Board of Education - Regular Meeting

Ready? Thank you for everyone's patience. Sorry, we had a little bit longer closed session than expected. Reconvening to open session, pardon me, as regards to the appeal of the student record change, we granted the student record change in part, denied it in part, and gave directions to staff to follow up on that. ALSO PRIOR TO GOING TO CLOSED SESSION, THE BOARD GRANTED TRUSTEE KAHN TO BE ABLE TO JOIN THE MEETING REMOTELY DUE TO JUST CAUSE FOR A FAMILY EMERGENCY. I THINK WE NOW NEED TO DO A ROLL CALL.

TRUSTEE KAHN?

I CONFIRM THERE'S NO ONE IN THE ROOM WITH ME AND I'M PRESENT. TRUSTEE BOYD?

Here.

Trustee Hopwood? Here. Vice President Inglis? Here. President Mahoney? Here. Superintendent Stoughton?

Here.

Thank you.

We're going to move on to the Pledge of Allegiance. I now ask for a reading of the foundational commitments. Maybe we'll just do a rotation with our student board members not here, and I'll exempt Trustee Khan, given she's a remote. I'll put you on, I'll have you start us up, Trustee Boyd.

Okay, so I'm just going AUSD vision, right?

Yeah, you got that. Okay. Each and every student, that's where, okay, it's a big moment.

Each and every student is empowered to realize their fullest potential, ready to lead, contribute, and thrive in an ever-changing world through the support of a diverse, engaged, and committed community.

Mission, Albany Unified School District provides an excellent public education that empowers every student to achieve their fullest potential. We honor the unique ways students learn and are committed to creating inclusive, supportive, and collaborative learning environments. By valuing individual strengths, celebrating differences, and fostering critical thinking, we ensure that every student is prepared to contribute to a just and joyful world and thrive as productive members of society.

Core values, number one, we believe in equity and excellence. Every student deserves access to high quality, rigorous, and inclusive learning experiences that honor their potential and ensure they are prepared to thrive.

Two, we believe in student-centered learning. Students flourish when they experience agency, belonging, and wellness in safe, supportive environments designed to meet their individual needs.

Three, we believe in collaborative leadership. Shared leadership and transparent accountable systems are crucial for building trust, driving improvement and fostering a culture of learning.

Four, we believe in honoring individual strengths. Each student brings unique gifts, identities and ways of learning. Recognizing and valuing these differences is foundational to meaningful education.

Five, we believe in the power of community partnership. When educators, students, families, and community partners work together, we create schools where everyone belongs and every student is empowered to lead, contribute, and thrive.

Board nomes and code of conduct. One, focus on what's best for students and ensure a respectful environment. Two, value diverse perspectives, act with dignity and professionalism. Three, maintain distinction between board and staff roles. Four, commit to continuous learning and professional development. Okay, look we can do it too. Okay, we're on to number four. Can I get an approval of the meeting agenda?

I move to approve the meeting agenda as is. I second.

All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Great, motion passes. Now we're gonna move on to the general public comment for items not on the agenda. A few ground rules. Each speaker has two minutes. The time cannot be transferred to another speaker. This period is for matters not on tonight's agenda. Under the Brown Act, the board cannot take action or discuss non-agendized items. Comments to be made here reflect the views of individual speakers. The board has no way to verify the accuracy of statements made at the podium, and we encourage you to seek the information through official district channels. And finally, if your comment involved a complaint against a specific district employee, this is not an inappropriate forum. Board policy requires such matters to be handled through the district's complaint process, either Board Policy 1312.1 for employee complaints or Board Policy 1312.3 for uniform complaint procedures. End of phrase here. Must be referred to closed session to protect employees' due process rights. Do we have any comments from the room? Go ahead, you have two minutes.

Hi, our group of elementary age parents would like to read a letter aloud to the board in four parts with four separate speakers, and we'll send this letter to the board after this meeting. Here's the first part. Dear Albany School Board members, a few months ago, parents at Marin Elementary began sharing their kids' experiences with technology at school. Some of us had children reeling from burnout, overstimulation, anxiety, and headaches due to screens. Others lacked a clear picture of the EdTech landscape and wanted to understand more. We shared a striking lack of insight into the devices and applications our children use each day, how they're chosen, how often they're in use, and what purposes they serve. As we asked questions, we learned that, along with advertisements and Gemini, AI-powered assistive autocomplete was enabled on our students, our elementary-age students' Chromebooks. Teachers told us they couldn't turn it off, despite having raised concerns months, by some accounts, a full year before. We were alarmed. How could our kids develop foundational writing and reading skills when their tools were offering to write, spell, and even read for them?

The more we learned, the more alarmed we became. There is a growing body of evidence that screen use in education offers little benefit to young learners and may actively harm them. Children reading on paper demonstrate greater attention and deeper rereading behaviors, while screen readers tend to skim. When there is an in-app benefit, there is a well-documented lack of transfer from devices to other contextual settings. There is a negative correlation between device use and academic outcomes across mathematics, science, and reading, as well as between screen time and mental and physical health outcomes. Perhaps most troubling, device use has actually a gap widening effect. Negative outcomes are outsized for otherwise disadvantaged students. We partnered with school leadership to survey teachers, parents, students, and caregivers. Survey results indicated that while Marin teachers are generally comfortable with the level of technology they choose to use in their own classrooms, they worry about its effectiveness and costs broadly, with student well-being, both mental and physical, cited as a particular concern. While teachers list some benefits, such as differentiation, engagement, and classroom management, they flag concerns about overall screen time levels and the adoption of AI-assisted technologies.

Thank you. Next speaker.

The 171 parents and caregivers who responded to our survey were largely unconvinced of the benefits of screen use for the TK through fifth age group. They expressed dismay at their lack of insight into technology decisions at school, a shared sense that current screen time levels are excessive, and confusion over the logic behind particular applications and sites available to students, such as YouTube. Caregivers mourned what students lose to screens, time for play, human connection, and real-world interaction. as well as the harms, loss of privacy, difficulty focusing, stress, and anxiety. Parents and caregivers also pointed to school districts now choosing to limit digital technology in the elementary grades, including the LA School District, which is joining a movement from Vermont to Mississippi toward paper-first learning. The trend is global. Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, countries with excellent academic track records, are removing screens from classrooms in response to plummeting performance indicators. As a small district, Albany has an opportunity to lead on this issue. The school district has already taken one step in the right direction. Autocomplete was turned off a few weeks ago. Our kids can now write stories and reports for themselves in their own unique voices. But this isn't the story of one erroneous setting. Autocomplete was a symptom of a larger problem, starting with the fact that it was enabled in the first place. Teachers raised concerns. Parents raised concerns. Principal Poole raised concerns. It took months, by some accounts years, before the setting changed. That process and timeline should concern us all.

Thank you. Next speaker.

The pace of technological change doesn't allow for a slow, lengthy or one-off process. Here in Albany, we need a stable set of values and practices to guide responsible decisions about technology adoption and use. Screens carry significant trade-offs. We should shift from automatic adoption of tools to careful deliberation over them. Any technology adoption or renewal decisions should rely on independent evidence of learning gains that transfer across contexts, weighed against the inherent costs of screen time, the risks of harm to students, and the implications for the privacy and mental health of students and their families. These decisions should be public and transparent, and invite public comment from all teachers and caregivers. We should clarify what screens are for in our schools and set age appropriate maximum screen time standards. We should distinguish between engagement and learning and use screens for the latter and sparingly, if at all, for the former. For years, our system has nudged teachers towards digital formats with limited training. We should actively support teachers exploring analog alternatives. We share a goal to raise critical thinkers and empathetic leaders, children who use digital tools but are not used by them, who are educated in a system centered on them and not their screens. We are grateful for the engagement from teachers, parents, students, board members, and district staff on this issue, and we look forward to working together to reimagine classroom technology at the elementary level. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Good evening, superintendent and school board. My name is Julie Legrand. I am the parent of a rising junior at the high school and two rising eighth graders, one at AMS and one who had to be removed from the district due to a mental health crisis, driven in part by technology's impact on her developing brain. I'm saying that not for sympathy, but because it's the reason I'm here tonight, to open a dialogue around the impacts of technology that it's having on our kids. For some families, it's not having a negative impact on learning. For others like mine, it is a matter of life and death. Now, I'm not just a parent. I am a student of industrial organizational psychology at Harvard, where I'm focused in large part on the intersection of technology and the well-being, motivation, and productivity of our human workers. And there are several concerning trends in this area that I believe that also apply to the classroom. In his book, The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haake documents a generation-wide surge in anxiety, depression, and self-harm, tracing it directly to the rise of smartphones and social media. The evidence of these facts is so strong that on March 25, a California jury found that not just Meta, but Google, aka YouTube, was negligent for deliberately engineering addictive features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, and algorithmic recommendations that causes serious mental health harm to young users. So we now know that YouTube causes harm. And yet, we still provide YouTube to our children on school Chromebooks. The fact is that YouTube is a form of social media, and this makes the game of whack-a-mole we're playing with our kids at home that much harder. My ask is simple. By August 12th, like you recently did with AI, I'm begging you to block YouTube on school Chromebooks as well. Teachers who want to share videos can do so by projecting it for the whole class. This sends a message to families. Thank you for your consideration.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Hi. Oh, shoot. Hi, my name is Addie Wilson, and I'm a rising seventh grader at AMS. I'm here to talk about the Chromebook usage at AUSD schools. As my time at Marin Elementary from first grade, we were on laptops. In fairness, it was COVID-19. Second grade, we did Reflex on iPads and Fast Bridge. Third and fourth grade, we wrote a few essays and we were on happy numbers. In fifth and sixth grade, people started using YouTube and AI and had group chats on Chromebooks via Google Docs. Being on Chromebooks my whole elementary time in COVID. Our grammar sucks because of the Chromebook auto-corrects. If we were writing on paper, our grammar, spelling, and sentence tracker would skyrocket test scores. As a district who's worried about mental health and wellness, we should kick out social media and AI for good.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Hi, my name is Maria Wilson, and I am a parent of two students, one at Marin and one at AMS. I support the preceding speakers, especially Ms. Legrand. YouTube has no place in our schools. My experience, educational technology has not served my rising seventh grader. She has had access to tools like autocorrect, autocomplete, and AI in writing class. These tools, which were given on district-issued Chromebook devices, are too tempting to use and too tempting to rely on. They should have no place in writing class. This cohort of kids suffered from learning on screens due to COVID. They are now continuing to suffer from over-reliance on tech in classrooms. As we head into August, I request the district adopt a concrete policy to remove Chromebooks from writing class, YouTube from the classrooms, so the students can learn, write, and district teachers can actually review and assess and improve the children's writing skills and not the output of AI or other autocorrect or autocomplete tools.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Good evening. I'm Mark Wilson. I am the proud parent of two kids, one at AMS and one at Marin. I don't want to take too much time because I believe there's other members of our group online who I'd love to let them tell their anecdotes and their stories. What I would implore this board to do is school starts August 12th. Please listen to me. Do something. Don't... convene a committee, don't like do something. You're hearing concrete ideas from parents. In writing classes, take the Chromebooks and YouTube out of the writing classes. Be a leader. Be the board that we need you guys to be. There's other districts who are acting and implementing policy that is taking away these harmful AIs and social medias from our children. Albany is supposed to be the gold standard of schools. It's why all these parents move here. This board needs to rise to the occasion. This summer, put together a plan. Get AI Chromebooks at least out of our writing classes. That's one step you can take. Do one step. I'm the first to admit there might be some nuances with some of this AI policy, maybe at the high school level, maybe in seventh and eighth grade. But no one can make a real argument that our kids in a writing class need access to AI or need access to YouTube to write sentences and paragraphs. So just be the board that Albany deserves. You have till August 12th. I implore you, take some action. Don't just listen to public comment. Don't just listen to people who are showing up, but take some action. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Unrelated topic, but I've known Jared Law to be a thoughtful, courageous, principled educator with unimpeachable integrity. I'm grateful to have Jared Law as a colleague and a union leader. Back in 2022, Jared and I navigated a serious emergency together, and I watched Jared Law put everyone else's needs before his own and do everything he could to help students through a really tough situation. He's reflective, holds himself to a high standard, and consistently applies an uncompromising ethical lens. He readily takes accountability when he has made a mistake. Jared Law is not perfect, but Jared Law is his own harshest critic, maybe second harshest critic. Over the past year, Jared has been a leader in making sure large language models don't steal learning opportunities from our students and making sure that we as a staff have a consistent response when they do. Protecting academic integrity has probably always been a really thankless job, but it seems recently like it's the quickest way to become the target of a foam-flecked screed. I just really want to say thank you, Jared Law. Thank you for everything you contribute to Albany Middle School. Thank you for the positive impact you've had on so many people across the district, from the preschoolers who don't have to share the annex with eighth graders to the now graduates you taught as a substitute when you first came to the district.

Thank you. Next speaker.

My name is Michael Golner. I'm a proud parent of a fourth grader at Marin Elementary. So I'm with the previous group. That was up here. You know, honestly, this wasn't even something on my radar until other parents started talking about this, and we talked to our own son and realized, wait, it's auto-completing your sentences? Well, yeah, it's easier if you click Tab, and we don't have to think about the rest. But it doesn't always say what we mean, but it's usually good enough. The landscape is changing quickly. I know this because I'm a professor at UC Berkeley, and so I teach students. And the AI landscape is changing in front of our eyes. One year, you don't see much. The next year, it solves all the homework and the exams for you. And suddenly, you have to change and shift. And so what I'm really advocating for is that we're thoughtful and that we're responsive and that we're talking with parents, talking with our educators, not just our leaders, but the teachers in the classroom, And really working together to see what our needs are and make sure that we're using technology in a thoughtful manner. Because I think these things are going to continue to change. And what we decide this year may be very different next year. And the landscape may change. And so we need this continuous thought and look at it. And I hope that we continue to use technology with thought and purpose for our children. Thank you.

Thank you. Anyone else in the room? Great. We'll go to Zoom. Go ahead. You're on.

