Mountain View Whisman School District Board of Education - Regular Meeting

Also order the March 5th, 2026 meeting of the Mountain View Wisman Board of Trustees. It is 6:02 PM. We're meeting tonight in the boardroom at 1400 Monaceto Avenue, Mountain View, California. This meeting is being broadcast live on YouTube, Zoom, and on mwsd.org and is being recorded. Uh now ask for the roll call. Bill Lambert, Evan Connley, Anna Reed, Lisa Henry,

Charles DeFazio. All members are present and a quorums established. Now we'll do the pledge of allegiance led tonight by Bub Elementary. I aliance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for it stands nation indivisible withy and justice.

Thank you. Um before we proceed with the agenda, I'll remind all attendees that the board welcomes and encourages public participation. We ask that all speakers adhere to the decorum and time limits established by our bylaws. I'll allow time during each item for public comments as we see how many speakers we have. Uh next item of business is the approval of the meeting agenda. Are there any questions from superintendent or board members to pull items, reorder or remove them? Seeing hearing seeing none, do I have a motion to approve the agenda? Oh, yes. Oh, thank you. Um, is there any public comment on the approval of the agenda? I will open. Seeing none in person, you can turn in a speaker card and one person like Okay. Um, I will allocate three minutes. Um, we're going to begin. I guess I'm unmuted. Is that correct? Um, yes. This is Stephen Nelson. I'm disappointed that um the trustees or staff has not scheduled an agenda item for the Arinda report critique on the tracking of middle school math. Um it would be really advantageous for the board itself to have a discussion item on this where they actually invite all the middle school math teachers to come and if they are interested give some perspective to the board on what their professional opinion is on what went wrong with this middle school math tracking and uh what

kind of things they think the board should be uh insisting to be uh changed or worked on. Uh we've seen too many times when there's surveys that come to the uh staff and then the staff massages them such that the voice of the teachers get um discounted or in some cases ignored in the final decision. that happened about near the end of my term when there was the issue of whether there should be these three track trackings in middle schools. the um um Kittinden, not Kittinden, yeah, the Kittinden math staff said they were against that idea and the staff just ignored that input from the majority of the actual math teachers who were working on this. And I think we've seen from outside uh analysis of what's happening that that was a grave mistake. So please don't make the grave mistake of again ignoring the actual teachers who this is their profession. This is what they do. This is what they see every day. These are the students that they try to help learn. Thank you.

Thank you. Now, do I have a motion to approve the agenda? I move to approve the agenda. Second. All right. All those in favor? I. All opposed? Motion passes unanimously. Now we are move to item two on our agenda, uh, the school showcase. Tonight we're featuring Bub Elementary. Uh, superintendent Bear, do you want to introduce the presentation?

Yes, would love to. Uh, welcome to Bub families and students and staff. Um, welcome to Jane Young, principal at BU. Looking forward to it. All right, there we are. Uh, once again, good evening, honorable board member, Superintendent Bayer, Executive Cabinet, to our staff, students, and community members. My name is Jane Jung, and I am the proud principal of Bub Elementary. There are so many wonderful things happening at Abub and tonight we wanted to highlight three initiatives that align with our strategic plan and SIPA goals four and five. At BUB we believe when our students feel like they belong and they feel welcome that they have great outcomes on student performance. Today we're going to talk about three initiatives. one about cultural responsiveness, one about inclusion and belonging, and the final one about a welcoming environment. Last year, if you recall, one degree difference that Bub had made for our Spanish-sp speakaking families was to voice record the principal bulletin every week and send it out to families. We wanted to further reduce a barrier and we decided to now just send it through auto dialer. So all families have to do is pick up the phone and hear the message. And we've been seeing an increase in attendance of our Spanish-sp speakaking families for principal coffee, ELAC, community events, and most recently the rate of registration return. Tonight I have Mr. Jose Kio, our staff, who will be talking about a initiative we took where we wanted to further visibilize our Spanish-sp speakaking students.

Good evening, members of the board, Superintendent Bayer, executive cabinet. Thank you so much for having us. It really is a privilege to be able to speak to you tonight. Um, at BUB, uh, we believe that community doesn't happen by accident. It's something that we actually have to work on intentionally to be able to make it happen. And so for our multilingual learners, community is especially important because we don't want school to just be something or a place where they just come to learn. We also want it to be a place where they feel like they belong. They feel like they are part of something much greater. And so this is something that is very uh dear to me. Uh the reason why is because I too one day uh was uh a newcomer uh here in the United States at only four years old. I too was also an English language learner. And so, uh, I know the feeling of sitting in a classroom where you're hearing instruction and you have no idea of what's being said. I know what it's like to feel like you want to fit in, but you also don't want to lose your identity. So when I see our our multilingual students and I have the privilege of being being able to work with their families, um I really see a reflection of myself in them. So I feel that commitment and that importance of the work that we do. And so with the support of principal Jung, one small but meaningful initiative that we started this year is a Spanish language club called Somos Bub. Somos bub literally means we are bub. Now once a week our Spanish speaking students they uh get together during lunch and we play games that encourage Spanish conversation. We listen to appropriate Spanish music and uh most importantly we really just create a safe space where their home

language is not something that is minimized but rather it's something that is celebrated. But rather than just hearing me talk about Somos bub, I thought it was very um would be more powerful and impactful if you got to hear it from your from for yourselves from our students. And so I made a small brief video for you all to get an idea. So I guess we'll move on to the next slide. Yep. I like being bub because I got to sing in Spanish and got to be with like other people from my culture. I like Los Buzz because we we get to play like Spanish games like Panol. I don't know. I am. So almost sobb is a very simple two phrase word or

two-word phrase sorry and yet it is still a very powerful statement that reassures our multilingual students that they too belong. At BU we believe that being bilingual is not a barrier but rather it is a superpower and that's something to be celebrated. Thank you for listening.

Thank you, Mr. Po. Um, the second initiative I'd like to to share is our inclusion and belonging. And this year, we thought about steam and project-based learning for our SAI classes. So, at BUBG, we are home to three SAI classes and we are also the uh a site with a brand new learning uh learning center model. um our esteemed teachers have been especially Miss Arbilder who's unfortunately unable to be with us here tonight has been leading the initiative on how do we celebrate neurodeiversity how do we strengthen our pedagogy around accommodations so that we meet the diverse needs of all of our students um she has been a great partner with our general ed teachers with the SEI teachers reaching out to resources she even attended attended a county county sponsored uh professional development on co-eing and what that would look like. So, she has two video clips that she would like to share.

Good evening. My name is Shannon Arbildo and I am the third through fifth grade steam teacher at Bub School. BUB is known for its strong culture of inclusion and belonging. We proudly serve a wide range of learners, including students in our district's learning center program and SAI classrooms. Our team works with intention, collaboration, and care to make sure every bub cub has access to meaningful, challenging, and engaging learning experiences. In Steam, we design learning to be projectbased. It is hands-on, standards aligned, and creative for all students. But we bring that same level of rigor and creativity into our SAI classrooms through thoughtful collaboration. Steam teachers and SAI teachers plan together, align lessons to grade level standards, and intentionally design instruction to be accessible, engaging, and exciting. In our most recent third through fifth grade project connected to fifth grade earth science standards, students began a solar system unit using adapted readalouds and videos designed to make complex content accessible with guided prompts, sentence frames, and adult support. Students conducted research, discussed key ideas, and each wrote an evidence-based sentence using scientific facts. Then came the creativity. Students use mediums such as watercolor, marble painting, and embossing to build planet models, bringing the A and steam to life. These experiences led to student created planetariums that you'll see in a moment. As you watch the video, I invite you to notice not just the artwork, but the academic thinking, language, and evidence-based learning behind the students sentences. Following the planetariums, students moved into guided hands-on investigations of gravity, collecting data, graphing results, and analyzing how their models worked. Next, they will be exploring shadows and the sun's apparent brightness through continued guided

inquiry and experimentation. Our goal is simple yet powerful. spark curiosity, uphold high expectations, and provide strong intentional supports so that every learner without exception has access to rigorous, engaging, standards aligned learning. Every student is a scientist, thinker, creator, and problem solver with extraordinary potential. When we design learning environments that recognize and nurture those strengths, all students benefit. At Bub, inclusion is not just something we say. It's something we design for. It's something we teach through and it's something we live and believe in every single day. Thank you. This thing

the sun gives earth energy warmer and light. Mercury is the closest to the south. Venus is the hottest planet and it rotates backwards. Earth is the only planet that supports life. Jupiter is the closest planet with over 50 moons.

Uranus is the coldest planet in the solar system. Neptune is over every 165 years.

Yes. And here are some images of the students as they were doing the project. As you can see, it had at different uh curriculum areas and we're just so so proud of of the work of the students. And finally, our our last initiative that we want to share. Um Buff, it prides itself on being a community-based school and building a welcoming environment. And we thought about how do we make our school even more welcoming for our new families, prospective families, and our kinders who are just starting school. Um, when children feel like school is like home from the start, they grow a love of learning. They want to come to school and it just sets them up for success. And Miss Yuings will now share an exciting partnership with our BUP PTA, our maintenance department, our community members, and also Canopy. Good evening. Thank you for having us. My name is Jamie Ewings. I'm a kindergarten teacher and I presented a video presentation for you to talk about this real community effort project. It started out as a vision that I had. My son is in first grade now and so I got to see what kindergarten the playground was like for him and then this year I've returned back to kindergarten for teaching and I had a little idea, a little vision. And I talked to a few teachers and a few parents about it. And this small vision of making a more welcoming environment has really grown and snowballed to a huge community effort to entice and engage our youngest learners.

Good evening. My name is Jamie Euings and I'm a kindergarten teacher at Bub School. I've had the pleasure of working at BUB, first as a kindergarten teacher, then a second grade teacher, and I'm proud to say this year I'm back as a kindergarten teacher, helping foster the youngest learners in their critical and foundational year. When I returned to kindergarten, I noticed two things straight away. First, our kindergarten students were not engaging with the play area, the play structure, toys, or really even each other. Secondly, I noticed that the playground for kindergarteners needed some TLC. The toys were in need of care and attention, as were some of the areas of the playground. I wanted to create a beautiful and functional space where children could play, collaborate, and engage in the environment and experience sensory rich activities. As Mr. Rogers said, play gives children a chance to practice what they're learning. And as Albert Einstein reminds us, play is the highest form of research. Play is not separate from learning for young children. Play is serious learning critical to their social emotional growth, cooperation, imagination, and problem solving. Next slide, please. So on the left are the photos of before that I took at the beginning of the year. Um, the playhouse is the picture on the bottom right and it was in disrepair. It needed to be reshingled. The wood was rotten and in fact it had been closed the previous year when my son was in kindergarten just because it was not great. And there's um folks that some of my kindergarters their parents have gone to BU and they said, "I remember that playhouse." And my first year of kindergarteners are in college now. They remember the playhouse. So I really wanted to make sure that we could get it

up and running. The pictures on the right are from this week. Um, you can see we have lots of new toys and things. If you play the next video, I'll talk more about that. With this in mind, I approached my principal who encouraged me to move forward with the project. I then presented a proposal to our PTA executive board who happily and generously funded the first pieces. New trikes and bikes for the kids, new sand toys, soil, flowers for the planters, and additional materials to begin transforming our space. This project, while still in progress, has blossomed into a community effort. Beyond the PTA support, we have also partnered with Canopy, whose mission centers on growing urban forests and connecting people with nature. They're helping to design the native plant garden that will be part of our kindergarten space. Canopy has also connected with living classroom to help us get new raised planter beds for the space so that kids can engage with the environment, dig in the soil, look for insects, and plant and grow things. The PTA strikes are already beloved. Students race around the track daily and have fun pretending that they're grown-ups. Their volunteers will soon paint the track with a road sign, stop sign, hopscotch, leaping log paths to all to support full body development, regulation, and joy. We've also repaired and reopened our playhouse, which was previously closed to wood deterioration. Thanks to one of our students grandparents, he reshingled the roof and added new trim. And it's now a fun and safe place that the kids love to use. They go in and they playhouse, they cook food, and they work together using their

imaginations to explore their roles in meaningful ways. We've added costumes, rakes for leaf raking, and of course, jumping into piles of leaves. new sandbox toys for building and construction play. And while there's still work to be done, our vision is coming to life. A safe, beautiful, engaging space where children can play, grow, learn, and do the work of childhood. Next slide, please. And before you play the next slide, this really is a community effort. And the wonderful grandparent that I said that fixed our playhouse is here. So a big thank you. The kids go in and they play and they love and they come and they serve me omelets and fruit salads and things. It's just so wonderful. So thank you for being an integral part. This enhanced yard supports focus in the classroom, strengthens bodies, builds friendship, nurtures curiosity, and helps children solve conflicts and engage with their environment. Although this began as my vision, it has become a shared community project made possible by families, volunteers, nonprofits, the PTA, the BUB community, teachers, administration, and people at the district level, all working together to create a space where children can thrive, create, exercise, and imagine. My hope is that not only BV, but all of our youngest learners across the district will have access to outdoor spaces like ours, places where they can dream, play, and grow. Thank you.

And the last one is really short. It's just the kindergarteners from this week expressing how they feel about recess and play. I like recess because I get some freedom and like I get to play with my friends. Recess gets my energy out. Recess is nice and peace. I like recess.

I like to do recesses. Makes me strong. Um, yay. Uh, thank you again for having Bub tonight. Uh, truly every day I walk amongst giants and equity warriors. We look forward to the board's visit tomorrow so we can show you all the great work and even more. Thank you.

Thank you every everyone for that presentation. Um, any comments from trustees? No. Okay. Um, with that, I'll now call for a brief five minute recess to allow for photos and so folks can exit if as we move on to more technical business.

All right,

we're now back back from our recess. Uh, I will now open public comment for items on the closed session agenda. If any members of the public in person wish to address the board regarding this item, please turn in a speaker card. And if you're online, please use the raise hand function. I'll wait to see how many speakers we have and allocate time accordingly. See no hands raised online and anyone in person wishing to speak. So, I will close the floor to public comment. Um, the board will now recess to close session. Before we move to close session, I wish to announce that I'm recusing myself from deliberation on item 4 C due to remote interest in the matter as defined under government code section 1091. I will not be present during the board's consideration of this item and will not obtain or review any non-public information regarding this decision. Court is now recessed at or close session at 6:34 p.m.

The board has reconvened in open session at 7:50 p.m. Uh during close session, the board of trustees took action to issue a notice of non-reelection to four certificated employees pursuant to education code section 44929.21B, 21B effective at the end of the 2025 to 2026 school year and directed the superintendent or designate to send out appropriate legal notices. The roll call vote was unanimous as follows. Uh trustees Lambert, Connley, Reed, Henry, and DeFazio in favor. We now move to the consent agenda. These items are considered routine and will be acted upon in one motion. Does any board member wish to remove an item for separate consideration?

Trusty Lambert. Yes. I'd like to pull item K just to make a brief comment. I would like to pull item G for more discussion.

Okay. Then we'll take do we have a motion for the balance and I'll take public or I'll take public comment on the balance of the consent agenda. Public comment. Yes. Yeah, I'll take public comment. Um, anyone in person wishing to speak on this item, please fill out a speaker card, turn it in, and anyone on the line, please raise your hand, and I will allocate time accordingly. Seeing none in person and no one online, we'll now entertain a motion for the balance of the consent agenda. I move that we approve the consent agenda with item G and item K um removed.

