Berkeley Unified School District School Board - Regular Meeting

Alrighty, thanks a lot. Good evening. Thank you for joining our meeting here on June 3rd. We're not very loud, not? Hello? Okay, good. All right. Thanks for coming out. I can feel the energy, lots of people here. You're excited to be here. We're excited to have you here. So we're starting up the June 3 school board meeting. And I think we start with a roll call, Ms. Chavez.

Stating 7.20 PM is our start time for the record. Director Ana Vasudev. PRESENTED. Director Jennifer Shanofsky. Here. Director Patricia Brown. Present. Vice President Jennifer Corn. Present. President Michael Chang.

I am here. Thank you. And next up, we have Vice President Corn is going to provide the closed session.

We need to approve the agenda for the evening. OK. Good evening, everyone. Closed session was called to order at 540.

Over the agenda? Approve the agenda? Of course. Sorry. Do we have a motion to approve the agenda?

I'll move to approve. I'll second.

All in favor? Ayes. Aye. No nays. All right. And now Vice President Corn will provide the closed session.

OK. Closed session was called to order at 5.42 PM with Director Chinoski, Vice President Korn, and President Chang in attendance. For item 3.1.1, the board received an update and gave direction. For item 3.2.1, the board received an update. For item 3.2.2, there was a motion by Korn seconded by Chang that was approved with Chang and Korn voting aye and Chinoski voting nay. For item 3.2.3, there was a motion by Korn, seconded by Vasudev. The motion was approved with Chang, Vasudev, and Korn voting yes, and Chinosky voting nay. For item 3.2.4, there was a motion by Korn, seconded by Vasudev. The motion was approved by Chang, Vasudev, and Korn. And Chinosky voted no. For item 3.2.5, there was a motion by Korn, seconded by Vasudev. It was approved by Chang, Vasudev, and Korn. And Chinosky voted no. For item 3.2.6, There was a motion by Korn, seconded by Vasudev. The motion was approved by Chang, Vasudev, and Korn. And Chinoski voted no. Item 3.2.7 will be delayed for the next meeting. For item 3.3, the board received an update. And for item 3.4, the board had a discussion. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Vice President Korn. Next on up, we have one of our most important items is superintendent comments. Superintendent.

Thank you, President Chang. Good evening, BUSD family. Good evening. You guys are getting better at that. It's a whole lot of y'all this evening. I'm so happy to see all your beautiful faces. I wish I would have prepared something to say. I'm going to be brief tonight because we have a pretty packed and engaged agenda. And I know that you all are here because you have a lot to say. Just a couple of announcements. Tonight in our closed session, the board approved the appointment, and it will be formalized on the consent agenda of Clifton T. Carley. as the vice principal for the Berkeley Adult School, beginning next, did you guys even know we have an adult school? Yes. We enable and inspire a very diverse student body, a body of all ages and all pathways. We want to give a round of applause, please, for Clifton T. Carley, the new vice principal. Oh, wait. Go ahead, Mr. Carley. Stand up. Look at that. I didn't even know you were in the room. Thank you, Mr. Carley. Mr. Carley has extensive experience in adult education. And we are so lucky and excited that he will contribute that to supporting the learners of Berkeley Unified Adult School towards a vision to foster equitable, kind, and resilient communities. We actually had our Berkeley Adult School graduation yesterday. And if you all have not seen an adult school graduation, you have not yet seen a graduation. It is so amazingly inspiring to hear folks from all different walks of life who took paths that are oftentimes called nontraditional tell their story of overcome, of resilience, and of persistence. And even though they are not, I don't refer to them as the babies, they are still folks that we enable and inspire to achieve academic excellence and make positive contributions to our world. And we are hashtag Berkeley Proud. for their accomplishments. Okay, I thought I was gonna be short. Oh yeah, clap it up. Tonight is round three of our budget series. You all might not know, but we know very well that tomorrow is the last day of school for the 25-26 school year. However, Tonight is not the last board meeting of the 25-26 school year. we have another board meeting on june 10th as well as june 20th i'm sorry as well as june 17th we will continue the conversations around budget and resource allocation with our board approving the proposed budget on the meeting on the 17th and so even though you are out of school or school is out maybe perhaps because it is we know you have extra time so i expect to see you all still here and engage on the 10th and the 17th is that a deal Finally, I just want to, because I do have a captive audience and y'all know I'm really shy, just to say thank you. This is the end of what is the fourth year for me, the fourth year for us as a team, the fourth year of us together in this formation of the BUSD family. Our hashtag this year, y'all should know it, was hashtag Berkeley Proud. And I am so, so proud of the work that we've been able to do together. I'm proud of the fact that Berkeley Unified has been named a district on the rise. I'm proud of the fact that we have reduced our chronic absenteeism, that we have improved our outcomes for all of our focal students, that we are, for the first time in Berkeley history, having no students in the red, which means that we are not just showing progress with proficiency. but we are also accelerating outcomes for our babies. I'm so glad that we were able to, I'm so proud that we were able to reach agreement with all of our amazing labor partners, our classified, certificated, and our administrators, and just proud to be in this community that is passionate, that is committed and that even though we don't always agree we are all very uh committed to this idea of excellence equity enrichment and engagement so thank you for having me for year four thank you for your continued partnership and your engagement and thank you for all the ways that you've done your part to make us hashtag berkeley proud

All right. Thank you so much, Superintendent, for that rousing public comment. And we all know that Berkeley is on the rise, but Berkeley has always been a great place to go to school. So thank you so much. So we are going to be shifting into public comment. I want to make a few framing suggestions for our public comment period. We are really excited to have everybody here. There's lots of folks here. Typically, there's 30 minutes for public comment. So we try to stay within range of that so that you not only have an opportunity to speak to us and provide us with your hearts and minds, this public forum here is really important for our community and for our school district. We absolutely recognize that. In order to balance that right and that interest in having you speak to us and our listening to you, we also need to move things along. So here are the ground rules. So there are a number of folks here that are here to speak on the same issues. Some of you are together, others who may or may not be. I have these green cards put together by subject matter. I'm going to give the groups who are falling into the same subject matter five minutes total. So I'm going to call out your names so you have a little bit of time to kind of think about what you're going to do as you're coming up. And then I'm going to call out the next group that's going to come up. as well. And each of these groups have five minutes. You'll have to figure out, you know, who amongst that group is going to chat and that Ms. Chara is going to start the timer and is going to beep really loudly at the end of that. And we apologize for that. And then if you move on smoothly for us, that gives us an opportunity to give other folks to speak. There are also folks online and you can also send your comments by email too. And then if they're individual, there are a number of individual folks who want to speak. We're providing you with one minute today. I know that sounds really short, but you can actually say a lot in one minute. And if you run out of time, of course, again, send an email to us. And finally, of course, we want our students to go first. We prioritize them first. So in some of these cases, I'm trying to figure out who the students are, and I believe I know. If, for some reason, a student in a particular group has not been flagged, just let me know. Raise your hand and let us know. So I'm going to start with a student first, Yoko Ito-Williams. If you'll come on up. Hello. And then Dan Brownson and Gladys Acampos-Stout, if you could be ready to come on up in a second.

Mike, are you trying to group by topic? Yeah, this.

Okay, yeah, good idea. So we have this one student, if you could go for one minute, that'd be great. And then we have another, I'm sorry, we have another set of students that will come after that. Thank you. So the next set of students, just to name you really quickly, appears to be a conversation on Bridge. Pedro Torero, and apologies for mispronouncing your names. Wells Grimes, J-U-E-L-Z, and you can tell me how to properly pronounce that when you come on up. Gels? Joel. Joel. Great. Very cool. And Tavell Gray? Tavell Gray? Tavell. Tavell. Tavell. Someone here was your teacher. Taji. Taji. Cool. I'm getting some of them right. Giselle. Giselle Lopez. Cool. So can you guys be ready to come on up right after you're in the group and five minutes to kind of think about what you're going to say together. Thanks so much. Apologies, Yoko. You can proceed.

My name is Yoko and I'm a fourth grader in Berkeley Unified. My mother is an ethnic studies teacher on special assignment and her job needs to be full time. She works really hard and does so many things like writing curriculum, training teachers, and helping teachers learn how to teach ethnic studies. She even goes to classrooms to help teachers. Like she came to my class and taught ethnic studies lessons which everyone loved and had fun learning. I'm proud of my mom and I'm proud of being in a school district that has ethnic studies even for elementary students like me. Berkeley is supposed to be a champion for equity, and if we cut back my mom's job, we are showing that we actually don't value equity like we say we do. We are giving people like Trump exactly what they want, which is less equity, less education about people of color, and less justice. Please fully fund the ethnic studies TSA job and the bridge program. Thank you.

All right, thank you so much. We always appreciate our students. And next on up that did we hear previously, Pedro, and you're going to make me mispronounce your names again. Are you guys coming up? Okay, we got all of them. So we just have two of you, but the names that I called out would be part of that group for five minutes. Is that cool? Yeah, so a total of five minutes.

All right.

Okay, I guess I need to go, yeah, Pedro Torero, Joel Grimes, sorry, Tavil Gray, Tavil, Taji, and Giselle Lopez. So, because you're talking about the same issue, you have a total of five minutes.

Okay, is this five minutes for the kids, or five minutes for, like, including adults? Yeah, that's cool Oh, okay

OK. OK. When people hear after-school program, they might think Bridge is just a place students go after school ends. But Bridge is so much more than that. Bridge provides constant support, support that is needed outside of the time we have after school. If I need help, I know I can send a message or make a call, and someone will be there for me. And we'll make sure that Bridge is that the Bridge team as a whole is there for me and not just the cohort teacher alone. They don't just wait for students to ask for help. They check in on us, call home, and make sure we're doing OK academically, emotionally, and personally. They do this for every single student, so it takes a team.

What makes Bridge different is that they don't forget about us when school day ends. They push us to succeed and encourage us to reach our goals and support us through challenges. They are invested in our growth both in and out of the classroom. Bridge is not just an after-school program. It is a community, a support system, and a constant resource to help students thrive every day. Thank you.

Great, you still got four minutes.

Good evening, superintendent, board members. I might not be a typical student, but I'm here representing for my gente. I'm here to speak on Bridge. I'm here to speak on Rise. I'm here to speak on Puente. I'm here to speak on ethnic studies. As a middle school counselor, my name is Aaron Lechuga. I'm a middle school counselor, restorative justice counselor at Longfellow Middle School. And the counselor, yeah, we had our graduation today. I got all my Longfellow people in la casa. vamos you know we middle school counselors we fight to uh get these spots in these programs that we know that work right uh they don't need less funding bridge needs more funding rise needs more support puente needs to be in the ninth grade like these are programs that serve our first gen college goers that serve black and brown students that look and create spaces to decolonize this process so that it is accessible to us to our kids so that they can be there and it gives them the love it gives them the case management it gives them the support That's critical. We fight for these spots as counselors. It's critical that we sit there and have meetings with Ms. Luxford, with Ms. Bette, with Ms. Melgoza about what needs to happen in order to get those spots because they're coveted. And we know that means those kids are going to a four-year college of their choice. It's guaranteed. And so you cannot limit that. You have to find other places to cut the money. I know it's hard. I know it's not just money growing on trees. I know you guys work with a lot of restraints. You know, it makes us fight amongst ourselves, right? That's the divine and conqueror mentality, right? So, but how do we look and find other places, not the ones that we know and see have a proven track record that get our kids, that all these kids that we get into those programs, they come back and they're like, Mr. LaChula, it works. It's working for me. I'm seeing, I'm heard. So it's critical. And we need our ethnic studies. Just like you heard, like if you've ever worked with from TK to high school, we've all used those amazing lessons, right? That join me, put together that our next level that are so well done. It's beautiful. And it's a one person department. Come on. Who else got to talk? Let's go. Give it up for these programs. All right. Here we go.

My name is Jessie Luxford and I am... The bridge staff should come up. The bridge staff should definitely come up because they made the effort to be here tonight. And it's not me, it's a team effort. So I just want to thank so many families for coming out, the students, the seniors who have signs. Again, we're here again just talking about how impactful this program has been for kids. And I know that the district knows that. The problem is that we're here for a second year in a row having 105 kids on a wait list. And we're being told that there's going to be cuts, but we're going to do the same thing, get the same results with cuts and reductions. And as somebody who absolutely has never had, except for having children, more love and devotion to a program, there's no way that you can cut and grow a program. And we need to grow it. We need to do better and do more. And if you cut and you say you're going to get the same thing, the bridge staff, it's not me. We've met repeatedly every week. There's no way that you can get the same thing, OK? And we're telling you that. So I just want to say that in order to understand the reality, this is not an after school 50 minute class. This is all day long. It's in the evenings. It's on the weekends. I have been on call for 16 years. I never leave my phone. Because if somebody needs something, the beauty of this position, the honesty, is that I have the time to have a long conversation and get families what they need quickly. Because the counselor is 60%. OK, am I done? Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. All right, next on up, our next group, same pattern. There's a number of students. Saji, Sebastian Bedouin, Xavier Ruffin, I believe these are all students, Lily Hammond, if you guys can start coming up, Lays, Luis Lee, Sebastian Frusville, that's partly your, okay, cool, thank you, Garcia Frusville, thank you so much. Another former student, Samuel Feseja, Feseja, Feseja, Feseja. Do you look, your principal, your teachers are up here. Alexana Herbellin, Alexana Herbellin. So you guys, I'll hear that. So five minutes, please. I know it takes a little bit of organization. And Ms. Chares will start up the timer.

Hi, I'm a senior from Berkeley High School, and I'm part of the track team. And speaking about Coach Brad, I've known Coach Brad since I was six years old, which is 12 years now. And in that time, he's been much more than a coach to me. He's always wanted what's best for me, even when it wasn't what's best for the team points-wise. And he taught me lessons that went far beyond sports and helped me shape me into a better person. What made Brad different was that he never made athletes feel like just another number. He genuinely cared about each person and the impact he had on their life. You can see that in the number of alumni who come back years after graduating just to talk to him and thank him for everything he's done. No matter the event, Brad was always there helping, supporting athletes, and doing whatever needed to be done. His impact on this program goes far beyond wins and losses. Current athletes have already felt the loss of not having him around, and the future athletes will miss on having a coach who truly cared about them as people. Coaches like Brad are super rare, and the positive impact he had on many lives shouldn't be overlooked. And there's never been a time where I don't think anybody on this team has ever felt any kind of way with him, felt uncomfortable, or felt like he didn't want what's best for him. Thank you.

Thank you. Ms. Charez, can you freeze the time for a second? I'm sorry, can you freeze the time for a second? I wanted to, yeah, I'm gonna, I'd like the students to go first, but this is also another subject matter that there are some adults that would like to speak as well. Can you come on up and try to figure out your time? So some of you are up. Ben Nathan is up and Sarah Hebelin. I'll cover it up here. Great. Ketani Toms, excellent. And Nathaniel Tai. All you guys up there or more? Just want to make sure. David Lee. Okay, thanks a lot. And Ms. Chares, please start up the clock again.

I can start. My name is Sebastian Garcia-Frausto. I'm a track athlete here at Berkeley High School. I'm a junior. I just want to come up here and talk about my coach, Brad. I want to talk about my experience with him. When I first joined the track team last year, I really got cut from the basketball team. Basketball was really everything for me. Sports was everything for me. And when I did get cut from that, I really had a loss. I felt lost in my grades. I didn't know what I was doing. And when I joined the track team, Brad just gave so much support to me. He showed me he gave me a path. I don't have like the best home life and I have a I say like I have a lot of like personal problems But I feel like Brad as a coach and not just as a coach as a good person that's a good mentor I was good everything he's really support me in every way possible and And it really makes me sick to think about kids in the future won't be able to have that mentor, be able to talk to, and not just get better at their sport, but be a better human being. And Brad really just not affected just me, but I've seen him affect many athletes. He's been here for what? 15, 15 something years as a head coach. He's inspired so many hundreds of athletes and it's just crazy to me to think that like no one else will like ever have that much impact that he has had on Berkeley High as a culture. If you really look at all the other sport teams at Berkeley High, you'll always hear kids in the hallways be talking about like, oh, this and that. But hey, Brad has always made a good environment for all the students. So I think that's all I had to say.

Hello. I'm an adult, but I just graduated from Berkeley High School. My least favorite part about Brad is that it seemed like every day there was some alumni who was visiting practice to say hi to Brad, which took up valuable time with him. But looking back now, all I can think about is just what kind of coach and what kind of mentor and what kind of person you have to be to have people who are Multiple years removed from Berkeley High, coming back to see you. The answer to that question is that more than anything, Brad was inspiring. He inspired hundreds of kids each year to join cross country and track and field, inspired kids to continue to be healthy and exercise and train after high school sports, and lastly, he inspired me to be a coach. Finally, as someone who has spent the better part of three hours a day with Brad for the last four years, I can say that I have never seen him make anyone feel anything other than comfortable, confident, and inspired. And to anyone who doesn't think Brad should be the head coach, clearly does not care about our children. Thank you.

Hi, my name is Ben Nathan. I'm a math teacher and the head wrestling coach at Berkeley High for the last 12 years. I have coached kids alongside Brad for that entire time. One of my most dedicated kids I've ever coached had Brad right after he would have me for every season. And the impact, if we talk about the impact of people on his life, Brad came before me and he saw me for three hours a day And he was in my classes like somebody who I was very closely tied to. As a coach, we look at our positive impacts that we've had on people, and that is how we judge what we have done. If I can have half the impact in my career that he has already had in his last 15, I will consider that a huge win. The number of kids I've seen inspired by him that have gone on to better things because of him, It is innumerable. I've seen so many lives changed by this man and not having him around is harming those futures of all the kids who will not get that opportunity.

Hello. I'm Sarah Herbalin, parent of a Berkeley High runner. Coach Brad has built the Berkeley High cross country and track and field programs, and he really actualizes BUSD's four Es. Building a team that's open to all students, no cuts. Athletes are encouraged to grow and do their personal best, engage with a supportive team, and are enriched as they're encouraged to compete in multiple events. Coach Brett has consistently worked for equity, providing opportunities to all athletes, not just a few elites. When there's an opportunity to keep in SoCal, he invited all the junior and senior athletes and planned tours by running alumni at colleges on the way down and back. He supports athletes to discover their personal excellence. We have a petition of over 100 people who've signed in just the last little while, as well as an overwhelming number of thank you letters.

Thank you so much. And you can send stuff by email too. Thank you. All righty. We have our next group, which is on ethnic studies, and five minutes as well. So there's a number of names here. I think there is Gabriela Casal, Dana Moran, Nadia Taylor, Jody Sacalor, Musa Tariq, and Yvette Falarka. if you guys could organize for five minutes thanks a lot whenever yeah okay hi my name is gabriella casal i grew up in berkeley and i'm sorry can you hang in a minute can folks i know folks in the back are just trying to move on out there's a little bit of reverb when you talk in the back though so thanks so much you get a lot of energy but we want to make sure here the folks who are up here at the podium thanks a lot please proceed

OK, I grew up in Berkeley and stood up at many meetings like this as a student. What has stayed with me about that time is what I learned about justice and what I learned about injustice. What has stayed with me are the seeds that were planted about so many diverse cultures and customs and perspectives far beyond my Berkeley bubble.

