Mountain View Whisman School District Board of Education - Regular Meeting

The August 8th, 2026, or August 6th, 2026 special meeting of the Board of Trustees will please come to order.

It is 12.02 p.m. We're meeting this afternoon in the boardroom at 1400 Montecito Avenue, Mountain View, California. The meeting is noticed at least 24 hours in advance.

The meeting is being broadcast live on YouTube. I wish to inform the public that this is a special meeting in accordance with the Brown Act. The board's discussion and action during this session are strictly limited to the specific items described on the posted agenda. No other business will be considered this afternoon regarding public participation because it's a special meeting. Public comment will be accepted only for items appearing on the agenda. There'll be no general public comment period for non-agenda items. We'll now proceed with the roll call of the board. Bill Lambert.

Devon Conley. Anna Reid. Lisa Henry.

Charles DeFazio. All members are present and quorum is established. Please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance.

which allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Before we proceed with the approval of the agenda, I wish to remind all attendees that the board welcomes and encourages public participation. I guess that all speakers adhere to the decorum and time limits established by our bylaws. I'll allocate time during each item for public comments as we see how many speakers we have. Now we move on to item C, approval of the agenda. Are there any requests from the superintendent or board members to pull, reorder, or move items on the agenda? I'd like to make one modification. Just moving the governance calendar review to the end of the agenda after G, just so that I think in case things come up during the consideration of those previous things, we can then review the governance calendar together.

I move that the Board approve the agenda with the modifications suggested by Trustee DeFazio.

I second.

All right.

I'll open public comment on the approval agenda. Any member of the public in person wish to speak can turn in a speaker card on the approval agenda. Wait to see how many speakers we have and then allocate time accordingly. Seeing none, I will proceed to the vote. All those in favor?

Aye.

All opposed? Motion passes unanimously. Now we'll move on to discussion and action item 2A, strategic planning process.

Yes, as you recall,

Yeah, good afternoon, trustees. I'm happy to introduce Aurora Laura from K-12 Coalition, and she's going to lead the initial kickoff of this process and explain, and then we can discuss and you can share your feedback.

Thanks. Because I think this will probably be a lengthy item, and I think it might be somewhat interactive between the board and the presentation. Let's take public comment now, ahead, and then we can kind of move into it. I'll now pause for public comment on item two, a strategic planning process. Any member of the public in person wishes to speak on this? I have a speaker card. Seeing none. Pause just to see, just in the interest of full transparency. Any member of the public wish to speak on this item? All right, seeing none, I'll now move on to the presentation. Thank you.

Okay, great. Thank you, Trustees and Superintendent Behr for having me today. My name is Aurora Laura, and I work with K-12 Coalition. And today, let's go ahead and go to the next slide. Today, what we're going to do is talk about the process and timeline for developing the strategic plan. So I'm going to explain everything that we're going to do, who's going to be involved, what role stakeholders will play, and then we'll open it up for your feedback. I'm also going to show you one of the activities that the steering committee will be doing at the first meeting where we get some feedback on what you want the end product to look like. Let's go ahead and go to the next slide. So to start with, though, I'd love to get to know a little bit more about each of you. Can each of you just tell me your name? How long you've been a member of the Mountain View Westman School Board and one word or phrase to describe how you feel about the district's next strategic plan?

I started something. Yeah. So my name is Bill Lambert. I was on the board from 2012 to 2016 involved in various activities until 2022 and I got on the board again and End of my term is right now. I how I feel about the next strategic plan. I think it's actually very critical for this school district to do a strategic plan and get it right. We have been quite frankly floundering for the last 15 years and this is just completely unacceptable. And I think that parents in our community, everyone is just getting increasingly frustrated with what is going on. Okay, great, thanks.

I'm Devin Conley. I've been on the board since 2018. And I think focused is probably the one word I would choose.

Charles DePazio. I've been on for three of us for almost two years now. I think my one word I think is focused. impatient, but I think in a positive way, I think we must get moving. I think this is really, we don't have a lot of time to waste. So I think I'm really eager to get this moving and started and see some change.

I'm Lisa Henry. I've been on the board since the end of 2024. And I'd say maybe anxious but hopeful.

Anna Reid, we're all elected at the same time. How I feel about the strategic plan. The next one, yes, I'm hopeful that'll be simplified. I think sometimes they get overly complicated. And when things are overly complicated, people just shove it off to the side and never think about it again. And I hope that this strategic plan changes that. Great, thank you.

So now I just wanna share a little bit about our company that is going to be working with you all to develop the strategic plan. We have been working with school districts since 2002 and a big picture, we've worked with over 7,000 districts on various different types of projects. Strategic planning wise, we've worked with 90 and you can see on the bottom of the screen, these are just some of the ones that we've done recently, but we have a lot of experience with strategic planning And specifically, I have worked at the company for five years working on strategic plans with districts around the country. Prior to coming to K-12, I've worked in education for 25 years. I've been a teacher, a principal, superintendent. So I've sat in all the seats and seen the importance of strategic planning to really guide the work of a district from various different perspectives. And I also understand why it's so important to make sure we've got the voices of different stakeholders pulled into this. So there's investment throughout your entire community and we're all on the same page, working in the same direction to help improve the district. So I'm excited to be here leading this work and I'll be with you throughout the entire process. So you'll see me at the different board work sessions and then I'll be leading steering committee meetings as well, along with the community engagement process. All right, so I want to talk to you a little bit about the process that we go through to build a strategic plan. And in the beginning, we make sure that a district is grounded in the vision, mission, core values, and the portrait of a graduate, because we want to make sure we are always reminded of the direction that we're going and the reason why we're doing this work and what we want our outcome to be. So we start at the beginning, making sure everyone understands what those things are for the district. And then we use, we dig into data, both quantitative and qualitative, to start to identify the priorities, then our goals in those areas, the strategies, action steps, and the key performance indicators or KPIs. So there's a lot of time looking at data, both your quantitative data, and then we will look at the results of our survey and focus groups that we've done to also make sure that we're sending the work in the right direction according to stakeholders. So this is really small on the screen, but I wanted to talk to you about the overall timeline for the project. So on the top line, what you can see is we will have three different board work sessions throughout this process. We've got today where we're kicking it off, explaining to you the process. We will come back and meet with you again in November, where we will bring you the results of the survey disaggregated by stakeholder groups. So you can see what a teacher say, what a student say, what a parent say, district employees. And then we'll come back to you again in February to show you the draft priorities, goals and strategies to get your feedback. And that way we can make revisions again before it comes to you for a vote in March. And we'll bring it to you on March 4th for the final reading and March 8th for board approval. In terms of stakeholder engagement, we have a few different opportunities. In October, we're gonna do a big community survey that everyone can participate in, and we will make sure we've got employees, teachers, students, community members, parents, and we keep those numbers disaggregated so that if we need to keep it open for longer and do additional outreach to get more people to participate, we will. But we'll probably keep that open for a good chunk of October. And so we've got this survey. And then we've got two rounds of focus groups that we'll be doing. One round in November. We're going to do those on November 5th and 6th. And then another round in February. We'll do February 4th and 5th. And in those focus groups, what we do is we bring whatever portions we've worked on so far out to the community to share with them. We get feedback, we take that feedback back to the steering committee so we can make revisions based on the things we're hearing. So your community will get two different opportunities to participate in in-person or virtual focus groups. We're also going to post The draft that we have online in February, so people who are not able to participate in a focus group are able to read the work and fill out a survey to let us know their feedback that way. So we want to make sure anyone who wants to participate in this process knows that they're welcome and that there's several opportunities for them to get involved. The big thing that we have is a steering committee. And I'm gonna talk to you a little bit more about who's on the steering committee and what they do. But we're gonna meet with this team once a month for six months. And in those meetings, we work on different pieces of the process. Today you're going to see what we'll do at the opening meeting, which is helping everyone understands what a strategic plan is and having them give feedback on what we want our end product to look like in terms of the amount of information we're sharing in the document, knowing some of it will come online. But how much do we want the public facing version? The second meeting, we will ground people in the core values, vision and mission to make sure they understand our vision. And then we're going to dig into the MVW SD way and help them understand the work that was done last year with some of your data and recommendations. So they have a good understanding of things that have already happened that we can build upon. We'll look at additional data then in meetings three and four as we work on taking all of that to build out the priorities and goals. We will look at strategies and KPIs in meeting number five, and then they'll do a final plan review in February. In between those meetings, we will be gathering feedback from the focus groups. So we also bring the focus groups back to the steering committee to make revisions based on what we heard. So they will see what we've done. They'll make revisions before we take it back out again for more feedback. work with your cabinet and superintendent in the second half of this process. The steering committee will be made up of a lot of different stakeholders, parents, community members, students, teachers, and because people have a diverse, amount of perspectives and sometimes not a lot of the detailed knowledge about what specifically the district's already done, what direction we need to go. We take their ideas and then work with the cabinet to put those ideas in writing and take it back to them for feedback. So we go back and forth between a lot of these groups and the cabinet so we can get everything operationalized and then get feedback on that. So we'll meet with them a lot. They work on drafting, they work on revisions. And then at the end of the process, we will work with the graphic designer to put your pictures in place, you know, take the feedback that we've gotten from the beginning of the process about what we want the end product to look like. And so that way you'll have a beautiful graphically designed document that shares the work that the steering committee and the district has done together at the end. Any questions about the timeline?

the the tail end is really brief together right like it's it goes from february 3rd finalizing a plan in the steering committee to focus groups on roughly that to then our last working session within like three days it's efficient to kind of incorporate the feedback and kind of Because that's our last chance right before we can actually, we're going to have our final reading like a month later, like four weeks from there.

Yeah, so that's the timeline that we are ideally working towards because we want to make sure we can approve this plan in time for it to inform the budget process. Yeah. What sometimes happens, though, just at the very end is if there's a lot of feedback or a lot of revisions that need to be made or if the board requests it, we may take an extra couple weeks to finish those revisions. So you all can let us know if you need a little bit more time or if we need a little bit more to work on it. But this is the timeline we're ideally working towards just to make sure we can finish it in enough time to inform the budget process.

Another thing I think maybe, like I think we've had like, we have a lot of metrics a lot of the time that maybe aren't kind of like tuned to actually focusing. Is it possible for us to get some feedback on like, not the numbers or like what the goals should be, but for what like, what are the things we want to measure earlier, right? Like maybe like between December, January, like when some of that stuff started to settle. what we're measuring, not necessarily like what our goals are, but like what we're measuring and all that kind of is gonna inform then like probably like our data review and the things that come out of that. Is it possible to pull that earlier just to give more? The time there, I don't know. Yeah, this is just I'm asking any other folks on the board.

Do you mean from the board specifically?

Yeah, like, because we're not going to see anything between November 7th and February 6th. We get this. The steering committee reports, right? But, um. What member on there?

Yeah, as I say, if I made the, um, we will have 1 member on there and I would hope that that member would be giving updates at our board meetings during the committee update process. That would be the perfect time for them to bring back.

Yes, information to our board. So maybe then, like the, after the December 9 steering committee, maybe like an actual agenda item where we just talk about what the, it doesn't have to be like a survey or facilitated, but just an agenda item for us to discuss what our metrics kind of measurements might be.

I think that would be great. I kind of tying into that a little bit. We're talking about it today with the board. Will we have some sort of announcement or presentation for the public in August when everyone's back at our board meetings to make sure people know about the steering committee in the process. Okay, thank you.

And to your question, we can build probably some of that into the November 7th board work session, or if the superintendent talks with you and you'll want to make a slight adjustment to the month, that could also be shifted to December to make it more of a midpoint there.

Yeah, I think if it's prepared and fits in the November 7th, we can put it in there too. I'm not kind of opposed to that anymore, just kind of I want to make sure we don't go down an alley where we've already like defined a lot of the things that we're going to measure. And then by the time we get stuff, there's like little time for us to course correct, if we so want.

Yeah, I understand. I want to go, can I just, you mentioned about this is aligned with the budget process. Could maybe Jeff explain, this is a retreat here, explain a little bit more about how that fits in to our budget decisions there. Yeah.

So. As we get the direction from the strategic plan, it may, it will likely point us to some initiatives that we want to address and measure that may cause us to spend money in a different place than we currently are spending it, right? I think the Orenda report, which, or we'll address on the next slide, already does some of that, right? It's... pretty clear about, you know, money not being effective spent here and that you need to, when we think about needing to establish the floor for all students in Mountain View-Wisman, right, and then the discussion not being whether or not those children can achieve that, but under what conditions can those children achieve that means that we're going to have to allocate additional resources in some places because some children require more and less, right? So... We anticipate that the strategic plan is going to incorporate that system study we had done well, right? It's going to incorporate well to this. And that's really going to point us at you need to be spending money here.

Do you see that happening concurrently with this timeline or sort of at the end of the report? So I think...

So the reality of what's going to happen is we're going to have, I think, some pretty clear signals of where this is going. December, January, before the final product is baked. And that will certainly inform Rebecca's and my hour discussions about what the budget needs to look like, or what the budget needs to look like, of course, coming to you for approval. But there's going to be some signals in there. Okay.

