missing is the tax tsunami of 2026. on the June ballot, you will have a large marine health bond. You'll have smart and you might

045possibly uh have a um a preschool tax on it. On the November ballot, there will be Tam Union and who knows what else. Um so um I think that you also need to note that everyone who's answering this poll faces a um [clears throat] a big increase with a simple parcel tax. um whereas when you had the square foot there were some winners and some losers. So for many the retry is actually um more daunting to them than the first try. So um you know I know that you're very keen to get your parcel tax renewed um and you can't afford to uh lose [clears throat] again. So, I think really your best chance of passage is you you need to ask for meaningfully less. Um, and the fact that your employees want more doesn't

046mean that voters will approve that. And um uh you know, you you can't afford another failure. Thank you for listening. >> Thank you. Any other public comments? Bring it back to the board for discussion. And we have Anna Marsh trustee who's joined us. >> Sorry I'm late. [clears throat] >> Any comments appear? >> Um the only comment that I that I have that I might my take away is back to the question that I had about the timing. Well, the numbers look like there's not much change and maybe haven't like what have you learned because it's all the same. It's the it's all kind of in that zone of 65 but not your 66.6%. But for me again I think what's behind it is the fact that the first time we did it the baking

047in of people's perceptions of the economy that I think um the first goound didn't anticipate this big cliff and crisis with tariffs and S&P stuff going on. the result that we got had that baked in because I think that influenced people and then this one also has it but it's back up again or [snorts] doesn't look like it's back up but uh it does bake in people's sense of the economy so I take heart to that um but it's already got that in that's a kind of a new insight for me that I feel hard >> I think another thing to point out is that we have a sunset in all of these questions and we didn't on the sunset the first time we did it in April 2024 and I think a lot of

048people had a strong reaction to that >> which we changed that when we put out measure E but I think that that probably dragged a lot of people into the no region >> um and I don't know how much that plays into this here but I know that that was from me when I got feedback people that was the reaction that they were like it doesn't have an end date >> because it felt like it was just going to go on and on and >> and these these these numbers are not just pulled out of the sky these These are actually calculations to determine what we can uh work at for the period of time. So it is truly baking in what what is the ultimate lowest amount we can go to be able to

049not [clears throat] function in a deficit in three or four years. Correct. And then how high can we go in respect to the community that we rely on to to pay not just these parcel taxes but bonds. Our schools are falling apart. Okay. The elephant in the room is that everyone's going to come to help keep the infrastructure going and those are bonds. Am I correct Chris? >> Yes. >> So you know we're not we're not having phantom numbers here. We have thought about these numbers because we don't want to be here in five years to say surprise, we're functioning at a deficit again. We have to go out and ask for another parcel tax. >> So, we are actually negligent in asking for less. >> Am I correct? I'm just I'm just spitballing. >>

050I think Brian makes a good recommendation to get more specific community feedback on the size of the increase. Right. >> Right. I think that's something we can do through another town hall or more conversations. Obviously, people know they can reach out directly to me or to all of you, >> right? >> Um about this topic. >> I'll I'll share this in a in a one of the other presentations tonight. >> The the difference between our revenue, which is the source of the problem, is the LCFF calculator, >> right? >> Puts us in the bottom 4% of the state of California. State of California is at the bottom is number 32 out of 50 in the country. So underfunded state and we are at the bottom of the underfunded state. Um if we just had a

051the average uh per pupil funding, it'd be a gap of $4.6 million to what we have right now >> for the state. The average of the state >> just for the average of the state, right? >> A 80% of the average of the state is $3.6 $6 million, which is still 600,000 less than what we asked for in measure E. So the size of our problem, if we wanted to pay teachers in the bottom quartile of the county, again, we're not trying to compete with the top of the the bottom quartile and maintain our student programs because we're seeing academic improvements over the last four years, would be right in that 3.6 to$4.6 million. Our highest ask here is right at the bottom of that range. So, >> you know, and I think what we

052heard from the public here is you hear some public say you should ask for more because you actually need more and that's accurate. >> And you're hearing other people in the public say you should ask for less because you took a loss and you should listen to the community. And I think the reality is there's somewhere in between there. We need to talk to the community more about what the real thing is because >> a passage is what's needed most >> and where that number falls. We're open to feedback from the community. Mhm. >> But the numbers according to the research, it's 70 65% are in favor of renewing at 749 and 65% are in favor of renewing at 749 plus 540 >> and a 4% inflation rate. >> Yeah. So, uh >> to me,

053I hear that as for what you need. We don't [snorts] want you to come back again and again. >> You can't be here in four years. you can't be here in four years and again to this all the you know you got the little dials and the shorter you have to come back it you just people don't feel like ask for what you need we don't want to be have get back to educating and we don't have to do this again if you need it you need it I mean that's that's that one message that I think we we have definitely heard >> the biggest source of feedback that I got from measure E was don't do it on a special election >> we heard that loud and clear we're going out in a statewide

054election. >> We'll continue to do that. And I actually think it's more favorable for us in a in a statewide election than it is in a special election anyway. So, lesson learned. The other one was people in this community have been supporting a flat tax for 30 years. They didn't want a change in methodology. They wanted to stick to the same methodology because there were winners and there were losers. And people in the community didn't like that. people wanted a flat tax. So, I think that's why we pulled on this flat tax and [clears throat] then played with inflation rate and um >> and the the amount of the increase. >> But I think through the work that everybody's done in the community with measure E, right, people are much more in favor of how

055we're managing the public funds. >> But that's a that's a big difference than where we were in November of 2024. >> Right. So again, the message is out there. People are hearing this. People are hearing it from from all sides. And that's a that's a big piece. I don't know if 56% is a good number, but it's better than what we were at 42%. Right? So that's that's to me we're telling the right story. People realize how how critical this is. And the next, you know, agenda items will be talking about cutting. >> That's right. >> Right. And so this isn't this we we're going to build, you know, we're going to give our teachers. This is just again to be realistic to where we are at a district, which is a fair amount. >>

056And I think to, you know, something else I heard from public is that, you know, I would love to pay our teachers the same we pay the TAM district. I love that. There's no world in which that will ever happen in the Ross Valley School District. It just won't. But if we can compete with the bottom quartile, which is kind of where our revenue is, then I'm happy with that. [snorts] And I think that's fair. If if our revenue stream is in the bottom quartile and our pay is in the bottom quartile, that seems fair. Aspirationally, would I love to give more? Sure. But that's just not a reality. We're not getting $25,000 per student. We're getting 11,000 per student. Yeah, I was skeptical that we even did this polling, but I I think it

057it told us a lot. I think that the everyone fair is fair and we're people are telling us that that we and we should ask for what we need because I agree that it is we're not being greedy. It's we're just trying to bottom quartile like that is I think everybody can agree that that's that is not greedy. >> And we have fantastic teachers that are putting outcomes out in the top cile of the of the county. >> So I mean this isn't like a you know situation where we're overpaying teachers and getting poor outcomes. We're underpaying our teachers and getting excellent outcomes. So in terms of like if you think about it as a business, we are hyperefficient. We spend less per student than any other district in the county and we get some

058of the highest outcomes in the county. We should be super proud of that. And if your business gets too efficient, the product starts failing. >> We're on that cusp right now. So just to come back this amount let's just say the 540 we have that's where we have bookended to a level of comfort to say we're not we're not going out and asking for the for the moon here. We're asking what we need to ask tolerating the dignity and threshold of taxpayers. This is going to get us where we need to be where we don't have to turn around in a few years and say we're operating at a deficit. Am I correct? >> Well, I think what this is giving us is like a baseline for us to start talking to because I think

059we need to hear what the community has to say about these numbers now that we've heard from the survey, but I think we need to actually like talk to stakeholders as Brian was saying. >> Exactly. >> I think this gives us like a target starting place like not because we're not talking about terms of a partial tax. I don't I don't want to >> but that's what I'm thinking. This is this is the threshold that we need clarity on to make sure this is why we're here. And I just want to make sure that we're being very clear about why we're at this number. Right. >> Okay. >> And I think between now and January 27th, we can have engagement and listen to the community. January 27th board meeting, we'll start talking about the election

060timing, the size, the structure, all of the details. We'll get more feedback. And then on February 11th, we'll actually vote to put something on the ballot. So, there's plenty of time for community feedback. Send the board an email, send me an email, come talk to me. We're open for specific and actionable feedback. Um, we're happy to take it and then we'll discuss it again on January 27th where we'll get into the nuts and bolts of the actual ballot and then on the on February 11th, we'll make the vote. Okay. >> So, open to feedback. >> Great. Thank you. This is That's all we have. >> No action has even been taken. >> All right. So, are we okay moving on? >> Thank you, Brian. >> Yes. >> Thank you, everybody. Have a good evening. >>

061You too. >> All right. So, our next item is recommended approval of the tentative agreement between the Ross Valley School District Board of Trustees and the Ross Valley Teachers Association to resolve negotiations for the 202526 school year and the AB1200 disclosure. >> [snorts] >> And I'm going to start with this, but do you want to say something before we begin, Tyler? >> Uh why don't you start and I'll uh end it. >> Okay. First of all, um this is the culmination of negotiations with the Ross Valley Teachers Association. And um before before I even get into this, we just we truly want to say thank you to the Ross Valley teachers for the hard work that they put in and um what ultimately was led to this agreement. And so as we get into it,

062um in terms of the dollars, uh what they did agree to was 0% on schedule. And so, kind of going back to what we've been talking about in terms of our budget, the teachers um really recognize that and um have have accepted 0% on schedule. What we were able to give to the teachers was a $1,000 off schedule, which you see there. Um and that is being paid for using one-time funding sources. And so that's works out to a onetime bonus. and it looks like a 1% salary increase. And then the other thing that we have done is picked up the um health and benefit health and benefit costs that um provides for single coverage for Kaiser single plus um um your dental benefits as well. And so by doing that the all-in cost for

063the district is $191,515 um for this settlement. And there were some other things that were built into the agreements as well. Um, and so we've we've provided a copy of the AB1200 which is required. Um, and those numbers have been built into our budget and that document is signed by the superintendent and I is uh then provided to the county office of education. We have to give them 10 days to at least look at it prior so if they have any concerns they can come back to us. Uh and that was all done prior to to this. And so that is attached in here as well. And by approving this item tonight, you will be accepting the the agreements that um the tenative agreements that are attached. [clears throat] >> So I just want to

064say that this is bittersweet for me. Um, on one side of the coin, I'm [snorts] proud of our relationship with our union partners and the understanding of teachers around our budget. They understand where we are and that we're deficit spending at an unsustainable pace and we can't afford compensation increases. So, I'm really proud of that. I think the union did an amazing job at the table collaborating with us and working on things that were not directly cost issues but were more time and working condition issues and the district was able to kind of give on some of those things. So proud of that collaboration and that uh communication. On the flip side, a 0% raise to our teachers is problematic. We're at the bottom of the county and we're losing ground. That's one of the

065talking points. We're at the bottom of the county and we're losing ground. The next lowest district is giving a two or 3% raise. So, we're at the bottom of the county and we're losing ground to other districts. And I think this is concerning to me. Although a lot of our teachers want to stay here because the culture and climate is great, our families are great. Our board is phenomenal. Their administrators are great. Their colleagues are amazing. That's why people stay here. If we continue to lose ground, we're going to continue to lose excellent teachers to other districts. And I think um this is why this settlement agreement is bittersweet to me. Uh really proud of that collaboration, but also disappointed the fact that we're at the bottom of the county and losing ground. >> Do

066we have questions? Are there questions? >> Quick just quick when you presented the these numbers are reflected in the budget. >> Correct. >> The first in >> correct >> we did it in terms of order of operations. This is in front of that intentionally because once you approve it then >> it gets automatically built into the budget. And this 0% increase this year doesn't affect step and column increases that some people might qualify for. >> Correct. >> Traditionally, right throughout the year, >> they still they still get the step and column increases. And that is a function that happens at the beginning of every school year. >> So it would happen again July one. >> Good. >> Just the one time. [clears throat] I know that you had a productive conversation with property SD and

067my my concern is attrition and I want to sort of gauge what your thoughts are around, you know, as we go into the summer. What does that potentially look like given [clears throat] that our teachers aren't getting another increase? Last year, we lost 4% of our teaching staff directly because of pay. Exit interviews for a few of the folks that that left and 4% of them left because of pay. Um, when I talk to teachers, a lot of teachers stick around because culture, climate, colleagues, the board, administrators, it's a really great place to work and I think it's hard to leave when you know the culture and climate is so healthy. Um, but when you look across the street or down the road and it's not just individual health care, but it's full family health

068care, that's a, you know, 15 to$20,000 increase right there in addition to a $ 15 to $20,000 compensation increase. So total package, you're looking at somewhere between 15 and $30,000 more at a district within a 10-minute commute. Um, I think if we continue to be at the bottom and lose ground, we're going to see more attrition. And I wouldn't be surprised if it's in that four to six% year-over-year. Um, I won't name names, but one of our best kindergarten teachers last year had a an excruciating decision to make when she was offered a position down the road for 20 or $30,000 more. and she sat in my office with tears in her eyes, not wanting to leave this district. Even though that was going to help fund college and pay bills and put food on

069the table, she wanted to stay here, but after that it didn't pass, she she knew she couldn't. And I think that's the story of this district, unfortunately, because we have the bottom 4% revenue in the state of California. It's hard to retain phenomenal people like that when they're faced with a, you know, a compensation increase of that magnitude. You can't blame the person for going somewhere else. And that impacts kids. There's a different kindergarten teacher in that classroom. And I think, you know, we just have to be careful about that. >> Questions? Okay. Do we have public comment on this item? [clears throat] >> I you all know who I am. I was at home. I was listening in. I decided I had to show up here. Um few things to cover. First off, the

070lady at the beginning, not Representative Weey Thomas. Completely nuts. Julie Harris is a gem. I will die on that hill. Um she's wonderful. Great principal. Uh second point, Anya Twig with her um analysis of the statistical variation across those numbers. You didn't really learn anything. The deviation is is too small. That is too small to make decisions off of. We love numbers. They tell us the truth. Be careful. That is my advice to you. It is 400 representative uh citizens out of 18,000 in the district. That is 2.2% of the population. It's not enough to make an educated decision on. However, Miss Cobb, you landed it. Go for what you know will pass. That is the state we are in. We have to do what you need to survive for the next few years. If

071you have to come back, you have to come back for teacher pay. We love our teachers. They are great. I will also fight for any of the other teachers at Way Thomas. Wonderful. Uh yeah, pretty much all I had. Um I was eating dinner. I'm going to go back to that. Sucks that the teachers are not going to get a pay increase this year. Is what it is. That's the fight we have to fight. We'll do what we can in the school to support them as much as we can. Thank you all. Have a lovely evening. I'm hungry. >> Thank you. >> Any other additional comments on this agenda item? >> [snorts] >> I uh PJ Becker man her parent again. Um yeah, you know, just like the board, this is I would say not

072just disappointing but um embarrassing um for the district. Um, and I think we really, you know, you're talking about the 4% of teachers that are leaving um because of salary specifically and it's in a later item, but um we talk about the increase in agency fees. Um, I think the board should have presented to it like very explicitly the cost of attrition every year as an expense to really think about it um in a and help grapple with how much of that money going to salary or even the stipen that um is going out this year um would offset some of the >> gains and I think it's um it's a marvel that our uh test scores and results are going up despite it. Um, you know, I was looking at the census um data

073and the census tables where they rank the states in relation to public elementary secondary school finance um amounts [clears throat] for $1,000 of personal income. And RVSD's uh state and local uh [clears throat] revenue is the equivalent of Indiana or 46th if it was a state. Um, and the California statewide total is uh we're at $26.40 per,000 of personal income. California statewide is $4057 uh per $1,000 of income. So when we talk about what our funding is relative to the state, we're also we're not really considering what our funding is relative to the state when you factor in the relative uh net worth of uh these of the community. And I think the community would be embarrassed to know that they're funding their schools at a 46 out of 50 states in the US uh

074wide level. And this is the impact that it's having. And when we talk about the economic climate and the tariffs and the taxes and the rent and cost of living expenses, those should not be a we can't raise the money because of this. It's this is all the things that the increase has to pay for. Um, you know, and I'm afraid of attrition increasing more than it already is. >> Thank you. Any additional public comment? All right, seeing none, I will close public comment. Do we have discussion here for the board? [snorts] It's terrible. [snorts] Period. But it's a fire under our butts. And the relationship that Tyler you've created across the district is awesome. We heard the buzz advisory committee. You know, people know where we are. People know we're not hiding money anymore.

