San Francisco Unified school district for APRIL 22nd 2025 is now called to order at 5 P.M. Roll copies. Thank you. Commissioner alexander. MR. Fischer. MR. Gupta here. Vice PRESIDENT Healey here. MR. Ray here. Commissioner west board PRESIDENT Kim. Thank you. item a general information accessibility formation translation and interpreter services and virtual meeting information can be found online on our agenda at as if you see that edu as if you will provide child care for regular board meetings and monitoring meetings on the first floor in the enrollment center at 555 franklin from 6:30 P.M. To 9 P.M. Or the closing the meeting whichever comes first. child care is for families who will be attending the regular and monitoring board meetings. Space is limited and will be provided on a first come first
served basis for children ages 3 to 10. For any questions please contact the board office at (415) 241-6427 or board office at as opposed to that edu. At this time before the board goes into close session I call for any speakers to the closed session items listed in the agenda. There will be a total of five minutes for speakers. Are there any speakers for public comment? There are none in person. There are no virtual participants. I now recessed this meeting in 5 or 3 P.M. S.F. Gov tv san francisco government television S.F. Gov tv san francisco government television . the board will now vote on student exposure matters as part of our report from close session on item c one.
I move approval of the stipulated expulsion agreement for one middle school student. Matter number 2024-2025-26. During the enforcement period the student will attend civic center middle school during the suspended expulsion period. The student will attend a comprehensive high school from to school options provided by s of us d. Can I have a second? Second roll call please MR. Steel. Thank you, PRESIDENT Kim. Q MR. Alexander yes. MR. Fisher. Yes. MR. Gupta. Yes. Vice PRESIDENT Lee. Yes. Commissioner ray. Yes. MR. Weissbourd yes. PRESIDENT Kim yes, sir. thank you. Item c to report from closed session and to matters of anticipated litigation the board by a vote of seven eyes gives direction to the general counsel in the matter of as opposed or in the matter of as of my gosh excuse me in the matter of student F.D. Versus sfi usd okay each case number (202) 412-0251 the board by a vote of seven I's gives the
authority of the district to pay up to the stipulated amount in the matter of as if used at all versus americorp and the uh california case number 325 dash cv dash 02425 dash emc the board by a vote of seven I's gives the authority of the district to pay up to the stipulated amount. Actually yeah. I don't think that was a settlement per se direction gives direction to the council. I apologize in the matter of case number (202) 504-0023 the board by a vote of seven I's gives the authority of the district to pay up to the stipulated amount in the matter of o h case number (202) 504-0313 the board by a vote of seven a's gives the authority to the district to pay up to the stipulated amount . That's of course the board of education follows the student
outcomes focused governance model based on community input. The board has adopted our vision values, goals and guardrails in order to increase the portion of board meeting time we spend on student outcomes. Every other regular meeting is a monitoring workshop. This model also calls on the board to empower the superintendent to take full ownership of the strategies used to reach these goals within the guardrails set by the board as we implement this new governance framework, the board will continue to adopt new systems, routines and policies to improve student outcomes. We encourage the public to follow this work on our website at sfo us data edu slash governance as we commit to finding new and improved ways to more meaningfully engage with staff, students and families. Moving to item d public comments to align with our effective governance model public comment will last for one hour or until 8 P.M. Whichever is earlier. We aim to respect staff, family and community time by beginning
board business no later than 8 P.M.. Our hope is to conduct board business in an efficient, effective and accessible manner during reasonable hours for each participant you MAY speak up to one minute. Staff will think the participant at the one minute mark at one minute and five seconds. I've asked MR. Steele and mysterious to please turn off the mic and transition to the next speaker. I asked members of the public to please respect that one minute limit so that we can hear from as many speakers as possible. I encourage speakers who are speaking on the same topic to collaborate and combine their comments so that the board can hear all viewpoints during our limited time. Please also note that the board accepts written public comments via email at board office at sfo usd.Edu. We will first hear from students then the general public in person on agenda items followed by students in person on non agenda items
and then general public in person on an agenda items regardless of whether in person public comment is complete we will save 15 minutes for remote public comment taking commenters in the same order as in person if any time remains we will then return to in-person in-person public comment. As a reminder board rules in california law do not allow us to respond to comment or attempt to answer questions during public comment time if appropriate the superintendent will ask staff follow up with the speakers. With that I'll turn it over to MR. Steele to facilitate public comment. thank you. Thank you, PRESIDENT Kim. I'm going to call the students first. I have three cards for students if there are any additional ones you can line up as well. The first is amelia brown. Come to the podium here please. Jessica shafer. And then I think it's up to leah I'm sorry from t I. please come on up. You have one minute each. She can use this one here. Yeah.
So if you hear to that's just fine. hello. My name is a million of them. I am eight years old. i am an MS. And second grade class adopted child. You. Also I wrote this speech. We gather around here to fight for what is right. We need our parents. We need them for extra help. We also need them to help with the kids. I learned slept separate the parents mess up. Carrie taught me how to read and spell. MS.. Angel teaches me and my friends comprehension so we can think better. MR. Rainey teaches us premium third grade MS.. The board of education. We need our parents to help with the kids, help with tips and to keep fighting for us. If we lose them this will not happen for us anymore. We will be sad in our computer test scores will go low.
Stand and applaud if you agree with me. thank you. When you. All right. I'm wesley shear. I'm a knight. I'm nine years old and am a third grader at starkey elementary school. My mom yesterday told me that next year when I am in fourth grade, fourth and fifth grade will only have three teachers. I don't think that is okay because when my class are I have 18 students and it's already chaotic enough. So when next year I will have 35 students in my class and it will be way more chaotic. Yeah. thank you. Thank you. yeah. when did. Hello. My name too literally. I'm at DR. Charles drew elementary school. I am in the fifth grade. I am here today to request our peer educators MS..
Kelly MR. Romney, MS.. Shikari. MS.. Angel. MS.. Angel. Make sure we are safe and helped me with my academic and writing. MR. Rodney teaches me to have self-respect and integrity. These relationships were built over these past six years and are irreplaceable. They are not just parent educators. They are family. Thank you. thank you. All right. That's all I have for student cards today. I'll be moving on to agenda items of college game. First five people please stand at the podium. Valerie. Cookie sarah newman. Lena werner, roberto guzman and marissa o'connell. Go ahead when you're ready. My name is valerie cookie and I have worked as a reading teacher since 2017. We have students who can't
decode and read. I had a student say to me once, MS.. Cookie, does this say three or there I became an aunt of two target instruction for these students. Socio economically disadvantaged students are the most effective affected. They cannot afford tutors. My understanding is that we still need a multi tiered system of support. One of the action items is on the agenda is to explain about the dyslexia screener. If we are screening for dyslexia we still need to support. We should have a multi tiered system of support. To me if we get rid of the artists the tier two support we will have two tiers tier one and two of tier three. Our most vulnerable students will fall through the cracks. We will only increase our in chief meant gap. San francisco unified's proposed commitment to increase our our test scores for english language arts from 52%
proficiency to 70% proficiency by 2027 will not happen. thank you. Please turn it off. Good evening. my name is sarah newman and I am a kindergarten teacher and parent at george peabody elementary. I am very concerned that the district is choosing to not allow our tiffs at schools at this time. You have received countless emails from upset parents, staff and teachers your very own jen steiner said at the board meeting over a month ago. How important these positions are. i am here today to speak on your agenda item related to the language and literacy and assess plan a plan that calls for artists. I am asking that you allow grant and pta funds to pay for permanent district teachers school sites that fund these positions do not affect the budget. Blocking these funds will do nothing to close the deficit. Experienced artists are essential to meeting S.F. Usda's third grade literacy
goals eliminating our tough positions to ensure all classrooms have the teachers they need will not help without our tests. How will the district meet the california state mandate code? Sb 114 to screen, identify and address reading difficulties there is a network of literacy specialists artists that have trained for years. Schools have built systems around their presence. Schools have made strategic decisions to fund these positions because of the critical services that they provide. my name is meena and I'm a first grade teacher. Sorry I'm a first grade teacher at george peabody. I'm here to speak on behalf of our schools artists a literacy specialist who has made a real difference in the lives of our students. Our artist works with six of my most struggling readers who came into first grade still trying to have sense of letters and sounds. Three of these six are now at grade level and three have made tremendous strides in both skills and confidence this year.
Without early intervention supports from artists these students are the ones that could fall through the cracks. Getting referred to special education and costing the district even more. Artists have been funded by pta or grants not the general fund . Removing these positions doesn't save the district money. If S.F. Usta is serious about meeting its third grade reading goals or complying with sb one one for california's new mandate to screen identify and intervene for students with reading difficulties, then we need to get trained literacy specialists more than ever let students and schools continue to use pta and grant funds to support support permanent teaching positions and keep artists in our schools. thank you. my name is roberto. As we implemented the bills to ease policy 50 1a1 and the T.K. Peter I want daughters what I
lopez future since 2014 when peter paris shifted to visitation by la middle school I enrollment has declined by 40 years to this time annually families face so certainly with many now assigned to denman and others to visitation by these three busses father disconnect our communities by transporting a student to a school on the west side this has made families fearful and less likely to choose what i look we are now seeing grow whether visiting is this in a community, a school and we are rebuilding through gutierrez ponce a practice a strong family partnerships and focus on belonging and the students success so we are requesting a spanish dual language transitional kindergarten and additional general education in the class. Currently such a pre-k families are not automatically assigned to what lupe kindergarten or pkk pipeline. These additions will align early programs to multilingual loaner. Thank you.
Increased access to locus families what I look beyond those chronic assets is not thank you. Do I? Okay. Good evening. I'm marissa. Let me tell you about jasmine, a senior at o'connell who will be the first in her family to graduate from high school and to attend college next semester. She credits ccr with providing opportunities to turn her life around when she received a presentation from her ccr site coordinator in her sophomore year. She was failing classes and in unhealthy relationships after being accepted into an internship at the va hospital. Things began to turn around for her. She realized she wanted to work in the health industry. She became more focused in school and life. now she is a student leader in the health pathway and on the honor roll through ccr. Jasmine has interned at the va hospital boys and girls clubs giant giant community fund ucsf
and is an acne training program with the reduction of the entirely grant funded positions in ccr. Jasmine is likely one of the last students to have access to these opportunities. Please consider how absurd it is that all three of as if you have these goals and guardrails is to increase college and career readiness while we are simultaneously dismantling the grant funded infrastructure that makes that goal possible. Eliminating these roles forces ccr to return millions of dollars in secured grant funding. Ccr site coordinators are not central office roles they're big hitters embedded in the school community. thank you. Thank you and will call the next group please come to the podium, says amy from o'connell one cornell hall I believe marilyn hernandez, vanessa guerrero and renee gomez. hi everyone. My name is amy barrow, principal at john o'connor high school. Had something prepared by going to actually speak from my heart to build on what marissa said. Jonathan my high school is a
wall to wall career technical education readiness school. We have all of our students are on wall to wall pathways between the cuts to college and career readiness next year our support from research giving our students in internships, work based learning etc. We've also experience a 90% cut in equity funding since a 2324 school year which makes it increasingly difficult to support our students with our college and career readiness goals in regards to goal three interim goal 3.3 progress monitoring our students have the highest percentage across S.F. Ucd high schools with 80% of our 11th and 12th grade african-american latin x and pacific islander 11 students completing at least one semester long cte course with a letter grade of c or higher. that's something we're really proud of and something we hope that doesn't stall over the next few years. thank you. Thank you. I mean not this one courtney
who we represent nationally well look at this grade the san francisco ca yesterday a guy is broke it is time this union dollar familia the corazon yumiko lozano la matriculate para pre-k in the school our loopy e boracay classroom made up mandarin waiting lists come with possible sick one day to present a partial equilar case study bernie endo but I will leave MR. Familiar the remote care that I want in conjunto seattle luna familia that the number silicon lobel equilar where loopy margalit frasier sheila bonomo sunset when they say to get the name will open it'll mean more benefits you know I guess strategy what that i use it to do that in metro schools is that your potential is to keep on a failure of work I you if I met a of promising goals you know porter los ninos this those o'neals forget the la only corazon get your will be erica and transition please
to just such a high my name is one call nicole and I'm here representing what I look for elementary school and I what going on here why are you breaking our families apart? As you know, my daughter was selected to be in pre-k but now she's in the waiting list that what is happening? Why are you breaking? Were you breaking apart our family? I want to know where you going to be? Well, the changes you're going to make for school even if you change the name sunset or whatever other name we're here to unify. And if we don't do that unification what is going to be the future not only for my child but all the children in the united states? Thank you. okay. Good evening everyone. I am here on behalf of guadalupe elementary and let me tell you your system is ridiculous. how are you spending 6 million on a school bus that takes our neighborhood kids to another school when they can perfectly attend guadalupe?
Oh, but they do come after school and use our afterschool program at that 6 million that can be used for our programs on our kids all all live in all of our programs all of the decisions that you are making are affecting our kids drastically ever since you decided to have a middle school feeder school and making visitation middle school I'm sorry feeder school making our enrollment has declined has been at least 40 students each year even though not all of our students get sent to west valley middle school. But parents don't want to deal with the headache and do time. That is why some parents manage to manage the system that your time. Thank you. Our school is big enough to have another kindergarten class make our school great but where
everybody can thrive they okay . Good evening. My name is rene gomez and uh, I'm a parent. Um, my daughter goes to whether lopez elementary and to study from pre-k which is, uh it's a gray I believe it's a great help for kids, especially those who don't um who their first language is is not english and um also um, I it's there are like about nine classrooms available and we got a great staff over there whether loopy um all we are asking is help because it takes a community to raise a child. yeah. yeah. Thank you. Ready? Hi. Good evening. My name is DR. Vanessa. I'm the executive director of parents of public schools of
san francisco and I was the community school coordinator social worker at some of the schools that I mentioned here. I wanted to first ask a question about impact assessments. Have you done any internal impact assessments you can use any logic theory you can use any continuous improvement sciences what's the trickle down effect to the consolidations that you are proposing? I sent I think one of the board members some questions to help and I'd like for you to consider evaluating actually how are these cuts going to be affecting the very people that just came up the other day? I looked over the central office plan noticing that curriculum instruction has 8.2 million dollars in reductions. The department for technical technology has 4.0 and student
and family services has 4.6. thank you. So in other words we are reducing where we are saying that we have goals. thank you for this district. Thank you. We'll be moving on to non agenda items now I'm call the first five cassandra curial frank lara jessica arroyo rebecca hendler and maria angie moreno please come to the podium one minute each. Good evening, commissioners cassandra creel, PRESIDENT Of usf. The issue of our vacancies for next year is an unresolved and very urgent crisis. Not only do we have layoffs that need to be rescinded for our parent educators in positions that are instructional aide family counseling and a 15 I'm sorry family relations community relations specialist but also 15 security guards. All of these positions as we've heard students say, are necessary in addition to what
we've projected to be on our data over 500 possible vacancies for next year that currently exist right now with nothing else changed. We have 280 of our members right now teaching in schools. They're on temporary contracts to be called back and so this those like behavior that MR. Elliot dushan is currently holding hostage of about making sure we can employ and fully staff our classrooms so that every student has a teacher at the beginning of the school year it is imperative that you take every measure to advocate to fill those with the people we know want to work in san francisco. that's right. Thank you. good evening. My name is maria moreno but everybody calls me angie. I am the wellness health education and youth leadership coordinator and one of the many are 35. There received a pink slip a few months ago. my work is to support,
facilitate and help lead youth internships like yao and job yao groups are facilitate it in our high schools through out of our wellness centers and they focus on educator and their peers on health issues that directly impact them. Chavez our central youth group that is in charge of leading and organizing our anti vaping anti tobacco psa contest that has been happening for the district for many years. They also organize conferences and workshops. I'm also the chow mentor which is a role that traditionally did not exist and we have advocated for many years even when I was a child. This role is very crucial to support child's develop their skills as professionals and to develop their tier one interventions and wellness centers. Thank. I ask you to just please reconsider the pink slips for all 35 and I have letters of support here. thank you. Thank you. And go ahead. Okay.
Good evening. My name is jessica arroyo and I'm a first year bilingual teacher at sanchez elementary. At sanchez we serve a deeply high needs student population with many students experiencing serious issues including housing insecurity, food shortages and immigration challenges. I'm here tonight to urge you to consider reconsider the proposed cuts to two critical positions at our school our attendance liaison and our reading interventionist. Our attendance liaison sandra is bilingual, deeply trusted and goes far beyond her role. she's a pillar that holds our community together. Equally vital is our reading interventionist marso with 22 students in my class with several not yet reading at grade level. I'm already stretched very thin . Marcel provides expert targeted instruction that has helped my students go from struggling readers to competent and joyful ones. These positions are not extras they are essential. Protect the positions that help our children not just survive but thrive. thank you.
Right on. I'm rebecca ensler, the lgbtiq youth support liaison denman middle school for 18 years. When sfo usd founded the lgbtq student support services program in 1990 we were the first district in the world to actively support its students. In 35 years the program has literally saved thousands of lives. One supportive adult enabled gbtc you youth's life can make that difference as if us these students are 20% less likely to attempt suicide. the person in S.F. Usd who recruits that that at least one adult for each school who trains us leads us provides resources is lgbtq school climate coordinator can I hazelwood can I is essential to our work supporting students and now you are laying can off.
How dare you how dare you balance the budget by abandoning our lgbtq youth? our youth is disposable to you as they are to the trump administration. you strongly. evening commissioners. Evening superintendent to y thing I want to echo with the concerns of growing concerns that we're seeing in an elected. You know bureaucratic was first assignment is to accept you as the and now we're seeing more and more even as the district is moving and showing growth and showing changes we still have this an elected individual as our PRESIDENT Was saying, you know, dodging the district. We can't just assume this is happening nationally. Those effects are happening here. The union said in JANUARY and we warned everybody who was paying attention so we keep saying listen to the educators we told you a thousand positions would be affected. Right. We told you that there would be hundreds of open positions coming summer there happening we have over 400 open positions now there's only 96 consolidations.
So the contradiction that our sites are facing is you're forcing cuts and while budget wise you can do that as elected board members I'll tell you this because you can win over the public, right? C.D. Is supposed to represent the interest of the local. Then first then to actually not have this person who's a singular person not letting the voters of san francisco use the money that they voted to use for our students. thank you and call the next group please forgive me if I mispronounced names najwa ahmed kena, hazelwood, martin mays, bruce mace and lisa campbell. please come to the podium one minute each. good evening. I am so sorry that I'm having to be here for a third time to get a little bit short. thank you. Hi everybody. My name is kind of hazelwood. I am your district coordinator for lgbtq student services for the third time I'm here asking for you to put your words into
action and make sure we have somebody to support our and trans students. I'm talking to families every day who are looking for assurance that their kid will be okay. They don't have to detransition socially in order for them to continue to be safe. It is very real the fears that people are experiencing and knowing that they have somebody who is going to still be there that they can talk to you and make sure that there's a person in their schools is essential. this is our pride month. Hi. I've seen so many of you marched with us in the parade. It's been wonderful. but it's not just about marching. It is about action and it's about making sure that we have the people we need to keep our kids safe. I'm asking about you. Do what you know you need to do and make sure that all of our students feel safe in our district. good evening. My name is nigel ahmed and I'm a manager for wellness and health education for the district. I'm also a parent of district students and I'm also an as a
few a z grad myself I am here to advocate for well to have spoke maria morano and kate and kind of hazelwood to keep these are 35 positions because they both positions support youth leadership and adults who support the student students and such as the community health outreach workers, our staff who work at sites need the central support for them to increase their capacity to make sure we reach our goals as a district to increase student attendance and the sense of belonging. Also I'm here to talk about the to advocate for college and career internships. Without these our students would not get the opportunity to explore different opportunities throughout the city. Please keep the goal of student centeredness and keep these roles and opportunities for our students in S.F. Usd. Okay. hi, good evening. My name is marty mays. I'm a spanish speaking r 40 at longfellow school community relations specialist.