A lot of times the districts we work with finish it in May or June to start on July 1, but here we moved it up to make sure that we can make sure that the budget is going to be able to align with the direction we're going. Okay. So I do want to talk a little bit about how the Arenda study and the MVWSC way is going to inform the strategic plan, because you all did a lot of work on that last year, and we want to make sure that we're building upon that since just a lot of research went into it. So, first of all, at our second meeting with the steering committee, we're going to help people understand what's in the in the WSD way, help them understand the data that went into informant and the major findings and recommendations that came out of that report. Because your study said there are four really big things that we need to get right in this district in order to make improvement. And we want to make sure that this study is grounded in improving in those areas. So then we'll look at focusing the plan on those root causes to make sure that they're addressed. We will work on the details of how we're going to do that and take those ideas out to stakeholders to get feedback on. Are we approaching these the right way? Are we are our thoughts about what we should do to achieve this? being done in a way that makes sense for everyone. And then at the end or in the second half of the process, that's when we'll build everything for coherence. We will set our priorities, goals, and metrics aligned to those recommendations and any other kind of themes that come out of the focus group feedback. Let's go to the next slide.

comment just briefly we've talked about it but I think it would be good for the trustees to hear this isn't unusual our circumstance where we've had a system study and then we're building a strategic plan to flesh that out right you've done that with other districts absolutely you know

Sometimes in our typical process, we are kind of doing that work as we go along with the steering committee, but we don't always get as in depth in that process. And so what's great is districts who've done some kind of audit or systems review before, So using that to ground the work makes the process a little bit simpler and helps make sure you know you're going in the right direction. So we have done that in several other districts, and it does just make everything a lot easier because a lot of work has gone into it. So I do wanna just remind you all and the public about the recommendations that did come out of the MVWSD way. The recommendation said the district should work on strengthening symbolic data systems, weak program design, Christmas tree effect and weak system alignment. And so these will be things that the steering committee will talk about and how we should go about working on those. And that's something we will also get feedback on from your community. And down at the bottom, it kind of talks about then how that informs making the strategic plan. Those recommendations will help clarify the direction that we're going in and the things we know we need to fix. But then after we do that, and after we identify how we're gonna do that, we'll make sure that our systems and programs are all aligned to getting those outcomes. It'll help us focus our work then in our budget on what matters most and what we're gonna keep doing and what we need to stop doing in order to just really get those recommendations to come to life. And then allow us to then implement with fidelity as you kind of implement this plan in future years, how do we know we don't have a bar for which like we're measuring the what we're doing and we can improve measure and improve everything over time. So this kind of informs the long term work that will happen in this district over your next six years. So I do want to share a little bit about the steering committee now. The steering committee typically has about 25 to 30 members on it who are selected based on individual knowledge and skills and their affiliations with different stakeholder groups. So we asked districts to think about inviting district and school staff, students, parents, community members, and any other key partners from your community who should be at the table. We put them together and just make sure that they've just represented different demographics, different areas of your community, range of school levels. So we want to make sure we've got early elementary, mid-elementary, middle school, and any internal or external stakeholders that really need to be part of this process. Go to the next slide. And the purpose of the steering committee is to advise on the development of the plan. So we're going to meet six times and they're going to give us feedback on different areas and look at the feedback from the focus groups to identify what changes we should make. It elevates the voices of different stakeholders and make sure that we are thinking about the strategic plan through the lens of all the people that will be impacted. So we want to make sure parents are bringing a parent perspective, students are bringing a student perspective, you know, teachers, principals, everyone, that they're all represented in the process. It allows them to be ambassadors for the project in the end, so that people know that this plan wasn't written by a group of district employees sitting behind closed doors, but it allows people to be able to share how we went through the process, what we did with the feedback, what changes we made based on feedback, and allows them to assure that all voices were at the table when we did this work. And then at the end of the process, we will ask them their thoughts about implementation of the plan. And after we've completed it, what they would like to see from the district over the next several years in terms of how the district shares out progress and what they would like to hear just reported on. And here, we'll do this last slide and open it up for questions, but we wanna show you the makeup of the steering committee that has been put together by your district. For district leadership and classified staff, you can see the representation. They have six members, school representatives, principal, teacher, or parent rep from each, and you've got the schools represented, employees and community partners, And then board of trustee members, you will have one that we'll talk about at the end of this meeting or at the end of this presentation for a total of 26 people. So I'd like to open it up to any questions that you all have about the steering committee.

So this is a board where I imagine a lot of us are very, very interested in the strategic planning process. And if we could all be on the steering committee, we would be on the steering committee. Is it possible for board members to observe the steering committee meeting if they aren't the appointed person?

Yeah, I will leave that up in the superintendent. It is.

It is legal for that to occur, right? Because they will be meetings that are public. They won't be publicly noticed meetings, but they will be meetings that are public. I think what has to be weighed just from a... process standpoint is what's the impact if there's one trustee on the steering committee and four of you decide to attend, that becomes a presence, right? That I'm not sure it is our intent to steer the steering committee, right?

Yeah, and the one thing I'll share just from past experience, we have had board members do that. We also just want to think about making sure that people on the steering committee feel safe to share their perspectives. even any things that they don't agree with that have been decided in the past. And sometimes when there's a board member who might have been driving a certain change, sometimes people feel a little bit nervous to say that if that person's in the room. So we just want to make sure everyone who participates feels really comfortable sharing their true experiences.

Are you looking for input on this now or offline?

You're welcome to share input right now. Yeah, that'd be great.

I question having the city of Mountain View participate in this.

Do you want to say more?

We do not have a history of this Mountain View-Misman School District and the city of Mountain View being on cooperative committees, organizations.

I'll just, if I can add, I think one of the charges when I was hired was to rebuild community, right? And reestablish partnerships. And we've been working hard at that. And it seems like one of those opportunities where they have a voice among 26 to bring perspective from the city.

Yeah. And I wonder many other community groups that have an interest in the state and the students of Mountain View. I'm thinking of various Latino organizations, social service organizations. Yeah.

Yeah, we asked the districts welcome to put anyone on this that they want. So definitely share that. Any other thoughts that you have with the superintendent?

I think the challenge there is there's many different groups representing those kind of organizations. And it just gets over, to be completely fair, it would get overwhelming. So to figure that out just judiciously, who can represent a whole group. How large, I think we said like 25 to 30, how large would it be if this becomes unmanageable, right?

Because we're balancing the broad representative input from folks, but also we don't want like 100 people there, right?

Yeah, I mean, we think 25 to 30 is ideal. We have pushed that number a little bit higher in some places. So it's up to the district.

So would the Board like us to consider some broader representation?

I would recommend, yes. I do think we should have a seat for the City of Mountain View on this body. I think it's an olive branch. I think it also helps keep the city more informed of what we're doing and lets them understand in more depth what's going on within our school district, which is a positive thing. I know the city already runs, and this might be a place where we look for what other community organizations or community partners we might want to pull in. They run a regular meeting of a lot of the community service organizations to bring them together, like Hope's Corner, CSA, the community foundations, Reach Potential Movement. Maybe we look there to figure out a few other organizations to bring in. I agree with Trustee Lambert. I'm particularly interested in having representation from some of our organizations that work more closely with our Spanish-speaking community represented here. But I think if we could go up to 30, that would be great.

We'll work on that.

I was just going to say, though, I do... Agree with getting those additional perspectives I don't know if there might end up being maybe an additional way to do that and another focus group or something. Because I think the thing that's jumping out at me is the each school having one representative and what I don't know. Like how the balance would be determined of how many of those schools have the principal, how many have a teacher, how many have a parent, I do want to make sure we have really. robust parent and student representation in here. And if it's only one person per school, that's the concern that I'm seeing more than the organizations.

Yeah, and when we do, in a few slides, I'm gonna talk about the engagement process. And just so you know, when we do focus groups, we go and do them at the schools where we'll meet with teachers, we'll do one for administrators, we'll do community ones in the evenings at schools. We have the ability to meet with other community groups. So you all kind of build the schedule for those days, but we go out to do them in different locations where we can just make sure they've got a voice in the process.

And I think too, I think about wanting this process to be representative of what we collectively as 11 schools want for our district, right? So because if we're gonna start making budgetary decisions about applying additional resources at the kids who most need it, That's going to mean an understanding that that's how we're going to begin allocating resources in a more targeted fashion, less like peanut butter and more like just a really precise way.

Yeah, I think Trustee Henry, I think, sort of made me think that, you know, resend some of my comments that, or maybe just change the, make sure the focus is on education, right? And that having people with the background in education who really can drive this program and drive their strategic plan rather than all these sort of ancillary organizations that maybe that are that have more specialized and focused interest and less of the expertise. And that's sort of where City of Mountain View jumped out at me there. But I can see it without these other kind of groups as well, that we don't want to dilute the focus on education, excellence, success.

i noted that two slides ago it mentioned students and i don't think we see any student representative listed here um with i think civically minded middle schoolers would potentially

Yeah, I mean, we will go out and do focus groups with students. Sometimes we have a student on the steering committee. Sometimes we don't, but we make sure that we've had enough student voice in the process through those focus groups. I will say a lot of times it's usually high school students, and I know you guys go up to middle school. So our thought had been perhaps doing more focus groups here, but that's kind of up for discussion.

I'd like to consider an eighth grader or potentially from the middle schools. I think that would be... It's a time commitment on weeknights and things like that, but I think it's potentially a really good experience for driving some of the change that they're going to see for their communities.

Yeah, and I don't disagree.

Just one of the thought processes I got into is we're looking for diverse representation. And if we're going to have diverse representation of... parents and so forth, are we going to put all of that into a single student on that committee? How many demographic areas do we want that child to touch, right? Or do we want to have, just like this, one from each middle school who checks these boxes, right? Because we're looking for diversity of viewpoint here in this. And I, I think about it if you have Putting a student on That student voice is very important right that student is going to have all that weight on him or her. And when they express their point of view, it's going to be very personal and perhaps not represent the viewpoint of the, I'll just make this up, non-English speaking migrant child, right? So it's just something to consider.

I agree that we definitely want student voice. I lean more towards in-depth focus groups with students because I remember back when Mistral was going through the transition from a 90-10 language model to a 50-50 language model. And being in a meeting with parents where people felt very strongly and were sharing opinions very strongly. energetically. And there were literally groups of people crying outside afterwards. And I don't anticipate that that's going to be our strategic planning process. But I do know that people really, really care about what's happening in schools and really care about their students and their education. And I want to make sure when we ask our students for input that we're doing it in a safe space while also making sure they feel heard. So it might be that the steering committee isn't the best format for that. But even if we could ask the focus group of students if they want to give a presentation to the steering committee, maybe that's the moment where they get to approach that larger group. But I want to scaffold it in a way that is supportive. and developmentally appropriate.

Great. Okay.

Just to, yeah, I think probably maybe we need some more discussion around student input and how it goes, but maybe not right now. But I think one thing I'm really excited to see on there is the LA, the representation there, I think, right? Because it's similar to the portrait of a graduate, but like we're handing off to them. And so having them actually being able to engage with us and say, I really hope that we get someone from MDLA there that's capable of speaking to us about what they see from our students coming in and how that'll feed back like any data they have and get it sharing from the school district, I think will be really useful in setting where our target is, right? And I think that's a really valuable insight that they can provide us. So basically my second subsequent question is how are we selecting folks that will serve on this? I don't think that was, I don't remember it being in the presentation, but yeah.

skipped over right so we're we're presenting it as having a couple of different opportunities right one would be um uh through focus groups right we anticipate getting a lot of um robust input there and then we have talked to the principals we have looked at who has provided uh uh guidance and thoughts and input during the course of the year that I've been here, those that I have interacted with, and then checking with the principals about those too, right? So we're looking, and the principals know we want to, and they want as well, a broad spectrum of representation. They get, they understand what this is for.

Is it, so we're not going to be selecting folks from interviews or anything like that that's just going to be appointed by I guess for the peer district or the peer organizations they're going to recommend folks that serves do you anticipate city and high school district to be a elected officials or staff members to ours immediately elected on there.

If I could just add to that, I think having gone through a strategic planning process before in this district, one, I'm really excited that there will be a Board of Trustee member on this because we weren't, we didn't have that opportunity last time. And to really see the sausage kind of being made, but we also didn't have the steering committee structure and process. So I'm really excited to see this. And I think it's going to be a very healthy and open way for our community to have these discussions. But I also like the structure because at the end of the day, the strategic plan isn't a board document. It is a community document. It's a community plan that guides your work. And so it shouldn't be driven by trustees in the sense that it needs to come from the community. And then our job as trustees is to take that plan and oversee the implementation of it in faith with our community. So I do like the structure very much, and I'm looking forward to seeing the steering committee's work.

To be fair, I think just we did, you know, in the past, we probably did have the opportunity to serve on this. It's a choice we make, right? We can choose whether or not we want to. If there's anything here that we want to change now, we can change. If we're worried that, in hindsight, we will look back and say, I wish we had had the opportunity to do X, Y, Z. Now is the time for that.