I'm sorry, can you hold on one second, too? I apologize. I'm still having trouble hearing. Folks in the back end are really excited and trying to get out the door. Maybe you can move on out into the courtyard and chat, because it is kind of echoing up here. Thanks a lot. Apologies. Please do proceed.

Can I start over? OK. Sorry. Sorry. I was on a roll.

Cool. Ms. Torres, if you could start over.

All right. Okay. All right. Here we go. My name is Gabriela Casal. I grew up in Berkeley. I stood up at meetings like this as a student many times. What has stayed with me is what I learned in school about justice and injustice. What has stayed with me are the seeds that were planted about so many diverse cultures and customs and perspectives far beyond my Berkeley bubble. I'm an equity teacher leader as Sylvia Mendez. This is an informal title since the district no longer supports our work. Stipends and a meeting space for equity teacher leaders were cut. So now Joemi Ito-Gates is the person carrying forward equity work in BUSD. Her title may formerly be Ethnic Studies TSA, but in reality, her role holds so much more. Her full-time position ensures every teacher has culturally relevant materials. Her full-time position helps busy teachers prioritize reflecting our students' identities. Because of her work this school year, I taught my students about black mathematicians and scientists, and Filipino farm workers, lessons on stereotypes from the Arab American National Museum. These are just a few examples from her beautiful resource guides. These are not even from the ethnic studies curriculum. i left 10 years of teaching in oakland and chose to return to my roots here in busd because i believe that equity really was at the center of this district's work we need to put our limited resources where they matter in the hands of smart thoughtful hard-working and dedicated educators like joanne she makes me hashtag berkeley proud thank you

Good evening. My name is Dana Moran, and I graduated from Berkeley High for the first time in 1980 and the second time when I retired in June of 2024 after 31 years at Berkeley High and 38 years of teaching overall. And since the passing of the legendary Dr. McKnight, I think I have taught ethnic studies at Berkeley High longer than any living person. I'm here, I applaud your decision to fund the Ethnic Studies TSA, but it needs to be a full-time position because splitting the FTE with teaching dishonors both jobs. The TSA position has yielded enormous results in the short time it has been in existence, from the visibility of celebrating district staff, to ongoing curriculum development and resources for teachers, to partnerships with UC Berkeley, to Berkeley High students presenting at the elementary schools. And as someone who has taught part time for many years, we know that teaching takes up your entire brain and somehow expands to fill your entire schedule. So the ability to meet and plan with other teachers, UC partners, district staff and administrators, and community partners would be exponentially more difficult for the TSA if tried to squeeze into a teaching day. I would urge you to support the district's values of equity and inclusion by fully supporting a 1.0 FTE for the ethnic studies coordinator. Thank you.

Hi, good evening. My name is Nadia Taylor and I'm here. I was on the Ethnic Studies Advisory Board and I'm here about the Ethnic Studies TSA. So I had the pleasure of being part of that advisory committee and beginning to see the fantastic work that was being done. And I, most importantly, am a parent of a child who is a rising eighth grader at King who just had the opportunity to actually see some of that pilot material and was really touched by it. So I'm here to support the continued funding for the TSA to be able to devote 100% of time to continue the incredibly strong work that has already been started. We know that ethnic studies is incredibly important to our children here in Berkeley, and despite very difficult budgetary choices, I think we also know that with someone at the helm at the district office working full time, consistent and persistent work on ethnic studies throughout the levels of the district will not continue. I urge your support, thank you.

Hi, my name is Jody Sokolower, but I'm actually reading a statement by Miguel Hundolf Lima, who is a recent USD grad and a tribal member. This is his statement. During my time as the co-president of the BHS Native Student Union, I worked extensively with Jo Annie in her role as the Ethnic Studies TSA. Under her supervision, the NASU conceptualized and painted the land commitment mural that's on the district building right around the corner. Little could have been done without Joannie's undivided commitment to the project as it was coordinated and carried out during school hours. the mural should be a reminder of the district's commitment to creating curricula and adequately represent indigenous peoples and systems that support young indians meeting these needs is essential and requires a person who can dedicate their time to working with community and educators cutting down the capacity the tsa position will represent the failure of the institution to meet the needs of indigenous students just a year and a half after the completion of the mural If the position is cut down, let our faces on the mural remind the district of the students that were failed via this decision. Thank you.

Thank you so much. You can, of course, email your comments as well. Thank you. Next on up, we have Tech in Schools. That's a subject area. Vanessa Vega, or Vega. Vandana Balakrishnan. Cool. Thumbs up, Rachy Lee, Great Megan Werner, and Grace . If you guys can all come on up, and you've got five minutes, please.

Hi, everybody. For all the community members and educators who are still in the room, there's a flyer. We're here for Berkeley Unplugged on the back table. Please pick one up. We would love to have your support. First, this is unprepared, but I just want to say we urge you here as a group of Berkeley Unplugged to invest in proven human-centered programs like ethnic studies, like Bridge, that build relationships, belonging, and real engagement, not clicks. Re-examine the hundreds and thousands of dollars that you're spending on screens and apps to see if they're actually improving learning. If the answer is no or you're not sure, move that money to these programs. It makes sense. You've got the proof right here. I'm here to actually talk about how my son came home early from school the other day with a migraine. We dropped him off in the morning. He was totally fine. I asked him what happened. He told me during class, students have been watching whatever they wanted on YouTube on their Chromebooks through their Berkeley student email accounts. He loves to game, so he was doing all sorts of gaming stuff. He said that he spent so much time staring at the screen that he had a headache and eye strain. Eyestrain. These are words spoken by a 12 year old. Like just think about that for a second. That's absolute insanity. And you know last week I came here to tell you about his friends who no longer play basketball outside at lunch because instead they're going into a classroom to play online games on Chromebooks. This is not okay. We are battling this at home. We need our schools to work with us. Our kids deserve better. Thank you.

Good evening, my name is Vandana Balakrishnan, also Berkeley Unplugged. It is tempting to believe that schools should focus on our kids adapting to the technological needs of the future. While that goal is well-intentioned, let's not forget the basic developmental needs of our children. Building memory, attention span, developing focus and concentration, preserving their ability to handle the inherent discomfort that comes with learning. Screens without guardrails disrupt that at every turn. When a child is forced to do all his work on computers with easy access to distraction of the internet. When a child learns to simply ask AI instead of sitting with the problem himself. When a child just turns to his phone rather than engaging with the social discomfort of making new friends. I have no doubt that our kids will adapt to technology when the time is right, but I worry that the skills that children can only develop through time, attention, and care that the school fosters is being shortchanged. This is a crucial time in their lives. Let's not allow big tech to experiment with the brains of our children.

And it's recently posted FAQ, the district states, YouTube access is restricted to assigned curricular materials only. But the data from our child's school account reveals an unmonitored algorithm-driven environment of digital distraction, featuring shorts, gaming, live streams, ads, and AI-generated content with little to no educational value. This is a profound systemic failure. In a three month period, our child viewed 3,445 YouTube videos on her school account. Alarmingly, 516 of those were accessed during instructional time. The problem extends home as we calculated 1,487 minutes of video-based YouTube homework assigned in just one class over three months. What are BUSD middle schoolers watching is equally concerning. 94% of it is on autoplay spirals. 21% is AI slop, an industry term for low quality AI generated clickbait designed to generate revenue. I believe that the district's lack of a substantive technology plan coupled with substandard implementation and a distressing absence of oversight has caused substantial harm to my child. and to my child's community. We call on the board to immediately conduct a district-wide technology audit to safeguard student privacy and well-being.

It took roughly 40 years for the US Surgeon General to confirm that cigarettes cause lung cancer. We do not have 40 years to wait for long-term studies on smartphones, social media, and constant screen exposure to our children's cognitive development. The warning signs are already in front of us. Educational technology has been widely promoted as a way to improve learning, but the results have not consistently matched the promise. Earlier this year, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath testified before the US Senate and raised concerns that rapid expansion of classroom technology may be contributing to declines in attention, memory, reading, and problem-solving skills. These devices are designed to capture attention and keep it, and makes a sustained Sustained focus harder for students. I've seen this with my own children. Research shows students often learn more deeply when they write by hand and work with fewer digital distractions. This is not about blame. It is about course correction. Now that we know better, we can do better with district and parent partnership to set stronger boundaries around technologies use and please act.

Thanks a lot. Please email your additional comments. Thanks a lot. So next on up, so that's the full five minutes, we have Gladys Ocampos out. And then just one minute, Gladys, please, and Dan Brownson right afterwards. And that'll be it for in-person public comments.

Hello, my name is Gladys Ocampo-Stout, and I'm speaking on behalf of Latinos Unidos de Berkeley. Latinos make up over 22% of Berkeley Unified. While we're encouraged by recent improvements in Latino student outcomes and graduation rates, we know this progress came from intentional investments in bilingual staff and culturally responsive programs. We cannot celebrate progress while weakening the very supports that helped create it. We're asking the district to make a clear, long-term commitment to Latino students and multilingual families by, one, continuing to fully fund the ethnic studies position, two, securing the 0.5 OFI Spanish bilingual district position, three, requiring Spanish bilingual qualifications for key positions at Sylvia Mendez Elementary including the after-school position. Four, protecting and prioritizing programs that have data showing success with underrepresented students, such as Puente Bridge and Rise. Bilingual staff and culturally competent programs are essential. They help families navigate the school systems, communicate with teachers, and advocate for their children. At Berkeley Unified, truly value students. That commitment must be reflected in budget and staffing decisions. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Sam?

Hello. Congratulations to all our students and especially the class of 2026 as we come to the end of the school year. At this time, I would like to mention a few other endings I'd like to see. An end to budgeting that solves the district's financial woes by threatening to ruin the lives of the workers least responsible for these problems. We show up and do our jobs. We didn't cause the district's money problems, but our jobs, which we depend on for our lives, are the ones always seen as expendable. Enough is enough. And then to a tax on the BCCE's merit system and the Personnel Commission it requires. We'd never propose getting rid of tenure or any other protections for workers in our sister unions. We only ask for the same respect. Finally, an end to McCarthyite witch hunts educators have been subjected to. The most recent complaints were filed not even by parents or students, but by a faceless organization in order to harass and intimidate our education workers to stop us from standing up for our values. Some of these complaints were for merely wearing stickers and patches that say, Free Palestine. Thank you.

You can, of course, email. So we're moving on to public comment. We are trying to stay within time. We're already exceeding time. We want to get to the agenda items today, which are very important. So we're going to do one minute a piece of the top five online and if i apologize if you're not on the top five online which there are a number of folks um if you could come back at the end of the meeting uh so uh miss charis if you could pull up based upon who is uh raising their hand in in chronological order by time good thanks lindsay no felt

Good evening. My name, can you hear me? Okay, thank you. Good evening, my name is Lindsay Nofelt. First, a quick request. Please do not approve after school bus fees later tonight. Once we add in exempt programs and the collection costs, it's unrealistic to gain 200K of savings and it harms our community partners. Now I'd like to talk about how we teach foundational math. In our math curriculum and PD choices, we rely heavily on inquiry-based discovery learning. Using exploration to teach new concepts is inequitable. Early in the learning process, inquiry acts as a centrifuge. Kids with prior knowledge might survive it, but those without it are left behind. In reading, we use structured systematic methods backed by decades of data. The human brain doesn't change its wiring when it switches from letters to numbers. The evidence is deep and wide. Explicit structured teaching is superior. Let's look at how the brain actually learns and teach our kids the way they need to be taught. Thank you.

Thank you. Ms. Charles, who do we have next?

Lorona Custer.

Lorona Custer.

And you have one minute.

Hello, everyone. My name is Lorona Custer, and I'm both a parent and an employee of the district. I'm here today to advocate for the importance of fully funding the Bridge program and not making any cuts. Bridge is an invaluable program that provides students with the support, guidance, and opportunities they need to succeed academically and to prepare for their futures. The program offers tutoring, monitors students' academic progress, and provides interventions when students begin to struggle. It also exposes students to colleges and universities they may not otherwise have the opportunity to visit, helping them envision possibilities beyond high school. For many students, Bridge serves as a source of encouragement, accountability, and mentorship. It helps keep students on track for graduation while promoting college and career readiness. The relationship students build through the program can have a lasting impact on their confidence, motivation, and long-term success. Programs like Bridge are not extra. They are essential investments to the student's achievement and equity. Please keep Bridge.

Thank you. I appreciate you guys getting right in that minute. I think we have three more. Sandra Loving is next. Thank you, Ms. Charez.

Yes, we can hear you. Okay, great. My name is Sandra Loving and I'm the extended care program director at Berkeley Alternatives and was formerly the Berkeley High PTSA president and also served on PAC. I'm here to speak about the Bridge program once again. We know Bridge has a proven record of success for many, many years. Bottom line, what they do, they do well. And the reason for this is that they go above and beyond for their students and families. Bridge is and has been successful because the students and families have access to something that is unfamiliar to many of our Black and Brown families, a program that is trustworthy and reliable. I know firsthand that they have literally saved lives. Let me repeat that. These staff members have saved lives through their dedication, patience, and love. If the bridge oversight budget is cut and we offer the same amount of cohorts, the students will not receive the same high-quality programming. So if the decision has been made to cut to cut the funding, the oversight funding, then we should do four cohorts instead of five. Superintendent, school board members, please do the right thing and don't shortchange our staff and students. Thank you.

Thank you. One minute around the button and Mike W is next. And then for the folks who are not able to speak at this point or coming over at the end, you can also send an email in the meantime as well. Mike W and then Jamila Dunn. Mike W. Mike, do you hear us? Ms. Charez, should we move on to the next one? Okay. Mike doesn't need to be accepting the offer. So, Mike, you have to come to the end. Oh, there you come. All right. Let's go. Thanks. So put your hand down, please. You can always come at the end if you want. So we're going to do two more. Jamila Dunn and then Lina Makdisi. Lina, can you hear us?

Unmute yourself, Jamila.

Yeah, Jamila is up then. Jamila, do you want to unmute yourself? Ms. Saras, has Jamila accepted?

They're muted.

Okay. So if, so Mike W has declined, Jamala is having some, maybe some technical issues. How about Lena Mac DC?

Hello?

Hi there. I'll play, go ahead.

Yes, as an educator with a master's in education and a new BUSD parent of a rising third grader, I'm speaking here tonight to demand immediate transparency regarding the district's elementary technology practices. During a recent school tour, my simple question about third grade technology frequency received a conflicting and evasive response. The principal first claimed Chromebooks were used three times a week for an hour, but later admitted that they're used every single day. This lack of consistency from leadership is deeply concerning. As a low-tech family with a neurodiverse child in the early elementary years, this ambiguity is unacceptable. My rising third grader is at a critical developmental stage, learning to read, write, and physically form letters. This requires active human instruction, not passive screens. There is a lack of clear accessible technology plan. The USD must act immediately to publish clear technology guidelines and protect foundational hands-on learning before the upcoming school year. Thank you.

Thank you. Up next, we have Courtney Kawano. And that'll be our last. So the rest of the folks, please come to the end if you want to still speak and or email. Courtney, you want to come off mute?

Hi, good evening superintendent, school board directors and community members. My name is Courtney Kawano and I'm an assistant professor in the Berkeley School of Education and a university partner with BUSD's Ethnic Studies TSA on a UC Berkeley Chancellor's Community Partnership Fund grant for the 2026 to 2027 academic year with goals to pursue financial support from education research foundations and philanthropy in future years. which can only come to fruition with a 100% line for the TSA position. I also speak as a graduate of Hawaiian-focused K-12 schooling in my home state of Hawaii. Knowing that the design and implementation of Hawaiian-focused education did not take just one or two years, it took decades. And even when I graduated from high school in the mid-2010s, the work to improve, to refine, to evolve, did not end with my generation, it continues to this day. Please support BUSD's ongoing commitment to the important work of building out an ethnic studies system to honor Berkeley's longstanding legacy as a leader in this field. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Thank you so much. And so for the other folks, you can come on at the end and or email. even now, if you want, to the board members. So we're going to move on to committee comments. We have some students still here, and it's getting kind of late. We have GSHAK coming on up first. And then after that, right after GSHAK, just to set it up, we have Construction Board Oversight Committee. And GSHAK stands for Gender Equity and Sexual Harassment Advisory Committee. Great. You guys coming up? Come on. and then pack after CBOC. Thanks. Hi.

Can you hear me OK? Good evening, board members, superintendent, staff, students, and community members. My name is Rose Levine. I'm one of the student reps for the superintendent's Gender Equity Sexual Harassment Advisory Committee. And I will be a proud alumni of Berkeley High in about 48 hours. But who's counting? In addition to GSHAC, during my time at Berkeley High, I was lucky to be involved in leadership, student clubs, and like BHS Stop Harassing, and my personal favorite, Green Dot. One of the reasons that I'm leaving Berkeley High as a proud alumni is because of you, the school board, and your continued support of programs that truly make a difference in student climate and wellness. You care enough about your students to allocate and continue to fund such important bullying and sexual harassment prevention programs, such as Welcoming Schools, Green Dot, Berkeley Athletics Consent Empowerment. They're all committed to increasing gender neutral facilities and continue to support positions promoting gender equity and eliminating sexual harassment, such as our Title IX coordinator, prevention coordinator, and site-specific LGBTQ plus liaisons, as well as your continued professional development for BUSD staff. All of these things were greatly celebrated in G-Shack this year. Out of all these amazing things that I just listed, I really want to focus on my personal favorite prevention program, Green Dot. When my friend nominated me to be a Green Dot ambassador, I honestly didn't really have an idea of what Green Dot was. They told me you get lunch every couple weeks, you go to an all-day training with Ms. Molly and Mr. V, and you know, you make the school a better place. And I thought, hey, free lunch, missing school for a training, and making a difference, that sounds like my cup of tea. At the beginning of junior year, I was sitting in sixth period math when somebody walked in with a letter, along with the official permission slip for the training, inviting me into Green Dot. At the time, I didn't have any idea that that one little permission slip would change the rest of my high school experience. Green Dot started as a program that I truly barely understood. And it quickly became an incredible community of students who truly walk the talk when it comes to preventing harm and supporting people when harm has already happened. Green Dot teaches students that we all have a role in stopping red dots, which are moments of harm, harassment, violence, or disrespect. A green dot is any action that we take to interrupt that harm and make our community safer. And the best part is you don't have to be perfect. You don't have to be fearless. You don't have to magically know what to say. You just need to do something. Green Dot teaches the three main ways to step in, direct, delegate, and distract. And what makes Green Dot special at Berkeley High is that it did not stay a small program. It grew. And during my junior year, there were so many nominations, and by my senior year, there were double. I had never seen so many students so excited to be a part of changing the culture of a school. Green Dot became cool. And I don't mean like school assembly cool with polite applause and then forgetting what they actually said. I mean actually cool. Students wanted to be a part of it. Students were talking about it. Students were Green Dotting real life situations. Over the past two years, Green Dot went from being a program that students had barely heard of to becoming an action that students understood. It became a culture and language of Berkeley High. And as a senior, seeing how Green Dot is operating now gives me confidence that this will continue after my class leaves campus. And obviously, students are not the only reason that this program has grown. Mr. V has expanded the role of Green Dot by incorporating into student service and leadership, and Ms. Molly's undying commitment and support, energy, and probably way too many emails reminding us that not everybody has to do something, but everybody, not everyone, nobody has to do everything, but everybody has to do something. And together they have poured so much into this program and to every Green Dot ambassador. So on behalf of one of your newest alumni, knock on wood, and GCHAT committee, I want to thank you for continuing to prioritize and fund gender equity, sexual harassment prevention in Berkeley Unified School District. You are all truly Green Dots. And I encourage you to therefore, we have come so far, but we still have a lot of work to do. Therefore, I encourage you to continue to be Green Dots and continue to support programs that prevent bullying and sexual harassment across the district. So we also have very fancy shirts for you guys to prove it. And I know that I will be wearing mine at University of Maryland this fall. Thanks. And remember, nobody has to do everything, but everyone has to do something. And your support is a huge something. May I approach the dais to give you these shirts in multiple sizes?