Hi, I actually think that my comment is related to one of the agenda items. So should I raise my hand later on when that gets discussed?

Yes, that would be more appropriate. Thank you.

I will do that later.

Thank you. Seeing no other comments on Zoom, we'll move on to the next part of our agenda, which is the up. Sorry, hold on. Oops, sorry. Go ahead.

Hi there. My name is David Espin. I'm a father of a rising first grader and fourth grader. I'm also a former technology industry employee. And I just wanted to call in and say I support this letter and this initiative to get Chromebooks and AI out of the classrooms. Our children will be exposed to this one way or another. Many of their future careers will involve this technology and what it'll continue morphing into. And I hope that we can expose the two of them when it's necessary but not too early it definitely we can see how it informs our thinking and learning and how our thought processing changes as adults this is such a critical time for them to be learning and they're just giant sponges so i'm hoping you will listen and we can make this change together thank you great thank you uh next call next person on zoom go ahead you're on you're up

Hi, my name is Denise. I have a rising second grader at Marin Elementary. I just want to say that I don't think our elementary school age children should be spending any appreciable amount of time on tablets. And my comment is brief. And that's all I wanted to say. Thank you.

Great. Thank you. Okay. We'll now move on to our reports, starting with our labor partners. Does anyone from our labor partner want to speak on their behalf?

Just a really short update from ATA tonight. We were encouraged by the May revise and look forward to a better round of bargaining starting early next school year. Thank you.

Thank you, no rest for the weary. Okay, is there a superintendent report this evening?

I AM NOT GOING TO GIVE A REPORT SINCE WE HAVE OUR VITAL SCIENCE PRESENTATION TODAY AND I WILL BE SPEAKING AT THAT POINT.

BOARD COMMITTEE UPDATES. I'LL START WITH TRUSTEE BOYD.

OKAY. QUICKLY. SO THIS PAST WEEK I HAD THE CHANCE TO ATTEND THE STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT LAST WEEK. LAST WEEK. THE STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT COMMITTEE LAST MEETING OF THE SCHOOL YEAR. where we got to review end of year data and it was just, I had the opportunity to engage in really thoughtful, interesting conversations around the best way to serve our students and the best ways to make all of our students feel that they are capable of achieving great And it was really inspiring. So that was a wonderful meeting. Appreciate Karen Shriner for leading those meetings. And then also a little bit back now, but we had our final equity council meeting where we got to see the mural that was created. And it was a great chance this year to be able to start working with leaders from all of our various parent engagement groups. It's difficult work sometimes because we all have our specific and specific concerns, very real concerns, especially in this day and age, but important groundwork I think is being laid for us to be able to work together and solve problems in our district that are going to benefit all of our students.

Great, Trustee Hopwood.

Not really a committee update as much as another appreciation for Karen Schreiner. I was fortunate enough to be observing at the ILT meetings this year and have really enjoyed those and really appreciate the way that she has run them so thoughtfully and they were so productive, thank you.

Vice President Inglis.

I just have one. So as part of my role on the Giltrack Farm Advisory Committee, I had the pleasure of going on a hour and a half long tour at the Giltrack Farm a couple of weeks ago. I met the Giltrack staff. I met EDGESET students. And as part of that tour, I visited stations that were hosted by the EDGESET students. It was set up to demonstrate what a elementary school field trip might look like for kids, which is outdoors and really fantastic. In the fall, I will attend my first Dean's Advisory Committee, which is a new or maybe a revamped committee to talk about ways that AUSD, Giltrack Farm, and the City of Albany can work better together to support the farm and support the students.

Thank you. At the end of May, I attended the Citizens Bond Oversight Committee. I think Aaron's gonna be presenting later today, though I don't see him in the room, so I'm nervous. But I won't spoil it, because that's a report we're gonna talk about later. Also, I was on, met with the Tech Master Planning Committee to get feedback on the current draft of the plan. I just wanna say thank you to all the teachers, parents, students, and administrators that have given their time. It's a journey. I think we made some progress in outlining some initial structures and identifying some of the gaps that we need to address in the fall. I believe a document will be presented at the next board meeting for discussion. I think now we're on to board member reports. Oh, sorry, you're right. Thank you. Thank you, Trustee Boyd. I'm so sorry, Trustee Cahn, go ahead.

No worries. Tracy Boyd already covered most of what I was going to say, but I did want to give a quick thank you and appreciation for Vice President Inglis, actually. While not a formal committee, the fundraising collaborative meetings that she's been hosting alongside all of our PTAs and various fundraising groups in Albany has led to a lot of productive conversations and just thoughtful discussions about how to fill some of the gaps that we're seeing with what can and cannot be done inside and outside of the classroom to support our students' education. I just really, really appreciate her efforts and just the very thoughtful way in which she's engaged everyone and kept everybody going and the goals that she's helped us set for the next school year.

Thank you, Trustee Cahn, and apologies. We'll figure this out. The remote is always tricky. I'll go back to Trustee Boyd for a board report.

I'll just share that I got to attend two end of year ceremonial celebrations, the Cornell fifth grade promotion and the Albany Middle School eighth grade promotion. Just so wonderful, such excited students, such wonderful writings from the fifth graders sharing their poems and their reflections on fifth grade. Just so much joy and pride and it was wonderful and at the AMS eighth grade promotion where my daughter was promoted I It's okay, but thank you I just want to share the the tradition of doing the welcome in all of the various languages from our students backgrounds It's just glorious. It is so incredibly wonderful. I love it so much it speaks to a so much of what we hold dear in this district and it's just really very special and I It makes me one of the many reasons it makes me proud to to be a member of this district Perfect.

I'm gonna go to trustee Khan next because I'm gonna try and remember things. Trustee Khan anything for your board report?

I think similar to trustee Boyd really enjoyed attending the ocean view promotion partially because my child promoted, but I didn't expect to have so many tears that day. But I also wanted to share appreciation for all of the staff and teachers who have helped just make the last week. Wonderful all across our school. all of our school sites with just showing up for our kiddos, whether it's field day celebrations, what have you, it's been wonderful to see what's been happening across all of our sites.

Thank you. Trustee Hopwood.

Add to the last week of school appreciation. I attended eighth grade promotion, totally second what Trustee Boyd just said about that. Welcome in different languages. Also the Marin promotion and the high school graduation. And then on Monday, yesterday morning, I was so excited to be invited to the Albany Children's Center for Singing, which was just the best way, as I said to Director Reed yesterday, that was the best way of starting the week. Half an hour of little kids singing in English and Spanish, so super impressive, with an amazing teacher, Ana Maria, who came in and has been teaching them for the last number of weeks, I think 17 weeks, so that was a great start. I have another part of my board report, which is, I've written it down so I don't want to take too long. I know we have a packed agenda tonight, but relating to Measure V and how we're doing with implementing that. So just a quick background that in November 2024, Albany voters passed Measure V to amend the city charter to reduce the minimum voting age the municipal and school district elections to 16 years old. So it would allow 16 and 17 year old residents to vote for both candidates and ballot measures in Albany municipal and school district elections provided they are obviously United States citizens and registered to vote. They can't vote in other elections, they can't be elected. But passing Measure V did not automatically implement youth voting. In fact, the new Section 6.04 of the city charter, which Measure V authorized, states that implementation shall be postponed until the Board of Education, by ordinance or resolution, finds that the Alameda County Registrar of Voters can feasibly accommodate a school district election. It includes persons 16 and 17 years old as electors at a cost-effective price for the service. So at half every meeting, I was appointed by the board to research cost and feasibility. Since then, I've engaged with our superintendent as well as a coalition of partners from neighbouring districts excuse me, representatives from the Alameda County Office of Education, Oakland Kids First, and the Alameda County Registrar of Voters, all coordinated by former Berkeley Unified board member, Oakland Unified Legal Counsel, and general youth voting champion, Josh Daniels. Just over a week ago, we heard from the Registrar of Voters regarding the estimated cost of implementing youth voting in Albany. which amounts to just over $83 per youth voter, as well as a one-time payment of $5,500 to reimburse the city of Oakland and Berkeley Unified for our share of the setup costs that they incurred. Currently, we have just over 80 16 and 17-year-olds preregistered, and a total of 373 students who'll be 16 or 17 by November. So those are our students in the district. We may have others, obviously, that attend out-of-district schools. I've also been working with our legal counsel, who has reviewed the existing memorandum of understanding between the county, Berkeley Unified, and the cities of Oakland and Berkeley, as there is a provision in the MOU for additional jurisdictions to join through an amendment or addendum. So he and his colleague are liaising with Alameda County's counsel to facilitate that, as all the other parties to the MOU would need to sign off on us joining. So that's our biggest challenge, is the ROV would need us to formalise our intention by the end of this month in order for us to implement youth voting this November. By the way, it took Berkeley and Oakland eight and four years respectively to implement, so just to set expectations. I've almost finalised a resolution to bring to the board for adoption at our next meeting, which is now on June the 18th. If an amendment to the MOU has been completed by then, it will be attached to the resolution and also brought to the board. If we are unable to meet the June deadline, we will need to postpone implementation until 2028. So that is my update on what is happening with Measure V, but it's looking a lot more promising in the last week, and it's really just a matter of trying to get these last parts of the process formalized. So thank you.

Thank you for the update. Thank you for all your hard work. And I'm still jealous that you got to go to the ACC for the singing morning. So I'll go over to Vice President Inglis.

I have no update except I also attended one of the graduations, the high school graduation, which was amazing. I do have a graduate, I have a son who graduated, so it was personal, yep. Thank you. And yeah, it was a great day. A little hot, but great day.

It was definitely hot. I've got a few things, unfortunately, for you guys. You'll have to listen to these. So May, I went to the student presentation on their visit to the HBCUs. And I just really want to shout it out. It was amazing to see these young people, their maturity, how they bonded as a group and kind of had a sense of belonging. Because I'm such a big believer that finding a group of your people is one of the most important things to be able to navigate high school and beyond. And so this is one of those things that kind of really warmed my heart. Along with Trustee Hopwood, I was able to be part of the committee to select a new student board member, Charlie Bolas-Small, who was here at our last half board meeting. I got to attend Shabbat at Ocean View, which was great. Chatted to a bunch of people. It was a lovely way to kind of finish up the school year for that group. I was able to attend the AHS PTA meeting as they wrap up the year, and I want to kind of shout them out. That group is small, their funding is dwarfed by our other PTAs, but their thoughtfulness around the high school block party and the way they made graduation a success and feel special was just terrific, and I also, as a parent of a graduating senior, very much appreciated it. And then he did all the work, not me. And then I attended the Oceanview PTA meeting as well as the fifth grade promotion ceremony. And that was super well run. And I loved the student enthusiasm. It was more craziness from students in terms of energy than I've seen in a long, and in a constructive way. It was just terrific. So as many of you know, my son graduated from high school on Friday, and earlier that day, as I mentioned, I had the opportunity to go to the Ocean View fifth grade promotion and hear the speeches given by some of the fifth graders. And that sort of took me back on memory lane. My son actually gave one of those speeches at his fifth grade promotion at Marin, shout out Ms. Donovan, and I remember a lot of it. He gave kind of the it takes a village speech, where you think not only his teachers, but the parents, custodians, clerical staff, and everyone who helped kind of make the elementary school what it was. And so one of the things I've tried to get better myself up as I age is of telling those people that have had a positive impact on my life and on the life of my kids that they've done so. And at the high school graduation, I was able to do that. I was able to connect with a bunch of teachers and coaches from my son and my daughter and thank them for being part of the community that changed my kids' lives. I know there are a lot more people that have had an impact on my kids in the school district than I was able to speak to. And I want to thank them for their impact, not only on my kids, but of all the students in the district. So thanks to all the teachers, principals, administrators, security staff, custodians, clerical staff. Probably by listing that I probably left somebody out, so I apologize for all the work you've done. And I also want to thank my fellow board members. You guys put in hundreds of hours of work, show up with thoughtful questions, curious mind, and a focus on kids. For that, I thank you. Moving on, I want to give a little bit of a PSA, which Trustee Hopwood alluded to. Our next board meeting is going to be moved to the 18th to make sure that we can get a quorum from the board. Unfortunately, that means we won't be able to use this room, so we will likely not be on KALB, but we still have Zoom, and we'll figure out how we can still be able to see us on Zoom streaming, still be able to comment on Zoom streaming, and still show up in person as well. And that, I think, is our board reports. And I think we go on to our first review, first and only review and discussion item, vital signs. Executive Director Schreiner.