Second. All those in favor? I I I motion P. All opposed. The motion passes unanimously. Uh we'll take item G for order. Um, Trusty Heat, I just wanted um a little bit more detail and clarification of um the RFQS that were submitted um how many there were, how um who was interviewed and why in the scoring process just a little bit more detail.

Sure. So, this is for the RFQP process for uh construction management services. Uh typically at uh districts don't always go through the RFPQ process near the end of their bond program, but because we're nearing uh a longer period of time, the district wanted to go kind of above and beyond and issued an RFP RFQ um to go out and see what else is out there. So we had full respondents to our RFPQ um which is actually double the respondents that we got from when we initially issued it at the beginning of measure T. oftentimes at the end of a bond program because there is less funding available. It takes quite a bit of um manpower in order to enter into a new district. So why would I know there were questions about the number of proposals that we received. So in order to take on a new construction management um to enter into a district um firms are not always as interested if there is less on the table for them to do work on. So since we are on the tail end of our bond program, um that's also partially why we received four respondents. Uh we sent we directly sent it out to 10 different uh construction management firms that have done work in this area and in California. Uh and we also posted it on our website. Um and then in terms of the scoring, so all of the proposals were scored by a group of individuals. Then the top two were invited for interviews. Thank you.

Any further comments or questions from trustees? I'll now take public comment on item G. Uh if any members of the public wish to speak, fill out a speaker card in person or use the raise hand function if you're online. We'll see how many speakers we have and then allocate time. Seeing none in person and no one online. Now, do we have a motion on item G? I move to approve item G. Second. All right. All those in favor? I I. All opposed. Motion passes unanimously. Now to item K for Trusty Lambert.

First, I'd like to thank the staff for answering the questions I sent in uh on the consent agenda. Uh I want to just talk about cons uh King Consulting. I think that's great. We're going out for a dem uh comprehensive demographic analysis. Um these are usually very important and they're notoriously difficult to do in uh in our region um because it's so unique in the area. I would like uh to suggest that uh at some point the board have an opportunity to uh speak with the um analyst before they start the project. Um the main reason is I think we can point out things that we would like to see and so that we get a much better report rather than have a report come and then we you start questioning it and wish that it was done a different way and other things were considered. So I think we would like to have some input upfront and probably the community would also because these are very important. They last for a while while it's important that they be done right. So thank you. Any further discussion or

I support that. Support I support that as well. That's direction from the board. Okay. Um and now we'll move on to public comment on item K. Any member of the public in person wish to speak on this item. Turn in a speaker card or if you're online, please rate use the raise hand function. Seeing none, do we now have a motion to approve item K? Move to approve item K with the board's comments. Second. All those in favor?

Oh, I can make a comment. Superintendent Bar um getting some getting an idea of what what it would look like, what you're what you're suggesting, I think would be important. So I can imagine them uh explaining um you know what their process is, what information they're going to take into account um you know what assumptions are going to be using to generate their metrics. Um and um sorry not what information but what what format presentation at a board meeting. Uh

I think at a board meeting would work. I think that would work well and the public would have an opportunity to comment as well during it and and give it give their input. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Now we'll go with a vote on the motion. I think it's all we got a motion to second. Right. Okay. All those in favor?

I I all opposed. Motion passes unanimously. That concludes the consent agenda. We now move to section seven of communications. Uh do we have any employee organizations speak? None. Next, we'll move on to district committees. Are there any reports from district committees? No. Now, finally, I'll call on Superintendent Bear to for the superintendent report.

All right. Just a couple of um uh good news information items here for the board. Um, first Kittinden's mock trial team uh took first place at the Santa Clair County mock trial tournament. Um, which is an incredible accomplishment considering this was their very first competition and the team was formed just a month ago. Uh, so uh, impressive. Uh, they'll now advance to the state finals that will take uh, place at UCLA later this month. um really proud of their hard work and grateful for Miss Dylan uh for her leadership. She uh took that on and clearly uh organized a good mock trial team. Um so please join me in wishing them the best at state and I'll report to you uh how they do um probably have them here either way um because that is quite an accomplishment. Um second, our early literacy program has been named a 2026 Glen W. Hoffman exemplary program award recipient by the Santa Clair County School Boards Association. So that's fantastic news. This award recognizes programs that make a significant impact on student success and it is a strong affirmation of our district's focus on ensuring all students are reading by third grade. We're very proud of our early literacy team and the meaningful difference they're making for students across our schools. And we'll be formally recognized in May at the uh county school boards association annual event. So, congrats to all who are involved in that effort. And, uh, Kathy, congrats to your department. Thank you. I will now open public comments for communications. If any member of the public wishes to speak in person, turn in a speaker card. Anyone online, please use the raise hand function. Seeing none, we will now close the floor to public comments. Now, at this time, we open the Florida community comments on items not appearing on tonight's

agenda. Please remember the Brown Act prohibits the board from discussing or taking action on any item not listed on the posted agenda. Trustees or staff may briefly respond to clarify facts or we may direct the superintendent to agendaize the matter for a future meeting. Um, I'll allocate time after I see how many speakers we have. I'll look online for the raised hand. And do we have any in person? No one in person wishing to speak on agendaized items and no one online. We will I'll close the floor to close the floor on community comments. Here we now move on to discussion and action item 9A preschool update. This is a discussion item only and no action will be taken tonight. I'll ask Director Keer to present the staff report. Good evening everyone. I'm Terry Keer, director of the preschool program and tonight I'm here to share our 202425 state preschool self evaluation. Here's our alignment to the district strategic plan. I'll start with some general information about our preschool program. And here's a brief video on a day in the life of a preschooler. Welcome to the MVWSD preschool program. Our award-winning preschool has lowcost and flexible options for all families. The program is for three and fouryear-olds and is conveniently located near two of our elementary

schools. We offer both morning and afternoon partday preschool programs. In addition, there is a full-day program with the option for afterare. Children are supported by caring teachers with two staff members in part-day classes and three in full day classrooms. Every day is filled with learning, play, and discovery in a warm, nurturing environment. While each classroom's routine may differ slightly, here's what a typical day looks like for our preschoolers. Each morning, families sign their children in as they enter the classroom. Once inside, children drop off their belongings in their cubby and wash their hands. They say goodbye to their grown-up and settle in for the day ahead. They have the option to eat breakfast or play independently in centers or with other children as they arrive. Outdoor play is an important time for children to explore, build friendships, and strengthen their motor skills. They get plenty of fresh air and movement while supervised by our dedicated staff. Preschoolers then participate in large group instruction, also known as circle time. This is when children come together to sing songs, read stories, and talk about the day's schedule. Music and movement are an exciting part of the day. These activities help children develop coordination, listening skills, and confidence while having fun. Throughout the day, children engage in hands-on learning experiences that support early language, literacy, and math skills. Teachers provide small groupoup instruction, tailoring activities to match each child's developmental needs. When finished, students can participate in independent or group play. Meal times are a special part of our day. Preschoolers eat together in a family style setting. Here they practice social skills and independence while enjoying a nutritious

meal. For our full day preschoolers, nap time is an essential part of the afternoon. A quiet and restful environment helps children recharge for the rest of the day's activities. Consistent routines help preschoolers feel secure, and there's also room for exploration. Our learning centers encourage creativity, problem solving, and independence. During this time, children choose activities from different centers in the classroom. Toileting is supervised to support children in developing healthy hygiene habits and independence. For students enrolled in full day preschool, there is the option to enroll in afterare until 5:00 p.m. As the day comes to an end, families sign their children out and we say goodbye until the next fun-filled day of learning. Our preschool program provides a safe, engaging environment where children can grow, explore, and develop a lifelong love of learning. Monthly tuition costs depend on program and parents income. For more information, visit mvwsd.org/preschool. We can't wait to welcome your child to preschool. So, at MPWSD, we operate both partday and full day preschool sessions. Part day is 3 hours and full day is 7 hours with the option of a 2-hour afterchool care program. For staff education, our preschool staff meet all meet or exceed the education and training requirements for community care licensing. California State Preschool programs and QIS. For teachers, we've traditionally hired those with bachelor's degrees or higher. However, shifts in early education, including a large number of professionals leaving the field during and after COVID and TK expansion, have impacted our efforts to continue hiring at that level. All of our classroom

staff, including instructional assistants, have child development permits from the Commission on Teacher Credentiing, and the majority majority independently participate in ongoing education and professional development in addition to the training and coaching they receive on the job. The state rolled out a new prek through3 credential about two years ago and preschool teachers have been encouraged to enroll, particularly those who teach in district preschools. Currently, these credential programs are free. The credential has been advertised as a career pathway in which preschool teachers receive educational credit for their years as early educators and upon completion of the program segue into higher paying positions in TK at school districts serving children in the same age group they were teaching in preschool. The goal is to ensure highly qualified teachers and developmentally appropriate learning environments for TK. This program has had a substantial impact on our program with five out of eight teachers participating. Last year, three of those teachers left the preschool to complete the internship or fieldwork portion of their credential programs. Two of the three that left stayed in Mountain View uh Wisman School District and one went to San Jose Unified. The other two continue to teach at the preschool and we provide staff coverage for them to do their fieldwork in elementary classrooms on site through a partnership with the Santa Clara County Office of Education. And now for the state preschool self-evaluation process. All state funded preschool and childare programs are required to engage in an annual self-evaluation and report their findings to the California Department of Education's Early Learning and Care Division. The self-evaluation process is a synthesis of ongoing data collection from student assessment, assessment of instructional environment, parent engagement, and administrative practices

and documentation. In addition to self-evaluation, programs undergo periodic reviews from the CDE um from CDE representatives to ensure compliance with program regulations. Reviewers examine all the same data and documentation used in the self-evaluation. Our last state review was during the 202122 school year where we were found to be in compliance with all standards. The program review instrument class and class environment and the desired results parent survey and developmental profiles are all components of the self-evaluation. The program review instrument is comprised of 24 compliance standards for state funded preschool and child care programs. These standards include parent involvement, family eligibility and enrollment, attendance records, curriculum, state licensing, and staff education qualifications. The tool is used to determine if we are meeting standards. The document lists the standard, a description of the standard and relevant title 5 regulations, ed code or California code of regulations, and ways in which a program can document that they are meeting the standard. In years past, we were required to include the early childhood environment rating scale or eers in our self-ealuation. ECUS has been replaced by the class environment tool to assess physical learning environments and materials. In addition to class environment as of last year, the CDE has mandated the annual implementation of the classroom assessment and scoring system used in preK through third grade classrooms to evaluate the quality of educator and child interactions on a variety of indicators and behavioral markers within the domains of emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support. The CDE is rolling out class implementation in stages. 202425 was the

first year and programs were required to complete class assessment in 15% of their sessions. This year we are required to complete the assessment in 30% of our sessions and 100% completion is expected by 2028 29. Our program evaluated 90% of our sessions in 2024 25. The desired results parent survey is an assessment of parent satisfaction. The questions are developed by the CDE and it's administered in December. We typically take time during our January staff development to have teachers and instructional assistants meet as classroom teams to review the surveys, look for trends, and identify areas of strength and necessary improvement. The data is compiled into a program level summary of findings. The DRDP is a statemandated developmental assessment that we're required to administer twice a year. There are several versions of the DRDP available. We use the essential view for most students which includes 29 measures that are rated based on observational notes, photos, work samples, and parent input. It has been collected by the classroom staff over the course of the rating period. The fundamental view with 43 measures is required for children with IEPs. After the fall rating period, each teacher creates a classroom level summary of findings report and the director creates a program level summary of findings report with action plans and goals to support student learning with follow-up in the winter and spring. Self-evaluation is an ongoing process from the beginning of the uh from the beginning to the end of each school year and builds on the action plans and goals from the previous years. All of the data collected from the various assessments I've mentioned are compiled into narratives and are used to answer self-evaluation questions with the intention of establishing whether or not we're in compliance with state program regulations. Program plans to maintain

or improve in areas of compliance and non-compliance are required. Next, I'll discuss the findings of our 202425 self-evaluation for 2024 25. We met 23 of the 23 standards in the program review instrument. The one area in which we need to improve involves the enrollment of children with special needs. In recent years, the state has updated regulations to require that we serve children with special needs at 5% of our funded enrollment. Funded enrollment refers to the maximum number of children we can serve with the entirety of our state preschool contract. We have not been able to meet our funded enrollment since 202021 due to the impact of COVID and TK expansion. Meaning we have not been able to fully enroll all of our state preschool spaces the way we used to. As a result, we do not always meet the 5% of children with special needs funded enrollment threshold. While we regularly serve children with special needs at 9 to 16% of our actual annual enrollment, it's not always enough to meet the state requirement. To meet the 5% of funded enrollment threshold of children with special needs, we do everything we can to continue supporting inclusion and early intervention in our classrooms. We have an ongoing partnership with the special education department to provide co-taught and supported class uh general education classrooms to which children are referred for enrollment by their IEP teams. We developed an MTSS cost process specifically for preschool early intervention and we prioritize enrollment for children with special needs. This school year, we're serving children with IEPs at 15% of our actual enrollment. Based on the CDE's calculations from our December enrollment and attendance report, we are expected to exceed the 5% threshold for funded enrollment this year.

The results of our parent surveys were an area of strength. We had a 74% return rate and a 100% of all respondents were either satisfied or very satisfied with our preschool program. Free response comments focused on our staff's dedication, going above and beyond for families, treating children with respect, and preparing them for kindergarten. There was also an appreciation for our extended program hours with 2024 25 as the first year of preschool after school care. DRDP assessment reflects learning along a continuum of developmental skills based on the CDE's preschool transitional kindergarten learning foundations and is aligned with the California content standards for kindergarten. The DRDP is designed with the understanding that all not all three or four year olds will reach the same levels of learning in any given domain all at the same time. There is a range of typical development. When assessing your students, we are measuring their growth over time giving an optimal learning environment. We use our ongoing data collection and fall and spring ratings to inform our instruction and programmatic practices. We also differentiate our goals for three and four year olds. In the fall 2024, we identified several of the lowest DRDP measures programwide in language and literacy and cognitive development as areas to target for extra student support and intervention. Since social emotional development is pivotal to all the other instruction and learning occurring in our classrooms, we include all of the SED measures in our goal setting. We set a goal for 50% of four-year-olds to reach the two highest developmental levels by spring. These levels would be typical of children who have turned or about to turn 5 years old and fall at the uppermost section of the range of appropriate development for four-year-olds. Moreover, we set a goal for 90% of all four-year-olds to be at the four highest levels of development by April, meaning that the vast majority

of four-year-olds will be within a developmentally appropriate range of learning, whether they are kindergarten bound, returning, or moving to TK. Our goals for four-year-olds were exceeded in all targeted measures. We set a goal for 25% of three-year-olds to reach the two highest elemental levels by spring. Again, these levels are typical of children who have turned or about to turn 5 years old by the end of the school year, but fall at the highest end of a range of development. We also set a goal for 80% of all three-year-olds to be at the four highest levels of development combined by April, meaning the most that most three-year-olds would be at or exceeding developmentally expected levels of learning as they return for their second year of preschool or transition to TK. Our goals for three-year-olds were exceeded in all targeted measures with the exception of reciprocal communication and conversation and interest in literacy which fell short by 5% and 1% respectively. Next steps. So what's next for our preschool program? We will complete the 202526 self-evaluation for the CDE by June 1st. We'll have ongoing training and coaching in class to ensure we continue to provide highquality learning environments and instruction leading to positive outcomes for our students and additional funding for our program. Next year will be the first year of mandated implementation of the revised DRDP. Our staff will undergo training and coaching to transition from DRDP version 2015 to the new DRDP 2025. We will also transition to a new preschool director and work with the board to consider cost effective modifications to our program.