I'm here to ask that you received rescind the preliminary pink slip that you gave us on MARCH. most of us are people of color were women and were multilingual staff were deeply rooted into these communities. Who is going to help with interpretation make of the folders in english, spanish and chinese as parents with parent view school cafe something that's already hard for our afraid is in place. Encourage parent engagement through pta elects sees fundraise for schools assist families with T.J. Kinder and middle school applications do the crucial work the enrollment center needs us to who's going to interpret at parent teacher conferences where the heart of the school is because we care for our students and our families and we need to help keep our jobs so that we can help these families also we need to save our nurses. We need nurses at school sites
not in cohorts in an emergency driving time from a court to an office MAY mean life or death for an innocent. thank you. Hi, my name is bruce mays. I'm a parent of former longfellow students alumni and they went there and received a great education and a very great time learning there. My wife just spoke now and she is amazing woman and worker at that school. She devotes so much time where so many hats and helps to raise money for the school with all the fundraisers. I just don't know who's going to do that. She's gone through like 4 or 5 principals in her career of 12 years there she holds that office together. You know she trains these people and all these different roles that they come in not knowing what to do. And her work ethic is unmatched . She is always working at home. She's always there. You know, she doesn't call in sick. You know, she's there at night
and from what I hear is like that's the the the norm for these pairs. You know, these community specialists this these are 40s and are 35 you know I don't know all the titles but they work hard and they care and they love their job so please the label thank you. hi my name is lisa campbell. I'm the mother of a ninth grader. I'm here to demand funding for the summer accelerated geometry program. Just yesterday families were told that 174 students are on the waiting list and there is no funding to open additional sections. This is ridiculous. The whole reason that kids need to take summer geometry is because of the failed as opposed to algebra policy. And now the district can't even provide enough spots for kids to overcome the policy. Summer geometry is essential for kids who want to be competitive for college admission. Further, there are almost no other in-person options for summer geometry.
We know from our super extended covid closure that online school is not good for kids. Our kids should not have to pay money to take geometry online and sit at home alone all summer. They need the learning but they also need the socialization in terms of other summer programs for socialization never mind the math. Deadlines for applying to most other summer internships and activities have already passed. As the park and rec programs fill up in MARCH. thank you. Going to call the next group please come to the podium. Tiffany yea. Kyra cooper. Scott cooper. Josh davidson and mabel ging. One minute. Okay. hi my name is tiffany. I am a parent and teacher at francis scott key elementary school. I am here today to express my concerns regarding the possible elimination of all assistant principals in elementary schools. I am deeply concerned about
the safety of our students and how that will impact the well-being of our students and staff without such a crucial position. although I have known our assistant principal carina mcgrath for only nine months, her impact is significant and our efforts community. MS. Mcgrath arrives at school before seven m every day. Consistently she is there ready to take on any questions, troubleshoot any issues and de-escalate any situation she is given. MS. Mcgrath finds joyful moments to bring to the staff. She is someone who truly cares about the interests of our staff and students. More importantly, she has an ability to make everyone feel hurt. She is a pillar to our school and losing her would be detrimental to our school community. thank you. my name is cara cooper and I'm a 14 year veteran kindergarten teacher from
francis scott key elementary school. I'm here to express my deep anger frustration and disappointment regarding the decision to eliminate assistant principals from all of U.S. Elementary schools. This decision is not only short sighted, it is reckless. Removing assistant principals from our schools sends a clear message. Leadership, safety and student well-being are no longer a priority. Do you understand what an assistant principal does on a daily basis? They mediate conflicts. Support students in crisis. Manage discipline with dignity. Help teachers with instruction . Connect with families. Run emergency drills. Coordinate support services and fill in wherever they're needed because in an elementary school the unexpected is constant. this decision will increase burnout among staff, decrease safety and stability for students and hurt our most vulnerable learners. It is baffling that a district claiming to champion equity and student centered learning would dismantle a role that is foundational to both our districts vision and mission.
In order for us to reach its vision through its mission, this decision must be reversed . Good evening, board doctor sue. Hi, my name is scott and I've been a para educator at fs k elementary for 13 years. This is a call to keep assistant principals at district elementary schools. I'd like to explain why our assistant principal is so vital from my special educator perspective as quoted from the district's pd series on admin roles with regard to special education, most principals don't receive much of any training related to the provision of services for students with disability eas and very few schools have special education supervisors or directors housed within the building. We are fortunate to have a prior s f sorry sped cohort supervisor in our building as our assistant principal. She's also been an r s p and a teacher. This experience includes curriculum design implementation, sped log compliance provider oversight and litigation familiarity. Her knowledge is of the utmost importance as very few special educator educators go into
administration. In our case we have a expert in-house who goes above and beyond daily to support this most vulnerable population numbering over 80 students at our site alone. I implore the board to please keep elementary assistant principals. thank you for your time. my name is mabel chang and I am a para educator at francis scott key which was chosen as a california distinguished school with five hundred and 50 plus students including 80 plus of ieps and 75 staff. Having an assistant principal is critical to maintaining school performance. Our MISS Carina mcgraw with her extensive experience in special ed provides the resources to implement and comply with the complexity of ieps while balancing and meeting the needs of the general ed population. What supports does the board and superintendent plan to give to large schools without an assistant principal? How will a principal cover two jobs like attending 100 ieps without an assistant principal? The district is setting itself
up for non-compliant lawsuits eliminating assistant principals without understanding the impact shows a lack of insight to the importance of an assistant principal to individual school operations. thank you. hi there. I'm josh davidson, chef for S.F. Usd, a chief steward for seiu 10 to 1 and my kitchen is located on the mcateer campus and I come with good news tonight so enjoy it for the next 50s on APRIL 8th as of usd for the first time ever served food grown by our students to our students in a school cafeteria we harvested 100 pounds of lettuce. We harvested 43 pounds of greens that first week another 60 pounds of greens. The following week we have another harvest coming in tomorrow. I'm very excited to go to work tomorrow and see what that holds. And it's all because of partnerships across the school
arts faculties science faculty at both academy and it's sort of a lot of parent involvement community support from food wise from urban sprouts, the help of the student nutrition department. If I do say so myself are all working together to build a real community space on to your campus and in my last couple of seconds I want to invite you to join us this saturday or on MAY 17th for community day. thank you. Thank you. you call the next group please come to the podium. Jessica magnus, jessica schaefer jenny one violet tilly and gabe schecter schachter I'm sorry I can't read it for gabe. If you hear good. hi, good evening. I'm here to advocate for star king elementary, a mandarin immersion school and petro help. We are one of the most socioeconomically and ethnically diverse schools in the city and were awarded the student success fund grant to help overcome inequities in our underserved communities.
20% of our students have ieps and we have a 45% on duplicated population. The budget stabilization plan is undercutting our efforts and enrollment by causing harm and disruption to our students, teachers and programs as if usd created a flawed structure of trying to funnel 44 more students into a classroom of 33 as they move from third to fourth grades with the apparent expectation of combo classes in the upper grades which is pedagogically does not work in mandarin. We've communicated our issues for years but left to solve them on our own through discretionary site funds the district is now forbidding this. Our administrator filed for an appeal and had conversations with the multilingual department our parents have been advocating and we have no solution coming from sp usd we are asking for a meeting with the commissioners at our school site to help advocate for our solution and help so our learning environment doesn't triage a district created
disaster. we listen. Hi my name is jenny one I am coming from a start coming here as a parent I want to stress that chinese immersion programs both mandarin and cantonese cannot simply combine fourth and fifth grades the way english or other alphabet based programs can. Chinese character learning is cumulative and highly structured and merging grades undermines that foundation. For the past nine years our community has solved this challenge ourselves through discretionary funds. Now not only is that support being taken away but the district also is not working with us to find a solution. We're not asking for extra. We're asking to keep what's working. As recipients of the student success fund, dcf has identified our students as a vulnerable population disrupting this program would hurt those that are already benefiting from it and cause real harm with the district's plans, we'll be losing qualified teachers and losing years of experience that we will not likely get back if we lose them now we MAY never rebuild the program.
Please reconsider this approach and let us be part of the solution. hi my name is jessica schaefer third kind of row from star king. So as all the other speakers have said this next year our school fight budget has resulted in switching from six teachers across fourth and fifth grade to three teachers. To handle that entire population. That is across two different programs a mandarin and mandarin immersion program as well as an english parent program. and they have said as they have said, you cannot combine fourth and fifth graders in mandarin because learning characters is a sequential based process. Additionally right now we are able to combine our fourth and fifth grade mandarin immersion and english learners in for the english learning arts section and now only logistically works if we have sufficient teachers. So if we do not have the
restoration of teachers that we need for next year we'll be unable to continue that community building process that has been so valuable for our school this year. Finally, it's really difficult to hire credentialed mandarin teachers and if tuesday and while next year we would only have three the year after we would need more. so you'll have to rehire those same teachers. Thank you. hi. I'm a teacher at this valley elementary school the station valley and I'm here to talk about our elementary supervisor, MR. R. Last year in my first year teaching I had a newcomer in my class who only spoke spanish and he had a really, really hard time and MR. R with the trusting loving adult on campus who build relationship helped him participate in class, helped him make friends and helped me get closer with him too. And there are so many students and so many families at our school who are just like that who rely on MR. R to keep them updated, to keep them involved
in the school, to help the kids with their work, to help the kids socially help them get along helps all of us as teachers too. He translates in the parent teacher conferences he comes to help when anyone needs help. He does everything for our school and if we lost him the kids would be devastated. The parents would be disconnected. Our school really would not function without him. And so we are here to ask you to rescind all the lay offs for para educators and to keep the cuts away from our kids. thank you. Thank you. Okay. Hello. My name is violet tilly. I'm a parent to tilly as she spoke earlier. I was kind of bothered when she came home and told me some like she was losing out on some of her peer educators. Um, I live in the neighborhood . My daughter has attended there for five years. I have seen generations of change. But what's happening to our
peer educators? It's the best I've ever seen. These are the people from the community black samoan whose kids who've looked up to them like my daughter said, they're not just their teachers our help, their family. They keep them safe. They take them around the neighborhood where we live. they show them that they are not the neighborhood, that they are them. That they can be someone to not be a part of where they come from. So I just ask you guys to please you know, think about this. Our kids are hurting. It's not just everyone else. thank you. Thank you. I will call the next group. Amelia rivera, susan ly jodi judy grossman. Gigi housley and sara by terry fox. Sorry I can't see it. Please come to the podium one minute each. You can go ahead. hello. My name is amelia rivera. I am the community school coordinator at vance valley elementary and I'm here to advocate for MR. Rodriguez, our student advisor at west valley
elementary, a title one community school in the very southeast corner of san francisco where our families and students often speak of feeling like a forgotten part of the city. As educators we are told to be student centered. Yet these layoffs are anything but that. To lay off our spanish speaking student advisor is cutting a lifeline for our students and families. We need MR. R and we need our students to have every possible resource to thrive. I invite any of you to actually come to our school and shadow MR. R and you can see how vital and irreplaceable he is to our community school and district. You need to do what is right for our kids and rescind these layoffs. thank you. Thank you. Sorry. Um. good evening. My name is susan ly and kindergarten teacher at darker charles drew over the past three years our educators have received consistent training from our instructor and coaches in cips, a research
based phonics program. As a result, 80% of our kindergarten students reached literacy proficiency last year. By the end of FEBRUARY this year 70% of our kindergartners are meeting proficiency. We close the gaps for our multilingual learners. These gains are the direct result of the unwavering dedication and expertise of our para educators. They are essential to our students academic success. How will you ensure we maintain and continue to grow this level of achievement if our trained para educators are replaced? Laying off four of our parent marketers who are also african american and pacific islander how do you intend to rebuild the trust of our students who see this as an direct impact on the representation and support they rely on? These are people that are from our community. They understand our students. So please resend please have them come back next year. I really need them. the kids really need them. Our community needs them. thank you. good afternoon.
My name is gasly and I've been employed with the district for 18 years now starting off as a security guard moving to a r 30 which is the activities coordinator and then moving to which is our 11 now and in these positions we do do a lot of work to support the kids mental health, their wellbeing and the student engagement between students and teachers building that building bridging that gap with them, helping them to understand the students and what they've gone through being a product of esf usd and being just like these students they need people like them in the schools to help bridge these gaps. Not only do we bridge the communication gap between them but we also create great ideas to fill the e w y list and missing x ray 45% of our students out because of the peer to peer mentoring program that I worked with MISS Rachel on with peer resources to do and now we've been piling this program for two years and it's working so please send the
letters. Thank you. hello. My name's judy grossman. Nice to see you, DR. Sue. MR. Kim, I've been volunteering at mission high school for 22 years and I've known G.G. Since she was a student there and I followed her progress into a caring, loving adult that makes a difference in students lives from success to create success for them in the rest of their lives. She mentors them. She works with them. She shows them the right way to do things and how to be stay on the straight and narrow. She has changed lives of countless, countless marginalized, underserved children and I think that her value to mission high is beyond reproach. She it makes a significant difference. I watch her grow as an adult and please rescind her notice she is a valuable valuable resource that can't be replaced .
thank you. hello. My name is sarah mokhtar fox and I teach ninth grade at mission high and I just want to read a little bit from the save usd website for the 2025 vision a truly equitable school district, the district's strong commitment to equity and social justice across all of its communities every school and every student is a part of a district wide system of supports designed to ensure that all students and family have the support and resources they need to thrive. That sounds real beautiful right now you've heard all these cuts tonight and you are cutting all our series resource positions which directly support the vision that you describe and as you just heard, you're cutting a lifeline. Gigi from mission high she's been there for 18 years the same school that she went to and she builds deep personal connections with students and families over generation specific equity with our historically underserved black populations who if we are anti-racist and equitable as we claim to be, we should be
giving more to not less. So please make your actions match your match your website and reinstate gigi immediately. thank you. came to call the final group please come line up missy kito mali velasquez mason waller. Michelle vidal. Chris bell morales and then teyana taylor tillery will be us as unicef's designee this evening. Good evening. My name is missy carroll and I'm an instructional coach at francis scott key elementary school. You know this maya angelou quote. People forget what you said. People will forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel. Our students will never forget the feeling of losing a trusted nurse para arts advisor teacher or teacher. Our families will never forget the frustration with the district unable to adequately staff their child's school. Our tenured teachers will never forget the stress of consolidations, the uncertainty ,the unrest this causes to both the teachers forced to
leave their beloved schools and to the teachers losing their dear colleagues. Our new teachers will never forget the feeling of disillusionment by a district that canvased hard to hire them only to dismiss them ten months later. You've talked of unnecessary pain we must endure to fix this budget. Just so you know this pain will last. Its impacts will endure and we'll never forget. thank you. hi, I'm michelle vidal. I'm the nsf parent and I'm the school social worker at visitation valley elementary school. I'm here tonight to ask you to rescind the layoff notice to MR. George rodriguez, our elementary school advisor. He's a lifeline to our spanish speaking community. I cannot do this work. Our wellness support team cannot do this work without him on a day to day basis. He walks alongside children and families so that they can overcome obstacles and barriers to learning in the southeast sector of san francisco. Like MR. Rivera mentioned earlier and often forgotten
part of san francisco, he is invaluable. We cannot use our site funds we learned yesterday to pay for his position next school year. We are asking that we can use our funds to pay for him. He we cannot do it without him. We cannot teach children. It requires more than a classroom teacher. This is a new world. It requires more than one teacher in a classroom to educate children. Families need basic needs to thrive. thank you. clearly there are a lot of problems that this district has put us in. Transparency or lack of it is a big one not transparency now. It isn't just about information. It's about giving people enough information so they can challenge decisions before they're made. This hasn't happened with you or it has it hasn't happened with our school administration and hillcrest and now we're in a position where decisions are made and we are
in communities fighting what everyone is claiming a done deal. Our hands are tied. That creates big problems when example layoffs. So even if we agree with principals about the positions we want to save because of seniority we're only saving the positions not in way too many cases as we've heard the person which is what really really matters to people positions. Sure. But those relationships with trusted adults too often exactly the people kids and families have grown to trust enough to share the information about themselves and their kids in the supports they want and need. And that would actually benefit them. Gone and now thank you. The decisions are made by you and our admin it's thing your time how much we can do now. make the best of it. When I started this minority series very moral thing what those thing is and what I look preschool when I am pre-k children say what I don't say
more you look at the knee and the meaning and the school thing I guess but I puzzled distrito but as they were doing them in the wrong for me less caloric meant to going to school is at minimum of the guinea antonio but are not any manila earliest days a literate scholar put up with it every two months alone as it was there there was education amazon using with services that you local community whose doja cat any in the list pass your standing one look at them with real liberty and I don't know how masa you the popular provider myself lucas your mama's near the metro is in you yasmin was running and nothing on what kind of address this girl has virtually no strawberries in that you go mobile that is what I what I well I look prepare the mosquitoes are you then go must my pereira read or try all litigating espanol again the jenkins orders the name was elizabeth also santa barbara said look look it necesitamos is that you that you tedesco must meisters be linguist yet can MR. Scola is an escola
willing with thank you friends welcome to this is morales I have two girls in one album and another one second I feel that it's very unfair that having my child at school I have to wait for the answer from the district to know where she is going to visit the school originally he counts with his face for over 500 children but we don't have the help that you guys from the school district could open more classrooms and you could get more indications to more children in our neighborhood which I think is very unfair because we do have this space and it's a very popular space as well. We should give us more help to give the educations to more children from my neighborhood so we don't have to go and look out for other schools outside our neighborhoods as parents as from the of the school we ask for more help from teachers that we can open more schools in for spanish and the decay so that we can have because we have enough space to do it
and we need your help and we also need bilingual teachers and he doesn't usually do it. PRESIDENT Kim do you want to make the announcement about the ussf designee? thank you. Yes, us f has unlimited time to speak on public comment during this time so please go ahead. thank you. Hey I good evening missioners tonight I come to you with a heavy heart and a pressing question who will do the work of the 123 paraprofessionals your lane off I know you can't answer me right now but I really need to ask you very clearly very directly who will do the work if these parent educators are gone? who will support the students who feel unseen and unheard or the students who
rely on us trust us and are guided by us who will make sure families who do not speak english still have access to their children's education, who will help them navigate the system, communicate with teachers and feel connected to the school community who will make sure there is enough coverage on campus to keep our schools safe to to de-escalate conflict, respond to emergencies or just be a steady presence in the hallways who will go into our communities, knock on doors, sit down with families whose children are not coming to school regularly and help them identify the barriers they're facing who will do all of this if we're laid off? Let's be real. We already do the work. We do it every single day not because we're told to but because we care. We love our students.
We know them by name. We see their potential and we show up for them day in and day out and what have we received in return? The threats of layoffs year after year a pair of educators live in constant state of anxiety never knowing if we have a job come the fall we try to plan our lives, support our families, pay our rent while holding our breath until the final decisions are made and yet we show up anyway. we work hard. We work pass are scheduled hours. we do more than our job descriptions. We put our hearts, our labor and yes even our health into this work without pensions we can't afford to retire so we work into our bodies give out and even then we push through. We do it with patience. We do it with dignity. We do it with the belief that
one day we'll be made whole. But we haven't been. We've been told to wait to hold on to trust that better days are coming. We don't complain. We haven't striked we waited and we serve. We're loyal even when the district hasn't been kind to us now for many of us the day we feared has come this layoff just isn't a budget decision. It's a betrayal of breaking a faith with the very workers who have held the district together through crisis after crisis is the message that our labor, our humanity is expendable and what's even more devastating is the way that it's being handled. We've been forced to make life altering decisions in incredibly short time spans.
Some of us are told by our own administrators that our positions are safe only to have those reassurances snatched away by a call in principle notice that we must attend layoff hearings in front of a judicial system. How are we supposed to trust our leaders when the communication is so broken, so fragmented, so inhumane? there's no transparency, no honesty, no dignity in the way the process has been unfolding . We're not just positions on a spreadsheet people who were parents were neighbors. we're educators. We're the ones who show up when the system does it. We're the ones who see our students when they're overlooked. We're the ones who stay even when we're told there's no future for us. so once again I ask you who will do the work when we're
gone? Who will be the ones who stand beside our students in crisis? Who will be the ones to listen to mentor to show love? Who will stand up for us now the educators who have stood by the district even when they didn't stand by us who among you will be brave enough to advocate for us not just here but at the state level to fight for funding for job security? And most importantly, who among you will show through action that we are valued, respected and needed because we are we always have been. But the real question tonight is will you act like you know I've come to you to speak on behalf of the educators at every meeting since the passing of the workforce resolution sharing comments about the impact of laying off the peer educators. I don't think I've been clear enough what I'm asking
you rescind the layoffs for our educators. thank you. That concludes in-person public comment because PRESIDENT Kim, can we move on to his comments? Yes. Yes. All right. We're now moving on to zoom public comment. Please raise your hand if you care to share public comment. Each speaker will have one minute. Can we please have that repeated in spanish and chinese when instead they selectively went along to build a news commentary goes for me and then I'll get the full medicine. So commentary is going particularly like this with my notes you get a as and then google again but then it will be presented as is cantonese. Go ahead. thank you. Thank you guy mom's on facebook making a do you are being on see your beauty game I found the emoji I'm going sell more you know if I'm doing if I can
translate thank you thank you MS. Marshall as that brings so much young sister to PRESIDENT Kim for commissioners and to assume all you have the end of life deeply with your I've heard all the heartfelt comments from the pair of them from the class first and especially the paraprofessional staff we hear you. We're so sorry this is happening and we're wondering in this very rich city first thank you for all that you do working with our students, working alongside of the classroom teacher and we're wondering what can be done in this great city. One of the richest in the cities in the world to reach out to all those corporation us who are who earn billions of dollars and many tax free dollars what can how can the district work with those those companies to help within these layoffs? And we're willing to go with the superintendent of the board commissioner to any meetings to know more about this kind of situation.