You know, I gotta test the clicker first, Jill. Okay, excellent. Good evening, Dr. Stone, President Mahoney, trustees, staff, and community. Thank you all for being here tonight. We're really excited to present our end of year vital signs, which is our annual look at how students are doing across Albany and what the data tells us about how we're doing now and where we're headed in the future. And we'll be digging into all three of our LCAP goal areas. I'm gonna focus on goal one, which is focused on equitable and inclusive instruction, which we'll get to shortly. And then some of my colleagues will join for the other components of our LCAP update. Okay, before we get into the actual data, just a quick framing for those who are new to this format. Three times a year, beginning, middle, and end, we bring a data check in that we call Vital Signs. It's really like the health checkup when you go to a doctor. And our purpose is really that. Are our LCAP goals actually moving? Are we actually making progress? Where are we making progress? Where are we not? What do we need to do about it? I'm going to get there. And just for some grounding, our LCAP, our Local Control and Accountability Plan, it's a three-year plan organized around three big goals. The first is equitable and inclusive instruction, as I mentioned before. Whole child development and belonging, it centers around goal two. And our third is focused on collaborative systems for continuous improvement. Our three priorities this year align to each of those goals, and they have come from a variety of different sources over time, a listening campaign, observational data, our academic data, our student survey data, cross-district working groups, and so we're excited to share how things are going thus far this year and where we are looking in the future. Of course, our goals, we want to make them measurable, and so we'll be sharing specifically related to what our quantitative goals were and where we have met the goals, where we've come close, and where we've exceeded them. So I'll start us off here with our work around equitable and inclusive instruction so that all students have access to high-quality instruction and instruction that really removes barriers for them and supports their growth. And I'm gonna start here. This is really a summary slide to sort of share at a glance what we're really excited about and where there's more work to do. And I wanna lead with some really exciting news because it is really exciting. 82% of our elementary students are reading at or above grade level. And that's a 12 percentage point improvement from where we started the year. And when we look at our data last year, which granted we were using a different assessment, FastBridge, so it's not apples to apples, but we were around 74% proficient at the end of last year. So that's real meaningful growth from end of year to end of year. When we look at our focal student groups, our black and African-American students grew 20 percentage points, our Latino students grew 13 percentage points, and our multilingual learners grew 16 percentage points, more than the typical average. That's not small news. That's a really big deal. And that's the result directly of the hard work of our teachers and our elementary principals and our leadership teams. We haven't met our goal of 85%. And disproportionality does still persist across our elementary schools. So there's more continued work to do there. But we're really excited about some of those early gains this year. In our middle school, our outcomes remained relatively stagnant with some declines in our student groups, and we'll dig into that data too. So this chart shows that elementary growth that we were just talking about from beginning of year to the end of year. And the other piece that I haven't named yet, in addition to that incredible growth that we've seen so far, is we've almost cut in half the number of students who are at high risk for future reading difficulty. And knowing how predictive this assessment is of students' future reading outcomes, that's really exciting. This is not in my talking points. I'm going off script here. But I just came from a really exciting six-hour retreat with all of our instructional leaders and teacher leaders across the district. And one of the teachers said, not just to me, but to their whole table, said, you know, I saw such incredible growth for my students this year, more than I've ever seen. And I really attribute to the support they got during wind time. And so we've had, we put some new systems in place this year, and we're excited that we're seeing that direct result from them. And cool to hear teachers name that too. When we look by site, all of our elementary sites made gains. Cornell is at 81% proficiency. Marin at 85%. They hit our goal. And Ocean View, 78%, growing 18 percentage points in a year. That's incredible, incredible growth, knowing that their students at the start of the year needed significant support. And that kind of growth doesn't happen by accident and is a great testament to the work done. When we look by grade level, almost every grade level saw growth as well. So really just wanting to name a few here. Our kindergarten team across the district, students grew 27 percentage points. 83% of kindergartners are proficient. I mean, that's just life-changing for kids. To really be ready for first grade and be readers and not need intervention is just absolutely incredible. I tell our kindergarten teachers all the time, y'all are unicorns. for many different reasons, but the amount of work that goes into teaching a five-year-old the basic literacy is incredibly complex and so important. And we're excited as a K2 team to continue the phonics pilot next year and have an adoption, and we're really hopeful and excited that we're gonna see continued gains in those lower grades from that alignment work that our team is doing together. And we see less gains in the upper elementary, and we're really trying to dig into that, understand why. There's definitely more work to do for our students who are needing more support. And it can be challenging to close that gap in just a year once students hit the upper elementary grades, which is why we're excited to see some of those really big gains early on. This slide here shows a glimpse into our work with a real equity lens in mind when it comes to thinking about the students that we serve and holding a lens on race. Our black and African-American students grew 20 percentage points this year in their proficiency, up to 74% proficient, which is really incredible. And our Latino students made outsized gains as well. The gap you can see represented by that dotted horizontal line, which sort of marks the end of year where the average student, all students together, scored. And you can see that that disproportionality exists. So while that accelerated growth happened, we still have more work to do. holding a different lens on some of our focal student groups who we are working to support with an equity lens in particular. Our multilingual learners are at about 54% proficient, which is 16 point gain from the start of the year. And I want to pause here for a moment because one of the benefits that we saw of wind time this year was, which is a structured time that students can get support for whatever it is they need support in. One of the benefits was so our students who are multilingual learners are not being pulled out of their ELA time. in order to get instruction in the English language. So we're really excited to see those gains, and also wanna name that that number of students really varies across the year, which is why that asterisk is there. When students enter the school year, they might be classified as an English learner, and then be reclassified as English proficient. And so it's a little bit of a tricky data point to pin down. And in fact, a week before we pulled this data, I think we had 23 multilingual learners reclassify who would have lived within those percentages. So it's just to sort of name that. OK, this is the slide that was confusing for all of us, myself including last time. So we're going to all do a better job this time around. This slide is really helpful because it tells the story of what happened for students who began the year at different starting points. So of the students who started the year at or above benchmark, which was about 1,000 of our K-5 students, 95% stayed there all year. And that's really the gold standard. 95% or more of students remaining in that at or above proficiency band tells us that our systems are working for students who are already on track, which is great. Of the students who started the year below benchmark, 65% are now at or above. That's incredible. It means 2 thirds of students who were behind made accelerated growth. And now they're either meeting grade level standards or they're exceeding. And of the students who started well below benchmark, our students with the highest needs, more than half of them made accelerated growth, growing at least one proficiency band. So more work to do there to support our students with the greatest need, but just really a testament, again, to our teachers and our leaders putting some really strong tiered systems in place this year. Shifting now to our middle school, we're gonna look at our STAR reading data, which, again, was a new assessment this year. We started the year, or excuse me, we're ending the year with 77% of our middle school students meeting or exceeding grade level standards in reading, which is a slight decrease to percentage points from the start of the year. When we look by grade level, seventh grade accounts for most of that movement. Proficiency there declined three points from the beginning of the year. But at the same point, or at the same time, the share of seventh graders in the well below category also did drop. So what we're seeing is there's some movement there for the students who are at some risk. I know our AMS leadership team and the department leadership team are actively thinking about this assessment and how to better set students up for success next year. So with a couple different pieces, right? So one is some more training around how to understand and read and use the assessment to drive changes, as well as the fact that it's computer adaptive, right? So that means if I'm a sixth grade student and I'm actually doing a really great job, the questions that I'm going to see get harder. in that 20 minute period where I'm taking that assessment. And if I don't know that as a student, that might be really intimidating or that might be really scary. And if I don't understand that, that that means I'm actually doing awesome, that can be tricky. So we're working to really calibrate there. When we look again with that equity lens in mind, wanting to be direct in name that our black students in particular experienced a decline this year in proficiency with 49% of students meeting or exceeding, 49% of our black students meeting or exceeding standard, which is a 15 point decrease from the beginning of the year. So something that we have questions and curiosity about so that we can really ensure that there's some responsive plans in place next year for students to get their needs met, whether that's through targeted support or intervention classes, et cetera. For our Latino students, 12% are now well below standard, which is actually a five-point decrease, so fewer students in that high-need category. And then similarly, holding a lens on some of our other focal student groups who we're really trying to make sure that we support. There's some positive news here with our multilingual learners. While it's not the data we want to see yet, but we are really seeing that decrease in our multilingual learners who are well below benchmark 19 point. DECREASE FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR, WHICH IS NOT INSIGNIFICANT. THAT POPULATION OF STUDENTS HAS SHRUNK REALLY SIGNIFICANTLY, AND THERE'S A LOT OF UNIQUE SUPPORTS THAT THE MIDDLE SCHOOL DOES PUT IN PLACE THERE FOR OUR MULTILINGUAL LEARNERS, AND SEEING THE PAYOFF, THOUGH, IT TAKES TIME, ESPECIALLY IF YOU'RE A LONG-TERM, EXCUSE ME, IF YOU'RE A NEWER TO THE COUNTRY OR A NEWER TO ALBANY TO BE ABLE TO MAKE THAT GROWTH. And the last piece I want to name on this slide is also for our students with disabilities, where the percentage of students there who are advanced has actually almost doubled. Again, not the numeric proficiency we want to see yet, but from 10% of the students being advanced to 18% is really impactful for those students. Shifting next, and I think the last data point when it comes to academics, is a little bit of a snapshot at our reclassification data for our multilingual learners. We have 348 multilingual learners across our system. This year we reclassified 95 of those students, which is not a small number. And one thing to sort of mention, and we talked about this at the middle of your Vital Signs is that Right now, our reclassification process does not happen on a consistent timeline, which can make reporting the data also a little tricky. And so one of the things we'll be working on with our ELD team next year is actually to create some common reclassification timelines so that we're following that kind of common process that we think will be supportive. And so in summary, well, I guess not really in summary, looking ahead to next year when we think about this data and where we want to move forward, there's really four things that we're working to do. One is to continue to deepen our literacy focus with our new fish tank curriculum, continuing our phonics adoption. And we're excited to have some systems and structures next year for teachers to have protected time to dig into that work. So our ELD teachers are going to be collaborating with our classroom teachers to really think, when I'm teaching a unit on habitats, for example, what are the language supports that would really benefit students? We're excited for that collaboration to happen. And again, I mentioned earlier, again, sort of growing up script here, but it was a really powerful thing to leave this six hour long retreat with this group of 36 educators across Albany who are really excited to be doing this work, whether as principals, assistant principals, or as teacher leaders. and are excited, I think, about the systems and structures we're trying to put in place and really build that teacher leadership capacity across our system. One of the teachers said, I was looking through the survey responses today and I just felt so, just feeling in such an optimistic space for next year. And one of our teachers said, you know, I felt so heard and respected and today felt really healing after a really tough year. And another teacher said, I feel like our instructional leadership teams are really set up to do great focused work next year. I'm so excited. And so I share that excitement with them. And I'll close out my section and hand it over to Deb. Come on up.