Thank you. Um are there any clarifying questions from trustees? Uh will the data presentation also be made or is that just provided asformational? Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Miss Kemper. You're welcome.

So, I have a question. It's um not so much in your presentation, but I just want a clarification. I believe I heard in our last board meeting that in the preschool um not all kids attend all the time. They 10 certain days of a week and not is is that accurate? No. In our preschool program, they actually attend Monday through Friday. Thanks. Any further questions?

That um uh this that was referring to the ELOP ELOP program after school where they kids have the option of attending different days. They don't have to attend all five.

Yeah. Okay, no further questions. I'll now turn to public comment on this item. Uh, any members of the public wishing to address the board in person, please turn in a speaker card. If you are online, please use the raise hand function and I will see how many speakers we have to allocate time. See no one in person and one person online. U two two hands online. I will now close the public comment and I will allocate three minutes to each of the two speakers online. So I will start with Lillian Good. You have three minutes.

Hi, I just had a question. Um, in the presentations that we've heard about budget reductions, um, the preschool director position was at the top of the list for something that was going to help with budget reductions. And so in the last slide that was given, there's a statement that there'll be a transition to a new preschool director. And I'm just looking for clarification on that because the budget reduction would indicate that that was a position that was being eliminated. So that's my question. Bear, would you like to clarify?

Right. With um with Miss Keer's retirement, we're uh still going to need someone to um oversee the program. So we will uh we'll fill that position internally with existing resources.

Thank you. Um I will now move on to Miss Lou. You have three minutes. Um, hi. Thank you for the presentation. Piggy back on Lillian questions. So, if the preschool cost $700,000 to run, does that include the preschool salary, the pre director salary, or it has not been included yet because there's no one that uh you have hired yet to replace her. And also I would like to um repeat my request in the past that I mean I'm not against preschool. am against um pay that the district paying for it when you know and I hoping that the district can figure out a way to collab with collaborate with the city on how to figure this out so that it doesn't um get into you know the the the fund that is supposed to support the TK to a kids in our district and also we are charging with like if if you charge too little it's going to run as a deficit it and then so that at the end of the day no one will benefit because it won't be able to work. So that that is just my comments. Thank you.

Thank you Luke. Return to the board for discussion. Trusty K.

Well, I very much appreciate the update. I have to say I'm most interested in the data because that's something we've been asking for for a while. Um and so the data presentation um shows for example that for our students who are um our students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged and also Hispanic and Latino students. those who attend our state preschool program outperform their peers from those two subgroups um in both ELA and in English language arts and math and that when we look at them you know by second grade those who attended two years of our preschool um do even better and so I think um and there's also data in here about half day versus full day and the so the students Students who attended for full days for two years who are socioeconomically disadvantaged have higher outcomes in English language arts and math at the end of kindergarten. And our Hispanic and Latino students um for one or who have full days for one or two years also have higher achievement levels at the end of kindergarten. The there are so many things that this data doesn't capture that we know that preschool does. It helps with school readiness. We're doing all kinds of case management with families at the preschool level that um is getting them integrated into our system and ready for school ahead of time. But I I do think it's very convincing to see as well the academic achievement data for our low-income families and for Hispanic and Latino families that these programs really are impacting those students outcomes over time. And it's a a worthwhile investment. It saves us money in the long run to invest early in our children and you know head off having to have

some sort of special intervention program later on in the district or have that the gaps begin and continue to widen when we can start early on trying to close that gap. Um so I was really really pleased to see the data. The only other question that came to mind because I think I was thinking about it for ELAP as well and we're going to see it in the ELAP presentation is I'm curious if there's any overlap in terms of chronic absenteeism later on as well because we have oriented these families to the school community. They're used to doing drop off and pickup. They have a positive relationship with staff on campus. Um I'm wondering if it might also help for those um different student groups that we have higher rates of chronic absenteeism with if that's not necessarily the case for those who come to us through preschool because they have had that really positive kind of intake relationship building um ahead of time. And then I wanted to note I told a story last time about referring a child to the program. It was two years ago. It wasn't one year ago. I had to think back to how old my toddler was. I haven't slept much in the last few years. Um, and I went through the superintendent. So, I didn't email Miss Keer directly. Um, but I went through the superintendent and we were able to get that child placed very quickly who was unhoused. Um, was able to get into our preschool program. So, I'm incredibly thankful for the work that um your team does, Director Kempter, for all of your years of service to our community and um and for the team at the sites and everything that they're doing with our children.

Thank you, Mr. Lbert.

Yeah. So, I want to have a very different take on this and I don't mean to I think it's a great program and I think preschool is really valuable. Um but I want to address the data as well and I look at it a little bit differently than trustee Connley. Um I think the uh the numbers here are so small that to reach conclusions on um the influence on academic performance in uh um you know in first grade and second grade is uh quite a stretch. Okay. And if anything, I'm surprised that the children who go to preschool are not doing better um than than they are in these test scores. So, I it's not that I don't think preschool is valuable, okay? I I would like to see it be more effective, okay, than it appears to be in the numbers that are being presented. However, these are very small numbers. One student here or there can make a huge difference in the interpretation. So just want to add that and I think um I do I do share like I share some of the concerns Jesse Lambert has just around you know the summary slide that I that I keyed on was that you know students that attend our preschool do not do as well as students that do not. But I think there are probably some cohort matching issues with that and I worry that again the sample sizes are so small that it's hard to really disentangle that. Um, I'd love to see us try to like peel that apart a little bit because I do think we have a lot of really good metrics for like the the preschool and and I was looking through right all of the the CDE

level ones and connecting that then to the later performance might be more of a systems issue that we've discussed with the random study of having that handoff to kinder or TK or handing handing off to the elementary school like aligning those programs together to see those really good developmental results actually really carry through for all of these students. But that was just my my interpretation of when I when I was reading this. And I think it's more of a a high level making sure that all of our programs are aligned as we discuss we structure these things going forward.

I think it's important to look at the disagregated data. So the the fact that our students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged and who are Hispanic and Latino are outperforming their peers from similar groups afterwards. That's significant. Um and so I'm not comparing apples to oranges. I'm comparing well children aren't fruit either, but I'm comparing children who are um coming in with some different barriers that they're facing and they're outperforming their peers. This is also the information that I want to know about mistrol for example. Are we still serving our multilingual learners there? Are they outperforming their peers by 8th grade? They should be if if our dual immersion program is doing what it's supposed to. I want to compare by disagregated data those student populations. I agree with you on a high level. We want to make sure everything's linked. I think a piece that's really missing here is um actually talking with our TK and kindergarten teachers about their experience of these students when they come out of the program. I can speak as um you know a former kindergarten teacher, I could always tell what experience children had had before they came into the kindergarten classroom. But even when my own child was in kindergarten at Mrol, um I volunteered in the classroom regularly and then Grammy Bonnie Bonnie Ler and I ran an afterchool math program as volunteers for kindergarten. And so we got exposure to kids from all the different classes and I remember noting some children who came in really well prepared and then finding out unsurprisingly that they came through the preschool program on the campus. Um, and so I think that's another piece that's missing here is actually finding out all these other social skills, developmental readiness, like how they're integrating into the classroom environment, how their parents participating in the school. Those are

things that we would need information from the TK and kind teachers to better understand. Yeah. Don't don't um don't misinterpret my my statements about the disagregated. I think it's just it's very difficult to do those statistics well when you have smaller sample sizes as you break it down. So that is something that I just want

we're not running a regression analysis on anything here frankly like not even even with our CASP results we're not running a regression analysis. So I I agree the sample size is small but we're not doing that level of analysis anywhere else either. I think we should be rigorously evaluating a lot of the things we do. And I don't think just because we don't do it somewhere else, we we shouldn't do it to programs as we're reviewing them and stuff like that. I think it's it's hard and I think, you know, there are limitations to what we can know. So, I want to make sure we're not overindexing on that. But when we make kind of some strong claims and try to see connect those, I think it's hard it's useful for us to try to connect it. But we'll Any further discussion? All right, thank you for the report. Uh we will now move on to item 9B, child nutrition update. Uh this is a discussion item only again and no action will be taken tonight. Uh I think director Austin and chief business officer Westover will present the staff report.

Good evening trustees. Uh this evening we have uh Debbie Austin, the director of child nutrition with us. So this is a very late night for her because she uh is typically on site about 6:00 a.m. So in a few hours she'll be back here uh at our central kitchen. Good evening

again. I'm Debbie Austin. I'm your child nutrition director. This is my 10th year as of Friday. Overview of purpose. Purpose to ensure equitable access to meals so every student is ready to learn each day. We serve 11 schools across the district. We provide all students with nutritious appealing meals that support their health, learning, and overall well-being. Milk production model includes scratch cooking and designated production kitchens, credit and gram schools. We are working to reduce the amount of processed foods. At the elementary level, 53% 8 out of 15 days in February of meals are scratched. 26% in February of quick scratch and 20% or three out of 15 days in February were pre-prepared. At the middle school level, 48% of the meals offered to scratch, 52% are quick scratch, and zero are pre-prepared. Quick scratch includes items such as sandwiches and cheese bites. We are limited in the amount of scratch cooking due to the size of our kitchen. Heat and serve is done at satellite school sites. Bulk meal service is being tested now in Montaloma to reduce paper usage and present fresh plated meals. It's basically old school meal service. Central Kitchen. The kitchen at credit serves all of the elementary sites as well as creditin. The kitchen is size to produce only for credit itself. It was not built as a production kitchen. Overview of purpose programs offered. We offer school breakfast program. The reimbursement rate is 3.46. We offer national school lunch program. NSLP reimbursement is 5.69. 69 after

school supper CSCFP reimbursement is 4.6 California University meal programs school served and service model district participates fully in the California universal meals program providing two free meals per student per day regardless of income or eligibility. Meal requirements and compliance. USDA meal patterns. Meals follow USDA guidelines for breakfast and lunch, ensuring students receive appropriate servings of fruits, vegetables, grains, protein, and daring each week. California University meals program. All students are offered breakfast and lunch daily at no cost, supporting access to nutritious meals for every child. This is something that the state of California does. Not all states offer universal meals. State nutrition standards. Menus meet California specific nutrition standards including enhanced fruit and vegetable offerings, limits on sodium, added sugars, and reduced fats. Meal requirements and compliance. Reimburseable meal components. Each meal includes all required components to qualify for federal reimbursement, ensuring compliance and consistent nutrition. Wellness policy alignment. Meal planning aligns with the district's wellness policy, which is reviewed and updated annually to reflect current nutrition standards, exercise, and best practices. Something for uh the public to know about our meal program is it's based on reimbursement. So, the district doesn't get an upfront amount of money to run our program. We submit every month to say this is how many meals we served. So, a question that sometimes will come up is my student doesn't want the full meal. They only want X. In order for us to submit for reimbursement, they have to take the entire full meal um for us to get funding for that.

Yes. The three components for breakfast, fruit, brain or meat alternative, and milk. At breakfast, they must take the milk. That is part of the federal law. They cannot say, "I don't want the milk." They must choose at least three items, including a half a cup of fruit and a vegetable for a nutritious meal to choose all. And on the fruit, we have a fruit bar in the morning. The children can take as much fruit as they want. We we do not turn children away. They can eat all day of that bar if they want to. Bar components for lunch. Vegetable, a fruit, a grain, milk, meat, and meat alternative. They must choose at least three components, including a half a cup of fruit and vegetable. They do not have to take the milk. For a nutritious meal, choose all five. Many development and quality improvements. Department of Education, the CDE, nutrition guidelines, balancing health, variety, and student appeal. Mini design and review. Menus are carefully planned and reviewed to ensure compliance with the California nutritional guidelines. We actually have a program called Nutri Kids, which does dictate what we um serve and if we meet the requirements. Student taste test and feedback. New recipes and menu items undergo taste tests with students to gather input, ensuring meals are both nutritious and enjoyable. Annually, surveys will go out to elementary and middle school students asking favorite and least favorite meals. And we do have a survey going out this month. Nutritional content of meals. Meals are input into a nutrition program that ensures proper nutrition content dictated by the USDA by age. data driven adjustments, participation rates, and food waste data are analyzed regularly to refine menus, reduce waste,

better meet student preferences and nutritional needs. Nutrition quality improvements. Continuous efforts are meant to reduce added sugars, sodium, and highly processed ingredients while incorporating fresh, whole, and minimally processed foods whenever possible. One of the benefits I get from working with Debbie is understanding a lot more about child nutrition. Um, something that is very interesting about our student population is uh their dynamic taste buds. So, when Debbie does these surveys, we will review them, look at what are kids interested in eating in. Of course, she gets a lot of what we would anticipate French fries. they want um the stuff that a lot of kids enjoy, but we also see things like they would like sushi um because they have uh they're exposed to many different types of food. So, the food pallets of our students are quite diverse um in comparison to maybe other school district or other areas of the state.

Exactly. This is my lunch salad bar in December. You see, we have at least a minimum of nine different fresh fruits and vegetables. Some are organic and most are local. We actually have a vendor that locally sources our produce. He actually tasted to be for sure it's good before he delivers it to us. We have a vegetarian fried rice, which we had to delete the mushrooms. The kids didn't like the mushrooms. So, so now our fried rice is just a standard vegetable fried rice with no mushrooms.

Sorry, Debbie jumping in again. Um, in addition to doing the surveys, uh, Debbie will discuss, uh, meal participation rates. So, when we serve a meal and students aren't interested, we see the participation rates go down, which means that indicates to Debbie that that's not a meal that students prefer. And part of what Debbie does in the child nutrition department is you want meal participation up because the more participation you get, the higher the re the more reimbursement we get, which means the more the larger ability we have to provide different options. Um, and then also make sure that we cover our costs for staff.

Exactly. Next is chicken bites and rice peel. Again, there's my rice peelock without the mushrooms. And the kids love this meal. We actually served it bulk service um this week at Montalola and the children much preferred it. They said the food was hotter and the uh chicken bites were actually crunchy and they much enjoyed the meal. The next picture shows our school garden tasting. It's a kale salad made by Chef Dalton. Our food truck went out last year at several several school sites and we taste tested the produce that came out of the school garden. Next slide shows our chicken burrito bowl 6th through 8th grade level. Our chicken ranch wrap which is also operated offered at the sixth through 8th grade level. Next is pizza. Of course, that's a kid's favorite across all levels. Our barbecue chicken, that's uh the cornbread is homemade. The chicken is homemade, and the rice peel is also scratch. That's also another children's favorite. K through five menu items. We have orange chicken and a breakfast sandwich. And again, those are also scratch-cooked. The next slide shows a hummus box in beef teriyak grade K through eight. The hummus box we typically do in the summer and the kids really enjoy the hummus. The hummus is also homemade by Chef Dalton. Breakfast options. We have the Mega O's. That's a new option that we're testing right now. It's organic. It also has protein and it's vegan. and we have the Cheerios and Tricks and we're basically doing away with the tricks. And so we're um offering cereals that do not have dye and that are not highly processed.

