Mountain View Whisman School District Board of Education - Regular Meeting

The September 17th, 2026 meeting of the Mountain View Wisdom Board of Trustees will place an order. It is 6.02 p.m. Meeting tonight in the boardroom at 1400 Montecito Avenue in Mountain View, California. This meeting is being broadcast live on YouTube, Zoom, and on mpwsd.org. It is being recorded. I'll perform the roll call of the board.

Bill Lambert.

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

I pledge 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.

All right, and before we proceed with the agenda, I wish to remind all attendees that the board welcomes and encourages public participation. We ask that all speakers adhere to the decorum and time limits established by our bylaws, and we'll allocate time during each item for public comments as we see how many speakers we have. Next item of business is the approval of the meeting agenda. Are there any requests from the superintendent or board members to pull items, reorder items, or move items from discussion action to consent?

I move that the board approve the agenda as presented.

All those in favor. Oh, I'll open public comment on the approval of the agenda where we vote. Any member of the public wishing to speak on this item, please turn on your speaker card in person or use the raise hand function online. I'll wait to see how many speakers we have. Seeing no one in person and no one online. No. All those in favor? Aye. All opposed? The motion passes unanimously. Now, and move directly to consent agenda. These items are considered routine and will be acted upon in one motion. Does any board member wish to remove an item for separate consideration? I would like to move the two emergency resolutions just for separate consideration to discuss. It's items I and J, I believe. Do I have a motion to approve the balance of the consent agenda?

I move that the board approve the consent agenda with items I and J pulled. All those in favor?

I'll open public comment on the balance of the consent agenda on that motion. Any member of the public wishing to speak on that, please turn the speaker card in person or use the raise hand function online. All right, seeing none, now I'll proceed with the vote. All those in favor? Aye. All opposed? Motion passes unanimously. Now we'll go to items I and J. Yeah, just for clarity, just because these are emergency resolutions, we kind of wanted some for us to have a separate vote on it, just because I think we, by our bylaws, need four-fifths approval of it to make sure that's recorded. And then also just...

noting what's what what is the emergency that we're establishing here sure so both of these items um are in emergency uh situation because they can impact the operations of the school so there are very few things that kind of fall into this category that would allow us to bring on a contractor right away and these fall into those categories for crittenden we needed to bring someone in right away because we saw that the beam was damaged the classroom is not being used right now so that Constitutes an emergency situation for the other piece that they're caught on we found dry rot and you need to get it replaced before the rainy season so that's the nature of the emergency resolution, so we could get it fixed as quickly as possible.

Thank clarifying questions from members of the board. Now open public comment on these names, I remember the public wishing to speak in person, please turn in a speaker card if you're online use the raise hand function now allocate time accordingly, I see how many speakers, we have. one speaker in person and no one online. I'll allocate three minutes. Mr. Nelson.

Thank you. I sent in a some correspondence to you about both of these items. I was mainly concerned about what the cost is and wanted to remind you that this is the kind of thing that happens when you leave basic utilities and structures to late in the process, later than what originally is recommended by your construction people. These are two things that were, not doing the roofs early, for instance, before Devon Conley's favorite greening project or outdoor learning, When you delay things that fix the basic infrastructure, you risk damaging those structures. Or you risk, as happened at a mine in 2024, you risk losing classroom time because you have to fix a broken sewer that's 60 or 70 years old. So I'm glad this is coming up. I think I'm glad you pulled it so you understood why it's an emergency. But emergencies like this don't happen when facilities are managed responsibly and when a board, rather than its own wishes in its uh landmark things that wants to do when a board responsibly fixes the basic infrastructure first and then goes after uh award-winning projects later thank you thank you mr nelson do i have a motion to write up sign j

I actually had a clarifying question for Dr. Westover, if that's okay. Dr. Westover, could you speak to the timing of the roofing projects and if any other projects that we've taken on were interfering with the timeline of our roofing?

None of the other projects were interfering with the timing of our roofing. We put off phase one roofing because of a DSA change the year before, which is why this summer we did phase one and phase two.

Thank you.

Any further discussion from members of the board? Do I have a motion?

I move that the board approve consent agenda items I and J.

Second.

All those in favor?

Aye.

Aye. All opposed? Motion passes unanimously. Thank you, Dr. Westover. We now move to section three of the agenda, communications. Do we have any, I don't see employee organizations. Do we have any district committees with a report? Trustee Reid?

The steering committee met for the first time. It was a great time for everybody just to get to know each other. And it's a very diverse mix of people. So glad to see that so many community members and educational partners are there. And we went over similar to what we did on our retreat, viewing different types of strategic plans and trying to figure out what elements we liked and what elements weren't for us and moving forward with the next meeting next month.

Thank you, Trustee Reid. Vice President Henry.

The policy committee met last week, worked through some policies that were both, some at request of trustees, some at request of staff, and so we'll be bringing those back for first reading, some of those back for first reading at the October 7th meeting. We also have some, I think, second reading from a previous meeting.