Thank you.

Thank you for your time.

Thanks so much. Those shirts look great. And thank you for your comments on the important work your group does that myself and Vice President Korn are sitting on. And congratulations on your upcoming graduation. Very exciting. I think it's guaranteed. All right. You've done what you need to do. Nothing's guaranteed. That customer professor. Yeah, go to school tomorrow. The professor has spoken. Make sure to listen. Don't blow off school. So we have construction bond oversight next. Thank you. And then we have parent advisory committee after that.

Good evening, Superintendent and Board of Education. That's a hard act to follow, and I'm sorry to say I don't have any T-shirts to give out. I know. What's wrong? So I'm David Golden. I'm one of the seven members on the Measure I and Measure G Citizens Bond Facilities Oversight Committee. For those of you who need a slight lesson down memory road, Measure I passed in 2010, $210 million. Measure G passed in 2020 for $380 million. Both programs are in full bore, going full steam. Measure I, all the bonds are sold. The money is winding down. Measure G, 75% of the bonds have been sold. Projects are going full bore at the moment. For those of you that don't remember, the Ed Code requires that if you pass a facility bond measure with 55% plus one, you need a happy committee like ours to make sure that all the money gets spent the way it's supposed to be. And every year we have to do an annual audit, and every year we do an annual report for the Board of Education. and as with last year and the year before and the year before i come with a cup with nothing but good news which is the the facility bond program has continued to go full speed has spent all of the money exactly the way it's supposed to be on exactly the things it was supposed to spend it on and The audit that justifies that has been forwarded to you with our recommendation that you adopt the audit. That's really important news because there are districts all over the state that are struggling with communities that don't trust that the Board of Education and the facility department knows what they're doing. And I think after 5, 10, 15 years of good hard work This district has proven that we're really good at what we do. And that brings me to thanking Assistant Superintendent Calise and his entire staff for all of the hard work that they have done during the year, really an exemplary amount of work. The Bond Oversight Committee, in addition to the audit and the report, we also closely monitor the work like at Longfellow and at Sylvia Mendez. And for those in the audience and those on the board that haven't been to Sylvia Mendez yet, I would recommend a tour. I think the facility is going to be wonderful. So in general, it's good news. And I want to sort of conclude with a special thanks, one, to John and his team. to the superintendent and the board for their continued support, particularly for Jennifer Sanowski and Jennifer Korn, who have come to our meetings and suffered through some of the nonsense that happens at these meetings with their wisdom. And it's greatly appreciated. And mostly, and more importantly, I want to publicly thank on the air the voters and the citizens of the city of Berkeley having faith and confidence that education is important in Berkeley. And in order to teach and learn in the 21st century, we have to have some of the best facilities in California. And I think that's happening here in Berkeley, and we should all be proud. And Eric Weaver is the chair of the committee. And if he wants to add any words of wisdom, I'll turn it over to him.

But thank you. The only point that I wanted to add is in the last couple of reports, we pointed out that our committee wasn't fully appointed by the law. They're supposed to be seven members. We now have all seven members. I wanted to thank you for making sure that we had a full complement of people. The people who were added this year have added a lot, a couple of architects, people with a lot of experience. So thank you very much.

Thank you so much. Thanks for your hard work. PAC, which stands for Parent Advisory Committee.

Good evening. My name is Cielo, and this is Michael, and we are this year's PAC co-chairs, here to share our committee's feedback on the LCAP for the school year. We'd first like to thank our district partners, Dr. Lena Sweeney, Joya Ball, Jill Hugendijk, Dr. Dave, and Raquel Baham. We also extend our deepest gratitude to each PAC member, especially to our student members. During each of our 11 meetings, PAC received presentations that had a strong balance of anecdotal insights and timely data with a focus on our unduplicated students. This year in BUSD, our unduplicated population is 2,896 students, or 30.4% of the total student population. To be clear, when we say unduplicated student, that means our kids that are multilingual learners, our socioeconomically disadvantaged kids, our kids experiencing homelessness, and our foster youth. We celebrate Longfellow and Willard's recognition as 2026 California Distinguished Schools, and we are so happy to see improvements in the California dashboard, where college and career readiness, math, and English language arts have all risen to their highest levels, a clear signal that the work is working. At the same time, our committee remains concerned about the state funding model, which does not fully account for the needs of our community. As in prior years, our district faces budget reductions due to lower enrollment, ADA, and expiring funds and grants, making our task of offering constructive recommendations for LCAP-funded roles and programs especially challenging, knowing that any reduction in services will have a lasting impact on our most vulnerable students. For the purposes of tonight's comment, PAC wants to highlight our five high-level prioritized recommendations, but we encourage our community to read the whole thing. It's linked in the agenda, you should read it. First, protect and properly staff student-centered roles. At some sites, a single RTI teacher will monitor 400 plus students across MTSS tiers. Our ELD teachers must maintain FTE despite reclassification changes at each school site. Our McKinney-Vento liaison serves nearly 250 students across 17 school sites. OFI is no longer present at each school site daily. Restorative justice counselors are the primary mental health touchpoint for 25% of our middle schoolers, an important element to note in light of expiring mental health funding. second stabilize funding for proven high equity high impact programs with avid discontinued at bhs bridge and puente are the only first generation college pathways funded by the lcff at the high school level and puente isn't available for rising ninth graders who must wait until 10th grade to re-enroll leaving a gap in their critical freshman year in high school Third, mandate SEL, PBIS, and restorative justice as Tier 1 practices. These programs are currently recommended but not consistently implemented. The gap is in execution, not program design, as our community has reiterated in this year's LCAP survey responses. Restorative justice must expand from reactive to proactive work. invest in family engagement and multilingual home-to-school connection. Despite persistent requests from PAC, DLAC, and LCAP survey respondents, we still do not have OFI representatives at each school site. LCAP Actions 4.2 and 4.3 carry a $0 budget line and are solely shouldered by our OFI partners. By prioritizing family engagement to include elements like take-home literacy tools and math support on top of existing OFI-led programming, we can only strengthen the school-to-home connection. And fifth, build coherent, disaggregated systems. We all benefit from the incredible work of the Brea department. And we ask for more data on TWI Spanish assessments for better data parity to non-TWI sites. We ask for methods to track MTSS touchpoints to ensure our students' needs are identified and paired with the right programs, as well as post-secondary persistence tracking to further validate the effort and effectiveness of our college and career programs. In closing, California's ADA per pupil funding model wasn't built for today's reality of declining enrollment. Since that model isn't likely to change soon, we asked the district to consider requiring that a portion of any funds contributed by private individuals or organizations include an allocation to high equity, high impact programs. So the programs and roles that are clearly working for our kids can continue regardless of fluctuations in state funding. We look forward to continued collaboration with the district to promote successful outcomes for all of our BUSD kids. Thank you so much for your service. We appreciate you.

Thank you so much. We appreciate you as well and all the committees for their hard work. Are there other committee members? Make sure I haven't missed anybody. Anyone online? Ms. Charez? No. Thanks so much for your work and for staying here and waiting until pretty late. So let's see. Make sure I'm not missing anything. Union comments, of course. Are there union folks here? One of our very important partners. Thank you.

All right. Good evening, board. My name is Moja Shem, the vice president for BCC. And before I say anything else tonight, there are two people I need to recognize. Because often we stand at this podium, it is because we are advocating for something, defending something, questioning something, or asking leadership to truly listen. But before the school year comes to a close, BCCC wants to acknowledge two individuals who rarely stand in the spotlight, yet help keep this district moving every single day. Jessica Lopez and Lizana Chavez. Jessica, the executive assistant to the superintendent, and Lizana, the executive assistant to the Board of Education, are two of the hardest working people in this district. They are not represented by a union, but make no mistake, they are represented by the respect and appreciation of the people who work throughout BUSD. Jessica works behind the scenes supporting the superintendent, coordinating countless moving pieces, responding to endless requests, and somehow doing it all with professionalism, grace, and a smile. and Lizana. Well, anyone who has ever attended a board meeting knows that if things are running smoothly, there is a very good chance Lizana is somewhere behind the curtain making sure they do. She keeps agendas organized, board members informed, deadlines met, and somehow manages all the different personalities, opinions, schedules, emergencies, and last minute changes that come with helping lead a district the size of Berkeley. Let's be honest, that alone deserves hazard pay. Tonight, before the school year ends, we simply wanted to say thank you for the work that most people never see, but all of us benefit from every day. And while we are recognizing people, BCC also wants to congratulate all of our BUSD graduates. Whether you are moving on from elementary school, middle school, high school, adult school, or beginning a new chapter in life, remember this, the best is yet to come. And perhaps that's true not only for our graduates, but for all of us. The end of a school year gives us an opportunity to look ahead, but also gives us a chance to look back to reflect on what we've accomplished, what we've learned, and where we can do better. As BCC leadership reflected on this school year, we thought about the speeches we have given from this podium. Throughout this year, we spoke about power, respect, fairness, transparency, protecting workers, protecting programs, and ensuring decisions were made for the right reasons. And as we look back, we realize that all of those topics really come down to one thing. Accountability. Because accountability is not about punishment, it is about ownership. It is about having the courage to admit mistakes, correct them, and do better. It is about understanding that leadership is not measured by a title. Leadership is measured by actions. A title may tell us your position, but your character tells us who you are. Your decisions tell us what you value, and your willingness to be accountable tells us whether people can trust you. As we prepare for a new school year, after we end this one tomorrow, BCCE hope is simple. Our hope is that accountability is expected from everyone, not just classified employees, not just teachers, and not just union members, everyone. Too often it feels as though accountability is applied differently depending on who you are, your position you hold, or what title sits on your business card. Accountability should not change based on a title. If we expect classified staff to be accountable, then management must be accountable as well. If we expect employees to own mistakes, then leadership must own mistakes, as I do. If we expect honesty, transparency, and professionalism from staff, then we should expect the same from those who lead them. If this school year taught us anything, it is as titles may create authority, but accountability creates trust. This year we spoke about P's, value people, lead with purpose, stand on principles, honor the process, and let your performance speak louder than your title. When these five things are aligned, organizations thrive. When they are ignored, trust begins to break down. So as we close this school year and prepare for the next one, I challenge all of us, including myself, to reflect on those five Ps and recommit ourselves to them. Because at the end of the day, titles come and go, positions change, people retire, boards change, administrators change, but character remains. So to our students, congratulations. To our graduates, the best is yet to come. To our staff, thank you for showing up every day for children. And to our leadership, we look forward to a new school year where accountability is not something we ask of others, but something we expect of ourselves. Thank you, have a wonderful summer, and congratulations to the class of 2026.

Thank you so much. Are there other union commenters here or online? I don't believe so. So we are moving on now to board member comments. I will go last, and I'll be short. But are there other board members? Vice President Corn?

Thank you. Tonight, I want to call into the room an additional meaning of hashtag Berkeley Proud, because it's June, y'all. This is Pride Month. Thank you. I am so proud to have been an out and proud lesbian teacher principal parent and board member in this district over the past 20 years. And I'm proud to serve on the G shack committee with rose and with a dedicated group of educators families and students who are working hard to advocate for queer, trans and gender expansive students, staff and families. BUSD has been a leader for many years in the work of ensuring that our schools are safe and welcoming for LGBTQ students, staff, and families. And I am hashtag Berkeley proud of our steadfast commitment to that ongoing work. In addition to that, I just want to say thank you to everyone who came out tonight to advocate for students and programs, to the really hardworking committee representatives who shared comments this evening. We still have a number of difficult budget decisions ahead of us over the coming weeks. And I am grateful to all of our engaged community members bringing your perspectives into the conversation. And I'm looking forward to tonight's discussion.

Thank you so much, Vice President Quirin. Is there another board member would like to go next? Who would like to go next? Dr. . Yep, on my left.

No, I have no comments tonight.

Thanks.

Thank you. OK, she doesn't have comments, but she kind of tricked me for a second there. How about on the right here?

I'll be brief as well, because we're running behind. I want to make time for Director Brown and her copious comments. I'm just kidding. I had the honor and privilege of attending the adult school graduation yesterday. And it's been said before, but that is you know, no disrespect to anybody else, but that is my favorite graduation, seeing the resilience of those students, their families, and the joy and the pride at overcoming something that many people thought they would never, or accomplishing something that many of them never thought they'd be able to. just is really touching. So thank you so much. I'm excited to go to the BHS graduations on Friday. Congratulations to all the graduates. I want to thank all of the staff for their hard work in this really difficult budget season and thank everyone who's coming out to advocate for their programs It is really hard to make these decisions, and they are not taken lightly. In the end, we have to pass a balanced budget. And so I would encourage folks, as they're advocating for positions, to please help us find where we are going to make the cuts for the programs and the people and the positions and the things that we want to keep. And I will finalize my comments as I've done like all budget season by saying, please take a moment to call your assembly person and your senator and ask them to fully fund Prop 98, which would give us another $8 million into our general fund that would allow these decisions to be much easier and much fewer. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Good reminder on Prop 98. Do we have, do we? Yes.

Good evening, everyone. Thank you all so much for taking the time to be here and to those of you who decided to stay here. But most importantly, those of you who spoke to the Board of Education tonight with your public comments and who take the time to email us. I think that your comments are incredibly important to us and really help us to govern and help us to make decisions. And so it is important that you know that your comments don't fall on deaf ears, but on the ears of those who are interested in doing work on behalf of our Berkeley community. I will follow Director Coren's lead and say happy Pride Month to everyone. Yeah, clap it up. Every Pride Month since I've been on the board, I take the opportunity to really celebrate Audre Lorde. And typically I read a portion of some of her writing and really call her into the room, bring her into this space as she carries so many different, and she wears so many different hats, but is an inspirational person while I always take the opportunity to honor this month, and this month is no different. And so I do call her in and bring her into this space. On the heels of graduations, we always go to the Berkeley High graduation, and it's such a wonderful celebration. And we always attend the affinity celebrations for our high school students. But this year, I decided to attend some of our middle school celebrations. which were absolutely phenomenal. This year I spent the afternoon with Longfellow Middle School and attended their Longfellow graduation. And the graduation was so large that of course they moved out of the Longfellow space and moved into the Donahue gym. And the gym was absolutely packed with friends, family members, community members who were proud of the students who were graduating and also proud of the educators who helped them along the way. But what stuck out with me most about the graduation is how prepared the students are for the next chapter that they are getting ready to embark on. A lot of times we talk about the next chapter in our high school students' lives as they continue to post-secondary opportunities in education, but we don't really talk about what's happening with our middle schoolers. And I am happy to report to Berkeley High that we have some phenomenal, prepared, brilliant, and resilient students who are getting ready to enter into our high school community. So congratulations to all of our graduates, but definitely congratulations to our middle schoolers who are ready to promote to the next grade. I am going to cut my comments short tonight. Thank you, Director Shenoski. But I do want to identify that, you know, in our agenda tonight we're discussing our LCAP plan, our budgeting, contracts, and some budget balancing solutions. And I think that it gives us the opportunity to ask ourselves, what kind of district do we want to be? And when we ask ourselves that, this is our opportunity to really put our money where our mouth is. Director Shanofsky has been reminding us week after week after week after week, and it feels like we've been here every week, but week after week after week after week, about the need to call on our elected officials so that we can be able to do what we need to do for our students. But the truth of the matter is we are here right now with the type of budget that we have. And I want to acknowledge that budget conversations are very difficult because budgets are not simply numbers, but they are statements of priorities. Every reduction that we make, every investment that we make, every staffing decision that we make, not only has an impact to our district, but it has an impact to the human beings that serve our students and serve our communities. And as board members, our responsibility to balance financial stability with our commitment to students and families and those who love our schools and the students who feel them is the most important job that we do here on the dais. And so I hope that we, tonight and moving into next week, can come together as a community around some of the most important questions. Number one, are we preserving the supports and programs that students need the most? Number two, are we protecting direct services whenever possible? Number three, are we being transparent about trade-offs? As Director Chinoski mentioned, that's the third time I mentioned your name. That's too much. That's too much. And then number four, are we listening carefully to the people who are affected most by the decisions? I encourage us as we're having conversations here on the dais and in the boardrooms, as we're having conversations within committees, and as we're having conversations within our communities to keep these questions at the forefront of our mind. No, we may not always agree on how we balance our budget. We may not always agree on which programs are here and which programs should remain, but what we have to agree on are these four points. What's best for our students? How are we preserving direct services? Are we being transparent about trade-offs? And are we listening carefully to the people who are most affected? I look forward to our conversation tonight, and I look forward to our discussion tonight, as well as looking forward to making sure that we're making decisions that follow these four points. Thank you.

Thank you so much. I just want to say thanks for folks coming out and speaking their hearts and minds. And you can see from the range of viewpoints and perspectives and the energy that was brought here that Berkeley is a really unique place. And that's why many of us have come here from far afield to live here. It is a moment in time too that there has been many challenges at the national level that has resulted in Berkeley being in the news and the school district being in the news. And I want to reiterate that as a board member and as board president, I'm here to ensure that Berkeley values continue to be represented even in the face of national politicization and polarization. So I want to move on to the next portion of our board meeting. So we've got the consent calendar. Do we have a motion to approve?

So moved. I'd like to move that we, sorry, I need to look up the number, that we Remove, I'd like to move that we approve the agenda with the exception of item 12.10.

I'd like to second that we approve the consent calendar with the removal of item 12.10. Thank you.