Something else to that I have learned from Debbie is a lot of the uh cereals that we serve, they look very similar to what you can purchase at the grocery store, but they are actually nutritionally different because they have to comply with the NSLP rules. So, for example, uh growing up, I remember eating tricks and it has this wonderful coating of sugar on the outside. The tricks that we serve, if you open it up, do not have that. They also have 25% less sugar than what is found in the grocery store. Next picture, school garden produce tasting at Stevenson that we did last year. As the weather gets better, we will go out to the school sites this year that have produce. If they don't have produce, the gardens didn't quite make it, then I'll basically decide put something new for the kids to try and and we'll do it that way. Waste reduction initiatives. This is something I'm proud of. Our share tables. We started our share tables several years back. Standardized share tables. implemented shared tables in accordance with California Department of Education guidance, allowing unopened, safe food items to be shared instead of discarded, reducing overall food waste. All students can eat from the shared tables. Recycling and composting programs. Schools actively participate in recycling and composting programs to divert food scraps, packaging, and other materials from landfills, supporting sustainability goals. Packaging improvements. Child Nutrition currently uses compostable trays and silverware, reducing single-use plastics to minimize environmental impact while maintaining food safety and convenience for students. Again, B food service will reduce a lot of our paper waste. Participating trends, meal counts, prepandemic versus corn participation. Pre- pandemic participation breakfast was 27.5% lunch was 35.15%.

Universal meals 2025 breakfast are now serving 54.55%. Lunch for serving 57.5% of the students. Breakfast production per day averages 240 meals. Lunch production averages 2,464 meals. And that's out of a kitchen that's built to feed four or 500 kids. To provide a little context for participation rates, our partic in comparison to districts across the county, our partition participation rates are very high, which means that the kids are eating in our program.

Lunch participation. Lunch participation is based on favorite menu items and time allotted for the meal. Meal counts and meals. It does no good to feed kids meals that they will not eat. We scratch we stealth cook in that when possible we parade vegetables and add them to casserles. So we trick them into eating vegetables. Supper programs. The beyond the belt program is the only CACF site. The CDE allows sites that were dictated by area eligibility by the quantity of free and reduced students in the area. We currently only have Castro site that is eligible. This year the program is operating at a break even point. Honest reviews and oversight. Administrative review is conducted by the California Department of Education every 5 years to ensure program compliance includes review of the most recent findings and implementation of corrective actions as needed. 2024 audits of the afterchool program. The CSCFP. No findings. Procurement audit 2024, no findings. And NSLP 2025 is currently under review. Procurement review evaluates purchasing practices to ensure compliance with federal state regulations, including competitive bill game, cost analysis, and vendor eligibility and USDA buy local requirements. We try to buy local as much as possible. And our pizzas are actually prepared by a local in Mountain View vendor. So we don't use the frozen pizzas. We buy fresh and they're delivered. Um there's so many pizzas per school site that we have three deliveries per week. So we have some schools are on Tuesday. The middle schools are on Tuesday. We have other sites that are on Wednesday and the remainder of the sites are on Friday.

Health and food safety inspections. Regular county health inspections, three annually, and internal food safety audits are conducted to maintain safe food preparation and service environments. All sites have a food safety certified staff member. Site audits are conducted by the director and the chef. Civil rights compliance. Staff receive ongoing training to ensure equal access to meals and adherence to civil rights regulations. We also must take an annual course on civil rights mail verification and eligibility processes are in place to verify mail counts and eligibility paperwork for applicable even under the community eligibility provision C ensuring program integrity and accurate reporting. What is eligibility? Families complete a free and reduced price meal application or are directly certified i.e. stamped in a foster or homeless applications are reviewed for completeness accuracy. Students are approved for free, reduced or paid. Eligibility is entered into the student meal system and kept confidential. What is verification? Verification is a federal requirement to confirm eligibility information. A random sample of approved applications is selected each year. Selected households are notified and asked to provide proof of income or participation. Documentation is reviewed and eligibility is confirmed, changed or denied. Sometimes that question comes up is why are we still doing eligibility when California has a meals for all program? This is because the state makes up the difference. So when a student qualifies for a free meal, the federal government covers the cost and the state is not picking up that cost. So it is important uh for the state as a whole if we want to help this program continue that families continue to fill out the

eligibility um requirement paperwork.

Why it matters? It ensures program integrity and compliance with the USDA rules, confirms accurate reimbursements for meals served and it protects access meals for students who qualify. Timeline applications are accepted year round. Verification is conducted in the fall. Results completed and reported by the required deadline. Funding streams and revenue sources, cost pressures and financial sustainability. USA reimbursements, federal funding based on the number of complete meals served and student eligibility categories. This is the primary revenue source supporting daily meal service and program operations. California State Meal Reimbursement or the Universal Meals Program. State funding that supplements federal reimbursement to provide two free meals to all students, helping to offset the true costs of producing compliant breakfast and lunch nutritious meals. Seamless summer option provides reimbursement for meals served during summer and interession periods for simplified claiming, ensuring continued access for students when school is not in session. Reimbursement rates are by meal type. Breakfast, lunch, and snack reimbursement rates vary by program eligibility and are adjusted annually. Participation levels directly impact total revenue. Grant funding and one-time resources. Competitive state and federal grants, including kitchen infrastructure and training and equipment grants, support kitchen modernization, staff training, and operational improvements. Reimburseable revenue versus operating cost. Ongoing analysis compares total reimbursement revenue against food, labor, supplies, utilities, and direct cost to monitor program sustainability. Impact of raising food cost. Continued

food inflation, supply chain volatility, and increased cost for compliant and scratch food items are driving higher per meal expenses. Food inflation this year is averaging 3.1%. That concludes. Are there any questions? Couple of slides still remaining. Um I think I missed them.

Mainly focusing on kind of the financial projections of our child nutrition program. So as we've Debbie has gone through the intricacies of the child nutrition program. This is not a simple program to run. even from uh procurement, how we buy our food. Um we're not able to go to Costco and buy in bulk. We're ordering from particular companies where an RFP has been put out. They have to uh maintain that they uh do not purchase food from outside the United States along with a variety of other requirements. Um this is a look at our cost pressures and financial stability uh over the next three years. So these projections are based on our current model of service and what we're providing. Um again, it doesn't include any potential increases that the federal or state government might provide and it does not include any potential uh um grants. So for example, for the past few years there have been kitchen infrastructure grants which have helped absorb some of the cost of running a kitchen. So that lunch cost that you see that the district receives of a little bit over $5 per meal, that has to pay for everything in the child nutrition program, the labor, everything that's in the kitchen, the operating expenses, as well as the food costs. Um, in conversations with Debbie talking about how difficult it is to run a child nutrition program. Um, if we think as normal uh individuals, going to the grocery store trying to buy a lunch for $5 becomes quite difficult um even when you prepare it yourself. But our child nutrition programs actually across the state, this is what they are tasked to do. This is a a review of kind of what our reimbursement rate is. Uh so the federal government uh provides $4.60 60 cents and then California increases that by another dollar because as we're providing meals for all students um this impacts the entire state that most programs cannot be costneutral if the state was not providing that additional funding.

Uh this talks a little bit more about our kitchen infrastructure grant what it assists with. Uh something that middle school students have recently seen. We have new cold and warm uh service. Uh so when they walk through it's it's really actually really nice looking um that it's it's shows Kittinden and Graham. Uh it's and um they're new uh through the kitchen infrastructure grant. Uh Debbie had actually been operating with equipment that didn't work. So the refrigeration for the milk, she would put ice in the the unit because it was no longer cooling. But now because of the kitchen infrastructure grant, we were able to purchase new equipment for the middle schools.

The equipment was actually 30 years old. I think it was 25 95 um program strengths and accomplishments.

Uh so strengths our participation has grown. So after the pandemic when with universal meals um we have seen a huge increase in the number of meals that we serve. We we have also seen that there's res reduced stigma around meal access. So right now any student that's interested in eating goes through the meal line and it's really based on do I feel like eating what's being offered today as opposed to in the past sometimes it was I don't want to eat hot lunch um because of the stigma addressed with it and that's not the case at all in our meal program currently. Um Debbie has worked to alter our menu and uh nutrition. So we try to do more scratch prepared. So if you look at our um menu from four or five years ago, it looks very different now. And the reason that we're able to do that is because we have increased participation. So we're able to do more of that scratch prepared cooking which does require more labor which is actually a major driver of the cost of our child nutrition program. Other accomplishments are waste reduction in operational efficiency. So we've reduced the number of leftover meals by approximately 10%. So they're the staff on site are constantly monitoring what are the kids choosing to eat um how much are they're eating. At one point we did attempt to have students tell us the day before or in the morning are you interested in eating hot lunch today because then that would dictate how much we would send out the door. Um we were not very successful in that. Uh students were not very good about saying yes I want to eat today or it look good and then they want to eat. Um so really we go by averages and what we see. We also are very um dependent on the school site offices telling us how many field trips are are there today. Uh the child nutrition staff will also prepare lunch bags to go for the kids. So getting it really down to uh an art of uh estimating what students are going to eat by constantly monitoring. We also have a very high staff retention. Many

districts uh struggle with maintaining uh staff and we have a fairly stable child nutrition staff which is very helpful for us. So for next step steps and recommendation, we're continuing our many refinement and participation growth. More students that we can participate, the easier it is for us to provide more options for students and to reduce uh the impact on the general fund. Uh Debbie continues to pursue grant funding uh which then again helps us with our kitchen infrastructure. Uh sometimes there are grants for buying local fruits and vegetables and expanding our farm-toschool partnerships. Uh potential next steps is uh I guess this is big ideas of what we could do.

Wish lists.

Wish lists. Um production a production kitchen upgrade. So right now, as you saw from our photos, we produce our elementary meals out of a middle school kitchen. uh sustainability integration, further integrating composting and recycling practices to support our environmental goals and reduce overall waste. Uh continuing with staff training and compliance and again increasing our breakfast and lunch participation. So, some of the things that we're continuing on is working on uh our new guidelines which reduce red and yellow dyes as well as a variety of other food additives that we know much more about now that we shouldn't be eating and that uh working on the California child nutrition regulations and making sure that we push more towards serving fresh locally grown foods and striving for 100% scratch meat meals. Any questions? Mr. President Henry,

um you mentioned that and thank you for the presentation. Um you mentioned that there's uh you're testing out bulk meal service. I think you said monoloma. Yes. Um can you just tell talk a little bit about that and what's the difference in the staffing needs?

Basically old school meal service like you had 25 35 years ago. It's the lunch lady actually putting the food on the plate fresh. It's not pre It's not prepackaged in the morning and then reheated at the site. It's sent out hot and fresh. It's made a couple hours before we actually serve it. And the kids actually love it. We checked the garbage can um after we served it and the trays were clean. So, the kids really do like it. A group of kids came up after I left and actually told the lunch lady, "Keep this up. We want we want this every day." And what's the difference in the staffing needed for for that type of service? you need two people. Okay,

maybe to clarify a little bit, yes, you do need two two people. One of my questions to Debbie, is that going to cost more? Um, the answer is no. Um, so instead of having the staff in the central kitchen package because that takes quite a bit of time after they cooked to package it and then they have a machine that puts the uh the wrap on the top, they put it in a bulk pan and they send that bulk pan out. So instead of having that staff member do the packaging, they spend their time doing the serving. So there's no increase in in cost for staff. Um to maybe I know uh trustee DeFazio going on to a previous question about or request from the board about doing um washing because I'm keeping an eye on like is this possible? Could we add it in um using the reusable trays even with send if because right now we're utilizing the same staff. We're just altering how we're using their time. not yet able to in add in the washing of the trays yet, but we're keeping an eye on for it. You know, is that possible in the future?

Thank you. Trusty Lambert. Yeah. Could you uh you said that the um the staffing drives the cost. Could you give a ratio of staff cost to food costs? My flu cost is approximately 49 to 51% and I would say my labor is probably the other 50%. This district or I should say this county has extremely high labor compared to other counties. We paid probably double what other districts pay in labor.

To also provide and put that into context. It's not that we overpay our child nutrition staff. Um it's just the location that we're located in. It's our county. our county, our cost of living. We're also competing against fast foods restaurants. Um, and we have to pay similar wages in order to get employees. We do actually have a starting wage that does match McDonald's. Yeah. Another thing I'd like you to comment on, which I think is important, is that you offer food services during the vacations. Yes. During the summers, could you Yes. talk about that a little bit?

In the summer, we have summer seamless. We roll our food truck out and we feed all kids under 18 in the city. the gain line. We don't ask for any repayment. The meals are basically reimbursed by the state of California, but again, it doesn't cover the cost. We also serve at some of our elementary schools where we have summer school and they actually get a hot breakfast and a hot lunch. We serve all summer. We only have a week off. We take that week off to kind of wind down, clean our kitchen, and get ready for the next school year. So, we basically serve all year. Sometimes even during Christmas, the two weeks during Christmas, we serve the ELOC programs.

Yeah. Another uh just question that came to mind. It sounds like a lot of the equipment we have is pretty old and perhaps not in the right place. It was not now. Not now. I mean, even even things like that. So, our new equipment came in about two weeks ago. Two. Just I'm just thinking about, you know, future cost and things like that. If we ever go out for or when we go out for a bond again, you know what to upgrade kitchen services. What kind of costs would be involved?

I think our model has changed. So, under measure G, we have full kitchens at all of our school sites. Um, because of the we get more bang for our buck by having a centralized kitchen. um our space at Kittinden is too small for the size of kitchen we need. So that's actually would be part of a larger master facility plan um of how big should our kitchen be in order to operate that central kitchen style. That doesn't answer your question about the cost. I actually I'm not sure yet, but that would be part of it. Yes. Followup too. It sounds like if the district grows then we'd be sort of strained in providing food services as well. Is that

I think that's all part of developing a master facility plan. The last master facility plan that we did in 2020 actually also highlighted the need for a central kitchen. Um kind of outlined based on potential student growth how much space we would need. At the time of the master facility plan we did not and we still do not have a location. As uh the district continues to grow, the space needs also grow to house our students. So at Kittinden where our central kitchen it is is it possible one of the options I think I'm going too far down a rabbit hole right now but um one of the options is could be you know you you make that kitchen smaller for a serviceon kitchen and you regain some of that space to add more classrooms and cook out of somewhere else. Um similar models Santa Clara Unified they have a large central kitchen.

Thank you for the answers and thank you for the presentation. Thank you.

Um, one question. All right, I had two questions. The second one's probably a little bit easier, but um, I saw that there was the note that food inflation averaging 3.1% and food costs increasing 4.3%. Which one do we use for our projections here for like the ongoing costs? So for this part is normally a conversation between uh child nutrition and us. So we look at we say okay we started this year if this is what we thought food cost would be this is where we ended up. Um we chat with Debbie because she sees kind of what is happening. It's not always equal how food costs are rising. Um so sometimes Debbie will say I've seen a hu a big increase in the cost of uh uh

protein uh chicken and meats. And so she's looking at what she has actually served this year and how much she needs to increase her protein. So it's really a conversation actually at each interim of what she's seeing in increased costs. Um we also look at uh statistics that come out for the average cost of food that we would buy at the grocery store, but that's not a direct comparison. So some of it is adjustments that Debbie is making combined with that information that we see. Right. And the costs go up almost per invoice. Unfortunately, it may be a few cents here and a few cents there, but it adds up.

Thank you. And then I'll questions. I'll go to my next one. Um, and this I think you kind of prefaced this during the presentation. So, in the the future vision of a larger production kitchen, do we how far down the line do we have cost estimate or where we're going to get funding for that identified or um we have no funding for it currently. It's not within our measure T bond program. Uh it would likely be another bond program unless we there's another source of revenue. Thank you. I just want to make sure I was clear. It's a wish.