And, well, I'm glad we're doing it this way. Let me say that. In the past, there was a this structure that was brought as an option. And I am very glad to have it as an option.

Yeah. I would encourage if you have other things that you envision future trustee Connelly looking back and saying, you wish we had had this. Now is our chance. So don't feel like we're boxed in by what's here.

Fair. Thank you.

All right. Yeah. And I would agree. I'm not locked into having a trustee. on that committee. First of all, it's the only elected official, and that actually means something. And yeah, it should be a community document.

Okay. All right. Oh, you did. We actually, on the previous slide about the timeline, we actually kind of talked about what the steering committee will do at each of the meetings. So I think we can go ahead and skip past this one. Okay, so I wanna talk about the role of the board in this process. So you all are gonna be receiving progress updates throughout the strategic planning process. You will be able to provide feedback on sections of the strategic plan at board work sessions. So we are gonna come to you two more times in this process. Today we're doing the kickoff and strategic plan review. We'll just take a look at an example strategic plan or two. Um, the next time we come, we are going to share with you the results of the stakeholder survey disaggregated by the different stakeholder groups. We'll also give you a steering committee progress update. And at that point, we might also be able to get your feedback on some of the things you would like to see measured in the process. And then it's steering committee number three. That's when we'll bring you all the focus group feedback that we heard. You'll see how we kind of put that together into the plan and incorporated that. And you'll be able to give us feedback on the proposed priorities and goals. And then it'll come back to you in March for approval. Next slide.

Oh, go ahead. Go back. about that. I just want to make clear what you said, and I think it's a great idea, okay, that we're going to have board work sessions to go over the documents and review them and not do this during a board meeting. Board meetings are, in my opinion, sort of a presentation for the public to be aware of what's going on. It's certainly not a... It's not the... the venue for discussing and going over and critiquing and doing these plans. So that's good. Thank you very much for sort of doing it.

Yeah, I think it works a lot better to do it at a board work session so everyone can kind of roll their sleeves up and, you know, really take time to discuss it as a group, so. Okay, next slide. Just so you know, the role of the superintendent and cabinet, they will be providing feedback on sections of the plan. They're gonna do the drafting of the priorities, goals and strategies using that feedback from the steering committee, the board and the community through their surveys and focus groups. They'll draft things. We take it back out for feedback. They get the feedback and make revisions to those drafts based on what we've heard. And then at the end, they'll also give input for the graphic design of the final document. And next slide. And then our stakeholder feedback opportunities. Like I said, we will have three opportunities. We're gonna have an online survey in October. We'll do focus groups in November and February. And then before the board approval, we will post the plan online and allow people to fill out a survey with additional feedback that we will have the cabinet review to make revisions on. And focus groups, you can see down at the bottom, we will have focus groups with teachers, administrators, support staff, students, parents, district office employees, community members. So we have during the two sets, we asked the district to build the schedule and just let us know where to go for us to run those focus groups.

What's kind of the structure of the survey going to look like that we send out to folks?

Yeah, what we typically do, and the district is reviewing it to let us know if they want to make any changes, but typically what it has is a pretty short survey, and we give people a list of things the district could be focused on over the next five years or six years, and we ask them to select the top five things that they think are most important for us to improve on. So we then share that feedback back out. So that's really quick. They just pick their top five. And then at the end of the survey, we usually leave open-ended questions about what should the district start doing, stop doing, and continue doing to improve student outcomes in the district. So that part is optional, but we encourage as many people as possible to take the survey. And then we look at themes that come out of the open-ended to help also inform the goals and strategies we use.

one thing i think might be useful also because i think we're the the um the stake will the results of that survey be at like the first stakeholder committee meeting i think the timing was close if i remember correctly yeah it's like meaning two is like core values vision and mission yeah we typically um do that we go over that at usually meeting number three

which should be in November.

I think like the open-ended part of that is useful in setting what like the community values, right? And I would like to, I don't know how other folks feel about this, but something less of like, I like the idea of having the start-stop, but I think some of the core questions we have sometimes for folks of like, what do you actually care about in your schools? What makes our schools great to you? Kind of those things that people care about. Some people it's, you know, academics it's opportunities for different programs it's athletics it's theater these are different things that people bring to what they want to get out for their kids and having some sense of those values just to bake into that might be helpful for us

Yeah, I like Trustee DeFazio's idea too. We do a lot of public outreach in our community, the City of Mountain View does too. It's very typical that we start off with menu topics because that's sort of an easy thing to do. We have a very opinionated community for good and bad. And people have a lot to say and want to participate. So I would really try to structure this. So sort of lead with solicitations of ideas rather than lock people into a framework that is sort of pre-baked, and especially you have the other current core values that sort of locks into what we did in the past. It's like, allow people, structure it so people really want to and are encouraged to come up with their own ideas. Okay.

Great. Yeah, we will talk with the superintendent about maybe making some changes to how the survey is structured.

I think it's just having done this before, it's a balance because a segment of the population will be able to just go on with the open-ended, and others really draw from the prompting of ideas, right? And I will tell you that the bulk of those prompts are really tied closely to our system study, right?

And I think that's sort of the point. If we're going to be specific, right, make sure that you're really... Answers are going to be, you know, directed toward that some actionable goal or something. Exactly. No, that's exactly what we're doing. And not just a broad, you know, what your vision is. But, okay, we need an answer to this, right?

Yep. Yeah, but I would like to, I think some just at the base level of like. I think understanding how our community feels about what makes a good school, right? Like that's something that's hard to touch on individually and we all have our own kind of ideas and pulling that together I think would help us. The other thing that I'm curious about is I think a significant population in our district, English is not their primary language at home and so how are we What languages are we going to be translating to are we going to facilitate the focus groups with native speakers right like that kind of or translator interpreter like how How are we gonna make sure we get like broad coverage here?

Yeah, we ask the district to provide translators or translations for any groups that they need. But we typically do run the survey as soon as they give us the translation in English and Spanish and any other languages that are needed. And then for focus groups, we have in the past had the district provide translators and we've gone and done sessions.

I think something along the lines of I worry about the, if this is what we're doing, like an English language facilitator that's getting translated for a community of non-English speakers versus having someone actually like communicating directly in Spanish, Chinese.

So I think this is where our SCFs will be particularly important. Each school has a school community engagement facilitator, and I believe most of them are native Spanish speakers. They might be our outlet for engaging. I We have seen, for example, with our LCAP survey this last year, some of the response rates for certain student groups, including our Spanish-speaking families, were much lower than the response rates for other groups. So I'm hoping, as a district, this is as internal, and not you, but us, that maybe we can be creative about asking our SCFs to work with families to fill out the survey or going to our ELACs and asking everyone in our ELAC to fill out the survey. Like, how are we going? Is there going to be a community info night or a back to school night? Or, you know, how are we actually engaging our Spanish speaking and other language communities proactively to get the kind of feedback response rate that we would hope for. And can we, you know, maybe we even want to set some goals like that or, you know, I leave that up to staff, but I know the board is, I think we are all very interested in making sure that everyone's voice is heard and that we are very proactive in our engagement for this.

Yeah, to your point of it being across multiple different languages, right, that our community speaks. A lot of times if we're trying to engage parents, their primary language might not be English or Spanish, right? Like these are things that we need.

But as we know, what Trustee Connolly said, as we know, just translations alone are not going to, you know, get participation. It's like anything else, you know, you have to talk to some of your staff. We have to do something else if we're really serious about it.

Something that MVLA offers for things like this is a night where they invite their parent community to come and they have people there who can not only translate but also help fill out the paperwork. I translated that for you but you still don't know what that means. This is kind of what it is and it helps people get through the paperwork. in a community oriented fashion. And it's usually scheduled at a time where students need to be on campus for whatever reason, like a back to school night orientation or some athletic activity. So partnering up with that, just creative ways to do that QR code pick up or drop off in the morning where people can scan and, oh, I can do this later. But ways to engage a community that we have not been successful in engaging just in creative ways.

Great.

Okay.

So we're gonna go quickly just through the next pieces. Like I shared in the beginning of this process, we do like to ground people in the current core values, vision and mission. So I'll just share quickly what those things are and we'll just look at what you all currently have just so everyone can be reminded of that. Core values are typically the set of beliefs that drive all behaviors of the district. The vision describes what the district hopes to achieve or be in the future is usually short, aspirational. It's what our dream is for our students. And the mission articulates what is unique about who the district is, what the district does, who the district serves. You can include those pieces, but it's basically what we're doing every day in order to achieve our vision. And so we'll just quickly take a look at the current core values, and I'll just let you kind of scan through that, but these are the current ones that the district has. And so at our first meeting, we'll make sure that the steering committee or at our second meeting has kind of read through these and internalized kind of what they mean.

There's 11 of them, core values that drive every decision.

I feel like we probably could prune this down to four or five.

That's a good outcome from this process of... Um, yeah, I think it's hard to keep. It's something we've, I think, a lot of things is it's easy to add things and you continue to expand. And I think, right, like. it's hard for these to be core values if there's so many.

And I think some of them are pretty close to each other.

Absolutely. A lot of times, sometimes boards do make some adjustments to what they've got. So we're open to that.

But I hope from the outcome of the process, we end up with a reduced set here, just like a lot of our other plans that we've had.

Okay, great. Let's go on to the next slide. Here are your current vision and mission statements. Okay. The last thing, now we are at one hour. So do we still wanna do the activity or do we wanna wrap it up here? We're fine. Okay. What I'm gonna do now, so this will be an activity that we do with the steering committee at the first meeting, but we're gonna do a sample plan walkthrough and we're not reading the content. What I'm gonna show you are sort of the features and decisions that we can make about the end product that we wanna make. that we want to build. I'm going to show you two strategic plans that our company did with districts. These are very different districts than where you are from, but they've got some interesting just features in their plan that that's what we're looking at. So just things like they've got a title or they've got a section about this. And so we're just looking at that. We understand these are very different. But we're going to go ahead and start. I'm going to pass some around, and I'll just kind of walk you through the things to pay attention to in each plan, and then we'll just get your feedback. Oh, these are my copies. Okay. Okay, so this is an older... It's an older plan that we did, but we also did their newer plan, and this one has kind of more interesting features, so we're still going to take a look at this one. But what we want to show you, starting on the cover, on their plan, they've got a picture of a student. What is interesting about this cover is they've got a name for their plan. They called it Excellence for All. Some districts just call this the Strategic Plan and put the years, but they came up with a specific tagline and title for theirs, so that's what I want to highlight there. Okay, next page. Here they've got their vision mission, board of trustees.

Keep going.

Here they've got their core values. So they've got, there's our list. They're a little bit different than yours. They've got words with definitions. Some districts have kind of the things that they believe, which is what you have. But they've got those on a separate page at the beginning of the plan. So on the next page, what they've put is our shared commitments. This is their page with the letter from the superintendent It is a pretty long letter, but what we wanna show you is that this superintendent made a section about what this plan means for scholars, or that's what they're calling students, what it means for families, what it means for staff and what it means for community members. So some districts like that it calls out what it means for each group. And so I wanted to kind of share that, cause that's the decision you'll make about whether you want something like that in your plan, but that they put that in their superintendent letter Okay, we can go on down to the next page. Then they've got their table of contents. We do get some feedback about the table of contents is in an odd place, because maybe it should be moved sooner. All right, let's go on down. Okay, on the next page, they included context about their district and kind of some information about the history. You all will decide if you want a section like this, the balance we're making is how long you want this to be. So there's a lot of good information we could include, But also, we want to make sure it does not end up so long that people won't want to read it. And so, anyway, this district chose to put some of this background about how many schools they've got and the history of the district itself. Okay, we'll keep going on down. It takes up two pages, and then they've also got a list of the people on their steering committee who worked on this plan. They called it the Better Together Commission Members. Mm-hmm. Okay, let's go on down to the next section. Then they've got a full page about how they developed the plan and what implementation will look like. So they've got several kind of paragraphs here. It is kind of small print. Keep going on down. On the next page, okay. They've got a full page about their targeted outcomes. So they, instead of putting the goals on the page with the categories, they pulled them all into a one-pager and kind of moved it up to the beginning with where they want to be five years from now, where are they now, and what they will be measuring along the way. They just put kind of the five-year goal You know, at the beginning, so they didn't include specific year by year, but they pulled it all to the beginning and then they go through each of the priority areas. They call their priorities commitments. And you'll see instead of the specific goals with numbers, they just include kind of a description, the key initiatives they will use for that priority area. And then what is interesting about this one, go up just a little bit, is they put an implementation plan here. So you're not going to see this in very many other plans. But what this is, is they showed for our initiatives that we're going to have, we've got five years on this plan, and we want to show you that we have a place where everything will roll out, but we're not rolling out every single thing on the first day because we cannot roll out every initiative from the beginning and do everything well. So they wanted to show the committee, the community, I's are the things that we are implementing that will be new that year. So in the first year, they're gonna implement three of those initiatives. That's what I stands for implement, P stands for planning, meaning we're planning for it, we're thinking about it, it's gonna roll out in the future, but we're not rolling it out exactly right now. And then R stands for refinement. And that means that strategy or initiative should be fully up and running. And now we're refining, we're monitoring, we're making changes, but it's not new implementation. So you can see by the later parts of the plan, everything that they're rolling out will be up and running and just refining. So that's kind of interesting that some districts choose to do, but to let the community know about how we're facing this in over time. So they just go through each of their initiatives. This Strong Start, that's about early childhood. Let's go to the next one. The next one is about innovative teaching and learning. So that's all their academic goals. The next one's about talented and empowered teams. So that's their human resources category with recruiting teachers and staff. next joyful learning environments. These all look the same. And then their last priority is about the culture of accountability and excellence. Then the last page here that you'll see next is they've got their portrait of a graduate at the end. And so districts like to think about, do we want that at the beginning or towards the end? This district chose to put it at the end because they wanted to show that when we do all these things, we are going to produce graduates who excel in these areas. And these are the skills they'll leave us with. Other districts like to put this in the very beginning with the vision, mission, and core values because, again, they're saying this is going to ground our work, and here is what we'll do to accomplish those things. And so just a choice about where you want to put that in the document. And then let's go on to the last. I think it's just our back cover. So we wanted to show you an example here. I don't know if we can, for a few minutes, just open it up to any thoughts that you have about this, and then I'm going to show you one more that looks a little bit different, and then we'll wrap up. But any thoughts about things you like or didn't like?