Got it. Do we have the ayes and yes?

Aye. Aye.

Great. Why not mute? Okay. We are now on to The public hearing portion. Only 16 minutes. It says 8.30 on here. So you guys did a good job hustling. We're 13.1, if I'm reading this correctly. 13.1. Is there someone here to speak on the local control and accountability plan?

Congratulations. Congratulations.

Thanks again.

Thank you. You'll just open it up for a public hearing, officially say those words, and ask if anyone is here to speak on these items for the hearing.

Yes, we've opened up for public hearing to speak on these items. Is there anybody here to speak on these items on local control and accountability plan? How about online? We're a little surprised there aren't, but that could happen at this time of the night.

Seeing none, we may close the hearing.

So seeing that there are no persons here in person nor online to join us in public hearing, we're going to close 13.1 on local control and accountability plan. Now we have 13.2, same thing. Public hearing, we're going to open it on the 2026-27 preliminary budget. Is there anyone here in person who would like to? speak in public hearing now that we've opened that up. I don't see anyone online. And having not seen folks online or in person, we're now going to close 13.2. So we move on now to 14.1, discussion on local control and accountability plan.

I got you.

Oh, did she give it? You guys are going to do that? OK.

All right, good evening, superintendent, members of the board, members of the public. My name is Jill Hogendike. I'm the associate superintendent of the Berkeley Unified School District. I'm joined here at the dais by Dr. Lena Sweeney, who is our director of BREA, and Ms. Joya Bock, who is our director of state and federal programs. I also want to acknowledge the team in the audience in the event that there are additional questions. We do have our other staff members here who are available to help answer questions. If we go to the next slide, we are here this evening for the first reading of the draft LCAP. We're going to provide a brief overview of the LCAP. We are going to review some key components of the year that of the current LCAP, which is a 2024-2027 plan. So we will be entering the third year of a three year LCAP and we will take feedback from the board to finalize the 2026 LCAP, which will be submitted to the state by the end of the month. So we're gonna start with a quick overview of the LCAP for members of the public who may not be aware. On the next slide, we have some content there, but the original purpose of the LCAP or the Local Control Accountability Plan was to address opportunity and achievement gaps, particularly for focal student groups, including students identified as unduplicated under the local control funding formula, which is how the state funds our districts. And as Ms. Rios shared in the PAC report, our unduplicated students are our multilingual learners, students who qualify for free and reduced price lunch, our students experiencing housing insecurity, and our foster youth. Our BUSD LCAP is also situated in the broader context of BUSD's emerging strategic plan, district initiatives, and board adopted resolutions. and a quick refresher the LCAP is a required planning document for all California school districts that receive funding through the local control funding formula it is a three-year plan that connects identified student needs with goals actions services and investments that are designed to improve student outcomes and while the LCAP covers a three-year cycle districts are required to review and update the plan annually to reflect progress and respond to community input and address evolving student needs. And so you will see attached to the agenda that is online when we will review in our presentation advisory committee recommendations and staff response. on the next slide you see a very big high level overview of the timeline of LCAP development the green arrow indicates where we are today and at this stage in the process we have engaged with our educational partners and we're preparing the budget and refining content as we present the draft LCAP for you this evening It's at this point in time that we bring the proposed LCAP forward for public review and the required Public hearing which just took place on board consideration and then finally approval As a component of this process, the Alameda County Office of Education, or ACOE, reviews the draft in the categories that you see here and identify any corrections in the following categories. Technical changes and required actions, and then also those things that meet requirements. We met with the Alameda County Office of Education staff on May 21 and the overall feedback of our draft LCAP was positive. And while there were some technical issues, some of the budget issues, some of the budget numbers were not in at the time of the review. and some of the calculations were not complete, we have been able to update that for the draft LCAP that you have before you. Some of the successes that you see here on meeting requirements was that we do in BUSD sponsor a very robust engagement with various educational partners. And we have clarity around the five goals and associated actions. and our actions have also been leading to some pretty positive gains in our data although we still do have gaps for some of our focal student groups we did have some required revisions that you see there in red for developing a further developing rationale for our investment choices and that is work that the team has been doing and we are checking in pretty regularly with ACOE to ensure that those corrections meet requirements before we will submit that for board approval on the 17th our LCAP is anchored in the five goals that you see here we have not made any changes on those goals they are described more fully on the next slide These five goals elevate the work that we're doing to ensure that our students have the opportunity to achieve academic excellence, that they have the supports needed to attend to their mental health and wellness and belonging, to support partnership and engagement. And as a reminder, goal five is a goal specific to Berkeley Technology Academy to help students graduate from school prepared for college and career. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Sweeney, who is going to share an overview of the feedback from our educational partner engagement this year.

Thank you, Jill, and good evening, Board of Directors and Superintendent. As part of the LCAP process, we gather feedback from our educational partners, including the Parent Advisory Committee, the District English Language Advisory Committee, and the Educator Advisor Committee, known as EAC. The next few slides highlight the key themes that emerge from those conversations. Next slide, please. The LCAP and strategic planning survey was open for approximately five weeks this late winter and received approximately 2,900 responses overall, representing a participation improvement. Student participation continued to grow. That's at the secondary level. And we also saw increased engagement from staff and teachers. We recognize a decrease from our parent guardian group, which represents an area of growth for us. Next slide, please. Thank you. We are pleased with the increased participation this year, as I mentioned, and remain committed to strengthening engagement efforts, particularly with our educational partners whose voices have been historically less represented in district feedback processes. And next slide, please. Thank you. So this is a very high level summary of the work that we've done across the district in various meeting spaces, looking at some of the themes and comments, both in regards to strengths and areas of growth for us. Responses highlight strong appreciation for BUSD's commitment to equity, student support, and community partnerships, while also pointing to opportunities to strengthen consistency, access, and outcomes across the district. Next slide, please. The PAC, or the Parent Advisory Committee's recommendations highlighted several priorities, including, as you heard, protecting student supports, sustaining effective programs, strengthening school climate, expanding OFI, and continuing to improve our data systems. We appreciate the thoughtful feedback and partnership with our PAC. Next slide. The DLAC or ELAC's recommendations centered on maintaining and strengthening supports for multilingual learners. Its members emphasize the importance of preserving existing English language development services, protecting key staffing positions and expanding multilingual access.

And next slide, please.

The Educators Advisory Committee is an advisory group we had a number of years ago. And at the discretion of the superintendent, there was a decision to reinstate this group this year. The Educator Advisory Committee recommendations also focused on strengthening direct student supports and emphasize the importance of sustainability. And next slide. And I'll pass Oh, I'll pass this over to you, Joia. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Okay, so for Section 3, we're highlighting the LCAP actions across all five district goals. And while advisory groups review the full LCAP, only some actions fall under their specific purview because not all actions are funded through the LCFF supplemental funds. We're going to discuss the funding distinctions in greater detail during the budget part of the presentation. So for goal one, providing high quality curriculum and responsive instructional practices, there are 15 actions supported by 21 metrics to progress monitor. A notable revision in this year's LCAP is AVID. So you can see there in maroon. For the 25-26 school year, AVID was offered exclusively at the middle schools rather than in both middle and high school. This adjustment reflects an analysis of the program participation and the scheduling considerations, which indicated that high school enrollment remained low due to competition with other academic opportunities serving a similar student population. The revised model allows the district to focus resources on strengthening AVID implementation during the critical middle school years where the program has demonstrated stronger participation and impact. So for goal two, focusing on providing and monitoring timely and effective academic and behavioral interventions necessary to accelerate student outcomes and eliminate barriers to success. Through these actions, the district aims to ensure that students receive the appropriate level of intervention progress monitoring and instructional support needed to achieve these outcomes, there are no notable changes for this goal. Goal three focuses on fostering safe, welcoming, and inclusive school climates that are humanizing and culturally and linguistically responsive for students. Actions within this goal include restorative justice practices, attendance improvement efforts, behavioral health services, and other supports designed to strengthen student wellbeing, belonging, and engagement. A notable revision in this year's LCAP is the reduction of LEAP class sections. Based on ongoing data monitoring and evaluation of student outcomes, the district found that the program demonstrated limited impact over time relative to its intended goals. So as a result, resources have been adjusted to align the enrollment to course capacity and reinvest in interventions and support that show stronger evidence of effectiveness in improving student outcomes. Goal four focuses on building authentic partnerships amongst families, staff, and educational partners by leveraging the diverse strengths, perspectives, and talents within the Berkeley community to support positive student outcomes for all students. So actions within this goal are designed to meet that outcome. A notable enhancement this year is the district's commitment to systemically providing translation and interpretation services for advisory committee meetings and stakeholder engagement opportunities, ensuring that multilingual families can fully participate in shaping district programs, policies, and priorities. And then finally, goal five is specific to Berkeley Technology Academy. A key revision in this year's LCAP is a strategic shift in resources from additional counseling services towards the expanded college and career readiness supports. This change reflects a deliberate effort to strengthen career-connected learning by building a robust CTE career technical education pathway. increasing opportunities for students to engage in meaningful career exploration, and investing in teacher professional development to enhance the instructional practices aligned to workforce and post-secondary expectations. And so this final slide provides a summary of the major revisions made to the goals and actions section of this year's LCAP based on stakeholder feedback, ongoing program evaluation, and analysis of student outcome data. this these revisions reflect the district's commitment to continuous improvement using evidence stakeholder input and effectiveness data to guide the decision making and ensure that our investments remain focused on strategies that best support student success i'm going to hand it back over to dr lena sweeney for the metrics thank you joya now it will walk us through key metrics for our if you just go back just one thank you for our local control accountability plan

Okay, next slide.

The LCAP includes 28 required metrics tied to the eight state priority along with areas for district to develop local measures. Next slide. Here we outline how metrics support our continuous improvement efforts. Each goal is supported by actions that are directly tied to specific measurable outcomes. Honing in on our three by five target, our goal is to increase proficiency annually by 3% for all students with an accelerated target of 5% for our focal groups across all academic content areas. Next slide, please. This slide presents samples of Goal 1 metrics with a description of the baseline data and growth required to meet each target. The data in the end of year 25-26 column represents the most current data we have for each area. For example, the CAASPP state data reflects spring 2025 data as 2026 scores are not fully in at this point. while our STAR and DIBELS data is new as of May 1, 2026. Next slide. In 2025, no student groups were represented in the red on the California state dashboard, which is an improvement for us. And as you can see, the data show growth for most student groups. At the same time, outcomes for focal groups remind us that significant opportunities for improvement remain. Next slide. Here we zoom into our K through two disaggregated end of year DIBELS data. We see an increase according to our three by five target, particularly noted here for our students experiencing homelessness and our economically disadvantaged students. And next slide. Thank you. This slide highlights a sample of goals one and two measures. We are seeing positive movement in several key outcomes, including A through G completion, college and career readiness, science achievement, graduation rates, and CTE participation. Next slide. Moving on here to goal three, wellness and belonging. Goal three snapshots highlight positive movement in school climate and engagement measures as measured by our checks data. We see improvements in school connectedness, caring adult relationship, and our suspension rates. These data suggest that many students are experiencing stronger connections to school while also reminding us that continued focus on belonging, engagement, and well-being remain imperative. Next slide. And here we highlight goal three using grade five school connectedness as an example. We can see both overall performance and outcomes for individual student groups alongside established targets. In this case, grade five students exceeded the target with 82% reporting a sense of school connectedness in 2026. And this is a fresh data set. Next slide, please. For goal four, partnership and engagement, our metrics are designed to assess the depth and breadth of our family and community engagement. We maintained 100% compliance with SSC and ELAC's or DLAC as we refer to it, and more families of students with disabilities reported feeling welcomed by their schools. At the same time, feedback from families of multilingual learners remind us that we must continue strengthening our outreach, communication, and engagement efforts. And next slide, thank you. Overall, we're seeing positive trends across many of our key measures, including strong academic performance and growth. Early literacy remains strong. as it does improvement in our state data. These data help us identify where continued attention is needed, particularly noting around persistent opportunity gaps in areas of our mathematics outcomes, particularly noted in our star three through five and six through eight end of year data. And I will now pass on to Jill.

Okay, in this next section, we're going to talk about the LCAP budget considerations. On the next slide, you will see our district's core values for resource allocation, which should be extremely familiar to everybody at this point in time. These were also core values that we used in our educational partner engagement opportunities throughout the school year. Similarly, on the next slide, we also recognize the importance of balancing an impact with fiscal sustainability with regard to the LCAP actions as the LCAP expenditures have exceeded ongoing revenue in recent years. As we have shared in many presentations, We are operating a deficit budget on our LCAP actions, and we've been funding a number of them through grants that are now expiring and moving some of that work into current grants that will expire in 2028. We do have some good news, however. So on the next slide, when we came to you with a projected LCAP budget a couple of months ago, we are anticipating that budget being about $6.6 million. the May revise, another $100,000 was added to that budget projection. And then most recently, adjustment has been made based on the P2 attendance and enrollment of another $95,000, bringing our projected budget to nearly $6.8 million. is great because that is adding capacity into the budget that said we still have a deficit as we are anticipating the impacts of budget negotiations we know that there's going to be a mid-year bump almost entirely the LCAP budget the LCAP supplemental funds are being used to pay for staffing so we know that in January we'll see an increase on those staffing costs when the benefits kick in. So still about half a million dollars on a deficit, recognizing that we're going to be moving that into mostly learning recovery. So we'll go over that, which is offering temporary stability as we think about these actions. but considering Director Brown's charge of where we put our money shows where our priorities are over the next few slides while there are nearly 48 different actions in the LCAP not all of the actions are funded through the LCFF supplemental fund so we're going to focus just on those actions so across goal one you can see here we are using LCAP supplemental to fund for part of a TSA the other part of the TSA is in our BSEP budget and the board will be hearing the BSEP or the P&O recommendations for BSEP and BARRA next week We also fund our AVID programming, which is inclusive of the three middle schools, and our bridge programming. We are recommending to move some of that while we're going to be making a slight reduction in that bridge programming. That's the recommendation. We'll still move part of the costs for the bridge program into the learning recovery block grant. across goal two, which is that next goal here. You see that we have significant investments in our RTI staffing. Those are allocations that are made to our K-8 schools. Goal 2.4 is our ELD support. We support and invest in our ELD TSAs and an ELD coordinator at the high school. To goal 2.5 is the central based ELD TSA. And again, our math support coming out of Actions 2.7 and 2.8. One shift for the middle school math support classes. There are currently three classes at each of the three middle schools. We're recommending that the LCFF supplemental be used to support a third of that and then the other third will go to BSEP funding and then in conversation with our middle school principals they will pick up that third section with their site funds so we're reducing costs from the supplemental budget there on goal three which is our goal focused on wellness and belonging you see there and you heard from PAC comments tonight that we do sponsor a McKinney-Vento counselor We also pay for the RG counselors and the RG coordinators in our middle and high school. We have supported intervention counselors, which really came at the time of COVID. We had some COVID funds that were allocated to school sites, and then we've moved some of those costs into the LCAP, but we will split that funding of the two intervention counselors at the high school between supplemental budget and the learning recovery, and then back up to the high school RJ counselor. This has come up in one, I think the May 20th presentation. We've funded one of the two RJ coordinators at the high school on an ACO wellness grant this current school year. And we got an extension on that grant for the 26, 27 school year. So we will maintain that staffing. but paying that second RJ coordinator on that grant that expires in June of 2027. And then as Joya mentioned, the reduction on the LEAP classes. We're not paying for any of the LEAP classes in the LCFF supplemental. The remaining sections are being paid for out of BSEP. Goal four on partnership and engagement. We are supporting our eight family engagement specialists. It says 7.47 there at the top because Berkeley High School picks up the other 0.53 for the high school OFI specialist. and the supervisor is included there. We have done some work with the P&O and looking at where we have capacity in the BSEP budget, so we'll be moving the cost of some of our OFI staff, $232,000 and change, into the BSEP budget. Supplemental funds also go to pay for the Berkeley High school welfare and attendance support, and then LCAP evaluation and support. And then we have to put the indirect costs in some goal, so we put it in goal four. And then finally, on goal five, goal five, again, specifically for BTA, does not receive, it says supplemental budget there, and we should probably put an asterisk, my favorite symbol too, because this is equity multiplier funds that we receive from the state that entirely go to BTA. BTA did not qualify for equity multiplier funds this year. The equity multiplier funds are received based on calculation of free and reduced price lunch rate and transiency rates. And we won't have that information from the state until the fall. So but we still have some carry over. So we'll be spending that down. And one of the other requirements that we talked about last year, we districts across the state receive learning recovery emergency block grant. And these are funds that go out to individual school sites and Thank you to the advocacy of all of our community members and labor partners and staff. We've been receiving small additional amounts of learning recovery block grant funds back. If you will recall, the state allocated a number of dollars to districts across the state. And then midway between that first year, they took some of the money back, and they've been slowly giving that money back. So we are getting some of that. But as a result, there is a requirement to include learning recovery block grant expenditures in the LCAP. And you saw a couple of those expenditures in the previous slides. Our expenditures need to be based on a needs analysis, which we shared with you a year ago, but the big broad strokes of that needs analysis is on the next slide. I'm really wanting to focus in alignment with the guidance of those funds on enhancing our social, emotional, and mental health supports. That was a big area of concern and interest, particularly for our families. and our Spanish-speaking families in particular, wanting to know how mental health supports were being, mental health was being supported at the school site, but also wanting to understand how to support their students at home. And our OFI team, And I think some of you were actually at a mental health event last Friday. So you see some of those workshops have been happening. They also want strengthening family and community support, building out a robust MTSS system for attendance, and then high needs grade levels. So broad strokes overview about our expenses that are tagged in the LCAP for the learning recovery block grant are on the next slide. Again, some of which we've talked about before on the previous slides bridge specifically. We pay for the Puente counselor out of the learning recovery block grant funds plus some additional allocation for some hours for the counselor and the teachers. The classroom teachers for Puente are part of the teacher template because the Puente classes serve as an English class at the middle school and the high school. So we don't need additional budget to support that particular component of the programming. the biggest line item on the learning recovery block grant has been for our mental health contracts at the elementary school and moving into this year doing some partial funding for some of the mental health coordinators at bta and berkeley at berkeley high this does reflect a reduction on the current mental health contracts and dr shelley has been working with site principles some sites have elected to use some of their site funds to help fill out those additional costs but if you might recall about three or four years ago the cost of those mental health contracts didn't just grow incrementally they grew exponentially and we have been receiving to subsidize part of that to the mental health grant from the city of Berkeley, which expires this month too. So we're waiting to hear from the city of Berkeley if there'll be additional allocations. There has been an application that's been submitted, but they too are going through their own budget process. And then you saw the intervention counselor. So that's a total of about a million dollars. It leaves us, depending on whether or not we score the most recent numbers coming in from the state in May, it currently leaves us with about eight, seven-ish, almost $800,000 remaining in learning recovery block grant for next year. that will grow with the final budget I just want to tag that we've got a million dollars of expenses already there so any additional expenses can go on to learning recovery we definitely have capacity there but then the sustainability question will be one that we'll need to consider because we won't have the ability to cover the costs of these through the 27-28 school year when this grant expires so as we shared with you at one of the last presentations we do have a big asterisk across all of this there's still a number of things that are shifting we have some positions that are open and currently being filled Those expenses for staffing will need to be confirmed. We're also working to ensure that we spend down the grants that are expiring. And as we know that we'll have some capacity because we might have had people on leave, et cetera, we'll be moving some of either the LCAP expenses or the learning recovery expenses onto those expiring grants where they're appropriate. And then again, we will have a mid-year budget increase to cover the negotiated benefits coming in January. All right, Joy will close us out.