Well, and it it might be good for this board at some point because um we have so many newer board members to do kind of an overview um of our our bonding capacity and when that shifts over time. um because we will have bonding capacity coming back to us as we um pay off the old as the old bonds are paid off. Any further questions? Trusty Reed. Um it was mentioned earlier that milk during the um first meal served of the day is a required take for students. What accommodations are we um having for those who are lactose intolerant or have a dairy allergy?

We serve soy milk. It's available at every meal for those students. Thank you. Seeing no further questions. Thank you again for the report. I'll open public comment on this. Um any members of the public wishing to speak, turn in a speaker card and anyone online use the raise hand function on Zoom. I will wait to see how many speakers we have online and then I'll allocate time. see one speaker online. I'll close it now and we have two in person. So I will give believe three minutes per um I'll start with in person. So um Miss S.

Hi. Thank you. Um, I'm probably not supposed to admit this, but I have had, sorry, I tried some of my daughter's hummus, uh, platter once, and I thought it was really good. So, um, one thing that I've noticed from my daughter is that every once in a while she'll come home and she says that she hasn't eaten. And she says mainly it's because by the time she waits in line and gets her food and then goes outside and sits and eats, um, it's, uh, not warm anymore and so it's not as appetizing to her. And so I wondered if there was I guess my question is there like a quality check to make sure kids are getting through the line fast enough that food is coming out hot enough that it's making it outside to the outside picnic benches um warm enough. And then it also sounds like maybe this new what's being, you know, attempted at Montaloma might be a possible solution. It sounds like stuff might stay a little bit warmer that way. Thank you.

Thank you. Um, I'll now move to the next speaker is Miss Cho.

Hi. Hello. Okay. uh starting with Miss uh Debbie Austin's retirement, what are our plans to make sure that the progress that she has made and then and the trajectory that we're on is not lost in the momentum with bringing in people and also just kind of continue forward on the path of establishing healthy habits not just for the kids on daily basis but like lifelong healthy habits. So what I'm wondering thank you. Thank you. Now we'll go to our online speaker. Um, Miss Lou, you have three minutes.

Um, hi. I I have a few clarifying questions. So when M Austin mentioned that um we are um we pay what other district pay is that for the county comparison or is that for a neighboring district? Um and then do you I for like for the I figure for the daily meal count like you you probably count it from the kids card. Do you al like do you know like how much of it actually eaten um and how much of it end up in the trash? Um and then for the for I you mentioned for the soy milk it's for kids with allergies. What about kids who are vegetarian and don't does that are they able to do that? Um, and just another thing that, um, I wanted to bring up, um, I just recently saw Santa Clara Unifi have the sushi making machine that is so awesome and so fast to do and so I just want to like drop it in there. I thought that was really cool. So, thank you. In case you want to look for other, you know, uh, cool stuff to add to your kitchen. Thank you.

Thank you. Um, that concludes public comment and I'll return to the board for discussion. Any member of the board want to any comments? Trusty Reed?

Um, AB1264. I know that implementation on that isn't for like another decade. So, I very much appreciate that we are already starting to look at that and make shifts now. Um, so that's um really great to see. I also uh really appreciate the focus on the environmental sustainability piece. I know that with surrounding districts, we are um there on the forefront of making sure we're composting, we have um environmentally friendly utensils and there are other steps that we're taking to really prioritize the environment. So that's very much appreciated. Thank you. Is he calling?

Yeah, I wanted to thank Director Austin for the presentation. It's been a while since we've had a food nutrition presentation and it's always incredibly informative. Um, the number of meals that are put out, the amount that is scratch or quick scratch produced in house. Um, I think that's information that the public should also be aware of. um you know, children don't always realize when they see something that comes to them with a a plastic cover on it. They don't realize that it's actually been made um by the district itself that it wasn't something that was, you know, picked up in mass from an outside provider. Um, and it it is in the universal meal program that the state of California has done has just been um such a dramatic change for children and really equalizing kind of access to food and destigmatizing it. We talked about it a little bit, but um you know when that program came into uh reality, I said to my own child, I said, "Look, you can make your own lunch or you can have school lunch. I'm not making it anymore." And um and it turns out he and most of his friends all opted for school lunch. And you know, the peer their peers, they all eat together. Um, and so to have that and and he was at Mistral, which has a very economically diverse student population. Um, and so to have that um, in place is fantastic. I still kind of wish there was a way or an option that if parents wanted to donate to the nutrition program specifically, they could. That might be something to help offset some of our costs. um I'd be more than happy to do so, but not have to have kids have different cards and show they're paid or not paid or anything like that, but I'd be happy, you know, and I think there

are probably some other families out there, too, who'd be happy to donate in that um if that were an option. But the fact that we can have, you know, we can take in our children, we can feed them at least two meals a day. If they're in our after school program, we can feed them again. We will get food out over the summer and inter session. um it's profound to make sure that our children are able to eat and it's um it's just one of the fundamental things that needs to happen for them to be able to be successful at school. So, thank you for all of your work.

Um yeah, I think thank thank you again for the presentation. I think um right the universal meal program I think is just an amazing thing that we have and I've I'm glad we do that here. I like, you know, I always recoil in horror when I hear people talk about retiring lunch debt and things like that. So, I'm glad that like we, like you said, don't have paid versus not paid and things like that. Um, I do worry about our structural imbalance that we have in the program and trying to make sure that we keep it operationally sustainable so that we can keep providing the great meals that we do. um just something for us to I think keep in mind as we go for how how we make sure that we don't overwhelm kind of the rest of our funds to provide this. Um, and so I think in the interest of that I would I think in future pres future updates I think it'd be nice to see some of just the operational and financial details some more around like what our efficiencies are cost per meals um like meals per labor hour that kind of stuff so that we can really try to bring that back into balance so we can continue to serve all of the students that we have here and all of the community that we do. That's just my perspective. Further comments? Seeing none, thank you again. We'll move on to our next item. Oh yes. Uh we'll take a short five minute recess.

All right, we have returned at 9:20 p.m. We now will move on to item 9C, expanded learning opportunities program update. This is again a discussion item only, so no action will be taken tonight. I'll ask uh director Watan to present the staff report.

Thank you very much. Good evening, board. Um, I'm happy to be here again this evening to share an update about ELO. And I'm going to go sort of quickly through some of these because some of these are repeat sites that you've seen before. So um, all right. So MVWs Plus um, sponsors our afterchool and interession programs throughout the district with nearly or just over 900 students participating. were funded through ACES after school education and safety and Elon and operated by our district Beyond the Bell and our community partner YMCA. And I like to think of it as our own um school. It's like the largest school in the district uh with more kids than we have at Graham. Um just split across 11 different uh 11 different sites and and different cultures and climates and needs. but um and and staffed um without any credentialed teachers. Anyway, a fun way to look at the program. So, um as a reminder, uh Beyond the Bell is our district-run program funded through ACES, which as we've spoken before is authorized through Prop 49. Um, ASES has its own requirements for programming that includes academic and enrichment um, parts of the program and nutritious snack and that the program runs until 6:00 every day. Um, students in the program must attend if they're enrolled. Uh, because our program has an attendance requirement. If we fall below 85% average attendance in the program for two years, our funding for program can be reduced. And so we want to make sure that students are there participating regularly. Um we do partner in BTB with city of Mountain

View for recreation and BTB um operates at Castro Landals, Monoloma, Theracov, Brittendon and has about 350 students participating in program. Um, ELOP is uh provides funding for students in TK through six. And while the rules are a little bit different than BTB, they're not that far different. They still provide the academic and enrichment. Um, their school day is required to be 9 hours, but if you look at the number of hours, pretty similar to BTB. They're there till 6. Um, and they include an additional 30 days of program beyond the regular school year. Um, if we look at how people enroll in ELOP, um, every spring, our MVWSD Plus team reviews all of our student information and then sends invitations to students who qualify for the ELOP program. Throughout the year, they continue um, looking at all new student enrollments and anybody who qualifies is invited to the program. And throughout the year, sometimes our our family needs change and students become eligible for program midyear. So, as they um become eligible, they are included and sent an invitation. Um that does require that we do have a weight list. Um weight lists are not the most popular thing, but they're necessary sometimes when it comes to um staffing and facilities and and um capacity. So, there are variety of things that lead to a weight list. the number of interested students at a particular location compared to the staffing that we have at that location or even the space that's available and other program needs for a site too can all impact how many students we can get into a program. Um

has our largest program also has our largest weight list. Um and so we've done a lot of things to um to work through some of the weight list concerns we have over there, including um we're opening new classrooms. So we have uh 23 new students that are starting program within the next week or two and then another 22 beyond that that will be starting program by the end of the month. Um and so we are almost completely through all of our weight list. Um which is great news. um for the the students there. We've also been able to move three of our classes from Mistral over to the Castro campus to allow for some more space for participation which is great news. That's happening um next week which is going to be wonderful. Um so Eli funding I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this slide because we've talked about this quite a bit. Um it it is determined by our enrollment. We're a rate two district. So it's determined also by the money that is remaining after rate one districts are funded. Um the next slide also I'm not going to spend a lot of time on because we've talked about it before. I just thought it was important that we keep it at you know in the um in the presentation so that we are continuing to think about charging fees for families. Um, our partner for ELOP is YMCA. It's our contracted provider for all of our ELOP programs at our elementary sites. ELOP also, um, runs a parent paid program at all of our elementary sites. Um, they have approximately 550 students in ELUB and another 500 beyond that in paid program.

And this is just a summary of all of the things that I've just said to you that you've seen a couple of times before. So I'm not going to spend time, if that's okay, um, on this particular slide because I would like to talk about benefits and challenges of program. Um, and I'm going to start with benefits first. afterchool program offers number one a safe place for children to be after school hours a healthy snack and opportunities that they wouldn't have if they were home alone. Um for over 900 students and their families this is really an amazing support. Of course it comes with some challenges too. The first one being the nine hours a day. It's a long day for children. It's longer than some adults are at work. Um and so we have to consider that sometimes with our children. Um, and then staffing, we've talked about before, can be challenging in our afterchool programs. Um, and staff turnover because of um this the short number of hours we're hiring staff can be a challenge as well. When we look at attendance on the next slide, um, we have a lot of children being served by our programs. Attendance is mandatory and beyond the bell, which we've talked about already. can then impact our funding if we don't have students participating regularly enough. Um on the next slide, um attendance is not mandatory in ELO and so this is another little bit of a challenge that there it's different between the two programs. Um though it's not mandatory, we will be reporting our attendance for all the students in El this year to the state. Families can um participate full-time or part-time. um whatever their need might be. And while this is really important for families, this becomes really challenging when it comes to planning and preparing um for

program. Um as an example, in January, we found there were 33 children who were enrolled in program but hadn't participated in program in a month. And so in reaching out to families, there were a few who said, "Oh goodness, um I'll be there every day." children have been here every day since. And there have been some who said, "Oh, yeah, we didn't need programs, so you can give our spot to somebody else." And then there's another group of families who have just said, "We're not sure. We'll just stay on the wait list and maybe we'll participate later." And that's okay, but um you know, it's helpful to know that information as we as we plan ahead. Um back one slide for me if you don't mind. Um, oh, maybe not. Maybe I'm off. Go ahead. Okay. So, if we look at all of our after school enrollment, sorry about that. Um, you know, we have our our BTB, our YMCA, and our paid enrollment. Um, YMCA and BTB at Castro Mestral are definitely our largest um program. uh 95 students in BTB from Castro plus 30 of those 197 at Mistral are actually Castro students. The other 167 um are mistrol students. So really a a very large um group. But all in all, if you add all three programs together, we're serving over 1,400 students every day and after school programs on campuses, which is great. Um, not only do we serve every day after school, but in inter sessions, we're serving 30 different days out of the year. Um, most of those take place when we have a day off coming up on March 20th. We'll have an inter session where students can come. Um, and

when we look at um the number of stu parents who enroll versus the number of students who attend, this becomes a big challenge for us. I think a lot of people enroll because they're not sure what their plans are. Um and so we really need to have um better communication with families. We need to count on families to let us know whether they're coming or not. Um our staff know that to estimate a little bit that not everybody is going to come. So we can order a little bit less food or a little fewer supplies, but we also don't want to have students coming and not have enough for them. And so it it causes a challenge and we're just going to keep asking parents to give us their best um estimate of how often they're going to attend. Okay. So we're going to share a little bit of program data. Um and I just want to give a couple reminders. teaching happens during the school day. After school program is not for core instruction, but it's to support that school day and help our children. So, both programs BTB and YCA have a homework time and enrichment. BTB has um been doing brain pop to frontload academic vocabulary. Got to see that this week at Monoloma. It was great. Um but the core instruction is going on with the credential teachers in the classroom. The other um piece of information I wanted to share is the kind of the um enrollment of our students in program just to give you a little bit of understanding as we look at um the data moving forward. Okay. So um last meeting I think it was Dr. gave a great presentation and broke down data for um diagnostic 2 really well and I'm just going to share that same data but giving you information about students in program versus students who

are not participating in programs. Okay. um based on a request um it's it's really challenging to make a direct conclusion about whether the program makes a difference because there are so many different factors but it's interesting to look at um our subgroups um in this in this way looking at program versus not. So as we look at tier one, these are students in the reading um diagnostic two score who are at or above grade level by subgroup. Keep moving on. Um to the tier 2 students also these are students who are approaching grade level but maybe a year behind. And then in tier three, these are the students who are two or more years behind. This is the chart that we want to see the smallest uh smallest bars at but it's As you're looking at these charts, I want you to pay attention to the first two um the first two bars on each. We'll go through and just continue on math. Um same thing D um tier one students who are at or above grade level by subgroup students who are at tier 2 in math and then our tier three schools in math. Um again there's so many different factors that contribute to student academic data. Um but it's been very interesting to review the data particularly for our um economically disadvantaged students and our English learners who are the highest population of students in our after school program um to see how their their data compares to their peers who were not participating in the program. Um and as we look at the next slide um the difference is a little bit more

dramatic with that those two particular subgroups. um chronic abs and TSMO course is for students who have missed 10% or more of the school year and while again there are so many different factors and I can't say that after school program is what fixes chronic absenteeism um we definitely can see that with our English learner and economically disadvantaged groups in particular that the rate of chronic absenteeism is significantly lower from students who are in program than those who are Um I've included also a little bit of suspension data. Um our numbers are pretty low across the board, but you can see um the percentage of students in each different group who have been suspended at least once during the school day um based on who is participating in program and who's not. And then we move to budget considerations. Um, AC's grant of course funds a specific uh number of student spots for us. Um, the maximum number of student spots we can have at a school through this grant is 84. Um, I shared with you last time I presented I believe that we were applying for round two funding in December. We still haven't heard um about whether we've received our grants or not and we don't have a date by which we expect to hear. So um we did apply for funding for every single elementary school or every school in the district. Um and while we didn't receive any information about whether we did or didn't receive that grant, we went ahead and applied for the next round anyway um just in case. So we shall see. Hopefully one of those um

comes up. So this next um chart just shows you the amount of of spots we had at each of the schools through ASUS funding, how much more we have requested and what our total number could be if we um received that funding in the upcoming year. You'll notice there are a couple of schools that have only 60 and that is based on their current enrollment in ELO right now. what we predict we might need. Um the other sites have the maximum of 80. And then in the next slides, these are um slides you've seen before with the projected budgets. And I just I I want to emphasize that these are all estimates and these slides are really just designed to show how variable the funding in ELO can be. Okay, next. So, um, in our current year, we have had some cost adjustments. Um, so you'll see that our costs are a little bit lower on one side, but you'll notice that we are um going to have a little bit of carryover that is going to be earmarked for summer program um for students who are in program this year, but will be attending our program in June and July. Um, so there's a difference um on that slide. And then if we move to the next, here's where it becomes really interesting as we look at next year. Um, if uh ELAP continues and our ASUS funding remains the same and we get the full $1,800 per student that the governor has projected, we will um we will end up as a district contributing almost a million dollars to our after school program. Go to the next slide. If there are more round one or rate one