Great. Thank you, Director Schreiner. And hello to our board, superintendent, community, and staff. Thank you all for being here. Before I jump in, I also just want to just say a really big thank you to Michelle Sinclair and, in particular, our teacher on special assignment, Dan Gottheiner, who put an incredible amount of time and effort into pulling a lot of this data for us. going back and forth about like, actually, I'd really like to see it. Could you pull it this way or what if this or what if that and really was incredibly responsive. I think in all my years of Albany, this is the best we've ever done as a district of really having data at our fingertips, which I think you can see what that allows us to do in terms of actually planning and being responsive and using the data the way it's meant to be used. So I'm really excited about that. So I'm getting into the student belonging piece. Yes, it's working. Perfect. I always like to really state this piece that I know everybody knows, but I think is still important to ground us in, which is that we care about student belonging in and of itself because we want our students to feel a sense of belonging in school. And also, it's a key lever for academic outcomes, and there is a lot of research supporting that. So it's not only that we care, but it's also that if we want to impact their academics, that it's integrally tied together. And our data indicates that we're making great progress in improving our students' sense of belonging. And so I'm excited to walk you through some of the data. The main sources of data we're going to look at are our attendance rates and chronic absenteeism. They're the lowest that they've been since the pandemic. Our suspension rates are declining overall and are below 1%. And then we have California Healthy Kids survey data that we're going to be sharing. And that shows that students' perception of caring adult relationships and school connectedness has increased. So excited to be able to share some of those outcomes. In addition, we always want to look at where are we falling short and not just look at the celebrations and where do we need to put our extra energy and time. And even though we've seen gains, we really see that our students with disabilities, our Latin A students, our black African American students, and students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged disproportionately have higher rates of chronic absenteeism. We've really focused in, even though there's some intersectionality, that 1.7% of our students with disabilities have been suspended, which is 1.3 percentage points higher than our overall student body. Looking forward to collaborating with Dr. Biggs in the special education department in this coming year, working with our teaching staff and our administrative staff on how we can impact some of those outcomes. So our average daily attendance rate has increased over the past school years and is really, really right there, very close with our pre-pandemic levels. So it's very exciting to see these gains. And additionally, the flip side of looking at our average daily attendance is looking at chronic absenteeism, which is when the student has missed 10% or more of the school days for any reason. It can be excused absences, unexcused absences. Regardless, it's lost learning time. So we look at that kind of as a whole category. And so if you look at this graph, you can see that our chronic absenteeism rates, they're at the end of each school year. And 7% of our students were chronically absent in the 26, 27 school year, which is a four percentage point decline from last school year. So it's really exciting to see. When we look at it by focal group, we can see that 17% of our students with disabilities were chronically absent this year, which is 10 percentage points higher than our general population. So again, this is an area that we want to have a lot of collaboration, a lot of discussions, and really drilling into what that's about. Also, our Latin A and black African American students have slightly elevated percentages of students who are chronically absent. And students from economically vulnerable homes also have slightly elevated percentage rates. And so, again, while we're seeing gains, those are still areas that we really need to focus our energy. So you can look over by time, and so this is where you can really see what the gains have been. And so if you look at the, you know, that last blue column, that's this, oh, I am not seeing the 26, 27. Okay. Chronically absent. I know that we looked at our current school years. I'm just wondering, I'm looking at this now and seeing, oh, it's 25, 26. I don't know why in my head I'm... It's been a long day. It's 2026 right now, not 2027. Great. So you can just see, though, an incredible gain. So again, chronic absenteeism, we're celebrating lower rates, not higher rates. So if you look at all students, we're down to 6.4, which is back to pre-pandemic levels, which is fabulous to see. And you can see with every single one of our specific groups that we've highlighted on here, all of them have showed incredible gains. So while we still do have some disproportionality, and it still does require our focused attention, we are moving in the right direction by a pretty significant rate, and that's exciting to see. OK, so we're now shifting from talking about attendance to talking about suspension, which is another indicator that we look at related to student belonging. One thing to note when we're looking at suspension data is that it's unduplicated counts. So this is like specific students who are suspended one or more times. It's not talking about the number of suspensions. It's talking about number of students. So that's important to know. And you can just see our suspension rates across the board are down. And so if you look at our 2021-22 data at the beginning there, at 1.5% for all schools combined and down to 0.4% this year, 0.2% at elementary, 0.9% at the middle school, and 0.3% at the high school. So we've seen some really significant progress made in that area. When we look at it by focal group, again, we see really significant and positive gains. And also, I want to just note our students with disabilities, which is one of our main focal groups that we're looking at for trying to do better with suspension rates. 1.7% of students with disabilities were suspended, which is a 2.4 percentage point decrease since the 22-23 school year. So again, it sort of mimics our attendance data in the sense that there's still disproportionality that needs to be addressed, and we are making significant gains with all of these different subgroups that we're looking at. I'm now switching to California Healthy Kids survey data. One thing that I want to highlight before jumping into the data is that this is anonymous. It's an anonymous survey, which means that when we look at our focal groups, it's self-reported. We have no way of verifying what's true, not true. We generally see that the percentage trends mimic what our percentages are in the district. So we can say generally, but we have no way of verifying that information. So one of the things, so we were seeing also just some fabulous gains in this area, and I thought what might be helpful to also just share is when we look at these questions, so like caring adult, there are several different questions that are asked related to a caring adult that students are asked to rate on. And when we look at those, what we look at is that they say yes all of the time or yes some of the time, and that's what this percentage reflects. So an example might be, there's a teacher or some other adult from my school who really cares about me. And we're looking for them to say yes all of the time or yes some of the time. And that's what these percentages are. And so you can see, in this case, we've broken it down by school. And you can see that students who are reporting a caring adult and what the percentages are across the different sites. In general, those percentages are high percentages. What we see is that we met our goal that we had set for ourselves in elementary school. There is a slight decline in Marin that we need to look at. And again, when we look at the data, it's not cohorted, right? It's a fifth grade, and so it's a different group of students, so sometimes that can cause variations in the level. We've exceeded the goal by two percentage points at the middle school with an increase of 11 percentage points from the previous school year, which is really significant. And at the high school, despite not meeting the goal, we still have seen an increase in the percentage. So we can still see that we're moving in the right direction. This is our fifth grade bifocal groups. So 77% of fifth grade students report having a caring adult relationship overall. And then we can look at it in terms of focal groups and increases. So I think what I will draw our attention to, because we always want to be looking at where we can continue to work and see improvements, 63% of our black African-American students reported a care and adult relationship, which was a significant decrease from last year. Again, it's not the same group of students, right, but it's our fifth graders overall, so that's something for us to be taking a careful look at. On the other hand, our Latin A students have a 34 percentage point increase. This is looking at the middle school. And again, overall, we're looking at really positive growth and increases across the different populations. For our students with disabilities, to see a 33% percentage point increase from last year is phenomenal, 76%. And so that's something we want to, again, dial in on. when we're looking at these shifts and changes, not just like, okay, what went wrong, but also what went right? What do we need to do more of? What do we need to make sure we keep doing? And so that's really important. And again, when we look at our high school, again, we're just seeing overall significant increases. When we look for our black African American data for this year for the 9th and 11th grades, which are separately calculated, there wasn't a high enough population to be able to have data on this. Sometimes some of our black African American students are counted under two or more races. Obviously, some are not. So unfortunately, we don't have data there. We do see that overall there are pretty significant increases across the board. Again, students with disabilities being a really striking one. School connectedness was the other category that we really look at related to the sense of belonging. And we again see a pretty significant positive increase in this area. 72% of students surveyed reporting feelings of school connectedness. And you can just sort of see across the different schools that we overall have increases. And again, middle and high school, which tend to be pretty difficult to impact, have pretty significant increases in this category. When we look at school connectedness by student group, again, when you see missing information, it's because they didn't report that to us because there wasn't a high enough number in that cohort. But again, overall, we're just seeing increases not just in our overall numbers, but also in our focal groups. And both the trend for the last one and this one with our two or more races, we have a positive increase, but not as significant as some of the others. In the middle school, 67% of seventh graders at school say they feel a sense of school connectedness. We have a 14 percentage point increase for our Latin A students. Our students with disabilities, 66%, which is an 18 percentage point increase. Again, some really positive increases. One area of concern is our multilingual learners, which where we saw 21 percentage point decline from last year. And again, I'll say it's not cohorted, and our multilingual learners tend to be a revolving group just in terms of reclassification as well as sometimes moving in and out. And still, we need to look at that number and what that decrease is about. So this is all data that we'll be using in our work next year with site leaders and with our leadership teams. And then this shows the high school broken down by our focal groups. And again, just to highlight a couple of pieces, our students with disabilities went up. This also mimics the middle school with the multilingual learners having a decrease. So to wrap up my portion, just looking at some specific action steps for next year, training all of our cost teams on Panorama so that the data can be something that we're looking at as a regular weekly practice and integrating that into the review. Implementing clear structures and supports to drive that continuous data-driven improvements in these different areas. and really being able to integrate in this particular data, what are the areas we need to focus on, what are some actions, specific action steps that we're going to take, how can we further integrate in more of a restorative lens, which is a really research proven and backed way to support students' connectedness to school. So we want to look at how can we increase the use of restorative practices in response to student behavior, which starts with tier one and connectedness pieces and then moves through as we're responding to when harm is caused or when students need to be reminded of what the school norms are. And then just building on attendance interventions and stronger tracking and increased incentives for the tier one and tier two, tier three. I think our positions for next year with Melissa Poole's new position and with Linda Williams' new position is going to be incredible support to our school staffs are already starting to do a lot of work around planning out what they could do to help get these systems in place and I Expect to see the data keep moving in the right direction Thank you All right, I'm gonna be next and Deb if you wouldn't mind handing me that remote that would be wonderful I'm gonna stay here Which way do I go?

All right. All right, thank you. And again, good evening, everyone. I'm excited to talk about the third part of our goals, which are collaborative systems for continuous improvement, and specifically working on strengthening shared leadership, data-driven decision-making, and inclusive engagement to foster equitable outcomes and continuous learning. So this year we've been focusing in three areas in this particular goal. We wanted to focus on building systems that connect fiscal responsibility, operational excellence, and community trust. And how we have worked to do that is working to present budget information in formats that are easy to access. that are clear and that are supported by plain language explanations for staff, families, and community. And in addition to that, having budget processes at the school sites that are very much about engaging all of the stakeholders in the decision making. We've also been working to use data and feedback to strengthen the conditions that make our schools great places to learn and work. And part of that has been regularly seeking feedback from our students, staff, families, and community members so that this feedback can inform decisions that we're making. And last, we are working really hard to ensure that our schools are safe, clean, and well-maintained because we know that that is actually the number one foundation for student learning. Well, first, they need to get to school, as Executive Director Brill mentioned. And then when they're there, we want them to be in spaces that are clean, that are safe, and that are conducive. to learning and that create a sense of pride. And so we are working on really building out some of the systems around this, timeliness. We did hear from community today that there were requests that were made around technology and things like that. And part of what we're trying to do is get more efficient and better at getting those requests met and in a way that really supports student learning and the teacher and teaching environment. So we've made some growth. This is a little bit less exciting, I think, than our academic growth and our school belonging growth, because some of this is really about we've created systems. giving us the information yet that we want in terms of are these systems working? But what I can say is that we have fully created a very transparent budgeting process. 100% of our site leaders when asked said that they much better understood the budget and how it relates to the work that they're doing in their school sites and they were able to engage their communities in that process. We now have more clarity about what it is that we want our facilities to look like in terms of cleanliness as well as some processes and some better systems in place to ensure that when things aren't working, we have a better process to get things working. We now have what we will call a net promoter score. I want to be clear that this 100% does not mean that we have a great net promoter score. We actually have right now a negative 19% net promoter score in terms of our community saying, yes, I would recommend Albany schools. AND NEGATIVE 62 WITH OUR STAFF. SO OF COURSE WE WANT THAT SCORE TO BE ABOVE ZERO. IDEALLY IT WOULD BE AT 100%. 100% OF ASKED SAY YES, THEY WOULD RECOMMEND WHOLEHEARTEDLY TO COME TO ALBANY. BUT RIGHT NOW WE HAVE A BASELINE AND THAT WAS THE GOAL FOR THIS YEAR. And the last goal for this year was really around survey participation. I'm still not happy that we only have about 75%. And it's kind of a little bit hard because when you're giving surveys, when we're sending them out to our entire community, it's hard to say whether or not we've met the 100% threshold. But what I will say is we are seeing increases in the number of people who are taking the surveys that we send out. That's not cohort match, though. And I don't think we'll be able to do that. So again, just kind of to look at where we were at the beginning of the year, we sort of had clarity about what we were doing around our budget. There were some kind of processes. And towards the end of the year, it's much more clear. And it's much more clear how the budget is connected to the vision, the goals, and the values that we have. And in terms of our fiscal stewardship, we will have a budget presentation tonight that will help us understand better about where we are in terms of being responsible with our budget. And we'll talk a little bit more about some of the next steps with the budget when we get to that presentation. In terms of systems, again, some of these things we've been really wanting to make sure that, again, when there's requests for something to get fixed, it gets fixed in a timely manner. When there's a question about cleanliness, that things are looking more clean. Our chick survey, actually, that we didn't present tonight, we do have some pretty good results in terms of students and staff, naming that the schools seem cleaner. We still want to create a cleanliness rubric that we can use across the board so that there's just like clarity. What does it mean to walk into a school and see the school be ready for learning? And we are continuing to work on our facilities improvement dashboard as well as our technology need dashboards. And around sentiment, like I said, we are seeing that there is a need to continue to improve how we respond. And when we talk about we, we mean actually at the district office to the needs of our school sites and to our community members. And so we're working together. to continue to receive feedback, understand how we can improve that net promoter score, and ultimately create the best customer service that we possibly can to our teachers, to our staff, to our community, to our students. And a big part of this is also we wanna have more and more people engaged in giving us their feedback. So one of the goals that we're looking towards for next year is ensuring that not only are we getting the engagement or the feedback from the people who normally respond to these types of things, but we're also intentionally seeking out more voices. And that includes our student voices. So next steps. One of the things my dream has been to be able to have a publicly available budget dashboard on the website, which not only shows all of our school site budgets, but also our department level budgets. And this will actually help us to all be on the same page about how we're spending our dollars, which is really, as I've said many times over the year, shows where our values are. And also it will help us to understand better how we can advocate for more funding, because we do actively, collectively need to work together to advocate for more funding. We are working right now on upgrading our Wi-Fi network. I know we just heard folks today saying, get the technology out of the classrooms. And that is absolutely something that we're going to be continuing to think about and work on in a developmentally appropriate and responsible and respectful way. And also, I have heard from teachers and leaders over and over again that our Wi-Fi has not been reliable, and so we want to make sure that for our teachers and for our staff that it is. Again, creating a school cleanliness rubric so we can all walk into a place and we have the same idea of what this should look like. And again, creating more publicly available dashboards around how we're doing in terms of improvements. And we're going to continue to send out general feedback surveys three times a year so we can see hopefully some growth on that promoter score. We'll continue to share results during our vital signs presentations as well as in other public forums. And we're going to continue to review that feedback and make adjustments to our work. And the goal is to bring all of this together into what we're going to be developing next year, which is a new LCAP for a new three-year cycle, as well as a strategic plan. So this is basically something, again, it's been a dream of mine to be able to say, here is our Vital Signs dashboard. So we have actually a Vital Signs dashboard for the 25-26 school year with the goals that we've been focusing on and with the metrics that we've been looking at. And so we can see where we've made growth and some areas where we need to continue to think about improvement. And this actually helps us to consider what we are doing for our LCAP next year. We are not changing our goals for our 26-27 LCAP. It is the last year of this particular LCAP. But what it did is it helped us to refine a little bit about what we are going to do around those goals. And it helped us to set some benchmarks and end-of-year goals in connection to the LCAP.

Thank you. Thank you. Any questions or comments from the board?

Should I go first since I'm on Zoom?

Yes, please do, Trustee Kahn.

Thank you. I think just want to just no questions, but like, really just want to share massive gratitude for all of the district staff, teachers, everyone that's made these results possible because I'm like, as I'm obviously I reviewed this in advance, but just hearing everything from the folks that presented just now. It really hit for me that there were so many areas where Trustee Boyd and I had like continuously for the last four years asked over and over, like, why are we not seeing improvement in this area? And I know there was a lot being done, but like the massive growth in that four year period is undeniable. And I just want to really show appreciation for everyone that has made that possible from the executive team, Superintendent Stone, all of our teachers and staff. It's very much noticed and appreciated. And I think the survey of the students themselves, that growth is a very clear reflection of what's like changing in real time, not just based on numbers and data of like test scores and whatnot, but just how our kids are feeling about being received and being present at school. And I just feel really, really a lot of gratitude for everyone right now.

Great. Thank you, Trustee Kahn, despite the hiccup. Any other questions? I had kind of two quick questions. One, on slide 10, it seems like our progress on grades four and five is sort of static. I know you commented briefly on this, but what's our current thinking on why we were sort of stalled in progress there, or seeing less progress?

Yeah, it's a great question. The honest answer is we need to dig into the subtest data more, because in the upper grades, there's really two little assessments. One is a three-minute reading comprehension assessment that tells whether students are understanding what they're reading. And then the other is that one-minute assessment we talked about at the assessment presentation. And I haven't looked as deeply yet at that DataGET, looking forward to doing that this summer. But the trend that came up at the middle of the year is that there's a good amount of students who are not fluent readers in the upper grades. So whether they're not reading quickly enough or whether they're not reading with enough expression or prosody in order to understand what they're reading, we don't always I think that upper elementary students need that kind of explicit instruction and I think just with my knowledge of being in classrooms, there's some inconsistent instruction when it comes to fluency, which isn't surprising because I think it's often thought of as a younger grade skill. So I'm curious to look more closely to see if that could be some of the reason.

Thank you. My other question was just, it was actually going to be for Deb or whoever she is, but it feels like we made some really nice progress on sense of belonging. And again, you might not know the answer to this, but what do we think worked? How did we make that progress? Some of this was fairly dramatic.