075Not a tree that's in your office. >> We never were hiding money. They don't think >> Not that we're not hiding in it. Just want to clarify that. I know this mess. [laughter] >> One one thing I heard from uh someone that I talked to pretty frequently is there's a big difference between transparency and clarity. Transparency, if someone wants to know our budget, it's posted online. It we're fully transparent. You can go leap through that thing, print it out, highlight it, run it through chat GPT, talk to a consultant, like it we're transparent, but having it posted online is not clear. There are lots of people that can't read that document. It's a difficult doc document to read. Clarity is making something complex simple for the average Sanelmo or Fairfax resident or teacher to understand.

076And I think that's where Chris and our team has done a really remarkable job of making something complex digestible and simple so people clearly understand it. And that's where you get a relationship with the union to say, "Okay, we're going to take 0% even though we're disappointed about it because we understand the context." That's why I'm like, you know, I'm embarrassed about the 0%, but [clears throat] I'm proud about the collective understanding of where we are. And I think one of the reasons I worked so hard on measure E was I didn't want to end up here. Like I know our teachers deserve more than 0%. I know it like in my core. And I worked so hard because I knew this was a result and we've had it on all the presentations. Like this

077is one of the ramifications of us not passing measure E. So I've got this top of my mind when I'm thinking of like what we have to do for the next one and what we need to look at and how we make sure we do pass that because I don't want to see a 0% on here ever again as a trustee ever. As a citizen, I don't want to see that. Like I know what our teachers are worth and it's not this. So yeah, this is both disappointing but also like I'm really thankful that we do have a relationship with our teachers that they understand that we're doing their best for them and we're going to keep doing that. I'm going to work twice as hard on the next measure whenever that comes about. But

078um yeah, I'm I'm [snorts] just it's sad >> and I don't I don't personally regret going out for the special election. Um, I think you know the superheroes, Anna Twig, Anna Marsh, you others to to name I could name them all busted butts to to educate and get this going and we exceeded what we were expected to in terms of the outcome and the results, right? We were just shy of passing it. Um, so I I I think I think that going out again is a logical step. I feel I feel confident that it's going to be successful with the same superheroes I hope coming forward. Um, but I really hope that this doesn't result in attrition. Um, I really hope we don't lose any more of our great teachers. It's hard to not get

079a raise for two years running, right? Um, so I just want to recognize um the teachers that are staying knowing we're working our butts off to try to get this change. >> I mean, that's why I started coming to board meetings a couple years ago was I did not understand. It was not easy. >> Nothing was clear. >> Teachers didn't know like our community didn't know like why are we not paying our teachers more? And from then to now I feel like we are working as a team. People are do understand it's become you know it's not the board against everybody else. It's much and I have seen that change and been a part of it and that feels good. This is >> so sad. Um I dug through my closet today. I'm like, I

080have to have something red, but I it's the only thing I own that's red. Um, yeah, it breaks my heart. I mean, my kids are in second and fourth grade and they have had the best teachers. They don't care who they have every year because they're all so good. And yeah, I mean we it's it's my number one priority and this is what we need to I mean we're we're I just I want it for all our kids in our community and we're we're going to work hard. I also wanted to add to coming back from the California School Board CSBA California School Board Association conference as well and hearing from some other colleagues around the state. >> Yeah. >> Also just added more appreciation to the working relationship that has been developed to move

081through this from what I've heard from other colleagues in other districts across the state and what they're going through. Again, nobody's happy with it's weird to say nobody's happy with the outcome, but It was awesome the way that we've been able to work together and I feel hopeful for the future with the last presentation, this presentation, the work, the groundwork, the foundation that's been laid, you know. So, I'm feeling disappointed and hopeful. And I also really appreciate extending that concept of who should feel embarrassed or disappointed to like the entire community. Um, not just, oh, the school district should be doing this or the school district should be disappointed in the fact that it didn't pass or the school district should be disappointed that you're at the bottom. It's like, no, it's all of us

082because it's the community that comes together to help fund our school district. That's public education. So, I really appreciated that extension of it's not just it's everybody that needs to feel this. Um so any discussion on this one otherwise I think we have to vote to accept this one >> or not. >> So the action is to the action >> uh to approve the tenative agreement. >> Approve the tenative agreement. So that's no longer tenative. >> Correct. >> So would you like to make a motion? So, I'll make a motion that we approve the tenative agreement between Ross Valley School District and the Ross Valley Teacher Association to resolve negotiations for the 2526 school year and the AB 1200 disclosure. >> Great. Do I have a second? >> I'll second. Thank you, Daniel. >> Hi,

083>> Anna. >> I Shel. >> I Chris. >> I >> Rachel. Our next item is recommended approval of the first interim budget report. Go ahead, Chris. >> So before Chris gets started, um I just want to name two quick things. Uh some of you may have read a Marin article I think a week or two ago about uh Marin districts losing 2% of their uh enrollment. In that article buried kind of towards the bottom was actually some data showing Ross Valley is actually increasing their enrollment. Um, now I I say that now just to name that a lot of districts are making cuts and having challenges with their budget right now. And a lot of it has to do with either a uh sunsetting COVID funds or b decreasing enrollment. We certainly are facing the

084same things. We are seeing some suns setting funds from from COVID. However, we are seeing slight upticks in our enrollment. Part of that is expanding TK. Part of that is our messaging and our communication to the community. Um, but I just wanted to kind of name that before we dive into the first interim. So, Chris, take it away. [snorts] >> So, the first thing that well, first of all, thank you for the opportunity to discuss the first interim with you this evening. But the first thing we wanted to do was to kind of give you an overview of where we are [snorts] as we stand right now. Um, and you've heard earlier, uh, Tyler was talking about us being in the bottom 4% of of the state in terms of our LCFF revenues. That's really

085a critical thing to to understand. But then the other component of that is we are we have gone from a community funded district last year to a state aid funded district this year. And so they consider that to be teetering and we expect to teeter back into community funded next year. And so we have these large swings in our LCFF revenue. So that's where we are within our budget the current year and moving forward into our multi-year projections. As Tyler was alluding to just a moment ago, our enrollment is up as a district and uh that is primarily due to TK students and there are offsets with our revenues. But the other part of that is at the same time we have a lot of absences due to illness and as such our attendance rates

086are starting to drop as well. So um that's important to kind of have in in the back of our minds. >> But that's cyclical because we're in a middle of a flu walking pneumonia epidemic, right? So that by spring hopefully that will >> what we traditionally see is is a higher attendance um rate percentage. So if we say that um 99% of our kids come to school the first day of school by the time you get to the end of the year your average is somewhere around 95% 96%. um but in between it may have fluctuated and so it generally drops throughout the year. So as we look at it right now what we've seen is we've seen it drop lower than we were even last year. >> The last three years we were 93%

08794% 95%. So in the last three years we're increasing. Um so far this year we're at 94.2. what Chris is saying that usually your numbers are a little higher in the fall and they kind of dwindle. Um, but past performance isn't always indicative of future performance. So, I think what we can do is continue to message the community, send your kids to school, you know, unless they're throwing up or have a fever, send your kids to school because it makes a big difference. Again, we talked about this a lot last year. Every kid in a in a classroom is $75 a day for the school. If you do that, on average it's about half a million dollars of last lost revenue. Um, and I'll talk a little bit more about this difference of funding. Many

088states fund their schools based on enrollment, not attendance. California is rare in that it funds on attendance. Um, there is some legislation in in the works to move it to enrollment and that would help us to the tune of, you know, 500 to 8 $800,000 would be and that's real money that we're that we need. So, um, I'll talk more about that later. >> So, the other thing that is important to note is in as you start to get towards the weeds a little bit more, our parcel tax revenues, you see, um, what's built into our multi-year projections, it's important to note that in the fourth year, uh, we would have to, as it stands right now, remove all of our parcel tax revenues. So that's the reason for the um agenda item that we

089had um discussing with God and related to the the questions. The other thing that's important is negotiations. Um and negotiations we do have the RVTA settlement that was just approved by the governing board and again thank you to RBTA for all of the hard work on that. Um and there is a lot more work for us to do on our end. um related to to revenues, but we still have CSEA and management unsettled. So those are future impacts potentially with the district. There's been some positive changes to the district budget, um we have in terms of our revenues, we have LCFF revenues, um which the higher enrollment and higher TK numbers have increased our our attendance and our our LCFF revenues. Uh, our federal revenues are up. We had something that happened um this year.

090It's the first time I've ever had this happen where I actually questioned numbers from the state and our we were in a meeting, Julie and I were in a meeting with the county office of education and they shared our new title one uh allocation and I went that's double what it what we would traditionally get is their mistake. and the county office of education went back to the state and the state went through the numbers with a fine tooth comb and came back and said because your poverty numbers have been going up in the district you now qualify for a little bit more money and so our federal revenues have gone up by 86,000. It's something that could go away in the future but it is a positive within our budget right now. Uh the

091other thing that's that's positive is we have the new um one-time grant um that the new student support and professional development [snorts] block grant that we received at the beginning of the year with the June budget adoption. So that get got built in um plus some additional state dollars. And then we also have $24,000 in more facility use um beyond what we had budgeted for. >> Go ahead. >> I was just going to say that's all positive news. >> Two quick things. the local revenues for 24K, that is our revised facilities use agreement. People paying for the use of our fields and our uh and our gyms. So, we get to put that right back into our fields and make our fields better for the community. So, that's a big positive. The state revenue that

092is actually all spent already. Half of it just went to the RVTA settlement, that $1,000 off schedule, straight out of that bucket. >> That was my question. >> Yep. And then the other half of it is to pay our counselors who we've cut from the budget but are backfilling for one more year with this. Um so that is a positive in the budget but also we've already have a plan to spend it. Um >> okay [snorts] >> so with all the positives there are negatives. Um, and so I kind of detailed the the numbers off to the right, but different things that kind of go into making those up. We just had a salary settlement that was agreed upon. Those are negatives that you see. You see them in terms of employee benefits and salaries.

093Uh, you have continued u use of agency staff for unfilled positions. And so what we've done is reduced our salary and benefits for positions that we have to budget for at the beginning of the year and then move those dollars into agency as we're spending those. and and we'll keep those dollars there and if if we hire somebody then they go back into employee salary and benefits. >> So just as like an oversimplified version of that we budget $100,000 round number for a teacher but if we can't fill the position we have to go to an agency it cost us $120,000. So that increases the budget at first interim because we would we would logically assume [clears throat] that we're gonna budget for a you know [cough] one of our teachers and if we can't

094fill it we've got to go out to the agency at a about a 20% premium >> and it's just kind of shifting. >> And when we go to these agencies are they on retainer? Do we continuously pay them anyway to tap into their services or we only pay them when we need them to build? We only pay for actual services rendered. >> Okay. >> So they they submit to us like a more or less like a time card for the person they >> just checking. >> Do we agencies compare this? I'm just curious right now compared to a year ago is it about the same generally would you say? >> Um we have hired a few more staff this year. We just replaced a um resource teacher that was an agency hireer with a certificated

095hire. So we're we're always looking and trying >> and we've hired several instructional aids as well for for example [snorts] for agency. So there's some of that. >> So good good example. We had a position at uh White Hill. We budget the 100,000 the hypothetical 100,000. We had to hire the $120,000 agency person. We kept that position posted so we could get an internal hire. We internally hired. Now we're paying the internal rate, not the agency rate. So that's a a win. On the flip side, we have an SDC where we have an agency person in in the special day class because we couldn't find an internal person. >> The the other option is just to not have a certificated teacher there. And then there's all these uh settlement agreements that we have to do

096with special ed families because we don't have a certificated teacher in there. So it a 20% premium it's like yes yes yes please here you go. >> No that's an essential role. Yeah we need that. >> So I think the agency thing is complex and unfortunate. >> Every district in the state of California is facing this >> and we want to do everything we can to hire internal. If you've got great people that want to work in our district let us know. We're always hiring. >> I mean agency this it goes beyond schools. It is a problem everywhere. problem. >> But you rais a good point though because these aren't these aren't linear costs. These are tentacled costs that become bigger because if we lose a resource person and we can't meet the needs that

097student, then we're facing a lawsuit >> down the road and we don't have a leg to stand on. If we can't meet the services with that kid, we're looking at an additional six figures at some point, right? So yeah, >> your better service kind of goes back to parcel tax. >> Okay. >> All right. >> It all goes back to >> all back to the parcel. >> It's a It's a good It's a good point though, right? So that that SDC, the special day class position that we have a current agency person in. If we had bigger salaries, we could hire that position and get the person in. The same story could be told for Spanish at White Hill. We've had a little bit of a revolving door. very difficult to bring someone in when

098you've got to drive down Sir Francis Drake and they've got Spanish openings in all those districts that pay way more. So why would you drive all the way to, you know, deep Fairfax for a 30% less [snorts] pay? >> And kind of going along that same theme, that that kind of gets into the staffing and student needs. So things change throughout the year. So what we budgeted for might be different than what we where we're at right now and we need to um hire additional positions, that type of thing. And so those things get built into the first interim. We also have one-time related costs, things such as the parcel tax, special education review, um which we're doing currently, some grant writing, hopefully looking for additional um revenue sources that that are out there that

099are built in. And that's not an all-inclusive list. There's a lot more, but those types of things are are built in. And then you get into other things that are your categorical funds like your carryover dollars that we are spending dollars on. Things like your new textbook adoption, like your TK furniture for all of the new TK classrooms that we were purchasing for at the beginning of the school year. So, all of those go into those budgets and help to drive those costs up. It's not unusual for this to happen where you get these large swings to start the year at first and end. It's something that's really common >> and I know I'm sorry. Go ahead. >> I was going to say the what you just mentioned the textbooks that's under that's the supplies

100>> that goes under the supplies. Yes. Along with the the TK classroom furniture [clears throat] ends up under supplies as well. >> And I know it takes a lot of person power to do this and sort of resources but in tough times we do tough things. And I and my understanding is there are grants out there that we probably haven't even explored. Correct. Or I'm sure you have. I don't know. How are we approaching that universe? Like I know that there have been some grants that you've applied for that we've gotten which has been wonderful, but have we explored other opportunities to tap into potential grants? something as simple as a garden grant to, you know, I don't know. I don't know what's out there, but I'm just trying to understand how we can grasp

101its straws for some type of money coming in. >> Anytime I see a CDE grant, I look at it and I'll forward it to Chris and we'll kind of mull it over. A lot of times they require matching funds. So, in order to get 500,000, you got to pay 500,000. We just don't have that kind of money. Um, we have worked with the county office of education to do a uh CTE or uh >> career tech career technology thank you career technical education grant for our makers lab at White Hill. Um, but that's $10,000. Uh, we're also spending I think it's about $7,000 on a grant writer who knows the whole world of grants out in the United States and he's applying for some grants. So things that I wouldn't know even exist, he knows

102that they come up and um he'll apply for a few of them for us. >> That's great. >> What's the timeline on that? >> It just depends on the the degree. >> He just applied for one and there's going to be another one in the spring. The two that we're targeting are all around school safety. So could fund things like fencing and cameras and you know updated things just to keep our campuses safe and secure. training for our staff uh with an earthquake or a fire or you know any other thing that would happen on campus. >> My I would I would also say I mean I think grants are helpful for one time or for equipment or capital things >> but I really would shy away from any kind of grant funding for ongoing

103known expense because then >> it's just so much it's unstable. We should, right? >> We should >> through our public funding as a public institution fund ourselves not on annual big sales. >> I'm not I'm not I'm not I'm not implying that we should have an annuitized approach to it. >> I'm just thinking at this point after agreeing to a 0% raise to our teachers and looking at these negative numbers, >> we should be grasping at everything we can right now just to fill the gap. And so for instance, this one thing that we applied for and I'm hoping we get is built into it is some training for teachers that would require them to come a day early in the summer that we would pay them their daily rate. So it would be like

104a half a percent raise for them baked into this this training. So there we're trying to get creative with how can we use safety dollars to get some one-time money to our teachers and improve our you know security for students. >> So it's going towards salaries but for one time type things as opposed to something that for somebody's position. >> Yeah. Right. That's creative. >> We're trying. When looking at our general fund, um what you can see here is in the 2526 year, we now show a deficit of 3,80,000 um in 2526. And we do show our deficit dropping substantially in the general fund moving forward in 2627 and 2728. Um the other thing that is important to note on this slide is just we talked about being a teeter district. you see us teetering