So there would not be any parallels. thank you. Thank you, emily. Hi. my name's emily wang. I'm a parent of a first and third grader at star king elementary. I do travel programs in special ed mandarin and on general. Our school is one of 53 of us do community schools and it's really concerning to us if you have these preventing these schools and communities from using already approved grant money and other funds in place for their intended purposes, one would think that during all this turmoil in the country san francisco would get it right. San francisco should support a trained and educated workforce with job security and stability not cut the educators and supporters arbitrarily like we're seeing around the rest of the country. San francisco should be a place where we continue to support those most in need. san francisco should be where we're really supporting diversity, equity and inclusion
like I'm hearing being lost all around this district. We should continue to also support our students in a way that they need which is not a one size fits all approach that's starting. we're set to lose three more teachers next year on top of the already three we lost last year. These are people not numbers they're credentialed some with with language positions that are difficult to replace but the old inhumane way that we're treating these educators. thank you, emily. that should help. Thank you. color ending in 034. Good evening. Board members and signatories to the chapters being a product of our public schools I appreciate your hard work when you have no money. I have a question of where you do have money. On MARCH 29th, 2024 the district received 24.65 million in the jewel settlement. Thanks to the work of the city attorney. At that time the district said
it would cover costs of current staff nurses at each middle school. Counselors and health educators and high school 8 to $10 million to be spent that year. And then 8 to 10 million in future years. That was just 13 months ago. It was supposed to pay for 76 nurses, counselors and health educators. It's important that you can explain to the public where the money went. If there's still money being spent the next year to tell us where was spent and if it's been said on something other than nurses and other than health, then maybe the court should know and the public should know. I know you have a lot of hard work but I think there's money available for the nurses. and I just want to bring it to your attention. Thank you. Thank you, jamie. I am shocked and in awe of all of you and your ability to
upkeep all the resources required to pretend that you are not closing schools and calling it something else. How dare you fire kenna? How dare you fire one para? How dare you balance your budget on our kids? You allow us to pay for our staff using our entire pta budget next year. This means we will fund one single community event for the whole year. And then what? What after that? By allowing us to use our fundraising money you are literally taxing all the people in my community. This could all be solved if you do one minute and tax one single billionaire. I'm asking that you put all these cuts on hold until we can elect our own superintendent someone who will fight for us, not against us. Sue is illegitimate. She is not for us to the board. Now it's time to act. Fire you fire! Save usd doge. Good night. Thank you.
Alyssa. thank you. I want to echo all of the support for our lgbtq student services coordinator kenneth hazelwood. Our trans kids are being targeted by no less than the PRESIDENT And as a usd sole staff member dedicated to our kids has gotten a layoff notice on behalf of my son and his peers, I'm asking you to do what you know is right and rescind ken his layoff notice and secondly, laying off security guards is a backdoor to letting as a pd back into our schools which the district voted to end in the black minds matter resolution in 2020 and I know none of you were here for that but it was widely supported by the community so you should not be doing secret back doors to policies especially through layoffs. Please keep our trusted security guards. thank you. Thank you, laura.
Can you hear me? yes, we can hear you. My name is lori kennedy. I'm a parent at yellow elementary and a member of our school side council. This we go with celebrating autism and neurodiversity celebrating the diverse spectrum and beauty of human minds minds of all kinds. It was one of only six elementary schools to support students with mild to severe autism. In DECEMBER I shared with aap that our k through two special day classroom was without a full time teacher today with three new commissioners and six weeks left in the school year. These students are still without a full time teacher in these most formative years. We're not alone. We have 90 plus vacancies in the district. I'm here today to ask DR. Sue the board s of leaders at all levels and anyone listening to come together to fill these vacancies. Please provide us with the data on these data vacancies we could accrue as a collective for anyone who came here with the request meeting artists to reduce class sizes. Filling these vacancies is the path to getting what you seek. So please let us come together
and step up the urgency this moment calls for to fill the classroom vacancies. thank you. Thank you, erin. Yes, thank you. I was paige so I would just go as a board member and I would like to speak to the short term evaluation for the board of education members matrix that was shared. I was concerned. I want to know how the board of education commissioners will be evaluated. It is crucial that it not just be a self evaluation during the period but include the community who elects the board of education commissioner whether it be a town hall where community members can actually share their thoughts would be a survey or focus groups or many other ways that the community
and residents surely typically elect the board of education commissioners MAY have some input in their evaluation and not have it be a self evaluation where they integrate themselves. thank you and that is your time. thank you. Thank you, noah. Hi. My name's noiseless associates parent and board member of parents for public schools. Tonight there will be a presentation about the new payroll in erp system that has a $16 million price tag just for this fiscal year as supposed to spend at least $30 million on empower which will now be scrapped. So it's a total waste. Parents did not do this but they are being told that they can have the teachers and perry educators their need. My question is will the central office take responsibility for in power and who will be held accountable?
Thank you. Thank you, diane. Hi, I'm kate shader archer that you quote you will not be able to implement the tax plan because you are eliminating all artists. We are your intervention staff. Tier three of the plan says are for other intervention staff. There is no other intervention staff I know of. Tier two says r2 for classroom teacher classroom teachers can do some small group instruction. They do not have the time in the day to do 1 or 2 groups of students 30 minutes a day for at least ten weeks. Without our tips you have no mta in this plan. Many sites have funding including stable multi-year funding for our kids which they are being told they are not allowed to use. scrap the staffing plan waiting until 92% of positions are filled won't work for one. Sites will have budgeted the money elsewhere.
Now is when sites are planning their budget allows sites to use any available funds for an artist. Thank you. thank you. Harbor. hello. Hi. My name is robert kelly and I'm the cac chair. I just want to remind everyone the purpose of the dyslexia screener law is so we can catch our kids as early as possible to provide them the interventions needed. So as much as I'm concerned about the choice of a mirror, I am equally concerned about the improvement plan thereafter. They consider although we have an empty nest system by the fall it is likely we will not have an artist network. And with that we will have lost years of training, expertise, institutional knowledge. Not to mention I am uncertain what the plan will be once a
child is free and identified as needing additional reading interventions. So please my house is for you all to transparently share. What is the plan? What will the future be for our students who are the most vulnerable in the state? should you lisa? Hello. My name is lisa richardson. I am a family liaison care educator at mount mason academy . and I really feel for everyone that is speaking tonight. Thank you tom tillery for your work. Because hopefully those people that are sitting behind that just this resonates with them. You guys don't understand the drama the drama, the anxiety, the grief that you're causing people. You are taking some of the most valuable employees away from these students. But yet san francisco call themselves student center. I don't think it is unfair. It's a disgrace. And I agree with someone.
We need to vote on our next superintendent. It's unfair that you come in to this position. Hire somebody that you know that's making six times the the the price of someone as a peer educator. and are they going to come out and talk to the families? Are they not going to really said that's your time. thank you, chris. and this is the department head at washington high school . A school that expects to lose two academic counselors next year increasing counseling caseload by more than 100 students per counselor to care which will especially hard work for those five open plans. I urge educators to also say that they are to center educator consolidate until strict principles and stable and family support positions and special educational family liaison roles and other support roles such as our lgbt services cannot handle it. I am appalled that that last provision is on the chopping block especially given the terrifying times that we are in serving parent educator and counselor position for
science and our lgbt social services coordinator like this ignores so many schools into survival mode instead of supporting them so that they can thrive. I saw ellis to make these budget cuts and find additional funding sources and show that you actually care about our schools. Thank you and hello. Yes, we can hear you. Hi, my name's anna and I'm a teacher at meditation valley elementary school. And as so many public comments have already eloquently stated please, please rescind the parent educator layoff notices. Our schools elementary advisor MR. Ah is so crucial to our community. As a teacher I see every day how MR. R's hard work really lead to my students success in school. Literally he gets them to school. He's got home visits to help address absenteeism at our
school and help students come to school. He handles restorative conversations to resolve conflicts so that my students come back to class ready to learn. And my students know MR. R cares about them and they trust him. And we can't just have any any elementary advisor at school. it has to be MR. R because he has won those relationships. He's irreplaceable complete with the peer educator layoff notices. Thank you. Thank you PRESIDENT Kim conclude virtual public comment. thank you. I want to just acknowledge and thank members of the public for showing up today at voice your concerns questions and pushes and we've received many emails since our last board meeting and trust they're being read and when we are acknowledging as many as we can but just want to I think folks this is a difficult time for our district. We have a lot of challenging decisions to make and and
and people educate our students and all of these will require some thoughtful collaboration and conversation with both the public, the superintendent and the rest of the board. So thank you for so much for being here and and voicing your perspectives. Um, I'm going to go ahead and move us on to our next item here to align with our effective governance practices . The superintendent and her team are tasked with providing a draft of each agenda 12 days in advance. Once that draft agenda is made public on our website board members have made a commitment to submit, clarifying and tactical questions and staff have made a commitment to respond to those questions in advance of each board meeting. This q&a doc is linked into each board agenda on board docs and today it is linked in item one we invite the public to review those questions and answers alongside our discussions today. Additionally to create more
focus on more more space focus and see the outcomes we will be moving both items to our consent calendar and identifying only our highest priority agenda items to discuss. board members are reminded not to restate questions answered by staff in advance but instead to bring forward strategic questions that will allow us to better understand our progress towards goals and the underlying strategies that we can be better informed in our decision making and partner with the superintendent as we hold her accountable. Item e workshop on student outcomes item one scope and sequence of available measures I call on the superintendent to uh call on staff. Thank you PRESIDENT Kim as I shared in MARCH I the are in our MARCH meeting that we will start the process to design and craft interim new interim goals and guardrails that we will share with the board and with the community so that we can move forward in monitoring for that in the
new school year the to start that process what we're going to share today is I've invited our research policy and accountability team to come and share with you all of the different data metrics, performance measures and assessment tools that we have at our ready at the in our data team and then have that conversation about which ones are meaningful for us, which ones maybe we should just gently retire and how will we collect this data in order to really move the needle on student outcomes and more importantly to help us monitor the work of moving toward student outcomes. So with that I am going to invite DR. Rita khanna, our head of research, planning and accountability as well as her team to share the presentation. thank you. Let's go. Good evening. Board commissioners, superintendent and members of
the public. My name is jess reyes from research, planning and assessment and I'm joined by my colleagues rita connor and devin corrigan. We'll be sharing with you this as the fewest student outcome measures. Next slide please. As a few as this scope of measures is based on the 2000 2425 student outcome measures which are situated in four broader domains attendance, wellbeing academics and high school specific outcome measures from these broader measures we can then specify metrics to better understand how our students are doing. For example, some metrics for attendance MAY include daily attendance rate or the chronic absenteeism rate for example. Next slide please. this slide shows the student outcome measures that are aligned to the 20 2425 vision values goals and guardrails along with the specific metric
the frequency and the dates that the data are available. The goal level measures for goal one to and three are state summative measures which occur annually. The interim goal measures are the benchmark assessments that occur more frequently which are used to inform instruction and importantly serve as the such measures for progress monitoring. You'll note that the interim guardrails corresponding to guardrail two which is the whole child are also student outcome measures and they are listed here as well. Next slide. so this 20 2425 as us calendar of measures is a illustrative and shows many of our student outcome measures. The applicable grade levels, the frequency and the timing of that each occurs. there is a hyperlink toward the top of the slide that takes you to a spreadsheet
and provides much much more detailed information about sfi usd student outcome measures and the metrics, scope and sequence which includes how each metric is calculated at the source of the data. The corresponding strategy owners reporting frequency hyperlinks and the vg alignment. And now I'll turn it over to my colleague devin corrigan who will share information about our dashboards. thanks, jess. Evening commissioners student delegates, members of the public. Thank you for having me. And I'm just going to briefly take you through a few of our data dashboards which are related typically new offerings to the public and to our school site staff. This first slide is our public data dashboard. This is actually created in response to a board resolution back in the summer of 2020. As some of you MAY know, so you know you know well if you've seen data presentations in here
before, there are eight categories for race ethnicity that are commonly reported on. Those are defined by the state and the federal government on our enrollment form. However, we have 20 categories 21 if you include not specified which you can also check. So I could tell you more about the resolution and I'm happy to do so. But in a nutshell what this was designed to do was give a lot more data on demand from members of the public not just enrollment data which is the snapshot we're looking at now but across various metrics which you can see in those tiles on the top or perhaps you can't see because it's small but they are there as back attendance suspension data. The survey results for the acl culture climate survey. There's there's a ton of data in there and you're able to interact directly with this dashboard again on demand it's always there for you to look at by filtering you're able to interact by filtering
and really changing the report in countless ways. The permutations are there's thousands and thousands of ways you can look at the groups on these reports by race, ethnicity and also by various other student groups. You really want to make sure that we we showed you a snapshot of this. I encourage you to look through the other views on this dashboard as well. Each of those six tiles on the top would take you to a different view and as you'll see across all those tiles, the measures are disaggregated in various ways. I also wanted to mention that we update this twice per year. A lot of the measures that are included on this dashboard there simply isn't data to update all year long. For example, this back is just once a year what we do update it twice a year and that's actually something that's defined in the board resolution when that was that was passed in the summer of 2020 and the link is down there too if you'd like to click through that or write that down to to explore more on your own time. Next slide please.
So I've got two more slides left and they're going to show two different dashboards. The thing to know about these two dashboards is that they are for internal use only. so these were designed for site leaders. they're designed for site leaders and they contain personally identifiable student information which that first dashboard does not that is public ready. This one is not you're able to click through on these data visualization as you're able to click through and actually eventually get down to lists of student names. So it's a really powerful tool for site leaders looking to make decisions about what's happening at their school. And we actually update this every six weeks or even more frequently because it has it has data that is updated more frequently. For example, the star district assessment is something that we can update quite frequently and we do. So I just wanted to point out a couple of things by way of giving you a brief tour here. The green boxes at the top
that's where you click through just as in the previous slide this will take you to different views which are associated with different measures or metrics. They are aligned to the vgs as many of them and we call that out at the top so you can see where that alignment is. You try to make that as clear as possible. We also disaggregate that's the orange or look sort of yellow that filters at the top. Also similar to the last dashboard view that really is where the power in these dashboards is. I mentioned that it's on demand which is another very powerful aspect of these dashboards to really that that filtering is where these reports become so powerful because you're not reaching out to my department to ask for a custom report. You can just make it yourself. And the last thing I want to point out and this is really something we always strive to do with our reports is report trend data. So that blue box down in the bottom left is showing data over a period of two years and in other reports we show three years or ten years it depends on the context but we
always show trend data when we have it and when it's comparable. Next slide please. this is a different dashboard. It was designed last spring and summer for the purpose of helping site leaders plan for the upcoming school year. Now the difference between what you're looking at now and the last one while they are both internal dashboards. The last one is a progress monitoring dashboard that we update throughout the school year whereas this one was a one off at the end of the school year we compile all this data once it's all clean and ready to go at the end of the year and we put it here again this is sort of similar to the static pdf reports we've produced in the past but far more powerful because of the filters that are here and I don't want to repeat too much because it shares a lot in common with these other dashboards. I've already talked through. But one thing I want to point out here is that on this end of your dashboard you can actually
you can have the metrics sort of interact with each other. So if you had if you zoomed in on this, you would see that it has suspension data has se aspect data and then that filter up at the top right on both of these views is allowing you to filter on students who are chronically absent and students who are not chronically absent. So you could see se back outcomes suspension outcomes for students that are in one or either of those groups or both of those groups. So again, really powerful tool to be able to interact with the data on demand using these filters as we put in as many groups as we can, we can fit so much more data in these dashboards than we can in a pdf or an a slide. So again first when I showed you this for the public these last two are for internal use and they proved very popular and I'm looking forward to taking any questions about these. We're sort of building out our capacity to put more dashboards in the hands of more of our stakeholders. So it's early days yet but we're looking forward to
building it out and taking your questions. Thank you. Thank you so much. Commissioners, just given the amount of items we have on our agenda today and the way I'm going to structure our discussion is to have each commissioner go around and just ask their top question for now we'll do a similar like word vomiting of our questions but just one at a time. We'll give staff an opportunity to make sense of that and respond and we'll enter into a conversation. I am going to put a two minute timer for ourselves and if you hear it go off just know it's two minutes and if you have not asked a question by then I will ask you to ask a question. Just wanted to frontload expectations here. Okay. Do we have someone who wants to kick us off of questions before we start? can I just. Yes. Sorry. Just what's there what's our goal here in this? I'm not totally clear on what the what our work goals. Oh, sorry. Thank you for that. I just want to yeah.
Um, I actually wrote this and I never actually mentioned it. so the focus to be clear is on these measures, not on progress monitoring. We have a separate conversation will have as part of our ongoing conversations around how to progress monitor in part with our board metrics today but also just ongoing through an ad hoc potentially the focus today is just on making sense of the measures that we have in front of us to better understand the data that the district uses and that's available to the public. This is not an action item so there's no motion to make or action to give. It's more of an opportunity for both the public to witness and the board to understand what the data is that we have as a district and we can ask questions around that. But again focused on the measures themselves, not around the progress monitoring of that. With that being promised, yeah, go forward.
Thank you. Is there my just to close? Okay. Thank you all so much and wow this is a lot of numbers and a lot of data and a lot of sheets and clicks and things which is not necessarily in my expertise but I appreciate it and I know that we need this information in order to inform sort of our next steps in what we're doing. So my question is about I guess it's slide five that the public dashboard with the summative student data and there's the the squares on the top it starts off with enrollment race and ethnicity attendance. You see which one. So michael, I guess if we're if the question is about the data and the data and and the measures we know that race
and ethnicity relate to suspensions. We know that attendance relates to often maps on to aspect scores if you're not there to take the test or you've missed parts of certain days of school or a certain number of schools it impacts. So I'm wondering how or how are you all going to be sort of I guess integrating the data so that we can see all of the trends because I think it's really important that we have this. But obviously they're not they don't operate in silos. They're so interconnected. So does did they do these dashboards allow you to say okay, we're going to look at how attendance MAY be relates to suspensions and a-spec numbers? Is that something that these dashboards allow the public to see? great. So thank you so much for this. It's a really nice visualization. I really appreciate the
inventory and the in and this is clearly a reference document that I'd love to just continually go back to you just to understand the cadence of when things come out and so forth. So I really appreciate that. my one question right and I have a lot of individual comments are I'd love to you know perhaps take offline I think the one question that I have right now is you you know, I always seek to democratize data and provide as much transparency as possible. I think that's especially critical at this point at this juncture with sfd, is there a way to down for folks to be able to download the data so that users can analyze it as they see fit, be it educators, be it parents, community members in a way creating peer to peer to peer ability to see what the amazing folks of san francisco can come up with if they have access to this data
or database. I want to echo everyone's appreciation for these dashboards. I cannot wait to geek out on them. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Um, I know this has been a long time in the coming in this has been multiple and iterations so thank you very much. Um I my question is about slide. Um I don't know what number it is. Uh, the slide three measures align to the 2425 vgs. So my question is more specific and this is a question I've asked over multiple years in multiple administrations and multiple boards do we have the right metrics in place when it comes to reading proficiency ? Um I've always questioned the efficacy of using our standardized tests and I appreciate DR. Connors willingness to always be a thought partner in this area. Um, I'll give a very specific anecdote in this area. Um, there's an elementary school and especially looking
at 1.1 where we're talking about our each and every student where we put some extra attention. Um, we had one elementary school where with that fall um ,early literacy benchmark the school was super excited to see that 80% of their african-american and pacific islander students in that each and every initiative scored in proficient. I mean it was great. Um then when when we did our winter assessment um the scores dropped to 20% proficiency in the same student groups which of course set off alarm bells. So it's great to have the data to go back and figure out and dig into the why and the why that was found was in that first iteration. Um, the school had given release time to the teachers to oversee the administration of this computerized test because they're kindergartners. Right. And so the teachers themselves didn't they didn't administer
the test but they were in there in the background to keep students on t keep on fine. I'm going to there's a point there's a point to keep students engaged. Um, but because things had gone so well in that first iteration they didn't do the same release time and the kids were left on their own for the administration of the test even though they had the skill sets. They didn't stay engaged with the test to actually get the same proficiency levels. So to me the results that we're getting and using to monitor whether or not they're indicative of whether or not our students can access the tests, not whether or not our students can actually read. And this is one data point one example, but it really highlights my huge concerns with whether these standardized tests are what we should be using to measure this hugely important goal. Is there a question there? That was that was a question. It was are these standardized tests based on this? Um, I question whether or not
these are the right measures to actually show the brilliant knowledge that our kids are learning in our school. Thank you. Student delegates and then we'll come back around. first of all, that was a really good question. I was going to add on to that but for now my main question was how do you plan on using this data to benefit students when it comes to providing them with resources they need to catch up, continue persevering and stay on track for the near future? I want to echo the appreciation for the amazing work. My question is sort of more on the the cultivation and how we're like showcasing the data and it's more of what sort of feedback have you collected from educators and people that you want to see as really in the exclusive data set the people that you want to be using this to to influence their decision making? What has there been a concerted effort to like get their
feedback to then change some of the things on the site because obviously I'm not really the intended audience but some of the things I'm looking at I'm like I'm a little concerned or confusing what's going on? So I want to know if that's sort of been something that you've looked at and asked people for feedback on how you could make it potentially a little bit more streamlined and easier to understand for them. good evening everyone and thank you so much. You've distinguished here between public dashboard and a site facing some site facing dashboards. And what I'd like to ask you is what do you think is most helpful for the public to know about the public dashboard and accessing it and for the site to know and who can each of those groups go to if they have a question or need help in figuring out how to use these? as usual brilliant work by the research planning and assessment department.