Yeah, it's a great question, and I think I can just kind of give an initial answer, but it probably deserves a lot deeper dive. But I think that our school staffs have been really explicitly focusing and working with their cost teams, which some of them call student services or care teams, and really working to build out services and have just more coordinated communication and efforts. And so, you know, like we were, I was just talking with the high school administrative team at our retreat on Monday about how, you know, at their care teams, and then the counselors, and then the S3, and the camp, and then there's a coordination, then we're gonna talk to the campus supervisors. And then also our teachers have been really, I think, engaging with administration in a different way around some of these pieces. And the way that our site leaders have talked about that is just, again, this just sort of more coordinated effort around this student who's struggling and they're popping out of this class and these teachers, there are structures being put in place in staff meetings for teachers to be able to kind of de-silo and talk across departments or across different areas. And so one of the thoughts when we were reflecting on this data together is that that de-siloing and coordinated effort is really making a difference for supporting our students.

thank you very much great if there's no other oh sorry trustee boyd sorry um okay so quickly just want to echo what trustee khan said about really appreciating all of the growth really want to appreciate all of the work that went into at the elementary school being able to change schedules around as was needed to make sure that our students were getting all the tier one support that they needed and not being pulled out in order to do other things for that um i think uh you know I'm not an educator by career, so I don't pretend to know things I don't know, but it seems that there's some proof in the pudding here, and so that's pretty exciting. And we want to really appreciate all the effort that has gone into that. Also appreciate, as was said, the availability of the data and the clearness of the data at various points throughout the year. It's not something I've seen personally in the time that I've been on the board. So I really want to appreciate that and all the people who are making that happen. And in celebrating all of the great things that are happening, and I appreciate all of the flags for our different groups of students that we're focusing on, just of course want to continue to name that in the places where we're not seeing the same sort of growth or we're seeing more stagnant, levels and not seeing that progress that I appreciate the fact that thinking is going into it and a focus is being paid to it and following up on what President Mahoney said with the older elementary school grades and also at the middle school level and I'm looking forward to collaboration with middle school teachers and thinkers about how that can be approached so that we can continue to serve all of our different students, but really just appreciate all the work that's going into making changes where we need to make changes and to supporting our students at all their different levels. Thanks so much.

Terrific. Thank you. I think that's all. Terrific. We'll move on to the public hearing. We have nobody in the room and nobody on the Zoom. move on to the public hearing on the 26 27 local control accountability plan lcap in 2526 lcap annual update i think you don't present i just tap the thing right yeah yeah okay so i'm going to open the i'm open the hearing um for anyone to provide um input prior to our board consideration adoption of these documents our final adoption will be at the next board meeting so here i open them open the hearing Seeing no comments in the, oh, we have a comment.

Go ahead, David. Go ahead.

I wasn't sure if it was time for that. I just want to say thank you for the thoughtful presentations and all the work that goes into making those vital sign reports. I don't know if this will change anything this year, but just some comments about a few of these things that are in these goals. I'm not convinced that absenteeism and suspensions are a sign of belonging, especially at the younger age. My kid's going to school. It has nothing to do with whether or not she's feeling belonging in kindergarten, right? I can see at high school maybe there's more agency for students to not show up or something like that. So just considering, I do appreciate that we have some measures, but I've noticed across the board, we often don't ask our younger kids things. Like in the facilities master plan, we didn't talk to the elementary students, and we only survey fifth graders. The little ones have a lot of brilliant things to say. So I just would urge, and I think I heard Deb mention Panorama, so maybe there will be more surveying at a more appropriate level. So that's great. Very appreciative that it said percentage points and not percent increases. That's a step in the right. I think that was not like that before, so that's awesome. And I will repeat my constant call for looking more longitudinally. At the very least, I feel like for elementary schools, if we're going to be judging elementary school based on last year we should just take the k4 data from last year and look at the one through five data this year because those are the same mostly the same kids rather than 20% different sets of kids just something to think about not to throw out this work we should look at the whole school but also for talking about progress compare something that is more apples to apples and then suspension rates i would highly encourage also looking at the total number of days that students were suspended divided by the total number of days of enrollment rather than just how many kids were suspended because again if a kid is suspended one day that counts the same in this metric as being suspended 10 days so just thinking about that thank you thank you any other comments in the room

See if there's any comments on the phone or Zoom. I'm not seeing any. Okay, I'm going to close the hearing. Okay, hearing is closed. We'll now move on to our next review and discussion item, which is the 26-27 proposed budget.

Good evening. Superintendent, board trustees, executive assistant, thank you for giving me the time to share with you basically next year's budget for adoption. This is just a reminder of how fast the year goes by. We're right back at budget adoption again. But what I really want to share with you this year is that our team worked incredibly hard alongside with all the site leaders and the budget managers to kind of help provide input that feeds into the creation of the FY27 budget. So with that said, we started back in November this year instead of mid-April. Last year was like on speed, right? It was like super fast. We had our roller skates on. This year we started, we took our time, we started in November. The SSE meeting started gathering community input. We began enrollment projections. In December, we started finalizing our enrollment. And we started drafting the site and community-facing one-pagers. In January, the staffing, we basically reviewed the staffing. We did a quick budget kickoff, and then we started the plan for site communication. In February, the site budget development with the SSEs took place alongside with teachers and sought community feedback. And then in March, we did our budget lock-ins with all the site leaders. So thank you to the site leaders for spending the hours with us. discussing, like, what's the most appropriate use of resources for your sites. And then come April, we had the final lock-in sessions. We loaded the budgets, and we started cleaning them up. What happens after then? Well, the governor decides to revise his assumptions for us. So we went through a May revise, got some updated assumptions, and we scrubbed the budgets again and tried to implement some of those things in, as I'll show you in future slides. And now we're here in June. I won't read through all of this, but this is really like a reference summary table to share with you some of the thoughts that go back and forth. I can't actually juggle, I won't do that right now, but you're juggling basically the assumptions that the governor's telling you that they want to adopt into their own state budget, and then we have to kind of figure out what's the most responsible thing to do. What do we know for sure? What are the things that we should leave out? So the guidance that we receive, we take a look at what the risks are and the budget guidance that we received for the time being is to include a 2.87% COLA and then come back when the governor has had an opportunity to adopt his budget and present to you a 45-day budget revision. So what are some of the considerations that's up and coming? I want to fast forward, really, to get to that 45 days, because at least I know for sure what's really coming ahead. The good news, optimistic news, I should say, is that there's discretionary block grant funding that the state is trying to make a commitment to right now. And the dollar per ADA that they're trying to fund is $946 per ADA. In addition to that, I don't like calling it a super COLA, really, it's just a one-time additional COLA that the state's gonna fund. It's approximately 1.44%, and I did the math on that, you know, according to the LCFF calculator that we have, and it equates to about 600 grand. So those are the things, I'm hoping it comes to fruition with my 45-day budget update. So with that said, just a quick reminder, because we do a lot of the comparisons based off of what we've reported in the past. I won't comb through all of this, but enrollment's roughly 37, 49. Attendance levels, as mentioned by the academic team, is circling around 96%. The revenue we had is almost 70 million. The expenses we had was almost 76 million. Whoops, we're at deficit spending, but really not because we had a lot of carryover balances from the prior year that we're trying to spend down that were restricted grant-related. So what does that mean for today? The beach ocean side, I'm not there right now, but the enrollment that we have is still relatively flat right now from working with student services and looking at the enrollment projections. We've decided to keep our projections at 3750. I would say the attendance trends are moving up, even since the last time we reported P2. So we're projecting approximately 36, 27 ADA is our actual attendance. It's a little over 96%. The revenue that that actually generates for us is approximately 71 million. In terms of expenses, we're at 75 million. So in my previous slide, I showed you deficit spending was approximately five million, and now as we're spending down those grants, you'd expect that this difference will start narrowing. So now let's take a deeper look. This is a high-level summary of all your unrestricted and restricted funds. When you take a look at what I've circled up there with the COLA implemented in place, you could see that overall the net increase is about $1.5 million. You'll notice that the local revenues right now is projected a decrease. And the primary reason for that is that we don't project revenues for local funds because they're primarily donations. So as we get into the new fiscal year, I anticipate we will receive additional donations, and that figure will start coming up as we provide budget updates. Taking a look at expenditures, there's a lot of fluctuation here, but it's for good reasons. If you take a look at certificate salaries, we're planning to increase that by one and a half million dollars. The green in the non-salary line items for material supplies, services, and other operating is primarily because, as I mentioned, we're spending down some of those restricted grants carryover. It carries over only once. It doesn't keep carrying over. I wish it did. It doesn't keep carrying over, so you have to start taking those expense line items out of your budget. In addition to that, we also realigned some of the service contracts that we've had that we put in place, particularly for special education program with positions that were very difficult to fill. We had to contract out for that in the current year. We anticipate that we should be able to fill hopefully some of that in the upcoming year, but should we still experience vacancies in those areas, we'll do the fluctuations again and we'll just provide that update to you. Any questions on the current year budget before I go forward?

You mentioned on the local revenue side that it was about donations, but how much of that is, or are you anticipating any loss in local revenue due to the closing of Golden Gate and potential sale of Golden Gate Fields?

So with the sales of Golden Gate Fields, I prorated. Because they're on the hook to at least pay us a proration of what the property taxes are supposed to be for that. So I took out almost $300,000 to prorate that. And then you'll see in the subsequent years, in the multi-year projections that will be presented later on, you'll see that I took it all out.

Great. Thank you.

Great question. I'm curious about that too. So just kind of highlighting for you some of the things, because we always say materials and supplies. What are the things that fall under the categories of materials and supplies that were funded from one-time funds? Some of the categories include textbooks, some of the core curriculum stuff, books and reference materials. We do actually have some materials and supplies, like the printing paper and the pens and stuff that we buy. Non-capital furniture and equipment includes things like the chairs, the desks, the laptops that we're purchasing. And then I'm happy to report that $4,700 is zero. for food. Not that I don't like to eat. Going into the 5000s, we have the services. These are the categories that fall under services. This is really more or less like a friendly reminder that services doesn't mean consultants. Services means contracted services that we have going out, which includes travel and conferences, dues and memberships, the insurance that we pay, utilities, rentals, leases, repairs, and then of course we do have some consulting services, and then we have communications like our phone lines and so forth. This is a quick refresher, unrestricted versus restricted. Unrestricted funds are the funds that you're allowed to set aside for a rainy day. Restricted has a specific purpose. So as you take a look at this, and for those of you who follow me at every budget revision, the picture is actually a little brighter this time. The outlook for the rainy day is actually a little greener. But I did want to separate out the unrestricted versus the restricted funds. So you could see we're projecting right now for the budget, we have about $50 million in unrestricted funds coming in. And then for the restricted, it's about $21 million. Then you look at the expenditures, we're at $42 million. For unrestricted, we're at $33 million for restricted funds. I will take you all the way down, because then what does that mean for our bottom line? What's the true meaning of that? What's falling out? Do we have any available balance after the fact? And we do. So number one, we met our 3% required reserve, and we have additional reserves. It's not quite the 2% anymore going forward, but we have approximately like a million dollars right now that's kind of set aside. What is a multi-year projection? A projection is a higher level estimate of what the future fiscal plans may look like based on information available today. And the reason I say that is because even the governor right now is still trying to finalize what his budget for the new year is going to be. And a lot of that is impacted on our economy, our market outlook. I mentioned before, you know, every day you turn on the TV, sometimes the Dow drops like, I don't know, a couple thousand points, which is crazy. And sometimes it increases a couple thousand points. But those fluctuations in the economy tells us how much the government is actually going to get and is indicative then on what we can expect on how that transcends into education. For the multi-year projections, this high level, this is not doom and gloom or pessimist or anything like that. You could see here that we were at 3694 projected enrollment. We're leaving it relatively flat over the next few years. I do think that there's potential here primarily because our TKers are growing at a rapid pace. So we will continue to monitor that and keep you posted on what comes in the fall. For our revenue, as I mentioned, it's 2.87% COLA. You'll see in FY28, it's expected to go up to 3.3% for our COLA, and then it dips back down to 3.09%. So what that tells me is that for the subsequent years, I would say that what's being projected is a little uncertain. They're unsure. And this, to me, looks like they're being a little cautious. They're scaling back a little bit by FY29. In terms of federal funds, uncertainty in the federal level, so we're keeping that relatively flat. For state funding, we reduce the one-time funds that are coming in throughout the subsequent years as they expire or as we use it up. And then for our local funds, I've decreased the parcel taxes according to the sales of Golden Gate Fields in anticipation of what I think the dollar impact would be. And for expenses, the step and column, you'll see the current salary posted basically on the salary schedules. You could kind of see some fluctuations there. The medical benefits is somewhat estimated at approximately a 5% increase. It varies every year, which is kind of scary. But, you know, it could be as low as, like, 4%, or it could be high as, like, 12%. And so right now we're kind of keeping that at the middle ground at approximately 5%. And in terms of materials and supplies, as I mentioned earlier, generally you increase the ongoing expenses by approximately 3%. But like I said, we took out some of the expenses that we know were funded from one-time funds. So with that said, what does the picture look like? More ants crawling on an Excel table. On the top line, I wanted to highlight, you'll see that for unrestricted funds, I broke it down separately this time for the outlook, because the assumptions vary pretty drastically. If you're looking at the beginning fund balance, you could see that because we're continuing to deficit spend, we are using our fund balance. And so it slowly dwindles and declines over time. As I draw your attention then down to the excess of revenues over expenses, that's where it's telling us we're deficit spending. So when that doesn't become a good sign is actually when you don't have any more carryover funds to absorb that excess deficiency in spending. So what does that mean for the fund balance? Well, you see here we're deficit spending. I'm cautioning in yellow because over time, the increase, the additional set-asides that we are able to do above the 3% starts to slowly decline. And then you'll see that the good news is that we will be able to still continuously meet our 3% reserve, but it is declining, and that's something to look out for. As you look at the restricted funds, this is telling us the story that we're spending down the restricted grants also as we're receiving them. I wanna highlight the bottom, and this is not meant for doom and gloom, there's some caveats here. So you can see, based off of what we know today, we anticipate then we will spend down all of our restricted grant funds by FY29. From my experience, is that gonna hold true? I would say likely not, because right now, two years down the line, usually the governors we'll make updated priorities and we'll get new grant funds that are coming in. It's just that we don't know that right now. And so trying to project out in the multi-year when that information isn't available is tough. And so all we could do is kind of state what we do know. And so to me, this is still okay. Not because I put a stamp there, though. So this is just a combined total of the unrestricted and the funds that I just shared with you. So I won't comb through all of this again. So what's next? We're going to be busy, that's for sure. Because we're trying to wrap up the current fiscal year. We're entering into adopting the next fiscal year. We want to come back in 45 days and give you guys an update. And then we'll start closing the books and give you an unaudited actuals report, tell you where we ended up closing up the year. And then we get to do it all over again. Any questions?