105back and forth uh down at the bottom. [snorts] >> Can I you go back to that one? >> No. >> If you're a teetering district, what that means is that you essentially receive the bare minimum level of funding that you could get from the state. That's what it means. The deeper you are into state aid or the deeper you are on community funded means you have more money than the state would give you as a base grant. This essentially shows that Ross Valley School District gets the base. So whatever, whoever the, you know, founding women and men of the LCFF decided, well, this is the absolute bare minimum we would ever need to give a school district, that's what we get. >> You also see it kind of to dovtail on that, you see it

106penned out in the LCFF revenues. If you look at the 2425, it's 19.6 6 million and it's 19.3 million in 2526. And so that's because we received more money in 2425 due to to increased property taxes. So you see these large swings in our revenues. The other thing that is important to note, this is a slide that we've shown before. um when looking at our uh adopted budget versus our first interim, you do see um things that have gone into it um getting worse, things such as the the salary settlement, for example. You've got some onetime costs that go in there and again some of those other things that we were talking about that um you know, services, etc. that are ongoing expenses that are increasing. And so we still are above 3% but it's

107important to note that those are getting pretty tight for us. And um from a CBO perspective, these can be kind of scary. >> Just another talking point that we've talked about for about 18 months. Uh the state requirement in that third year out is 3%. We're at 4.2 there. The board policy is 10%. We're at 4.2. And the state average for elementary school districts is 25%. So well below that >> and again coming back to the parcel tax we are only we've only been able to weather this situation because in 21 22 22 23 23 24 we had in [clears throat] reserves what we had. >> Yep. So, we've been able to weather this, eek out, not have to make crazy cuts so far except for this time, give a little bit of raises that

108we could give simply because we had those reserves. >> If we are now saying, which I'm not saying because I think if we somehow recalibrate downward that the new normal is now 4%. Or we're saying, well, the state only said 3%, so let's just hang out at 3%. we will not be able to weather anything else ever again and we will be constantly in a state of turmoil >> even with a parcel even with you know so that's just another one of those factors when we go out and ask for what we need I know we can't ask for huge reserves but I do think it's important for us to note that if we don't have adequate reserves >> we don't have anything to weather anything again so >> that's a really good point there

109can you go back one slide real [snorts] quick had a [clears throat] thought and see if it can come back to me. So if you look at 2425 down in the net change in fund balance you see 2.6 million deficit and then in 2526 you see $3 billion deficit in brackets there. That's the fiscal cliff that Chris has been talking about. That's it right there. It's not the 2324 year because that's relatively reasonable. It's the 2425 and the 2526. Those big numbers. That's the fiscal cliff. We had to have revenue or we had to have reserves in order to weather that fiscal cliff. We're there. We're getting dangerously close, but we either have to increase revenue through attendance, enrollment, or increase local funding, or we have to cut student programs. Those are our options. And

110I I just want to also give a shout out to past board members as the person who like the old historian who've been here. I just want to give a shout out to passport members who took a lot of heat in decades ago to maintain go back to the next slide to maintain the reserves at what they were in 21 like pre2122 and the people who were sitting in our seats really took a lot of heat >> for having that level of revenue and I just want to shout out some appreciation to them because had they not >> been able to understand the importance of that. We in these seats now would not be able to be making the decisions that we've been able to make. >> Chris keeps saying, >> I don't know if

111they're listening or whatever, I'm just feeling a moment of appreciation for the heat that they took for that. >> Yeah, Chris keeps saying salary settlements. There really wasn't a salary settlement. There was a health and welfare benefits settlement because we gave 0%. But without these reserves, you could see a world in which we don't keep up with the cost of health and welfare benefits. And that is an effective uh reduction in salary for staff and teachers because we wouldn't be covering health and welfare benefits for singlepayer. So the reserves helped us from giving you know actually reduction in salary. So next steps um one of the things that we have to do is go through AB1200. AB1200 looks at uh it it was put in place by the state because districts went belly up and

112went to the state for u emergency loans. And so this the county office of education has the oversight of our district. And so they have to approve each of our budgets. And at the budget adoption, they gave us a a a quote in here where they're in essence requiring us at first interim to uh come up with a plan on how we're going to eliminate those deficits in the future so that we can maintain those reserves and have the ability to to to move as we go forward as a district in in the whole. And so what we are doing here is showing first we had the budget advisory committee. So we went through and had a budget advisory committee meeting in November. Then we had a a follow-up meeting last Thursday uh here in

113December. And what we were doing is helping to prioritize and and look at uh budget cuts um for recommendations to the governing board. uh the the board of trustees in a uh agenda item after this will be discussing um what that budget cut plan will look like. Uh and so we have to come up with that plan for cuts into the future. That those aren't cuts that are going to be made this year, not cuts necessarily for next year either. Um but it's things that are out there for the 27 28 year. And uh then we also are are looking at potentially um very seriously looking at parcel tax renewal and increase. Obviously that's something that has to happen. Um and the other thing that Tyler has talked about several times this evening has to

114do with our enrollment and our attendance and and really focusing on that. That's kind of what we need to to refocus on. um and um you know just moving forward those types of things. >> Can I ask a question about enrollment in attendance and forgive me if I'm asking a stupid question but if we start off the school year strong as we always have and the pattern is is that it does eventually go down. What long-term impact do we actually get from focusing on enrollment and attendance when it always deviates from the highest number we need for it to make an impact. >> So the way that the attendance works is we get >> it's counted at that one point in time right >> one point in time which is our P2 attendance report. So

115>> okay enrollment not attendance there is a one point in time. >> How do we work that? >> I was just going to say so theoretically if we know what the P2 date is we could be like go [laughter] to class this day, >> right? >> I'm just trying to figure out like we can we can focus on it as an idea, >> but the actual realization of the benefit of that number is going to be tossing the dice and preaching something that's not going to work in the long run. Right? >> So, I'm going to take a step back just for a second because you talked about two different things. So when you're talking enrollment from a budgetary standpoint, I count enrollment as a single day. That single day is all of the children

116that were enrolled in the school on the first Wednesday in October. That's called our CBEDS date. So for me, that's the important date for enrollment. >> Okay. >> For that kids could come at a 50% rate that day. And Chris still has the enrollment number, not the attendance number. Okay. >> So, they're enrolled in school. >> For attendance, it's an accumulation of how many days that they're coming to school every day. So, >> it's an average. It's an averaging [snorts] and accumulation of every time the teacher is taking attendance. It's not just a snapshot. >> Correct. And so, that is a date at the end of March and it fluctuates every year. It's not a set date. So going back to my original question is if attendance starts to go dwindle over time anyway, >>

117how are we going to put a dent in that when we're in the 90s 90 94 >> it's a it's a question of how deep is this slide right? So if we start the year off on day one at 99%. How long can we maintain somewhere around 97%. Which is kind of pre- pandemic numbers or during the pandemic you would see it go down to like low 90s. So what you want to do is basically maintain as high a rate as possible. It's not a um >> predictable the the decline is not a predictable amount. Why [clears throat] does the state do two different times of year? >> It's just their the way they do it. So one again is the enrollment and the other is your attendance. And your attendance again is an accumulation.

118>> So to move us on the bottom point there is I think one thing we started to do is some state advocacy. So we're doing everything we can attendance, enrollment, grant writing, budget cuts, local funding, state advocacy. that we're not leaving a stone unturned. The state advocacy, there's a a two-year assembly bill called Assembly Bill 1204 that has a few different provisions in it. One of which is a regional cost of living calculator buff. So for places like Santa Clara County, Sano County, and Marin County, there would be a a recognition that it's a high cost of living area and you would need a little bit more to fund your schools. that is literally for us. We need to advocate for AB1204. I'd invite any community member, parent or otherwise, to get on board and

119help us advocate for AB1204. Um, within AB204 and another uh assembly bill that's out there, there is a provision to start doing just enrollment and not attendance. That's what I talked about a little while ago. It would be about a $500 to $800,000 boon to us if we were just funded on enrollment, not attendance. I remember hearing a couple years ago that we want that, but other districts would lose money. So, it's I don't know if that's still true, but and all if if we get more money, other places are going to have to lose money. So, that's the fight >> that it's not just great, we'll just give everybody more money. Well, what it does is it narrows the gap a little bit between a community funded district and a basic aid district, >>

120which to your point is like okay with us. Um, we are kind of teetering district getting that base minimum from the state and we're surrounded by there was a great article in Ed Source not too long ago that there are a few districts in the state that are like us that are on [snorts] the bottom of the funding level but they're surrounded by deep basic aid districts and it's very difficult to run a district when your your competition is able to, you know, far outpace you. And the only I was just going to talk about it in relation to our first bullet up there. Um the LCFF was originally put in to to kind of level the playing field for all districts. But what has happened is that districts and it seems to be primarily

121here in the Bay Area uh that are really high cost of living districts. you might have a really low um Prop 13 um property rate within your your district boundaries because homes aren't turning over at a real high level. And so it might cost a fortune to get in to one of those homes, but they're not selling. And what ends up happening is that lower tax base has a negative impact on districts. and you end up with a district like us that is in the bottom 4% of the state. Even though we're in a really high cost of living area, our properties are really pricey and if we were to sell every one of them, we'd be probably deep in in community funded status and wouldn't be having this type of a discussion. So, that's

122just something um >> I mean that's that is it. That is huge. like that education piece right there is what with measure E with I mean we [snorts] a lot of people do not they don't know that and it's certainly our job our community here to educate people of that because a lot of people still assume that wait what our property tax like they don't know that piece of Prop 13 and how the percentage of our community that like you said the homes and that is educ our job all of us to educate the community to understand that >> so then the other thing that's really important to note and from an education standpoint is that our district LCFF revenues are two roughly $2720 less than the statewide average and if you were to look

123at our students that's about $4.6 $6 million. >> That's what I was talking about, the size of the problem earlier. >> The difference between our $11,771 per pupil revenue versus the state average of 14,494 is that $2720. Multiply that by our 1720 students, that's $4.6 million. That's the size of the problem. That's just the average. 80% of that is 3.6 million. So even measure E was asking for less than that and what we pulled on recently was somewhere between 2.9 and 3.6. So not even getting us to the statewide average. And this is where I think the community needs to come out and share where do we want to fall? Do we want to go significantly less than measure E or should we go closer to what the size of the real problem is? I'm

124eager to hear from folks. And then just finally um to double down on what Tyler was mentioning a few moments ago, you know, we welcome any any assistance from the community in getting out that advocacy at the state level for any of those bills and just, you know, getting more funding to to a district like Ross Valley in general. So, and with that, I think I am done. I know we've had a lot of questions already, but if are there any other questions? >> Oh, sorry. [laughter] >> That's okay. >> It actually works better that way because then you get >> Yeah, in the moment. >> Yeah, [clears throat] >> I have one the um what was it the third slide? The federal revenue up 86,000. How much is that? Would you say that's equal

125like is that equivalent to what we spend for that on the students you think or is that end up a net positive net like how does that >> well we only spend it in things that we can afford. So what we do with the dollars, we primarily use it for intervention teachers. Um so that's the type of services that we would use it for >> and our intervent the total cost of our intervention program far exceeds what we get from uh title one. So this increase in title one will help offset some of our general fund obligation that we pay towards that program. So, it's not going to No new programs, but a little bit of relief, >> right? Okay. >> Could could you go to the slide where you listed uh year out? No,

126fourth year out has a zero to it. >> It was like the >> I'm sorry, I'm having trouble going back on the slides. >> It's the partial tax revenues where it drops to zero. I just wanted to look at those dates because for our next conversation about when I think >> I think what I'm hearing is that the idea of having to make cuts coincides with that zero and so I just wanted to look at the dates and >> one more clarify >> but we have to make so we have to make cuts in the 2728 year because we know that the if we don't this is the if the parcel tax doesn't pass scenario kind of thing part partially is that the Yes. And so in order to have a a positive budget in

127the 2728 school year, we're going to have to cut at least a million dollars. >> However, you have June of this year or November of next year to pass a partial tax. If it doesn't happen in November, the cuts that we'll have to make for far exceed what we'll talk about tonight. >> Yes. >> Right. So when you say June of this year, you mean this school year? >> Yes. So June of this school year, if there are not increased local revenues, we're going to have to cut a minimum of a million dollars. We'll talk about that in the next but in the next uh agenda item. [snorts] And then if something doesn't happen for local revenue in November of next school year of 2026, the the size of the cuts are much more significant

128and the implications are >> astronomical. >> They're they're huge. I will talk about those specifically in the next item. >> I just wanted to look at this time frame both for this because I know we we're we are looking at our budgets in three-year tres. >> When Chris comes to you with a budget in June, likely potentially right before the partial tax vote happens. If you all decided to go out in June, the third year out is going to have $5 million taken out of the budget. you're gonna have a negative budget >> the 2728 >> for 2829 >> for 28 >> because if you look when at budget adoption in June you're going to see 2627 2728 and the third year out is going to be 2829 with a loss of $5 million in

129local rent >> because that's where the parallel track >> that's right >> okay thank you >> any other questions from the board on this one >> questions we We'll open it up to public comment. >> Thanks, Chris. >> Yes, Chris. >> Good evening, everyone. So, [clears throat] looking at all this stuff, it seems very dire and um I was at a meeting yesterday in regards to live on the Avenue and all these young families that are kids go to the yes, you know, go to Ross Valley School District. They had over 200 responses because they were going to move Live on the Avenue to just one night. So, the problem is communication. You can get Michael Kristoff from It's a Vive and get Ryan Scott and all these guys putting out stuff because they're going

130to cut one day from Live on the Avenue because some of the business hurts their businesses and we can't get those same people to look at this stuff. So what's the problem is what people feel is important is what the problem is. The other point I'd like to make is when we're talking about advocacy Tyler we need people that are going to be going to our state representatives then Damon I think Jared and why aren't we doing that? So what we're it seems like we're going from the bottom up instead of top down. And so we need to rethink how we're going to be doing these things and making sure that the people are getting this information because if they feel that live on the avenue is more important than us losing our schools, our

131teachers, and all the other things instead of pointing out what Prop 13's doing and all this other we all know that. What we need to do is get them to understand what's important to them. going downtown and having fun on a Friday instead of a Saturday or vice versa or keeping the best teachers in our school district. So, your messaging has to change. I sit here and listen and it's Groundhog Day. You guys are saying the same thing over and over again for three years. We need to try a different approach. Thank you for your time. >> Any other comments? >> Just one second. >> [clears throat] >> Sorry, >> it's a brand new system. >> Okay. Appreciate your patience. Thank you. Um, PJ Becker Man parent. Um, first, thank you for the presentation, Chris.