Okay, thank you. So as we conclude tonight's presentation, we want to highlight the remaining opportunities for review feedback and adoption of the 2627 local control and accountability plan. So as you can see here, starting June 3, we did post the 2026 LCAP on our district website. And we do have a physical copy available at the lobby here 2020 Bonar Street during normal business hours if you prefer hard copy for review. We encourage all of our educational partners to continue sharing their feedback through June 10th. Please use the survey link. The feedback that you've shared thus far has been incorporated and highly important as we've made these difficult decisions. on June 17th staff will return to the board with the final LCAP and budget for adoption and following board approval the district is required to submit the LCAP and the local indicator data to the Alameda County Office of Education by July 1st for review July 1st also marks our beginning of our implementation for the next year and at that point we're going to transition from planning to action, launching the investments, supports and strategies outlined in this year's LCAP. We remain committed to our continuous improvement process, monitoring the impact of our actions, engaging our stakeholders and educational partners, and really using our data to ensure that these efforts are producing meaningful impact for all of our students here in BUSD. So thank you to all of our advisory committees, our families, our staff, our students, our community partners, and board members for your partnership in developing this draft plan and supporting the success of Berkeley Unified Students.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate all the work that went into that and the detailed review. I want to make sure that, yes, we move on to our board members so they can have questions and discuss.

Thank you all so much for your presentation and for your work. I also want to thank PAC for their comments. which will, I hope, help drive some of our conversations this evening. I do have a number of questions. Don't be surprised because it always goes like that. But I'll start off with one and then leave space for my work colleagues to ask their questions. I first want to start off talking about LEAP. And in Goal 3, you mentioned that there was going to be a reduction around the sections of LEAP. And you mentioned some of the data that specifically helped to lead to that conclusion as well as the need to shift. And I have maybe more than one question around that. So the first is how many students are we currently serving in LEAP and What specific data led us to the conclusion? And then you mentioned some alternative supports that students will receive. So I'm interested to know what those alternative supports are. And my most, I think, important question in this section is, It's my understanding that LEAP is an elective class, but as an elective class, it is also an A through G requirement, specifically a G requirement for graduation. I think about the students who are currently in that course or in those sections or future students to come who will need to potentially be in those sections and need as much support as they can get to meet their A through G requirements. Removing some sections will prevent students from being able to do that. And so when you answer the question about alternative supports that they will receive, can you also ensure that you're talking about alternative supports that meet those A through G requirements, specifically the G requirement. Thank you.

I'll let Dr. Sweeney speak to the data, but just so we know, there are currently 12 sections of LEAP across the seven hives. I think it might be 14. So that's a capacity of about 150 students, 12 students per hive. But we currently have about 59 students enrolled in those sections with some the highest and the highest number of a class is 10 and we have one two one two three four five, six, eight of those current sections with five or fewer students enrolled, right? So we have the capacity to be able to support the number of students. I think as you all know, one of the challenges at Berkeley High School with a six period day is that there are a limited number of option of space, there's a limited amount of space and a schedule for a number of electives. So we do have students who are opting into a number of other electives, not everybody chooses leap. And we want to make sure that we're targeting resources into both sections that are desirable for students, but also that can provide the level of support. So I do think that this is going to be, this as I understand it, was a key component of the U9 design at the time that it happened. But it hasn't realized the enrollment and the data that we're seeing for students who are participating in LEAP are not necessarily accelerating, given the low teacher to student ratio that we're seeing in these classes.

And, and specifically the data that was used in this evaluation was student df rate compared to df rate student attendance, as well as student suspension data and we also did an analysis of course of demographics, to see the relative representation of our unduplicated populations.

Thank you for taking the time to explain the rationale behind the decision as well as the data that you derived this decision from. I'm still kind of left with the question around what alternative support looks like, specifically alternative supports that will meet the G requirement.

I'm not gonna have all of that information, but I can get that to you about what, I don't know where they go if they don't go to LEAP. I just don't have that cross section here, but I can get that to you.

Director Brown, can I ask a quick follow up? Is it correct that even, it sounds like there's a small enough number of students opting into LEAP that would it be fair to say that anyone who wants to take LEAP next year should still have access to a LEAP class?

Even with seven sections, so there will be one section high, but we would be, with the current enrollment, we would still have a capacity for more students to be in LEAP. It's about 12 students a class.

Sorry, I have another follow-up question. So the original The original way that students were enrolled in LEAP was from a recommendation by, well, first of all, students and families could self-elect for it, but then they were also recruited through recommendations from eighth grade, from middle school, right? So if our sections are low, what has happened there? Is it still that students and families can self-select to participate? Are we touching base or have we touched base with our middle schools to ensure that the recruitment efforts are high? Just what has happened? Because even if we do reduce it, which is fine if it's enough space for students, without those efforts, we'll continue to see those classes go lower and lower and lower and lower. So what's happening?

Both of those are true, right? So there's a high level of communication on the part of the Berkeley High team as they go out to middle schools. But we also offer students and families a lot of choice in what they can select. And they're not opting in. I have a theory that it might be slightly lower because we did see an uptick in the number of students, the number of ninth grade students who enrolled in PE this year in compared to previous years. So that could be a contributing factor. But I think that it what it boils down to is that student choice and or student and family choice in that in that design.

Yes, Dr. Schnauzy.

I have a question about the survey. So I didn't make a note of what slide it was, but you know what I'm going to ask. It's very low. And I'm wondering why, and also connected to that, I have a suspicion that we have some survey fatigue. And I'm wondering, we had the other survey. No, this isn't the one.

It's probably slide 11 is where it starts. But just for members of the public to also know that we have more extensive information about the survey data in the appendix.

Hold on. I'm talking about the slide number. There it is. This end of year survey on slide number 34. So it just looks like we went down quite a bit, right? This is just the number I was looking for. And so I'm just wondering if we, I know you said we have a goal to improve that, if we have any ideas on why it was so low or what kind of outreach we did. and maybe if it's possible for us to combine some of the various surveys we're doing so that we're getting the same information but not ask you know when you're pushing out the complete the survey complete the survey in all the places that can give us more information for more pieces so we get that feedback more comprehensively

Yeah, and we did receive feedback that the survey is extremely long and relatively complicated. We are using the same survey for continuity in comparing survey results. And we had the opportunity with writing the new LCAP to shift that survey and I believe to make it a more streamlined and approachable survey for our families. On our part, I feel like we worked hard to get more participation and I'm not completely sure of the reason why it decreased from last year, but that's something that we're looking at is how to increase that next year, knowing that we'll use it again.

as we I just want to just add because I think the really specific feedback that we've heard a number of times is that this we're trying to get the sweet spot of the survey administration because school sites also have their individual surveys and what we hear from parents who are on advisory groups is that those surveys are getting them information But they're all designed a little bit differently based on what the school needs are. We don't actually have a uniform template of school-based surveys, right? So school site councils and their site leaders are working on collecting that information. And I think those two things are happening at the same time. We're trying to do that at a system level and also recognize that some of these data points are components that are aligned with the local indicators that are required. So that's a little tricky. We've really divided our LCAP survey into three main sections over the course of the last two years. The first section is just general feedback on each of the individual goals. And then we have those local indicator questions, which are on the Likert scale, but they are in constructs around things like school connectedness, et cetera. And then the third section has been on the graduate profile. getting inputs about the graduate profile. Now we've got inputs and we were workshopping some of the content for the graduate profile. So totally want to acknowledge that it's long. We do have an opportunity to reset on that and figure out different ways. My understanding is prior to my arrival here, they at one point tried to break the survey down into three separate parts, but there was fatigue that way too. So definitely have some work to do in that area.

Just as we streamline it seems like it would be good to have some kind of template so that at least you're gathering similar information across the school sites and then I also wanted to just ask that as we streamline to make sure that our parent leaders are involved in that process so that you know sometimes surveys become so administrative have, you know, sort of lens and you lose some of the nuance of what's happening at the school site. So if they are willing and able, I think it would be great to keep our parents involved there. Thank you so much.

I have also a survey question. I'm wondering, do individual school sites get access to their specific school site survey data? And when they're designing their survey, they know what's going to be asked on this survey and what data they're going to get so they can ask different questions, somewhat. OK. Yeah. I have also just all of this talk about, redesigning things next year and sort of preparing for a new three-year plan. I'm not entirely sure what my question is but I have a lot of questions about the fact that we're ending the this is going to be the third year of a three-year cycle and what is that process going to look like next year to prepare for a new three-year cycle and how different do you anticipate the plan that gets written for the next three years to look compared to like, just how are you thinking about approaching that?

I have a list of summer projects and I've been talking with these ladies here and my team. We do want to get a scope and sequence ready in the summer so that we can launch it at the beginning of the year. In my ideal world, we would have some draft goals by December. That's important because we want to make any shifts on the school plan templates before the sites start engaging their schools, and we want the goals to be aligned. So one of the things that Berkeley does really well is that our LCAP goals go into the site SPSAs, the School Plans for Student Achievement. So there is some clear alignment there and expectation. I think one of the things that we did for this current three-year LCAP cycle was that we had a sense of what the emerging pillars were on the strategic plan, and the goals are really aligned to the pillar. So the extent to which we get the strategic plan off the ground I have a wonder if we're going to deviate from these current major pillars of academic excellence, wellness and belonging, partnership and engagement, while we might need to take a more critical look at the actions that we're prioritizing for the funding. But again, showed you a sample of the actions that are funded with our supplemental funds, but there are There are a few other actions in the LCAP that we're prioritizing for our just our our district wide efforts.

Hi, thanks so much. I found your presentation to be informative and appreciate it because I know I've been asking and we didn't hear comments from DLAC about the budget this time around. So it was helpful to kind of just get anecdotally like how you got to your conclusions around how to serve English language learners. Yep.

Oh, go ahead. Is that a question? Because Director Albeck is here. He is our liaison for the DLAC. I do want to say our DLAC chair has a promoting eighth grader. And so while we did ask about her attendance here, as you all know, it's middle school promotion night. The most important night for that.

No worries. I have a question about you made, and I think it was you, Dr. Sweeney, who made reference to the feedback that you had gone in about doing better family engagement for our English language learners in the you know next iteration of this and so wanted to know kind of preliminarily what you were thinking and also I know on one of the slides we saw like the baseline for ELPAC progress and that struck me I think it was like in the 60s I don't remember exactly what percentage it was struck me as low but I'm wondering if that's like If our baseline is an anomaly to other districts' baselines or on par, I'm just curious around our baseline for ELPAC progress. And I did attend the multilingual program graduation, had a chance to talk to our staff and also to families there. And one of the things that they wanted me to hear just about how the district could be more supportive to families and our LTELs in particular and our English language learners was more support for the oral portion of the exam. wanted to know how that was kind of factored into your recommendations or if that's something that you looked at for the yeah for the future thanks I can't talk about it but I feel like you're there in it come on

Good evening everyone. So as it relates to, as I understand the question to be family engagement for our multilingual learners and specifically support for the oral component of the ELPAC. A few things have come up. We are very fortunate that the Board of Education and BUSD continues to support ELD coordinators across all of our school sites. And we are currently doing a crosswalk of several of our neighboring districts, including Alameda, Albany, Castro Valley, and two other districts, just learning about what their service delivery model has looked like. for we know that it does have a significant impact on our budget but I'll return to that in that our ELD coordinators are a huge opportunity for us in addition to our OP staff to be having that regular communication with our families and I think Part of the data that we saw this evening reflects that in regards to our active ELACs and then our joint DELAC which Director Korn has been able to be a part of this year. It has been very well attended and the recommendations made this year that informed this evening's presentation um had a lot of thoughtful feedback and conversations that went into it so i do feel confident that we have the capacity given the decisions made in our district with our eld coordinators site coordinators and also our op staff that we have the opportunity to have real engagement and authentic engagement with our multilingual learner families always work to be done and opportunities to improve And I think one example that we that really shows some commitment to this work is that we noticed that for our newcomer families that were just coming to the country. They were having a lot of challenges or difficulty navigating the admissions process. So what we did is we created online videos in home languages. that we presented directly to families when they came to admissions that really helped them navigate the process in addition to the staffing capacity. And then lastly, as it relates to the oral language component of the ELPAC, we are seeing a big opportunity there and also room for continuous improvement there. So this year we launched our LTEL committee and through doing interviews with families and also students, the oral language component continue to come up. So we'll be working with our ELD coordinators on that component next year on what do we need to do with our designated and integrated ELD to improve that component. But thank you for bringing the question and something we can continue to improve on.

I'm glad it's on your radar. I think that's consistent with the feedback that I heard that evening. So thank you.

Thank you. Are there other board questions? Yes, Director Brown.

I first want to appreciate the effort to try to save as many programs and initiatives as possible, but I am nervous about continuing to operate with the projected supplemental spending deficit that is temporarily supported by grants that are going away, right? I really am nervous about what our long-term plan is, our long-term sustainability plan is, once these temporary funds expire. And I'm sure that you all have been thinking about it, and so I just would like to hear some more.

Yes. I mean, I think that that's the ultimate challenge. And I'm going to go back to Director Shanofsky's board member comments. We're not fully funded for the services that we're expected to deliver. And that's not just true of the LCAP. We had a whole board study session about special education and the underfunding of special education. There are a lot of pressure points on school districts, public school districts in particular, to serve to serve students and one of the things that i'm hashtag berkeley proud of is the commitment of this community to focus on our focal student groups we call them by name we work to address them i think our lcap reflects that and we've been doing our level best to ensure that we're stabilizing as much as possible and this is really you know a year ago two years ago we the board voted to use some of the we have an LCFF reserve right that reserve was then used last year to help balance the budget so it wasn't available and we you know we we made it through the budget development season coming into this year without having to make significant cuts but I do think we were very transparent that we were going to have to come back this spring and that we might have a different landscape And that's the reality of where we are. I do think that any of the reductions that we're recommending, I just wanna say, have absolutely no statement on the value that it brings for any of our students. But we are in a situation where we're trying to look for efficiencies and to be able to continue the work to support the students and that the way that we go about doing that for any of these reductions might look differently. It might mean that the work moves slower. And I think that at least myself and my team, we're going to be looking for directions from the board about where do you want us to then prioritize. And so that I think that we're all committed to public education. We're here at the dais and in the audience because we fundamentally believe in the work that we're doing. We know that the work that we've been doing over the last four years has been getting us some pretty significant results, even though the gaps are still there. we're still in the business of building some infrastructure. We spent the first three years, at least of my tenure, building the literacy infrastructure, which really is, I mean, there's just a fundamental difference about what's happening in classrooms. I was in a kindergarten classroom with Sylvia Mendez and all of those students were reading, like all of them. all of them reading and we're turning our attention to MTSS infrastructure and you know I think based on a lot of the recommendations that we've got from our advisory groups which are similar themes to last year whether or not we've had the capacity to address all of them is a different question but one of the big ones as we come into next year is how do we evaluate these programs and look to where we find efficiencies and how students are being identified. What we are learning is that we have a large number of students who are not involved in any of the programs. Some of those students are achieving greater success than others, and we need to better understand that. We're building a data infrastructure with our BREA team, and then I will say by extension to any one of these other teams who are now more proficient at using the data because we have a platform that's allowing us to do that we're changing the culture of what it means to go through data cycles and we still have lots of room for improvement for sure but I think you're asking you know the big question coming out of the cycle is we are we are trying to be super strategic about how we're using the grant funds and how we are Grant funds is one thing. Grant funds plus grant fund guidelines is a whole other thing. ball of wax. So there's a lot of work that we have to do to understand where those things match up. I do also want to give a shout out to our P&O partners because we'd worked to build some capacity in BSEP. Chris and his team and Juan, Principal Regosa at the high school and his team, we made 10% reductions on BSEP, but we needed that savings to then pay for the teacher template. So it didn't realize any of the capacity that we were hoping to achieve, not because we weren't trying to get there, but because we have other costs that we are now obligated for all the right reasons to make sure that we're paying for.

Thank you, Jill, for that thoughtful reflection. And I think that on the heels of just what the community has been saying, what I said last board meeting, even from the PAC comments tonight about the need to stabilize our funding for high quality programs, high equitable programs, Yes, all of those things remain true, and when we no longer have these one-time grants, because unfortunately next June some of them are even disappearing, it looks like us providing real and authentic direction for very difficult decisions around program evaluation, around what stays, around what's continued to be funded, around what are we funding based off of values and what are we funding based off of outcomes. And so I think the conversation will need to continue to happen and I think that we do our best to try to keep as many things as we want and do our best to try to keep whatever the community comes out and tells us to keep but the truth is we are not going to be in the same position next year financially that we are in this year and so the conversation has to start sooner about what that looks like and it will not be an easy conversation to have it'll be a necessary conversation to have because we won't have the same money And we still have the same goal of stabilizing these programs. So thank you for that.

I think, can I just add, just to piggyback off of that, Director Brown, is we have our core values of resource allocation. We have our principles for resource allocation. And stability and sustainability are the two at the bottom for a reason, because those are the ones that are oftentimes hardest for districts to do. And I think we're working to do a better job of helping folks understand what that means. And so sometimes you might get a proposal for a reduction and that might seem counter to the idea of stabilizing or sustaining because you're getting rid of it. You're moving it. And actually that's not the case. Sometimes and oftentimes in the cases of the examples given here and that will also be given later on tonight, stability looks like knowing what we could afford and knowing we could afford not just now but long term and saying we might not be able to fund this at this level but we actually can do it a little bit longer if it's at this level. So just trying to help our community understand that stability and sustainability does not mean keep it the exact same way it is currently but thinking ahead of the game and thinking about what is actually doable both fiscally but also in terms of human capacity to manage and hold the work is something that I think we are grappling with and trying to better to our constituents. Thank you. I don't have constituents.