districts that accept funding and there's not enough left over for rate to districts like ours to receive the full 1,800 and we get a lesser amount, our district contribution is going to be more like 1.3 million. Um, and if you look at the next slide, um, it's not likely that we would end up in a place where we would only get $1,280, but like to project the whole way out and know where we're heading. Um, but again, if that were to happen, then our contribution would be again that much more. 1.7 I think is where we're at here. Um on the other hand on the next slide if um ELOP continues and our ASUS grant is increased and we get the full amount that we have requested our our situation is much much better. We won't be using El funds to support um the additional students that BTB is serving at our schools. So that amount wipes out. Um, if we are granted the entire amount of $1,800, we will be really close to breaking even, we might even have a little bit like $30,000 left over. Um, based on that, if we get fully funded and ELOP comes in at$,575 per student, our district contribution would be about $270,000 instead of 1.7 million. Um, so I'm going to be really really hopeful and keep keep waiting to hear from the state about ACES funding um as that can be really really important. Uh so you know the considerations we have to have for the budget um you know our our funding comes from two sources right now ACE is a steady funding once we have it it continues um it's just

really killing me to have to wait for it um but each year elocations um you know, are are a little bit different. And we don't know our full allocation until after we've already started planning and sending invitations and staffing and um providing for that program, which makes it really challenging. Um I'm not going to talk about being a tier 2 district again, but you know, the the the funding can shift each year and fluctuate. Enrollment fluctuates every year, and so does the cost for the program. And so it just makes it challenging um to have so many unknowns and variables. Um as a next step, uh we know that after school care is important for a lot of our families. Uh right now we're planning for inter session programs. Um notices and invitations go out this month. In April, we have to notify the state whether we're taking e-le funds or not. And in May, we typically start sending our invitations for the new year so we can get all of our um program plan prepared. Um so on the next slide, we know ASUS funding is going to continue until the next year and beyond. We know that ELOP um isn't going to operate as costneutral anymore and it will have an impact on the general fund. Just aren't sure how much. And so uh staff will be asking for direction from the board about whether to continue accepting funding but that is going to come as part of the request first budget presentation.

Thank you. Thank you. Uh questions from trustees. Trusty Conley. Thank you very much for the presentation. um within ELOP and the regulations around it, is there ability for the district to create its own attendance requirements? We we could actually mirror what we're doing in um in BTB if we were running a a consolidated program. Okay. So um what do you mean by if we were running a consolidated program?

So if we partner in a different way with um our eloc provider and we do more um collaborative work and we have similar expectations we can do that. Okay. Would there be an anticipated cost with that? No. No. Um and similarly um you know along those same lines because the incentive here is that if kids aren't at ELOP we don't get the money for their attendance right. Say that again. If a child is not in in ELOP we do not get paid for their attendance. Is that correct? No. It's just a straight It's just a flat.

Correct. Yeah. If they um Yes. So, we're paying for their spot whether they're in their spot or not. Okay. But we don't receive money differently. Okay. Um for the inter session programming, what is our process right now? Like when do for finding out whether or not students are going to attend? When do we go to families and ask them to confirm attendance? Um is it something they have to do in writing? it, you know, how do how are we doing that to try and ensure that those children are actually showing up?

Right. So, we're in that process right now for the March 20th intercession. Usually two weeks prior to program, we're trying to confirm all of those spots that are coming. Um, not only confirming attendance, but confirming any transportation needs that are had. And then, um, YMCA also, um, calls families to confirm those who are coming. Do we have a collaborative effort? Do we have parents sign any type of commitment form or anything like that for the inter session? We haven't. Okay. Thank you, Steve Lambert. Yeah. What are the consequences if we do not accept the elop funding?

Well, the consequence of not having the money is we would not be able to run um as large an afterchool program. We would only be running our BTB program after school. So that's roughly 450 students would not be able to have an afterchool program. Yeah. A little over 500 about 550 would be if we don't get the additional funding. Okay. Thank you. Yes, Vice President Henry.

Um just looking at questions about the program itself. um what actual what do they do? What is the enrichment that they do in the ELO program?

Sure. So um in the YMCA ELO program, they're doing a lot of um STEM projects right now as part of their enrichment and um and doing art projects as well. Try to tie those more to um themes um each month. And so there's been a more of a collaborative effort um to have some similar lessons and and tools and kits and um and science projects that are going on. Um and just I know that roughly a year ago um there was a RFP and you know consolidation with the the Y for the to be the provider. Um and so I I have not looked back at what the RFP looked like. Do we have kind of written goals for the ELAC program? What we want to get out of that program?

We do have um we do have a program plan and we do have goals and expectations um about what we want to see in program for students. Um can you uh for we presented the three different revenue scenarios. Can you remind me which one is the governor's proposal for the the budget? Is it the current proposal right now is 1,800 per student. Okay. Um and then the also on the revenue projections there was the um MBWSD plus T salaries and benefits like what what positions are those specifically? Do you have a

um so we have our managers, our program managers, um uh Erica and Jenny who oversee BTB and ELOP and then we have a secretary who also is part of that um that staff who oversee programs. Thank you, Trusty Lbert.

Yeah, just comment on a thought I have. There's um seems to be an awful lot of ancillary cost with this program, too. I mean, you're talking about contacting parents, managing this, the uncertainty, making sure food's available. You have classrooms that you're using with janitor services. Um, yeah. On and on, right? And I know it's hard to, you know, I'm not I'd love to know what the what that costs overall, but I'm not asking you to do that. But it's complicated. But I think the point is it actually costs a district a lot more when you look at everything else um you know that that is involved with keeping these programs running.

Further questions? It's about 9:47. It's maybe time to entertain a motion to extend the meeting. Have to do it, but I'll I'll uh I'll say 11:00.

Come on in. I jumped out there.

I'll second it. Right. Motion by Trusty Lambert, seconded by Vice President Henry to extend the meeting till 11 o'clock. All those in favor? I. All opposed? Motion passes with trustes Library, Connley, Henry, and DeFazio in favor and Trusty Reed a post. Any further questions? No. We'll have go to public comment on this item. Thank you for the presentation. Um, anyone remote wishing to speak, please use the raise hand function. And members of the public, turn in a speaker card if you'd like to speak on this item. This is I see I have one card for this item and seeing one hand raised to remote. So, we'll give three minutes per person. Uh, first is Ms. S. I think Hi, thank you so much. I um just wanted to speak as a parent at Mistral Elementary. Um before ELOP came, Mrol did not have a free after school program. um we weren't eligible for BTV and it was a real hardship to the families there and ELOP has um really changed what the school can do and what families can do um and has really um really been great for families in that sense. And so even if Beyond the Bell is expanded, if I'm doing the math right, the school that's going to be hit the hardest is be strong because at least half of them will lose um after school access. So um I just want to be sure that that is um understood. Thank you.

Thank you. Now I'll go to the remote speaker. Um Miss Kamacho. Um hello members of the Mountain View Wishman School um board. My name is Lana Kamacho. I am an organizer for parents of Santa Clara and I'm a mom of two daughters in the Mountain View Wishment School District. One in kindergarten and one in fifth grade. Both of my daughters participating in the ELO program. Since um since Tuesday of this week, we have gathered 42 parent um signatures um that are enrolled uh for the ELO program and it's a petition. I'm also um sorry, I'm also one of those parents. As a working mom, I rely on the ELOP to make sure my daughters are safe and cared for while I'm at work. Kindergartener dismissal time makes it very difficult for working parents to leave work early enough to pick up their children because our school does not offer beyond the bell. El is the only after school um support available for families like mine. I know firsthand how important programs like this are. When my older daughter first academic style ELIOP did not exist at the time I was a single mom going to college and working without after school care. I struggled to balance school, work, parenting, and eventually had to make the difficult decision to leave college and work full-time so I could afford child care and provide for us. That what that that is why hearing that families may have to wait for access funding is concerning. For many of us, this program is not an optional. It is what allows us to work and support our childrens. For families like mine, El is not a lecture. It's a necessity and please make sure is funded for the next school year. Thank you.

Thank you. All right. Now, I'll return to the board for discussion.

I'll just remind you there'll be room for discussion as well in the ne within the next budget item. But then the next I'll defer then the next board agenda item. Defer to the next item I think that is fair enough. Um yeah. So let's with that we will move on to item 9D budget discussion. Um Superintendent Bearer I believe you're sending the staff report.

Yes I think uh Dr. Dr. Westerber and I will will do this. Um, you want to start, Shelley? Some of these slides you will have seen certainly as we have discussed the budget over the past several months. So, this uh ties into the current strategic plan. I'm reminding you of board policy 3100 which uh identifies our target reserve range uh three years out. Keep going. So, just a reminder of the fact that we've been talking about this particular topic all the way back to September. Go ahead. Um, this is dated since we have a new county assessor. Uh, but the former assessor, Greg Montarde, uh, reminded us of this that we should anticipate low AV growth um, going out a few years. Keep going. you've seen this not happy picture. Um I think our projection is is solid. I it just uh FYI, I think if we we have about four months remaining on the AV role growth. We're at 1.72 I think it is right now with four months to go. It has been a very slow growth. So we are hopeful that we'll reach our 2% uh assumption. Keep going. Um restating the same information. Let's keep going. Again, we have a strong reserve to help us weather this uh this downturn in a vgrowth. Keep going. All right. At the uh board meeting um

January 29, the board took action or directed staff to um move forward on $7.5 million worth of reductions. Uh these should look familiar to you. We have a move forward on on each of these. So, I'll remind you that within here is the very last line item before the total is uh we did include the 660,000 proposed increase to the ELOP funding as a quote unquote savings um against our um deficit spend. So, we're hopeful that that comes through. Keep going. So, this is Do you want to talk about this, Rebecca?

This is looking at a six-year projection based on first interim. So uh after the board uh takes action and we reduce by 7.5 million. You'll notice that the trajectory of the reserve level has flattened out a little bit. So previously it was at a much steeper decline but in year six still leaves us at that 8.49% reserve level. Um so still continuing that deficit spend meaning that we are spending more than we are taking in each year. Um but again just does change that the slope of the line. Um we do anticipate next time when we come to you uh during the next board meeting for second interim we are seeing some savings from this current year because we have positions that uh people knew that they would be uh laid off next year. They found a new job and so we had cost savings for the remainder of the year. So that will be included in our second interim. Um, and for context, uh, 1% of AV for the 2728 year is about $777,000 and a 1% raise for our staff is about $930,000. What we've shown here does not include any raises past the 2627 year. So when we're thinking of what could AV growth be right now for this uh for the next year as the role is building we are aiming for 2% which does not cover our increased costs as a district. So when we come to the 2728 year we have no raises for our employees and we think of what do we think we might anticipate in terms of AV growth. um if we see things that we're seeing right now um we would not really have any funding in the budget to provide a raise without making different other choices. Um this is the same uh spending level but without uh a lease right now for the Slater campus and their campus.

So I think uh just as a reminder um assumptions are just that right uh they're they're assumptions for a point in time our best guess based on a past performance in a number of areas. Uh go back one slide, Shelley. I think a good reminder is this is a trajectory here, right? It's meant to illustrate a trend line. This is going to be wrong, right? Because it is built on assumptions. Keep going forward. Uh so we are anticipating a continued deficit spend. Um and we will talk about that during second interim and talk about that during the um during the budget building process here in the spring. We also have um strategic planning that we will be doing and we are uh really focused right now on the improvement of student outcomes and that will likely uh require some investment as well. Right. as we really um dig in to make sure that happens. Keep going. So, since uh that January 29th meeting, we are still in process of uh implementing those reductions. Uh each of the departments, Rebecca and our team have been working with those um with those people to uh review expenses and make reductions that will have minimal impact on sites. but really looking at what uh we've we've budgeted and what the actuals are. Uh so current where we are the uh board of trustees at the January 29th meeting, I know you knew this because you were there um just opted not to make changes to preschool programming or reducing or reassigning at risk intervention supervisors or school community engagement facilitators.

there's a hanging question still out there, right? Um and I think um uh making a definitive statement at this meeting would be very helpful uh for every uh for everyone working out at our schools uh and here at the district to understand uh we have moved past the window being able to take action on the steam program. So still remaining as a rhythm and moves, right? I'll remind you that was about a million dollar cost. you just heard about the ELIT program um and the budget implications of that. So, we're we're hoping to get some clarity on those tonight. Next slide. So, just a reminder about rhythm and moves. This is uh repeated information. Uh students in grades one to five get PE two times per week through Rhythm and Moves for 50 minutes. This does fulfill our state requirement for um PE instruction and it also fulfills our contractual requirement for weekly prep time for elementary teachers. Um going again this is a reminder of what the um what the teachers preferences were regarding choice between steam and rhythm and moves. Keep going. So we are seeking uh direction on whether to continue to accept ELO funding and continue the program and then also whether we should continue contracting with rhythm and moves to provide uh PE instruction in grades one through five. Um what's the next slide, Shelly? Is that it? Yeah. Um at this point in time, I would recommend we go forward with both programs for the next school year. um we can get greater clarity on on budget during this this next school year. We are going to have a great deal

of work to do uh with regard to implementing u recommendations from the recent study we have. Uh so creating stability here um I think would benefit us as we do that. Thank you. We have any clarifying questions from the board? I'll start with Trusty Lambert.

I have questions in both topics here. They have questions. Um so um is rhythms and move um is that still either keep rhythm and moves and get rid of steam or do steam and rhythm of moves? Is this still this binary? So the opportunity the opportunity to take action on the steam program that window has passed. So that's no longer an option.

And could you um just clarify for me about again with the rhythm and moves about the ideas get rid of rhythm and moves. The teachers would teach this in their classroom but then they wouldn't have would not have the extra prep hour. How does that work? And talk about the contractual arrangement there.

Right. So currently the contractual um obligation to provide preparatory time for elementary teachers uh in grades one through five is fulfilled through rhythm and moves, right? Through that uh P instruction happening with an outside agency. uh we would if rhythm and moves were to go away, we would have to restructure how we execute on the steam program and have the steam time fulfill that prep obligation.

So the kids will go to steam and teachers would be able to prep still something like that. Yes. Yep.

Could I keep asking question? One more question about the ELO program. It is it um actually I I did a really quick number 2.3 million and 900 kids. You know, that's roughly $2,500 a year for kids to after school. That's pretty uh generous on average. Um or low amount, right? Um, is it uh possible to um have families pay for the afterchool program and some kind of a tiered arrangement and you know be able to you know get rid of ELO but then have another provider come in and help with that for care.

Oh yes, I mean that is a possibility. You could create we could create our own afterchool program where parents paid. I think that's um a tremendous undertaking. I mean, you talk about starting an entire program from scratch and having to hire your own staff to serve 900 kids. It's a lot. Um but it's possible. It couldn't happen next year. Um for ELOC, there is the possibility that we could charge fees to some families, not all. The only fees you can charge are to families that are not sed. I saw that in the slides, right? And

and I do not I don't want to have an oversight. We just hiring a provider running after school program is so much more than that. like you said, it's a takes a lot of staff time and that is it. Yeah, it's hard to calculate, but yeah, I mean, I would say that just looking at Miss Vicard, who's overseeing transitional kindergarten, um, special ed, preschool, and after school, probably spends 70% of her week on after school. It's a huge amount of time. I'll let other I have other let other trustees ask questions and then I have another thought I'd like you to

Henry

um with rhythm and moves um is I was curious if a particular site were interested in choosing doing something different then what does it have to be I guess does it have to be kind of rhythm and moves is uh the prep period good time for everybody. Could a Could one site pilot something different if they wanted to try doing the prep period during science? And those teachers really wanted to teach PE. I mean, yes, anything's possible. I think we'd have to work through the, you know, with our with our teachers association and understand the just the impacts of that, but yeah, I think anything's possible. Yeah. Collie.