132My only criticism is I feel like asking about the title one money is like you're the student asking the teacher to to remind them to give us more homework uh uh with with whether or not we got too much money. Um, one thing that, uh, the board hasn't discussed yet in detail for this budget. You, we discussed it a little bit in terms of the agency fees is the, um, services um, spending and the professional services, you know, object, you know, 5800 uh, line item code. And you know, I understand this is an issue facing everybody, but comparing to the four peer districts um that we use for the other sort of budget presentations, Larsburg, quarter, Madera, Kentfield, and Miller Creek. Um we are still the outlier um you know, significantly and it's a big

133number. I mean just overall services um from our adopted budget to um this one going from $4.9 million to 6.4 million almost 30% increase and that $1.5 million would be a over a 10% increase on the salary schedule. Like 1% increase on the salary schedule is $140,000. Um so you know getting that percentage increase down to match you know the 14.9% in Kentfield or uh 6.9% in large quarter port Madera um and and trying to cut those back is is the something percentage salary increase you know Tyler you know brought up that the uh there was a health and welfare increase um otherwise there would be a salary reduction but there already is a salary reduction like the CPI for this year is 3.09% so not getting that is a salary you know getting 0%

134as opposed to 3.09 9 is a salary reduction. And then, you know, just a point I've made before, but especially in light of the conversation on having to pay more for agency fees and having to pay more for settlements for special education costs, the prior board didn't get enough heat. Having those reserves means that you're having more attrition and putting us constantly behind the eightball and not being able to uh keep our expenses down. Any more public comment? Okay, seeing that I will close public comment and bring it back to the board here discussion on our budget. I think one thing that I just want to note for everyone is that we are looking at this from every single angle. We are looking at it from increased revenue through local funding i.e. parcel tax enrollment

135with marketing attendance with our attendance campaign grant writing and we're looking for budget reductions through our budget advisory committee and we are doing letterw writing campaigns and advocacy at the state level for state legislation to change the LCFF. So there is not a rock unturned. We're taking this extremely seriously and we're not doing we're we're not leaving any potential option for increased revenue or budget reductions off the table at this point. >> I want to go back to what Anna said earlier about how before she became part of measur and came onto the board she was like what's going on? Why can't we pay our teachers more? Why are we not people move here for the schools? You know, I know we did. And what are we missing from a and I've always thought this

136from a marketing perspective, right? Like we can talk about this at these meetings. We can same people will listen. the same people will show up. But what are what are we doing with marketing to the people that just bought the $2 million home down the street and are planning to have children go to the schools? I'm trying to figure out what what what are we missing? Everyone should be chanting everywhere ubiquitously the same thing. We're we're we're living in million-dollar homes in a Kentucky education system. Okay. >> Funding, not outcomes, but funding. >> Outcomes are amazing. Outcomes are amazing, but the funding. And where where is the disconnect? Are we failing or I'm just trying to wrap my head around this because when I moved here, I thought the same thing. And now that I'm

137sitting up here, I'm kind of like, what made my light bulb go go off is because I had to study this stuff. And not everybody does that. >> So, we've got to figure out it's we've got to figure out how to shift the message. We've got >> I mean, you're telling somebody sitting in a $2 million home whose kids are getting an awesome education that we're broke. And they're just like, that doesn't make any sense. >> That doesn't make any sense. But it's true because the way that education is funded is this crazy outlier of any kind of somebody's rational business funding models that the person who's living in the $2 million home probably was educated in their business school on. And they're thinking, well, schools are run like businesses, right? But those economic dials

138are not the same. >> But talk to me like I'm in the third grade and I have 20 seconds of your time. That's what I that's what we need to do. Like >> what? >> More. >> I guess I've never That's We're always talking about we need more, we need more. What What What's the goal? >> Our our elementary schools are approximately 260 to 275 kids. >> Yeah. >> Um they have capacity for probably closer to 350 or 400. Okay. >> I would have to look into the numbers with Chris on that, but >> you know, another 400 kids, 500 kids in the district. Okay. If we're up closer to 2,000 students, um, that would be pretty good. >> And how many I'm curious compared to other counties of people living in our district are

139going to private schools versus Morin County. Like that's got to have something to do with it, too. Like we can't both I mean, >> it's pretty standard across the state. It's usually about 30% of whatever the community is goes to private. Um, and public school enrollment has been declining and so has private school. So, you know, you'll hear the anecdote of someone leaving for a private school or, you know, a couple people leaving a school to go to a different private school for something. Um, but it's it's pretty negligible. Um, yeah, and the more kids that we have come to us, the better, whether they're going to a charter school or a private school or a, you know, any other school in the area, we want to serve every Fairfax and Santa kid in our

140schools. I mean, if we bring more kids in, we have to hire more staff. So, yay, more kids. Boo, more money, right? [clears throat] >> And I think this is kind of the essence of what happens in measurse conversations. We start getting into the weeds because you're right, more kids in the LCFF year, that's a good thing. We have more money. But the next year when we're base, it hurts us. >> The core thing is there's 995 districts in the state of California. We rank 959 out of funding. If we want good schools, we have to find another way to to fund them. And the hard thing is when people are like thinking about like go get money, then the way schools are funded are through property taxes. That's it. There's no other way they

141come. The money we get from the state is from property taxes. It just goes from the property tax to the state to us. And then the parcel tax is just straight from the pro the parcel to us. It doesn't go to the third party. So there's no other way to find money that's ongoing other than increased property taxes. >> So I think if someone >> whether it's from the state level, if we if we advocate at the state level and increase the LCF, that means an increase to property taxes. That's what it looks like. >> Well, back to Daniel's comment initially. I think if someone knocked on my door and said, "Would you pay more, a little bit more than you pay to have your garbage picked up, to have your schools be able to

142rise above the lowest level of funding, >> it's a no-brainer." >> Absolutely. >> And I think the simplistic messaging, >> I just want to make sure we just put that in front of us. That has to be right there in front of us as we start to move forward with this. You want to pay more to have your garbage picked up. >> Sewer. >> Specifically sewer. >> Let's say your sewer. Even better. You want to pay more for your sewer than you will for the schools. >> I mean, >> I think the message from the the community members is accurate. It's all about messaging. >> Okay. >> And I think that that is >> and that's a that's a we'll toss that down. >> Simple. >> Let's toss that ahead. But I think we need

143to really make sure that as we move forward, we don't get caught up in the weeds. >> But what can we do here between now and January 27th, February 11th to get again more people in the room that are messaging professionals that that understand social sciences that understand how people think and how we how we can create this simple message. consultants and I so like Teresa and I have been working on our third installment of the community newsletter that gets mailed to everybody in Fairfax and Santa Selmo. My message will be about the parcel tax and I'm inviting people in that message to come to January 27th and February 11th to have your voice heard around the parcel tax. We're also designing a flyer um that is another invitation directly specifically for those two board

144meetings with some messaging. We're doing it. It's the superintendent and the admin [clears throat] assistant. We're not hiring cons consultants. So my guess is these are going to hit mailboxes and people are going to go like this isn't as polished as it should be. But if we hired a consultant, they would be like we [cough] spent $30,000 in consultant. So you're going to get critique either way. We're gonna do the best we can to put out the best product we can at the least uh cost. But those are kind of what we can do. And honestly, all of this is word of mouth. >> Talk to somebody. Talk to five people. Text a text chain. Like that's what this all is about. And I think to the other comment about the live on the Avenue,

145people react to losing something. Well, we're going to talk about that next. >> You you lose life on the avenue, you get fired up. The parcel tax isn't a loss to someone, it's actually an increased cost to them. So, it's harder to motivate someone to say, "Hey, actually, lose some of your money versus lose, you know, a community event." So, I think it's a harder message to to dial in. >> And the [clears throat] problem is that as far as like finding a behavioral economics person to figure out how to do this is you've got delayed gratification. We're our >> crew >> and you've got this competing messaging. So if we want more students, we'd say we've got great schools, which we do. Our academics are great. Come and be a part of this. It's

146a great community, great academics, great schools. So that's a message to get the enrollment up, which helps with money. However, that message then begs the question, well, why do you need more money? You've got these great schools. Why are you asking for more money? What you're doing is great. It's working. And you've had the money that you've had. that comes into the delayed gratification. They're great schools because they're living off of those years where we have high reserves, more money. So, you're always going to have these cycles of delayed fund. You know, you've got more money. So, you invest it, you get a great outcome, but that money now is going away and then the delayed impact to the to the hurt part of it is not going to show up until down the road.

147But, we need you to vote now to keep from getting hurt. So it's like we need you to vote now to not feel the hurt of >> and that's this is the challenge and that's hard to >> how complex is that message? >> You know what I'm saying? So the story that I like to tell is think of it as a business, >> right? We are an efficient business. We spend less and get better outcomes. We spend the least in the county and get some of the best in the county results. We're proud of that. We're on the precipice of making significant cuts that will change the outcome. And if you're a business owner and you're reducing costs by hiring fewer people, you have different customer service, you've reduced prices, you don't have as much

148overhead, so people don't have the product they want. Eventually, your business kind of falls apart and you're not the great business you once were because you've had to reduce so much. We're on that precipice right now. Great outcomes, efficient spending. If we continue to go deeper into more efficient spending, the outcome fails. >> And we we need I mean we have urgency. So we need the education and the door knocking to get so we can get our tax pass. But right looking ahead the delayed gratification um the legislators and I do feel like there are a lot of people in our community they do not want a door knock. That is not their thing. But people have asked and so that's something we can spend some some time educating on okay is there how do

149I who do I contact you know is there a template we could make a template letter like those kinds of things we can start to think about because we I feel like it's something we're starting to talk about more but we could do a little more community education. >> So I'm going to get us focused back on the budget. Yeah, since this is this is probably for our future conversation, do you have any more talk about the interim budget report? >> Thanks. >> Sorry. >> No, just while it still seems complex, I appreciate the simplic I mean, I appreciate being able to put all that education funding into whatever six slides or something is in and of itself >> a great accomplishment for bringing it to become understandable. Thank you. >> And if people don't

150understand, contact us. We will we will help. >> So this is an actual >> Yep. >> And it's acceptance of the No, >> it's recommended approval of the ten of agreement between Oh, wait. Sorry. Recommended approval of the 2025 26 first interim budget report. I'll make a motion to approve the >> first interim budget for the 2025 [snorts] 2026 school year. >> This is for the certification, right, Chris? >> Correct. >> Yeah. Okay. I'll second. >> All right. First and second, Shel. >> Hi, Chris. >> Hi, Hi. [clears throat] >> Hi. >> And drinking a lot tonight. >> [clears throat] >> All right. Our next item is uh recommend acceptance of the budget cuts plan to be implemented in the 202728 school year. >> Yeah, that's me. I'm going to try to go through this

151one relatively quickly because the prior three agenda items all kind of in mesh and connect to this. Um, I want to be really clear with those listening in or those in the room. We're not approving budget cuts tonight. We are approving plans in the event that we don't have increased local revenue by June. Um so that's kind of this is a backup plan to our first plan which is uh an increased and renewed parallel tax >> and it's for the 202728 school year. >> Cuts will be implemented in the 2728 school year >> if the world doesn't fall into place. >> That's right. and would require additional action, >> right? >> Yes, you would have to we would have to come back to you in June >> to have a deeper discussion about which items

152you want to choose and would probably go back to the budget advisory committee to get a little bit more refined within this framework that we're presenting you tonight. >> Thank you for that. Quick question. So, this this satisfies the letter that I got from MCE saying that we needed to work on a budget reduction plan. >> Yep. Yep. So, we will be telling MCE we're cutting the budget by a million dollars including some of these items. It's going to be kind of a loose plan like that. So, we're going to go through a little bit of budget context, although we just went through a lot of budget context in the last agenda item. Um, we'll talk about the budget reductions plan and then some next steps and timeline. So, you know, a lot of people

153ask me like we need talking points. We need talking points. Watch any of the agenda items from today. There's lots of talking points woven in all of these. lowest per pupil funding in the county, bottom 4% of the state, the the district has been cutting the budget, and this is the one I think people forget about. The district has been cutting the budget for five years. So, you know, some of those first initial easy cuts that you would make, like cut the district office administrators, we've done that years ago. So, now we're kind of down to the bone. Um there's an expiring partial tax that represents 15.6% of our budget. Um that happens in the 2829 school year. We have the lowest salaries in the county and we're losing ground. You heard me talk about

154that in the AB1200 [snorts] uh item. >> This is a great slide by the way. >> And the district is deficit spending, particularly that 2425 and 2526 year, the the kind of fiscal cliff we just talked about in the last item. So right down there in the bottom, in spite of the district being really desirable, families are moving here in part because of our schools. We're seeing increased enrollment, improved attendance, our academic outcomes are far exceeding statewide averages. Um, we're near the [snorts] top of Moon County. So, in spite of all that, we're still performing pretty well. This letter we got from MCE that Rachel just highlighted, Chris had in his budget item highlighted a few things there. The budget's approved, but we're deficit spending at an unsustainable level and we need to make cuts.

155That's kind of the underlying parts. That's the core of this message from MCOE. There's some other details in there that we can get into uh later or at another time, but that's the core of that message from MCOE. So, we've had ongoing meetings with the budget advisory committee. Uh they've [snorts] been meeting for actually sorry the misspelling there um or actually that is past tense met for the last three years. I actually remember as a prospective superintendent sitting in this room with uh folks back when I was still working for Centerfell. Um and those meetings have come a long way. We've done a lot of work in those three years. Actually last year we cut $700,000 from the budget and this year we met in October and then again just a few days ago. uh

156members are, you know, there's a whole bunch of parents, teachers, counselors, union leadership, district and sight admin, um a couple trustees, and obviously I was part of that as well. And really our our task is to discuss and identify a prioritized list of budget reductions to the tune of a million dollars. Last year, many of you have already seen this slide. This was kind of our backup plan or our contingency plan to uh measure E. We said we'd cut $500,000. We said we might consider deeper cuts. And we said said salary increases will stagnate, aka 0% um to teachers. All three of those came true. We cut 500. We went deeper to the tune of 700,000 and we gave a 0% increase to our teachers. So that seemed dramatic at the time, but was actually

157just the plan. It was the plan. Um, [snorts] moving forward, these are the plans. So, if we don't have increased funding, um, by June 2026, we may need to consider a million dollars of cuts. Here are some of the items. We'll talk more about that later. And salary increases will continue to further stagnate. So, that's kind of the plan for next school year. Million in cuts, salary, salary stagnating. Now, if it doesn't happen in November 2026, this is when that $5 billion falls off the books that Chris was talking about in the last item, we could need to close a school or two at that at that stage. um continued salary stagnation and there's [clears throat] a real potential of state receiverhip you know in 18 months you know six to 18 months from that

158date we will be a deep deep ne negative uh budget at that point and that's when you know we'll lose local control of our schools the state will come in much like you're seeing in uh Hayward Oakland and San Francisco um so That's not really where we want to be. We want to trying to find a solution, but this is kind of the plan. It's a twofold plan in for June and and November. Tonight, we're really talking about the June 2026 cuts to a million dollars. That's kind of what we're talking about. So, we've kind of developed two buckets of ideas. There are bucket there's an idea there's a bucket of ideas that cost $100,000 or more. In order to get to a million dollars, you got to pick some big ticket items. We're probably

159going to have to pick a couple items from this list. Uh instructional coach, certificated PE, potentially close a school, eliminating uh zero period, that's middle school electives. Um close two schools got some votes. Transitioning our TK program from full day to half day, moving back to Brookside upper and lower instead of Hidden Valley and Brookside. uh actually changing kindergarten to AMM. That one would be a pretty challenging one, but it's a potential uh eliminate art and music and move the yes funding to general fund. Actually talked to the yes uh foundation president today about that. Um eliminating counseling services and eliminating ELD and intervention support. We don't have to pick all this, but we're going to have to pick a couple of these big ones. Um so the the framework is we've got to pick

160a few of these big ones. We don't have to name which ones they are today, but we're gonna have to pick some of them. Then there's a bunch of cuts under $100,000. So, in order to get to a million, we got to pick a couple of those big ones, but then we probably have to pick a handful of these as well. What I noticed from the budget advisory committee is that because we had this conversation, we got to pick some big ones, most of the dots of their votes came on this big big side of the bucket. So, at the bottom of this, there are some cuts that we could make that got zero votes, but might not be as painful as something like closing a school, for instance, right? Um, so we're going to

161have to pick some of these to get us to that million-doll mark. Again, these are a little bit smaller, increase size, class sizes. This means kind of being more judicious with uh combo classes and, you know, having a few more combo classes. Uh, let's see here. Delight stipens. So, that might seem kind of insignificant. It's $30,000 is just stipens, but what that is is our teacher leadership group that gives us, you know, voice into curricular decisions. We want teachers making decisions around the curriculum, but if we're not going to pay them after school to do it, you know, we're going to have to find some other way to get teacher voice into it. Um, we put management furlow. Uh that's 12,600 is actual furlow of one day to all administrators classified and certificated. So not

162a ton of money, but it it's on the table. Um [clears throat] so I I just want to kind of sit here. Uh the thing that scared me the most is that there was a lot of energy around closing a school, 12 votes, and closing two schools, three votes. That's pretty scary. Um, if you look at this, you might be worried. I think there's a lot we can do as a governance team to make the million dollars of cuts before we get to that that point. Closing a school is a big big deal in a community. Um, and we'd really need to think critically about having that as one of the items. But it is something that the community talked a lot about and um, there's some energy around it. Was it a philosophical reason

163for that or was it just because those are big numbers that they get us there faster? >> Yeah, I'm curious too. A >> little bit of both. >> Okay. >> Yeah, a little bit of both. Um the big numbers, I mean, in order to get to a million, you've got to pick something that's like close to 400 grand. Um, so you know, getting rid of certificated PE teachers, um, eliminating the zero period. Those are kind of big ones that get you there pretty quick. So are closing schools. But if you think about the impact to the community, you know, there's a lot of tumult that happens with closing schools as you see in districts around the the the bay. >> Did you get Oh, is this question time? Sorry, >> you can ask questions. >>

164Yeah, questions. Did you did we get input from Okay, I'm going to preface this. So, there's two items on here that I remember living I remember living through with my kids and it was not the end of the world. They grew up. They're great. The schools were still great. Uh certificated PE in elementary schools, kids used to have that taught by their teacher, my kids, not that long ago. Mhm. >> Uh and half day TK transitioning to half day also remember uh half day kindergarten not TK half day kindergarten uh AM PM early bird late bird you know um kind of stuff. So, I was just wondering whether you were getting any feedback from people in our community whose kids have grown up and gone on who might be able to speak to >> families

165who know nothing different, who've always had a PE teacher, who've always had full day kindergarten to be able to speak with people in the community who live through eras when we didn't have that, to be able to say, "Hey, it's not fun when something gets taken away, but here's my experience with it when it was that way." or having different um size classes than we have now when you know your kids live through higher. So, I don't know if that might be something to >> Yeah, I' I'd be open to talking to folks about that and getting input. There was a lot of philosophical discussion. Anything that got a lot of vote, we had a lot of conversation around and I think that's partially why they got the votes. They got um PE some of

166the drawbacks there. I mean, some of the conversation was like, well, teachers have taught in the past, so we can teach it again in the future. Um, the consequence there is that teachers are losing a prep period. And earlier when I talked about a lot of teachers stay here because of the culture and climate or working conditions that's working conditions. So it needs to be negotiated and there's a consequence there. Um, also there's another one there eliminating zero period or even the TK moving to half day. Like some some people might make that are on the cusp of like, well, maybe I'll go to the more enriching quote unquote enriching private school >> because now I only get one elective and I want my kid to be prepared for uh for high school. I think

167our middle school does an exceptional job even with one elective preparing our kids for high school. But there are certainly some people that would think otherwise. Um, and then the TK, I think some people will go like, "Wait, I need to pick up my kid at noon now. I actually can't afford to do that. I'm actually going to spend the money to send my kid to preschool at a tune of $20,000." And then we don't get the ADA for those kids. So then our revenue goes down. So there was a lot of really good conversation around every one of these items. And there's, like I said earlier, we've been cutting for four or five years now. We're down to the bone where there's consequences to every one of these cuts. None of them are easy.