I have a question. Who is the customer for this document?

So this will be the public facing document that is kind of produced for your schools and broader community. And so what I do wanna share is usually in this process, we will produce two things for you. We will do the public facing version and we'll do a one pager that you can also share. Usually what districts also have is some kind of QR code or place on the web where people can go for more in deep, more in depth information. So we're trying to think about the public facing version that you would distribute to families and communities and in school staff.

Okay.

I really like the targeted outcomes page because these are concrete measurements that have been chosen. And I think our last strategic plan, we had a dashboard that was trying to track things along the way. And then that dashboard didn't come back as often. And it didn't necessarily have concrete metrics tied to it. It had, some of it was about just implementation. But yeah, I very much wanna see concrete goals that we are working towards and measuring on a regular basis. So I'm excited about this targeted outcomes page.

Yeah, just to reiterate, I really like that it has baseline measurements for where the district is and then where we're aiming to go through the course of the plan. The other thing I really did like in this one compared to the other one was this, the table of the planned planning, initial implementation, continuous refinement, that I thought was really a good way to visualize things that are going to be in flight over the course of multiple years and cycles and seeing, are we actually on track for what we said we were going to do?

It's not fixed in time.

Things will have to change over time as we learn things, but it's a good way to communicate to the public. Over this long timeframe that this spans, six years, Where are we kind of like, when are things going to start landing?

I like to lay out of the core values. I think you have the choice here of seeing what the actual core values are and then reading on if you want detail. Whereas ours is just a lot of it could be broken down like this. But visually, it's a lot more intimidating. This is easier to digest for a lot more people.

I'll just say I think unique in this, and I don't know that I've seen this one before, is just this idea that there are, you know, a number of commitments that have implementation plans. There's no outcomes in them. The outcomes are, this is what you're going to see as a result, right? And that makes sense.

I agree with others that having measurable outcomes that are clearly communicated to the community are certainly important. I'm concerned about all these commitments and that the number of, I don't know, column initiatives are, yes, although they're spread out over five years, there's a lot of them. It seems to be. And maybe to Superintendent Baer's point, it's not clear how they're going to hide into education. And I think anything we talked about, it's going back to the measurables. Who's going to be accountable for this? How are we going to measure? How are we going to do the process? I also wonder, too, and maybe it doesn't come in here, is that six years, I think we're suggesting the plan.

Mm-hmm.

is when and why do we revisit it to see just a standard check? Are we changing our goals? Is it working? What works? What do we need to change? I think oftentimes, all the organizations, we see long-term strategic plans. Sometimes they go on for 10, 15 years, and it's still the same plan. And that's dangerous, especially around here. But it changes very, very rapidly.

Right the the rationale for the length yeah is that we also have this requirement of an l cap that we have to contend with right and it's very difficult, if not impossible to change the because we tried to change the l cap for this year. but it's just too cumbersome to do because we have committed to that for a three-year cycle, right? So we looked at this and thought about two three-year cycles so that the completion of this will fall at a time when we are also adopting or implementing a new LCAP, drafting a new LCAP, right? So that's the reason for that length.

And then the first three-year LCAP would provide an opportunity or time to revisit the plan. Correct, in the interim, right?

And we will... I think this particular version or layout makes some sense because it does have the mechanics of what we're actually going to be doing. And they are tied to these, right? But sometimes it's quite difficult when you have particular initiatives or, yeah, initiatives within an action. to tie outcomes specifically. They don't always have an exact measurable outcome, but it is tied back to ultimately the outcomes for students.

Yeah, that is true. As outcomes for students, I think you're very less, you know, page 13. That's... I think that's what parents are going to relate to. If he goes to this school, this is what's going to happen in whatever it is, like eight, seven, eight years, right? And just make it idiot-proof, right?

I like that underneath every commitment, it tells you how that commitment ties back to students. I think that's an important piece to start out with. Like, yeah, you're going to see a lot of stuff in a minute, but this is why you're going to see it there.

I look at this, I'll tell you right now, if we were implementing this, we are heavily focused at this moment in time on commitment to the very first initiative, right? It's coming up with the coherent, focused curricula that every student in the district is going to follow. Once we have that, then we can start building.

I'm going to show you one more plan that looks a little bit different. Go ahead and pass this around. So, and we do kind of tailor these to what the community, you know, what the, what the, you know, what the district wants to see and what you want to see in the end product. So you'll see districts might have looked at that one and said, there's some things we like, things we don't like. And so you're going to see a different district's take on this. This is one we just completed for Erie, Pennsylvania. So we'll go ahead and do a quick scroll through. This district also liked coming up with a name for their plan. So they called it Building Excellence Together, Strategic Plan for Student Success. Then they've got their table of contents. Lots of big pictures in here, okay. All right, next they've got their superintendent letter that ends with kind of a hashtag about what their theme is for this plan. All right, let's keep scrolling. Then they've got their vision and mission page right here at the beginning. Okay, let's keep scrolling. And then their core beliefs. Again, they've got them kind of with words and then a description of them underneath. All right, here's just a full page picture, graduate. All right, and then they put their portrait of a graduate at the beginning, because they wanted to show this is what we're building towards for our student. And different kind of graphic here. They put student-centered in the middle and then showed these are all the things we are doing or building in our students. Keep scrolling. They did include a section about how they developed the plan and how they implemented the plan. They liked that out of the Jackson one, and so they said we wanted a similar section, although some districts leave that out to make it shorter. they included a section about how their plan drills down so people can understand going from priorities to goals to strategies to KPIs because they included a little bit more detail in there. And so they wanted people to understand how to kind of understand the different pieces of what they've built.

Okay, let's go ahead and keep going.

All right, and so then they start with their priorities. They've got kind of a page sharing it. And then they chose to have a lot more detail on their page about the content. So they put for each priority, they put the goals up at the top for all their goals for that area. And then they put each of the strategies down below that they will implement to achieve each goal. So it's just a lot more detail and you all can determine how much detail you wanna go in in the public facing document. They do have also like a QR code for then going if people wanna see like the specific KPIs that they'll have for each of the areas for what their specific target is for each year of the plan. But they chose to have kind of a lot more on each page. So we can just flip through, you see their next category is academics. Next one is wellbeing and safety. Okay, keep going. Next category, just recruit and retain diverse and talented educators. And priority five, family and community engagement. Then next in their thing, they wanted to include a page about demographics in their district, just some fast facts about the district itself. Go ahead and just keep scrolling. And then last, they just put, they put a list of the steering committee members that participated and a group picture of them at the top for the end of the plan. Okay. So any thoughts about the second one?

Half thoughts. I love photos of children and community members, but this feels like a full page photo and then putting a whole bunch of information tightly on one page doesn't feel like the best use of communication space to me. And so I would, depending on whatever level of detail we go with, I don't think I would quite organize it like this.

One thing I noted just, It's been a failure mode of some of our planning is, I think. I went to look for these before before the event was trying to review this. Um, like, basically all the metrics are improved by 15%, and I don't think we want that to happen here. We should actually be setting these based on what we think is reasonable and we can effectively do and. baselining them. This lacks a lot of baselining as well.

We're going to push for that idea of backcasting. Where do we want kids in six years? And then what do we do to get there?

Because I think generally, to me, that communicates when we have these types of things. It's like someone pulled a number that sounded good out of the air and not actually something they believe they can achieve. That's

I would also suggest in general, I think our community is fairly good with numbers to the extent that things can be put in nonverbal forms. One comment, I'm really impressed that both of these had pictures of kids doing chemistry experiments.

Which only I could look at.

All right, we'll make a note of that. I like having a demographics page like I mean it for this to be a public facing document together like what was snapshot of who we were as a district at the time this. plan was made because I like the idea of this being a thing that if you just didn't know anything about who we are as a district that you could read this whole thing and understand what you're coming into like maybe you're a new staff person or your new parent what are our commitments to our kids who are committed to our family and and who are we kind of all in one document right just any other thoughts

I think the So this is this is more on content, which I think is probably something that's going to shake out of the process right but like right like our portrait of a graduate is going to be baked into from like what MLA straight like our targets are going to be very different from from these ones, which are all I think like like a CT driven things like that preparation for for college. Are going to be ready for high school and it's going to come from the other part that I think was there was a gather.

See, I think, trustee read, you might be able to speak to it more, but Cupertino has a whichever graduate that's pretty concrete and well done. And it's also a K school district. So there's some good reference points that may be really useful.

Yeah. So just so you know, at the first steering committee, we do a walkthrough all together with the whole steering committee of one, so they know kind of what to look at. And then in small groups, we have a whole bunch of strategic plans. And so every group's going to have a different one, and they'll present out and kind of share what they saw. So we look at just a whole lot of different layouts. And I think what's great about it is sometimes... coming to a meeting, if it's a parent or just a community member, they might not know all the details about what a strategic plan is supposed to be, and that can sound very scary, but we make it come to life. We show people what it's gonna look like, and everybody can look at these and tell us from their perspective as a parent or as a community member, Is it too long? Is it too jargony? Like how much, you know, how much do we want? And so we like to just have everyone kind of weigh in and it's a fun activity, but they'll look at a whole bunch of different ones at the first meeting. And we'll kind of gather up all that feedback about what we want the end product to look like. So we just want to show you a little taste of it, but just know they're going to get a much more comprehensive view by looking at lots of different ones. So. Okay, you want to go to the last slide? We're just, it's just on Q&A now. So are there any just questions? No, actually, it's next steps. Yep.

I think the next step is picking trust with that member. I think, like, do we want to set some baseline of what we kind of are looking for in a trustee that's serving on there, right?

Because I think one, obviously, attendance at the meetings, I think, is the baseline.

But also, I think what's useful is a willingness to communicate the board's perspective rather than necessarily, like, an individual priorities, right, which I think came from, like, the self-evaluation later later in the meeting but like right like being able to be on our eyes and ears on that on those steering committees and communicate the general feelings of the board and then coming back like we'll have reporting right that we talked about like probably at least a solid update from after each meeting to say how the process is going and what we're seeing i have to say that i think it was trustee labor it's comment earlier about do we actually want an elected on the steering committee or not

I don't know.

I could see going either way, actually.

I think just because otherwise we're going to be Not having any of us kind of reporting back to the board. What's the meetings and what kind of is going on in there?

But it's a person could observe right and and just give feedback. And yeah, it looks like there's plenty of other opportunities. So we're gonna get reported.

It would still be like a commitment right from that person to attend all of those meetings and observe if we want to just have an observer position.

It just yeah. The reason I say that before, public gives deference to elected officials in general. And yeah.

I think we might also still have a similar challenge with staff members on there too, right?

Yeah, but elected officials is just one notch up, right? I guess that's it. I think it interjects a political aspect to it too, which I think we should try to minimize. So that's fine.

I mean, I think I would like to have one of us on there to be able to, because sometimes when things, when we have our different committees that are out there picking a curriculum or doing things, we get a report when it's pretty far along the process, even a few months in. I think having somebody who's really part of that, and especially the reporting back on the how it's going piece of it. And I see your point, but there's also going to be principals, or there's going to be a pretty big group. And we have some vocal community members who I think will still speak their mind. So I would like to have somebody on it. I do acknowledge that we have an election coming up. So some of the meetings are after that election. I don't know if that affects the choice. I will say for myself, Wednesdays are kind of tough. So having just said that we should have somebody, I also say Wednesdays at 5 are kind of tough for me.

Yeah, and I mean, I think if we decide to have somebody on, personally, I think Devin and I should not be representatives. First of all, we've been on for the last several years where we have a history, okay? And I'd like to see this as starting something new. Also, we're both up for election and it becomes a political kind of issue. And one of us may or may not be here, right after, you know, December. So after November, after December. So we want that continuity too. And I defer to you guys as sort of the new strategic plan, right?