Thank you. My question I think is maybe similar to commissioner related to commissioner fischer's around you know this this is a phenomenal use of the data that we have and it's relatively easy to measure right standardized tests. The reason we use standardized tests is because they're quick ,they're easy and they're a great way to measure to take a rough dipstick of student achievement across large numbers of students. But the but the smaller group of students you get in the closer you get to the classroom ,the less useful they are. Frankly, teachers are using lots of other data on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to assess whether their kids how their kids are doing. If you ask a kindergarten teacher or a first grade teacher how kids are doing toward that third grade literacy goal, they have assessments they're using that might be sitting with a kid and reading with them. Right. I mean there's some are for
more formal some are less formal. So I guess my question is sort of how does this connect to that and how do we make sure that we don't sort of get distracted by what's easy to measure and just focus on the stuff we can measure as opposed to the stuff that really matters, right? Or how do we connect those to let's say right because this is again I don't want to diminish the importance of this for looking at trends but but it's not the stuff that actually teachers use to adjust their daily practice. right? So thank you so much. I think this is a really important for the board to understand the the important work that you're doing because if we don't understand what the data is and what the data's telling us, we can't actually effectively progress monitor and if we pick data points or measures that are really relevant to what's happening on the ground again we can't effectively know what our kids are learning and where to put our resources. And so my questions 1 or 2 echo
commissioner fischer's if we have reason to believe that some of our especially maybe younger grade reading assessments are actually maybe measuring more students ability to follow along with the test rather than what they're actually able to read then have we considered actually exploring that further and seeing whether we need to get release time for some of the at least you know, three times a year test that we're administering to help students with you know, who might not have developed attentions bands or might not be self-directed and interested in computer based standardized testing at six years old to help them actually do the test so that we can actually have meaningful information and know you know, where kids are learning and where they need help so we can better target those resources. And then my other question is
well if two one is with the dashboard and please forgive me if I not understand it but the grade groups pretty much correspond to what grade level a school is and it seems very difficult if not impossible to me it seems impossible what's built in on the dashboard to actually break information down by grade level within a school which then makes it very difficult for school site councils and impacts that are you know making I'm getting played off that are making funding direction recommendations to actually know when kids are having issues and so then when does a where to spend extra funds to intervene. And so I know there's all sorts of privacy considerations around small data sets but if there's a way that we can actually break down this data by grade level that would be I think really meaningful to
actually spend funds on the students where they need to figure out when they need intervention. And relatedly, a lot of our current metrics on interim guardrails um address the literacy and other achievement levels of english language learners but by definition an english language learners are folks who have not reclassified um or been reclassified for two years and so essentially once folks reclassify they're removed from that dataset and so we're not actually getting a full picture of how kids who come into the system learning english are um are progressing. Instead we're by definition looking at the kids who have not made progress. And so I'm wondering if you can give us your thoughts as experts in the data that we collect about what we might better look at to figure out what progress are for especially spanish speaking english language learners are and aren't making because maybe we need to look at how long it
takes students to reclassify or what percentage of students are reclassifying over a certain amount of time after coming because if we're just looking at data that's telling us these are newcomers rather than these are kids who are not responding to interventions like those are two very different things that the same data could be telling us. Um, so your kind of expertise and guidance around those areas would be would be really helpful. one question I'll just say okay um my question so I uh just kind of carrying on with the simple sentiment of just trying to understand what data we have that shows us the effect of the learning experience in the classroom to a certain extent. uh, commissioner alexander like just to uh acknowledge as well like star data kind of starts to get us there for actionable data as close to students as possible. I think that the question I have is around the difference
between the the kind of information we have for our k-8 students and the kind of information that we have for high school students. and the closest I think we can get there is based on gpa maybe or success in college and career readiness courses. But I guess my question is around particularly the metrics related to goal three what information do we have that tell us the quality of the learning that's happening in the classroom in high school? Um, and to me I'm able to make it a little bit clearer and more direct connection between star reading and star math with instruction and learning but just trying to better understand what what information do we have available at the high school level. And I was at a high school teacher middle school teacher so this is an area of learning for me to just generally understanding what that would look like and what that would
mean. Thank you. I know and I know many people have more questions but I'll give you some time to just maybe coordinate on where you want to begin and then we can start our conversation there. I know there are commissioners who have other questions and we will get to them as well. We know thank you for your question. When you're ready, go. Okay. Uh, I'm going to pick through the notes here for the dashboard related ones. MAY toss a few to my colleagues to elaborate. uh, but let's see. Okay. Thinking about how numbers interact, the question made me think about a point that I didn't quite make that I think is important. The resolution was passed in 2020 summer of 2020. The public dashboard was designed in response to that resolution. Shortly thereafter it came out that for all the other dashboards that I showed you that are internal were designed
years later actually just this past year. So I think you see a lot more interaction with the data sort of reflects the evolution and that we poured our time into exactly that showing that kind of interaction. So I would say the internal dashboards again that means that principals and assistant principals have access. And central office leaders but it's not a very large group and that's largely because the licenses are very expensive in those internal dashboards like you see a lot more of that interaction. And I couldn't agree more that that interaction is important and that's why you know, you saw that example where you could click on chronic absenteeism. Yes or no and see how that affects suspension rates. For example, if there are other interactions that you're interested in, we would love the feedback. Our only goal here is that this is useful. It's not just supposed to look pretty. We really want people to find this dashboard useful and actually inform their decisions.
So I think that also gets to another question which was about accessing the data downloading data. Democratizing the data all things that I agree with as well. I will say for the public dashboard the way it's set up right now is you can download those images and those slides. We don't have it set up to download like what you might call a research file. You can go to it, you go to the cde, you can find you know, a table or other data visualizations but then you could also find usually buried at the bottom you can download an actual research file and it's not going to have personally identifiable information stripped that of any small groups. So that is something even though you open it up and it's like the most data I've ever seen in your life, you're not going to be able to actually identify anybody. So we don't have that posted. But we could create a spreadsheet like that if there was interest and if there was interest in doing your own data analysis. Of course that's going to be what you need not you know,
slides or an image that you can download so you can download some but not all. Again, I think with every question there's going to be this distinction between the public dashboard and the internal dashboards that have I just started saying pii to shorten it personally identifiable information. There's so much power in those internal ones because they are allowed to download the data. They can they can zoom in on a group of two and then they want to know who are those two students and they can find out even just within the dashboard they don't have to go to another system. So it is very powerful in that way. For the internal use less so for the public. But one way I think we could scratch that edge is with a public research file if I'm understanding your question correctly. Okay. let's see what else. Feedback. Okay. So there are a couple of questions about feedback. couple of things.
So absolutely we always put our email address out there and encourage feedback. it goes back to a point I just made if this isn't really useful for the stakeholders it's just a waste of time. We really want to hear from people about what metrics they want to see and how they want to see them presented. So we did get feedback. I would say in particular we got feedback from members of lead and as fsd to make sure that the data included and the way it was displayed was actually going to be helpful and linked in you mentioned some things in particular and the question about who would we talk to is me. So I'm happy to talk any time about something that could be more clear, something that isn't there that maybe could be something that seems superfluous and maybe we should take it out. And there's always this balance I will say um, we are we sort of have this interesting problem of like feeling we're swimming in data all the time and also we don't have all the data and all the information we wish we had. And then on these dashboards of
course you're just seeing a little slice of the universe of data we have access to so we're constantly making decisions about what to put out there and what to leave off so that it's not just this total overwhelming experience as you open it up and that is going to be a push and pull that never goes away. And we would love feedback again on what to put up there what sort of should rise to the top and be featured on the dashboard when really there's so much information we could put out there. So yeah I'm the person please feel free to email me or anyone in my department they will get you to me and I'm always happy to talk about this stuff and make improvements. We do not consider these to be, you know, relics to be put behind museum glass. They are living and breathing and we want to update them. We want to improve them. So I really do encourage that feedback. Thanks for that question. See you. um, other things I know I'm
looking at that you might have um the eagles we have again I would say part of that answer is more detailed information in the internal dashboards you actually can look at really detailed english learner data but not on the public dashboard. That's something we could look into expanding what we're always trying to balance student privacy, student data privacy but happy to look more at that. and then the last thing maybe I'll just say quickly I just ask a question please for internal dashboard availability. Is there a way that that can be made accessible to like school site councils within privacy policies? Because I think that part of the issue MAY be that school site councils MAY have folks with expertise who really want to dig into this on a site level basis but the principals MAY not fully understand the tool or have the ability to do
the data analysis themselves or just the bandwidth to do it themselves. There are obviously very busy. um yeah I think that's a great point and you know these tableau licenses do cost a lot but this year we are going to get a grant from salesforce that would actually pay for all the licenses and we are trying to even extend it to you know, more than just the principal. There is a lot of data privacy so we can give them access but then not all the way down to the student name, you know, so we'll try to make sure that you know, if it's a council then there is a certain amount of for pass to that we are to that's one and then in terms of you know your your specific question I do want to see that the capacity of the data does allow you if you want to find out how am my third grade long
term as doing let's say you want to compare your latinos with your asian students so you can do all that within this dashboard so that capacity does exist if you would like to see what is the profile of my students that are chronically absent on all metrics? What's this those that are not chronically absent or not all metrics you have the power to do that. So that's there. But I do want also um you know, ask my high school students for us we just mainly look at gpa for high school to see if you're on track to see if their scores completion and their grades. But what are the measures that you think we can feature just the on the note around public um oh so sorry I did not mean to interrupt.
I'm pretty young too but I've you can go ahead and respond. I said we always you know look at just grades oh when we look we look at on track and we it still grades and we still look at gpa we look at your ap tests you know but primarily it's grades that we look at at the high school level. Are there other indicators that you feel are more important that we should have an account for that are academic? uh, personally I think from a larger like district scale I think it'd be harder to find anything um that's as you know like easy to identify as that from a district trend level and I think um. Christina alexander are you talking about this like school sites themselves they will have their own sort of assessments even the high school level that same sort of thing to feel like they're on track or not they have the same supports or not as someone like a counselor or like some they go to a lot right? But that would be harder. I'd obviously identify from like a larger district
prospective so I think that makes sense if you're I, I feel like you're thinking also because at least for me was like something easy identify like large scale it's probably not okay I want to better understand your questions like an answer to the best of my ability. So with that so um when you're talking about like tracking data what google is trying to get out of it oh it's primarily around progress monitoring our goals, you know, which is specifically goal three which is college and career readiness and we primarily use grades. yeah I feel like a good factor to take into account is also the support offered at schools. I don't think ap scores in particular are the best way to do that because I feel like in order to perform well in ap tests you also have to have the time outside of school to put into the coursework and a lot of students who have more time are able to do better on these
ap exams compared to the ones who don't have the same support or the same time. So I think eliminating ap scores from that just from your data would be by the most effective. So definitely take into consideration the resources offered at the school. thank you so much so I appreciate the comment that student delegate montgomery made about like thinking about what could be collected easily . Right. And I feel like the spreadsheet that was created that provided that detail really was a compilation of things that we commonly have in the school district and really it's more about what is what do we have at our disposal that we can use. That being said, there were a number of comments that were made about how we drill down much more deeply into understanding and getting much closer to the student and that's where I think it's really incumbent upon us to think about what are the multiple measures that we use.
We use one layer of you know, the assessments and the different measures that we have commonly but then what are the other pieces that we're layering in there? And I think that's really the critical piece about how we're using the data as one measure and then thinking about coupling and pairing that with other measures and that's very similar to the work around the yale student's progress, right? You're not just looking at standardized assessments and fact and reclassification. You're looking at student's progress on the lpac but you're also looking at a number of other measures as a way of ascertaining the extent to which students are making progress. So I think it's important to kind of contextualize the work that we're doing here around these metrics to really be more about what is it that we have our disposal, how do we continue to inquire and build and push on each other to understand a little bit more about the pieces that can complement the system so that when we think about how we're progress monitoring and moving
forward it is not just about those data that are the common measures but about the other pieces that complement them that can come to bear. And I think that's an important aspect of this is that it's not just one source of data. It's not just standardized assessments. It's the suite of multiple measures and how do we build as a system a way to incorporate that in the ways that we think about our progress monitoring our ways of thinking about how students are succeeding from both the board level and all the way trickling down to our classroom level. So I hope that answers kind of like the broad range of questions at least on the on the spectrum of limit limitations of some of the measures that we have and that the intention of the spreadsheet that we created was just to understand what do we do to student delegate montgomery's comment what do we commonly have that can be easily garnered or captured? So hopefully that answers kind of like a range of some of the
questions that were asked. Just a brief comment on that. I think one thing that might be useful I don't know if you consider this would be let's take for example goal one third grade literacy. If we said okay, the summative assessment is as back we twice a year we do star these are the types of assessments that best practice in classrooms teachers might be doing read aloud or whatever even like a a set of examples which I know exists right but to have that together so that we're being clear as a system to the point you just made right here's our satellite data, here's our map data and street data that the teachers so that so that we're saying and sort of acknowledging that your point without obviously we can't as a board have the data from the classrooms because it's it's not practical right but to recognize that we actually do expect our educators to collect that type of data right on their own and then to say is this matching with the standardized test data
and other that type of question that you're raising and teachers do actually do a lot of their own assessments and they have the platform called illuminate where they do enter that data so that even we can see but this is you know, by school by school basis to kind of bridge that to that the conversation around data accessibility I mean the right off the top of my mind they come up I think about like oh us these data portals I don't know if you all have a chance to look at them but I mean they have an incredible amount of data beyond just actual assessments themselves. In addition to an assessment calendar that I think is pretty in depth. I mean you could get names every single level of assessment that's possible in the district and by month lays it all out and you can click into it and see everything and and I and I just wonder well one I think there's a huge amount of power in that. I mean I know our neighbors have a different set of challenges than we do but
nevertheless like have an incredible wealth of data available for the public and their educators and families to see and leverage. But they just wanted to be able to connect. I mean you should be able to get granular with the kind of information that we have available as a system to the kind of data that we have accessible by the public broadly. and to that point, one of the things I was going to raise is it's great to see longitudinally how this is working and you know certainly at our school site council we look how we did year on year with the same cohort or you know this year's third grade versus that year's third grade and so forth. But one of the other things on this that we have the power to do would be wonderful to see is if we actually have in a way a benchmark against the same grade clusters or as f used so that a site can see how their site is doing vis a vis the others or even you know, if we
look at cdc data then being able to understand how we're doing across all sites across grade groups or at a particular site to be able to look at that and what but but to this point of you know what sites look at what educators look at. One of the things I'm very cognizant of given that I do this for 300 sites across the country in my day job is the training that then we provide our staff to be able to do this as well as the time because I'm fully conscious I mean our educators are principals. Everyone has their day job that they're doing watching our our students or being able to educate our students. So is it sounds like this system is relatively new or has been around and I'm curious what do you those resources how do you all think about the training that that we provide to be able to enable our staff to use this wonderful system?
well, we in terms of the data dashboards as devin mentioned earlier, these are kind of a revolutionary for our district kind of like groundbreaking you know, for the first time this year we've been able to do this and part of that is kind of like to to be honest with you, we've been tinkering quite a bit for and imagining and re-envisioning this many times over and the amount of work that it takes to kind of get this off the ground has been tremendous. But once we were able to get it off the ground and it really starts kind of with working at the very beginning of the year I believe the last dashboard that that devin showed at the admin institute early on as a way of trying to build kind of that that muscle and understanding of it. And I think the main thing that can come away from this right is that our previous ways of working with our school administrators was to work through the data desk which are the pdf kind of reports that are very static, right?