Thank you. Any further committees? All right, we'll go to Superintendent Perry.

Yeah, just a couple of quick updates this evening. First, just a reminder, there's a lot of important work happening right now, academic work, financial work, facilities work, enrollment work, all these things being done really in concert and making sure that we're making thoughtful, intentional decisions that we serve our students, that will serve our students for years to come, right? So this is really about kind of resetting the stage. And then good news to report from today, right? As of today, all of our schools who were slated for review have passed an educational materials audit with flying colors. County office has been out crawling through our schools in the last couple of weeks with Williams visits to ensure we're providing sufficient resources for students, specifically in instructional materials and safe facilities. And so thanks to Kathy and yet services team and our library specialists and principals and school secretaries and volunteers who made, uh, made it really a smooth process this year. So congrats.

Thank you. Now we will move to open the floor for community comments on items not appearing on tonight's agenda. Please remember that the Brown Act prohibits the board from discussing or taking action on any item not listed on the posted agenda. trustees or staff may respond to clarify facts or you may direct the superintendent to agenda is the matter for a future meeting. I will allocate time seeing how many speakers, we have if you're in person turn in a speaker card and if you're online, please use the raise hand function. One speaker in person. One speaker in person i'll give three minutes, Mr Nelson.

Yes. I'm Mr. Nelson, former trustee. How to lie with statistics? That's a question. And the answer the leaders of this institution have found, just don't report the standard academic results. Just let the completely computerized, eye-ready fall district summary sit there. Don't tell the community the results that were available at the start of June. available by the push of a button, according to the vendor. Bad news travels slowly in this district, in this particular world. The superintendent has chosen to not let the community and especially the high need student subgroups know what's up with their measured academic achievement. Are poor results being suppressed? Dante's Divine Comedy. How does damnation work? Well, this epic poem in early Italian tried to explain it. Abuse the poor, deny them aid, hide from their needs. You would find your damnation at a certain level of purgatory with a particular hellish task to do. Institutional integrity has been damaged by your actions, DeFazio and Behr, president and superintendent. By suppressing timely reporting, you insult the community, especially those subgroups most in need of understanding what their position is.

Thank you, Mr. Nelson. We will now move to discussion and action. Uh, our first item is item five, a public hearing, uh, resolution on sufficiency of people textbooks and instructional materials.

So as a superintendent Barry just mentioned, we just need to open the, open the public. Sorry, go ahead.

We'll open the public hearing at 6 14 PM. Thank you, Chrissy.

Sorry about that. So as Superintendent Baer just mentioned, we just finished our last of our Williams compliance reviews today. All of our schools passed with no findings. So tonight I'm asking you to please hold the public hearing and approve the resolution stating that all of our students have access to textbooks and instructional materials aligned to the academic core standards. This means they have standards-aligned textbooks or instructional materials to use at class and in home and have them in both. They have access to print materials, but they also, if they so choose, have access to digital materials.

Open for clarifying questions from the board. Seeing none, I will now open public comment on this item. Any member of the public wishing to speak on this item, please turn in a speaker card. And then if you are online, please use the raise hand function. One. No one online. And members of the public, please turn in your speaker card. No member of the public wishes to speak on this item. I will close public comment. Please turn in a speaker card. Thank you. We have one member of the public wishing to speak on this item. We'll give you three minutes, Mr. Nelson.

Thank you. I did send you something and I hope it wasn't one of the ones that I forgot to send until this morning. Part of the things that you have explained is instructional materials are computer accessible materials that you need to have internet access to get to. And particularly you need to have computer access at home. But there's no explanation of how that's been measured. And particularly for the SED students who don't have high bandwidth, who don't have the availability that us middle class people have, that us wealthy people have, That's never been measured. We talk about having this community radio internet service, but there's been no reports on how it is actually working for the SED students. Are they getting access to these materials? Are they using that access? Are their parents trained to help them get that access? Has that training been done in Spanish, which many of our economically disadvantaged student families is their primary language. These issues probably didn't get checked when they went to the sites because it has to do with a district-wide program that is supposedly providing, let's say, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth students. Because if we're leaving now off first, second, and third, it doesn't apply to them. But what are the actual metrics? that show those instructional materials are available. Because availability is something different when it's digital availability. If the parents don't have the knowledge to access that, or they're given an extremely low bandwidth shared With the rest of the community way of accessing that internet, it may not be feasible. How many of you have ever used this community radio-based citizen band, radio-based access? Has our chief academic officer ever tried to use it herself? Is it available or it's only available to students like from Amai and Stevenson and Bob who are in the most advantage economic situations? So I urge you to have your staff in the Education Department actually has gone to a report and show you what those numbers are. Otherwise, you're spending a lot of money on computer. Step all have this access that isn't being used and isn't affected.