I see this. I have a question that's probably unfair to ask, but I'll ask it anyway, which is, so basically I read this as in three years we're basically flat to the three percent reserve i.e still being able to run our own schools um and your assumption on the cola was what was given from the state which was like we're at 2.8 and forgive me for not remembering off my head 2.8 and three point and change and that back down to three yes do you have any sense of like how if you push the 2.87 or whatever it is through for three years how much variability does that put in our budget In other words, how much trouble are we in in three years?

I'm just trying to... A half a percent increase is approximately, I would say, a range from approximately $500,000 to $700,000. Okay.

That's helpful. I mean, not good, but helpful. Any other questions? Great. Thank you, CBO Wu. I think we're going to move on to the public hearing on the proposed budget for FY26-27. We'll conduct a public hearing to provide community members an opportunity to review and provide input prior to the board consideration adoption of these documents. Final adoption will be at the next board meeting. I'm going to open the hearing. Seeing no comment in the room and seeing no comment online, I'm going to close the hearing. Great, thank you. Thank you. We're going to move on to staff reports. Yeah, let's move on to staff reports. On to the CPSOs.

Okay, all right. Hi, everyone. I'm Ana Delgado. Thank you all for allowing us to be here and present our school plans for student achievement at the elementary level. I'm the principal at Ocean View Elementary School, and my colleagues here at the elementary level will also introduce themselves.

Hi, good evening. Catherine Floresca, principal at Cornell.

Good evening, guys. Melissa Poole, principal at Marin for another minute. All right.

OK. Sorry, I have it over here, too. But I guess I don't need that. Sorry, it's kind of late. So let me take a breath. I'm not up this late.

Hey, at least you're not looking down the barrel of another couple hours. Go for it. I know. Sorry. OK.

So we are going to briefly describe the components of a student achievement plan, our goals around it that we have at the elementary level, the actions and strategies that we are using, and then we are gonna talk a little bit more specifically about the CPSAs specific to our elementary schools.

Great, and so the CIPSA process, it is always like a continual process of improvement. We're looking at student performance, we analyze data, we identify needs, we set goals, we create plans for action, and then determine measurable outcomes. Some metrics that we look at from year to year is the California Dashboard, looking at our progress on state testing in English language arts, math, and science, English learner progress, chronic absenteeism, suspension. We look at FastBridge reports. This year we used DIBELS and the California School Climate Health and Learning Surveys that are administered to kids, staff, and parents.

So how does the CIPSA tell our school's story? We walk through a process all year long with site council and think about questions like the ones that are listed here. We start by looking at data, similar to what we did tonight. We look at trends to see which student groups we need to focus on, and we talk about evidence-based practices and strategies that we're using to support students. It's a collaboration, it's a brainstorming session, basically what do we need to do, to meet the needs of our students, specifically the students who are underperforming. And we shore up our systems around interventions and supports to address learning gaps and extend learning for folks. And this is a new toy I'm not familiar with. So I'm just going to push a button. OK, awesome. Let's see what this one does. OK. So the CIPSA goals are aligned to the LCAP goals, which we just saw. They're not different. Goal one is equitable, inclusive, and rigorous instruction. Whole child development and belonging and collaborative systems are what we focus on to stay aligned with the district goals.

All right, so we kind of highlighted out kind of the overarching strategy that we use, and these are common to all of the schools. So what you can see is all of us are teaching to the standards, we all are looking to have fully credentialed teachers, having assessments that we do beginning, middle, end of year, providing professional development, doing things like SSTs, we've increased our curriculum offerings at the elementary level, providing different interventions, targeted ELD and ELOP, among other things.

In terms of whole child development and belonging, some strategies across the elementary schools is, again, administering the Healthy Kids Survey, providing social, emotional, and anti-bias curriculum and instruction, positive behavior and intervention systems, and having SST teams. mental health counseling, school safety plans, attendance monitoring, mental health support, and having, again, staff and parent surveys.

The things that we're all aligned on are our home school communications, newsletters that go out through Parent Square, our parent education events. We partner with, whenever one elementary school has a parent ed event, we invite all three elementaries so that all parents in the district can benefit. We have opportunities for parent and guardian participation, school and district committee participation. Parent-teacher conferences are a really important tool and time for us to communicate with families about student progress. Our ELAC and DELAC meetings serve our multilingual learners really well. We have translation services available for IEPs and SSDs. and 504 meetings. We progress on, or we report on student progress regularly. Our California school parent survey that was listed previously. We've done a lot of work on our cost teams, and I'm looking forward to doing more next year. And our instructional leadership teams are just bursting and growing, so that's exciting.

So at Cornell, students continue to perform well on the English language arts and math SBAC assessments. But we did see a slight dip in the 24-25 school year by a couple of percentage points overall. But I do want to highlight some subgroup performances for our Latinx, Latine student scores, those percentage, those students increased by 10 percentage points. Our English learner student scores increased by 8 percentage points, while students with disabilities and students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds decreased in percentage points. In math, While we did see, again, a slight decrease overall, all of the following subgroups increased in their performance. Students with disabilities improved by five percentage points, students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds improved by one percentage point, English learners by three percentage points, and Latinx, Latine students increased by one percentage point. Overall, our chronic absenteeism continues to improve by declining one percentage point. And for students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds and our Latina and Latinx students, their overall absenteeism declined as well. Our mental health referrals continue to remain a consistent flow. And so the identified needs at Cornell, in ELA we will continue, the need is to continue on an instructional focus on literacy with our lens on English learners and targeted interventions. We'll provide consistent math support for student groups and provide consistent social-emotional learning opportunities. And so what this will look like is that we will continue to refine both the student and collaboration schedules to prioritize outcomes for intervention in both ELA and math for ELD, we will continue to focus on our English learner progress by increasing collaboration among teachers for multilingual learner success. And overall, we'll continue to do our data talks within the different grade levels to examine instructional practices and look at student groupings for support. We will refine and review our culturally affirming and social emotional learning practices to create a stronger sense of belonging. And what this really looks like is also refining our tools and creating consistent opportunities for students to provide feedback on school and belonging.

So at Marin, we've been working really hard too, and I'm really proud of our scores. Our student scoring proficient went up slightly, two points to 77%. Our Latino students went up 4% percentage points, so not quite closing an opportunity gap there, but we're definitely getting closer, and that's exciting. Our black students increased three percentage points, multilingual learners increased, oh my gosh, 7% percentage points, and students with disabilities also increased. One thing to pay attention to is two student groups that decreased were our white students and our students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged. And that's our ELA scores overall. In Fastbridge, our AMath scores, this is K through five. So the first group was third through fifth. That was based on the CAASPP. Our first K through five scores, everybody went up. 84% of all students proficient. I'm really psyched about our black student population. They grew 10%. to 88% proficient, and on this assessment, they closed the opportunity gap. I know, I recognize that this is not cohort data. I recognize that this is a very small group of students, but I think we're definitely heading in the right direction. Our Latino students grew to 79% proficient, so it's exciting to see them get closer to closing that gap as well. Our two or more races went up to 85% proficient. Asian students and students with disabilities stayed approximately the same. And our socioeconomically disadvantaged scores increased to 74% proficient. So doing some great work there. Attendance. Our number of students who are chronically absent decreased to 5%, and all of our student groups decreased as well. So that's exciting to see. I think the letters are definitely working. It's improved communication, and it helps parents know that we want to work with them, and it opens the door for opportunities. So I appreciate the letters that are sent out regularly. Our identified need at Marin that we're focusing on in ELA and math is to continue to reduce achievement gaps and opportunity gaps for student subgroups not performing at the same overall rate as their peers. And our efforts to reduce chronic absenteeism are working in an area to target our focus is with our students with disabilities who have a lower attendance rate. Okay, so some of the action steps that we're taking in ELA is we're refining our prep schedule, prioritizing collaboration time for teachers at least four days a week, and continuing with the protected what I need time. In some grade levels, this will go down to 30 minutes next year, but our data supports that shift. And our designated ELD curriculum is going to continue to support us along with designated ELD time in the schedule next year. Our math intervention program has been an area of focus for a number of years at Marin. I'm really sorry to say that Yael Bloom is parting ways with us this year. She's been moving on and she's been carrying the torch in math intervention for a long time. And a lot of our growth is due to her. So we'll be sad to see her go, but the program is gonna continue and we'll be supporting students in math during wind time. We're gonna continue all the great communication around attendance and overall our culturally responsive teaching practices, continuing to emphasize those, our data-driven response to intervention and serving the whole child, focusing as well on how to support kids with a collaborative lens during cost team time. and focusing on our inclusion model with the growing number of students with disabilities. We added a new ESN class two years ago and so we have an increased number of students with disabilities in our school and it's exciting to see them included in our school.

Okay. At Ocean View, we have been seeing over the course of actually the four years that I've been there, longitudinal data that shows increases just overall and in all of our subgroups, which has been very exciting. So the data here, though it's year to year, if you looked at our scores longitudinally, if that's the right word, then you would also just see like an increase in our CASP scores and a decrease in chronic absenteeism and all the different metrics that we've been looking at this whole evening, which is really exciting for us. Overall, our scores year over year increased by 5% in ELA CASP. Our subgroups all, you know, increased year over year. some making substantial significant growth, but one group whose scores decreased year over year substantially was our Asian demographic of students. This is one where we want to dig deeper and see what it is that's happening for them. One thing that I was looking at in our end of year data is that, I don't want to say the wrong percentage, so let me make sure I say it, but we have, you know, some subgroups at our school that are also ELs. And one group that I know has in terms of our ELs is the Asian demographic of ELs, right? We have more Asian, sorry, at Oceanview that we've had in the past. And so I'm wondering, you know, just like what that, if that's part of what can be challenging, right? That these students are both multi-language learners. Yeah, because 68% of our students who are below or well below in DIBELS at the end of the trimester are actually Asian, identify as Asian demographic. So that was kind of something that I was like, hmm, I'm curious. So anyway, and in math, we also increased our score slightly year over year and in all of the subgroups except for that Asian demographic of students. All right. In terms of other metrics, we had last school year a huge percentage of students who made tremendous ELPAC growth and proficiency. So year over year, it looks like pretty substantial, like a decline. But then if you look at our trajectory for the past three years with specifically ELPAC scores, We are two points above what we were in 2022. So again, longitudinally we're still increasing, though year over year it fell. Our chronic absenteeism rates rose slightly from last year, which is interesting because we feel anecdotally that things have gotten better, but obviously that's something to dig into more. Our students with disabilities, we continue to see some chronic absenteeism. So that's something that we want to focus our efforts on and our Latinx students as well had greater absenteeism in year over year. So, in terms of needs, we still, having a large percentage of our school be multi-language learners, we want to continue to have an instructional leadership focus on how our English learners comprehend and make sense of mathematics and also understand how to read and comprehend. We have a renewed interest in thinking about our students with disabilities with a lens of like UDL, which we've done before, but really using them as kind of our focus group to then make systemic differences in our classrooms to challenge ourselves to provide better instruction for students with disabilities in all of our areas. Obviously we want to dig deeper into the demographic of our Asian population and see what's going on there and support them as needed. We want to provide more professional development for integrated ELD in our classrooms because we think that'll benefit all students. Also continue to develop our strategic designated, you know, pull out ELD supports and and collaborate more with the special education department so that we can have a, we can see greater gains in that area. And then just overall at Ocean View, we are celebrating incremental growth because we have seen it, we have felt it, we're really excited about it. We continue to be proud of the work that we're doing and we wanna just continue to strengthen our teacher pedagogy and student connectedness. our presentation, so any questions?

Questions? Trustee Boyd.

Just one question about the Cornell metrics. I just wasn't sure for the slight decreases that happened in the English language and the math scores, I wasn't sure whether the specific populations, I know there are some that are called out, but the specific populations that their performance decreased, if those are sort of called out and if the actions that are, like the actions in need that are identified are in some ways focusing on those specific groups. Let me know if that doesn't make sense, it's late for me too.

So, yes. So, for example, for students with disabilities and students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, I mean, absolutely, like, this is all part of not just what I need time, but our cost process in terms of, like, really identifying and working with our teachers and all the different adults who support the individual students, making sure that they are getting all the well-rounded support that they need. And so... It's not just about the win time, but it's also the coordinated effort for individual students. And I would say similarly for any student who's struggling in math as well.

Thanks.

Are there comments, questions? My one comment would just be, I think in general, the CIPs or results sort of show our focus. Like we see where the places where we focus are the places we're making progress in general as across the board. So I think that's, that just tells us as we pick the things that we focus on each year, those are the choices we're gonna have to make in terms of the places we wanna have the real impact. So thank you. If there are no other questions, I think we'll move on, though I think we need to make a motion before we move on to the secondary schools to extend the meeting. Trustee Hopwood is giving me the stink eye.

I can make a motion. How much longer do you think? Should we just do 30 minutes to start with?

I think we can only make one motion.

Can we? Oh.

I think we get one motion to extend the meeting, if I remember the bylaws correctly. Sorry.

Sure. That's okay. No, I think you're right, actually.

Yeah. Stop clock is right twice a day.

Just for open session, right? Do we then have to convene to closed session?

That's the part. We do. Yeah. I'm going to look at Julie on that one. When we extend the meeting, does that also need to include our time in closed session? Because I know we've got, for better or for worse, a decent closed session conversation. It's okay. It's okay if it's bad news, Julie.

Sorry, I don't know the answer to that, but I would say probably you need to have one for closed session as well. Okay, but I just think we're not going to be productive if we're here late, late, late.

So what's the longest we can... Is there anything we can table that we have currently?

I think we can, I'd have to look to CBO, we can table the CBOC report probably, but that's also a two-minute conversation, I think, so that doesn't save us a ton of time.

Just trying to be realistic.

Can we table the math vision? So somebody else will have to, because I think...

I think it'll work. We can table the math vision.

Great, we'll do that.