And the ability to be able to then transition that into I can filter down to all sorts of different things and the dashboard was just revolutionary for us. So that started that piece at the beginning of the year and then throughout the course of the year we were like one of the major pieces we were trying to push on was now that we had built the muscle on an end of the year very static. It's the summative data dashboard. We're like how can we build this in a progress monitoring way so that data can be refreshed as as humanly possible as we can do it given the amount of working coding that has to go behind it but then to be able to do it in as timely a fashion to be able to support our folks. So in partnership with lead we were able to have to basically meeting parties with our school leaders that points sided with the star data being available and for them to be able to go in there and be able to kind of surf through and understand
and build capacity in those ways and I think it's one of those pieces that as we're building capacity with it it's really kind of like once you're tinkering with all the different filters then folks are able to start to understand the power behind it especially as as devin mentioned when we show and highlight certain features that might elucidate some of the data that comes along with it. And I think it's a journey that we're going to continue on. I think it it'll extend as reto mentioned as we build out our licenses how that then can parlay into working with our staff and then eventually if we can expand it out with four provisions obviously followed to to community I'm glad you brought that up jess. I was going to say the use of data speeds have been really important because you know the more we're in the room and if somebody has a question we can help them in real time whether it's with access or
understanding how the filters work or just really trying to, you know, meet the potential of what these dashboards can do. Those sessions have been really important and we've had several of them throughout the year. The other thing I would just quickly mention is just documentation, you know, making sure that we have accessible documentation so you can click through and and understand like oh how do I how like why would I click on this and what is that going to do for me and what happens if I hover the cursor over because then you get more information we can build in more information from that hovering feature. So there are some things that I think are I don't want to say they're obvious but they're more self evident than others like that hovering feature. How would you know unless you've gone in and played around and happened to discover that so that's on us to provide documentation which we always do when we put out a report like this one so that that's a that's a key part of it and we
also announce changes to the dashboards through to the lead bulletin. It's another way we could say like oh this has been updated. We now have this assessment data so you can go in and see the latest assessment data. You could see the latest attendance data. So that's one way we try to keep people updated on what's there and also how how to use the dashboards. thank you MR. Steel. If we can put five minutes onto the clock for final comments and questions and then I'll open it up to commissioners for any remaining questions before we move on. MR.. MR. Fischer MR. Fischer um, just in the spirit of feedback and getting to satellite data I love the tableau. It has been so much fun to play around in it but I think that if I could ask for one feature
it would be I appreciate how we're disaggregating now by peak 85 middle school high school if we could have an all feature so that we could do an overall comparison I think that would be super helpful as well. So that the any other questions or comments um just that I really appreciate the work to figure out like really what the data is and the expansion and public availability of data over really recent years um and I think that one of the things that I love to see the district and department work on next is how can we really do a analysis to figure out like where the causation is and what is correlation or what is just demographics so that we can reach our goals for monitoring of actually not just knowing what the numbers are but knowing whether the numbers
reflect an improvement and success in our student outcomes and of our strategies or whether they're perhaps reflecting something else. And when we're just at the level of looking at like what are the numbers that doesn't really give us that analysis. And I know um commissioner gupta has brought up the fed up substack before but I think that's a really good example of a community member who's gone into these data sets to say you know, to take to try and take a stab at analyzing and saying like well we're seeing differences in say our third grade reading but is that reflecting a change in demographics or is that reflecting catch up in loss of covid reading or is that reflecting the new curriculum introduction or something else? And so kind of digging deeper to figure out what it is that the data is telling us is really essential for the progress monitoring reports to be effective and for us to make
sense of this data. thank you so much. I also know this is not the last conversation we'll have around data and just so the board is aware this will hopefully feed into a conversation now about interim revised interim goals and guardrails that the superintendent will have conversations with over the next month. So thank you to staff and very much appreciate your presentation today. Thank you. We'll move to item f we have three discussion items on our uh agenda today one around front line over another around our central office plan and the last around board leadership response to board metrics. Um given just the number we have of them uh, I know that DR. Sue has asked staff to be as concise brief and direct as possible in the work that we have in front of us. Um and so I will read out item
f one fiscal and operational update front line in red rover and I'll pass it to DR. Sue. great. Thank you PRESIDENT Kim as the team is coming up to the dais I just want to share with our community that we are working very diligently to make sure that we transition from our current payroll budget fiscal system that is currently called empower into our new system that will be more reliable and that is actually used across the entire state. Well, 60% of school districts in the state that actually will be able to to save us funding but but more importantly to be able to accurately pay our employees which as I've shared before is the most important thing for us because our employees do the amazing work each and every day for our students. So I'm going to hand this over to to MS. Enter helio who is going to introduce the members of the team that's here and I'm
really grateful actually for leadership of front line enterprise that is here today with us. So maureen and I'm getting a go first, right? yes. So you're only getting a few. Good evening, commissioners. So I'll forego the formalities before we start just to grant those we're here to provide an update on front line and red rover, our erp and hcm new acronyms or something that we need to know that's a good thing. The fact that we're talking about joining a system that works for california k-12 so at this point is something that the system needs. This is complicated. You're going to hear a little bit about where we stumbled, how we are regrouping and how we are still committed to the goal like date of JULY 1st. Okay. next slide you can skip the next slide after that. So a brief history back in MARCH of 2022 our state fiscal advisors strongly recommended that we needed to modernize our system. They also at that time told us that we needed to before moving to a new system stabilize as a p and they had urged the board at that time to put money aside
for that journey and they were not wrong. Next slide because later that year we hit a critical point and we had to declare a state of emergency for those of you who remember at that point we brought in external experts to help us stabilize the system to some extent we had to accelerate getting our the business experts for those items and elements in H.R. Business service and payroll and we had to bring temporary staff to help us right. so this was a turning point. We were we have calmed the system. I was DR. Clark emphasizes to use the word that we have stabilized as a p is not correct. we have calmed the system. We cannot stabilize it. that's why we're abandoning it. So we had to make a choice and there were three of them. Number one, stay with us. Happy you're here. We're not doing that number to keep up. We had turned on and sap and cobbled together other systems or number three, abandon the current system and adopt a new system so we opted for option three when selecting this new erp we applied self applied some criteria to guide the
conversation we wanted a system that was built for california k-12 that was known and had a successful track record and there was something that was already built in fully integrated and that did not require so many consultants and was not that expensive to maintain. So that gave us only two options. Next slide one of them was peoplesoft one that you MAY know the city uses it. We reached out to people saw first through the county office of ed in san diego they talked to us for a moment then they ghosted us. Then they came back and said you know what, you're very complicated. We can help you. The next team was frontline. They also looked at it very closely and they actually said not only can we help you, there's actually a part that we're not sure that we can help you but we want to figure that out and that was the configuration with the city and I'll talk a little bit more about that very briefly I'm
going to ask kathy hopkins to kind of remind and educate everyone what we currently have . thank you so this slide represents the current architecture that the district is using. You can see by the various cylinders those are all each individual different systems that are kind of cobbled together in order to get the data out and our end result of people paid and retirement reporting done and accounts payable you can see each of those are individual and some of them are connected through the black lines. Those black lines represent files so they're not actually an integrated system. They're all individual systems that are connected by data files and through replication. if we go to the next slide this is a representation of what our new system will look like the new architecture which is two systems only. So all of the other systems are being replaced within these two making it a much simpler architecture and structure with data entry getting in one place and being used throughout those systems rather than dual entry
or file transfers. Thank you. Kathy yeah, that's good. Okay. So how much is this going to cost? Well you can see that at the beginning it costs a lot, right? Because we have to maintain both the current system alive as we transition to a new system. But if you notice by 2627 we're paying about a fraction of what we're currently spending to keep as a running right? So if we go to the next slide just for some reorientation you see that I talked about frontline a fully integrated system but you also see a new word which is red rover who is our human capital system, right frontline is the R.P. Red rover is the hcm next slide I think DR. Taylor has already mentioned frontline that the talking points built for k 12 are used widely in california and it's a system that now makes us part of a larger family of users because across
the bay in alameda etc. But they're using frontline next slide we are going to be part of 35 counties office of ed and 520 school districts that are going to be using frontline 60% of california uses frontline. Next slide so although frontline has the functionality to support in hcm we recognize that the functionality with frontline has some area of growth. So we actually opted to go with another system and because frontline works really well with third party that's not an issue. So we actually embarked on using the tool which is extremely friendly. Red rover is equally designed to support k-12 schools in california. There are partner or self management went live with red rover. It went really well and right now if you apply for a job in san francisco you're using the red rover system. It works. Yeah. So next slide. So again we can skip the slide. It's just we have more time.
So where are we now? As you can see on the next slide, 74% of the technical elements of this system have been implemented. You see that there are some areas that we're going to talk a little bit in more detail that are in red and yellow and I want to explain some of the tensions that have contributed to the status of those next slide. So at this moment we have some tensions that I would group under complexities of managing a change which takes time the need to have clean data which not you understand it's very difficult to extract from the current ecosystem of many erp systems that we have and the real challenge of doing the day to day work of building a new erp while still doing the day to day work of running the organization and that is hard no matter where it is. It's even harder here given how unstable our system is. There has also been significant leadership turnover and that has impacted our ability to maintain momentum and to move fast. Just things slowed down.
We also can lose sight that we had a failed implementation right and so in the best of times as I'm learning about your ip implementations there are bumpy roads so anytime there's a bump here it feels like an earthquake and rightfully so, right? So it takes time to build the trust and maintain the momentum. Our team wants to get this right. They really do. But every time we stumble it it settles down a little bit. next slide we decided as we moved to a new system that we wanted to adopt best business practices. You keep hearing sometimes how unique we are but there are legitimate things, commissioner for sure. I think you'll be happy for me to say this that are very unique and good things in san francisco unified that need to be right took me two years to figure that out. Okay. they didn't need to be but it
takes time to work that out and to figure out what's truly needed to be stayed the same and what needs to change because sap is the way it is extracting data you're hurt. It's an issue. And lastly it's unfortunate but it happened. We had a system performance with frontline as budgets were being developed and principals were working on it. It didn't go well. However those issues although not grade are not they're better than what's happening with that sap and in part of that that's because we have a very strong relationship with frontline and the evidence of that is they're here today. so I'm going to turn it over to vice PRESIDENT Of what is your title service agreement, MR. Kirkpatrick to talk about that. great. Thank you so much. We did experience an unexpected performance delay within one of our modules around budget as principals and budget analyst were coming into the system to start working on their budgets.
We did they did experience significant slowness. We know it's a critical time in the implementation as well as time for principals to step away from their daily business operating in the schools and simply apologize for the delay and disruption that that has caused. As soon as the issue was brought to our attention we mobilized our technical team. We sent folks onsite to begin looking at and testing the connectivity within the system as well as operating and diagnosing where was the slowness occurring. So we could quickly address those issues and get the team back up and running. We did within the first week put up a performance update improving the system which significantly got the system back up but still really not at the level that we wanted it to be yet we continued over the next couple of weeks to continue to make increasing updates in the system and we continue to monitor that on a daily basis making sure the
system is performing where we need it to perform. As we look at the system today we actually did have our I.T teams meet today to really talk about the network infrastructure and traffic within the system. So again trying to make sure we're looking at every element within the system to ensure that we've got that success. One of the things we continue to do is we're fully engaged with the team here. We meet on a daily basis just to make sure that our our concerns that they have are being addressed critically and in real time. We know that this is again as we MARCH towards JULY we want to make sure that we have everything in place for the success of the team. We're confident that the team with with the support here with the san francisco team, you know, we're committed to the the implementation and want to make sure that we see the success for it so we're confident in the system in terms of it being on the right track forward and fully support the team as we move forward. thank you. Thank you, carolyn. And it's worth noting that healthy relationships sometimes
requires some really adult hard conversations which we've had candidly that have not been always easy to have but we can have them and again I want to reinforce that they are here today which is new for us. Right. So moving forward I want to just pause here and have you read some of the key milestones that have been achieved by the team? Take a moment and see if we can go to the next slide. There's more. And so at this time I really want the pause intentionally and I want to thank the team that has done that because it hasn't been us here fully. It's been our D.O.T. Team has been the H.R. Team, the payroll team, the benefits team, the budget team, the city and our principals together we have and they have built they have done pay comparisons.
We have built a 2526 budget in the new system today that's a major accomplishment. Figure out major workflows working on purchasing, figuring out the relationship for the city and for the first time that I can tell we won't have to do a manual connection with the city. the system will be operationalize on the next slide. You'll see that we have a plan to ensure we stay on track on our timeline given the attention that we address. so we go forward. So what you see is we've decided to chunk our work into two phases phase one and phase two for us to successfully go live on JULY 1st. Several core functions of H.R. Payroll and finance need to be implemented. you see them on the left for us to successfully go live on JULY 1st we needed to think strategically about what could we defer and do after post go live that was not when they impact our mission critical goal of ensuring that every employee gets paid correctly from day one. Right?
So that's that's the change that we're there we're showing you that beyond the technical work if we go to the next slide we're also focusing on what I alluded which is managing the people change. There's a lot of work to do there. We needed to get better at change management and project management. We needed to ensure that we continue to train staff on the system that works but where they need to continue getting the support needed to learn and practice as much as they can. and then on the next slide you'll see our current best thinking of how we're going to get to seven one. i want you to really see face one is blocked right? these are parallel swim lanes of work that is happening almost at the same time by the same group of people who are still running the district. Right. So that is that that's our process for phase one and phase two we are continue to train staff so they feel confidence confident and on the and we remain committed to the JULY 1st. So in the summer I try to talk
however I want to pause here and say that should something change on phase one and we stumble on one of those critical swim lanes it is important for us to pause and reflect on whether or not we will be ready to go live on JULY 1st. At this moment I'm here to tell you that we look it looks good but you can see how tight everything is should something change. And we heard from DR. Sue. We will not allow this system to go live and we would have to think of the next time for it to go live which will be in JANUARY of 2026. I want to repeat again that is not where we are right now but this helps you understand why we would need to make such a critical decision which is not an easy decision. The pain that we're going through right now is better than the pain we would have to go through if we decide to defer to JANUARY. So a lot of work either way and at this point I just want to finish by saying on the next slide that this system if we want to be student centered san francisco deserves a system
that works that stable. this effort has definitely brought up the need for us to remain fearless for everyone in the team. We need to be united to get this done. Social justice needs a system that works more than ever before especially right now. We have a diverse team of folks in our team who keep us focused on our core values. This completes our I think we're ready for your questions . I don't know where to begin but just to start with thank you for for all your work um, and uh and so I just leave it at that. I will open it up for questions and we'll do a similar like just one question per person. Thank you. Yeah, one question per person before we pass it off to staff could respond and then we'll come back to the second round and you don't have to give a question to anybody. Commissioner fisher and we'll go over this way.
Um, I would definitely also echo my thanks. Oh my gosh. Um, so first of all to have the folks from front line here helping to diagnose I mean when we started to struggle with empower we had to hire a&m as outside consultants and spend millions and millions of dollars to get absolutely nowhere with emphasis and empower and bring in a whole central command team working out I mean for it was so ridiculously painful. So the fact that you're here and working thank you night and day difference my question and there is a question I promise is really on slide 25 on the updated implementation timeline. I just want to clarify the the items listed in phase two. Those are not currently in empower. Those are not currently depended on our current like we can still get rid of empower and have these phase two
systems not impacted correct? commissioner ray very good question. commissioner hi and also many thanks for all the work that you're doing and the teamwork that's required to achieve this especially given what we have been dealing with for, you know, for some years now. Thank you so much. I have a quick question which is there's a reference in the commissioner q&a to a payroll simulation in being conducted on APRIL 18th. How did that go? great question. So I'll have about 2:00 and then got the answer quickly or whoever. I'll let you start. go ahead. We're going to fight over it. It went well. So we've run our first simulation on a sample set of employees. This is, as you well know, a very large district with a very large set of employees. so we took a small sample set for our first simulation. It went very well.
What one issue that we did find that we knew we were going to come across was that our data is not staying in sync between the two systems because of a dual entry. So we have been coming step back, figure out a plan working with the district staff on making sure that happens while we're also doing what we've been doing which is checking through the data and comparing data files to data files as far as the system readiness and the calculations that occurred. There was nothing that I found at all that did not calculate as we expected. In fact we found things that calculated better as we had expected we would. So I would say the results were very good. We're continuing to do simulations. We're getting ready to do another one next week on the entire month end for MARCH 31st payroll on the entire population of that payroll and we'll continue to do the simulations through the end of the fiscal year.
I want to add just a little bit to that. For me the biggest concern was when the data transitioned into front line if all things were equal meaning the data looks the same. Can the new system front line calculate the pay the way that it's supposed to? And based on that first simulation I also agree that the answer is yes. but I want to lift something up and that is the data itself and in how clean that data is. In a perfect migration you'd be able to extract the data, do a mapping and push it into the new system and then we're off with very little need to do manual manipulation. That's not the case where what we're seeing and we knew that because again you saw the bird's nest of all the different softwares and so there is manual adjustments that will need to happen to clean that data up. The good news is once the data is cleaned up the system does calculate the way it needs to be. And I don't want to lose sight
of that because that is a lot of work to ask the staff to do between now and go live and in thinking about that go live that really needs to be acknowledged with the right support systems in place to ensure the staff can continue with their day job. hold empower the way it needs to be held and help lift this up to get it over the finish line. I just want to jump in here and appreciate that word of caution if you will. I mean in a former life I was overseeing edtech implementation for schools and I don't know of a single program that actually launched with perfect success and and so I guess my question there just to build off sorry I know we're kind of out of order here is like what is the contingency plan? I mean let's assume that all of the all the systems are greenlit and looks like it's good to go. Then JULY 1st it turns on
and something breaks like is there. What is the contingency plan? There is the determination after JULY 1st to to pause at that point or or what does that look like? good question. And first let's start with part of the contingency plan was to adopt a system that works right because with acp we have to build it the pay compares is critical. This is what normally every erp system does. I was talking to the city. The city was actually happy that we are deferring some of the modules because they turned on all of them and to this day to quote one of them said the city has a new some of them. So in a way though that's not how we ended here. It's good that we put some of that stuff away to really focus on what matters. That's what that's how I would answer that question how can be or if you want not sure I'll I'll give my opinion and this is just is my opinion others MAY feel different. I think that over the next week or two as we continue with the simulations the district will
have to make the decision about what we have in this system recognizing that huge lift with the law, the manual data cleanup that needs to happen and whether or not it wants to go forward with that process again huge lift if the decision is made to defer it there needs to be I want to use the phrase real talk because that means the district would need to stay in its current state and also continue with the dual entry and data cleanup not just into JULY 1st but to JANUARY 1st or some other date in the midst of making budget reductions and seeing staff you know, capacity be stretched. In addition to that, the cost that were on the sly go to a certain and I think it all a lot of it ends DECEMBER 31st and so if the goal is to go past that there would be additional costs to hold up sap and a lot of those other
software that you don't see in that particular slide because that was built on the expectation certain things were going to expire by the end of this year. So you're talking you know, staff that MAY not necessarily be here to hold all of it additional cost and you know I've been in education for 20 some years where you're adding costs for those softwares. It takes away from where we need the dollars the most which is at the at the school site but it doesn't mean it doesn't mean that you don't do it. It's just understanding the implications for those just those decisions. Can I ask a follow up question? I'm sorry to interrupt but this is directly related to so when you talk about the potential need for manual data cleanup and support systems which is people so I am looking at that slide ten with the numbers on it sap in your 2526 is $927,000 emphasis is 1.6 million right? so are there some small
temporary investments in bringing in people to help with the manual data entry right now that you think we should prioritize that might save us millions of dollars over the 2526 school year. Do you have recommendations in that area for us as a board or leadership team to approve now? Yeah. So on the first part thank you for that. You actually have given me the funding to mobilize that as it stands right now in our inbox is suite of I believe 15 individuals from roper have we have payroll experience and accounting experience for us to review they stand ready to help us with those data entry should we need it tomorrow we'll continue to talk about the actual live. So that's one investment that I think is worth it if we need those extra hands. The balance there is sometimes it takes longer to train people so that's why we asked for the right people from the very beginning so that we don't have to waste a lot of time with the training.
But I know kathy, you've been wanting to add something to this. yeah, I just wanted to go back to the question of, you know, a contingency plan, right? So a totally agree with everything everybody said the best option is to get this thing live on time. Having said that, it's not a flip the switch on JUNE 30th or july 1st we will be continuing to run this current year payrolls into JULY and AUGUST out of empower and we'll be starting to run our frontline payrolls in JULY and AUGUST out of frontline so the system will still be in tact and we'll have that there there would be a lot of lift to get it ready for a new year if we had to do that. So that's where that timeline having this decision sooner rather than later if that decision had to be made is important as well as the costs . But it's not a switch that says we're turning it off if we don't have it ready to go. yeah, that makes sense. I mean I equated to like if we're going to launch chromebooks in a classroom you should have paper materials
ready on the backup, right? So like what I'm hearing is that that's essentially the plan is that we're going to have perimeter deals and chromebooks both ready assuming that chromebooks work and if chromebooks fail then we'll we have the paper to back up. That's correct. We actually have a written contingency plan already in place that we can follow should we need to. Great. Except it's six different pieces of paper with all different instructions on them right now. And to be clear on the metaphor, the chromebooks really work but other way yeah just to be clear we just we just got the wrong target collection or we have a time limit here. yeah I just want to confirm reaffirm that that metaphor of the paper we would not be making that decision on JUNE 30th. you're right. Right. Right. We would be telling you way in ahead of that, right? Yeah. So that's a nice paper. yeah. Okay. Thank you, MR. Alexander. Okay. To build on my paper metaphor, I will first thank you to our
staff, especially the staff that are working so hard to do this DR. Clark and everybody and then front line. Yeah, just echoing. It's so great that you're here and thank you for being transparent, accountable and getting it done with us as a partner. That's really different than we've had in the past and just really appreciate it. And I think my question was sort of similar I guess one of the I don't know I can just use this as an example. One thing I have heard from principals was sort of feeling overwhelmed about learning the system saying why wasn't able to just send a google sheet to some budget analyst and have them do it you know that kind of question which I imagine there's an answer to but I guess more importantly I guess there's the question I think is like our how are we thinking about the impacts on the system ? You know, I get it sometimes it's just like well we just have to push through and everyone has to learn this new thing, right? So just love to hear a little
bit more specifically around the school and and kind of that does that make sense? The question I'm asking and then again what are the tradeoffs or could we could we hire more folks to help or are there other ways we could really push and get this thing done in a way that has the minimal impact on the system? so this is transparent facilitation or ideation in this process? Definitely the the benefits of a principal building their budget in front line live is that they don't need to ask someone else if they intend to make this a 0.58.7 and use their title one funds that's the best thing right? The downside is it's a new system. It's clunky like yes any system and it would be best if they had someone right next to them to help them. So I think we've all been talking about how can we keep that part alive which is one source of truth because what we don't want is to go back to another google sheet where p principal says well I updated it last night and you didn't look at it that's not going to work right.