To our community. Community. Thank you. And I do want to say that, you know, on the heels of my comments, I also want to make it very clear that year after year we come up, we're up here and we're talking about the same programs and thinking about are they effective in this way? Are they effective in that way? These are programs that we're recommending to cut. hundreds of contracts. We have hundreds of programs. And I'm kind of tired of having the same conversations about the same things. And so when I say we need to have some difficult conversations, I'm not necessarily talking about the programs that we're year after year fighting for. I'm talking about like let's start looking other places. Let's start looking other places where we need to cut because we're up here year after year literally perpetuating the oppression Olympics. And it's not fair to our community. It's not fair to our students. It's not fair to the staff. It's not fair to us, really, to you all as staff, but to us as board members. Let's start talking about something else, because we're constantly talking about the same programs over and over and over and over and over again. And we already know the effectiveness of those programs. We already know those are our values. I'm talking about let's talk about something different. I digress. Thank you.

Thank you, Dr. Brown. Are there other questions or comments? OK, thank you so much for your time. Next on up, we have our 14.2 agenda item, the 2026-2027 preliminary budget.

Are you going to do it?

Oh yeah, because we don't, it never works and we don't. She's gonna, she needs a keeper. Is it evening or is it afternoon? Good evening. So good evening, board members, superintendent. We'll be presenting the preliminary budget. It's just an overview at this point because we're missing a lot of the information, but we're going to take you through the process. I'm presenting this evening with Mehdi Rivzi, who is our executive director of business services. So next slide. We're presenting, of course, in accordance with our mission and our four E's. Our agenda, we're going to be focused on the unrestricted general fund at this time, and again, it's more of a process overview at this point. We're going to look at the budget summary and highlights of the budget, look at our budget risk, what's... in the budget, what's not in the budget, and then the budget cycle and some budget assumptions and next steps. Next slide. So in terms of the budget highlights, again, we have an unrestricted general fund focus. Obviously, the district's budget is made up of restricted programs and other funds. But our focus at this point is unrestricted general fund. And as we presented in the May revise, there's a lot of risk and uncertainty in the budget in terms of some of the assumptions that the governor shared in his May revise. I'm not finished yet. Sorry. And we're also waiting on information from the board. We're going to be going through budget balancing solutions. You'll be voting on that later. We also have increasing program costs. And the governor's budget itself has a lot of unknowns. We will know more when he actually adopts the budget in June, towards the end of June. So again, we're going to look at what's in the budget, what's not in the budget, a quick look at our budget cycle and our assumptions, and then next steps. So let's go on. Based on our information that we have and based on the outcome of unknowns, we are confident we'll have a positive certification, which means we'll have a positive ending fund balance for the current year and subsequent two years. Even though at this point our undesignated ending fund balance is negative with the unknowns and after tonight's vote, we project that it will be positive. and then the multi-year projections you were not going to see those tonight but remember when you when we do bring them back on the 17th they will not have negotiated increases in all of the out years and again We're not funded adequately by the state, so we either need to have additional reductions to make sure that, to address our structural deficit or any additional costs. Next slide. You want to take this one, Maddie?

Yes, so the May revise was presented and at first sight it looks they said that there is additional money and additional funding available particularly for the LEAs. but when we go in more detail then we what we found that there are risks associated with each of those proposals so basically the this is a summary of how the those proposals from the governor, how they could be classified. So the first thing is our statutory COLA, which was increased from 2.41 to 2.87. And it is nearly zero risk because it is based on the inflation factor from the federal government. Then the additional 1.4% LCFF increase that is also nearly zero because they have shown some funding that will be available for it and they are linking the paid pregnancy disability leaves along with it so that looks like that that would be available then comes actually the our discretionary block grant that they said that they will increase those amounts which is the or it's part which they say that they will increase amount for all leas although it is part of the but governor budget but The risk level is a little high compared to the other two, and it is being termed as a medium risk level. Then LREBG, another area where they said that additional money will be available, but still that is not really risk-free, although the risk is low. and the greatest thing that could be helpful is the special education base rate which they are saying that they will increase by around 30 percent so that would be really helpful but still it is being classified as a low risk activity

OK, thanks, Mary. So this should look familiar to the board and the public, because we brought this when we presented the May revise, not the public, the viewing public. And then in terms of the common message, we also get information from ACOE on the common message that just came out today. So we're kind of building it as we're getting additional information. Next slide. So what's in the budget? In terms of budget balancing solutions, we have included in revenues the COLA, because we use that when we're actually building the LCFF, as well as the additional LCFF investments. The staffing formula is a part of us actually constructing our budget. So we do have the teacher template in the budget at this time and enrollment projections. For our SpudBug funding, we have included 2.7 million of the 5.9 million. And what we have done, the SpudBug usually comes in as restricted, so we have to transfer expenses out. to that restricted program. And for restricted funding, we're still waiting for the information from the CELPO for the total amount that we will receive in SPED, but we are building in $2 million at this point. As we get additional information, we'll be changing our assumptions. Next slide. What's not in the budget, as I mentioned before, the total SPUD bug revenue, we're pending about $3 million. We're waiting for the board tonight to approve all budget balancing proposals. Those excluding revenue will total about $2 million. The cost of the pregnancy leave, pregnancy disability leave, Mehdi mentioned that in terms of one of the risks that we're looking at. And then the other funds and other resources, we have to ensure that they have the projected cost of benefits in the current year and the subsequent years for the multi-year projections. So next slide. um so then we have to remember the budget cycle where are we in the actual um process we have received the governor's may revise and that happened probably another day not 5 14. um we should have the final budget by 6 15 but we know by 6 30 we will get the final um governor's budget and our budget will then be adjusted as needed um within 45 days so now we're um we'll be waiting for the governor's final budget and any cleanup bills and trailer bills that may um that may accompany the governor's budget next slide This is another representation. This is a representation that we've used in the past. So we are in the process of finalizing the 25-26 budget, which we call the estimated actuals, while we're trying to finalize a 26-27 budget. So we're working in two fiscal years. Next slide. So we can look at some of the assumptions that are in the budget and the major one, next one Liz, the major one that we look at is our ADA and our enrollment. So on the next slide we, next slide Liz. No. yep thanks, so this is a arm that was looking at our enrollment and attendance over several years 2627 we had increased the enrollment projections based on working with our enrollment office and our student. So the projections that he gives us, we use that to develop the teacher template as well as inform our revenue. From that, we also look at P2, we have P2 now for 25-26. That came in a little bit lower than we had projected. But then based on the ADA to enrollment projections, we have estimated our ADA to be at 89-37. So that's what we've used to actually construct our LCFF revenue, which is in the budget at this time. Next slide. Next slide. So the variance report. At this point, we usually give you a variance report looking at the adopted budget to the estimated actuals. But now we have too many unknowns for the comparison to be relevant. So we have a draft, but we're not sharing that tonight until we get the additional information about the budget balancing solutions, and actually we could get a little bit more information from ACOE as well. With the information that we have now, bearing in mind that we haven't taken all the spud bug, we haven't done budget balancing solutions, our preliminary ending fund balance is negative 2.8 million, but we know that once we get in all the revenue, that amount will be eliminated. And as a reminder, we'll be bringing back the final budget at the June 17th meeting for the board to approve. Next slide. You want to do the next steps?

yes so the next step that we have so the the whatever we are discussing is based on may revised and that was presented on may 14th and at the moment the legislature they are looking after the proposals from the governor they are discussing and in different committees so hopefully they should be able to do it second week of June and definitely their deadline in June 30th and if there are more changes compared to what with which we are working at the moment then we will be presenting a 45-day revision to the district budget and that would that is not be done but it is better if there are so many change many changes between may revise and the june final budget then it is a good practice to do that and if that happens that then we will come back with a 45 day revision somewhere in august And board approval of the budget on June 17th, what we hope that we will have, we will be able to incorporate the budget balancing solutions. And at the moment, there are some one-time activities from the state budget that we are trying to incorporate. And the challenges as we say that what are the challenges are basically, yes, next slide please. State revenue forecasts, that has changed substantially between January and May, and many people are looking at those with suspicion. So definitely those are aggressive revenue forecasts. ADA, basically what was done that the state changed the ADA, how they will fund it. They have started to use the three-year average, and Berkeley actually is now at a point where that is not of any benefit to us. Then we are looking at the expiring one-time funds and grants. and in some of the costs are outpacing the available revenues and the contribution and at the end we have to develop a comprehensive plan to maintain fiscal solvency and preserve the integrity of our educational program this is what the intent is okay

So thanks, Mitty. So as Jill actually shared earlier, the impact of the expiring grants, obviously it impacts not only the programs that Ed Services works on, but it impacts the entire budget. So if there are any questions or any things that we can assist with, we'll be happy to take questions at this point.

Thank you so much. And again, thanks again for coming to us multiple times with these important updates and keeping us, you know, informed as we go through this challenging process. Other board members would like to ask a question? Director Schanofsky?

I have a comment and then I have a question about the budget. My comment is just about our ADA and the fact that it's we're projecting it to be flat under just under 95 percent and so I just want to put out another call to really like trying to move the needle on that with every percent being a million dollars for our district so I know we've had a couple presentations on it before but if we're not moving the needle at all then the way that we're investing or what we're doing doesn't seem to be making improvements and then my question is I just really want to understand this. This is about the settle up. and the discretionary block grant. Well, it's complicated because we get the discretionary block grant, the settle up from last year. Yeah, there's like this lag. So what I want to be sure I understand is this year's settle up, which is huge for our district, is not at all being budgeted for in this budget right now, correct?

No, not this settle up. but the spud bug which may be related to the settle up. We're doing the spud bug but we're not budgeting for the settle up. When we presented the May revise, like the Prop 98 funding that we may or we may not get or may come in as revenue or may go to the reserves, that's not in the budget.

right but the prop 98 settle up money is generally given to us as a discretionary block grant so I'm kind of asking this because I think that it is it's very confusing and I don't know that most of our listeners or or even me that I fully have it clear because the spud bug is the settle up by another name from a previous year. So I just wanna be really clear that $8 million is not the 2.9, I think it was $2.9 million that we're putting in for this spud bug. It's an old settle up.

Okay. And it's difficult to track it because the state's not absolutely clear. um so this may have been the 25 26 settle up but we know that um from a statutory point of view they do owe us like eight million dollars but we can't count that revenue until it's actually given to us because we don't know the format that it's going to actually um be given to us in it so maybe a one-time grant or they may decide oh we're going to put it to the rainy fund rainy day fund So we really can't count it at this point. So we can kind of explain what we think is going on with the Prop 98 and how it relates to the SWAT bug. But what we're putting in the budget is when it has become like a a dollar amount that they're recommending that we put in and even though it's an unknown because we don't know in the governor's budget whether that's going to the final budget whether that's going to be have a UPP lens whether it's going to have some other kind of how they're going to actually distribute it but based on our budget balancing solutions this is counted as being unrestricted because that's the information we have now. But the rainy day fund has been now maximized.

So the amount of the potential settle up shouldn't get any smaller because of the rainy day fund because the governor has maximized what can go into the rainy day fund statutorily with the May revise. but so yeah but when when if there's any additional allocation right there's no guarantee that we're gonna get it no I understand but it wouldn't be a rainy day fund it would be more settle up one day we should get it great thank you I just wanted to make sure I was clear on that okay thanks okay I think it was a helpful clarification are there other folks with questions

No? OK. Thank you very much. We really appreciate it. And I know there'll be more conversation today.

We'll bring it back on the 17th.

Yes, that's right. Thank you. And so we have 14.3, and then we have 15.1. 14.3 is part of a discussion. It's procedures to fill potential board leaves. This is, I'm sorry? Oh, okay. It hasn't been switched. We're going to switch the order. Do we need to do, I think we forgot to do that, an agenda amendment? Yeah. Liz, can we do that? Would someone like to make an amendment to the, I mean, sorry, a motion to the

I move that we amend the agenda to put item 15.1 ahead of item 14.3.

I second it. Do we have the ayes?

Aye. Aye.

Good. I'm with you. Director Schanofsky is momentarily out. Do board members and folks here need a quick break? Yeah, why don't you take a, like a three to five minute break. Thank you, we'll be back in three to five minutes for 15.1.

It is freezing.

It's freezing.

So cold. It's freezing. Okay, thank you. It's freezing. No, we got to turn these off.

When I got here at five, it was like a thousand degrees in here.

Jesus, I hate when these chairs are... Shh, you guys, it's recording.

I'm not going to take forever.

No, I know, but I'm saying I don't have to do it. It's freezing. Like, blow me away. Can I have one?

Hold on, let me get you another one.

I'm going to blow you away.

Crazy. I'm waving at you. I'm saying hello. I'm right over here. I'm the girl. Hello, my friend. I was like, hello. I'm saying hello. It's good to see you. Oh, hi. The last person standing. Congratulations on the school year done. Tomorrow's the last day. I know. Do you have anything to say? Well, I just finished Myself, she was the speaker at my commencement ceremony for Christian College today. She's been playing with my bucket list today. She was disgusting. She did a master's in public administration.

I do.

I'm watching you guys.

To run the budget update. Yeah, yeah. So I'm really excited. Yeah, I just had to wrap up some courses today.

my commencement and she was there and I was like, hey. She did tell me she was speaking. Did she tell you that? She was amazing.

I did, I introduced myself.

Congratulations.

I was thinking about your baby glasses. Yeah, I know.