Thank you, Mr. Nelson. Now return to the board for the motion.

I make a motion to approve resolution number 01-091726, pupil textbooks and instructional materials aligned to the academic content standards and consistent with content and cycles of state frameworks as presented.

I second. All those in favor?

Aye.

Aye. All opposed? Motion passes unanimously. I'll now close the public hearing at 619 p.m. Thank you. Thank you.

Now we'll move on to item 5B, master facilities plan update.

This is a discussion item only and no action will be taken tonight. Our CBO, Dr. Westover will present the report.

Good evening. So this is an update on the master facility plan a little bit where we're at. So last year we had a couple of board meetings where we talked about starting the master facility plan and to get feedback on what the board was interested in seeing. We had our demographer come out and give some general information to start before bringing back more finished products to you to give input. So as an overview, in April, the board asked staff to bring back an updated master facility plan this fall. Since then, two things have changed. The board began a new strategic plan, and the district began right-sizing its budget. We're asking to align the facility plan with both, extending the process, so moving the adoption of the MFP update from fall of 2026 to June of 2027 to make sure that all of our plans align. Also look at what we maybe need to act on now as opposed to waiting. So for example, we have playground replacement that likely needs to be done this summer, but in order to get it done this summer, we need to get the project started now. And then also looking at science equipment. So this is where we are now, things that we have completed. So we have a facility inventory for all 11 schools and three leased or vacant properties of Slater, Wisman, and Cooper. We have our maximum and realistic capacity calculator for each school site, which is important when we go into what do our campuses need, addressing a campus utilization. I'm sorry, assess campus utilization at each school site, including TK and elementary grades. We have a 10 year enrollment projection, which you'll hear about later today and evaluated, um, uncompleted 2019 MFP projects and projects still needed with Greystone. We updated the project cost estimates with Greystone and data to fulfill the California master plan update requirements. So the plans for the master facility plan have slightly changed in order. So we have been the fortunate receiver of state funds for many of our projects. um the state now has additional requirements for the master facility plan in order to be eligible for those um those funds it doesn't go into effect right away so we have some time and currently we don't have any projects that are eligible to submit so waiting until june of this school year won't impact us. What we still need is community feedback, prioritization of projects by sites, configuration of our TK program, which is a big discussion topic that I know that we'll have a board study session on, how to address long-term growth in North Bayshore and East Wisman, how to address lower enrollment, and then also future timetables and plans for leased and vacant sites at Slater, Wisman, and Cooper. So why we're proposing to extend the process. I mentioned earlier, we have our strategic plan. This will also, so the strategic plan will be six years and it will also take a considerable amount of community and staff input. So if we're asking the community to be involved in our strategic plan, and then at the same time, trying to ask them to be involved in our master facility plan, there is a limited amount of bandwidth that our sites have and as well as our community. So the idea is that we would stagger this. Right-sizing our budget. We want to make sure what are we doing for the next several years and if it impacts our master facility plan to make sure they're aligned. Again, three additional time to align. We also want to make sure that we know how we're going to address TK. And that's going to be a longer discussion for the board to have. So what can't wait? This is a look at playgrounds in need of replacement. They are sectioned by approximately a million dollars a year. So we tried to categorize them based on the rating they received for safety. We have some of our playgrounds that are quite old, like the lower playground at Bub, the Mauna Loma Kindergarten, And chunk it out, this is roughly the potentially what the district could fund if it used any funding from staff housing that came back so you can put it on a rotation schedule so every year you're you're kind of. updating a chunk of sites in their playgrounds but there are two top chunks so the darker orange and then the lighter orange that the board could choose to do this upcoming summer. So based on a comprehensive district-wide assessment in 2024, playground equipment and surfacing at multiple school sites rate poorly for safety, accessibility, inclusivity, and need to be replaced. I want to be clear, this is a proactive measure. We have not had students be extremely hurt from our playground structures, but we do want to be proactive about it. We also have monthly checks on our playgrounds. So we have somebody that goes around and we check our playgrounds every month. The board has a choice to only do the most urgent first four or eight playgrounds within year one and year two, and then put playground projects on a yearly replacement cycle. For projects to be completed in the summer 2027, design work needs to begin now. Cost estimates are not based on actual bid costs since they have not been designed. So you noticed on the right-hand side, they were all about a million. Those are rough estimates from Greystone. Science equipment, we know that elementary science, technology, engineering, arts and math, steam rooms, occupied classrooms counted against capacity. Equipment replacement, FFNE money is not construction, but covered under our bond program under FFNE. Measure T carries about $1.1 million in FFNE. balance that is already available to spend on this type of project. What we need to confirm is a current inventory of science equipment by site and grade span. What equipment is needed? So this is working with the teachers asking is there, what do you need? Bond eligibility for each component. We would want to confirm with bond council to make sure it falls under FF&E and then cost estimates. So our recommendation would be to bring a scoped science equipment package back to the board in November, funded from the available Measure T, FF&E funds. So near-term package, items that move ahead of the plan, playground replacement at four to eight sites, and science equipment as needed. We would need to scope out to see what it is exactly that's needed. The estimate for doing this would either be roughly $1 million to $2 million for the playgrounds, and then the science equipment, of course, would be scoped, but likely within that FFNE budget that's already there. I should also state that the trade-off in doing this now is it leaves less for everything else, for the things that the strategic plan might surface, things that might come up in the MFP when we're doing our feedback sessions. So this is a proposed adjusted calendar. So today we're here at September 17th, where we're kind of giving an idea of what the process might look like moving forward, moving through kind of what it looks like for the next couple of months that we would do an early learning session sometime between October and December. In November, we would have information about science equipment to bring back to the board to take a look at. And then, as we always do, a two-step process, it would come back to the board for approval of the FF&E. Then the board would approve the strategic plan. And then starting in February, we would start all of our discussions and community input on the MFP. And the board would preview it in May and then approve in June. So what would our community input look like? So we would ask a broad question, what do our schools need? We would do a district-wide survey in English and Spanish, site council meetings at all 11 schools, student voice sessions at Crittenden and Graham. We would also get feedback in community briefing meetings at DLAC, ELAC, and our bond oversight committee. This is looking at what would be our drafting guiding principles. One, condition and safety first. Make sure that our facilities are safe for students. If it's reached the end of its life, it moves ahead of a facility we simply would like to improve. Number two, every school and not every project. No site waits 10 years for it to turn. Reach across all 11 schools before depth at any one. Program before buildings. Fund the spaces that the strategic plan asks us to deliver instruction in. Number four, preserve options on our property. We don't know what the future holds. Things have changed drastically in the last five years. So making sure that whatever decisions we make don't impact our ability to be nimble in the future. And fund what we can operate. Every capital decision identifies an ongoing custodial utility and maintenance cost. So we would want to know what is that going to cost us before taking on these projects. And match the plan to the money. Publish a plan we can actually fund now with options to fund in the future. What we need from the board tonight, so this is for direction and then potential action at another meeting. So direction, does the board support the existing adoption of the MFP update to June 2027? does the board support advancing playgrounds and science equipment projects ahead of the full mfp plan update and then are the six draft draft guiding principles are they the right ones have we missed something and is there anything else you would like to see trying to do multiple checkpoints along the way so the board can provide input before the final project is done um and again direction for action um would you like to prove either four or eight playgrounds to be addressed prior to the MFP being done. And then questions.