Yeah, I had a process question. So, normally for a budget decision of this level, we would take a formal vote and this is a discussion item tonight, but it asks for direction. My assumption is that this is coming back for a second meeting for a vote. Is that correct? If you would like it to come back to a second meeting for a vote, it can. By doing nothing with it, it will continue. Right. I understand. Yeah. I just the it is unusual to have something of this gravity one be one board meeting and two to be a discussion item with direction instead of an action item.

Well, it's it's been at multiple board meetings. This isn't just at one board meeting, right? It's been at three board meetings there. I think a lot of people left our last budget discussion thinking what I've been hearing is people are surprised to see things up for consideration again after the last budget meeting because we had a formal vote there and I'm worried about communicating to the public um especially because this was listed as discussion and not action um that this is a a cut that could be made tonight.

So if a cut were to be made, we would bring it back again at the next meeting as an action. Um my sense from the board from the two discussion opportunities was that there wasn't interest in cutting these for next year. But I wanted to bring it back for confirmation. Thank you. That is very helpful.

I just had one one question I and it's probably getting far ahead of where we are, but we did have and you mentioned potential 27 28 reductions. Do we have a sense of where we think that scope might be in the like will we see that at like the interim or is that something that we'll have some preparation for what that might have to look like?

Yeah. So I think you'll we'll have the second interim report at the next meeting on March 19th and then as April and May roll through you will be hearing about the the building of the budget, right? and we'll make very clear um what we anticipate the deficit spend to be right and um one of the thoughts was uh as we have that discussion uh during the budget process that there may be some value in the board acknowledging that we are planning to deficit spend again next year and these are the areas that we are choosing to do that deficit spend in um it may not work exactly that cleanly, but I think understanding for us as a staff and a community broadly that the board is actively choosing to deficit spend, right, which we are going to do, right? But to know what are those areas that we're choosing to make that expenditure in, right, might bring I think would bring some greater clarity to where the choice is being made, why the choice is being made, and should the board choose not to deficit spend in the future. These are the things that we should probably be looking at first.

Thank you, Trusty Liber. to to my other thought. So ELOP funding is only available to school districts

that sorry yes

I I guess I'm I'm trying to figure out these are large number of kids these programs are serving that if um and it's mainly the ELO because it sounds like Beyond the Bell is covered pretty much consistently um that what other organization in the community could sort of pick up uh after school care for kids and um you know since the school district has taken on this responsibility for I don't know how many years um it sort of has um you know taken away other opportunities within the community where kids can go after school and I I wonder how that dynamic works if as if the school system sort of chose to or Mount D. Wisman chose to sort of get out of this business and how it could be recreated in the community. Parents as parents need after school care and just, you know, you need it and you need affordable lowcost after school. many families need lowcost affordable after school care that's convenient and um I'm you know it's a thought and I think it's a process and I wonder how other communities do this as well. Um so I I'll throw that out there. Trusty Reed,

I'm wondering if we have any data on um the amount of students that we have that are eligible to attend the teen center and how many actually attend the teen center um because that is a free option for students and we have the free shuttle that drops off right at the teen center and if there's advertising that is done to the students that qualify to get that ID card and attend those sessions students that is fully funded by the city. Well, I think the teen center you have to be 12 and up, too. So, it might be kind of limited by age as well.

So, we don't I don't have any current data. We used to partner um with the teen center in summer programs and we would run um a bus from summer to the teen center. We really only sent about 35 kids out of our summer program there. But I can I could talk to the teen center to see kind of what usage seems like, but we don't have that data tonight. Yeah, they have a ton of programs and they do have staffing there that's qualified just like um what we would have at any kind of afterchool program that we have. Plus, they have uh

frequent guest speakers and uh guest classes that come in. And there's a a huge variety of things that they do there that we don't necessarily have the facilities for. Oh, still on. Uh yeah, I I mean I um you know with the ELOP program I think think this needs to be thought through and I think that uh transitioning out of this program in the long run would be a good idea and I think some thought should go into how we do that. Um I'm writing down a couple of notes of people I can talk to about it but uh um I I yeah seems like we have to keep it for next year. Um uh with regard to rhythm and moves, I think it makes a lot of sense right now to you know transfer the responsibility for physical education onto the teachers and uh you know uh they'll have their prep hours by sending the kids to uh the steam classrooms and um that seems to work pretty well.

Pull you back from discussion. Um we are I think we will do any further questions. These are questions. I apologize. It's okay. Any further questions from trustees? Okay. Now we'll move on to public comment. Any member of the public wishing to speak in person, please turn the speaker card and anyone remote, please use the raise hand function. I'll wait for a moment to see how many speakers we have. See one in person and two hands remote. I'll allocate three minutes to each speaker. Um, starting with in person, uh, Sarah.

Hi. Um, I'm Sarah Stacy. I'm a fifth grade teacher at Vargas. Um, I really wasn't expecting to speak tonight, so I didn't prepare anything formal, just my notebook. Um, first of all, I realize that the decisions that you are having to make to meet the cuts are super difficult. With that being said, when you consider whether the cut rhythm moves, I want to put my faith in you that you will follow the results of the teacher survey that when it came down to it, the majority of teachers would rather teach steam over physical education. Of course, teachers want to have both and we are grateful with your work to keep steam as we highly value our steam colleagues. I myself have been in the district for 24 years and I have been in the position of having to teach my own PE. I've had a credential teacher, PE teacher teach PE and algorithm and moves. I also have taught science more years than I haven't and I actually miss it. I have plenty of reasons why the majority of teachers would choose to teach steam over PE or just to have a designated PE teacher, but so do other teachers. So if you want more detailed feedback, please ask us. To close, I ask you again to follow the results of the teacher survey and to keep them mov. Thank you.

Thank you. No remote. I will start with Miss Good. You have three minutes.

Hello. Um, one thing I I did want to point out is that as far as public understanding of the board's plan regarding voting for what budget reductions might still occur. Um, I was left with the impression that consideration of the three different preschool options to possibly try to be costneutral was still a consideration and that it was also planned to have a final decision on rhythm and moves at a meeting after the January 29th meeting because that did not require the same time constraints of notifying primary Mountain View Whispin School District staff about whether or not they would be kept on. So just from a public standpoint, um it didn't seem clear to me that there was no further discussion of those items that we'd be expecting um this spring. But the main reason why I raised my hand was for the sake of both transparency and truthfulness. I wanted to clarify a question about the budget cuts um budget reductions. the largest savings of an individual staff member that you guys have projected, including tonight in your your slides, was the elimination of the preschool director. But tonight, instead, you've stated that that position will be filled internally. So my question is, what happens to the job duties of the person that they previously had for this person that is going to internally fill the preschool director position? Is this going to result in complete sharing of district office administrative duties amongst the current staff or is there going to be decided that there's going to be a need for additional staffing costs to take on the current responsibilities of the role from which this internal hire has been taken from. Bluntly, I'm wondering if we're really getting fully truthful information that the district will actually realize a $422,000 cost savings with the promised elimination of the preschool director

role, or are we going to come up with a need for another administrative position to take over the duties of the person who now becomes the preschool director? Will we really see that savings? Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker is Miss Lou. You have three minutes.

Um, hi. Yes. I was um surprised to see um on slide number 19 where you know current status is that you know no change to the preschool program because I thought there were two options that were presented and the board you know expected to come back would you know choosing um one of those three um so just want to get clarification on that and then physical ed I was wondering has the district also explored the options of having I know we're trying to reduce that but having like PE teacher but like having them travel to sites or like to like two sides sharing one PE teachers I I don't know what is the cost on on that would be but I don't um I wonder if that's something that would be more you know with less expensive than um than the rhythm and move program. Um and then to second Anna's um thing about teen center, the teen um I don't know if the district know the teen center which I also learned recently the teen center also has homework help and my son has been using the teen center since sixth grade. So you don't have to be 12. You all you have to do is you just have to be in middle school. And it's such an amazing place. It's such a gem. I think that's the one thing that the city does so well. There's just great classes, great programs there and the staffs are wonderful. They learn cooking, they learn art, they learn like just um they do field trips. Um so yes, so I'm I'm glad. Thank you for bringing that up. Uh trustee we that's it.

You turn to the board for discussion. President Henry,

um I'm glad that you brought this topic back just because I do think the sites need clarity on what's going to happen with PE, if there going to be any changes. Um I am personally in favor of leaving rhythm and moves in place for next year. Um continuing to accept ELOP funding for next year. Um with um those being you know things that we can continue to discuss um for longer term. Um also on the preschool um I do want to continue again for the following school year perhaps to consider um looking at at changing um our approach um to make it more costneutral. Um but it was for me I would not I was not expecting to make any um changes to that program for 26 27. Piggybacking on those comments, um I feel the same about um yes, we are in a deficit spend and yes, we already approved uh about 7.5 million in reductions and seeing the trajectory of our line. We are um continuing on a downward trend reducing our reserves but also based on our own board policy um we we do want to reduce those reserves. It is our goal to keep the reserves three years out um to be 17 to 20%. So that's um for the slide 19 um that trustee Henry was just talking about. I also want to continue having conversations about how to make preschool more costneutral. Um different ways to organize or fund ELOP. But for next school year, um I also

would like to see the continuation of these programs like Rhythm and Moves to give us a longer runway. Um but also to follow the survey that we we gave staff and we received feedback on um to kind of go against their wishes at at this point when it's not um crucial to our financial situation. Um it doesn't seem like something that I personally want to a road that I want to travel. Um, so for the current status of everything that we have been discussing, I would like to continue to discuss those things, but not for cutting now and implementing for the upcoming school year. I just want to give my uh thoughts about the uh um the numbers, the percentage of uh of teachers voting. That seems to be an issue. Um as a board member, I feel I have to make tough decisions. Uh but in terms of numbers here, I'm seeing 17 respondents of classroom teachers and steam teachers with 50 7% of them saying to eliminate steam. That's not an overwhelming majority. Furthermore, 70 respondents I I see there's about 200 teachers in the school district. That's only 30% of the teachers responding. So it hardly represents majority. I I'll just point out that we surveyed first through fifth grade teachers only because those are the ones affected by rather moves.

Thank you. Um I think uh you know one of the challenges of um sitting in these seats is having to deal with a lot of ambiguity and I appreciate that it is probably the case for our superintendent and many of our staff members as well. Um and so we we do have to balance a lot of um unknown information with known information, things we wish we knew and an economic forecast that we have to make assumptions about but we don't know actually how things are going to go. Um, you know, in an ideal world, we would, for example, I think regression analysis came up earlier. In an ideal world, school districts would be research institutions and we could run statistical regression analysis on our programming and and try to come up with definitive um causation of which programs are the most effective. I don't know any school district that has the capacity internally to reg to run regression analysis. That's not something that we have built our school districts to be able to do. We are lucky if we can find a research partner. For example, maybe someone at Stamford is doing a study and we can bring them in for a program and then at best after a year they might be able to give us a qualitative analysis based on the work that they've been doing. But even then it's rare that we would get something statistically significant. So we have to do the best that we can in making decisions to sit with the data that we have available and then what we know from the broader research context. What's out there that is researchbacked and how do we weave those two things together? What we see in our programs even when they're small um and what is supported by the bulk of the research literature um and what's going on. And so we have to deal with that ambiguity in education all the time. Um something compelling, you know, I spoke earlier about the

preschool data being compelling to me. If we want bigger numbers, why don't we expand the program? We could get bigger numbers to study. Um but if we want you know to make decisions now when I look at the ELP data something that was compelling to me in this um that we hadn't seen before was the significantly lower chronic absenteeism rates for our socioeconomically disadvantaged students, our multilingual learners and um our Hispanic Latino students. Um, I mean, we're talking as much as a a 20% difference in some cases, um, if not more in terms of chronic absenteeism, which is a major challenge that we know we fundamentally have to address to work on academic achievement. Um, that being said, we're not going to get clear-cut, cookie cutter. Here's here's the green arrow pointing to the right decision um situations in in these roles and in public policym and so we're going to do the best that we can. Um, I agree with my uh two female colleagues on the board that um I think we should stay the course for this year and see um how things are going to play out. We don't know about the ASUS funding yet for expanding beyond the bill. If that were to come through and we accepted ELOP funding, we could be costneutral next year. Um, if we were able to expand the Beyond the Bell and then accept ELAP for the students who needed it. I had no interest in leaving 550 lowincome or multilingual learner students without a place to go in um after school. And frankly, the reason that this program was created at the state level is because there aren't outside providers who do this. There there is not a way to make this pencil out in a commercial setting for families

who are so far behind economically. Um and so I I wish that the free market would um provide more kind of what I consider social programming, but it doesn't right now. Um and so, you know, I believe that Governor Nuomo is going to fully fund um the HELOC program because it's a signature program for him. He's lining up to run for bigger things, I think, and he's not getting push back from the legislature on the other side or just at all about uh ELAP funding in particular. So, I think we're going to see that $1,800. Um, but we will be deficit spending and we're going to have to continue to examine um what are the areas where it makes sense to um cut back on ongoing expenses because deficit spending if we're deficit spending deficit that needs to come down revenue or are reserves that are a little too high three years out we should not be spending from ongoing expenses for that. And usually the rule of thumb or the advice on school boards is, you know, you're you don't want to it's like one time monies need to go to things that aren't ongoing costs. It's this is the inverse of that that um or the reverse of that that basically your ongoing expenses should not be drawing down your reserves. it should be one-time expenditures that you're pulling out when you need to draw down your reserves. And so we need to keep looking at making that shift. Um, and I still think there are other ways to do it. Um, that is not um, unfortunately being the burden of our our most economically disadvantaged students. Um,

and we've had a lot of, you know, preschool and ELAC, we know really serve our most vulnerable students in our community. And so I would like to protect those programs if we can as we continue to explore how to um decrease our deficit spend overtime. Um, I for one wouldn't sell our staff short. I think they are very capable and able to run analyses. Um, but I think they're just statistical regression analysis. What I brought up earlier, that's that's different.

I that's fair. I think but I think there are, you know, we we can have we have capable staff that are able to do these things. Um I do I think agree with um Trusty Henry's question earlier around um the ELOP how we started the RFP for for our um expansion and I think one of the things there right I think when I was going through the slide there's a tension that we had between like the activities are not meant to be instructional and then presenting performance data I think it's very important for us to upfront be clear about what we expect to get out of those programs because I do I was extremely heartened to see chronic absenteeism and and um those signals really improve for those students, right? And we're serving them well. And I think if it's not meant to impact academics specifically, then we should not be judging it on that, right? Like these are the things that we as a board have to I think put together. Um, I'm optimistic about uh ELO funding coming through, cautiously optimistic, but I think that'll be really really attenuate some of the the concerns there. Um, one of the one of the things that I really enjoyed about or not enjoyed but um found illuminating about the presentation was um the kind of ratio that we have between AV growth of 1% and then the salary increases of 1% and how the ratio between those two are imbalanced right like our revenues are going to go up and our costs are going to rise significantly higher and trying to bring that um balance And that's I think before step and column increases that we'll have to get on an ongoing basis. So keeping an eye on that for our budget discussions I think is useful. Just for clarity on that when that that data was presented the 1% AV growth

against the 1% salary increase what is not included in there is the natural right the every year we have sepum increase every year we have health benefits increase every year we have rising costs of you name it right and that is probably equivalent to about a 5% salary increase right the natural natural growth. Is that right? Four to 5%. In the ballpark when we talk about our budget totality, but when we do second interim, we're actually going to show you what the like the natural growth is from year to year so you can see it.