168>> Okay. Go ahead. I >> just going to say that closing a school that number does that factor in the fact that like we have to secure a campus that's empty that we have to like have security for because this all came up when we were looking at Deer Park and like having an empty facility, which is nothing that I've ever wanted. Um, but that I don't I don't Does that include having that? Because that's what we were talking about having to do. Having a security, having it gated off, having like a gate like protected. >> You still have to manage a facility. >> You still have to manage it because it's an empty facility. It's a liability. >> So, what you're asking is that number >> is that baked into that because I don't

169>> cost of exactly like it seems to me that that's too low. >> What I would say is that these are pretty round numbers. So, if at the end of this presentation, you all wanted us to come back when we actually decide which cuts with more specific information, you would give us direction to say, can you double check that school closure number and make sure it's as accurate as possible. Um, or you could say something like, I actually want you to take that off the table al together. I don't really want to talk about that in when we come back. So, that's kind of the guidance that we're looking for tonight. Chris, did you want to say anything about the the school closure number? >> I was just going to say that it generally will

170take that into consideration because what it's looking at mainly are the positions that are being saved, but then you also um I haven't baked in any other savings like electricity and those types of things. So you have some give on the other side >> but you would also have presumable costs of >> fencing it off or >> not just that but the other schools you got to put those 300 students somewhere. So what are the classrooms then at? Yeah. Portable haven't done that. >> Sounds like quite accurate. Yeah, I'd like I'd like more numbers on that particular item before we looked at closing school because that's a that's like not a great >> that's a big deal but it also may affect many that's what we're again these conversations are horribly awesome to participate because

171it's like there's no right answer. We we've done so much for the past five years not affecting students trying not affect family right and not affecting teachers and so oh PE teachers can do PE great but right yeah they've done in the past but this is when they're prep okay maybe that's not as easy um but how do you spread the costs around to the entire community right even for families people that don't have kids in the district what impacts them and how do This is plan B, right? Plan A is >> tax partial tax. So, how do we communicate, hey, these are things that are on the table, but really we want to get the entire community behind these because this we wouldn't want this in our community. So, it's again goes back to

172the messaging like Chris said, >> right? I'm sure like a lot a lot of residents are not going to want to live next to a ghost property where there's nothing, you know, just a big building waiting for people to break into or something. >> And to the messaging, I think just having this list of cuts out here is this is the pain that will be felt if I mean this is >> it goes back to this felt dramatic last year, but it was the plan. Right now, this feels dramatic and it is the plan. It's probably not even deep enough of a cut. We should probably go deeper than million dollars. But this is this is where we're at. And I think um this isn't a scare tactic. This isn't, you know, these are actually

173the conversations we're having in order to get to a million. We've got to talk about real significant items. At this point, >> I have a question [clears throat] some more information back on the other side. The owner, >> I it seems to me that there's an interdependency between eliminating zero period at middle school and the eliminating art music and [snorts] more because if you eliminate zero period, isn't that where some of the art and music happens? So it seems like it got 11 votes for eliminating zero period which would by default also but zero for eliminating art and music for people aware that like if you eliminate zero period you're possibly also or is that not is that not >> what that would likely look like is let's hypothetically say you have chorus in zero

174period cut zero [clears throat] period now chorus is in like third period like in the in the day so we haven't cut course because we're funded through Yes. That's we want to fund as much in that core program through yes as possible. But what that does is it kicks out on the master schedule Spanish program. >> So now you don't have Spanish. >> Something has to give >> something something goes right. You can't squeeze those zero periods into the master schedule without something coming out the other end. So our makers lab that's a super popular elective that we have in middle school. Kids take it multiple years in a row. We wouldn't have schedu potentially we wouldn't have that in the schedule anymore. Does that make sense? Because those are funded by general fund dollars

175where the music and arts is funded by the foundation >> and and other districts nearby have eliminated many of their electives. >> That's right. We're one of I think the only other middle school that has two electives is Sanfell. They just added that I think two years ago. But Larksburg Corto Madera and Kentfield have eliminated their second elective in the last few years. >> What does Brookside up lower specifically mean? Could you say a little more about that? >> Yeah. So what you do is instead of having Brookside and Hidden Valley, it's one school >> like it used to be. >> Yeah. Back to >> So you have TK through third at Brookside and you have fourth and fifth or third, fourth, and fifth up at Hidden Valley campus. Okay. And what that does is

176it gives you a little bit of efficiency. So instead of having a combo class or classes that with like 17 kids, you kind of max out capacity and you might save on a teacher or two max. >> Okay. >> So pretty disruptive. >> Um it you can live with it like the community already lived with it. There's no doubt but um >> it would be disruptive. So all this to say, these are some potential things we can talk about uh you know after the partial tax vote if it goes the no direction. We'll come back to this and we'll actually pick a few from this list and we'll pick a handful from this list to actually have a concrete million dollars to to begin planning 27 2627 for cut in 2728. So, we wouldn't actually

177state the cuts until the summer of 2026 or >> Yes. >> November of 2026. >> That's right. Great. Good transition. Um, so here are the next steps. We need to submit this framework to MCE. So, we're basically going to say if you if you all vote to approve this, we're going to cut a billion dollars from these two buckets. That's kind of the vagueness that we'll go go to them with. Um we'll continue conversations about the partial tax renewal and increase. Want to be transparent that it's a renewal and an increase. Um if you all vote on it in uh later this year, uh the board will discuss the partial tax measure on these two dates on January 27th and February 11th. Anyone listening in here who's interested in giving feedback, shoot me an email,

178send the board an email, attend those two meetings. We want to hear your voice. That goes for staff, community members, parents. Please come talk to us. We're [snorts] eager to hear your voice. Um, we'll receive the results potentially [clears throat] in June or November, depending on when you all vote to to go out. If the partial tax fails in either one of those, we will start identifying specific cuts. So, that could be this summer or it could be in the fall. And then we'll start planning for implementing the cuts in 2627. and will actually implement the cuts in 2728. So if I go back here, we could make some of these cuts next year. Most of these cuts need a year of planning in order to implement the eliminate zero period would take a full

179year to get community input to design a new master schedule. The Bell schedule would change at White Hill. Like there's a lot to change there. And then obviously if we were going to close a school there'd be massive uh community engagement around that about identifying which school and what the timeline is and what the consequences are. So that's the timeline. So happy to take any other questions or take any direction from the board on investigating any of these or taking anything off the list or you know anything else you want if we have to come back to you in June. Shelly, >> so I was taking to heart what you were saying about like this is what we did before is we said these are this is the plan didn't pass plan went into place

180>> here we are again >> and I'm also reflecting on that how do we like fire that apparently or the like no really kind of like yes we have urgency but people don't react until their party is taken away on the avenue kind of thing I I mean, this plan has us making cuts later as opposed to just throwing this out. This is just a thought before the partial tax and saying, [snorts] "No, really, we're not messing around here." And we're so not messing around here. that we are preemptively going to start making some of these painful, awful, we don't want to do it cuts because everybody needs to understand that we're not this is not a we'll make we'll make do we we'll stitch it together with gum and shoring like we always have.

181This is real. And so we're going to actually show it, not tell it. And we're going to make cuts before the parcel tax so people can come and scream and yell at us for making hard decisions, which is why we're sitting in these chairs is to make hard decisions. But we're doing it by showing, not telling the community and sharing that pain ahead of time and say, "You want to have this back?" We have to have the money to be able to bring it back. And if we get the money, if it passes, great. I don't know if this is a good idea, but I'm just trying to think through how can everybody feel it? cuz I know we feel it sitting up in these seats and we feel the weight and the importance of

182it because we're sitting here because we've chosen to care for everybody's children. But everybody needs to care for everybody's children, not just the people sitting up here and the staff and the teachers and the administrators. And somehow we need to create that feeling in people's guts like I know we have up here. We're not messing around. So if people haven't [clears throat] felt it before, I'm just throwing out there that people have to feel it. [snorts] I thought it was interesting. We had two budget advisory committee meetings this year. One was in October and the culture of the team has actually gotten pretty good where people know each other. They connect personally. We can kind of wrestle with intellectual ideas and disagree and kind of have a good conversation. And in October, there were actually

183points in time in the committee where we were kind of like, dare I say it, like laughing and having fun. It was actually a really great meeting. Um, I think the the team is fantastic. And when we talked about this earlier this week, there was no laughter. The difference was in October, it was really an intellectual idea. We were brainstorming, kind of thinking about all the options. And earlier this week, we were actually like, you're putting a sticker on something you think can get cut. And the the feeling in the room was still collaborative and and uh connected, but it was really heavy to actually consider the pros and cons of closing a school or eliminating electives or changing working conditions for teachers. It was it was heavy. >> I [snorts] brought this up to

184you just slight boring, but I've been able to see the trajectory living here long enough. I've seen young kids get prepared for White Hill by the K through five. And then from White Hill, I've seen them get prepared to go into town. And I've actually seen those kids, very kids, go on to UC, Berkeley, Davis, great schools. and the preparation that they've had to be able to go from step to step has been very clear and and we've been very clear about prepping them for TAM for example from middle school as you look at these cuts and then you're looking at TAM cutting a bunch of things as well I'm just trying to keep that continuity and connection for the ultimate end success that we want for our kids starting on the first day of

185TK, you know, what is their trajectory going to look like? Is it going to reach a glass ceiling because we've had to cut things that cannot protect them to accommodate them into the next phase of schooling. And so I'm just wondering, are we overlaying what's happening everywhere? Because we're not the only ones dealing with this, right? Tam is going through a lot of cuts. >> Yeah, I think so. all districts around. I mean, I I read the uh CSVA Daily Digest almost every day. Yeah. >> And there's articles from around the state. Every school district, almost every school district is facing some sort of cuts this year because of the sunsetting of the rolling average and the >> the COVID funds. A lot of people are c like cutting counseling services, intervention services. A lot

186of people are cutting admin. Um, Sak City, I read an article, they're cutting 70 admin. We barely have 70 teachers in this district. So, some of these bigger districts like TAM have more room to cut, but if you look at the board conversation they're having, they're closing a school. They're taking one of their alternative schools, closing it, and merging with another. So, it's a real conversation in in most districts. I would say that, you know, if you cut an intervention program, fewer kids are going to be prepared for middle school and high school, >> right? >> If you cut your electives, depending on what electives you cut, you could see a kid not prepared for world language in high school, >> right? >> Or potentially a CTE course in high school, >> which affects them

187>> or band or orchestra or name the elective that gets cut, >> right? Um and then you have kids coming from other districts that did get that potentially that uh have a leg up. So this is why this was a heavy meeting on the 11th. It's because every one of these actually impacts kids or teachers >> and I hope every single person in that room went out and spoke to all of their neighbors and conveyed that as well. I mean that's the we're not mess we just have to recommend this and it is going to happen if we can't >> well I think that that's my biggest worry is that the people that are internal are nervous and quiet and the people that are kind of like measure is a perfect example the anti-measure people

188had endurance they were loud they went to every meeting and anytime there was public comment you best be sure they were making public comment and you saw some of it here tonight. The advocates tend to [snorts] listen and are pretty quiet. So, we need people to start I I mean I talked about that I kind of tongue and cheek said this at the budget advisory committee. It has to be kind of like a MLM like I go text 15 people. I asked those 15 people to text text 15 people and they text 15 people. Like we have to be loud, persistence, have endurance and share this story. Like this is a real these four items tonight. Every single one of them is like we need to be shouting this from I've got a press release

189that's going to go out at 10 o'clock to this. I've got a parent square that's going to go out at 6 am tomorrow morning to every person in the community. I need people to read those. I need people to forward them to other people in the community so people know the story. I need you to talk to people about it. >> And I'm also gonna say when you have a board agenda item that says we are discussing closing a school, this room will be packed. >> Yep. >> We are discussing cutting art and music. This room will be packed. >> And unfortunately, I don't mean to be too cynical, until and unless you do that, people show up at the 11th hour. People show up at the 11th and a half hour. It's it's just

190it's what I've seen in this community. I don't know if it's all communities, but it's what I've seen in this community is people will not show up when we're having these discussions. >> They're going to show up. Not not those of you who are here. We thank I appreciate that you're here, but it's not a packed house. You guys keep coming here and you you understand this and you've been here, but it's not a packed house and it will be when we have an agenda item. And then they will say, "You haven't told us all the information." I mean, so >> no, no, no. So, so what I'm kind of hearing from Shel is like I think she would like us to explore maybe looking at doing these sooner is kind of what it sounds

191like like a possibility of looking at [clears throat] just discussing it sooner >> or picking picking one thing like that. We >> Okay, so that's what I mean that's what I'm hearing. >> I'd like to I'd like to explore again. This is this is this is just something that I'm like, how can other people besides the handful of you that are sitting here who I we really appreciate you being here and um get people to show up even if it's [cough] >> and pay attention. >> All right. >> So, are you guys you guys done with questions? >> Questions. Okay. >> All right. Questions? >> Yeah, I know. Public comment. Do you have any public comments? >> I got my soap box out too early. [laughter] >> Discussion like [snorts] >> just all right. So,

192um man, I've been in every single the budget advisory committee since before Tyler was our superintendent. Um I was very very involved in measure E some of you know and talked to I probably knocked most doors on that campaign and from that so I have perspectives on both of those things and what I am worried about is that we don't actually have a plan right so say I am involved in this measure Y whatever it's going to be called if we don't actually have exact plan and we just have this giant that we don't like we don't say this is what's happening then what I'm going to tell my neighbor are we not going to have ticket or are we going to close school like what we don't have a specific this is what's happening

193if you don't vote yes and I will have to go and do this talking way before the June and so then it's kind of like last time the message was modeled sure support the teachers yes of course we support the teachers Right. But we need much more solid. This is what's happening. And if we are not doing this till June, that's then where I'm going to tell the people I'm knocking on the doors. Am I going to tell them that we may not have music and then or am I going to tell them we're going to close the school? Those are very different things for the community. And so I feel like we as a district need to have a actual plan before we go talk to people about voting. And so I'm concerned that

194it sounds like we might not have that plan because we really need it. I need to be able to tell people this is what's happening. If you are not I need you I need you to go fill that ballot. And I understand that it's scary to say going to close school. I totally get it. There's a lot going on in the same way how there's a lot going on into any of those things. None of them and as I've been in all those meetings, I know that none of them are easy, but we need to be solid. It's like this is our messaging because we can't have another campaign with somewhat muted muddled message. We need A, B, C. Those are the things we are doing if we don't get this passed and I don't

195feel like we have it and I'll have to be starting knocking the doors comes you know March April. So we got to I think we got to think of the what does it mean in terms of the messaging and you know even now we encouraging people to go say go talk to your neighbors. We need to have a solid, not modeled, not vague message that we're gonna go and tell people. And I feel like we're not ready or I don't see it ready. So that's my thoughts. >> Thank you. >> Any further comment? Okay. Um, so you know the board had some questions talked about stuff that we we did talk about in detail on in these meetings discussing these cuts. The [snorts] thing I want to say off the top is that, you know,