Thank you. Any questions from members of the board? Vice President Henry?

For the playgrounds, ideally, what would be a typical refresh cycle or replacement cycle for playgrounds?

So it depends on the playground and it depends on the usage. Playgrounds can last for 25 years. When they get heavy use, things tend to break a little bit more quickly. One thing that we're running into right now is when we want to replace parts, no one will sell us parts because they don't want the liability. So we end up having to either close the structure or try to figure out how to make it work. And that's especially true with our older playgrounds. Most of the playgrounds now come with a warranty. So if you need a part, so for example, at Vargas, when we need a part, we just call and say that we need this part.

Does that answer? Yeah. No, it does. And then for just on slide 13, we have the proposed board calendar. There's a December 3rd on there, but we don't actually have a board meeting date. So I was wondering, should that be November 17th? would you or should it be the um we can make november 17th work or i can look back and see what the december meeting was okay uh the 19th is the thursday i think sorry i misspoke But the science piece of this I know one of my colleagues asked in the trustee questions about the middle school versus it was elementary school and that. answer to the question was that it was this was about middle schools, but I think the slides talked also about elementary i'm just clarifying if like that would be. yeah different discussions this fall potentially.

yeah depending on the board direction we would do both and get feedback, both from steam teachers, as well as from the middle school.

trustee labor.

Yeah, sure. Start off with the playgrounds. So during the outdoor learning discussions, I heard that many of the schools really needed playground replacements, and somehow the playground replacements were not included in the outdoor learning effort.

So now I hear from you that

Yes, indeed, there are serious issues with the playgrounds that they are outdated. There is an urgency. In fact, some of them you said are unsafe. Yet, on the other hand, you've also presented that the board should consider potentially holding off on these expenses because we could reserve money for other facilities needs down the road. So I'm a little confused about what is being asked here and how I'm supposed to weigh this and why this wasn't done sooner before it got to this stage.

So I want to be clear, this is us being proactive. We are seeing that the playgrounds are getting older and need replacement. For the outdoor learning project, initially it had not been contemplated that it would include playgrounds, but some school sites very much valued the playgrounds. So they said, we want that more than anything. And at the time, the board chose to give that flexibility. If you would like a playground, if you would like X, that that would be allowable. So that's why those playgrounds got in as part of outdoor learning because the school sites really wanted an upgrade to their playground.