And at the same time having been at a school site for over ten years, I know what it's like right? The fact that you can even close your door. So how do we help principals there? So I think we learn a lot from right now there's a big a beautiful tradition of social service and that's obviously that I think we want to preserve to some extent. And I think DR. Sue I think you're also committed to keep thinking of better ways to do that. So we haven't lost track of that. what I will say right now is that the idea of completely removing it from the principal does not seem realistic to me right now. Good partnership above one team the site those are parts and professors that we have to balance that. so yeah I just wanted to add to the question of you know google sheets versus going into the system and having to learn a new system to do it.
The value of doing it within the system is that the data is already there, right? So you can look to see what your staffing looks like. You can look to see what your vacancies are as opposed to having someone in the team have to constantly maintain that download it put it into google sheets so that you can see it and then re upload the data in for changes so it's keeping it current and accurate and on time. MR. Seo can we just put five minutes on to wrap up this portion here and then I'll open it up to any other questions and comments before we move on . so acknowledging that this is not a question I just want to say that two minutes I haven't got this I get that the entire district and the entire city are rooting for your success. we could not possibly have learned the lesson harder as a district in a city that these
core systems are extremely vital vital to our teachers, vital to our educators and staff, to students being able to have the supports that they need. And so just thank you for taking on this very high profile job and I know that you're all working really hard around the clock and so just know that you have you know, feel the wind at your back of everybody rooting you on for your success. We really appreciate the seriousness that you're taking this challenge on with and we are rooting for you and so to that end, my question is um, DR. Sue are there any additional resources that the district needs from philanthropic or community partners to help with change manager mint training to make sure that people are ready additional resources for temps
anything that we as a board or the community can step up to help bring in to the district in time to meet this critical transition. thank you. Vice PRESIDENT Huling that's a great question. I know that over the last several weeks now actually if not months we've actually had to increase our contract to to increase the hours that dr. clark can spend with us because we need that level of expertise that DR. Clark is bringing to the table. And so that was really important. But because of that we we would need additional resources to provide supports for training our people. We've got thousands of people we need to train. We've started that training many months ago but we all know you just can't train just once we'll have to do multiple
trainings and multiple supports so any type of support that our philanthropic community can provide us that would be very, very much welcomed at this moment in time. Yes. Would say oh wait you have matt alexander and your name tags are not like we so vice PRESIDENT Gillie if if there are experts on change thank you like if there are experts on change management that one they have to do that I'm sure that's someone's idea of an APRIL fools if they are experts on change management that they have done erp transfer and when they come and join the conversation happy to talk to them and see how they can help we absolutely we need doers not just people who say you should have thought up like we need people right now happy to take that help. I think if it's helpful for sure. Yeah. unless you're credentialed teacher in which case we need
you in which case do our jobs that we have available for you. just to be clear commissioners, any other comments before we move? We have one minute left. Oh, we'll do commissioner gupta and then commissioner fishing around up. so just echoing I think vice PRESIDENT Huling said it incredibly well when she said the wind is at your backs in terms of know that we in the city and everyone is rooting for you, I cannot think of anything that is more critical for the school district in the short term and will be more redemptive in terms of saying look, we understood, we heard we will not pay our staff late or not have your payroll ready and to that extent I'm curious in in this in the contingency is there any chance whatsoever that we will not have paychecks
ready in in kind of the redundancy that you all are building and if so how do you know what is the pre mortem that you're doing to make sure that that is not the case? You're saying? so it goes back to that conversation about to go live or no go no not go live right. If you stay in the existing system you still have all the work arounds that are keeping the system calm and that would continue to move forward. I recognize the district is building the budget now in front line and so if the pivot needs to happen we have to figure out how to get that budget over into the empower system when I've been in this for 26 years now I have gone through many different implementations across a variety of organizations and so whenever you go live there's always the risk that something will be missed, right?
And in this case someone talk about pay okay so what what what I'm always concerned about is what we saw with the empower implementation where there was an issue with pay in this system just would not do it. It would not calculate or process pay hence why people were here spending the night give us our money like that's an extreme situation. Let's talk about over here on this side based on what we've seen so far I have a high level of confidence that the system can calculate pay. But let's say something happens marines record is off. He's not on the right salary schedule based on what we've seen so far. Someone can actually go into the system correct at his pay and within 2448 or 72 hours actually generate a check and have it in his hands. That's different from someone being camped out over here because we can't get the system to move. And so I just want to level set there because there MAY there MAY be a situation where something falls through it's 6000 employees, thousands of records. But what happens when we figure
out what it is the question for me is can the system respond course correct and do what needs to be done. And there are always situations where you can process pay the exact same day based on what I've seen so far I believe the answer to that is yes. So for the folks who experience the empower debacle that hopefully will give them a high level of assurance that even if I'm an employee and something happens in my pay fall through the cracks, this system will allow the team to course correct and generate pay in a relatively short period of time. That's critical and I think that's important for going forward with this process. I really appreciate that especially as a decision maker to understand what that what the potential consequences are or what the mitigation factor is so that we can we're better empowered to make that decision . I mean I guess one one just really quick thing is, you know, kind of the converse of the question of what resources you might need to run tendency is is there anything that could
potentially be it sounds like a lot of this MAY be dependent on site staff site administrators in terms of being able to get the implementation up and running. And I'm curious if there is anything we might be able to d prioritize off the plate of site administrators or site staff so that they have sufficient time to be able to interact, engage and be able to do this work. I would just say commercial not for the pay actually. I mean this is the to the point this should be a boring non topic conversation moving forward right? In k-12 people get paid. yeah so so can you say that again think hey 12 people should get paid people should get paid it's a boring subject and it just works right? It does it should not have a high dependency on the site leader to ensure that happens except for monitoring for vacation bereavement and you know what we call those absences. Yeah. So I'm sensitive to the time and I wanted to say something so I just wanted to say one
thing in regards to the conversation about pay rate what is what's going to happen in JULY? Are we going to have paychecks coming out? So absolutely correct what DR. Clark said. But just to be clear, I'm already running paychecks for JULY like step increases are already done. We're verifying that data. I literally am running JULY payroll. We're also running our simulations for the current year but we're able to do that in front line. We're able to see the future and I can see what the data looks like and that's to the point of the budget development we talked about. It's real payroll data that we're using to develop the budget with and that payroll data is available to print checks on right now. Commissioner fisher, last word. Word just getting well played in lowell that I really appreciate that that last framing system is hopkins first of all, thank you for all the
expertise that you have brought in to help make this successful. You could be in a lot of different places and you're here with us and so that's much appreciated and I really want to go back to something you said about the data being in the system being key not just for us as district leaders but also for our community partners. As a former cac member we used to spend a lot of time trying to get well and still cac member. you know we part of our oversight and accountability is monitoring vacancies right and and to pull that information about vacancies of of special ed teachers in paras and you know the related service providers that's painful right now and so to be able to have that data for it to be a click and a report I mean just wow, I'm so excited about that. Yeah. thank you. Oh, yes. Well, I just I just I just want to greatly acknowledge cathy
for being here on the weekends . You know, I've been here on the weekends with the team and she's here. She's working with the team helping them go through all those pay compares. I've been here I've been over to 135 and I've seen the front line team there providing real time in person support to our principals and I feel like this is truly the all hands on deck moment and I just greatly appreciate that you also recognize that your success is our success and we have to be we have to be in this together. So just thank you so much and I say this with the greatest amount of respect I really hope I don't have to see you again. thank you so much. so again, just at the citywide parade will be throwing the ticker tape parade. thank you so much. thank you. General counsel. I'm going to propose that we
move our item h action items up to right now so that we can have staff present and we can vote on that if that's okay. Do we need a is there any action or prep procedure we need to go down to do that? any objection? Okay. In that case we're going to suspend for a moment our discussion items and just go right to item h action items and I'll start actually backwards with item three. So item h 3254-223 updates to policy 5101 student assignment to create ticket peters early education schools staff come to the dais on that one. I also want to acknowledge that item 4254-22 esp for k-2 reading difficulties risk screener adoption we are actually going to table practically table that item given new information from the state that we receive today and so more information is coming and sorry commissioners that we didn't give you a heads up on that earlier but just know that we are going to table
that for a future agenda as well. So with that I will go back to item three and pass it on to the superintendent. I thank you PRESIDENT Kim to the dais we have assistant superintendent christine herrera as well as executive director lauren koehler. from our involvement I still call it ypsi because I that's how I remember how I enroll my children the enrollment center who's going to give as a an update on the our new t k feeder policy and I'm going to hand it over to both of these wonderful individuals so that we can go through the conversation the dec wonderful. Good evening everyone. We're happy to be here. you can go to the next slide so we're here to talk about some updates for our universal t k and implementation on a proposal for a feeder for our early childhood sites that have a t k program on campus. This slide just shows kind of
the history of where we've been since 2023. We've added 60 4tk classrooms. You can see that the slide up the picture on the left is where we were in 2021 and where we're projected to be for 2526 this year we received over 2000 applications for a t k which is a great thing. so next slide please. righty. One of the things that we discovered as we've been expanding t k across the district is that not every site can fit 8-k classroom and so we've run into a handful of problems with that. This is because of facility constraints. some of the schools are too small. The requirements for ticket sites are pretty stringent and we want to make sure all kids are safe. so we've been trying to
think about how we make sure every attendance area elementary school has a t k program that feeds into it and so the challenges that we're working to address are making sure that all of our attendance areas have t k so this is to make sure that all families have fair access to t k programs and have the same tiebreakers for t k across the city. the other issue that we've noticed is that we have two k programs still at our wonderful wonderful early education sites and those families are the only two k families in the district. The need to apply for kindergarten again. So right now the t k students at elementary schools are promoted automatically to kindergarten at those elementary schools the students at early education schools in t k need to do the lottery again. So this is two years in a row of a complicated process for them and so we want to make sure that everybody's having the same equal experience with automatic promotion and so our
goals when we were talking about exactly what we should do were fairness for families. So making sure that all families have equal access to t k across san francisco. so we want things to be predictable because we know that simplicity and predictability are two of the really important parts of what families want from the assignment system and so making sure that there's a clear pathway from t k at an early ed site to kindergarten we want to make sure that the early ed sites were in the same neighborhood or as close to the same neighborhood as we could get so that there is a lot of proximity for families that we're able to place families closer to home and then we know that making sure that we're doing everything we can to increase our enrollment is a really important thing for us to focus on at this point. Next slide. so here's the proposal that we have two k feeder programs
so starting next year where the applications for the following year for 2627 will make for every year early education school and the messy t k programs feeders for elementary schools that don't have space to have t k on their campus so when applying to t k a family would indicate which kindergarten feeder they wanted to apply to and we would use tiebreakers like attendance area and sibling for that kindergarten when the student was applying to t k. we'll talk about an example of this in a second which I think will make it feel a lot easier and then those students once they're in that t k program would be automatically promoted to kindergarten at their corresponding feeder elementary school unless they wanted to apply elsewhere and we wouldn't change their other tiebreakers. They could still apply to other kindergartens if they chose to do that next slide. so let's do an example of this first. Glenn park is one of our sites that is unable to accommodate t k on its campus so t k applicants who live in the glen
park attendance area in this plan would get an attendance area tiebreaker to process was early education school so they would apply there to the glen park pathway they would get the tiebreaker if they had a sibling at glen park they would get a tiebreaker as though they were attending glen park. If they got in at sarah annex they would automatically be promoted to kindergarten at glen park at the end of t k says creates like a consistent pathway for these families where they had the same access to an attendance area. Tc as all other students in the city and they have the same promotion to kindergarten that's guaranteed to students going to any other elementary school no for their applications required here until middle school. next slide please. Thank you. So this slide shows what the early education school site is and the feeder it would feed in for t k k so you can see
here on the list are gone early childhood education school would feed into jefferson elementary's kindergarten program. the ones in bold are the ones that do not have space for T.K. Currently you'll see some on there like mission ed center feeding into one of us to horace mann to learn swear to a second t k class and marshall but the boards do not have currently space for t k classroom next slide please. This is just an illustration on where the early childhood education school is and the feeder schools that it would be to so for example on the left hand side on my left hand side you can see noriega early childhood education school would feed into sunset and you lower to the park would feed into you. Whoa peabody nutrition and new traditions and you can see the correlation of the colors as well. Next slide. So our implementation plan
in FEBRUARY we started engagement with our families actually before that in DECEMBER we met with our early childhood principals to see what they thought about this idea and their feedback on this and answered a lot of their questions and thinking about the logistics. Then we launched a family engagement and community engagement with families and teachers and we also met with elementary principals at the elementary school sites that would be receiving a t k feeder as well. And we're in spring right now in 2025 waiting for a final decision on the proposal and then we would open up applications in OCTOBER of two for 25 this this year of 25 for 2627 applications and DECEMBER and spring moving forward they would get their placements and you can see the rest of the pattern there. All right. so we've done quite a lot of community engagement on this so far. We did five community workshops at different early education
sites and virtually we had meetings in english, spanish and cantonese. We as kristi mentioned work with the principals that early education schools and at the elementary schools with no tech. We had some survey responses from people who weren't able to attend community workshops and then the principals also responded to a survey we heard from about two thirds of families that they agreed or strongly agreed with the proposal and site leaders were very enthusiastic about this. About 90% of the people who responded to the survey who were site leaders were in favor of this proposal. Next slide. okay. This is a very dense slide. We heard three big concerns while we were doing community engagement. The first one is as you can see on the map some of these early edge sites and the schools they're going to are pretty far apart. they're about a mile apart at the farthest.
So we really want to make sure that the policy is fair for everybody and that everybody has equal access to tech and the best way for us to accomplish that is to build these neighborhood based feeder patterns. however, that said, sometimes we can't get closer than a mile to the school that we want to promote kids to and that's unfortunate but it does make it more fair for everybody to have the same access and so it seems like an appropriate tradeoff. that said, as we are able to identify more classrooms and we've been working really hard on identifying more classrooms, we'll adjust the feeder patterns so that we can make things as close to people's elementary school as possible. another concern there's two schools that will still not have tech associated with their campus. Alice fong, yu and lilienthal were really focused on making everything fair for attendance area families and making sure that there is consistency and simplicity and predictability for our early education site families.
so as we were able to find more classrooms we will hopefully be able to include these two schools in feeder patterns but we don't have the classrooms identified for them yet. and then the last thing is we heard from families enrolled in the pre-k programs that early education sites who don't live in their feeder schools attendance area that they're concerned about losing a tie breaker to tech at that early end site. So the families in pre-k actually want to make sure that they can go to t care at holyoke and because when they applied for pre-k at the oak they were under the impression they were getting this tiebreaker. We actually included that in the policy we want to grandfather in all of those families so that they're not losing a tiebreaker, that they believe that they had access to. so we will do a one year tiebreaker for any pre-k families to take at their early
education site. All right. Do you guys have any questions ? thank you so much. Um, I will open it up for questions. Similar process. I'll do two minutes and then we'll start um with whomever wants to start. Commissioner fisher um, I would just like to thank you both for this hard work and it's uh yeah, um, thankless work too as well. You know, there's there's no right answer no better matter what you do, someone's someone's always going to be frustrated with whatever decision we make. So thank you for balancing everything and especially for respecting and honoring the promises or the the perceived commitments that we had made to some of our families. It's really, really important. Thank you so much. Um, we've talked a lot in student enrollment and students assignment systems in the past about predictability proximity and choice and the tensions between them. And so I think you did a great job of balancing a lot of that here. So thank you for breaking that
down for us. Um, the the two questions that I have now and they seemed to always be the hardest in any enrollment system to address are language pathways, language programs. You know or what does this mean for our students and families who come in who don't speak english, you know, are multilingual families and also we have special education programs in early ed what does that look like for pathways into our elementary schools as well? this is a great question. I'm really glad you asked about this the special ed programs. So what we've talked about with special education is that we want all of our kids general ed or special ed to have the same pathway from t k to fifth grade without any interruptions. and because of the nature of the pathways for special education because they're spread all over the city this like neighborhood feeder model didn't make a lot of sense. So what we're planning to do is increase the number of classrooms on elementary school sites for special ed so that we're able to build like a
continuous pathway for the pathways that we're looking at. So there's three special education classrooms at early education sites. There's two mild moors and a moderate severe. So we will be adding classrooms at elementary schools so that we can accommodate everybody who wants to go to t k at an elementary school in those pathways so that way they don't need to even move schools twice . does that make sense? That's great news and I think the piece about the language pathway is really important as well. We were hearing from families that they were wanting more language pathways for tc so we opened up a japanese language pathway for k and a spanish bilingual as well. yep and several more spanish immersion at mission ed center which made us think we've been treating mission ed center like a different entity than an early education site but we really need to make sure that those families also have this feeder opportunity. Thank you for those exciting
updates. New commissioner rick hi. I just wanted to follow up on a question that I asked and the commissioner q&a about impacts on pre-k families. I see that you have extended the tie breaker as commissioner fisher mentioned referenced for a year which is helpful. But I'm I'm wondering what that means for pre-k families afterwards. There was an indication in the answer here that oh, the pre-k families would retain their tie breaker to kindergarten at the attendance area school where the early the site is located. So the tiebreaker impact be on tk is unchanged. I mean perhaps I'm not understanding this correctly but are we saying that pre-k families are going to go to some to a school and that once the one year period is passed they could then have to go to a
different tech but then they would still be able to go back potentially to the to the school they were at before and since. No, hopefully not. So the hope here is for the students who are currently in pre-k they thought that they would go to tk at their early end site. But we're going to there's another set of tiebreakers that work here and the attendance area tiebreaker set and so those families will keep their tiebreaker to their attendance area tk or kindergarten. So instead of we want to make sure that we're keeping our promises to all of the families who thought that they were going to get to go to t k at their same site but for new families coming in we'll explain to them as we're assigning them to pre-k that they'll have that tiebreaker to the t k or kindergarten at the t k or kindergarten of their attendance area school. Does that make sense? so so families after this initial period is over could started a pre-k they would not be they would not have a
tiebreaker to their t k they could also end up at a different t k once they did that they would have they could continue to go to that other tk I mean the k that that t case associated with what if they wanted to for whatever reason return or what if it was just easier for them to have a path at the same place all the way through? Is that essentially not possible for us to accommodate ? so for the early education sites it's already not possible for us to accommodate that because they ended t k so the students could go there for pre-k and then t care and then it would need to trade or change sites for kindergarten. So this instead of changing sites at the t k kindergarten break they would change ties that the early and t k break. It's just moving the timeline at which they changed sites up a little bit. Okay so I guess my fundamental question then is is there some way that people could start at pre-k and just continue t k k and so forth? Is that a feasible thing to do ?
so at some schools yes in our current setup but most of our schools don't have pre-k A.K.A at an elementary school site. okay so are you asking can they go to pre-k t k and then kindergarten and I'm essentially wondering can we just simplify this from the earliest possible point if the earliest point we take kids is pre-k can we make it so their families could just go straight through at the same time in order to or with wherever they expect it to go from when they got into pre-k so they would know from that point. right. You know, just sort of make this all easier for so yeah, it MAY not be possible. I'm trying to find out if it is I love this idea the what the requirements are for pre-k is slightly different than the requirements for t k they're based on different laws and so everybody who's in pre-k can't necessarily go to t k at the same site because you can go to
pre-k if you live anywhere in california whereas t k is specific to our L.A. So I hear you. I think you would be great to simplify this more and I think that we're doing as much work as we can to get the policies to look like each other and the application process to be the same so that it's easier for families but just because of the different laws that are here we haven't made that switch yet. I think it's something we could talk about. Okay. Thank you, commissioner alexander yeah, I the last it's just been really difficult for me to listen to the last 15 minutes of complexity because I think it exemplifies all of the things that are wrong with our enrollment system and I appreciate the work that's been put into this and I think within the confines of our broken enrollment system this is a great sort of problem solving exercise but our enrollment system is broken
and the board of education voted in 2018 to change to a new zone based system or sorry in 2018 to change the system in in 2020 to go to his own based system and it's five years later and we haven't done it and now here we are trying to put another jerry rigged system for because we have t k which is amazing. So now we're trying to integrate it in to a broken system and I just it's not so to me and I don't like it doesn't make any sense that we can't plan big picture for the future and actually tackle once and for all our enrollment system families. This is the number one reason families give for not enrolling in s f usd is the elementary enrollment system. It's chaotic, it's unpredictable. It's not a choice system because people it's a lottery, right? So people don't actually have choice. They put their name in and they maybe get it and they maybe don't so I think it's great
that t k to add predictability to okay but I'm just I'm really concerned that we're once again taking on this little piece of it and trying to jerry rigged something in and avoiding the problem so I'm I MAY vote no on this just for that reason I mean again I think it's for the t k problem. I think it's a it's a good solution and appreciate the work that's been done on it but I just I I've been on the board now more than four years in that entire time like the vote to actually go to the zone based system was made before I was elected to the board of education and every year it's I've been told by staff well we can't do it this year so we'll do it next year. Oh we can't do it this year. We'll do it next year. Oh we can't do it this year. We're next year you know we spend over $3 million a year on an enrollment department that most other school districts don't have. Sorry, I'll stop renting because the timer is going off.