196I was at a table where I was the only parent with all other staff members in the most recent time and I at least our table reflected that it was a complete non-starter cutting intervention and counseling services um just seemed nobody wanted even to discuss that. every other option was on the table ahead of that. Um, in terms of cutting schools, one of the reasons why I personally think uh cutting schools is the best option is it's affects every student equally as opposed to taking out uh the budget just affecting the White Hill students and then maybe we pass a parcel tax and they get their programs. you know, you're this [snorts] we don't want an unfortunate two years of students who suffer on these programs um because of these cuts. And when you're cutting

197a school, I think, you know, it sounds scary and it sounds like a big deal because it is. But in terms of impact on students, it's class sizes and physical location for students who may have to be in a portable for families. uh commutes um but hopefully their education is otherwise uh the same and you know it's an enrollment issue. You know, what one of the Chris mentioned a little bit, the numbers we're seeing is just the decrease in staff because right now looking at the enrollment numbers from October, which was the most recent, um, in each grade level, we have essentially an extra classroom of [clears throat] students in terms of not filling up your 24 uh students for K through three and 28 for fourth and fifth grade. um you know and that

198that's real savings that you get uh with with closing a school and I forget if it was after June or if you know if a parcel tax doesn't pass in June um or if it was a November issue but I think uh Tyler you mentioned that if we don't hit June or maybe if we don't hit November and are scrambling last minute no matter what school closing is the only option So, you don't want to delay the the serious option and again take away programs from students. Um because I agree that the community who is voting on these taxes really should be the ones that feel it. Unfortunately, I think implementing these programs is just making the kids feel it. Implementing these calls. Thank you. >> Any other public comments? bring [snorts] it back to

199the desk for discussions additional. >> It makes me think should we start looking at the 27280 from the parcel tax like cutting a million here. Should we be messaging if this doesn't pass? [clears throat] We're losing five million from the budget. So then that is a bigger >> right bigger convers maybe that maybe that does light more of a fire under people. I don't it's all messaging, right? And I I'm not a messaging person. >> So, I just want to be clear that this has been on my road show this year. >> Right there at the bottom. >> It's a public comment, >> right? >> If if it doesn't happen in November, we will have to cut the million dollars and not give raises and close schools, >> right? >> And probably be in state

200takeover within six months to 12 months of that. I put this in parent square messages. I've talked to uh the PTA over at Archie about this. I've shopped this around with our teachers. Every one of our teachers has seen this. Our administrators have seen this. It's this is in my budget road show that's on YouTube that, you know, a couple hundred people have seen. Like this is this is part of the messaging and it's been part of the messaging. So, um I I I tend to agree that we don't have a spec hyper specific plan, but we have a specific enough plan and there's specific enough talking points to say lowest funding in the county, bottom 4% of the state, cutting a million dollars, which could include things such as these. And it might not

201be the fear factor, but I actually don't tend to lead with like the stick. I'd rather lead with the carrot. and see see where things go. So, I mean, Shelley, to your your point earlier, you could make one of these cuts, scare people into voting, and then reestablish the program, but you risk losing staff. You know, the program might not be able to be implemented. And that's something we talked about last year is want something easy to unplug and replplug back in. >> [clears throat] >> closing a school, you unplug that, opening a school back up is, you know, not gonna happen anytime soon. >> Kyler, could you put it to the first slide that shows all of the the cuts, potential cuts, >> we could >> not not slide one. It's where has it

202has to >> the $100,000? >> We could vote to be specific on a thing that's going to be implemented. Obviously, closing a school doesn't happen the day after we take that vote. So we could actually make a very tangible, very specific decision says we are going to do X. We're going to cut a school. We're going to do half a TK. Whatever it is that very clear decision and maybe we don't have to do a whole million of them, >> but you're right. We have had talking points. >> I think we do have a relatively specific plan. What we haven't had is action. >> This has closed two schools. >> One of them does. >> Yeah. >> One one has closed one school, one has closed two. If I add up every item on just

203this page with the exception of not saying close two, just add the closed one, you're not even to $4 million. And then if you go one more page, these are all, if you just use the smaller, these are all small and it's less than a quarter of a million, you're nowhere near the $5 million that you're going to lose in revenue. >> That's true. You're saying if we did every single one of these things on this list, we still don't even come close to being the $5 million. >> That's exactly what I'm saying. >> So it's it's cut all of this, close two schools and state receiverhip. >> Right. >> Like that's the like there's no clearer message than that. And I think this is the thing that frustrates me from time to time. I've

204been saying the same thing >> for 18 months >> over and over and over and over and over and over again. And people are like, "Well, I need talking points." repeat what I said. They're right here. >> I I again I >> right there >> people can hear it. People can hear it. They're not feeling it. >> They're hearing it. >> We've said it lots of times in different ways. You're an excellent communicator. It has nothing Don't take it personally. >> People are not feeling it and talking to the same people and we've done and we've done a great job of helping them not feel it. We've done an amazing job at being efficient and making $700,000 worth of cuts that people aren't even really feeling because we've been able to squeeze it out and

205parcel it out and reconfigure it and that kind of stuff, which is awesome because we haven't hurt, we haven't impacted kids, but it also kind of creates a people aren't feeling it. Is there anything not on this list that you Tyler or Chris would ask us to consider? >> We we had talked about maybe languages at White Hill as something >> that would be part of the eliminating zero period like there would still you'd need a year to discuss which programs would it would be. [snorts] We came up I mean this started a cabinet so the four of us had a long discussion about what we could cut. We took it to principles, got more input from principles, um, and then we took it to the budget advisory committee and they added even more things

206on there that we hadn't thought of or that we had talked about last year and didn't get back on this list. So, this is a pretty comprehensive list. If we cut every one of these things, essentially, we're doing exactly what the state funds us for, bare minimum schools. What a bare minimum school is is a principal, an exa an admin assistant in the front, a custodian, and teachers. >> Packed classrooms, >> nothing else. Um, one thing I'd recommend for those listening and us is to take a slide, maybe the first slide or one of the slides that goes to cutting the million and ask chat GPT to make three sentences to communicate the impact of what that says. And there it is. That's what you tell people, okay? It's a great thing to do and

207it will spit out the sentences you need to say if it's too much verbiage, but we need all of this information to get the point across. >> But the hypothetical is not it's not clear to like people are are not feeling it. It's I don't know. I mean, it's like I don't see anything on this list we could we could close tomorrow. Like it all takes planning. I I hear I think there are some things on this part of the list that we could cut next school year. >> Yeah, easily >> on that one. >> But we're talking like $25,000. >> Yeah, we might be able to cut one of these things maybe. >> but we're doing death by a thousand cuts >> and and and over time we become the frog in the pot,

208>> you know, and then we don't realize how hot it is. I think you have to just >> slip the throat. And I I also think that like part of the problem isn't the problem isn't that we don't have the information. I've been giving the the presentations. People have the information. They're in the board packets. Like I've offered to get coffee with anyone who wants it. The information is there. >> It's the motivation. >> I don't really want to knock doors. I feel uncomfortable. >> Put salt in their coffee when you when you talk to them and say that's what it feels like. >> [laughter] >> But the people that but but you're right the endurance of those that will come and say no no no no die die die die die die die die

209die die die die die die die die die die die die die on the cross no we got to get the same passion I I feel like >> 100% >> I >> the no person the no person texts their big group group chat that lives in their neighborhood >> y >> they go to the HOA meeting >> they go to the board meeting they They go to the town of Sanelmo, they go to the town of Fairfax, they post on Next Door. They are relentless. >> Yeah. >> We need >> of those people on our side to be relentless. >> Yeah. >> And I think we've got had a nice core group that was in the the Measure E campaign last year. But aside from that core group, [snorts] it was a let's hope they

210vote for it. small group of people working really really hard as opposed to >> and it's easier to motivate people on a no >> than it is to motivate people on a yes. So it's going to take more endurance and more excitement and more consistency. >> The no can come from we don't want this to happen to our schools. >> The no can be against >> us. TJ half day and which it will be. I mean that's what I'm saying. We need people yelling at us because we're making difficult decisions that have to that we clearly have to make. >> Absolutely. >> And so, I mean, ironically, we're asking to create a circumstance where people are going to come and be mad at us because we're having to make things that are going to impact

211their family. And like I I was going back and forth with the editor of the J about a little pnicity thing that I had and he was begging me to write an opinion article in the J. Anyone in in the here can write an opinion article to the J. You can take my parents quick message from tomorrow and revise it. Write your own spin on it. And like I think that's the like creativity and action. Mhm. >> It's not the ringing our hands in the parking lot after this meeting. It's the go do something. Michelle Obama said it in her speech not too long long ago. Do something. You've got to do something. >> And not just >> Yeah. >> Can I ask a couple of the other small questions on the increased class size

212number >> which I think is on the other page. That's from what to what what did you estimate the um where is it >> that is it's essentially t being more judicious around the number of uh combo classes we have >> well I know but I'm saying if we increased class sizes without combo cl like we went from 17 students to 30 students per class and we ate the penalty and like is there is that I'm saying for exploration on where additional funding that that's one question that I have is >> I mean we've we've seen in the past class sizes up I am so not advocating for this I can't even believe it's coming out of my mouth but we've seen class sizes at 26 27 28 they hit 30 at one point awful

213terrible but to [snorts] your point I think was or somebody's of like what's going to be kind of universally impactful for everybody that's a thing that everybody feels. If all classes are larger, then it's something that impacts literally everybody. Um, so that might be something to look at is what that's calculated on and whether it can >> and what that would actually look like, just for anyone listening in or in the room, is more combination classes, splitting students that might siblings that might go to two different schools. So right now we usually try to make the decision if Daniel's older daughter is at Brookside, the younger daughter's going to be Brookside. We just try to keep it together. We could overflow to another school and then Daniel's got to do two drop offs. >> The

214word overflow sends shivers down people's spines. >> So it's it's combos, it's overflows, it's larger class sizes, it's it's all of it. And it it to have a concrete plan, we'd have to have our enrollment numbers for this year and kind of work some things through. But it could [snorts] be a savings even more than that if we get super super tight with it. >> Just that was just one thing that I was thinking of if we're going to come back in, >> take action and make a decision where we're going to say we're going to pick two things >> and we're going to make a decision on the [clears throat] 27th and we put it as an agenda item and figure out how to do that. That's just a thought. The other one is

215would cutting a school on the class size issue. Would cutting a school by default increase class sizes because we would need to fit more students in fewer space. So, it's kind of like a >> and more kids and kids in portables, too. >> And kids and portables, but it's also increasing class sizes because you're fitting. >> But also cutting a school opens us up for potential competitors stepping into our campuses and using our facilities. >> Yep. There's pros and cons to all Yes, there is. There's pros and cons to all of it. And if people knew that perhaps they would feel it also. I mean it's none of these I want to make a decision on clearly. But >> so any more direction for Tyler? >> I have >> uh what would what would be

216the process of moving yes funds to general like how how would that just I'm just curious. I have no idea. They would have to classified as a nonprofit first because they've got a specific mission. >> Their charter is specifically arts and music. So it' take a lot of work on their end. And then essentially what they would do is instead of donating donating $850,000 for art and music would just eliminate art and music programs and use that $850,000 for intervention support or core academics or you know electives at the middle school. Um it would just basically offset our general fund, >> right? But the I mean it would take a a year a cycle because everybody that's donated >> most of these big ones are big enough that it takes a year to plan. >>

217Yeah. >> To to [snorts] Shel's point, there's a few of these things increase size class sizes and do more combos. >> We especially in the last two years, we have been student and family first in a lot of those decisions. We could have reversed five or six decisions last year that would have saved us some money, but we would have overflowed a kid to another school or had another combo or overflowed a class from 24 kids to 26 kids, >> which is awesome. And we're not kidding that we're here where we are and we can't keep doing that because we ain't we don't have anywhere else to go. We can't we can't. >> Yep. >> And thank you for doing that. [snorts] [laughter] But don't do it again. >> Any more directions? So, it sounds

218like you want you guys want to look at cuts sooner than after. >> Let me just I'm clarifying by action. I mean action by taking a decision, not necessarily implementing a cut sooner. And I know this was for the 2728 school. >> I think that's the big feedback I'm hearing. >> We could still have it be for the 2728 school year. It's just we make a binding decision. Yeah. >> On what those cuts, not a plan or a framework or something like that. I know we're going to in the 2728 we're already making this decision unless something changes but >> and this is a this is a concrete plan. >> Yes. >> I don't want to >> like this is not >> gray. This is crystal clear. >> It's how much and again if we

219go back to the November 2026 part of this it's crystal clear and concrete. It's all of that. >> Right. So the the difference is for June 2026 it's some of that >> right >> and this is on top of freezing salaries and I mean this is in addition to which again >> lowest both of these is salaries are held flat there's none of that plus we do all this >> so I I think the direction I'm hearing from the board is to come back with these two buckets and we'll get a even more specific plan for what we're going cut in the 2728 school year and what we would cut in the 2829 out year if we didn't have more local funding. And I think the thing we've got to be careful about is especially

220as staff we can't go around saying if this doesn't pass this happens. The committee can go do that, but staff can't use staff time to do that. But this is our plan and our primary plan is the parcel tax. So if that doesn't pass, these are the things that may happen and that's legally what we can say at this point. >> Okay. So are we approving something? >> Yes, you're approving a framework to cut a million dollars. >> We need to submit that. >> So I'm going to recommend that the board Oh, I'm sorry. >> I know. I'm going to recommend that the board um accept the budget cut plan to be implemented in the 202728 school year to be submitted to NCO. >> Second. >> Okay. Hi >> Anna. >> Hi >> Shelley. >>

221Hi >> Daniel. >> Hi >> Rachel. I >> And we'll bring this back >> probably in the early spring late winter to have a more specific conversation where you all can kind of >> pick and Chris and I may go back to the budget advisory committee because I think the voting that we had was a little skewed in one direction and one more conversation around that could be helpful for recommendation for you all. I suggest closer to early spring. So then it has impact for like the next possible two cycles of election. >> Early spring, you said? >> Yeah. Because if [snorts] you wait until the fall depending on what we decide to do. >> Yep. >> Great. Um, our next item is present for public review notice resolution 032526 and the annual accounting of

222the 202425 developer fees and fun 25 government code section 6601D and 660B and but that's good. So, this is one of those prefuncter things that I have to bring to you u this board meeting and then I'll bring it back to you again at the next board meeting in January. So, tonight is just uh hearing it. Uh and it's letting you know how much money we received in our developer fees fund which is fund 25. And so last year we received a total of $53,034 uh in revenues. That was both in developer fees and interest income. Developer fees are anytime somebody pulls a permit to to uh construct either a home or a business or to add on in excess of 500 square feet, they have to pay a fee, a school fee to help

223offset the cost of um the impact upon a growing uh school campus. And so we we received those revenues and then um we had expenses of 21,393 that was uh for modular building at U Manor as well as our uh demographic study that we did last year. And so in total we have an ending fund balance of 251,536. And so at the next board meeting, you will be just approving a resolution that says this is how much we received and how much we spent in in this particular fund. >> Do we have any questions for visitor? Do you have any public comment on this item? >> Okay, seeing that I'll bring it back to uh the board for discussion. [snorts] >> Okay, seeing that I'll entertain a motion on this item. >> There's no motion.