Okay, so that means that we have our... The math division, I think, is probably one of our longer... Our secondary, and then we would have our... Those guys are going to be on it.

I have full confidence in those guys.

Okay, and also... And we'll talk too slow. Do we want to say that we'll extend by an hour?

Yeah, I think we need at least an hour. Yeah.

Is that sufficient, though? I don't want to be... That at least gives people something to work towards, because I think that's late enough.

Oh, I'm not. Let's be clear. I'm not looking forward to being here.

I was just thinking if we, yeah, we need to be realistic.

I mean, I might go an hour and a half just to be safe, but I might be a negative. I may be a doomsdayer.

Josh, I think we might be limited to no longer than 11pm in the board policy.

I think the, if I recall, I'm going to look at Julia to correct me. I think the Board of Policy says we get one extension, but I don't recall that it says the duration of the duration. Yeah, I don't recall.

Can I have a...

I'm phoning a friend to get the right answer here.

I'm looking right now.

As I'm sweating to death with everybody else in this room to make it a really comfortable extra hour or two. Here we go.

Right.

Verdict says.

Oh, I found it.

This is five precious minutes.

Just gotta find it.

We can't skip the board bylaw, I don't think. I think we have to, well, I guess we could do it at the next meeting. I think we have to do it this year.

That's a conversation.

We can push it to the next meeting.

Sorry, I'm just trying to find. All right.

I'm still looking, I'm sorry.

Here we go. We're looking at whether or not there's a limit to how long we can extend. I don't recall one, but I'm not always right. We've got one minute to make the call. Here we go.

It does or does not. OK. I can't find it.

OK. So let's assume, I think we're going to assume that it doesn't say anything since we can't find anything. So I'm going to recommend that we extend for an hour and a half and hope that we do not have to take that full time. And then after this presentation, we'll have a brief conversation about amending the remaining items on the agenda. Does that sound appropriate?

Yep. So I move to extend the meeting by an hour and a half.

Great. Can I have a second?

I second.

ALL IN FAVOR, SORRY, I SHOULD DO A ROLL CALL VOTE. I FORGOT TO DO THIS EARLIER. LET'S DO A ROLL CALL VOTE AND EXTEND IT BY AN HOUR AND A HALF. THE HITS KEEP COMING.

TRUSTEE CAHN. THERE IS NO ONE IN THE ROOM I VOTE YES. TRUSTEE BOYD. YES. TRUSTEE HOPWOOD. YES. VICE PRESIDENT INGLIS. YES. PRESIDENT MAHONEY.

YES. OKAY. SORRY FOR THE BRIEF INTERRUPTION. HELP BRING US HOME FOR THIS LAST HOUR AND A HALF. WE'RE READY.

All right, well, thank you for having us. I'm just going to introduce myself, and then I'm going to have my counterpart introduce herself. Eric Mapes, principal of Albany Middle School.

Michelle Lausheim, assistant principal at Albany High School. Darren McNally could not make it tonight.

Okay, so we're going to go pretty quickly here in the beginning because I think it's a lot of the same. I will say in going through the CIPSA process this year, I think there was more collaboration than there's been in my four years at the middle school with different groups. And I think that's a testament to Dr. Stone and her team wanting us to do that and pushing us to do that, which actually really does help in the process. As 15 years as a teacher, I actually never was asked to look at my school's SIPSA. So that is a good change, positive change. Okay, so at the middle school, much like the elementaries, we are looking at basically the same data, except we moved from Fastbridge to Starr. And we have some growing pains with STAR, but I think the one reason we went to STAR reading and math is because our FASBridge scores were much higher than our CAASPP scores. And so was it really giving us a good local assessment of what the state assessment was showing? So that was the reason why we moved this year. Again, we looked at how our students are doing. Do we see trends? We were looking at data with our different groups, department leadership team, the instructional leadership team, school site council, and even students. And then what interventions do we have and what are we missing? And that's probably the hardest part is what are we missing? And I can talk about that in a little bit. So we do follow the LCAP goals. And so the first goal for us is always around student achievement, and then supporting the whole child, and then how as a staff can we get better. Just to look quickly over the metrics, our English scores did go up by 3%. Unfortunately, our math stayed the same, which I was hoping would go up. If you look at our star data from the beginning of the year, it's pretty similar. Actually, our math star data was actually at 63%. And our language arts was, I think, was 79%. So it was pretty similar. We saw some increases, and unfortunately we saw some decreases. And so what I like to do is I like to say I look at our groups of students, and I look at them more as individuals and not as groups. And so targeting individual students who we see in these groups, what are we going to do for them? And so that's something we talk about in our care team meetings, which is our cost team. We talk about that as a leadership team with our counseling team, with our department leadership and our instructional leadership, which was new this year and is actually a very valuable addition to how we do things at Albany Middle. And our science went up by 1%. A little bit here and there. I mean, the decreases really bother me with our African-American black students decreasing on the English language arts and our Latino students decreasing a little bit. I don't like to see decreases. I like to see increases. So those are things we're going to work on and continue to work on year after year after year in what we put into place. English, our percent, English proficiency percent actually went down. And so that's something for ELD we want to really, with our English learners, really address this coming school year. Chronic absenteeism went down. Not enough. At the middle school level, you have to be there. In order to even, you know, was it 60% of being successful is being there. They have to be in the classroom. They have to be experiencing working with their counterparts, their peers. Every day they miss makes it hard, especially when we do two days a block. And those days you make it like missing two days of school. So chronic absenteeism did fall for many, but did also increase for our African American black students. But it fell for a few. We still have more to go. And so I think I'll talk about this a little bit more. Our suspension rate did go up. UNFORTUNATELY. I DON'T LIKE SUSPENDING KIDS. WE DO EVERYTHING WE CAN TO NOT SUSPEND KIDS, BUT THERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT HAPPEN AT SCHOOL THAT REQUIRE A SUSPENSION, AND THAT'S THE DECISION I HAVE TO MAKE AND MR. FRISHMAN AND OUR TEAM, AND THAT'S NOT AN EASY DECISION THAT WE MAKE WHEN WE HAVE TO DO THAT. So our goal, first goal is to increase student achievement. Our identified need is students in achievement and opportunity gap populations have academic outcomes below the school average. This disparity must be addressed through this plan. So that's what we're doing through this plan. We're addressing that. As a team, we're still offering the intervention classes, but something we're doing a little bit with those intervention classes is who's teaching those intervention classes and targeting those intervention classes with teachers that are able to help those kids. And we've seen it happen. I've seen it happen. I'm thinking the teachers. I don't want to name names. But I do think targeting those, having specific teachers, having after school homework help. We had that. We started that a little bit into the fall semester. Looking at the data, actually looking at the data. And I think that's something we talked about in our ILT meeting today with our team about how are we going to do that and then what are we going to do with that data. And how are we going to work closely as a department leadership team and an instructional leadership team to help with student outcomes? When we go to the whole child, we did see positive increases, I think, this year. And part of that was we had a full-time wellness coordinator. We had one campus supervisor, but we had a yard duty aide, and we had another person to help us as well at school. I think having more adults on campus is always a good thing. You know, it's that proximity piece. So that helped. Care team is a really important part of what we do in identifying kids who, whether it's for absenteeism, they're struggling with mental health, having a strong mental health program, which we do at our school site, all of those things really help with supporting the whole child. And again, offering them things that they can do outside of the classroom. That is a very important piece. We had over 30 clubs. We have 13 sports. We have one academic team. We have a very strong, thanks to you all, a very strong visual and performing arts program. All of those things make a child's experience that much more meaningful at middle school, which is a very tough time. In a parent's life and in the children's lives, when you were 11 to 14, you were going through a lot of changes, good and bad. Then we get to communicating and leading together. And identified need is to successfully meet our school goals. Teachers must receive high quality targeted professional development, along with the time and support needed to effectively implement new strategies and instructional tools. And as we know, time is our friend, but also our enemy, because there's not enough of it. One thing that we decided to do this year is we are going to have two of our teachers are going to become instructional coaches. They were our new teacher advisors this year and they built relationships with the newish teachers that we have at our school site. So we're really gonna, they're gonna be working with the administration, the counselors, the department leadership. They're also a part of the instructional leadership team to really focus on how can we make teaching and learning better in everyone's classroom. We also, almost everyone's coming back. We don't have a lot of turnover this year, which we've had over the years, but part of that is because we keep getting bigger, which is a positive, but it also means you need to hire new staff. So creating that consistency, that stability, I think is a really important piece. We also this year had critical friend groups where it's like a professional learning community and we brought people together from different grade levels and different departments and had them talk about important topics. And so these are the things that the staff, the faculty, are really into doing and wanting to do. They want to get better. We want to get better. And so that's an important piece of being at a school site. And I'm going to pass it off to Michelle.

So the WASC accreditation, this is something a little bit special for the high school, and this is part of the improvement process for the high school as they go through the accreditation process. And what I just want to mention is that we do use the SIPSA, and those five goals for the high school and three of those goals for McGregor are kind of the WASC goals. action plan and so it's all about kind of making sure our schools meeting the standards for student learning and school effectiveness so it's ongoing in terms of improvement process I do want to mention that H Albany High School was accredited during the 24-25 school year and so full accreditation six years with a three-year mid-cycle review so that was last spring And then also McGregor had their mid-cycle review this school year. And so why the formatting looks different is that we stick to the WASC action plans. In terms of the metrics at the high school, just like everybody else, in terms of kind of our dashboard metrics, all the trends are going up. And so we have, you know, ELA and math going up. And one of the things I do want to point out is that our ELs making progress. We were in the yellow. It's a decrease from the previous year, but it's slightly decreasing. But when you look at post-COVID as a whole, the trend is going up. In terms of preparedness for college career, this is a huge jump for Albany High with 76 students kind of being eligible for the CSUs and the UC eligibility requirements. And so I just want to mention that. Our suspensions also less than 1% and low. And both, we have 68% of our students at grade level for both ELA and math. And our DNF in courses needed for graduations up to 30%, receiving a DNF. And one of the things I want to note is the graduation rate, 99.3% for the class of 2025. This is the best we've ever had. I've been at Albany High since 2003, so this is a very significant number. So just want to point that out. And then our California Healthy Kids Survey, we actually have an increase in terms of students indicating feeling of school connectiveness and feeling that they have caring adult relationships at the school. So just want to point that out as well. And then in terms of the high school, the five CIPSA goals are WASC action plans. So the first one is organization for student learning, right? Reviewing, realigning school systems to kind of reflect the SEL learning and also kind of aligning school-wide learning goals. and revising the mission and vision statements. And so the identified needs is to basically work together as a staff and kind of unifying that mission and vision to serve others. The second goal in curriculum is basically... Continuing to offer a wide variety of quality courses, kind of fostering training, collaboration with teachers, and maintaining high quality, utilizing strategies so that we can make sure our students, our graduates are career and college ready. So again, aligning our interests and also ensuring more career college readiness and kind of providing more interventions for students. Teaching and learning is basically increasing school interventions and supports and basically focusing on those students and trying to identify students that are not as achieving in comparisons to their peers and just kind of looking at more ways to support them. Assessment and accountability is revising and refining that process to identify who is struggling, right? We've before used the D and F grades for required classes for graduation. We've also used the college career readiness. And so staff and administration, we're trying to work together to identify those students again. School culture and support. One of the improvements is on communication throughout the school, whether it's from district to school, administration to staff, and school to students, and school to families. And so kind of finding ways to make communication cohesive. And at McGregor, it's curriculum and instruction, refining academic instruction techniques. One of the things about McGregor students in particular is that they haven't been successful in kind of traditional academic environments. And so just trying to find ways to really make them feel like they belong, whether it's smaller classes and more personalized relationships with those students. connects with goal two, social and emotional learning and creating a stronger culture and sense of community for our McGregor students to help increase engagement and so students sometimes feel disconnected from the school and the community and so one of the things we wanna focus on is kind of fostering success for these students and so that they feel cared for. And the last goal for McGregor is community connection, building more of a team-centered approach to all students, collaboration, and so McGregor has done a fantastic job. Students will, sorry, teachers and the admin will come together regularly to talk about each of the students in the McGregor program. And action steps. Yes.

So there are a number of secondary action steps. The department leadership team at Albany Middle and at Albany High really want to start doing more articulation, looking at the movement from eighth grade to ninth grade. And so those conversations were happening in our department leadership teams, and now they're going to be put into action, and we're going to be meeting throughout the year with each other and it's important that we do that. So we know what, we did some learning walks where our ILTs went to the high school and the middle school and got to see the similarities and differences and so we really want to make that articulation stronger and that hasn't happened for a long time and it's time it happens. We got a little envious of the elementaries and how closely they work together, so it's time we start looking more 6-12. You won't see a sixth grader playing on a high school basketball team, but that's okay. Create a clear progression in academic expectations through grades six through 12, including explicit instructions as expectations increase. You know, we can't say we're going to be doing the exact same things, because middle school and high school are very different. But I always say it's like, for middle school, it's like walking up three stairs. The next stair is not ninth grade. You actually have to come to a flat surface, turn the corner, and start going up those stairs. It is a jump, but we need to make sure our kids are ready, and we are ready, and we are doing everything possible to make them so they can be successful in high school. And then having clear expectations for students and teachers around how assignments should be communicated to students. I know the high school is going to be using Canvas. And we have come up with shared agreements at the middle school where all of our students this next year are getting planners. And every teacher is going to post the homework either on the board or on the television screen. And the students are going to be expected to write the homework down. So instead of having to go to six different places on Google Classrooms to find the homework, it'll be in one place, not just for the students, but for the families who we want to help them make sure they're staying on top of their studies. So some exciting things happening at the secondary around our partnership that we realize that needs to happen, and everybody's at that point ready to make it happen. And our ILTs have already been meeting, so it's good stuff happening. So wanted to make sure we put that in there.

And at that point, any questions? Terrific. Any questions from the board?

I have one question from the high school. So 30% of the students received a D or an F at the interim progress report, but you had a 99.3% graduation rate. So I guess two questions. Can you graduate with a D? Yes. Okay. But how are you getting the Fs up to get to 99%? Like, that's a huge jump.