Why can't we have a stable, predictable neighborhood zone based system that most districts have and then have kids go to schools where they near where they live and I think in san francisco schools would be almost as diverse if not more diverse than they are now. Is there a question that you wanted to ask or just my question is why but it doesn't to be when do we get those those but that doesn't need to be answered. I understand. I understand there are but I just yeah, that's my thank you thank you for that I think I can't answer the zone question but what I can answer specifically is that the reason why we brought this to you is that it didn't seem equitable that our tech programs that are on early ed sites don't have the same features that t k programs have in elementary schools and so I totally hear you about the other piece of it but where we were presenting
this about just equity for all of our tcu families. yeah. Thank you. This was a early so I think that commissioner alexander's sorry before you go can we vote to extend our meeting? oh no. sorry there. motion on the floor. Oh I'm so moved or seconded. Thank you. MR. Alexander. Yes, commissioner fisher? Yes, MR. Gupta? Yes. Vice PRESIDENT Hearing yes, MR. Ray. Yes. MR. Wiseman ward PRESIDENT Kim yes. Six eyes sorry. Go it so I think commissioner alexander's and my nameplates were accidentally switched to the beginning because I meant to say all the things that he said about the zone assignment system like reminds me of the campaign when we could give each other's answers because we heard each other talk about it so much. So thank you for raising that. Commissioner alexander um
and commissioner ray's point I think you know part of the concern as I understand it is that we can't have kids go all the way through one facility because our facilities essentially have not been retrofitted to meet all the legal requirements that p k's and tcs have for specialized facilities and first floor access and things like that. So this is again a band-aid but as far as our facilities planning on our new bond comes up um thinking ahead toward how we can integrate that so that we have more facilities that allow families to have just an easier um enrollment experience throughout their time and as of used would be great about this specific policy. I just have a couple of outstanding questions and I really appreciate you engaging with my many questions back and forth throughout this
process and for presenting this to the board so that and the public so everyone can understand one of my specific questions is have all of the feeder patterns been cross-checked against start times and commutes because I assume that there will be a significant number of families who have students at both the main k through five campus and the east campus and they MAY have students close in age for example a two k student and a first grade student like both need to be walked to their classroom and can't just be dropped off outside. So if those schools start at the same time but there is a commute of 20 minutes between them on a bus how is that does not actually help the equity and accessibility issue that we're trying to reach. So do we have confidence that either you know there's before care at one of the schools or one school opens earlier or you
know have we made sure that we don't have. 7:50 A.M. Yes start paired up with 9:30 A.M. Uh you know k through eight starts so that families also are spending two hours during drop off in the morning. that's a really good point. So at first we thought oh we'll just match them to the elementary school and then that was absolutely not the answer because of what you're saying. And so our early ed sites are open from 730 to 530 because of our early childhood programs and so we're working with the elementary schools to see what would be that start time. So if it's a 750 start time, should the t k program at the early headstart be 830 and not be such a gap? Right. So we have a little bit of flexibility with our early head starts to not have them be aligned to the elementary schools because we're open for ten hours every night so we're working with each elementary program to see what would be the best start time for
families that have kids in both locations. Great. And then my other question is specifically related to point MR. Horsman we've heard a lot from the community about the stresses that moving locations is going to put on them while they get their wonderful facilities upgrade but they're going to be at mse for t k under this plan and then students will be all the way down by maclaren park um for the other grades and it's quite there's not quite a long commute it's like a ten minute walk to the 14 and then a very long bus ride for transit like are we going to be able to provide transit options? Are we going to be able to temporarily house this additional t k at the temporary b m site so families don't have to make that leap? Is there any have we had engagement with them specifically about what works best for their school community ? we haven't engaged with them specifically about what works
best for their school community. I've heard the concerns that you're mentioning. I don't think that the site plan for the temporary site has space for t k and when vista has not had t k in the past so I totally hear you would be much more convenient for us to put it that site. I don't think that it's possible for us to put it at the jordan building but there is a t k site that's near JUNE jordan isn't there and so I'm forgetting it's mccormack oakland is close to there like would you know would we be able to put them have their t k feeder at mclaren for the years that they're located at jordan so there's just one drop off point just seems like it's at least for a few years going to be pretty difficult for those families. yeah that's a great suggestion. We can definitely talk about that instead of air taylor which I think is one of mclaren's features that makes total sense. Thank you.
Any other I don't have any questions. Okay, great. Thank you both so much. Very much appreciate this policy and we will turn it over to a roll call vote please. MR. Steele. I'm sorry if I missed it, but do we move in second this item? I don't know about that. Okay. Yeah, I moved second. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. An update to the policy 50 1a1 alexander no. MR. Fisher? Yes, MR. Gupta. Yes. Vice PRESIDENT Huling? Yes. MR. Ray. Yes. MR. Wiseman word PRESIDENT Kim yes. If buy this passes. Thank you. Thank you both so much. Very much appreciate your presentation. thank you. Um, we're going to go now to item h1254-2 to esp 12025202600 my gosh. 2523 six uh goodness it is late. Um sabbatical awards for united educators of san francisco unit
members uh, to pretend to um I'm just going to hand it over to associate superintendent amy bear. Thank you. I have the next two items and these are contractual obligations that we have with our certificated and our administrative units to honor sabbaticals for these groups. They come at a significant cost . The first item for certificated staff is a 14 million item for 62 certificated teachers to take a sabbatical. The reason the cost is so high is we pay the educator 60% of their salary while they're on sabbatical and then the district back fills their position with a temporary employee. So it's the equivalent of 1.6 fte for each employee. that also brings up some staffing issues that the board should be aware of that we're hiring. You know when you take a sabbatical you're entitled to go back to your same position. So we need to backfill those positions with temporary employees as an example, one school will have five staff on
sabbatical so that will mean five temporary teachers at that school for a year. Are there any questions? are we required to approve these sabbaticals under the collective bargaining agreement with usf? Yes. The agreement is the language was written that we shall approve these sabbaticals. I'll move to approve the item second we'll cover please, MR. Steel. Thank you, MR. Alexander. Yes, MR. Fisher? Yes, MR. Gupta. Yes, vice PRESIDENT Healey. Yes. MR. Ray. Yes. MR. Wiseman ward PRESIDENT Kim yes. six eyes are there any questions about item 2254-22 sb two 2025 2026 federal awards for united administrators of san francisco union members see you then we'll do a roll call vote please. We move this one as well. Oh yes, I think some a second.
Thank you. Commissioner alexander. Yes, sorry commissioner fisher. Yes. MR. Gupta? Yes. Vice PRESIDENT Healing. Yes. MR. Ray. Yes. MR. Wiseman ward PRESIDENT Kim yes. Success. thank you. Thank you. Uh uh, was there another presentation? Oh, no, no, no. okay. Okay. Thank you very much. You can open up the sunshine. yeah. Yes. Okay. So I'm going to go backwards in the agenda. Oh, I'm that's not probably what I was getting confused by. Okay, we're going to move backwards in the agenda and move to item g public hearing and adoption item one sunshine initial proposal from seiu and I turn it back over to you, MS. Bear thank you. you were wondering why I was still here. I understand. Yeah. So this item is to sunshine the seiu bargaining proposal government code requires the
initial bargaining proposals are presented at a public meeting. So this is the seiu sunshine to do a full contract reopen for for the contract expiring JUNE of 25 and the district will bring our sunshine to a future board meeting. Are there any questions? Sorry I just read the script so I will go ahead and read that out loud. I now open the public hearing on the initial proposal for a successor contract from seiu service employees international union 10 to 1 to the san francisco unified school district. DR. Sue has called on her designee amy baer so she's superintendent of H.R. To report on the initial proposal. At this time I invite the petitioners to make any presentation they have regarding the material revision and then we'll take comments from the board
and superintendent before we take public comment. Oh and there's no one presenting on that, correct? Correct. Okay. Are there comments from the board or superintendent on this item seeing none? Are there any comments commenters from the public didn't receive any cards. Great. Let's do a roll call vote please. And do we need a motion for this as well? Our motion a second roll call vote please. MR.. Thank you PRESIDENT Kim alexander yes. MR. Fisher. Yes. MR. Gupta. Yes. Vice PRESIDENT Huling. Yes, you're right. Yes. MR. Wise word PRESIDENT Kim. Yes. Success. Thank you. Thank you, MR. Chair. Thank you. And then moving back to item f discussion items item two central office plan I turn it over to the superintendent. Yes. Thank you. PRESIDENT Kim.
Today I want to share with you and the public our plans for how we're going to address the second part of our budget reduction. So as you all remember, we are facing a $140 million reduction to our $1.2 billion budget. In order for that to happen we are proposing three strategies to to reduce our budget. The first is to review all of our contracts and in this presentation you will see which contracts we are looking at. The second is to create and to create greater operational efficiencies through reorganization and redesigning of our central office and the way that we function and do the work. And then third is the reduction in force and that is of course the most painful which is what we've heard already today during public comment the most painful part of our budget reduction. so I am just going to go quickly through this budget presentation.
Thank you. Sorry to pull it up. I walked away from the budget and then or the presentation and then I defined it again. Okay so the guiding principles as we've already talked about a number of time is that student outcomes don't change until adult behaviors change. And that includes how we are going to reimagine and re-envision central office . We need to focus our work on student outcomes, families and community well-being as well as creating a sustainable and organization and organizational excellence. We need to prioritize programs focused on teaching, learning, leading and student wellness. And we need to strategically reorganize and merge central office programs and services to achieve systemwide fiscal sustainability. Next slide please. So this reorganization will do a number of things. One, it will increase our
integration of the work with our vision, values, goals and guardrails. It will allow our staff to be more nimble and efficient in how they work together. It will ensure that there is coherence and collaboration across our departments and divisions. We hope that it will decrease the staff silos. It will decrease the the the duplication of work. And it will decrease the barriers and the silos that we have and that I've seen over the last six months across our divisions and departments. You all have seen and we've talked about this where central office the proposal for reduction within central office is to reduce central office positions by 205 fte. That equates to almost $34 million. Next slide please.
Of the 205 fte ees that we are proposing to reduce 75 are currently vacant. There's 30 that are the 30 positions that will be taking the serp. And we do not plan to rehire for those positions which leaves us with 100 positions that will be laid off. That is three people layoffs of the 205 positions that we're proposing to eliminate. 72 are in the management classification. The subsequent slides show a little bit more detail about what that would look like within central office. You will see here the breakdown of divisions and departments across central office and the current fte is the current positions that we have in each of these divisions. The proposed reductions to those positions where will we where we will be after the
reduction as well as the percentage of the cost or the percentage of the positions within the context of central office? So for example the first line within central office we see business services where there are currently seven dft ees in that division. We are proposing to reduce nine positions from that division. That will leave 61 positions after the reduction. Currently business services represent 6% of central office . After this reduction it will represent 7% of our central office. You can do this across all of our divisions. But if you go down to the bottom you will see that currently we have 1080 fte within central office. After the proposed reduction we will land at 875 positions after the reduction.
The next two slides I'm going to ask our senior director of special initiatives MS. Manley last smith to walk you through. thank you, superintendent su and good evening commissioners and thank you for this opportunity to share more detailed information with you. I did want to say that while this preliminary analysis is going to talk about numbers, we are really aware that behind these numbers there are people and that these are really difficult decisions that we're making with real life implications. So while the position presentation is going to be focused on numbers, I just want you to be aware that we're very aware that behind every number there's a face. So this what I want to show with this chart is the sort of the preliminary analysis of the cost savings due to the reduction of those 205 positions that DR. Sue mentioned. The chart has both.
Each column is identified by a letter and then we do have some color coding in the columns to help folks follow follow along . So what we're looking at in column c the blue column is the total reductions from both restricted and unrestricted funds for those 209 positions to 33.9 million that DR. Su mentioned. The next column the green one is is and the yellow one are showing you the breakdown. How does that 33.9 million what is the breakdown between the restricted funding and the unrestricted? So in column c you can see that from restricted funding to about 20.8 million is coming that 33 million you have 20.8 that comes from restricted. And then in the yellow column c we about 13 million maybe 13.1 of the reductions of that 33.9
million comes from unrestricted . So that that gives you sort of where we are with the restricted versus the unrestricted. We also wanted to share with you today the analysis we've done starting to look at the reductions in unrestricted from the non fte side and when we say non fte we mean not positions so contracts or other ways of leveraging our restricted funding. So column e abcd e eyeglasses are definitely needing an upgrade notes the non fte reductions and that's in the amount of op. Thank you. i literally cannot see from f thank you. of 3.8 million and that is coming from contracts and we'll talk about that in the next slide. And then the other thing that on that next slide yet when I get to it sorry the other thing we wanted to talk about is we did talk about how do we more strategically leverage our restricted funding so we were
able to move $3.7 million of positions that were on the restricted fund on to the unrestricted sorry on the restricted unrestricted to the restricted side and then the next column e f g h is the total savings we have on the restricted side so that's column e, f and g and then column I gives you the total sum when we look at fte and and fte of $41.4 million savings towards r $114 million goal and this slide has even more colors and numbers. It has a lot of detail on it but we did want to sort of break this down to look more carefully at contracts and these are just contracts that are funded by the unrestricted funds right? Because that's where we have the savings. So you can see we have the pie chart that sort of matches up with that chart.
So the yellow which is column c it abc yes, column c is the amount of the $116 million of contracts in unrestricted funds that goes towards restrict required costs right that's $82 million and then the blue kind of tells you that's the one time funding that is mostly for the frontline erp system which you discussed earlier today and the resource alignment initiative. Now those funds are one time funds so when we cut those costs we don't have those costs to to use for other things but it does they come from our fund balance but are an unrestricted fund balance. So while we'll cut those and reduce them we don't have money to reinvest in other areas and then the green slice is d and that's where we can look for savings and it's about $10 million. So while we do have a large amount of money coming out of unrestricted monies for contracts when we start really breaking it down there's not quite as much savings as we
would like. We did look a little bit more carefully at the required costs and we did that in sort of the rose color because there is savings in our required costs, right? If we can hire more staff we can reduce our reliance on agency nurses on other related services and things like that. So there are there are savings to be made there in that I know that assistant superintendent regina piper is doing a lot of work on that. We're looking at reducing our agency contracts so when we looked at this our proposal right now is reducing services at swc administrative offices a $1.5 million reduction in general ed bus services to middle school students and a $2 million reduction to on our reliance on agency nurses. i do want to say we haven't finished central office budgets so this is our proposal today and we're going to keep looking
deeper at that 10 million to see if we can have more savings out of it as well as the rose colored numbers. Thank you, melanie. The next section is to show you the proposed central office reorganization. I will say that as melanie mentioned, this is these are really difficult conversations . This is really difficult decisions that we have to make . But I do believe that these are the right decisions to make so that we can build and achieve the level of efficiency accountability and coherence that our students and families need. So next slide please. So this slide represents my executive team at this moment in time and the proposal of where we want to go as you can see here we're making significant reductions to
several members of my senior team so that in by next school year we are looking at a a executive team that is comprised of five people plus myself which means we'll have a I a deputy superintendent of educational services and school operations as well as a deputy superintendent of business services and operations. The associate superintendent of H.R. Our head of communications which is now a merged position with multiple positions inside it and then of course the general counsel. Next slide please. So this is a a new what I'm learning is a double click here's a double click into into what would it look like for our for my my new cabinet, the new superintendent cabinet and so this is what I'm envisioning for the cabinet to move forward underneath the deputy
superintendent of education of services and operations school operations we will have a new head of academics and accountability. And what this means is that I'm merging academics with our research, research, planning and accountability team so we're moving that team closer together. We'll have a head of schools and we will have a head of special education and ourselves and this is really to wants to bring back the the position that we used to have before because we used to have a head of special education and we reduced that head down to an assistant superintendent under business services and operations. We are looking to hire a financial services officer currently we have an interim in this role. We're also looking to hire a technology services officer. We also have an interim in this role and then of course we want
to hire a head of operations because right now kelly is doing that job multiple heads of course we will continue to have our services super tight of H.R. And our head of comes in governance. what you'll also see on this slide is the assignment of our goals and guardrails into each of these positions because what I want is for us to be able to as a cabinet hold ourselves accountable to achieving these goals and guardrails that there's no more it's your job or that's this person's job or that person's fault. It is all of our jobs to ensure that we're moving the needle on these goals and guardrails. I will mention that in developing and designing this new org structure I worked with a consultant that is providing supports to other k-12 districts throughout the state of california and so he's
helping us think through what are the best practices that other allies across the across the state is doing and how we can maximize what we are doing here in the district and the next two slides are further double clicks into what each of these workstreams look like and honestly for this this slide here it represents what our deputy superintendent our current deputy superintendent of educational services in school operations is currently response able for this is DR. Carly aguilera ford and these are all the people that he supervises and there are even more clicks underneath each of these individuals and as well as our head of research, planning and assessment DR. We to kind of in the new iteration what I am proposing are these three heads so that there's once again more and greater
coherence across the system of schools of academics and accountability and special education so that we can have that level of accountability held in the in that structure. I'm also showing here the leadership changes the staffing changes the positions that will be either eliminated or changed so that we can meet this new model. We are going from 19 positions down to 15 positions which once again represents a reduction of of our leadership team right now. The next slide shows what will happen on the operational side once again of note is that I want to build that level of coherence and consistency across that system. We are going from 24 positions down to 50 positions so that we can have greater accountability and greater oversight over
major systems in our in our district. I will say that this reduction in central office represents now 16% of our budget. 84% of our budget will go towards supporting our schools and supporting our school community. The 60% reduction is quite painful. However, I firmly believe that we will be able to achieve the goals that we have sort of laid out for ourselves. We will be able to continue to provide the support for our teachers. We will be able to continue to pay our staff as well as continue to support our principals and gather the data and make sure that our our curriculums are aligned with what our in our schools needs are. But it does represent a very hard transition for a lot of
people. However, this reduction will bring us in line actually a little lower in line with other school districts across the state. Just a few years ago our central office was hovering at 25% of our budget. With this reduction it brings again our central office down to 16% of our budget because we really want to focus our funding and our resources towards our schools and school community. I mean a pause here and entertain questions. Thank you molly and thank you superintendent. I will go ahead and open up for questions. One question per person for now and I'll put a two minute timer on um and then we will see where we go so far. Thank you.
I just want to say how deeply I appreciate this work. I know well I have a sense of how difficult this must be for you and I'm sure it's much more difficult than than you know, my sense is is able to extend but I just really appreciate this and I'm glad to see commissioner alexander's work among others coming to fruition in reducing the size of central office so we really can focus on student outcomes. I appreciate the focus here on goals and guardrails and accountability so I just want to thank you for that. I have a couple of questions. one of my questions is whether the I see $34 million in total savings from the 205 position reductions I have a question regarding how that relates to or interacts with the cost of the buyouts. So if you could address that that would be great.
Like how much we're spending for the the cert buyouts and I also I actually don't know if MR. Dushan is on I don't know if it's possible to pose a question to him. If he is could someone let me know? I do believe he's almost are you on zoom? Maybe it's because I said MR. Elliott your jim okay interrupt us if you are okay. Well I mean I'll I'll ask it and perhaps he can address it later or maybe somebody else knows. So essentially I'd like to ask MR. Dushan and MR. Lawson I'm not sure I have her name pronounced correctly whether there's anything in this proposal that they have concerns about and if so, what are those things and why that would be helpful to know and if you know superintendent sue or MS. Smith have you had an opportunity to discuss with them please you know, let me know if there are any concerns that they've raised.
MR. Duchin is on MR. Okay. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you okay. hang on a second. It's all right. Boy that blank my screen all around. Okay. Yeah, basically this this represents as DR. Seuss said, a much more traditional and simpler district office struggle that I think will go a long way to improving communication and efficiency in the district office use you still there's a lot of work to be done. We are in the process of analyzing the cuts that are proposed for the central office in this plan and if not really come to a conclusion yet as you know you still have an uphill battle with your budget but I think this is a major first step. I don't know if that answers your question but I thank you. Hopefully we'll hear more from you and MS.. Lauzon if you do have concerns.