224>> Oh, no motion. Oh, that's right. Okay. Sorry. [laughter] >> Next item is F consent actions. Um, unless somebody would like to pull one of these out. >> Who's Chris Morgan? [clears throat] >> Who's donating the instruments? Who is that? >> It's a parent. >> Parent. >> Just curious. That was all I have. >> Thank you for that. Okay. Any other questions on that? Okay. If not, um, any public comment on consent actions? Public comment. I'll [snorts] entertain a motion on consent. >> I'll make a motion to approve all consent items. >> Do I have a second? >> I'll second. >> Daniel, >> hi. >> Chris, >> hi. >> Shelley, >> hi. >> And Anna, >> I >> and Rachel. All right. So, move consent. And the next item, sorry, this is a weird new

225agenda. Uh, gee, poor business. I didn't mess that up, did I? Um, so we got committee updates, reports from and announcements by trustees. >> So we just talked about the budget advisory committee that's been ongoing. Um, diversity, equity, inclusion committee has been really insightful trying to plan a larger event at White Hill later on in the spring. Um and uh the sixth grade girls basketball team at White Hill is going to dominate this year. [laughter] >> Yeah. Just to piggyback on the parent gardening equity task force. We had a very productive meeting. We had three committees that two merged into one, the outreach and communications. And we've got some interesting ideas coming out of that. But special shout out to Julia and her team for getting the you belong posters. uh that are up at

226all the campuses. So when you see them, they're quite wonderful in English and Spanish with the mascots and a great message to people coming on campus. Um we do have some ideas, some grand coming out of some of these committees. We'll see where they'll go. Um but a lot of it is around really trying to get that message of belonging. certainly yes has a video that you go to an open house and what does that look like and even having some training too for people coming on the committee so they don't have to start at ground zero away from people understanding where they are um I went to the White Hill holiday concert last night a lot of fun the band symphonic band and his jazz band um and the combined um concert band performed

227it was a lot of fun um the high school music teacher from Archie was there who also spoke up and back to that synergy of connecting the middle school experience to high school. Um he this this this this guy has turned music into an epic event at Archie and his excitement about welcoming the White Hill kids into the music program was really wonderful to to see and hear. So um that was a that was a great thing to experience. White Hill also performed at the Holiday on the Street Festival uh um in Sanmo and the tree lighting uh festival and it was really great. There were just people that were downtown that were like they were all like who is this? Who are these kids? Where are they from? And I was like Ross school

228district. [laughter] Um so u those are some great uh things and I I think that's it on my side. Y >> go ahead. >> Oh, I was just going to say the California Schoolboard Association conference was great to attend and the three of us that went in Tyler and um I think two themes. One was closing achievement gaps. Um closing opportunity gaps was a big one they went through. This is I think the 10th anniversary of LCFF um and LCAPS and so there was some conversation around how the um how important [clears throat] it is and strides have been made but there are still definitely gaps um in achievement and opportunity for students and different demographic groups. And with LCFF, there was an understanding that the current class of legislators who are there were not

229in those. There's barely any of them left who were in the seats when LCFF was the new thing was came into being, which was an equity issue of creating more educational equity with the way that funding happened. And while equity has been created, there are still gaps. So that was kind of the theme of a bunch of different sessions that I was in was making sure that the legislators who are sitting in the seats now really understand why LCFF calculator was put into place because the previous era was all of these categorical programs that would come and go and districts felt like they're getting whiplash from like we have this program for three years and then it's gone because then the pet project from another legislator comes in for three years and it was this

230crazy accounting scramble of all of this categorical funding and we're starting to see it creep back in and a lot of it is because legislators are in there now that didn't understand the importance and the fight and the struggle and the conversations when LCF was put into place. So it seems like this is a particular moment in time to um this whole idea of the enrollment not ADA not only would be a good thing but it would also reinvigorate the why do we have LCFF in the first place conversation. Um so I think the timing is right for that and it was just a great conference. >> Yeah, I agree. It was great. Um it was inspiring to be around so many schoolboard members. I mean I feel like you know being here was just

231that's just us but that it was that was you know the energy and to see that many people that are there just giving their time it's not their primary job source of income like that was u that was inspiring for me and the the sessions I mean it's just thinking about future more and like that to maintain a healthy district because we have urgent problems right [snorts] revenue. But, you know, part of our job too is to really Yeah. to think ahead. So, that was um that was good. I was I intended some policy um policy like you know I I did a 101 track like a new trustee track. So, it was like [snorts] you suggested and they were you know policy toolkit and all these different things. I would say the best thing

232that I got out of it and Rachel, you know, they agree. Rachel and I met with um there's a [clears throat] position called um Oh my god, wait. >> Pacers. >> Pacer. Thank you. I'm like what is it called? Um a pacer. So they're regional and so it's a person who uh is it liazison between CSBA and us. So any questions that we have or if we want to connect with legislators or if they if there's just to like they can connect us, they can answer questions so we can get support from CSBA. So we have her name is Carrie Castro and Rachel and I have lunch with her and she's definitely a resource that we have so we can um contact her. Uh and so that was that was nice to connect with her.

233Um and definitely we are not alone in our in our revenue problems like that is certainly [snorts] everybody's feeling that. Um also it's interesting so I I know that our district is small but I learned officially what that means. I don't know if all of you know this any district and I'm new here so I'm like any district under 2500 students I did not know that. And so we are certainly in that category and it it affects all sorts of things um including there's you know funding with like POP 98 all these things I didn't know. So that was great for me to to get some of that background education um and uh you know to some perspective. There were definitely some things there that didn't apply to us because of our the size of

234our district. Um >> and and the lower undocumented number >> unduplicated unduplicated seems like I'm tired. Sorry. >> Yeah. [cough] >> So yeah, I thought it was a great experience. Um overall uh let's see what else. Yes. has been [cough] fundraising like I mean they've been doing so much. So like all the merch and they had the turkey trot and they did I mean but and then they just had Giving Tuesday. They're like meeting all of their goals everything and more like it's it's great. Um yeah, their team is very on top of it motivated. It's a really they're bored. So, um, that's been nice to to see how kind of how they [snorts] operate. Uh, the winter market was very fun with the mascots last weekend. Um, have you guys seen the pictures? Cheers

235all. >> Oh, yeah. We sent them. >> So, that was fun. Um, yeah, tons of kids who wanted to be the be the mascots. >> But we, >> it was fun. Oh, we had some ideas for next year. You know the Ross Valley. Get your picture of the Ross Valley school mascot. Just like a little thing or if we're doing music on the Avenue. >> Ross Valley schools. >> Let me save this to like, you know. >> Oh, good idea. [laughter] >> But I need to have something to write. >> But it was inspiring. You're like next time. >> Uh, okay. >> And all the mascots had a great time. Little kids seeing them. It's It's like It's like they're at Disneyland. >> Yeah. Like >> it's amazing. It's like a really scary wild cat.

236Oh, >> Charlie was like, "Wait, why am I not the bear?" And I said, "Because you know, we have plans." >> That is something maybe we talked to some PTAs about. >> Seeing seeing the little kids light up, it's really cool. >> The mascot, >> the state of the mascot. >> That's great. [laughter] >> All right, that's it for me. All right, so I Oh gosh, I have a whole lot since November, our November meeting. I went to the Wade Thomas Harvest Mingle which is always it's always fun to go to those just to see what they were doing. So that was really interesting. There's always like interesting food and there's like like pop-ups with things you can learn about. Um I served as a panelist for the California Association of Student Councils, an organization

237I had not heard of um before I was contacted to serve on this panel, but what they do is their their mission is to have like leadership opportunities for elementary, middle school, and high school students. And what they do is they teach them how to um they teach them about ethics and collaborative decision-making and then they teach them basically and they bring them forward to this panel with proposals for how to improve education somehow. And so they've done all sorts of things in the past like they were they helped bring about like menstrual products in bathrooms for people. Um they've done they reduced PE in 11th and 12th grade because students need academics and not the PE. So they've they've done advocacy for all sorts of things and they've been in existence since 1947. It

238was founded by the CDE. Um so it was really fascinating to sit there and I I had high school students who were presenting to us. Um they there was one who presented about having wellness rooms in their schools and that should be a requirement and how to get that done. One was about having required food donation drives. Um, and then the other one was was so funny. The other panelists, there was another um there was a college and marine trustee there and then we had like a mayor and um like a couple couple other people there who were on the panel with me, but the last um student who spoke was um he wanted to increase school funding and they're like, "Oh, let you get this, Rachel." So, it was it was really fascinating just

239to hear like he was in a school in Santa Rosa that was impacted by cuts and he was like, "We're students. We're being affected by these cuts. We should have been consulted. why weren't we notified and like able to participate when these are directly affecting us? Like we don't have a workshop class, that's a really important class. So, it was just really fascinating to hear the perspective and how they were talking about um how he was like addressing it. And so, it was just it was really interesting. Um aside from that, I've been meeting with community members who were been interested in a parcel tax and a campaign and kind of just like reaching out for information. Um, I attended the League of Women Voters Morin and Library and Education meeting which was um, interesting.

240They're working on an article about education and school funding. It should be coming out soon. Um, the CSBA conference was the first time I've ever been in person and that was it was really interesting. I I managed to attend like every single possible like workshop I could in the time we were given for all of them and all general sessions. But what I found was that there's maybe one or two of the sessions were incredibly valuable, but the networking I was able to do was phenomenal. I was put in touch with a couple of the superintendent candidates for this coming election. I've already talked to one of them to find out like his like his stance on all sorts of things. Like so the fact that I was able to do that, I spoke with

241somebody from um the um the peninsula who is a school board member and they've got a successful like uh workforce housing project and they're working on doing another one. So there's all these people who I've been reading about and like following and then I was like able to meet them and just happen to sit down and just chat them up and be like, "Hey, where is your district?" and asking all these questions. Um, so I met a lot of people and it was really helpful just to hear like what they're struggling with. It's very similar in most cases, but it was just a [clears throat] good perspective. Um couple of the things that I went to that were really interesting was um advoc advocacy 101 which is I've already been doing it but it was

242very concise in like how to effectively reach your assembly members and we're [snorts] you know all the people who are ones pulling all these levers and writing these assembly bills that we need for these like to change the LCFF and things like that and it was like a blueprint for how to reach out to them and just like tips and things and I thought that was extremely helpful. Um, and the other one that was really helpful was um, just how to efficiently govern in the age of like political and social division. And so I thought that was just really helpful just to hear um, what other schools have gone through, how they've dealt with it, like successful ideas and things that just generally tend to make it easier to communicate with constituents and make sure

243that people understand so you're not necessarily dealing with culture wars. Um, and then aside from the conference, Anna did meet with our um, North Coast region pacer, which is a public affairs and community engagement rep. So, I had to look it up. >> Um, I've already reached out to her since we met with her. Um, and she's going to help get me in touch with a couple assembly members that I wanted to speak to who are working on LCFF adjustments. Um, and so [clears throat] I've already met with, you know, other local people here, but these are people who are statewide that are working in Sacramento. So they're people that I haven't had access to locally. Um, and then the Fairfax Winter Market, thank you for having people in those mascot costumes. That was awesome.

244And Pete Sanui was there. Know Twig was there supporting him. Um, they had a really sweet um, sing along that they did in public. It was it was very sweet. I loved it. Um, and then I was at the Hidden Valley sing along yesterday, which is like a big tradition there, and I think it's of all the schools, but it was just I have memories there because my kids weren't there. And then, uh, the White Hill Middle School band concert last night. I was there as well. And I actually have Mario Alparicio. have his recording of him giving the the welcome speech to the kids at um White Hill and inviting them to come and the eighth grade families to come and visit the music room when it's like parent eighth grade night and things

245like that. So um he said he wouldn't mind if I posted that which I will be >> but it was he was very welcoming. He's very encouraging of all this the young musicians. It was great. >> All right with that >> I have one I have one I forgot. I also attended the JLAC, the joint legislative J advocacy committee. Speaking of advocacy, which is what I was reminded of, >> a lot of it was a followup or recap or just talking about the um a lot of the messaging that came out of the um California School Board Association conference because it was right after that and the budget stuff. Um the governor is uh coming out with governor's budget in help me out here July January. >> middle of January. So the governor's proposed budget

246will come out in the middle of January. Uh so there was bills that were not quite passed but scrambling that his budget will come out. Trailer bill there's a conversation around trailer bills. Um, the other thing that I was going to say was the next opportunity for meeting people, speaking of which and networking is in February [snorts] is the Marine County School Board Association's trip to Sacramento, >> which we are all invited to go on if you want to go on. I don't have we forwarded we should forward that RSVP information um to all the school board members if you want to go. usually our represent so David Con Connelly and Mike Magcguire one or the other or both or their staffers are still there and I remember one of the messages from that was

247staffers are totally get in front of staffers so even if you aren't in front of the legislative person themselves their staffer is really important >> there's a lot of great information that happened at that Sacramento day and perhaps we can bring some of this messaging especially the enrollment um shift to them they listen I would also Other thing that we heard was that getting letters from parents is super they read them. They read those letters. Like that was one of the questions I think in this advocacy is like does it really make a difference if parents and people send letters and they're like yes it really does. They do read them. They do pay attention to them. And so I think the more we can encourage I don't know whether it's on our website or

248where it is but the more we can encourage parents to say your voice actually really does matter in Sacramento which will actually really matter to us. So take those emails that you send to us and forward them to them too or something like that I think would be really helpful to do. So >> that's good to know. That's good to know. [clears throat] >> So that's coming up in February. I I do [snorts] plan on going. So it's always great. And they did open it up. I don't know quite how it's going to work. I don't want to open the can of worms to eighth graders if there are some if there's an eighth grader or so who is a really strong leadership type of person. Um, they've had youth ambassadors come every year to

249Sacramento. They've always been high school, but I guess there was a couple of junior highs that said that, hey, maybe we might have some eighth graders. There's a little bit different supervisory [snorts] requirements. So, that was TBT. But, >> do you know what date in February it is off the top of your head? >> I don't off the top of my head. I want to say like mid. >> Okay, I'll look it up. >> February. I'm thinking in the teens. >> Okay. Last year was Valentine's Day. Quite romantic. >> Quite romantic. It was a lovely Yes. >> Who celebrates Valentine? >> Legislator all over again. [laughter] >> But we'll we'll get it and send it out to everybody. >> All right. Um so with that, uh we have approval of regular meeting minutes for November

25017th, 2025. And looks like actually I don't think you were present for that one. >> Sorry. >> It was the last meeting. >> Make a motion to approve. November 12th. It says November 12th on the >> November 17th here. >> Was that the one that I missed? >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> So, which date was it? The 17th. [clears throat] >> Which date it was for? >> Oh, it was probably the 12th. >> Was the 12th. >> Okay, cool. Just want to make sure. Okay. >> Can we approve it if it's got the wrong date? It should be fine. Yeah, I think you can approve it pending that change. >> I mean, the board minutes are correct. >> Oh, yeah. >> It's wrong in the description, but it's correct in the actual minutes. All right.

251Anybody have any changes to this? >> No. >> You have any public comment on it? >> All right. I'll enter motion. >> I'll make a motion to approve the board minutes from November 12th, 2025. >> Second. >> We'll second it. >> Thank you. Anna >> I >> Daniel >> I >> Shel >> abstain >> Chris >> I >> Rachel I [clears throat] >> and our next item is annual board of trustees organizational meeting to elect board president clerk and a representative to serve on the Marin County School Boards Association MCSBA for the term December 2025 through December 2026. >> Great. Well, this is an opportunity for us to talk about uh nominating three of you to either continue or step into uh three specific positions. We've got the board president, the board clerk, and the

252MS MCSBA uh rep. So, three really important positions. Um I believe right now the board president is Rachel Litwac. Clerk is Chris Landel Cobb. And Daniel, are you there? I think I'm the MCFA rep this year. >> Are you? Okay, great. >> So, I don't think we have like a formal process for this is, you know, someone can step forward or someone can nominate somebody. Um, you guys can have a discussion about uh who you want in each of those three positions. >> I think last time everybody said not a >> do you want to continue or are you ready? >> I am for a year. >> No, no, no. I mean like that you know the maximum number of terms years you can serve as one or is it just up to us? >>

253It's up to us. >> There are some boards that >> I mean watch the TAM board and see how they did it last earlier this week. [clears throat] Um some boards just do a rotation. So clerk moves into the or sometimes there's a a vice president moves into the president position. Um sometimes president sticks around for a while. Um, sometimes it's like a internal nomination thing. Um, so >> it's a coup. >> Sometimes it's a not it situation. So it it really depends on um, you know, what you all want to do. I think one thing Rachel and I have talked a lot about is we've worked hard to make the position as streamlined as possible. So it's not like a monumental amount of work, but it is a lot. I mean, you're Rachel does

254an amazing job posting online. She meets with me every week. Um, you she's out at sites a lot. She's hosting coffee chats. Like, it is a level up in terms of engagement. Um, so Rachel, would you like to continue? [snorts] >> I am. [laughter] >> If I need to continue, I will continue. I am very open to someone else. if they're ready to step in, I'm more than happy to let someone else shine because I think everybody here could do a really great job and I don't need to feel like I'm not the center. Like that's I don't need to be the center. >> Yeah. I don't think it's more of that. I think it's you have great capacity to really continue to be a strong board president. you know, I had considered like stepping