So these are one... Is it fair to say when it came down to it as school communities were deciding, some chose other amenities other than playgrounds as priority?

Correct. So let me just follow up with a thought then. So what that suggests is that schools who chose playgrounds or who did not choose playgrounds are getting extra outdoor facilities. Okay, thank you. Be clear. Go on to the next question. Science. What do you envision? I guess, are the teachers, are you expecting replacing existing supplies or upgrading existing materials that are used in the elementary and middle school classrooms? Or are we talking about new kind of curriculum?

This would definitely not be curriculum. This would be furniture, fixtures, and equipment. So think lab tables, major equipment pieces, not the curriculum side of things.

Waste disposal? Trustee Cotten.

Thank you. So to clarify, are any of our playgrounds unsafe right now?

I think they could become unsafe if we choose to do nothing.

in the next year, in the next two years?

You know, that's a really good question. And we tried to pin down our people that come out and look at the playgrounds. Nobody is willing to say it's going to break within the next day versus in the next six months. It's just these are things that probably should be addressed.

And then which of the outdoor learning projects include playground replacements?

Landals had additional playground space added, and I would have to pick up a look at the drawings, but I know Landals had additional playground space added. I think it was just Landals. I can go back and look at the plans. And it was an add.

It wasn't a replacement of an existing structure. It was an additional structure.

They enlarged a current space that had a playground on it.

Okay um when we developed the outdoor learning projects, we did a tremendous amount of work on creating a green index and green metrics and. Looking at materials and shade and all of these different things to incorporate will we be using all of that information in the design of the playground playground replacements since we've already done all of that work. We could. I hope so, because there was a tremendous amount of work and community input and time and money spent on developing how we can interact with these, how we can make these spaces better for our student use during the day. And so I would love to make sure that that work is incorporated. I don't want to steer off into discussion too much, though.

We just have to look at how that relates to play structures, right?

I'm happy to have a meeting with you to discuss that further, because I do think it does, especially when we talk about materials. My last piece was, you mentioned ELACs being included. I would love to see the ELACs added to that line, all 11 school site councils and all 11 ELACs, instead of being grouped under the district level committees, because ELACs are site specific. I think that was what you intended. But for the public, I would like that to be really clear, if that's possible. Sure. Thank you.

So I got three just timing questions first thanks strategic plan approval date I think you had a TBD and my notes are that's probably like early March is that roughly yeah okay. For the. MSP update needing to, not being required until May of 2027, but we're approving it on June 3rd. Is there slack there or are we going to be very tight up against a deadline or would we come out of compliance or are there any concerns there?

The board could choose to push off the adoption of the master facility plan until the following calendar year and still be okay. I think we were trying to get in before the school year and the break. Yeah.

I was just concerned we would fall out if we hadn't approved it by then and wanted to make sure that that was the case. And then if we choose to do the playgrounds, I think you said design would have to start now, but is there a deadline where we'd want to get that in? I know DSA can take a long time for this stuff. Yeah.

I mean, it's a combination between getting an architect on board, depending on how much design we want to go into the playgrounds, how much, you know, the community input, or if we want to take the greening index into play. If we want to do the greening index, I think we need to get started very, very quickly. Because there is not only the design time, DSA, which should be fairly quickly because it's a playground, but then also the lead time in ordering things.

And then I had two questions. This one's for the easier one. If we do eight versus four of them, do we anticipate any per unit savings in that group, or is it probably roughly the same?

I would assume that there's going to be some cost savings because they're mobilizing once for eight as opposed to just four. I don't think that should make or break the board's decision, though.

And this one's for the bigger one, which is, and I'm previewing our next item a little bit, The demographic projections have TK at all but two schools. I think Bub is one of them that doesn't have TK enrollment in the future because we haven't done a program there. Would our rebuilding of the playground there, would we constrain ourselves to cite TK? Because there's probably some age appropriateness and restrictions on that if we were to do TK there. So how does that intersect? Because we have like the early learning thing through December.

of the replacements of the playgrounds right now, all of our playgrounds are made for either kinder or older students at the elementary site. We actually do not have any playgrounds that are at most of our elementaries that are intended for TKH. It is a very specific playground that's much smaller, as you can imagine. So the proposed replacement are for the ones, are for playgrounds for kinder and up. If the board chooses to put, I think this is part of the bigger discussion for TK of like, what do our facilities look like for our TK, including playgrounds, restrooms, classrooms, that type of thing.

Yeah, I think my major concern was if we make a decision now that boxes us into a specific program configuration, which is kind of the opposite of one of our principles that we drafted, right, of programs should drive what this is. So I want to make sure we're not going down that path.

i think important is this discussion so we're talking about replacement of what exists anywhere we added tk would be an add to existing equipment that is already needed and we do have tk above oh okay maybe i misread the tables on the enroll on the demographic study um okay uh any other further questions um just one question that i thought of i know that this past summer um

location of summer school affected which, you know, where we were doing some of the construction? Would next plans for next summer summer school affect any of which playgrounds we could do?