yes you know your whole stuff you spoke at her graduation you spoke at her graduation are we clicking or she's looking she's clicking is there a clicker or no she's clicking we're back from break thank you so much Good evening board directors and members of the public. This is the last of three budget presentations this evening and this is a budget update through which, next slide please, we would like to do a couple things. We want to review the budget balancing proposals, next slide please, that was shared with the board at the May 20th meeting. The board recalls we have a budget balancing target and staff has made proposals over the last several months In most cases to and through SBAC. I brought these proposals to you on the 20th just for review, discussion, and information. And now we're bringing them back to you for action. And your action and your discussion will help us as we prepare to build a final budget to bring to you on June 17th for approval. So we're going to review the balancing proposals. We are also going to very quickly go through the slides that remind you all of our core values of resource allocation at the request of our president. But we will just make sure that they're there for the reference of you as well as members of the public. And then the main other action is for you to take action on those proposed balancing proposals. Next slide, please. You've seen this slide in different forms over the three presentations this evening, but this is our BUSD budget development timeline, slightly different than the one that you saw in the previous presentation, only because this is just kind of marking the places and different types of presentations we've had around the board, I'm sorry, around the budget over the last several weeks. So on the 20th, again, we present it to you all. the budget balancing proposals that we're going to revisit today for the purpose of discussion. We also had a budget update that focused on the governors may revise at our last board meeting. Tonight we are doing the first read of the preliminary budget which happened just prior to this particular agenda item. We also are going to and we did show you the LCAP budget for the purposes of discussion. At our next meeting on the 10th, we will be coming to you with our visa budget, and that will not be a discussion that will be an opportunity for you to discuss and take action on the recommendations for visa, as well as an information item, which is an update on our personnel commission budget, which also must be considered as we think about building our complete budget at the end of the school year. On the 17th, we'll come back to the board for the final action this school year with regard to the budget, bringing you our LCAP budget for you to take action on, the preliminary budget for you to take action on, as well as our site plans, also known as SIPSAs, where our schools outline in detail how they'll allocate resources towards the district mission and goals, but also specific to their site goals and needs. As you heard, June 15th, we will get the governor's final budget approval. We say June 30th because after we get that, we need to actually dissect it and understand it. And so sometime around the 30th, we'll have a better understanding of the implications for BUSD's budget and have an opportunity to revise the budget in the 45-day revise at the beginning of the school year in August. Just want to make sure that everyone understands the process and that you will likely see things and have seen things on more than one occasion. And that's because we want to make sure you have time to discuss and digest before we actually take action. So thinking about the budget target, just a quick reminder. You can go two slides, please. Quick reminder that we have a budget balancing target that we set some time ago prior to the governor's revise and prior to a lot of other information that we have now of $10.4 million for our unrestricted general fund. You just heard a presentation on LCAP and previously have heard presentations on our expiring uh grants or grants that are having reduced capacity reminder that this 10.4 does not include those grants this is strictly um general funds though we do know and appreciate that our various funding sources do have a relationship We set out with our SBAC to figure out some ways to move towards that 10.4 thousand, sorry, 10.4 thousand, that'd be nice. A $10.4 million budget balancing target, and we are gonna again go through those with you all this evening. Next slide. One more time, please. Thank you. And then one more time. So before doing so, President Chang thought it was important. And I agree that the community and you all as members of the board are reminded of a couple of things. One is that district budgets are not like the typical budget There's definitely revenue and expenditures like every other budget, but oftentimes our revenues come with expectations, requirements and restrictions. And we have different funding pots and types. So we have the unrestricted general fund, which is again what we're going to primarily focus on this evening. And that typically is more of a discretionary fund, though that also is misleading. But then, as you've heard in previous presentations, we have what we call our categorical dollars or soft dollars that come with stipulations and restrictions as to how they need to be spent and who they need to serve and oftentimes have timelines for which we receive the money or by which we need to expend the money. The next reminder we want to give you is that we've presented to you all this idea of musical chairs it stuck for a while and then it kind of disappeared but the idea of it next slide please Liz is the same that we want to make sure that as we think about programs staffing and services that we provide to our students in service of our mission that we actually have funding sources to sustain and maintain them and so again our analogy was musical chairs and so we want to make sure that we are not continuing programming services or staffing without making sure we also are clear on how those particular things will be funded Next slide, please. The core values of resource allocation you just saw in the presentation for LCAP. And so you've seen them several times. I want to make sure that the community knows they're here for your reference. But I also want to point out our next slide, which is our budget balancing principles, which is a new thing that we presented this year that doesn't just call out our focus on equity, but also says that we want to make sure that we are funding things that are actually impactful to the students. And I think I've heard some of that sentiment this evening from the dais. We try our best not to scale things that we cannot responsibly sustain. We align our investments to readiness and capacity. So Jill talked about infrastructure. If we don't have the infrastructure to do something, we want to be really transparent about that and take the time to actually build infrastructure before we make promises and commitments to our students and families. We believe that those closest to the work inform decisions and should inform decisions early. And that's why many of the conversations that you're going to hear this evening or many of the proposals have been informed by conversations that happen even as early as the fall. And then we try our best to continue to name trade-offs clearly and proactively, including when we are making decisions on funding sources that are not stable. Next slide. This last slide is important as it kind of gives you a preview of how we're going to organize tonight's proposals. These are budget balancing strategies and this is how we typically move as we're thinking about balancing our budget. No particular order except the first one always eliminating and removing vacancies is the first thing that we do as a district and the last thing we ever want to do is consolidate and reduce positions and or programs. All those strategies in the middle happen at different times and in different orders. And then finally want to remind you of our decision making triangle that as we make decisions about reductions or restructuring or changes to programs, we do so definitely holding up an equity lens and making sure that we are identifying where programs and services remove barriers, have high participation from our focal students, and otherwise support our work to disrupt some of the persistent and predictable narratives for our students' experiences and outcomes. And we want to make sure that, again, they are stable and can be sustained, and that they are having impact. So all the decisions that we are presenting to you, particularly those around restructuring, reducing, or changing program services, et cetera, we evaluate in this triangle. And you're going to see some... No, you won't. Not this presentation. That was SBAC. We have examples of how we've played with this decision-making triangle and rated different vertices. And then finally, I want to remind you all that though this is focused on unrestricted general funds, which is the funding resource that SBAC primarily has purview over, as was just presented in the previous presentation and the one before that, we actually have a number of advisory committees that inform and give us input on the decisions and the recommendations that we make. And so though we're here to represent SBAC, and you will see that in the slides that are to come, please know that there's been other groups that are involved in these recommendations as well. So we're gonna start just by reminding you of the 10.4 million and that we had three phases of budget balancing that we did that got us to $7.8 million towards that $10.4 million target. Our goal this afternoon, sorry, this evening is to recap those and I say recap because I'm gonna I'm kind of giving a disclaimer as to why I will not I might go a little faster than usual in the interest of time and I definitely ask that you can slow me down if necessary but all of these you and the public have seen before multiple times again including our presentation on the 20th and so I will move as if that is so and we'll stop and answer any questions if the board has them This is just our first three phases again, $7.8 million towards the $10.4 million target. Reminding you all that again, our first strategy, next slide please, is to eliminate and remove vacant positions. We had none this year because we exhausted this strategy last year. Next slide. We also had an opportunity to true up some costs. We redid our teacher template per the formula and we identified $1.1 million that we could score towards our $10.4 million target. And we were able to acknowledge some changes, some increases in our enrollment projections to the tune of $194,000. What is different in this presentation than the one that you saw on the 20th is to the right of each of these proposals, you will see a pie chart and that pie chart represents how SBAC polled these particular proposals. And so blue is yes, I support this approach. And so if you see blue, that means that the SBAC member who voted says yes, we're good with this proposal. Red is no, I do not support this approach. And then the orangish yellow is undecided. So looking at the staffing formula, as well as the enrollment change projections, you can see that over 90% of our SBAC members supported these proposals. I will also name that sometimes it's orange because at that particular time of voting, our aspect members had more questions about it. We typically look at 80% or more as we can go ahead and advance it to you all as a recommendation. Next slide, please. It's not matching. Okay. So we also identified some opportunities to eliminate expenses that were covered in funding sources that we can move into other places. And so we have some ergonomic evaluations that we currently contract out and we've reduced that contract. So moving that work in-house and that will save us $4,000. You can again see, I'm not going to go every time with what SBAC said, because I think you can figure out the pattern, but overwhelmingly SBAC supported it. And then we have the proposal for five furlough days. The five furlough days were actually, I think we brought that to SBAC at phase two or phase three. This is before the governors may revise. This is when that 10.4 million was looking incredibly daunting, and we were having back-to-back SBAC meetings, and we were trying to find a way to move towards the target. And so we brought back a recommendation or proposal that we had even last year, towards furloughs. What you can see here and the reason why there's a star is because there's a lot of questions about furlough days and this is probably the lower of all of the recommendations or all the scores for SBAC with about 80% saying yes we support but a group of 20% of the folks said that they were not ready to make that decision. So I wanted to point that out to the board as one distinction. We also look to make some website changes to the tune of $17,000, as well as reduce print shop costs for $150,000. We continue to work on our print shop costs. You see there that those costs run about $867,000 a year, and there's room for more reductions, but we want to make sure that we do things in ways that are not destabilizing for our educators and for the work that we do. And so we just scored $150,000 for the fall. We also have the opportunity to save some money, about $30,000 by moving some of our parent reports that we currently print and print in color to digital. This was overwhelmingly celebrated by many of our committees and many of our families who received these reports. Not only is it you know, a little bit more friendly in terms of environmentally. There's actually more information they can access from the digital reports. Our home and hospice instruction hours, we were able to score $75,000 there, and we were able to right-size some clerical support at BTA for $7,500, and those were both under looking for inefficiencies. Next slide, please. Then we moved to transferring expenses to other funds. And so this is not where we are removing or reducing. We're saying we're gonna keep that cost, but move it somewhere else off of general funds in this case. And so with that in mind, we moved $187,000 from our unrestricted general fund to BSEP. We also moved to $4,400 from our language line contract to BSEP. And then we moved 1.1 FTE of indirect costs for $194,000 to a number of other funds, not BSEP. Next slide. Again, the last thing we want to do is consolidate and reduce positions and programs, and so what you see here are some slight changes to positions. You will notice that our BHS expiring grant right side support for our Wellness Center that we brought to you on the 20th has now been struck through, and that is because we've since secured grant funding to take care of that position. We wanted to again continue to show what we've shown in previous presentations. And then finally, this next slide are all revenue generators. You can see they have overwhelming support from SBAC, except for one that I'll speak to in a moment and that you also heard a public comment about. We scored the initial spud bug of $4.5 million. We also had an opportunity to have a one-time saving from PG&E. and $100,000 ongoing. We also scored revenue from our CYBHI fee payment reimbursement that we have with Alameda County Office of Education for 250,000. All three of those received overwhelming support from SBAC. However, the transportation fee collection, which was a proposal that we would charge our non-BUSD afterschool programs, particularly starting with those that are for-profit, we proposed charging a dollar a day. for students to and from school, to and from, no, sorry, from after school, from school to the after school program, sorry, the non-BUSD programs, we were proposing to charge those organizations a dollar. Again, they are, some of them fee-based organizations, and so we were saying we're providing them a service by transporting the students to them, and we would charge them a dollar. We anticipated that would generate $242,000, and that was one that had less than 80% from SBAC, with a number of questions and concerns you heard one in public comment the main concern was that a lot of these organizations are also on fixed on fixed funds and so what would that how would that impact their budget if we were to charge them a dollar so that was one concern that came up another concern was that if we charge these organizations a dollar then they would just pass those costs on to families and so then families will be paying additional as well And another concern was that it just wasn't equitable and that Berkeley should be the ones responsible for getting students after school programs and transporting them despite us sharing the cost of transporting you all. I think you all have cars. You know the price of gas right now and so the price of gas for buses is increased as well as the cost that we have to pay for maintenance repairs. And with additional tariffs and taxes, the cost even for parts and repairs has gone up substantially. So we tried to balance that out, that we recognize and we want to support our community in providing after-school programming, but we were trying to find a way to offset some of the costs that we were experiencing. So that's why that one had the results that it did from SBAC. So those are our phases one through three. And again, all of those had bars or pie charts from SBAC. Our third, I'm sorry, our fourth proposal phase scored us about $3.4 million. You will notice that when I go through these next few slides, there's only two. There will not be a pie chart to the right of each and that is because we did not engage SBAC in the straw poll for these. These were all revenue generating and they kind of came in late with the governors may revise. Next slide please. And so for we did go over them with SBAC though and discuss them. So there's a statutory COLA and the amount given in excess and we were able to score 2.1. million towards our $10.4 million target for that. And then our BUSD share of additional spud bug after negotiations, we score for $1.2 million. To be clear, we received a set amount for this second layer of spud bug, if you will. However, in our negotiations with our labor partners, we have some language that said that if spud bug came in higher than what it was previously, we would allocate a portion to our members of our which is why we say this is BUSD's share of the spread book. And so that concludes all of the review of the proposals. We can pause and see if there's any questions or any clarifications because the next thing we're gonna ask you all to do Pauline's going to go line by line and ask you to take action on each proposal because, again, we're trying to build a budget and we don't want to build it with assumptions about what you approve and what you will go for. We'd rather hear your discussion and your feedback now so we can make any changes as we prepare the final budget.

Thank you so much.

Point of order. Can I ask you a question? So that we can go through, the time is 10.39, and we are almost reaching our time of adjournment. My recommendation would be to receive a motion that allows us to extend the meeting so that we can go straight through without any disruptions.

Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Thank you so much for the reminder. So is there a motion to extend?

You have to agree on a time that you want to extend it to.

I'm sorry, say that again. To what time? Oh, yeah.

I move we can extend to 1130. So I move that we extend to 1130 with the hopes that we don't go that long.

Thank you.

I'll second the motion.

Do the ayes?

Aye.

Aye. Unanimous. I have a question. Yeah.

Can you talk a little bit about the implications of the furlough proposal and what ramifications five days of furlough would have on the work that needs to get, I assume that would happen during the summer. So I assume it might impact summer work. Is that an accurate assumption?

We have not landed on when it would happen. It is probably most ideal for it to happen during summer months in some ways because school's not in session, but it's challenging because as you likely know, that's when a lot of the planning and prep work for the upcoming school year happens. So we didn't get that far. The implications for sure though is that you know bodies of work that are done at any period of time would would slow down wouldn't stop necessarily but that the board and community should expect that there would be some delays in the delivery of some of the the things that we typically would deliver throughout the school year i want to note that this is for employees that are unrepresented and who make 125 000 or more and so that is oftentimes our central office leadership for whom, again, summertime and the planning and the prep time is a big part of our work. And so, yeah, I would just be, we should anticipate, you know, a change in services delivered, or at least the timeline in which these services are delivered. And quite honestly, it is likely that some work might have to stop. Some of the projects and things that we're taking on might have to be paused, rather, and be taken on later in the school year.

Want to say more? Mm-mm.

Sam's going to say more. Mm-mm.

I just want to give a reminder that the money would be only one time.

It would not be an ongoing savings.

And you said it's only for unrepresented employees, so it wouldn't have to be negotiated with labor partners? Right. Right.

And that was at the recommendation of SBAC even last year when we proposed the District Y furlough. Black.

I'm just going to go ahead and go. I have two questions totally unrelated to each other. First is, what was the percentage of SBAC members that voted in this? Does this represent the entire SBAC? I'm just curious what the participation rate was there. And I actually don't know, I should know, how many SBAC members there are. I know there are a lot.

I can throughout.

You don't have to look that up. If you don't know it offhand, I can look it up. It's fine. Thank you. But do you know what the participation was generally?

I'm going to get that for you as well. I need to go to the Google form and see that. The votes took place over two pollings. And so the total number might change, but I can get that for you in just a minute. That would be helpful.

Thank you. And then my other question is, like last year when we were going through this process in a very similar way, We did not code or did not count certain revenue sources because we couldn't be sure that we were gonna receive them, but then we received them later. And one of the questions, concerns, comments I had was how that process was done, sort of separated from this budget process. So as we anticipate, I think it's pretty safe to say we will get additional funds this year at some point. I understand that we can't count on it right now in our in our budget balancing. But what is the process? I think it's important for us while we're talking about voting for these cuts. Also talking about the process of restoring things and the priority for the restoration.

So the revenue that's actually the spud bug revenue, based on the prior year when we were told not to score it and came in, this year we took a different approach. So we've actually counted all of the spud bug that we mentioned, the 4.5 that we did in an earlier phase. And in phase four, we counted an additional 1.1. So we are counting it all. in this budget development is a part of the recommendation.

But now I'm confused because my question in the earlier presentation was exactly about the fact that we can expect to get more revenue this year. So last year it was a little bit simpler because it was the TK funding and then it was the other block grant, but it wasn't a settle up that we were talking about at this time last year. This year, we know that we are not getting the full Prop 98 amount, and we are not quite sure how much of that will be restored in the next year. So my question is, as we're making these decisions to make cuts to meet the target that we have in front of us right now, Where is the process or the transparency around reinstating or prioritizing what will be reinstated if and when we get additional resources?

We don't, honestly, Director Chauncey, we don't have a process for that right now. If I'm looking at all of the proposals that are here, I mean, reducing print shop costs or website changes, I don't know that there's many that you all say, like, do not do that if you get more money. I think when we're having this discussion and you're taking action, though, we are more than happy to take note of you all saying we are, because we're going to go line by line, we approve this, and if additional funding comes in, it's something we want to direct staff to prioritize to bring back What I want to caution though before, what I want to put a comma or parentheses or something after saying that, is just reminding you all that part of why we're here every year is because of the fact that we have a budget target, we have had a budget balancing target for the last three years and we are able to meet that target in most years with a significant amount of one-time dollars, right? And so we still honestly have not met our targets even from two years ago and we kind of, what they say in SBAC, we've been kicking the can down the road You've heard from our labor partners, when it's time for negotiations, like we should have known this was coming. We knew this was happening. Even in SBAC and some of our other advisory committees, they say like, we knew this. And so we're trying to actually have a different strategy of not saying or not misleading us ourselves to think like when we get some extra money, we should bring stuff back. That might be a conversation the board wants to have, but we should also be thinking about the fact that we already know that we're at a deficit. We're gonna start the year at a deficit towards our multi-year target. And so we should be changing that frame of not, Always being sometimes it might be the case what are we gonna bring back to like okay? How are we gonna allocate this towards the ongoing budget target and that is something I didn't point out so I'm glad you asked the question and Sam kind of referenced it if you look at the the budget balancing spreadsheet that we have if you go back a couple is you will notice that there are on the chart there are two columns one says ongoing and one says One says ongoing and one says one time. And of that $11.2 million that we have towards our $10.4 million target, only 5.4%. So just about half of that or less than half of that is actually ongoing. So we know we're going to start the school year next year having to find about $6 million to balance. So just wanted to add that piece. But more than happy that as you all take action, we'll record what you want us to prioritize and bring them back if there's bring back money.

If I could just clarify, I understand that. I'm not doubting that. But as those resources come back into the budget, I don't always feel like we know where they're going. So for example, the TK, money from last year. We didn't score that in our budget. It's not being scored as a revenue. So I'm not saying we did anything bad with it. I know that we used it right for all the costs that come up. But I think some transparency around that would be helpful for me. And I think it would also be helpful for the public. Because as we're making difficult decisions, right, if there is, you know, if we were to get that full $8 million, then we would

be able to bring some of these things back and so i think being transparent about that i think would be helpful for right right so all the revenue that's in the budget is based on an assumption either from the may revise or additional money that comes in and the transparency is when we present the interims to the board and the public So there's full transparency. And when we got the block grant the last time, we did not put it in the adopted budget because that's what ACOE told us. We did not put it in. It came in later. And the board told us that we could use all of that money towards balancing the budget. And that was agreed to in closed session. So there's no lack of transparency. There's full transparency. We got, I can't remember what the amount was, but it also is reflected when I do the variance report. I explained that our electricity costs looked like it had decreased, but because this money comes in as restricted, we transferred expenses to that resource. So there's full transparency, and I'm hoping the board and the public is aware that we are presenting fully transparent information.

Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting anyone's hiding any. I'm suggesting a process for as we prioritize. We're also prioritizing what can be removed should that come to fruition.

So I'm not suggesting anyone is not. so that will be presented to the board along with our interims when or we can do a special budget update so we have three opportunities to do that when we close the books we're looking at what we actually spent we have the first interim we have the adopted actually we have preliminary adopted first interim and second interim so we have multiple discussions to share our budget with the board and the public

And it could be, Director Shenocki, that we just try to find a different way to present it. So Pauline is right. It's come in different forms. But it might be that for some, we need a visual. And we can actually specifically say, we got this in June, and we applied it this way. So we're definitely open to exploring other ways to tell the story. The story has been told. But to your point, if some people don't understand it or don't know it, then we need to figure out a different way to tell it. So definitely open to feedback around how we can do that going forward.

Thank you so much. And even as we go through the line item tonight, there could be a way where board directors who have a question about this is particularly an item that I have a question about that maybe if we do get the quote unquote funds that we could consider returning. And so it could have a preliminary flag for you that you should be aware of.

Right. OK. Sorry. I just want to, I do want to caution us from having that conversation about every line item that we see. I think we've already discussed on the dais and we've already made the things, we already said what our priorities were. around specific positions or specific things that we want to see so I want to caution us from moving away from that and then going line by line and saying okay well when it comes back when we get more money we want to bring this back we want to bring this back because then it widens our net and that's not what we want to do what we really need to be focusing on is the fact that next year we will have less money next year we won't have the grants that are available and so we need to be thinking about ways to be a little bit more, what's the word I'm looking for? strategic is important, but not the word I'm looking for, but conservative with our spending. But I think if I can just help us, that's one point. But if I could help us just bridge the gap, I think the direction that's coming from the dais is to have an additional budget conversation when we return in August or when we return in September. That is outside of the typical preliminary budget presentations that we have. That's the direction that I would support. And we can move on from that conversation. Is that OK? Yeah. All right.

Great.

Take it away. Are there other comments or questions? No. So we're going to go.

I guess I just I mean, I asked about furlough days before we start voting line by line. I guess I would just offer that of all of these budget balancing solutions that that is the one I feel most uncomfortable with. I mean, we're essentially talking about a salary reduction for some of our employees, which is a big decision to make and feels like it should be a last resort. So

Yeah.

By way of discussion, I would offer that to my colleagues.

I think that's helpful as a process to move through this efficiently. I'm going to raise a question so that when we're going line by line, some of it might move really rapidly. You have on the second page of the possible budget reduction spreadsheet,

Great. I'm sorry. I think we're going to go through.

I'm going to ask you a question just like Vice President Corn did. So the category of BHS, eliminate duplicative positions, that's a general term that perhaps you have raised it before and I've just forgotten. What types of roles does that include?

Are you referring to slide 22, the consolidate and reduce where it says VHS limited position school admin assistant or?

Yeah, it's on slide. That's right. It's referencing slide 29. Exactly. On slide 22. Yes. So that references a school admin assistant, and that falls under these balancing solutions that are super helpful as you're classifying them, consolidate, remove. Do any of these other categories across the school sites include TSAs, teachers in special assignment?

No. So if you can go to slide 22. So slide 22 is where we summarize the consolidate and reduce positions and our programming strategies. There's four there. Again, the last one around the wellness center FTE, we removed because we received grant funding to address that. So there are the three remaining, which is the district office clerical support. We had a 1.0 admin assistant, three, and that person is retiring. And so one could argue that it's eliminate vacancy, but that vacancy did not exist when we started the process. And so we went ahead and scored it under consolidate and reduce. And that after the retirement, we're not going to reopen that position. The VHS position, we were reducing a school site at, I'm sorry, a school admin assistant by 1.0. And then in BTA, we have the opportunity to right-size a teacher leader position by 0.2. Which of those two are you asking about? Neither of those are TSAs, though. Okay.

I just wanted to ask a general question. Yeah.

And just to clarify, the TSA positions will come next week when we look at the BSAP budget.

You will see some TSA positions in the BSAP budget. You saw some examples of TSA positions in the LCAP. The kind of TSAs are funded by different sources, so you will see it, but you definitely will see it when we bring it to you, the final budget, too.

you that's good for the members of the public uh to be aware um thank you um and then would would you like to run the process for how do we do this yeah so go ahead thank you um so now it comes time for you guys to vote on the budget balancing solutions you will see that the presentation is a little different from how anikia was focusing her presentation, she was looking at the various strategies. Now we're looking at grouping it like similar types and locations for budget balancing solutions. So what I've done, I've shared with the board a hard copy of what's on the screen. So if you can't see it on the slide presentation, you're welcome to look at the hard copy that I shared with each board member. So the first group, and we're now looking at Groupings we have 10 Suggestions or budget balancing solutions based on central office reductions and transfers those total 993 thousand of which 781 Thousand is ongoing and the one-time solution is the the furlough days that that Jennifer What is it miss corn said had reservations about so I recommend that either If there are questions, we are happy to take questions But each of these would need to have like a yes or a no vote By the majority of the board.