Well, I don't know the percentage of the Ds and the Fs, but... Yes, so if a student gets an F, they are not receiving credit for a class, and if it's a required class for graduation, there's interventions, there's credit recovery, depending on a student's age and how many credits they're deficient in, there is the McGregor program in which they have a faster chance to make up credits versus if it's one or two classes, summer school is the most appropriate place. So there's all these different interventions.

Other questions? Trustee Boyd?

Yeah, just one comment, and this doesn't pertain to this more than it's sort of like a global comment across really all the belonging, especially data that we've been seeing, just to flag the importance of diversifying our faculty and our staff, our teachers, in a very intentional way. It's something that... something that improves the the lives of our students across the board um but especially you know one of the wonderful things attending these graduation ceremonies was hearing all the beautiful names all the ranges of names and all it's just a wonderful rainbow of our community and the closer we get to having our adults on campuses reflect that the more likely that some of our students who might not might have a harder time feeling like they're connecting to an adult, the more likely that they'll be able to find someone.

You're here. Okay, any other questions? Thank you so much. Thank you for stepping in, and it was great. I appreciate it. Before we go on to the next things, let's have a brief conversation as a board, given our I'm going to make a few proposals, but feel free to, I'm going to propose we move the math vision conversation, which I think will be a hefty one, to our next board meeting. Seeing as I see Chair Tiedemann in the room, I'm going to say let's keep the CBOC conversation. I think the review and action we should take action on, because they may have some contractual things associated with them. And then item 13A, the discussion on the board bylaw regarding salary. I think that'll be a hefty conversation. We have to take action on it this year, but given our timeframe, I would suggest we do it at the next meeting if that works for people. That's my initial proposal. Quick reaction before we move to amend the agenda.

Yeah, I looked back at our governance calendar spreadsheet, and next meeting looks pretty light at the moment. Anything we can move to that is a good idea. Great. And also, we only had 10 minutes allocated approximately for the CBOC report. I mean, it doesn't sound like it's a particularly long...

I have full confidence in Aaron. I have full confidence in Aaron driving us home in...

Yeah, so no, I think what you proposed sounds good, yeah. Okay. And also you were correct when we, 9323 board policy, can do it once, does not give a limit.

Like I said, a stop clock is right twice a day, okay. Okay, so can I have a motion that says we're going to amend the agenda and move the math division and the discussion of board bylaw 9250 to our next meeting?

I move to postpone both of those agenda items to the next meeting.

I SECOND. CAN I HAVE A ROLL CALL VOTE?

THERE IS NO ONE IN THE ROOM, I VOTE YES.

THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE IN THIS ROOM AND I VOTE YES.

I'M SWEATING LIKE A DOG. LET'S MOVE ON TO THE CITIZEN BOND OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE ANNUAL REPORT.

Good evening, board members. I swear I won't need 10. I probably won't need eight. My name is Aaron Tiedemann. I am the chair of the CBOC, and I'm happy to be here to present our annual report for fiscal year 24-25. First, I just want to thank all our members of the committee, as well as our district staff, particularly Linda, who chairs the meetings or staffs the meetings, takes all the notes, and does all the presentations, as well as Josh, who attends them on the behalf of your board. This report and the presentation are both brief and should be accessible, but as summarized in the report, our committee was formed in 2017 after the passage of measures B and E. The report is our central responsibility each year and it summarizes the spending of each bond and makes sure they're within the will of the voters. that is based on the annual performance audits that was received by both our committee and your board in March. And it doesn't yet include Measure L, but hopefully the next one will as we know that that's started to sell its first tranche. Overall, we started that last fiscal year with relatively small balances in both bond accounts as they have been largely spent down with the vast majority going towards capital improvements to several schools. Measure B brought in a little bit over $72 million, and around $42 remains to be spent. So we're pretty much done, which is very exciting. Measure E was sold in several series and brought in about $27.5 million, and we have about $1.2 million remaining to be spent there. I anticipate probably by our next time looking at this, that'll probably be gone. The report this year also includes a couple new graphs from the one you saw last year that show the spending just in this last fiscal year to give an idea of what's been done recently. But the main conclusion and the highlight is that both our committee and the audit found no weaknesses or issues with the spending of any bond funds and concluded that those funds have been spent in line with the intention of the voters of the city of Albany. And just on a last note, I would ask anyone listening, if there is still any members of the public, we have some vacancies, so I would encourage people to take a look. We meet quarterly or as needed, and we keep the meetings very efficient, so it is not a heavy lift. With that, I'm happy to take any questions if you have any.

The speed reading is appreciated, and I appreciate Aaron does. As Aaron said, he runs an efficient meeting, so for people who are interested, it's actually a really great opportunity to get involved about how we're spending money for the next 5, 10, 15 years of the school district in terms of spending this bond money. And so we've done some really nice, I think, in terms of overviews of how this money is going to be spent. And as Erin said, with L first being sold, we're going to start to have some actual action happening on that. That'll be fun to see. Any other questions? Thank you for your time. Thank you for your staying late. And thank you for your brevity. We all appreciate that.

Of course. Thank you. Have a good meeting.

We'll move on to our review and action items. We've got the approval of the declaration and disposal of obsolete instructional materials. So you're up.

I'll be quick. So with the adoption of our new ELA curriculum, Fishtank, we are recommending that we, in accordance with Ed Code, go through with the disposal of our obsolete reading and writing instructional materials, the reading and writing units of study from Teachers College and Lucy Calkins. AND WE WOULD LIKE TO RECOMMEND THAT THE BOARD DECLARE THE INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS IDENTIFIED IN THE ATTACHED INVENTORY ABSOLUTE AND AUTHORIZE US TO DISPOSE OF THE MATERIALS IN ACCORDANCE WITH CALIFORNIA ED CODE, SECTION 60510-60530.

ANY QUESTIONS FROM THE BOARD? ANY COMMENTS FROM THE PUBLIC? Seeing none, do I have a motion?

I move to declare the instructional materials identified obsolete and dispose of them. Second.

May I have a roll call vote to dispose of the materials?

Trustee Cahn? There's no one in the room, yes. Trustee Boyd? Yes. Trustee Hopwood? Yes. Vice President Inglis? Yes. President Mahoney?

Yes. Thank you very much. We move on to our two conversations about the Cornell Elementary All-Gender Bathrooms. CBO Wu, you're back.

Thank you. At this time I would like to introduce Vanessa Rodriguez from our CPM partners to discuss the next two items.

Thank you for sticking around.

Thank you very much and welcome. I would look forward to working with you all, you guys, everybody else. Thank you for approving our contract a few board meetings ago. So I would like to discuss the Cornell Elementary All-Gender Restroom project contract. So Mark Builders, we went through a competitive bid process where this project has been reviewed and approved by DSA. The architect has been working diligently on trying to get this approved. Once it got approved, we went through the competitive bid process. Mark builders was the Second to the lowest bid so we did have a lower bid And that unfortunately contractor did not submit the correct Deliverable so he was then disqualified mark builders was the next one so we went through did our due diligence to the references experiences and and kind of like a whole reference check. So he checks out. We're excited. We're going to mobilize. Actually, I'm going to submit the NTP notice to proceed tomorrow. And we're going to mobilize on site specific this week to just setting things up and just kind of getting away of the land. And then next week, we'll start demolition.

Questions from the board? Sorry, I have one question. How should we think about these two projects in the context of all the facilities master planning stuff that's going on?

This has been a long time coming. And this is one of those items that we must do and cannot wait for the facilities master plan implementation phase to occur to upgrade these bathrooms. So we feel that this is a priority and we need to move forward.

Can I also add that it is a part of a closeout of a previous upgrade to Cornell for the playground? So we do need to close that out. And part of that is doing these bathrooms. But there is some intentionality around ensuring that whatever we do with this wouldn't be undone with whatever we do next at Cornell.

Great. Any other questions from the board? Comments from the public, either in person or on Zoom? Seeing none, do I have a motion? Come on, people.

I will, too, approve the contract with Mark Builders LLC for Cornell Elementary All-Gender Restrooms.

Thank you, Trustee Kahn. Do I have a second?

I'll second.

Okay, I have a roll call vote.

STILL THE ONLY PERSON IN THE ROOM, I VOTE YES.

THANK YOU. WE'RE MOVING ON TO THE RELATED APPROVAL OF THE AGREEMENT BETWEEN ALBANY USD AND SDG INSPECTION FOR THE CORNELL ELEMENTARY ALL GENDER RESTROOM PROJECT.

SO THIS CONTRACT IS SPECIFIC TO A DSA REQUIREMENT FOR PROJECT INSPECTOR. SO HE BASICALLY DOES ALL THE BACK CHECK AND MAKE SURE THAT ALL THE DSA REQUIREMENTS ARE MET AND WE'RE BUILDING UP THE PROJECT CORRECTLY. SO THIS IS OUR PROJECT INSPECTOR. WE DID ALSO GO THROUGH A COMPETITIVE BID PROCESS AND THIS WAS THE LOWEST BID.

THANK YOU. ANY QUESTIONS FROM THE BOARD? ANY COMMENTS FROM THE PUBLIC, EITHER IN THE ROOM OR ON ZOOM? SEEING NONE, DO I HAVE A MOTION?

I MOVE TO APPROVE THE AGREEMENT WITH STG INSPECTION LLC.

I SECOND.

CAN I HAVE A ROLL CALL?

TRUSTEE KHAN? STILL THE ONLY PERSON, I VOTE YES.

TRUSTEE BOYD? YES. TRUSTEE HOPWOOD? YES. VICE PRESIDENT INGLIS? YES.

Yes, great, the motion, both motions passed. Terrific. Thank you very much. Look forward to more bathrooms and better bathrooms on the Cornell campus. Okay, we're skipping item 13, which will be postponed to our meeting on 6-18. We're moving on to the consent calendar, which is item 14. Do we have any comments on the consent calendar before we go to motion? Anything from the public either in the room or on Zoom? Thank you, I have a question on Zoom. Go ahead.

Yeah, is this the agenda item with the human resources? Because I couldn't tell.

Yes.

Okay, yes, I do have a comment.

Go ahead.

So I have a comment related to the new position that's on here about educationally related mental health services. And I have a statement to read that's on behalf of our other school psychologists in the district. So, hello, I am Julia Hart, the school psychologist at Marin and Ocean View Elementary. I currently support students at my sites with IEP counseling, assessments for special education, and 504 plans and support the cost teams. I'm here to speak about the newly proposed position because as a school psychologist, I want to ensure that that we are providing the right support for students in order to support their growth. When I first read the new position description, I was confused because all of the listed duties are those of a school psychologist or BCBA, two positions we already currently have in the district. Through union bargaining, we also increased our school psychologist FTE to 5.0 so we could offer more counseling, MTSS, crisis and behavior support to our sites. After having conversations with our leadership, it is now clear to us psychologists that the intent of this position is not to replace the school psychologist, but to provide a higher level of mental health and behavioral support to students, primarily at the high school. The school psychologists are in favor of this idea. When deciding our position allocations for next year, we are planning to increase the support to these high need students and have a psychologist on site at the high school three days per week. for mental health counseling. We also understand that these students may actually need five days a week, which is part of this proposed plan. I personally have worked at several high schools with a counseling-enriched program and the successful programs do have a full-time mental health support person. And we agree that providing this high level of support will help reduce non-public school placements, a very restrictive placement that may not be in the best interest of students because we know the achievement is higher in the least restrictive settings. I'm out of time. Am I able to have a little bit more or no?

You can have a few more seconds. Go ahead.

Okay. Um, so basically we're requesting, um, to have more conversations with the district, um, leadership and HR to make changes to this position so that it's clear that it is not replacing, um, a school psychologist.

Great, thank you. Um, if you want up, uh, keep getting my consent to our pull it. We run comment.

I'd like to better understand the distinction.

Good evening, Board. This position is not to replace a school psychologist but to focus on supporting the high needs of mental health challenges for students with disabilities and being able to focus on the service provision as well as the case management of those students in hopes to help them stay in our schools and not go to a non-public school setting.

Thank you. Go ahead.

So it sounds like a supplementary position. That's correct. Thank you.

Any other questions on anything else? Thank you for your comment. Anything else from the board on the consent items? I have a motion on the consent calendar.

I move to approve the consent calendar.

Second the motion.

Can I have a roll call?

STILL THE ONLY PERSON IN THE ROOM, I VOTE YES.

TRUSTEE BOYD? YES. TRUSTEE HOPWOOD? YES. PRESIDENT INCLAS? YES. PRESIDENT MAHONEY?

YES. Great. We're on to future board meetings and agenda planning. I think the additional items are the ones that we identified in this meeting, which include the discussion of the board bylaw in 9250, as well as the math vision update. Do we have anything else as updates? Go ahead, Trustee Boyd.

Use of screens and tech at our various grade levels and also the equity across elementary schools.

Any other topic?

With regard to fundraising in particular.

Any other future board meeting topics?

YES. OVER A YEAR AGO WE APPROVED A NEW SPED POSITION AND WE HAD SAID WE WERE GOING TO BRING IT BACK AT SOME POINT AND UNDERSTAND IF IT IN FACT REDUCED OVERALL EXPENSES. I WOULD LIKE TO IN THE NEW YEAR HAVE THAT PRESENTATION AND UNDERSTAND WHAT HAS CHANGED IN THE LAST COUPLE OF YEARS BOTH WITH STAFF AND MONEY. THANK YOU.

Anything else from an agenda planning perspective? Yes, Julie.

I just have a question about the board bylaw discussion. Do you want that on a review and action item since you have to make a decision?

Yes, it has to be because we have to make a decision at the next meeting. So I appreciate that. Thank you for the clarification. Okay, so we're going to recess to close session to continue our conversation that we started earlier, and then we'll come back later. Thank you so much, everyone, for sticking around. reconvening from closed session. We took no further action. So we're going to adjourn.

Sorry, I did not start it yet.

Recording in progress reconvening from closed session. We took no further action. So we're adjourning the meeting tonight. Thank you.