That's a great question. It could, but because we've done so much of the roofing and outdoor learning, we have more options available to us. So this summer felt very tight because we were going to be doing roofing at almost every single site in addition to the outdoor learning.

Any further questions? Trustee Comey.

I would just love at some point to get a little more clarification on the difference between TK and kinder playgrounds. Kindergarten playgrounds in the past were designed for four-year-olds because we enrolled many more four-year-olds in kindergarten. And those design restrictions may be shifting as we expanded TK, but when I first started teaching kindergarten, we were getting some of those kiddos that are now in TK in kindergarten, and they were using that playground. And so I'm not entirely clear on how the Playgrounds would actually be that different. But maybe that's in a board report or some other written format to the board. I don't imagine that it's something you can just magically produce tonight, but it would be useful to have that information. Sure.

Any further questions? Seeing none, I'll now open public comment. I'll open public comment on this item. If any member of the public in person would like to speak on this item, please turn in a speaker card. Any member of the public online, please use the raise hand function, and then I will allocate time accordingly when I see how many speakers we have. I see no one online, and one member of the public in person. I will allocate three minutes. Mr. Nelson.

Thank you. I had a question. Chairman, do you plan on voting on an action as was asked on page 16? Because this is in the agenda only as a discussion item, and you'll be violating the Brown Act if you vote on an action. So just keep that in mind. I'm wondering, to follow up on Lambert's question, are the playground problems recorded in the SARCs, the School Accountability Report Cards? Because that has lists every year. Last January, there were reports on all these schools. Were any of these schools noted as poor on the playground equipment? That's one of the things where maybe Lambert and me and some other people are wondering how did this come up all of a sudden? It seems all of a sudden. But I also want to remind you what I sent was there's one half, at least one half century old utilities underground And they are a safety issue because if gas lines, old 60-year-old gas lines, finally rust through and break, it's an explosion problem at a school site. If the old clay pipes that we know are mine and Bob and some of these other places, those sewer lines break, school gets shut down. just as happened at Amai in 2024. If the water lines break, the school won't have any way of flushing their toilets. The school will be shut down, and so there'll be learning loss of those happening. And if there is a giant earthquake, and of course, they've increased the probability of either the fate or the or local big San Andreas going, there'll be lots of school sites with old underground utilities that will close the schools. And it will be a long time before you will be able to find enough contractors because there'll be lots of broken pipes all throughout the areas where the earthquake might happen. So please be aware that it's important to understand where those underground utilities are that haven't been replaced. If you're going to put playground equipment on top of them, you may make it hard to replace those. This is your responsibility. I'm going to beat on Devon again. When she brought up this thing for the learning outdoor stuff, it displaced about $10 or $12 million for things like this underground utility. And I know our CBO is trying to save money, but we shouldn't save money by not doing things that we promise the community.

Thank you, Mr. Nelson. Now return to the board for discussion. Trustee Lambert.

Yes, thank you. So I'm going to start at the back of the request here, or sort of the slide deck. You asked for additional guiding principles. One of the things, most important things I think is missing from this is to align The facilities purchases and plans with our educational objectives okay that sort of needs to be first and. Everything else follows you have aligned it with our finances and things like this, but it so I. that's important, I think.

Just to jump in, right? That was something that I was really interested in making sure happened. I think that was, it felt to me that was captured in number three, like the program before buildings, right? Like where we want to actually make sure that it lines up with that, but maybe it's a little different angle on that, perhaps.

I mean, perhaps more explicit.

Yeah, I think that's a great feedback.

Yeah, point made. Second thing is, and I think this, we have to do our strategic plan first, is that whenever we talk about facilities, you know, we have a big exercise ahead of us in understanding where the growth is going to be or not and how we're going to, even if it's not, we're going to have to rearrange some of where the students go and things like this. And that's going to have to, in my opinion, sort of guide the sort of the capital expenditures for our facilities. So some of this went back to the beginning as a little bit premature, although I would love to build all new playgrounds for all the kids and looking at some playgrounds that I've seen, they definitely are needed, kids deserve it. I also consider that we're at sort of the end of that measure T bond monies. And I'm concerned that in order to pull off our educational objectives, which are the most important thing, that we may need some of this facility monies. I don't want to spend it up before we understand what our true needs are and have this discussion about a longer-term plan. So I just hesitate, or maybe that's also an added request to, like you've done, I think, very confidently on the reserve presentation, is the similar one on our capital, where we are with our capital money. from all different buckets. That's a different slide. Then, I mean, going to science programs, I'm less concerned about that. It's not as big of an expense, but it sounds like it's just replacing or upgrading equipment and supplies the teachers are normally using anyway. So it sounds like a normal expenditure, if I'm correct.