Thank you, MR. Alexander yeah. Just to echo commissioner raise gratitude for the work here and I yeah, this has been I think necessary for a long time not just not just for the budget cuts but I think because of what MR. Dawson just said which is that it's actually a much we're beginning to streamline the central office and make it more effective like more effective school district. So one of the things that the 2023 budget legislative analyst report noted as the superintendent said was that we were spending 25% of our budget on central office compared to 18% in the 12 pure districts they looked at. But also we were spending it in different ways in that some of those districts like long beach and others have actually better outcomes for students and that there was some association perhaps with how they were spending their money and how they were organizing their central office with that
those outcomes so great gratitude, lots of gratitude for this work and then I guess my question would be maybe along the lines of what MR. Your time was saying I would love to see a little more detailed analysis of you know looking back at that bla report and the peer districts how are we aligning or not if we're making different choices the different departments like how much are we spending on and I as compared to technology as compared to H.R. So that sort of like slide uh slide what number is that? Six the one with the illicit fte is how does that's that's a great comparison for us if you sd like current state as to next year how does that compare again ballpark big picture how does that compare to peer districts maybe looking at that report just again so that we have a sense of like you know that that we're in the guard guardrails here of of best
practices around um effective districts in california would be great not today obviously that's a that's a I'm not asking you right now I echo what everyone's going to say which is thank you for doing this really difficult but important and in many ways overdue work and you know showing folks that the district is willing to make cuts especially those away from school sites to protect and to protect kids and their experience in the schools. one question that I have is I really appreciate the slide seven and beginning to show us where cuts might be able to be made for contracts and that columns f the danny danny f um and question I have is just do we think that that is all that there is because that's a very small percentage of the overall
cuts as we work to get toward that 114 million. You know it's not quite not even 4 million and contracts um is it possible that we're so lily contracting that that's all that we have that we can cut on that front or do we expect to see additional contracts x or additional cuts maybe or non renewals next year or things like that? Part of it depend on the contract cycle. I just love to to hear more detail about that particular issue. uh, I will continue to echo the appreciation and deep gratitude. Um also just recognizing that this has been an a year of immense changes and we have changes that are being felt there central office as well. So so much respect to the folks who are there currently who are continuing to shop each day. Um back there yes.
Um my question is is more of an assumption that I want to clarify of of I assume that the next step after this and perhaps this work is already happening is to better understand I mean behind all of these titles are not just people but also like workstreams that are definitely taking place and that and a question of of we we have to do less if we are just simply doing too much and and what does that look like to strategically abandon certain workstreams to reassign that work to re scoped roles and and and and the ultimate end goal here is what kind of clarity can we provide around the work that is going to continue in service of supporting our schools and sites knowing that org charts are very helpful and they do provide a very concrete picture of what will happen eventually. But just what is the programmatic impact and the service impacts that we know will be felt by our sites both the good and the bad way? Yeah, both the good and the bad. Right. And just what kind of picture
does that look like? My assumption here is that that is the next phase of planning here but I wanted to just affirm that check that and and ask just when we can anticipate that level of detail coming forward to the board commissioner, you've done um echo the gratitude and the comments that were shared. Um, I'll keep this brief 25% 16% that is that is deep that is painful. Uh, much as asked from sites and we see central giving that much as well. Um out of curiosity based on a comment that commissioner alexander had made earlier which department is enrollment under that? Is it operations? Okay. just general question about uh, what what's being cut in enrollment as well.
But I'll say that um I also appreciate the look at the other school districts so that we have a benchmark in the next phase of planning as this is a um the question for me is will we see the I understand and really appreciate the work on on this slide will we see the effect on the year oh gosh I'm going to get the year wrong but basically going once we enter JUNE we're obviously into a new year so it would be it would be great to understand what that looks like then three years out as we move towards hopefully a positive certification. commissioner fisher um I echo everyone's thanks and the transparency this is they also echo what we're hearing from our school sites and our folks who have received layoff notices and that this is painful and not easy. So thank you MISS Lowell smith for for acknowledging that to um um I think a lot of my
questions are really about how we're making these cuts with respect to our goals our guardrails and our equity work and so I appreciate that in the org chart you did name that superintendent sue um uh but I do have questions about how that cascades um, and the very very very important work that some of these positions and the people that are in them are doing as we heard throughout public comment and we continue to hear um you mentioned in superintendent sue you've mentioned in a couple of the budget townhalls that we lose 20 to 20 to $30 million due to under attendance. Um but it's our seawalls and it's our family liaisons and it's those folks who actually who increase attendance and so I'm seeing some tensions like we need to implement mtc and yet we're cutting our our tips and of course we need folks back
in the classroom, right? So I respect that prioritization but you know we were being sanctioned for over suspending our black youth and for over identifying our our black youth the special education and yet all these support staff that would get us out of these sanctions that cost us money we're cutting. And so I as many folks have said in public comment who's going to continue to do this work? Who's going to pick it up and really help us meet our equity goals and live I mean for many, many years in this district equity has been a pretty word. Um, and we haven't had the action that goes along with it and so I also struggle with seeing that here in this plan um um the slide eight though and starting to reduce our reliance on non public agencies I think that is a huge bright spot and so with all of this I think the devil is going to be in the details of seeing the more detailed plan about what this looks like, who's picking up the work that that is being done by these positions and and
how we can meet our compliance mandates and and the work we have to do is still my overarching question. And so we look forward to seeing that in future presentations. Yeah. So maybe I can take a couple and mellie I know that she was looking for some numbers as well. I will say that the next iteration for for this work is for us to draft up new job descriptions for staff to apply for. So after this we're going to go back and first many of the new positions that we're proposing because a lot of these positions are going to be merged positions because once again we're making these reductions. So we are going to work with that consultant work with our H.R. Team, work with the existing leadership team to draft the job description and then we're going to try our best to turn around and post those positions
so that we can have a seamless transition starting JULY first. There is a process that we're going through to really think about what are the strategic abandonments of our initiatives that we need to start engaging in because as you can imagine with reduction in staff there's no way for us to continue to provide the same all the different services, all the different programs. I know that I was in front of this board I think in DECEMBER saying that I have asked our staff to make proposals to me for reductions of between 20% to 40% and in some cases complete eliminate said and I am very grateful for the staff that they did do that. They went back, they dug deep, had deep conversations with their own team and and figured out which which initiatives we need to stop which of course meant which teams we no longer could continue to support. So those are very difficult,
painful conversations that has had started and now we are going to move into the implementation of that. And you know I think I said to PRESIDENT Kim I've you know and and very I love this work. I love doing this work. This is the part of the work that hurts my heart and hurts my soul the most because I you know, I I'm looking at people that I've spent the past six months with and for some people I've spent the past 20 years working with and where we're you know, we're at the cusp of saying goodbye to some of these people. It's really, really hard and I hope that I know this board will give us the grace but I also hope that our community would give us the grace to also be able to embrace our staff and hold our staff and think our staff for all the work that they have done.
Um, I agree that there are there are perhaps deeper cuts that we can make in our contracts. I think there is going to be some very painful decisions that we have to weigh the pros and cons for for certain things that we currently have in our contracts and and yes $3.8 million maybe is not enough and we're going to have to figure out how to cut deeper. We'll have to also wait until we do a final analysis of the school's budgets that our principal just finished entering into the system. I know that the budget team is looking at the budget now and trying to tally up what are the actual costs that that is going to go into our schools. What are the true student experience will be in schools because every school we have allocated site discretionary dollars to and those the school
community had the opportunity over the last several months to figure out what positions they were going to hire and and bring back so that they can serve their student community better. So once we go through each school's budget to determine what are the staffing levels inside those schools, then we'll have a better picture of how much money the school community is allocating towards schools and then we'll continue to have a clearer picture of how much money we're talking about at the end of the day. So that goes to your budget projection. We are going to be able to do that but we probably won't be able to do that until another another month or so. Um I think those are all the major questions. Melanie do you want to add anything? Sure. I can add a little bit commissioner ray to your question about how is the the
serp costs in the 33.9 million interact we haven't done the deep deep dive of that and we're kind of looking at it because there we're looking at about a $5,000,005 million cost to the district overall for for the buyouts and so we're going to look at it when we come in. This is kind of answering your question, commissioner gupta, about the multi-year projections and the third interim report that is coming. So with that we're going to update our fiscal stabilization plan and we'll be start tagging in that plan where that $5 million comes and how it impacts our stabilization. We need to do a little bit of a deeper dive on the 30 on the the the the savings of folks that we of positions where someone took this up in that position was eliminated versus someone took the serp in that position was filled in potentially with a lower salary. So a lot of things sort of have to come into play but that's something we just keep
continuing look on and maria and I are beginning to work with our cda advisors to start talking about the multi-year projection and the third interim what we really want to bring in the third interim is sort of the multiyear projections for the next three years for 25, 26, 26, 27 and 2728 because it doesn't really help to look at this year that it's ending. I mean it's helpful for the proposed adopted budget that we need in at the at the end of JUNE but we want to start looking at the next three years is very important. So that's where we're taking that discussion. I will say that the third interim will give you more detail but there will still be questions because it takes a while to build a budget and we've got the first reading of the proposed budget on JUNE 7th and then the second on the last meeting in JUNE. So will this keep bringing information to you as we build it and as we shift to the new system so we're actually having
to pull reports from two different places now and it's all going to be fine because changes change but we're working on that so we'll have a lot more detail. I agree with DR. Sue, vice PRESIDENT Huling I think there's more to be made in contracts we might come back with like this year is what we would recommend for transportation and next year maybe cut another x percent. So sort of some type of cascading in terms of the general transportation costs, contract costs. What we can do with the agency costs as we hire new staff and things like that. So we're starting to think strategically around that. You see any oh and sorry one more commissioner alexander on the ballet report. I appreciate those and we are going to look at those as much as possible I think also would be interesting once we've adopted the budget to do like a deeper dive and a more analysis to sort of inform the next year as we're moving into it.
i mean my recommendation would be to literally start planning your next year's budget as soon as you pass this year's budget. I have a lot of thoughts about that but I do want to say I also looked at the ballet report real quickly and what also really stood out for me is not only was it 25% and I think the year was 20 2021 was the benchmark I guess we can call that. But there were 1290 for central office positions and after this reductions you'll be down to 875. So that's again I want to say that's people and that's that I don't want to make light of it and also that's 419 fewer positions and if I looked a little bit more deeply at it there was a good amount of money that was reinvested into school side. So eliminating those positions did not just go to reducing the deficit but it was able to reinvest into into school sites.
So that work that started in 20 2122 is definitely moved the needle so far in those percentages and we'll keep looking at it. Thank you molly. I know it's reaching a dark out dark hour late it's late. I'll just share a very quick conversation that we had with our leadership team meeting on monday where you know, I just I bluntly said there is no other option but for us to meet our $114 million structural deficit goal this year. Not only was it something that something that was passed in our fiscal stabilization plan and not only is it a superintendent metric but we cannot go through all of this pain and not experience a better version of our district a year from now. And so that option I mean it's not it's not an option. We have to do this right and we have to do this honoring the
folks who committed their time service and and blood, sweat and tears to this organization and this institution. And so I just end by saying thank you for again the hard work here and we know this is not the last conversation that will have as a board. So thank you, molly. moving on to our last item is item f uh, three board leadership response to board metrics. I'll invite my colleagues to join me on our memo that was sent out to the board on friday. And again, thank you for the grace of not meeting our own expectations of attending district 12 draft. what I'm going to do during this time and I'm going to try to limit this to maybe as short as possible I'm going to say ten minutes would be great and just add some context to this one. We are not making action on this. This is just a discussion for us to get a directional alignment on where we're going and making sure that the board
feels informed on the direction that we're headed. this obviously requires some partnership with the superintendent and staff to make sure that we are able to operationalize all of this and and it will depend heavily on the capacity of central office and and her team to be able to support us in this work. But what I'll just do is quickly voice over what we have planned here and again I open it up for conversation and knowing that we will have opportunities to to operationalize this after today's meeting. Essentially what we're looking at are are a combination of leadership team work that will continue in partnership with the superintendent and shared board work in the form of ad hoc over the next 8 to 10 months there are three ad hoc that are being proposed here one around public engagement, another around progress monitoring and another around policy and what what I tried to do was articulate just kind of what were the some of the
parameter errors around some of those ad hoc and what you see in the last page here is kind of a proposed structure around what that ad hoc might look like. And so very quickly the first ad hoc on public engagement is meant to ask ourselves what is the expectation the baseline expectation that we are going to ask all commissioners to be engaged with in any given year between the board as a whole and the broader public? The reason I'm defining the broader public in that way is because anything else regarding school staff principal engagement site visits that are it requires staff time which falls under the superintendent and so those will be conversations that leadership will have with the superintendent around what's feasible and what's sustainable . But the conversations around how the board can engage with the public is a question and conversation we should have with the public. the second around progress monitoring this body of work is intended to set expectations
around what robust progress monitoring looks like so that the staff can have clarity on what they should be presenting to us and what those expectations MAY look like. And the hope is the time this such that we provide these expectations well before the next school year so that when the new interim goals and guardrails are presented that staff have clarity on how to best monitor present whatever materials to monitor that work and the last around the ad hoc committee on policy is in part out of the direction of the council of great city schools and the work around good governance efforts. But frankly the board has just never had an opportunity to reassess and take stock of the policies and resolutions that we have. We just keep adding, adding, adding and so this is an opportunity for us not to change any content of those policies yet but to just have a conversation around does this fall under the board purview? Does this fall under superintendent purview and are there other resolutions on board policies that are
significant that rise to the level of supporting our vgs that we also just want to retain? And so again it's a I don't want to underestimate the amount of work it takes to do this but it is meant to be an exercise of identifying what aligned actually to a new governance model and bringing those options to the board. Each of these should be you know again thoughtfully planned out and we need to create both work plans and a timeline for all of this as well. But the general hope is that we will start with an ad hoc committee on public engagement moving quickly into an ad hoc committee on progress monitoring. Again the hope there being that we can start the new year with some of those expectations and that we will end this year with an ad hoc on policy. everything else that you see that doesn't actually mention an ad hoc is work that we intend to do either between vice PRESIDENT Ruling myself
with the superintendent or we MAY pull in other commissioners to support but knowing that again all of this requires some thoughtful planning ahead of us. With that said, I will stop here and and really the question right now is does this directionally feel right? Is there anything that feels disconnected or not aligned in the work that we have intended and if so, it's a good opportunity to share that. Um, otherwise we'll take your silence as an endorsement and huling and superintendent stu if there's anything that you both want to add to this please please you michelle or for sure okay. I just want to thank you very much for the work that's gone into this. I'm really grateful. Before I was on the board and I was working with a couple of the commissioners at the time around a potential resolution for reading curriculum.
I remember meeting with our chief academic officer at the time, DR. Priestly and she wasn't opposed in theory to what we were trying to do but what she said just practically to me she said I have 18 resolutions from the board that I have to present on every year the data that we have to collect, the time that my staff has to work on those presentations just like it pulls us away from all of our other work. So she said think about that before you go through with writing this resolution and that was really transformative for the way that I thought about some of these well-intended but also unfunded policies that we we have in place right. And some of them do. I mean our mandate is governance, not operations and some of them do absolutely veer into micromanagement and and and to your point, PRESIDENT Kim, I think they also some of them are values
related and so there's some policies that I think especially now with our current federal administration it's really critically important for us to just maintain to show our students and our staff and our community how much we value them so that's down the line. First and foremost I'm super excited about the community engagement and I don't want to talk behind their backs because our student delegates are not here but I would strongly encourage us in the community engagement piece to include them as well because I know that has been a huge, huge priority of theirs is to figure out what student engagement looks like as well. Yes. And you taking ages coaching about ad hoc committees you know we're expecting that basically each ad hoc committee is going to be constituted is going to have essentially like a deliverable document at the end and so I think to your point about all of the resolutions like one thing we MAY want to look at is like what policies do we have
in place that there are on paper but they're they're actually no longer the direction that we're going and that we need to actually own up to that and say this is actually you know, need to take board action to undo some of those resolutions and also with the community engagement piece we're hoping that there will be essentially a calendar and a commitment proposed from all of our commissioners as to like a regular schedule and process for community engagement for example like town halls with that non quorum where we can hear from folks and not have people put in a position where they're coming to public comment to feel like they've been heard and also a regular schedule for visiting schools so that again schools you know have regular engagement with the board and are feeling like
they're having to you know, throw up a distressed flag when they need attention and one of the things that I think would be helpful for us since we can only discuss these things in person in open session as a group is to kind of hear what folks are interested in potentially serving on and we're hoping that we will be able to get some you know, have the capacity to potentially at least double check two of these or have overlapping um time periods so that they're on a rolling basis but everyone essentially serves on one um ad hoc policy committee and then we're going to draw straws to see which one of us ends up on to so hopefully those two will go concurrently but if you know folks have thoughts about that so that we can get the work
underway quickly and I guess one one question I have is if people pro or con working over the summer for me I'm like oh it's when we don't have board meetings to make it 11 o'clock to say yeah go go for it. I also want to really think um PRESIDENT Kim and veteran viewing and superintendents who for this work I think it's really great and really helpful and I'll just maybe highlight the ad hoc committee that you haven't talked about and which is actually the one I'm most interested in just to answer your question which is progress monitoring because I think that's like a really high leverage area where you know I think I love the concept but I think we've struggled frankly over the last couple of years as we've tried to do it to get the culture right where you know, it started feeling a little bit too like a too much
like a gotcha things and then we stopped voting and you know, it's like how do we ask questions in a way that actually creates the type of um discussion that we really want and I think that if we can figure that out as a governance team of how do we really set the tone that we want as the board to to be able to talk with staff around student outcomes that's going to help establish the culture of the whole district, right and how how student outcomes get talked about at other levels of the districts. I think that's a really interesting one. I don't I think it um it's going to require some some work and some maybe looking at other districts that have done it effectively and so forth. And I think that's that's a a high leverage area where we could really show our leadership as a board. So thank you for all this work you've done. any other comments or
questions? Awesome. Um, thanks. and we're working diligently on the governance calendar. Yeah. Yeah. Just by acknowledging this is meant to be complimentary to a lot of the the metrics of the superintendent as we know one of the metrics is for example to bring some good governance training and you know for this governance training to staff in the district and so and we have one as well to bring it to the public so that there's hopefully some complementary work here. Um that's pretty clear. Um excellent. Thank you so much. I'm going to move to item I consent calendar. Uh, are there any items withdrawn or corrected by the superintendent there? not I. I moved to remove the mou. Oh yes. Sorry for me. Yes. Yes. Um, I will need to read so I myself what is that which is
from item 14 under mou consent items I move to sever item I 14 from the consent calendar second okay MR. Steele, can we get a roll call vote on the remaining and consent calendar items and then we'll have the folks vote? I know we have to have you have to vote on it. Oh yeah. we could vote on the spring first. Yes. Okay. For you want real? Okay. i'm sorry I have 13 q MR. Alexander yes, MR. Fisher yes. MR. Gupta. Yes. Vice PRESIDENT Healey. Yes. MR. Ray fisher wise board PRESIDENT Kim yes. Six eyes seven right. can you tell me what you'd like for me to do next? I believe we can take a vote and move and take a vote on the rest of the thing. I agree. And then a motion for a vote on the consent a second roll call vote. MR. Steele.
Thank you. I'm sorry. Commissioner alexander. Yes. Commissioner fisher. Yes. MR. Gupta. Yes. Vice PRESIDENT Healey. Yes. MR. Ray. Yes. MR. Wiseman ward PRESIDENT Kim yes. because I thank you. Now we need to vote on I I 14 yes. so where does that he just can go right? I'm sorry I don't. So PRESIDENT Kim is excused himself to avoid the appearance of potential conflict so in his absence I'm resting with mike from him and I move to approve item I 14 you're not allowed second to deliberations or the roll call that we we have a second yes. okay. Thank you. great commercial alexander yes . Commissioner fisher? Yes. MR. Gupta? Yes. Vice PRESIDENT Huling. Yes. Uh, MR. Ray? Yes, sir.
I was ward and that's it. Uh, five votes. Thank you. One, two. I don't think I adjourn today's meeting at 11:09 P.M. For and I would actually also like to officially thank our c sba region delegate PRESIDENT Pat murray who was here earlier as well as fellow delegate from san mateo union who were here for most of the meeting watching. So thanks to them for being here. Thank you already.