But we need about 5% AV growth for us to cover natural expense increases. Is that accurate? Can we wait till a second? Yeah, of course. She loves she loves when I site numbers.

Um, let me pull back my thoughts. Um, oh yes, uh, your the the discussion of how we plan for basically reserve draw down, right? I think that's a very compelling point, right? Is that as we're doing that, I think hindsight, you know, here is a bit of 2020 where we're looking back and saying as we were drawing it down, we incurred some expenses that I think were more ongoing versus one-time monies. Um I think that's you know useful for us to learn as a board the lessons from that when boom times return.

And just one comment on that too just keeping in mind I know the 17 to 20% 3 years out right that's great but if we aren't doing something to correct that deficit spend we're going to have to make massive cuts in order to stay at that 17 to 20% right because our deficit spend is high. We just can't watch that line go down to 17% without doing anything about the level of deficit spending.

And then my final of my prefacing comments I think would be um I I think you mentioned that a lot of these programs serve our highest needs students, right? Like um and I think that's one of the things that I think is why we really want to preserve them as much as we can. I think one of the difficult things that we need to consider and think through is as the trade-offs we're making. And is why I think it's important to set the metrics that we have for the programs and what we expect them to do. Like those are dollars we could be spending on improved instructional time and building our core programs better so that the persistent achievement gaps we've had are are closing. Right? And so I don't know where the right balance of it. That's our job to kind of walk through together as a as a governing team. But I think it's just something that we need over time, right? These are the only place we get to discuss these things. So this is over time how we have to kind of talk through it and and and work work on it. But um I think to the main crux of the question here before us, I don't see any interest in or I don't have any interest in making any action this this coming.

Yeah, I I'm stated differently. I'm not I'm not hearing a want to bring this back as an action item. So you'll not see it again this year. Further comments from the board.

So just a closing thought. Right. So we have a number of state funded programs that are not fully funded. Right. If we look at child nutrition, we look at ELOP, we look at preschool, we the the the list goes on. The question is how many of those can we afford to sustain, right? Because I think we are going to have to come down to making choices because we can't deficit spend on every single underfunded state initiative. Right? To be fair, we also have some internally created initiatives that are equally, if not more, expensive and do not um necessarily, if we look at the aenda report, support outcomes for our most vulnerable students. So, there's a lot there's a lot to dig into.

Yeah. And I look forward to working through in with the action items that we will have from the agenda report for how we restructure these programs and line them up. So thank you. Any further comments? Seeing none. Excuse me. I'd like to make a recommendation. It's late and I would pull this suggest moving item F up to the next item or item E or F. Yes. that I think. Do we have a motion? I move to move item F. Second. All those in favor? I

I motion all opposed. Motion passes unanimously. We'll now move on to item 9F which is uh come out of order here. uh resolution refunding authorizing the issuance of MBWSD 2026 general obligation refunding bonds. Um Dr. Wistover and

good evening trustees. So um in justice to what we were just talking about with uh uh cutting costs across the district, this is actually some good news that we have to bring to you tonight about re uh refinancing refunding some of our bonds for some taxpayer savings. Um and tonight I have uh Chat Wang from Keegent who is our financial advisor. Uh Neur who will be back in just a moment who is our bond counsel and then Christine Gar from Piper Sandler who is also on um on Zoom online just in case there's some more questions. We have a very short presentation to outline what this bund oh my goodness 10:45 bond re uh refunding looks like the tax the savings for taxpayers. So I will turn it over. Thank you. And good evening, President DeFazio, members of the board, President Bayer. As Dr. Wester mentioned, we've got a very quick presentation that will cover the refinancing opportunity, market conditions, potential savings, and Nick will cover legal documents and next steps. So, in looking at the first slide, this is an overview of the refinancing. We're currently looking at the election of 2012 series B bonds where under current interest rates, we issue new bonds at lower rates to pay off these older bonds at higher rates without any extension of their original financing term. Current savings are around $3.6 million and bonds would be issued on a tax exempt basis with costsaving paid for out of the refinancing. The district does have a great history of saving taxpayer dollars through refinancings. Going back to 2010, the district has saved a total of over $10 million in refinancing. So, um working with district staff um really just watching the opportune times to sell

refunding bonds. And speaking of opportune times, here's a chart of municipal bond interest rates over the past year. And you can see they're significantly lower than the highs of 2025 when uh tariffs were implemented on foreign countries. At the end of 2025, the Fed began cutting the rates and you can see uh where we currently are, which is why we have the savings opportunity in front of us. Now, that said, over the past weekend, a there is now a conflict in Iran that has caused interest rates to increase, but our estimates are still conservative and we can achieve the savings that are shown here. Um investors are still looking for safe haven assets and what helps us here on the next slide is the fact that you are aa rated issuer AAA from Moody's AAA from standard and pores in looking at your local economy your finances your debt and the management of the district. So that certainly makes you desirable to investors looking for a safe place to invest their bonds to invest their funds. As far as what the savings look like, if you look at the table to the left, you can see in the green the total savings is about $3.7 million. You'll see in 2028 and 2029 there's two years of dis savings, which I'll explain on the next page. But on the chart to the right in yellow, the reduction in the interest rate, we go from a 3.3% to about a 2.8%. So that's a reduction of 0.5% in the interest cost. And you can see on the table to the left again in 2038, the new bonds do not extend that original payment. So, a lot of colors here on this slide,

but the district actually did refinance prior measure G bonds in 2020 and 2021. And those refinancings uh cherrypicked the most economical refinancings to to refinance. So, in 2020, those refinance those maturities highlighted in blue, the series A bonds 2024 through 2037. In 2021, those bonds refinanced the maturities on the left highlighted in red. And you can see there's a gap where 28 and 29 were refunded in 2021. So now in looking at our current refinancing opportunity now, the economic maturities are the remaining ones 2027 and then we skip 2829 and then 2030 through and including 38. So there are disavings in those two years because we refinanced bonds with an earlier refinancing. Looking at everything in aggregate, you can see the aggregate dis savings is quite a bit lower. Currently at about $340,000. In working with Chrisen Garrett Piper Sandler, um we believe that that number once these bonds are sold will actually be a positive figure. Um this changes with the interest rate environment. And on the next slide, uh, we've got a preview of the legal documents, which I'll turn over to Nick.

So, if approved by the board tonight, the resolution would authorize the issuance and sale of $74 million of bonds to refinance the 2012 Syria Bonds. This resolution establishes the basic terms and parameters and forms of the bonds. It also authorizes district staff to do all things necessary to complete the transaction. It also approves the central financing documents that are also in front of the board tonight. The first is the preliminary official statement. This is the offering document is the means by which the district communicates with the investing public and it's the document that investors use to decide whether to buy the district's bonds and at what price. because of that that the contents of a document is given by federal securities laws which are meant to protect those investors. So this document has to contain all material information that investor would want to know for buying the district's debt. The topics that are included are the terms of the bonds, the security of the bonds, which is the ad room tax, the information about the district's tax base on which that abs levied the district's financial and operating information as well as any potential material. Bond purchase agreement is the agreement between the district and Piper Sandler under which Piper Sandler agrees to buy bonds from the district. It also will contain the final terms of the bonds and will also contain the conditions of the closing. The continuing disclosure certificate district will sign a certificate at the closing in which it'll promise to provide investors with an annual update of the type that's included in the official statement. This is a requirement for all publicly sold debt in the district already makes these filings for other currently outstanding bonds. So it'll be the same process these bonds. And

finally the escro agreement between the district and the escro agent. This document governs deposit investment the bond proceeds and will direct the the escro agent to redeem the bonds on the district's behalf and send offices. The next page is on the next steps. So approved by the board tonight, we'll proceed with a mid-Marchch credit rating update. We'll finalize the official statement in late April and with the anticipated sale date early May.

Thank you. Do I any questions from the board? Um I had one I probably this was an interesting topic that I spent some time reading about so I probably just have enough information to ask bad questions. Um is there you mentioned like market conditions potentially changing is there any if markets shift significantly between now and the sale is there any sort of change that could happen or are we kind of booked into that maybe?

That that's a great question. And so approving this resolution does not obligate the issu uh the issuance of these refunding bonds. So we'll work closely with Rebecca and determine if we're comfortable proceeding. Um you know, we can schedule this the credit rating and the sale of the bonds, but we also have the option to sit and if interest rates spike or if savings go from $3.6 million down to, you know, $1.8 8 million and that's not acceptable. We'll wait until they creep back up and that's not uncommon especially in the volatile times that we're in. Thank you. Any further questions? Okay, I will now move to public comment on this item. Uh members of the public in person wishing to speak, turn in a speaker card. Uh anyone remote, you can use the raise hand function. I will count how many speakers Seeing one online. Um I will give you three minutes. Miss Lou.

Um hi. Thank you. I have a quick questions. I was just wondering um how uh how much is does it cost the district to pay to refinance this bond? Because recently a friend shared with me the attorney general opinion regarding um refinancing bonds and basically um his opinion is that you know why a petitioner have commonly read the larger statutory framework as permitting that you know paying underwriter discount or cost of insurance issuance from the bond premium um it is not consistent with the law. So I think the law um saying that all premium generated from the sale of the school district general obligation bond must be deposited in the debt service fund and no portion of the premium can be first diverted to any other use. In other words, premium cannot be used to pay underwriter discount, bond issuance or other issuance costs according to the attorney general. And I was wondering if you know the trust is aware of this and just wanted to bring that up. Thank you.

Thank you. Go ahead. Yes. I think clarifying comment. Yeah.

The attorney general opinion that was referenced in the public comment. That opinion um you know relates to the generation of original issue premium on you know new money bond transactions. So the attorney general has delivered the opinion that 100% of the premium has to be deposited into the debt service fund. And I should remind you the board that you know opinions of attorney the attorney general is not binding like a court um case would be but courts can find that argument persuasive. Um but in the case of a refunding bond you know 100% of you know the benefit of the transaction goes to the taxpayers and the costs of issuance are generated from the proceeds of um you know the refunding bonds and in the statute that the refunding bonds are issued under the distinction between premium and proceeds um is not the same as anybody transaction and you know the cost of issuance are clearly identified. as available to be paid from the proceeds of the bonds for funding.

Thank you. And I'll turn to the board for discussion and mutual action. Yes. I make a motion that the board approve resolution number 02-030526 authorizing issuance of Mount View Wisman School District of Santa Clara County, California's 2026 general obligation refunding bonds. Second. All right, I'll call a vote. Uh, all those in favor. All opposed. Thank you to um unanimously

our team who stayed so late. I might make a motion to move um item G up um because we have to vote on this and submit the vote results by March 15th. Second. Thank you. All those in favor? I.

All opposed? Motion passes unanimously. We'll now proceed on to item G. Sorry, I was watching I guess. Um, so this is uh the CSBA delegate assembly um ballot. There are four vacancies and we we you have a vote, right, as a whole, right? and you can vote for up to uh four vacancies, four candidates. Um attached are biographies that you were able to see. Um is there a Well, I'll I'll let you I'll let you discuss because there's I think there's some uh uh nuances to this one with writing candidates, etc. Right. So,

the um any clarifying questions or are you going to present? Go ahead.

I'm I'm happy to. I'm as the regional director. Um the delegates are elected by the boards and then the delegates elect me. Um so uh we have four incumbents who are running for their current spots and then two additional candidates. One of the incumbents, Carol Preszanka, um she submitted her bio profile and her board voted to nominate her and her administrative assistant in the district. um attempted to submit the nominating forms and apparently they did not go through which is why she did not appear on the ballot. This happens every single year. We almost always end up with a write-in candidate. It's not unusual unfortunately and CSBA is working on a better way of confirming with um districts that the materials have been received. Um beyond that, I won't say too much because I I'm not supposed to weigh in. Um the incumbents are um Isabelle Hub Flamerich who is also the CLSBA um interim president right now the California Latino School Boards Association and she's the chair of the legislative action committee for the Santa Clara County School Boards Association. Jod Mirhead um she's one of our longest serving delegates as an incumbent. Jessica Spicer um who you know well um is also an incumbent. The county board of education does have an appointed delegate as well. So we have nine de delegates total and their current appointed delegate is Jorge Pacheo Jr. but county board members can run at large um which uh Trusty Spicer is doing. And then um Carol Presanka I already spoke about. She's from the Cambrian school district is the only small school district that we have a delegate from. So we don't have other representation from small school districts. Um, Elizabeth Holidayiday is been uh very involved with the Santa Clair County School Boards Association

lately. Um, she's uh in her first term and is up for reelection this year. And um uh Derek Grassi, who you may know from Mount Pleasant, um has been on the legislative action committee for the Santa Clara County School Boards Association as well and as a current principal. Before we move on with the amount with public comment and friction, we may need to extend the meeting again. We have six minutes until our deadline because we have this and another item to consider. I make a motion that we extend the meeting till 11:10 p.m.

11:10 p.m. Do we have a second? Motion by Trusty Connley, seconded by Trusty Henry. All those in favor? I all oppose. Motion fails. We don't have enough. So, let's um let's vote quickly. We need we need to have comment. We will any member of the public who wish to speak on this item

and the present seeing no hands online we will now close public comment. Do we have a motion or discussion for the folks to nominate to vote for? Okay, I'll move forward. I I don't know really any of these people very well, but uh I'll not elect I propose electing the three um incumbents. There's four incumbents.

Harold Pzanka um because she's a right in was not starred but she's another incumbent as well. Stars. Yeah.

One of the stars I'd propose nominating set of those. Then we can have one left or remind the board that the meeting will say another one is a Campbell Union because they're close. Um, I guess I do think that the representation from Cambrian is important because it's that to the state delegate assembly to that whole picture and particularly representing our county um is an important voice. So, I would be in favor of including the right candidate.

Yeah, I think we had all a lot of well-qualified candidates. Um I I do think the incumbents and the right I think would um I would agree with a motion. I move to approve uh the nominations of the incumbents including the writing in incumbent.

I'll second motion. All in favor say I. I. All opposed. I'm gonna I think I'm gonna I think I'm supposed to abstain. And trusty Lambert posted. Yeah. Okay. So motion believe passes three. just remove accusing yourself. So now we'll move on to the next item which is authorizing or uh support of recognizing women's history month. Well, I do not think you're going to have time to um do this. So we bring that we can bring it to the next meeting.

Great. Okay. Thank you. We'll now move on to the next item. Board updates. Any any updates from the board? Seeing none, items for future agendas. Being none,

you went through board updates fast. I'm going to say get your reservation, get your tickets now for the Hoffman Awards because they sold out last year and um it's an amazing celebration, but our wonderful district there, the county will make a video about the program. It's fantastic. Okay, board updates are complete. We now move on to items for future agendas. Seeing none, future board meeting dates. The next regularly scheduled meeting is March 19th, 2026. And there's further meetings on April 16th and April 30th. Now move on with no more further business. And it's not quite 11 o'clock. The meeting is adjourned at 10:59 p.m.