Typically, FM&E isn't considered like a, it wouldn't be like resupplying consumable materials for a lab. This is like the big stuff. Think tables, microscopes, equipment. Less so about, because when you say the teachers are using already, my mind goes towards like the consumable equipment that they're using. So this is a little bit more substantial.

I guess my only caution then, the way you've just described that, is to make sure that that if we are purchasing this equipment, the teachers can and will use it, okay? Having microscopes around, absolutely wonderful, right? But if the teachers don't have time to use it, they're doing outdoor learning or something else, You know, there's no sense purchasing it right now. When the time comes, we look at curriculum, maybe have science classrooms and things like that. Maybe that's the time. You know, going back, one other comment I have about the playgrounds. It would be really useful at least to get some bids for the replacement costs so we have some real numbers we can work with.

I think looking at the estimates is probably the safest way to do it right now because to get bids, we would need to design them and then bid them. Design DSA, then bid.

Understood that. I retract that recommendation. Trustee Cullinan?

Well, first of all, I agree with Trustee Lambert and President DeFazio. I think refocusing this on the educational needs driving our facilities is a great idea. And I also agree, I think it's probably in shifting the draft guiding principle number three, program before buildings, maybe it is something about the instructional program driving facilities. So yes, the strategic plan is going to tie in directly to that. But that might be a way to refine that to really call it out. There are two other things that I would like to consider for adding to our guiding principles, especially because we're talking about play structures. Anything we can do around universal access as we update our playgrounds, I think is very important. it makes our playground spaces more usable for all of the students in our community rather than our students with special needs or in special education not being able to use the playground that's on their site because it actually isn't amenable to their needs. There has been so much progress made in universal playground access in the last decade. We've seen universal playgrounds built in our community. Landless has a much more universal access playground as well, that if we, I'm not saying the whole playground has to be this way, but if we can consider elements that provide more of that universal access, if we're gonna be spending this money anyways, why not make it broadly accessible? I'd love to include that. I don't know if that's in the guiding principles or more in the design process, but I do think it's something that we should really consider. And then I think climate resilience and sustainability should be one of the guiding principles because we are trying to build things that are going to still be usable even when we have a heat wave, for example. So that ties back into the outdoor learning spaces in our green index and green metrics. But considering all the work that we've been doing on that as a district, I think including that in our guiding principles makes a lot of sense. Fund what we can operate and match the plan to the money. Those two kind of seem like they could be compressed into one point. They don't seem... hugely different to me that we should, our plan should include ongoing operating costs and be based on the money that's accessible to us. So I don't know that those need to be called out separately. I think they could be compressed if we were to add another guiding principle.

Vice President Henry.

So I'll start with science. I think that the timeline proposed of assessing needs in the fall and moving forward with some decisions about science, to me, I think that would, which I think tracks with the way the trustee question was answered, that would, to me, be first focused on the middle schools because we are We have a curriculum that's not likely to change, but we're not in any way in the works of changing. So more a matter of finding out what the teachers need to teach the class that they're going to be teaching, that they are teaching, that they will continue to teach. What would enhance it? What do they need to have replaced? On the elementary level, you know, the concentrated STEAM teacher versus a different model of teaching science in elementary school was one of the discussions we had last year. And I don't know if I feel like that's totally resolved. So I think that, and that would be a different discussion of the types of what different, you know, schools already have versus, but I think on the middle schools, making sure, you know, both middle schools have, you know, access to, you know, the lab tables and the other things that those teachers need to really make it a high quality science program would be in favor of continuing to pursue this timeline. The playgrounds, I do, you know, just seeing how old they are and where that is, I'm interested in maybe this coming back to just get a little more specific about proposals of what it would look like to start moving forward, because I don't want to wait until 2028 for all of them. I would want to get, I would want to hear, I guess, what then, if we were to do, say, eight at once versus four at once, how that affects as we look down the road, what the replacement cycle would look like. If it would be, you know, we do eight at once and then, but four of those are going to have maybe an extra year along the way so that we're not locking ourselves into 10 or 15 years, whatever the cycle is, having another year where we have to do eight. And then I do agree with Trustee Conley that we should keep in mind the You know the the climate sustainability piece of this materials, making sure that we can use playgrounds even when it's 105 degrees, maybe not 105 degrees, but one is 90. And the end also you know, with a lot of the concerns that the parents have now that maybe they didn't have as much 10 or 15 years ago about the off gassing and things like that as materials.