Okay. I see that last column on the right-hand side.

Yes Scoring them as you guys tell me which yes or no.

Okay. Everyone has heard that. Um, I

I just have a quick question, clarification question. Do you want us to go each line by line or group in terms of your vote? Well, we can go line by line within the group.

Line by, who?

Okay. Well, okay.

Or if you have no questions, we can take.

We can take it as a group. Right. So if we have questions, we can pull them out and discuss it. But if we don't, it would be. Yeah. more beneficial to just vote for them as a group. Correct. Thank you.

So I would suggest that we remove the furloughs and vote on everything else as a group, and then discuss the furloughs separately.

Central operations office reductions and transfers.

So we would need the board to vote on removing the furloughs, and then we would just say yes to everything else.

I'll second Director Corn's motion.

Do we have the ayes?

Aye.

OK, unanimous to remove the furloughs.

So now I'm going to make another motion that we vote to approve all of the central operations office reductions and transfers with the exception of the furlough days. But that was the motion, OK. That was the motion.

I was just, yes. That was the motion. And so now we're at the place to discuss those five furloughs.

OK, so clarifying the intent, yeah. So you just did it one step. Yes, ma'am.

I have two questions. One is, it says five to 10 days furlough. No. Sorry, sorry. Oh, five. It doesn't say five to 10 days furlough?

It's five. It's five days, yeah.

OK, so five-day furloughs. And have we discussed that with those employees? These are all unrepresented employees?

These are all unrepresented employees, and they are all aware of the proposal. OK. Which is not going to happen, though, right? I'm sorry, say that again.

No, no, no, they didn't vote yet. I thought they just voted. Just for some clarification, what we did is we voted on the entire group of central operations office reductions and transfers, and we voted to pull the five furlough part of it for discussion. Right now, we will discuss it, and then we will vote to either approve the five furlough days or take it out. Thanks for the clarification. And I had one other.

Looking at the score and everything else, I want to make sure that . Yes, we have.

yes except for that scored it on the sheet and i had one other comment about it um just to while it has the impact of being a decrease in salary it's not actually a lowering of salary because you work fewer days so it's just it's not like a cut in pay so it's a holiday yeah it's not a cut in pay you're working less days

I think the felt experience for salaried, unrepresented folks who work year-round anyway, I know we can say, like, you're not going to work those five days. That's just not real. And so I think people will feel the impact fiscally, to your point, that is going to feel like it is a reduction in pay.

Because those particular days that they're furloughed, isn't the term furloughed referencing you do not get paid for that day? You're off. You've been taken off work, right?

You don't pay, you don't work, and you don't get paid, but the work still has to get done at this level of leadership.

So it'll be reduced pro rata.

So it might be, something has to stop, and that never happens, right? So the reality is that the people will work anyway, or you will expect the work, the community will expect the work to happen anyway, and the work will happen anyway, though it might be happening a little slower. So the failed experience is still, yes, a reduction.

Okay. Do you have Director Janowski?

So this is kind of why I was bringing up the comment that I made before about, like, if we need to do this in order to balance our budget, then I support doing this. And I want to respect the work of the people and what you just said, that people are not actually going to do it in every instance. And so that is what I'm looking for. That's why I asked the question before. Like, how do we... approve this with the understanding that if there are other areas that we can make cuts in or if we identify additional revenue sources that this is this comes off the list. I would say just like how you did it. Okay, so I would like to make a motion to approve the five furlough days with the understanding that if additional cuts or additional revenue is identified, this is the top priority for being removed from the budget balancing solutions.

So thank you, Dr. I'm just thinking this out. Yeah. So you're asserting it would be a top priority then as other directors go through this and also other budget days when we will be reviewing stuff as well, we'll have to keep track somehow of prioritization. And I don't know if it's like a rank order or like a

categorization of this falls in a category that when we reassess it if there are additional funds this is a set of top priorities this is medium priorities low priorities to kick back in in case we get more funds what I'm saying is I've reviewed this list we've seen it several times and for me this would be the top priority in this particular list of budget balancing solutions and so that is what my emotion is is that And, of course, it will come back to the board, but that this be prioritized for reinstatement as soon as possible if we can find some other solutions.

Okay. And so that's a good principle.

Is there a second?

Yeah, it's a good principle, and I think it's workable is what I'm saying. So is there a second? Yeah. I think also Director Brown had a question.

No, what needs to happen in terms of purpose, there's a motion made on the floor and there needs to be a second before we can engage in discussion. So if you don't agree with it after the second, you can offer a friendly amendment to the motion, but we need to take care of the business. So you should call for a second.

Yeah, that's what I'm doing. Is there a second?

If there isn't a second, then the motion dies and there's room for another motion to be made.

So I'm assuming that the motion has died. Is there another motion?

I move that we move forward with the five furlough days and think about it as a way to bring it back, maybe not as the top priority from our priority list, way to bring the funds for that to restore those days back, maybe not as a top priority, but as one of our priorities.

Sure, I'll second that. Do we have the ayes?

Aye. Aye. Nay.

Great. We've got that recorded. And thank you. So that looks like the central operations office category is completed. Is that correct? Has it been scored?

That is correct. And so staff direction, the way we understand it, is all of the items on the previous slide, if you go back one. with the central office operations, retire reductions and transfer, all were approved, including the furlough days with the direction from the board of us prioritizing that one, not as the top, but if funds avail themselves, or we identify an alternative means of moving towards the target, that one would be removed. That's what I understood. Director Brown and Director Sinatra, you agree with that? You agree with that? Thank you.

Yeah. Okay. Thanks for repeating the record. That's clear. For the record. Okay. So we should move on to the next section.

So the next page has two sections. We're looking at school sites and then we're also looking at staffing formula considerations. These total seven proposals totaling 1.3 million and all of these are ongoing. And the staffing formula would be included in the budget because this is part of our budget process. But we will be happy for you guys to vote on both sets of proposals on this page.

Okay, you're saying both sets as in school sites and staffing formula?

Right.

Okay.

I move that we accept the staff recommendations for both groups of school sites and staffing formula considerations.

I second.

Do we have the ayes?

Aye.

So it's been unanimous as moves. We're on to the third. Well done. Third page. It's 1107. It's the latest we've been this whole year. Hustle, hustle. Sorry, I don't mean that. I'm not saying you hustle.

We're just making a note.

Bordeaux hustle.

Sorry. And then the third and final page, that is our revenues, right? Yes. OK. So this is, it totals $8.7 million. And this is where we have a significant amount of one-time proposals. And the ongoing is $2.7 million, one times $6 million.

Any questions?

I move to adopt the staff recommendations. I second.

That's fast. Ayes. Aye.

Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye.

Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye.

Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye.

Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye. Aye.

Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye.

And can I also say thank you to the SBAC? I know that there have been a lot of meetings and a lot of engagement. So thank you also to the SBAC.

Absolutely. Good reminder. Lots of parents working on that group. Okay. We're not done, though. We still have... Let's see. So we have... So this is a conversation that is just specific to ensuring that we have process. 14.3 is called procedures to fill potential board leaves. This type of thing happens. It has happened in recent memory. And we want to have a conversation on what is the process that we would follow in case there is a board quote unquote leave. So we have engaged with counsel and he did provide a memo regarding the process. And board members have been exposed to this previously through their Friday notes. And I want to just verbally describe the very brief process. So there's two options. There's provisional appointment as a process in cases of board departure. And secondly, there is a special election. My understanding from our kind of looking at this is that the special election would take a lot of time and yeah and money and of these two options just transparently in the past you know what has happened is a personal appointment so my suggestion is to go in that direction if there's anyone who would like to maybe Yeah, what's that?

Yeah, we're not voting on this, right? We're just discussing.

No, we're discussing. We're actually setting for public transparency the process that we would use if there were. We can propose it. We're not going to vote for it at this point that we're going to propose a process.

I don't think, though, we can discuss what action we would take on an item that we can't vote on. I believe that we just have to discuss theoretically the processes.

And to be honest with you, we have our legal counsel online. Yeah. And I think that it would be in our best interest to stop our own discussion and allow our legal counsel to speak on this.

Roy, would you like to pop on and address this immediate issue with regard to our conversation on the process that you have laid out, the two options? Sure.

Can you hear me, first of all? Good evening. Can you hear me? OK. Okay, good. So, so I'll be very brief given hours. So I think, you know, board president, can you summarize it? The board has essentially two choices. I know this item is on just for discussion tonight, so you would not be making any decisions, but you certainly can discuss pros and cons, et cetera, of either option. But one is to call for a special election, which is both time requires a resolution. There's also a cost. that can be significant, particularly if the district is one of the few that calls for an election. So you could bear a pretty significant cost to have that election. The others are provisional appointment. And as you noted, at least prior Berkeley boards, when they're in a vacancy, they have gone the provisional appointment route. That doesn't mean you have to do that, but that has been the prior route that prior boards have taken. So big picture, without going through all the details and the amendments that the board received back in May, that's basically your process choices that you have. And then just a parenthetical comment about sort of the Brown Act issue. You can discuss these, but you can't take a vote, and even sort of a small vote will not really be appropriate, that sort of thing. But you absolutely can discuss pros and cons and among you may get a sense of where your colleagues are if you detect pros and cons. But those really are the two choices that are before you now in the event that there is a vacancy, which we now know there will be. And congratulations, by the way, to the board member because of the recent election.

Thank you. This provisional appointment procedure, as you've described, has a number of basic steps just for public transparency and the pros and cons here. We'll just talk it out quickly. As Roy has drafted in his memo, in summary, there's a selection process. And by resolution, the board approves a procedure, which we're not quite at yet. We're just kind of discussing and giving the public an opportunity to understand that there is this process discussion for a potential board member leave or director leave. It's called a provisional appointment of a new board member to fill the vacancy of the outgoing board member. Some of the common procedures for this process. are advertising the local media to solicit candidate applications, establishing a committee ad hoc consisting of less than the quorum of the board to review applicants, interviewing the candidates at a public meeting. I believe that may have happened in the past. Don't quote me. Vote to appoint candidate provisionally to fill the vacancy at that public meeting. And then there's a second step. The first step is kind of that first part of it, public notice of the provisional appointee. Within 10 days of making that provisional appointment, the district must provide notice of the appointment as pursuant to some ed codes and like posting on the website, newspaper, posted in at least three public spaces within the district and formal notice to the County Office of Education of that appointment. And that notice must also state, it's like resignation, date of the vacancy, full name of the provisional appointee, date of appointment, et cetera. Is there a question about this general process?

I have a question, Dr. Kadija.

OK. I do have a question, and I don't know. if you want to turn this over to Council Combs. But I do think that it is important for us before we talk about a procedure, we should talk about timeline and plan backwards. And so if it is possible, Council Combs, could you please advise us on what timeline looks like for us?

Well, in this instance, you do have the provisional appointment need not be made before the vacancy occurs. So that's one thing to keep in mind. There may have been some belief that the appointment needed to occur by June 30th or July 1st. That's actually not the case. You have a broader window of time. But in general, you would make the provisional appointment Within generally 60 days of the vacancy, that would be in this instance, July 1. We're making an assumption about that date with the statute related to the election in the ACLU. The new board member by law takes that seat effective July 1 of 2026. So the board would have to decide sort of the timeline from when it wants to finalize its selection if it chooses the provisional appointment and then work backwards from that date. And again, I don't know if the board would want to have someone in place, for example, before your first board meeting in the next year. I'm not sure exactly what that date would be. But if you were to choose that date, then work backwards from that date.

uh I think director had a question first and sorry vice president yeah so I guess I would like to understand next steps since we have two meetings left and it seems like we are going to need a process in order to fill the upcoming vacancy on our board and so Since that vacancy will take place on July 1, I guess I would like to provide some direction for us as a board to have an action item at the next meeting or the meeting after to to provide direction on a process. But Yeah, so I feel like we do need clarity on what the timeline is gonna look like, what the process is gonna look like, and that needs to happen either next week or the week after. So I guess I'm trying to give direction for that to be agendized and happen. Thank you.

My recommendation would be that we do it next week in case we are not in agreeance so that leaves us our last meeting to utilize that to vote if we need to. So my recommendation would be that we agendize it for action next meeting. But we should really use the 10 minutes, 11 minutes that we have left to just talk about what we want to see as a process. So when we get to next week, we know what we're talking about. And I'm sorry to interrupt Director Korn.

I would love to speak to that. You set me up beautifully. I mean, to the point about after the resignation, we would have 60 days to make an appointment. I appreciate that. And we've just spent a long time being a board of four. And we missed you when you were not here. And I would like to as quickly as possible become a board of five again. So I would like to set ourselves up to be able to make a provisional appointment as efficiently and quickly as possible I've been reviewing the information from I think 2013 the last time there was a resignation on the board and at that point the board appointed an ad hoc committee that was two board members to develop an application and kind of set out a timeline for the process so what I'm hoping we might do as an action item at our next meeting is direct ourselves to identify two of us to kind of hold that process. That's my suggestion.

Director Vasilev.

I have a question for Roy so what's kind of the best practice in terms of like public notice so it feels transparent like what do other districts do to notify that there is a vacancy and there's an application process like if if there were an ad hoc committee kind of what's the bare minimum level and I don't I'm not proposing right that we do the bare minimum that's never my proposal for engagement so let me clarify that off the bat, but kind of what's the standard best practice that districts do so that the public feels like there was enough notice and that they were aware?

Yeah, great question. I'm not sure if there really is a standard practice. You know, CSBA has some recommendations, but I've seen districts give anywhere from five to 14 days notice. of the opening of a vacancy so that individuals can submit either a letter of interest or if the board chooses a more formalized process with an application. So it really does vary. I wouldn't say that there is a standard per se. But if the board wants to solicit openly, then it has discretion on the timeline, whether it's two, three, four, five or more days. to invite individuals who may have an interest in the provisional appointment.

So it could look like, you know, there's a resignation and then there's a short time window where it's posted publicly, right? And then in that first August meeting, the board could take action, something like that.

That's correct. And just one thing, there's nothing that actually would prevent the board necessarily from starting the process, right? Not the appointment. but starting the process before july 1st i'm not suggesting you do that but legally that's not prohibited you could start the process of making an announcement that in a vacancy will occur those individuals who are interested can submit whatever information the board deems would be important

Thank you. Oh, sorry. You have a question? So to follow up with that, just to get the time frames in our heads, because we're off in July, as far as I'm concerned, as well. Roy, you laid out in your memo in step two, it seems like the kind of more rapid timeframes that get triggered are the public notice of the provisional appointee. There's like within 10 days of making a provisional appointee, the district must provide notice. And there's ed code. But before that, like notice for applicants is kind of more vague or it's not specific. I'm sorry for using terms like that. There's no specific timeframe. Is that correct or incorrect?

That's absolutely correct because there's no statutory requirement regarding that timeframe. So the board has discretion on whether to give notice. I mean, as a practical matter, the discussion tonight is beginning to inform people in an informal way who have tuned in that there will be a vacancy. So you're exactly right. There's no formal notice to the public that's required in advance of the board taking action on the provisional appointment. Again, the districts vary as to how much notice they give, but almost all will get some minimum notice and then three to five days at least.

Yeah, three to five days would seem minimum. Okay, I'm sorry, Director Schnassian and Director Brum. And also, I want to keep track of time. We could extend it. It's 11.24.

No, we can't. No. Unfortunately, we cannot extend it.

All right, you're right.

I just want to then agree again with Director Brown that it would be really important for us to agendize this at our next meeting so that we can start the process as soon as possible, especially notifying the public of the vacancy and the process so that we're not taking off July and we are ready to act in August.

Thank you. I had a question for Council Combs again. We can decide tonight who the two members we can appoint or they can raise their hand. the two members who would be interested in working on this and the board could direct them to move forward. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a vote of the board. We don't have to take action. It could just be an appointment or we can accept it as a volunteer signal from the board. Is that correct?

well well so the actual appointment of an ad hoc committee is an action by the board so that would need to occur when this comes back to the board for action but there's nothing tonight for you to discuss who might be interested and so on and so forth and if there's some consensus then at your next meeting you can formalize that with an action

Okay, thank you. So as a formal action, but everyone can kind of think about it. I'm just being wary of the time. Think about who may be interested. Yeah. Any other questions as we have like four minutes left?

So just point of clarity, you're going to agendize at the next meeting who who's going to be on the ad hoc committee?

And the process of confirming action item to form an ad hoc committee to lead the process.

To lead the process and a confirmation for members of the public of the process, which would be, it sounds like.

Right.

We're saying that's going to be an action item next time.

Yes. And as we talk about, we can still discuss, we just have a few more minutes, we can still discuss what feels good in terms of a process. What I'm hearing is that an application might be the best way to move forward. And so I agree with that. And I think that we should move forward with the application process. I think we should put the information out as much as we can as directed by council. I also agree with using with having an ad hoc committee that we will hopefully be able to vote for next meeting and all of this to say that it sounds like an appointment is probably the best route to go versus moving forward with an election.

Yeah, I think I would agree. And I think we have consensus here on that, I believe. And also, some type of public interview process, we'll be discussing that during the action item. But just kind of raise that as one of the things that one of the possibilities that Roy suggested could be offset to. OK, any other questions as we close out? Thank you so much. And Council Combs, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, I'm sorry, Ana Bess.

Just really quickly, you didn't discuss what happens during medical leaves, but I guess you'll just do that next time, the other part of what was agendized.

Yeah, we had agendized some medical leave.

The process for how to handle medical leave issues on the board that was agendized also wasn't discussed.

Yeah, I was meant to address that. So we'll pull that on for next time as well. and you know roy if you have any um kind of support on that in addition to the memo which would i think it requested but it was short notice that'd be great and um we might ask you to jump on you know next time around um i will let you know if that's a possibility okay i appreciate it okay all right good evening thank you council bye-bye sorry we have one hand online and we have one minute left before we have to adjourn

We have one hand on line and we have a minute before we need to, two minutes before we have to adjourn the meeting.

All right, so we have like two minutes to get a hustle of that. Thank you so much. Lindsay Nofelt, she's the one.

Hi, I'll make it really quick. I'd just like you to consider a hybrid option where you make an appointment and then put a special election in with the regular November election so that the public has a chance. You can't do that. The CSBA says that you can. So you could appoint a member of the board to serve until the November election, and then in that January, you could have a duly elected new member of the school board please consider letting the public have more of a voice in uh somebody who will sit there for another two years thank you thank you do we have any other um okay great and we have we are adjourned thank you so much

I'm going to turn off for a second.

Thank you.