Yes. And I love strategic planning. And I'm available for all of these dates and times. And I would love to do it. So if nobody else can go, I would happily do it. And then if things change and we have to hand it off to another trustee, we hand it off to another trustee. I also think there's, you know, regardless, I will go and observe if I am not the person who is the board representative as much as I can, because I think that whoever is there will reflect for our board our role as learning from the community in this process. The board is gonna have its own opportunity to weigh in on the strategic plan. So I don't see that as the role of the person from the board who is at these meetings. I see the board member more as the person who is observing and updating our board on what's going on. and then our board as a group will give feedback, but it shouldn't be this one person by themselves speaking for the board in this meeting. I don't think that that's the role of this person, which depoliticizes it if that's what we agree to, but I understand your points too.

Yeah, and I think that's always our intent. We intend all these committee meetings and things like that. You know, as well as I do when we speak like everybody listens right and you don't don't work. We're not speaking for the board or anything. It's just like, you know, dead silence and people are referring to us.

We're all down to earth and approachable.

So,

I still think we should have a board member there just even to carry, I think to your point, to carry questions that the board might have to report back the updates, not to necessarily advocate for positions one way or another, but to make sure that like we have at least some understanding because there's large gaps between, I think, when the board gets updated on what's going on. It's helpful.

And I think it's valuable to hear the conversations that happen in the steering committee and because we'll get you know, next step from that, but hearing kind of how that came about would be good.

So, I mean, I would look for Charles or Lisa or Anna to step up because Wednesdays are difficult for you.

They are. I don't want to.

Wednesdays are also a little difficult for me, but I could make it work. It's just those are days where I have early morning meetings, so that would extend my day.

I could make it work. I don't want to keep volunteering for committees. I have no interest in accumulating that, but I'm happy to serve if folks...

Well, I guess I'll also say, is there anything magic about the Wednesdays? I mean, I know those dates are on a calendar, but.

We try to avoid Thursdays. Right. And then project map is kind of built. They can appear at certain times. And so that's the order is kind of meeting during meeting to feedback to the board presentation. But all that to say, no, Wednesday's not magic. It's just kind of a.

first choice? Or Anna, I don't know.

Because I have a Monday, Wednesday, Friday 530 commitment. So I could potentially do it if it were on Tuesdays. I don't know if that or I don't know if Another, something else, obviously not Thursday.

Also, when are the VLA PTA council meetings? Those are usually Wednesdays. The VWSD board president's meeting, PTA president's meeting is also usually Wednesdays. I don't know if those overlap in any way.

That's a great point. Those are, like, council is usually like a five.

I heard from a council, PTA council rep, Wednesday was good for them.

Yeah.

On the other hand, I don't know if you do.

On the other hand, this is really important. So if you can't attend the president's meeting, hey, you know, somebody else can do it.

It's more having our board president consistently miss the PTA council meetings that he's assigned to to do this. That's what I'm...

But somebody else could consistently fill that role.

And it may be that council's a different Wednesday because these aren't every Wednesday.

I mean, everybody's going to have conflicts somewhere sometime. It's hard.

What stage is it? Six. All right, I'll do it.

OK. Well, our first steering committee is September 9th, so we're excited to kick that off. So thanks, Anna.

Thank you very much. We'll see you there, Anna.

And we're really excited to start this process with your community, and we will be back here to give you an update in November. All right, any final questions or things that you have for me?

When would the communication go out for steering committee interest from the community? Yeah.

When when will we see the when we see the roster for composition just to.

yeah.

yeah i'd love to see that also just ahead of time.

And can we add the steering committee meetings to the trustee engagement calendar, so if people are able to observe without being overbearing they can.

And also, if you don't mind, I would love to collect those examples back so I can use them with your steering committee. Okay. Copies. All right. Well, thank you all very much for your time today, and I look forward to seeing you again soon.

So did you work on the Jersey City?

I was not on that one. We have a couple people on our team that do them, so I didn't do Jersey City.

Yeah, with that, we'll do our research. Oh, item C?

Okay. Yeah, I think we have time.

All right.

All right, well, thank you. With that, we will... We'll move on to item C, or do you want to do the recess? We'll move on to item C, and then probably take a recess after that. So item C, we'll do the board professional development budget.

Yeah, it was requested that the board, the topic of board professional development come to the retreat and so attached was a copy of the board bylaw 9240.1 which speaks about a board development board professional development so um this would be an opportunity to talk about the the budget is twenty thousand dollars that has been budgeted right approved in the budget um in june and so this is just an opportunity to talk about what that what the forecast of that um professional development could look like for trustees.

Yeah, do you have information about the costs of AEC, the Unity Conference, the Coast to Coast? Do we have actual costs to look at?

Let me see if she has that. One second. So I'll ask Nancy to bring that up.

And I was curious, with the update that we got about current status of that budget, not much was encumbered, so I didn't know. I'm hoping that means that that meant something was paid at the end, that we are booked for AEC and that that's... We are, but I think it just didn't hit the...

Didn't make that report, okay. Book chat, yeah, that's what we're talking about, CSBA. Hi, Nancy. The question was about, maybe you can come over here. The question was about AUC for 2026 in San Diego. And has that booking been made?

The booking has been made, yes. Registration for the workshop.

Okay, and the budget, do you know the anticipated expense?

9000 total and did the fee like the AC fee part come out of last school year's budget or the school year's budget.

And that includes not having to pay for me for registration. Okay. That leaves us 11,000 in our budget.

Okay.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, Nancy.

And then have we registered anyone for the Unity Conference yet? Because we allocated, we wanted to send two, possibly a staff and a board member.

We have not done that one yet.

It closes, I think, like at the end of this week. It's about to close.

We did approve sending someone, right? Yeah. We don't need any direction to it.

We just, we need to figure out who's going to go.

All right. Any further questions?

I guess the other thing that I should have asked when Nancy was here, but on AAC, is last year, two of us attended the incoming president's workshop, which added another day of hotel and an extra fee for that. And then depending on how November goes, it's possible there could be someone who would need to have new trustee orientation

Did we register for, assuming the rotation holds as usual, did we register for a new president's training like we did last time?

I will double check on that, but Nancy and I had a conversation about that. It would be the two of you.

Yes, I believe she did book at least myself an extra day for that.

Well, so then in an ideal world, in an ideal world, we said, at least one person from our board and hopefully a staff member to the Unity Conference.

In an ideal world, we send somebody to coast to coast.

And we haven't done that for a few years. I have been before. I don't have to be the person that goes by any means. But I think it is very important for our board to be represented at the federal level. And I know we've gone back and forth on this and what it means and why it's important. But I think we should send, in the past districts have sent a superintendent and a trustee.

Pause for discussion. We're still on questions.

Oh, are we still on questions? Well, what is the, I mean, one question is what is the actual cost of coast to coast anticipated to be? Last year, the registration, I want to say it was like around $800 if you registered early. The main costs end up being things like flight and hotel. Do we want to pay for that? Do we not want to pay for that? Depending on our budget, or just pay for registration. It depends on what makes it feasible for people to attend.

I guess another question is whether, I know I have one more question. Mig course to do, because I had to reschedule. Whether this group of five has already done the whole series, or whether that ends up being something to factor into the budget.

Has everyone done Mig? Yep. Yes. So you're the only, only that one session left.

Thank you for the questions, trustees. Now with that, I will turn to public comment. Anyone in the public wishing to speak on this item, turn in a speaker card. We have one speaker. There's a microphone up there. Oh, there's a microphone. You're free. You'll have three minutes, Mr. Nelson.

And now the mic is live. Do you have time? Somebody test timing, right? You know that. Got it. Okay, great. Yeah, I definitely think that $20,000 is a good use. I definitely think you ought to keep it. And if finances, as Trustee Reid and the rest of us hope, start growing, So we're not headed towards that zero reserves. We'll be able to increase that in the future. The conference, CSB conference workshops are extremely useful. I sent you guys something about what I learned about how good boards, how the governance of good boards actually depends on that board governance calendar. Somehow ours has gotten shortened to governance calendar. This isn't a staff governance calendar, it's a board governance calendar. And there's a good workshop explaining how you use that strategically as a board to help with things like, and I mentioned something that Trustee Conley brought up and never got on the agenda. And that was a report on the Stevenson lottery. What's it doing for the segregation at that school? If you don't have reports, trustees, I don't know what convoluted way you have of saying whether a trustee asked for item actually gets on the agenda, but that's a different issue. But when it does get on the agenda, it should show up in that board governance. So that's a good idea. I think the idea that coast to coast, that we're gonna have important federal level differences, I think that's an exaggeration of what this small district can do in the nation. If somebody wants to run for Congress, I think she should run for Congress or he should run for Congress and work on bringing back the Department of Education. But I also think there's a mistake. I'm pretty sure there's a code that says if you designate somebody to go to a conference and there's expenses, then you're obligated to pay for those expenses. So you can't. The reason is to not have somebody who has a lot of money always representing the district on. places across the country. And I don't know if you guys have put restrictions, but the last superintendent's contract was renegotiated. So there was no restriction on the board having to vote for Dr. Rudolph to take off to the East Coast or leave the state of California. Or what we learned is put a ticket on his Credit card $5,000 to go to Helsinki and participate in the international conference. You don't want to be doing that so good luck with the 20,000 use it well there's some really good workshops and things that you get Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Wilson. With that we'll turn to the board for discussion. of discussion, important numbers. Pause for a second. One thing I noted was we do have the board shout out annually. There's an attachment for the policy or shout out annually develop a board training calendar. I don't think we've done that explicitly. I think we kind of ad hoc do that, but I think it'd be useful to break down to make sure we have that because I think we can add it to the governance calendar later for what that cadence of developing the training calendar is, but it's useful for the things that we know are coming up of like ADC, coast to coast, whether or not we want to do that, other conferences that we may be doing as professional development. Something that also came to mind from the previous item for me was, do we want to, we're going to have a trustee individually kind of evaluating the strategic plan and that process is going through. Is there any professional development we would want to look for that person to be able to more effectively serve in that role? That's just an opening, I think, for...

I don't know that PD to be the person sitting on the steering committee, that doesn't necessarily make sense to me. But I do want to make sure that there are, and this is separate, this is a whole separate budget, but it does inform it. I don't want to go... pull me back if I go too far into the weeds, but it is important that our district makes available substitute funding for board members who are teachers in other districts. And so if some of that is needed to be able to participate in the steering committee, I hope it gets used. I think it's up to 20 days. Our board doesn't dictate how that's done. It's just carried out at your discretion. And so I encourage that if that's needed to use it. But in the same vein, I think it's important One, that this budget be very clear to us. I expected, frankly, in the agenda attachment to see an itemized breakdown of the things that have already been funded and what is remaining in the budget. It's surprising to me to discuss a budget without having that information provided. And so let's break down what the items are, what monies have already been allocated, what money remains to be allocated, what we have already said, like the Unity Conference and this remaining midcourse, like what are the must haves that needs to happen? And then I agree with President DeFazio that having a concrete professional development calendar for the trustees is a good idea because For example, there will be workshops on the governor's budget proposal that are free. There are many opportunities for free professional development. But let's create our calendar of opportunities as they come so that all the trustees know when they're available and can participate. And I still think that we need to send, even if we just send our superintendent, at the federal level, things like special education funding that we have been advocating around for ages. Yes, we are a small district. we alone are not going to move the federal government. But the whole point is that showing up together matters. That advocacy, and I've had some experience in organizing or being organized in our community, advocacy in mass, advocacy in groups, it really matters. The California School Board Association is no longer a member of the National School Board Association. That organization has kind of floundered and fizzled. And so when it comes to advocating at the federal level, it really is up to the California School Board Association and AXA which is the Superintendent's Association, to be doing that advocacy at the federal level on behalf of the state. And I can tell you from my time going to Sacramento to represent Santa Clara County, Region 20 for the California School Boards Association, that our county and our needs are unique within the state. So if we are not showing up as a county, if we are not showing up as our school district to make ourselves heard on that trip and in that advocacy, it's not good. And so I I am fully in support of sending, and I don't even know if I'll be on the board in the spring, but sending one of the three trustees that we know will be here and paying for them to go to represent our district on that trip. Because showing up together, speaking to power about what is going on in our communities, is important and CSPA provides significant training at that event about federal issues impacting us locally and then prepares trustees to be able to go in and advocate effectively.

Any further discussion? Concretely, I think the specific thing which I think we can address a lot of Trustee Conley is discussing is when we actually do what our bylaw says of developing the board training calendar and having that paired with our governance calendar. That's basically like, what do we think is worth, what are important skills that we need to develop on the board, things that, what are the opportunities for that should go, et cetera, et cetera. I think that's where we kind of cover that. Not to say one way or the other, if I'm supportive or not of any specific But I think that's the case that we'll be able to kind of really lay that out for the year and then, you know, budget things like you may have new members next year, new member orientation. This is what our budget looks like. This is how we're using it. And looking back, how did we use it in the previous year? That's a good, good habit for us to make sure we get out of there. So,

The way you both alluded to having the concrete converse when we're making those decisions. There are a lot of things that can sound like a good idea, you know, one off, but making sure we're thinking through all the required things. I think we found three ways to do the required things like ethics training and, you know, getting annual updates on things like Brown Act. We've usually found other, you know, but making sure that we're thinking through those. Yeah, and then with additional things, just having the numbers, making decisions.