255up as the clerk because I'd filled in for you and I'm and I'm closest to that role. My problem is is that my life in San Francisco has become a lot more burdened with not being able to be as present as I've been in the past until we can kind of work that out in my job. Um, but if you were like, I can't do this anymore. I will I will volunteer to step up, but I would love for you to do it for one more year. >> That's as transparent as I can be. >> No, I appreciate that. >> And I will I will continue to be the clerk [cough] if if that is something that someone else doesn't want to do. We had talked at one point that it's nice for the clerk

256to be there and maybe potentially become the pro, you know, just from that learning step. >> Sure. >> And so that's why it's nice over there on that side, too. >> Like, why are you why am I filling out if I'm from you, Daniel? >> I [laughter] would do that. I mean, I would do the tr I would do the the clerk or the the schoolboard association. >> I mean, I'm not I don't I don't have the organization to be a president. I mean, I would be horrible running these meetings. >> [laughter] >> Everybody talk about whatever you want to talk about. Go. >> I just want there to be a success succession plan. >> Because I could do it for another year, but I would like to know that like there are other people

257who have this experience and everybody brings something different here. Like Shelly is, you know, I learned so much from having her there. >> Yeah. is like president >> and I feel like there's so much that like you guys I could learn from all of you if you were in this role and I don't want to like just be sitting here because you know it's convenient. So one thought in that realm also to maybe give you because I know as board president sometimes when I wasn't when somebody else was presiding it's like okay I can participate or whatever is if you stay on to intentionally pick a few people to tag you're going to be it in March. Oh, even if you're going to be here, I think that's totally it's totally okay to do and

258>> To facilitate a meeting because one, it gives you a little bit of a break facilitating meetings. Two, it spreads around the experience to a lot of different people because >> Chris, if you're in the >> um clerk role, but your life doesn't change, it would be good to have that experience maybe spread around and and leave you. So, that's my friendly amendment to the voting process would be to maybe think about doing something like that. All of us should lead at least one meeting a year. >> Could be that. Yeah, something like that. >> Sure. >> Um, so just a thought to help. >> Does that help reduce anything off of your plate? >> Actually, honestly, like this last year has been, dare I say it, like pretty easy. >> Oh, compared to what

259it [laughter] was with the >> work we had the year before and the year before that. >> And that's a lot to do with Tyler's leadership, but also like just as a team. Like I feel like >> strong team. >> Yeah, it's a strong team. And I feel like it's very easy to like figure out what we need to do as a group like >> getting mascots. Like that was fairly easy. >> But I do think that ubiquitous you you are ubiquitously present >> at a lot of events during the day that I used to be personally. And I think the president having that capacity is key. um especially during this time when we're facing a parcel tax. Um >> and it's just something I've thought about but like I said today today I would

260have I would have run the meeting today if you had to leave and >> I know that was so I I'm I've run the meetings and you know >> we all would have your back but if you want >> you're new and this is [laughter] this is what I'm concerned about as well is we're up for reelection. Um, >> Anna. Oh, right. >> Oh, right. >> And so, you know, I don't know who's going to run. Well, you know, >> I plan to run again. I made the announcement. [laughter] Um, if but if I win or not. And that and that that continuity is important as well, right? >> I don't I've only been through it once and I was board member or president when it happened and then president right after. >> That's right.

261You ran while you were president, right? Risking. Yeah. >> I mean, it switches over in December. So, >> yeah. True. [clears throat] >> True. True. True. True. >> Anyway, >> but even if you're new, it's still good to get experience >> as a clerk. >> Uh either as a clerk or facilitating doing doing facilitating a meeting just to kind of >> Yeah. get the get the experience and understand >> whether that role >> works or doesn't or whatever you learn from it is awesome. >> How much work is the clerk? Well, I've am part of the agenda planning um assign a lot of things [laughter] and uh I think I'm just kind of like >> back up back up if she if she isn't available and kind of stay in the front with Tyler. We

262we talk regularly just kind of ears to the ground. Mhm. >> He Tyler will call either of us for bouncing ideas off of. >> Yeah. So I I might write write something and ask for the two of them to give me feedback on it or if I've got a slide deck that we want to be, you know, really thoughtful around get their feedback before and and mostly meeting for about an hour before every meeting just to plan the agenda and talk through those logistics. >> Yep. Okay. Yeah. Are you Do you want to continue with Clint? >> I I'm open >> if you think you'd like to take it on for a year. >> I mean, if you do not want to. I would. I'm not like needing to >> Yet. want to give a

263lubricated [laughter] what am I to percolate for a while. Um it's your call. I am not I I have no ego >> in the game. >> I mean you're next. >> Yeah. I'll just do as I'm told. [laughter] >> I mean I can do I can cler or I can docsb. >> Yeah. >> Was that do mcb >> school board association w >> up with you? >> Okay. Yeah, I mean I would do that one too. >> MCSB. [clears throat] >> I think continuity is is helpful and I could definitely see you moving into or either of you. >> I love the idea of everybody filling in for you one time. I mean, I think that that once you get a taste of it, you're like, "Oh, this isn't as intimidating as it seems." Because

264that's true. >> For two meetings a year, right? Like why not like You have to do a couple. [laughter] >> Well, when we come with the schedule, we should put a little rotation. >> Yeah. Do we have to vote on any of this? >> So, I'm kind of hearing anything. >> I'm [laughter] kind of hearing Shel advocate for >> she wants to be president again. >> You see, do you see how far it's really not from getting cold? I haven't heard anybody step up to want to be president. >> I'm hearing >> I think we want Rachel to continue. >> I'm hearing Shelley advocate for continuity with the clerk and the president and maybe having MCSBA be one of the two of you. Is that kind of what I'm hearing? >> And I think and

265I also think that I I think other should share and plan the agenda. We talked about that before. Yeah, we could always do that where we rotate one of you on for agenda planning. >> It says here >> there's an alternate clerk trustee. Is that a >> What is that? >> Clerk, one trustee and an alternate clerk. >> Yeah, we have not done that in the past. >> Interesting. >> Not that I ever did that. >> Why don't we have an alternate clerk? >> A clerk and alternate clerk. >> Which would you rather do? alternate clerk or >> No, I'm asking you. Give me an answer. >> Uh, I'll do I'll do the clerk. >> Okay. >> The alternate clerk and I will do it >> thing one or thing two. >> Thing two door

266number one. >> Is there anything you are interested in? Are you pretty good? Well, I'm interested in a lot of stuff and I [laughter] >> think too with all of us sharing in in board preparation or me preparation throughout the year, >> right? Just you know one >> again not violating Brown Act but >> yeah, >> right that and then we should all lead one to two meetings a year as well. >> Okay. >> I do think I mean in conversation with Rachel and I'll let Rachel speak for herself. She's done it. It is a lot of work. doing it again is a lot of work again and having people rotate in and out of the president's seat is is important. So, you know, I'd love to have you as president again. I think it

267would be amazing and I think someone should be prepared to step into that position, you know, uh if Rachel doesn't want it again next year. >> I think you two have built a really good rapport, you know, especially some of the things that's coming down the pike. And I just I just think it's just another year would be more in our favor to have that same dynamic. >> Do I hear a motion? >> I have a motion to do motions on this. >> We do have to vote. >> Yes, we do have to vote and we can either vote slate or sequentially, but I think voting sequentially is probably just as easy. Maybe. >> Well, I appreciate the confidence and the honors you guys are conveying, and I definitely am not doing this next chair,

268so [clears throat] you all have better prepare. warning you now. Not going to be talked into it another year. >> No, >> that's good. >> We have we can make a plan and do an apprenticeship. You know, we'll make a >> Yeah. >> So, plan [laughter] [clears throat] for >> I move that we uh by a show of hands um support yay or nay for Rachel to >> I need a first and a second. >> You need a first and a second for that? Really? This is a regular. >> Okay. I wasn't sure if it was different for voting. Okay. Thank you, Teresa, for keeping us honest. >> I make a motion for Rachel to continue as board president of the Ross Valley School Board. >> Do I have a second? >> Okay. Chris, >>

269I >> Daniel. >> Hi. >> And I Rachel I [laughter] [laughter] >> Thank you. Congratulations, Madam President. >> We are lucky to have you. [laughter] >> All right. Uh, we have a board clerk position to fill. So, I will make a motion for Chris to remain as clerk for the 20 through December 2026. >> Do a second. >> I'll make a friendly amendment >> that Daniel be the alternate clerk. Can we do that soon? >> Sure. Motion. >> Perfect. I second that. >> Okay. Second. >> No, I can't. [laughter] >> Well, I suppose you could. >> I will second it though. All right. So, uh, Shelley, >> hi. >> Rachel, I >> Anna >> I, >> Chris, >> I Daniel, >> hi. >> All right. And then for >> Yes. Thank you. And then for

270Marin County School Boards Association, >> I will nominate I move I make a motion to nominate Anna Marsh as the Marin County School Board Association uh representative for the 2026 year. >> Do I have a second? >> She nominated >> not feeling the confidence. [laughter] >> You seconded. No, I said, "Do I have a second?" >> Oh, I THOUGHT YOU'LL SECOND IT. >> I'M SORRY. >> OH, I thought she said she second. [laughter] >> All right. I'm picking up what you're putting down. [laughter] >> All right. >> Awkward. >> Hi, [laughter] >> Daniel. >> Hi, >> Jelly. >> Hi, >> Anna. >> Hi. >> And Rachel. Hi. Thank you for saying. And then non-elected officers, board secretary. Oh, is that just Tyler? >> Yeah. >> Okay, we're gonna keep Tyler there. >> Thanks. [laughter] >>

271Well, here we are. >> All right. Next is superintendent and cabinet report and we've got updates. >> Yeah, I'll be really quick. Uh CSBA was fantastic. It was great to have three of you there. Um I went to a lot of uh budget and finance related sessions when I was down there and a lot of uh good information. Um, I've also been on paternity leave, so I've been spending the last few weeks reconnecting with principles and cabinet members and getting out to school sites, which has been really nice. Um, and spending a lot of time talking about the budget and the presentations. Uh, tonight a lot of work went into kind of getting the right data and all that. So, spent a lot of time on that in the last uh, few weeks. >> Uh,

272ED services has been prepping for a January 5th PD day. So the first day back for teachers, they'll be in full day professional development. Our K5 teachers um have a training with EL education coaches. They'll be kind of unpacking the next big unit that they're doing and then also digging into what's called the readthink, talk, write cycle, which is kind of the the framework for all of the lessons. Um so we're excited about that. I'm also super excited and Loriy's probably going to talk about it, but um that Lori is going to be running a behavior and safety training for the the rest of our elementary [snorts] certificate certificated folks that I think will be really really great um to help our kiddos who need a little more support and White Hill will be continuing

273their focus on increasing student depth of knowledge within all of their lessons in school. And then just some good news, the California dashboard. Um there's some new things on the dashboard this year and one of them are [snorts] these growth reports and they just came out today. So first time we've seen these and in both math and ELA um we were designated as accelerated growth which means that more than 70% of our students showed growth over the previous year in terms of their scores last year and their scores this year which is amazing. Great. >> Yeah, the highest level is exceptional and manner was exceptional in both. I haven't actually checked all the sites. >> Well, I was super proud to see that manner. Amazing. >> Um, sleeping. [laughter] >> Super cool news. >> Awesome.

274Um, and then just to piggy back on the January 5th PD day. Um, we're excited about that. And we do have some classified staff that will be attending. we do have some funding that we can provide them a full day of training at MCOE around um a um deescalation of behaviors and that kind of thing. And so um they're very excited to be involved and um get the opportunity to participate in some PD. Um we um I actually attended um an inclusion training at Marin County Office of Education with six of our teachers recently. Um we um just had a great time um just talking about our best practices as well as really looking at um just this notion of like there some supports are necessary for certain students but beneficial to all just that

275whole idea of making things accessible. Um Julia and I um did we um participated in TK walkthroughs with um representatives from Marine County Office of Education, our SULPA and the El Dorado Office of Education and they were looking at the best practices that were happening and we're going to do a debrief um probably right after the winter break on that. So that was really great. And then um I had mentioned um at another meeting that we received um 10 different grants from the dedication to special education grant funding. So 10 teachers apply for grants. They um received funding for different inclusive items in their class such as timers and different types of of seating and things like that. And I actually went to Jamie Evans class, Dy Walden's class, and Rebecca Hayher's class and saw

276these things in action the other day. And it's super exciting um to see the kiddos um using these things and and really um thriving. So >> that's great. Wonderful. the weather that's coming in [laughter] in earnest on Friday. Our maintenance staff is out there get preparing our sites. Um it is going to be a little difficult with with uh the holiday shutdown, but we will be keeping an eye on our sites to ensure that we don't have any issues and we'll address them if they do come up. And then um our staff has been working really hard in the uh business and HR realm in um with the installation of our new financial system at the county office of education. Uh we had a day of training last week. We've had two days of training

277this week and that's just in the last two weeks and it's constant and lots of dual entry and um it's just a process to [snorts] to put in a new system that we're working our way through and we're excited to get the new system next year, next fiscal year. >> So until you switch over, you're doing double entry and everything. >> Yes. >> I'm so sorry. [laughter] [sighs and gasps] All right, with that, um, we do not need to continue to close session. I've got meeting review here, aside from it being late. Sorry about that. Um, >> do we have any future board topics and direction? I believe I heard something about mascots. >> Um, they're a little tired, little little, you know, the the White Hill guy is a little scary to real kids.

278Teddy bear. Everybody loves the bear from Brookside. >> I don't know. >> I know. There's a toddler who's super happy with the hawk. >> Yeah. >> Very cute. >> But White Hill White Hills um >> they're all gross [laughter] >> from the inside. >> I mean, >> if we needed to prioritize >> No, they're matted. >> Anyway, something around mascot. That would be a good >> right [laughter] whether we ask >> parent clubs, >> right? >> I think the parent club should >> Yeah, agree. >> And also some type of branding like a a >> a board or like a pictures photo booth, but also White Hill band is here. Just >> some something where it's like, oh, Ross Valley Schools, Manor, right? >> That should have been, hey, sing along with Manor School. Ross

279Valley schools, you know, arrows. We don't, you know, we need to promote ourselves. There's competition. >> Yeah. >> In our neighborhood. >> Yeah. At the winter market, there were other schools. >> And so, how do we say these are the great things we're doing. Look at us. >> Totally. >> And there were it was it was they mostly the kids just wanted to hang out. Does it look like >> So if we would have had a sign, they could have hung out with the sign and then it would look kind of more inviting for them families to come over and take pictures. Random animals wandering around, >> right? [laughter] >> I think my third grader was most happy that sixth grade boys were asking who she was [laughter] like, oh >> that future. >> It's

280going to get easier. It's only going to get easier. [snorts] >> All right. future future topics. I think we did have conversations around continued decision- making around the budget stuff that we talked about and I would be more than happy to have some conversations around how we might structure meetings that might involve a lot of people attending them on how [snorts] to maybe structure you know I don't know whether it's a workshop knowing that there's a decision at the end or some how can we >> increase it >> yeah how can we um if we are going to have a lot of people at a difficult decision making meeting. How can we structure it in a way that is productive and helpful? Now that we have your attention, let's make it productive and helpful as

281best we can. Um, so I'm happy to help. >> Can we get maybe some color around what's happening with the bridge at Brookside and what the plans are around the facilities updates? Not right now, but a future board topic. >> We'll do that. All right. Any debrief items? >> Uh, can I just ask a question? When is the district office closed for the holidays >> starting? >> We're not really. >> No. Okay. [snorts] >> We have staff that are here during the the break. >> Okay. >> Most will be closed down for the next two weeks. >> We do lock the door, but we have staff here that are working. No, >> I want to make sure you guys are getting breaks. Mike, >> the only thing I want to say about the meeting is

282I appreciate the engagement. Those were four really, really difficult topics. The 0% raise, budget cuts, first interim, and the partial tax. Like, that's a huge huge meeting. They all interconnect. And I thought you we all did a pretty darn good job at the uh questions, public comment, discussion. >> We're getting better. >> Um yeah, we're getting better with that. I just feel like even with a hot topic, four hot topics, that we we did a really good job. And I hope to see more community members at the January 27th special meeting and the February 11th uh meeting where you all will make a decision on the timing and structure of the parcel tax. So folks listening in, please come to those meetings, text a few friends, bring them here. We want to hear your voice

283and if you have input, you know, send us an email. All right, with that um see what time is it? >> Sorry. Can we also get, >> you know, never mind. It's good. It's good. I'll I'll do the math in my head. I on a calculator actually, so don't worry about it. [laughter] Okay. All right. With that, I will adjourn our meeting at 9:59.