Who's going to go to CLSBA, y'all?

The Unity Conference. When is it again? In a couple weeks.

I thought it was sometime in August because I remember it being within my first couple weeks back to work, which is why I couldn't go.

When is it again? Have we budgeted? I think, at least.

August 27th to August 30th.

Okay, we'll put a discussion right down for action for who will volunteer for that, because this is just around our development budget. So, on that spring, I think we can discuss this. Can we just... Yeah, we might be authorized it.

Yeah, I just want to check the... I don't think the registration can be through the end of the month because it's on the 27th. And we just got an email from the president of the California Latino Schoolgirls Association saying the registration window is about to close. I'm concerned we're going to end up sending no one because we didn't agendize it properly.

Oh, the superintendent is confident that we will set some money.

Ready for the discussion?

All right. Seeing none, we'll close this item. Before proceeding, we will take a 30-minute recess at 1.55 p.m. All right, we are back from recess at 2.36 p.m. The trustee member isn't currently absent. He'll be here shortly. Now we'll move on to item D, self-animation of the board.

Yes. So you were sent a survey to reflect on work together as a board and... Just wanted an opportunity, as we did last year, just to discuss largely where there's maybe misalignment or varying responses. I'm thinking back to last year, actually. One of the areas that it looks like we have improved is this idea of rotating confidential information in a professional manner. I remember that was a sticking point or a question point last year, and that certainly seems to have rebounded or improved. The roles and responsibilities of the board and those of the superintendent are clearly understood and followed. That was number six. There's a bit of variance there. I think you all put it at six or seven. You're right. It's just lower than most scores. Any thoughts on that?

I kind of put in my notes, in my comments for that, kind of my thoughts on it. I think we have, like, a good sense in the, I think, traditional understanding of roles and responsibilities, set the vision and goals, and, you know, you execute on it. What I think was, what I felt was kind of lacking was maybe just challenging that balance a little bit, and that, you know, making sure we have some mutual accountability between us, really. We second those for you, and then in return, we're not committing to as rigorously what we offer you back to make sure that we're supporting you in handling it. So I think maybe that's, that was why I put it in the middle, because I think in the general sense, what we're supposed to be doing looks good, but I think the relationship part of how we share that with each other, I think, is something that we can work on from a Maybe I read differently into the question.

Can I ask you to describe, can you give me an example of what you think would be a model way for that to be carried out?

Right. Upcoming later on. Kind of thing, right, like we're, you know, we're strategic plan. We're going to be carrying this through like so much. It is next to the staff. We're staying behind level guidance, but we kind of have to have the commitment on our side and explicitly that we're going to help carry it through and say, like, this is going to take multiple years to execute on. We should have targets for doing an interim, but we need to stay focused on it and we expect that we're going to fund it, but we need to fund it, like, Make sure we're looking at paying attention to it, not spinning up new things to do all the time. That level of opportunity is what I'm thinking of. And I think we are all on the same page. I don't know if we've just been explicit about it in the goals we have for ourselves. Help.

Sure. I mean, I think what there's always this part of your role is to ask questions and to understand and to bring different perspectives. And so there's I don't know, in my old age, I've learned to let go a little bit more in the sense that everyone's, it is okay for people to ask questions and have different perspectives and push back on things, but we're still heading towards the same place. Um, and so I can see, I can definitely see where you're coming from. Um, I think we're still going to get to where we need to be, if that makes sense, even if people, well, my impression of this group is that we have a highly functioning board right now in the grand scheme of things. And everyone is aligned in terms of wanting to do a strategic plan and wanting to support this work. And everyone supported the Erenda report and moving forward on that work. And so I actually think this is one of the most aligned boards I've seen and is supportive, but also just trying to carry out its oversight very well, if that makes sense.

I talked to Steph about the idea that part of leading is, in my experience, is that, like, I know where X is. I know where we want to get to. And I have a pretty good idea of the most efficient way to get there. Right? It's a pretty direct line in my mind. I know the steps necessary. But the learning... occurs out on the edges, right? As questions are asked and you head over this way, you want to make sure it's moving in the right direction, but allow space for that questioning, the wonderings, the why are we doing it this way? I think it worked with principals, teachers. And allowing for that because That's where I think it becomes woven into the fabric of what we're doing versus compliance. Because straight line is just like, do it this way, I told you to do it this way, this is what we're doing, without really the knowledge of the why. we are working to accomplish this. I'll talk a little bit about that when we come to the Superdance update, just on what the work we've started kicked off today. But it's along those lines. So I just think of it as meek set guardrails and be able to meander within that. As long as the herd keeps moving generally west, we're moving in the right direction.

I think there's always a challenge between boards wanting to micromanage into the weeds or into the details.

Maybe it's not our place. And frankly, I think everybody at some point falls into that pothole because it's something that you care about or you know a lot about or is really relevant to why you're here. And so that's just always balance. There's always going to be attention there. We always have to figure out how to navigate it.

I have only been on this board for a small trip. But I think it's something that the particularly the way this board has it continues to move in a direction of particularly opening that oversight responsibility and the because we are overall a governance team, but we have different pieces of that, right? And the importance of continuing to evolve in our own understanding of that piece and responsibilities. And I think where we're not communicating to our community and staff that we own that responsibility piece of it. how we can particularly as a board really be like centering that. That's my responsibility to share your needs.

Part of it is certainly asking, when you hire me, asking the difficult questions and asking how, why, and show me. And that's all part of it, right? I told you long ago that that's what I expect. Because I'm here to execute on... The plan to ensure that every single student in this district is achieving and when they leave the doors in eighth grade, they have the same advantage, right? That's not a switch we're going to be able to flip and make happen tomorrow, but over time, we are going to achieve that. And that's going to be the foundation of the school district that's going to serve all kids. The president ensures that meetings proceed in a business-like manner while allowing opportunity for full discussion. And the president gave the lowest arguments there yet. What was that? I might be good to talk about because I read your comments.

Yeah, I can talk through a little bit. I think, you know, I think you should generally have a high standard for this. So I think one thing I want to prove from my practice is allocating time deliberately across the agenda items because sometimes I feel like we will have a discussion in the beginning of the meeting, but there are things later that like we really do want to be able to get our full attention and focus and charter at the end. I know as a prior practice in the meeting agendas that we used to have some estimate time boxes for those things, which might be useful. I think we'll still The presentation might be one thing, but also, like, you want to have some balance for discussion and just kind of reining, keeping that tight and kind of, again, focused in a professional manner, I think is important. So something I'm trying to help improve the meeting proceedings. Thank you for scoring tonight.

I like the idea of having kind of a timeframe to work with, and that way we're all kind of conscious on how long our discussion should be, and also really tighten up, like, is what I'm saying adding to our necessary, or could we just move on without it?

I will say sometimes those time frames felt very aspirational when we had them in the past, but I do think this, in the grand scheme of things, the board meetings seem to be closer to the right length. We've had a couple of long ones, but for the most part, in the last couple of years, it's gotten tighter, and so it's a good next step.

Also, it's helpful for community members that want to speak on a certain piece for them to kind of gauge when they can show up.

We can certainly help that in the planning as well. We space out agenda items, estimate them, but also recognize as, and I've never figured out, fair point, I've never figured out a remedy for this, but it has. It's generally the last three meetings occur this school year. There's a lot that ends up. to the end, specifically budgetary that you really can't handle earlier. It just comes and then there are other items that tend to land in those meetings as well. So we'll continue working with them.

One of my favorite parts at the end of the year is when we're recognizing our retiring employees and then also years of service. same things where we're trying to do all the compliance stuff. Could we have a special meeting that is just like a district celebration meeting and that's when we do that?

Yes, this one as well. You're following me on the scorecard. Question 14. Establishing measurable goals for student achievement. That will be coming.

Early meetings this year.

August, September, as we talk about, as we begin this work, looking at the trajectories we need to hit, we're planning on getting for student achievement. So we'll work on that. And a way to look at it, that... better recognizes where gains are made and not made. So building it a little bit up, actually a lot more granular, but we're looking at that data.

ambitious request. So when we get to school site plans, and then I know that we haven't been able to change our LCAP yet, the LCAP informs the school site plans, but there have been years where I and other trustees have tried to create our own spreadsheets comparing all of the goals across all of the different sites and like what their goals were last year and all this stuff. Is there something comprehensive that can be done for trustees instead of trustees having to create that tool that compares the goals of different sites? I can share the tools that trustees have made in the past, but we usually partnered up in Brown Act pairs and did it on our own.

I'd love to see it. I will talk to you about that and see if there's a way to do that. was bad to the end here, or maybe One of the open ended questions. What do you think are the three biggest problems that the board must deal with in the next two years? Active look outcomes, raw kits, agree. Yeah, this essentially says the same thing. We don't have the resources to prioritize over stopping anything. We still have our structural deficit for this study, this mystery effect, et cetera. Yeah, I think this is one of the bigger things we're gonna grapple with this year, and we'll start talking about it early. Rebecca and I and Executive Kevin are already talking about this. Just as we follow the recommendations of the system study we had done and fold that into that study, the work in that study will become synonymous with the WWSD way. And the memorandum will disappear, right? It's just going to be embedded in what we do. You will still see it, but it will be ours. But I think this is going to be one of the bigger challenges, is how do we stop doing things we've always done that aren't necessarily achieving measurable outcomes for kids? Identify places to put resources so that all kids can achieve, right? You'll hear this a number of times you're going to say, and I think we've said it before, but this idea that we need to have identical expectations for kids at every single one of our schools in whatever grade it is, right? Grade, third grade, seventh grade. we allocate resources for students to achieve those outcomes is where the money comes in, right? Because the question is, under what conditions can all students achieve this, right? If a child is not yet fluent in English, they're going to need a different set of resources to achieve those outcomes, right? And if all our money is locked up into what we've always done the way we've always done it, we're not going to have it to allocate to those places where we know we need to in order to make sure that those vulnerable students are achieving. So we're going to have to let go if we're really serious about moving the bill for all our students. It's going to be difficult. what are your finances and the LCAP and the LCAPs is quite important. You know, I think forms of governance count too, because right now we can present LCAPs and we can present tests, things like that sort of independently.

And There's not a clear mechanism to have those aligned and presented to the board. No, it's a suggestion. If we could have LCAP goals presented at the same time, not all of them, right, the subset of them, presented with the test scores that are relevant to those outcomes, and then we could get those aligned and see if it works or not. Rather than having to be done independently. It sort of makes sense. And that's what I was looking at the government's calendar. And for someone disconnected, you might know what they are.

But for the public, it's not exactly clear.

I think of it kind of being akin to the, what K-12 Commission was just here showing, the two examples. The first one we saw from Jackson, Mississippi, where those initiatives didn't have, this doesn't look exactly aligned to Billy Bill, but I think it went the same way. The initiatives were there, and if those are executed upon, those metrics on that first cover page should move. Right? But we don't know exactly the connection. We just know that if we do these things, the results are going to improve. Let me think about it again, too. About what you're saying. I'd like to tie in.

Because you understand that we have to make good decisions for the school community.

We have to hold ourselves accountable.

Right. So this one, this comment is the key to our success. We have not converted the systems study diagnosis into sustained action. Many of the most important findings, widening gaps for Hispanic Latino, socioeconomic disadvantage, ELs, special ed students, placement appeal patterns in middle school math, kids with turnover concentrated in our high school schools are not solved quickly. They need sustained focus, multi-year follow-through, and a board we need to keep its attention there. We still run the risk of producing a study that generates a lot of initial interest, but isn't carried through. I think that's true. That's a huge risk, right? We have a group of people, I can tell you, right now in this district who are people who are focused on this and excited about the sustained effort. From the principles, The teachers are like, this is amazing. We're so excited to be focused on standards and curriculum again, right? Like, this is a group of teachers at one of our highest schools. Like, this is what we should be doing, right? So there's a lot of energy that it reports I'm getting from the details about that first step. First step, because today is the first step of all the teachers into it, right? We've got leadership groups, we've got principals, we've had, you know, lead teachers, but today was the first day that it's everyone, right? All 300 teachers across the school district engaged. But it's going to take this day to make it happen. Anything else that stood out for anyone that you just kind of had to pull through?

That was my main third point there. That was my comment. Because it's really like, we have a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of excitement around this. I don't want us to squat by losing focus and not maintaining that focus that we have and supporting each other. I think folks in education see a lot of waves and these types of things. And so I don't want people to feel, want us to fall into keeping that in front of my mind. So there's a question too, if we have anything there, there's any new functions or behaviors.

Any other functions, roles, or behaviors you think the board needs to improve on? Of course, it's about the form of our progress reports and updates. Yes, I think we can come up with some updates. We have been setting goals for the superintendent and none for ourselves. Our goals should give us something to be evaluated against, and we love to report publicly that we commit to providing and supporting the goals for WESA for others. There are 15 items here and left. They have concerned conduct and meetings that may have been useful at different times. This is not our main challenge now. Nothing has to produce evidence. Whether we follow through on what we learn, whether we exercise school oversight or whether we set goals for ourselves. I'll move to any of those to start. Superintendent Behr is providing two stages of information to make our decisions. This has in many ways decreased stress and led to productive board meetings. I think we have a well-functioning board currently. So thoughts or comments on anything you want to add to those?

iterating on the form that we use for this I think is useful for us to kind of get a little fallout after we do the goal setting and subsequent bits, but like how we're self-evaluating what we're doing, where we think we need to focus, and not like when we measure scores and what we're seeing where we are succeeding or doing less well, we have a good sense that it's mapping to us executing on the things we need to do. It actually looks like it's a collaborative thing between all of us, obviously. So I think that's probably something to iterate on, right? The focus is already, I think, growing a lot, a lot around it, because I'm moving, like, understanding our roles and things like that, which I think, as you noted, we are pretty good at right now. We all have a well-lined board at the moment.

I think in terms of process, too, I think it's a great idea to have the president and vice president work with you to establish the gap. I think that makes it more transparent. It means at least you have, you know, two out of five board members sort of aligned, knowing what you expect in this board meeting.

It creates a smoothness in transition too, which is very valuable.

Yeah.

I just really like having a policy committee. Thank you to the policy committee.

I think that's been useful in still paying attention to those things of like keeping our policies up to date on time, which is one of the things here, but also not focusing the board meeting time on the diocese, but really clear things that we need to do.

And what's provided is at least for the board members to take a very careful and thorough look at these, right? Because before we could, a whole bunch came on us and no person could possibly review all of these. So that was, it's written out. And then having a brief review of the highlights also, very important. Because they're all dead meat, you have to go over all of them and the agenda items.

But it's, when it came in the other direction, you know, it's such a fundamental role of the board to make policy, but if it was really coming in the other direction, which is, say, fully baked, this is what you should And 30 minutes at a time, you could say, well, were there choices to make here? And this way, we've also, I think it's really helped to have some more jokes so that when women have to go to work, you can actually look at it and know what recommendations many made, but then There's still that chance to talk about a different decision, but there are a lot who want to do that.

And part of that is to connect on the time of trustees to engage in that process. Part of that is to connect upon the superintendent and his staff in supporting that process and having the extra meetings. And so also thank you.

superintendent bearer for you are in all of this policy committee and supporting supporting our overall i think to help as a governance yeah i think we'll be as if we didn't thank staff for supporting the community a good amount of effort to clean up a lot of things and get the concept now knowing intended it's relatively low effort to at the meeting, but before it was like, they could go through with the machete to try to clean things up.

I think there's a startup that was a little Kelly's key to this process, so thank you. Now it's not effortless, but it's certainly smoother than the first, I don't know, half dozen meetings that we had. It was still bumpy. But there's a flow to get into with that now, so thanks.

I agree that policy is a key function.

Of the board right, so it is important where you are that we are.

Last year, it's useful to have this division flavor among the board, if you have other types of committees, we would like to form that can help. Take some things get a deeper look, but still report back to the board for the actual decision. Categories that would benefit from that.

discussion.

I will not take public comment on this item. I will turn on the speaker card and allocate time. We have one new person. We have three minutes to get our team ready. Okay, Mr. Nelson, you have three minutes.

Thank you. Okay. Yeah, there is a comment earlier about one of the things was just the superintendent was talking about pointing where we're going to go and then we can work fast. or where we ought to be making progress. But this is the thing from the last strategic plan. And this was where the idea was we were going to be getting to. Particularly, you know, I've been working out the SAE component of our high needs students. And that ties in, of course, to the ethnic background of the student families also. But this is what the design was. that you would measure baseline from baseline, so the first year doesn't have things in particular, and then it's set from the baseline, we'll tell what the final goal is, and then we'll show how much advance we should be making per year. So this is the theoretical steady progress. If there was such a thing in this world as being able to plan steady progress, And this, I didn't even bother updating this. This is what the actual measures were in 2024, because you should know now that the slight 1-2% increase we've had in the Asian and white, and this doesn't show, non-SED, kind of stayed about where they were, they might have made up and said, oh, we've made no progress. It decreased. So, looking at what we've done annually, we decreased. And looking at what we've done over the interval since the baseline of this strategic plan, our finding students, and I didn't accentuate the English language learners, I just looked on the board, okay? I'm used to thinking about the board. The poor are in need of our help. The poem about poor coming to our shores, today is one of the anniversaries of the cornerstone and statue of liberty being set. What is the promise we have to those people who come to this country who are poor and destructed? We know the situation here is not all of these SEDs or Hispanics or Californios. We're like here with the Castro, the don'ts he's first made. And yet we're not able to do it. And the board hasn't been paying attention to this. And I strongly disagree. that you guys need to step on the toes of your superintendent when he goes into the office and say, why are you withholding this G3, this academic result? It was available with a push of a button. That concludes item D, the self-acclimation report. We move on to item E, board goals and updates.

Yes, the board had asked in June for some ideas about goals. I'm off to a little bit. I'm sure this is what Charles wanted to put this in front of you. It's in draft form. I think it's your reaction to this. Perhaps you're reading it in its entirety. I don't know. But it's this idea of, and you talked about it in your self-assessment of what can we do as a board to keep our eye on the ball and stay focused on the work in front of us to make the last change. So this really aligns with my goals, right? It aligns right up with my goals and it really identifies the focus of the governance and responsibilities that you could consider to adhere to in order to accelerate for our students. All right. Clearly, I'm not telling you what to do, but this is a draft. This is obviously awkward, right? But this is a draft, right? This is a suggestion of what allows us all to be pulling in the same direction so that we can ensure that all the kids from the school district achieve. So, I'll leave it at that. I don't know how far you want to take this, but I know it's a denser document. It might be worth looking at, reviewing, Telling you what's offensive about it. And we can revise. I know Charles is going to be taking a peek at it.

You kind of already answered that. I'm going to need time to process. But I would love to have a discussion about it.

But if we can process today, or if we can take time to process and have the future agenda, that would be great.

And something to notice from doing self-humiliation, which I think ties into the first question in there, it's already warmed us up for the dark industry, right?

The first question there is like, what are the big challenges facing us? And now, nice and deep into this, which I think, again, ties into more LCAP language, system study, and all these things right now.

The puzzle pieces are fitting together and it's all working in concert. at the end of last year. Those are the ones I'm working from now. Those have been shared with staff so they understand also where we're going and what we're trying to achieve for students in the school district. Some of the people sitting in this room have three different leadership groups. They have three copies of that. Sorry about that. But it's really helpful to align all of our leadership around the work we're trying to achieve, right? This is a single mission we're on here, right? And we all need to be aligned with that. So I never see them as just my goals, right? They're the goals for the success of the students at the school district.

This has to do with the presentations the staff gives the board. We typically have started off, really for the last four years I've known the board, this very high level goal of what the presentation is going to accomplish. You know, I think it would be a lot more helpful to have something more quantitative or focused on direct You know what we're trying to achieve here and and how we can demonstrate this works. These are just some of the presentations the board has changed a little bit to reflect this alignment strategy. And also that Everything doesn't have to be great all the time, right? And we don't have to be successful in everything. And that's one thing that we think is still the world, especially. It's still no criticism, right? It's like, hey, these are huge problems and essentially moments that we've been able to solve. So, yeah. Yeah.

We have been talking about in terms of presentations. How can we align those this year with the work that our teachers are doing in preparing for execution following it, right? Because they're going to do a lot this year to be ready to launch for English on Your Dreads next year. And how can, what's the best way we can present to the board prize of what's happening and why it means something. And here actually from the teachers, right? About why this is meaningful and important and it's going to make a difference, right? So it's not exactly what you said, Bill, but it I guess we kind of engaged the presentations.

And I think we often, as a board, ask for an update on some program or have progress indicate more different things that are going on. I think if we, as a board, can kind of be more explicit about what we're trying to see, because I think we all have different ways that we digest the information and will help us understand what's going on. But at least being concrete about, yeah, it helps to have an expectation, though. what they need to prepare, what they need to be kind of looking for, and then also just get this clear, what's being, what's not, how we understand it.

And I think some of this is naturally going to come out of having a new strategic plan that has concrete metrics written in it. Because instead of just having kind of this nebulous strategic plan go home at the top of the presentation, that is, here's what our concrete metrics is. Here's where we are right now.

Let's talk about what we're going to do.

Yeah. And I'm just, yeah, you can see I'm turning a strategic plan. I have to build all of that in the system.

possibly if I could just reiterate every opportunity possible to reiterate this, is that so much of what we were doing previously were from the ancillary to the core foundational work, right? We did not have consistent set of expectations, agreed upon standards for the greater and lesser district. So that means it becomes quite easy for expectations to change again, right? From one place to the next, from one classroom to the next, not intentionally, but just because there is calibration. And then at the end of the year, we're measured with this tool that is measuring everybody according to the same set of expectations, right? So if we're not teaching to the same expectations at every third grade classroom throughout the district, it's not surprising that there's variance in performance at the end of the road. Any further questions or discussion? I think. I apologize. I think that was true. I can't read it. I think we can generalize. Revisiting the subject was an action that I just, and then formally acting. Can it be ritualized? If you want to send me ahead of time between now and the next week, that would be great. And I can work to incorporate an island.

This is something that I would love to have two by two meetings about with you. Because I can process by myself, process really well with others. It would be nice to have a buddy in the room and you and whatever others have.

And then come back if you need broader discussion. That's a great idea.

Okay. Public comment on the site.

Speak.

That was the.

speaker card. You have one speaker in person, you have three kids.

Yes, when I think of the sawtooth diagram, or I think of the shark's teeth, those are numbers. All those things are registered numbers, but what percentage of kids are going to make the floor of performance in the different items that they're looking at, English language arts. So those numbers are there. The problem is, when I see these beginning of the year, or particular presentations, they're spending six pages on trying to explain to you what the SPAC measurements are measured. If you guys don't know that, after a year and a half on the board, you shouldn't be on this board. The staff needs to minimize the amount of time they're spending on going over stuff that you guys have already done. And they need to start putting lives into play. The numbers, and we've got plenty of numbers for academics. The numbers are coming out your ears. There's different versions of the numbers. Research says over the last four years, this district has given 8 tenths of a year in learning for the average student in this district. This isn't Asian or white students, as you can see. This is when you add in the Hispanic students and the other, there's a few other ethnic categories. That results in not one year of increased learning gain for every year or year. That represents some students are only getting half of a large portion. So those numbers are here. You are not being given the numbers that are the best and glorious ones. The staff loves to present the numbers that this group made, 2% improvement, and that group did well. Level is horrible when you're supposed to be getting 10% improvement in this group in one year, or 5%. You need to hold your staff. And that's what I'm talking about. You need to step on Jeff's toes and go into his office and say, why did you give us the G3, the D3 metrics? You know, as we're in the computers, in the buttons, they're already being used for deciding who's gonna get which class to middle school. He sequestered that data Holding back the truth is a form of lying. So I would say Jeff has allowed his staff to sort of lie to me and the community, and to especially the outstanding parents. If you go to Castro School and have a good translator, you might hear something like this. Okay.

This was on the agenda. If there were any final reviews that needed to come, we did not have any that came, so we don't have one. I guess we can move on to clarifying questions. Anyone want to follow up? I think one member in person.

Three minutes. Mr. Wilson. Yeah, I'll just read off what I put on the board. There was talk about the vice president, at least when I understood, being in the agenda. I wish somebody would look up the board violence for the agenda, because the last time I did, which was a month or two ago, that my law hadn't been changed to explicitly refuted the words that the president and vice president can ex officio, Not to be sad, we have to be in the meeting, but it's official reference. Check the board bylaws, please, to people on the board bylaw committee. I don't think the wording, I know the last time I checked the wording, it said the president. It did not explicitly say vice president. So if that's what you want your policy to be, you should change the rule of law to match what you say is a great idea. And that's what you're actually doing. Thank you. Thank you.

Do we have any discussion?

All right, so we have no discussion here. Now we'll move on to the credit on June, so we'll talk about evaluation.

Welcome to, it takes some time to give you an update on some work and preview of the fall. And since we're back in pre-PV list, but if you want to just give a little bit about how we're progressing on our campus, it'd be great. So we'll.

So quick update on our summer work.

Our campuses are very, very busy still, which we expected and anticipated. That's how summer construction always is. So at this point, if you're going to drive around to our campuses, you will have heart palpitations and we're right there with you. but they are more or less on schedule with all of the roofing, so that's the great news. There will likely be some weekend work for them to have some of the major work done, but our commitment was to have the major work done for the roofing. We'll probably still be doing some gutters in a couple of schools, but that's going to be off hours, so it won't impact the school day. Outdoor learning is well underway at some of the sites now.

Becca, just pointing out the one exception to that. Talk about Crittenden with roofing.

Yes, with one exception to that, Crittenden, with our roofing, when we took off the roof, we found some substantial dry rot on one of the main beams. So typically, we do find dry rot every time we take the roofs off, but this was pretty extensive. So in an overabundance of caution, we will be shoring up the beam. We're not going to hold classes in one of the rooms, and we're going to be doing a structural fix for that beam itself. So that might take a little bit longer. So thank you. So at Crittenden, there is that one room that will remain closed for anticipating maybe a couple of... I don't want to commit to a date yet. So we have an engineer working on it right now, and it will need to go through DSA. Okay. Outdoor learning is continuing. They're working through demo. As you know, our demo contractor did not show up on the first day. So we've had a couple of different crews out. But of course, summer is heavy construction time. So the individuals that they've sent us have been working away. But that will continue on up until we're hoping late October, but saying early November right now just to be on the safe side. All the fences have been pulled back to just the work area. So during the summer, all construction teams work full bore and they don't really worry about containing their mess. Right now we're telling them you need to pull back. So when you go to the campuses, you'll see the fences just around the construction zones and that's what would be fenced during the school year. different principles we've been talking to making accommodations for how their campus, how their students use their campuses. Uh, so at Crittenden, for example, we had put, um, green fabric over the fences, um, just as like a way to, um, keep the people from looking in. Um, but, uh, Principal Jamie asked if we could take them down because it helps them with line of sight in the courtyard. So we're taking down the fabric at Stevenson. There's some areas where it's a little bit of a tight walkway. So we're making sure to put cones on the fence feet so that you have the fence and the feet that stick out. So we're putting cones there. So we're working with all the principals to try to make sure that it's at least impactful as we can. Oh, we also ordered a lot of play equipment. I think from being at the school site, you give kids, they're going to be, some students will be disappointed when their blacktop area is reduced. So we decided we can buy lots of new cool play equipment. Principal Taylor suggested a bunch of like really fun things like the, what is that called? You have a little bean bag, cornhole bag. And then some other things that you can crawl through that the kids normally don't have, you know, don't play with at recess. And then, of course, a bunch of balls. So we bought a bunch of stuff for both any elementary school and middle and the middle schools that are under construction. So they'll have something new.

Brad is taking care of those expenses, right? That's correct. Right. EF Brad is taking care of those expenses.

And then we also offered to increase any new duty coverage they needed in case they needed a few more people. And that would also be covered by the contractor. They've been very good to work with.

And then just as a reminder, which schools are now next summer outdoor learning?

So next summer outdoor learning will be BUB and MI. And Castro, of course, that was already on the, for next summer. So now we'll have the three sites going for next summer. Thank you for prompting me. It was all from memory.

Any clarifying questions from the board? All right, now we'll open public comment on this item. Any member of the public wishing to speak can turn on a speaker card. Seeing no one in person wanting to speak on this item, now return for discussion. No discussion? All right, we're closed with that.

I'm just still hopeful that when our projects when our outdoor learning projects that are being done this year are completed at the end of October or early November, perhaps before the rain starts, we could do some sort of ribbon cutting and that we could also offer an olive branch and invite our mayor or city council to participate because these are shared open spaces and our joint use agreement.

Yep. Great suggestion. Thank you. Thank you for the discussion.

Now we'll move on to item B that we deferred from earlier, the governance calendar. Superintendent Behr?

Yes, so one of the items requested by the trustees to bring forward at our retreat today is the governance calendar, just to review. I think of note, I think you know this, but I'll just remind you we have put the purple section at the end, which are just updates that we have been pulling from policies that the board gets an annual update or whatever the frequency is. We actually have been talking about, so you'll see as the year unfolds, just coming up with a, how can we standardize a presentation because some of the, not presentation, some of these reports will depending on what they are will be a report to the board and consent right just to update you on what's going on so we want to create uh perhaps a standardized way of looking at that so that it's pretty predictable for the board you know what it is okay but with that um just bring them forward the governance calendar for you to review and discuss um

So one of my favorite parts of the year is when we get our enrollment attendance and staffing update, which usually comes in early October. It's after that eight-week count where we have to report enrollment to the state. So it's here. I'm hoping that we can start pairing as a governance item with that. a review or discussion about our lottery process for our choice schools, it seems to dovetail nicely with that enrollment update. And then that gives us time if we want to make changes or have deeper discussions about it to do so before we hit January actual enrollment period. So if we do it in October, it sets us up for success to make any future changes that we want to make for the coming year.

Is there enough time between those to make that any changes we would need? If we so have. Yes. Okay. Just to clarify.

I mean, we'll do it in September, but I think we need that enrollment count.

I think lining it up with the enrollment attendance, I think it works. I just wanted to make sure we at least, if we're setting this up in order to make that, it would be a shame if we couldn't make the changes we wanted to until like the subsequent year, right? Like these are always.

I appreciate that.

And just to sort of one big step.

As a reminder with that particular item, this year, this will be folded into also the demographic study that we have going on. So those will come either at the same meeting or very close, and they naturally wind together.

That sounds perfect. The only other thing, well, I'm sure something will come later, and I'm sure my colleagues have ideas as well. One thing that I'm interested in, so you know, a few years ago, we started implementing some fiscal reforms within the district and how we're reporting things, how we're sharing information. And I think there's, you know, I think the trustees have become very familiar with payrolls and warrants and credit card statements and what those things mean and how they appear and how our budget works. But I noticed that one of the challenges of being in a school district is parents are constantly changing and that kids age out and new families come in. Would it make sense to build in? Maybe it's an agenda item. Maybe it's an informational video that we have on our website that we can share. at the beginning of the year or something like that that explains how we do carry out fiscal oversight within the district, if that makes sense. Because a lot has changed. And I think we need to keep the public apprised of how they too can look closely at our finances and our stewardship and be informed appropriately, if that makes sense.

Um, I know that we, um, the math community recommendations are on here for the end of the year. Is it possible to get, I know that, you know, uh, kind of let's see, be in process, any kind of update sooner? Just if I'm wondering if it ended up being anything that there are questions or concerns about. don't want it to be at the moment that we get the this is going to be this is what we expect the curriculum to be for next year um so if there's if it's possible to get an update earlier okay

Jeff to finish writing. So as we talked about alignment. And knowing that, you know, there's certain Things that need to be presented, you know, as a matter of law right for But presenting at board meetings is not the time to discuss and delve into the details and criticize and tear things apart. But I think the board needs that opportunity. And staff needs that opportunity. And I'm wondering if we should set aside some workshops to... consider the alignment issues we've been talking about and able to ask those questions and have a discussion with the staff.

Sorry, Shelly and I have already been talking about and planning for our first cabinet meeting. You'll see it, you'll I think be seeing in the wall in there, not right now, but soon, just laying out the year, what's gonna be falling into board meetings, right? We have the governance calendar, but we've got some other big items coming up as well. We wanna make sure we're updating you on the, The standards alignment, there's going to be middle school scheduling we're going to be talking about. There's going to be a number of big items, right? So we know we're going to have to drop in some study sessions as well. So we're going to begin building that matrix for the year of where those might fit in and where they make sense as well.

And I think that would also help with, you know, managing board meetings and the time we spend and, you know, not go in and managing the community input that we do. It's...

Yeah. Yep.

It's a little open-ended right now. And I think we got not all that productive.

I think... There are three things I think we discussed that we need to add here, right? One is the board training, setting the board training calendar probably should happen. I don't know when that makes sense, but maybe we should have that on here to set the calendar. And then two of the activities we did today, one self-evaluation for the board and goal setting for the board, right? These are two things I think that probably belong with this, this is probably the right time for it. But just having it noted here that these are things we will be doing. And I think we also have the similarly paired mid year one with the superintendent evaluation mid year. So making sure we have that as well. So training calendar, board self evaluation and board goal setting.

Yeah. You know, another thing to just add, I don't know, it doesn't take a lot of work, but to identify those items where we're required by law to present those, you know, like a little asterisk or something to say, like, to help the community understand why in the world is this coming up right now? Why is it so brief? Why is it so matter of fact? Why aren't we discussing it?

it's a legal requirement yeah that plus maybe potentially um just a demarcation of if something is expected to be on consent or like a full presentation right so people ahead of time can know these are the things we expect to come through consent just to look at them but it's not going to get a full more time and we can then as a board discuss hey we want to elevate that to maybe a full one if we if we think so i also um you know we're going to be moving into budget discussions again in january and february

or probably will, probably earlier, but decision-making for sure by then. And I think it's important that if there are programs that may be considered for impact, that we actually have those program updates before the budget discussions instead of after. I'll just leave it at that for now.

Yeah, just do we have contracts to address this coming year? CTAs. Labor negotiations. That has to appear on the.

We'll have negotiations this year.

Yeah.

Next.

Yeah.

It's been a while. It's great. especially anything that's serious, right?

I don't know if it ties directly into the governance calendar, but I like to think it does. Do we want to do any type of tie to this schedule town halls or trustee office hours or anything like that that fits in? I think particularly around times when we know Big things are coming, like a strategic plan update. Is that a good time to schedule office hours in alignment?

Yeah, it might be. I'm thinking maybe something like a separate calendar, but kind of close to the engagements calendar that's publicly available. Like these are things that we can be available to the public for.

Yes, but I think it builds naturally off of, like when do we have a budget update coming? know sometimes we've gotten a lot of comments at our budget update meetings and it might make our meetings more efficient as trustee lambert was pointing out if um I don't know if we would have a full study session on it or if we would do, even if we just did some sort of trustee office hours or something to provide extra public input opportunities for topics that we know are going to be a big deal directly to the board or directly to two trustees at a time.

I think I envision it like spinning off from this, right, because there's specific key events on here that are going to necessitate that we have more availability at that time, but it's probably a separate document, I guess, I feel. I like the idea. I think it's a really useful thing for the public to know because I know lots of folks look at this calendar, but it's not as... Like, we use it to look what's coming up, but it's not as manageable, I think, for, like, these are times that I want to find, you know, Trustee Conley or Trustee Lambert and talk to them or pick their brains, right? Okay.

And then when will the... a report on technology use and the survey results and all of that. When is that coming? And I know we talked about an annual report on those things in the future. Do we want to plan when that annual report will be on our governance calendar? Intentional use of technology.

So I think as soon as we pull that, I think it's too early to say that at this moment.

That the whole ultimately feed into the strategic plan process as one of their inputs. President. We can always, this is a living document as well. So it's not the only time we will get to update this. So if things come to you later, we can always add things and make sure to update. But this is a good sync point for us to make sure of the things we know. All right, with that, I'll open public comment on this item. And for the public, we should speak and turn the speaker card. We see one card. You have three minutes, Mr. Nelson.

Thank you. And then please give me the same signals you did before. This time, I'm going to do something that... Dr. Rudolph sometimes did in a different way. So as I say to you, ask and keep on asking, and it shall be given you. Seek and keep on seeking, and you shall find. Knock and keep on knocking, and the door shall be opened for you. For everyone who asks, it keeps on asking, receives. And he who seeks, it keeps on seeking, finds. And to him who knocks and keeps on knocking, the door shall be opened. This happens to be from Christian scripture, Luke 11, 10 and 11. And yeah, I feel like I kept on knocking and kept on asking, and now finally there's a board governance calendar that's being consistently shown to the public. I urge you to change the name to board governance calendar, because administration calendar is much more detailed and much bigger and involves dates that are getting ready for a presentation for the board. And the purpose of the CSBA workshop Their explanation is this is the board's calendar. What the board is going to do at their meeting. I'd even like to see things like there's going to be a special meeting planned like this meeting, right? That that be on the board governance calendar so people know. And I think the division by months is good enough. The other point that Bill Lambert made, and I also did, is that certain things being delineated by square brackets or commas or asterisks or italic text isn't very much, that there's three major divisions of things. Things that you have to do in January, you have to get the school accountability plans done by the end of that month. There's budget things that have to be done on a certain month. Those are things that are set by EDCO. And there's things that the staff wants to have done at certain times. And there's actually stuff that you guys ask to be done. And if the president and vice president push that two people asking this to be put on there, we want it to be on the governance thing that it's gonna be done next month. you guys decide how to fit it in. I'm glad to see Trustee Conley is actually standing on a plate that she put in her platform six or seven years ago that this equity issue, I don't think it should be buried, Jeff. This is an extremely important thing about the segregation that happened at Stevenson and the community is And sometimes really got not that school because they aren't carrying their weight in the SED percent that they're carrying so to stick it off to the middle of another report is I don't think what trustee Connolly was asking in it definitely is not what I'm asking.

Okay.

That ends the discussion section of the meeting. Now we move on to item three, opportunity for members of the public to address the board's items on the closed session agenda. Any member of the public wish to address this on the closed session agenda, please bring your speaker card. See one member of the public. Now members of the public should speak on this item. We'll close public comment on the closed session agenda. And now at 3.49, we'll move to closed sessions.

There are no changes.

We are back from closed session at 4.55 p.m. Next item on the agenda is future board meeting dates. So the next regularly scheduled meeting is August 20th, 2026. Oh, the reportable action was taken in closed session. Thank you. And then August 20th, 2026 is our next meeting, and then September 3rd and September 17th. Having reached the end of the agenda with no further business,