I think when I was, I think I'm piggybacking on Trustee Lambert's remark around a guiding principle, right? I think when I was thinking through this of what else there should be, and I think having the demographic analysis coming afterwards, I think balance that right is like, we should be sizing all of these things to the students that we have or expect to have, right? So our plans should be like the facility decision should be taking projected enrollment, current utilization, and probably like the resident student counts that we have in those areas to make sure that like we are sizing it for the schools we will have. That way the demographic study actually feeds in as a planning constraint as we're developing that. And I think that's kind of where you were landing with that. That feels like it maybe fits somewhere between three and four, I guess. City Council Chambers, Program before buildings and preserving options on the property like those two things feel like they kind of this is saying like we need to know where. City Council Chambers, What the shape of our student population looks like right like to to the constraints, in addition to programmatically so I think that would be a useful guiding principle to make sure that these account for that. City Council Chambers, I appreciate the answer to the question that we had where we made the. principal five operate for this playground decision that we have of making sure that we can fund the ongoing maintenance. And we were able to have that. I think, yeah, I think vice president hanging an agreement of like four versus eight. I'm not, I want to make sure we're not on a cycle where we have to do eight every like they're all synced up. So we have to do eight all the time for replacements, but weighing the cost difference. And then like what that actually looks like when we start designing it, I think is, is kind of where, where my head's at for this. Trustee Reed.

I'm taking a look at the proposed board calendar again, and I'm seeing March for community input. I really feel like community input would be helpful prior to the approval of the FF&E. the more we hear from our community about what they prioritize and what they would like to see, the better we can have discussions and make decisions that will affect their children and their families.

Trustee Conley?

Yes, thank you. So I've gone back to slide 16 where it has five different areas that are being asked about because I focused just on the guiding principles in my comments. I'm going to try to move through some of these other points. Number one, I do support extending the MFP update to June of 2027 so that we build on the strategic plan. I support advancing the playgrounds and science equipment projects. When we look at the last update we had on our bond program, we had between $25 to $30 million left, I believe. Is that correct?

I was just going to remind the board that on June 11th, there was a presentation of bond funds available. I think all capital funds all in were probably up around $40 million. Yes.

And so, yes, I know that there are going to be other priorities that come to us out of the strategic plan that we want to include in the master facilities plan. But in the overall budget for what we still have left, because we implemented our bond program so quickly, we do have savings, we do have money that we can use. And so funding science equipment, which part of our bond was based around something that people expressed interest in, and it was in the prior master facilities plan, too, was updating our science labs. And so I think, to me, it is a very natural follow-on. We have the funding. We have the capacity. Let's get this done now. It's something that we already had a tremendous amount of community input on. And so I would actually like to go ahead and see that done. And then for the playgrounds, in the grand scheme of a playground's life, if it's rated for 10, 15, 20 years, what have you, breaking apart eight into four and doing four one year and four the next year, it's not going to be an issue because it's going to be 15 versus 16 or 14 versus 15. I don't see that being a barrier to the ongoing replacement cycle down the road, just realistically speaking. If you look at when the playgrounds were built in the first place, they may have already been on the same annual schedule to begin with. while we are going to try and do an annual cycle, hopefully, it doesn't mean there may be a period in the middle for five plus years where we aren't actually doing any playground replacements because everything is well within its usable lifespan. And so we don't need to be making an update at that point. So I don't think it's going to be every single year that we're dealing with four different playgrounds across the district. It's just going to take us a while to get everything kind of up to speed and on the next track. So I am comfortable with pursuing the eight playgrounds. And I think it's just, if we can do it now when we have done this outdoor learning space work, we have these design principles already, we have all of the community impact. I mean, people gave input already on playground design. Can we go back and just capture that from all of the input that happened? Yes, some schools deprioritized the playground space. Some schools prioritized it. But can we go back and just pull some of that as well to help us inform the playground design? So yes, I'm comfortable with moving forward with both of those things and all eight playgrounds. I would like to see, and maybe it's just as we move into the master facilities plan, an update on, we have had the discussion many times in the past around how are we checking our electrical, how are we checking our plumbing, how are we checking Our roofs, how are we checking all these things? I know that we have processes in place and those things have been regularly checked. When we had the water issue at MI, there were a lot of questions from the board then and information provided about how we check that on an ongoing basis. I would love to see that included in this master facilities plan process. Even if those aren't things we're immediately targeting, I think it's just useful to include the information about how we regularly monitor things like your pipes and make sure that they're up to standard.

Yeah, and I'll just put out to the board as well. you know, it's part of the governance team responsibility as well to keep an eye on those things that we know need to be addressed, right? Nobody is going to place sewer pipes over something new and flashy, right? So we know, I'm not pushing forward at this moment, but we know the playgrounds are old, right? They're still there and still working. So perhaps, and I think this is why, as I watched, I came in late to the process, but as I watched what happened is we went out again to the community for the outdoor learning input. There's a new set of people there who rejigger what is priority, and it becomes a moving target of sorts. So at some point, a stake has to be put in the ground, and I think it's our responsibility to keep an eye on those things that aren't quite as glamorous and will never be put at the top of the list but still need to be done.

This is why the last bond program focused on HVAC and roofing, right? It was not a sexy bond, but it was about accomplishing those things first so we move through the priorities quickly. And then if there is consensus around four or eight playgrounds for the Measure T project list, because this is a discussion item, I assume that those could possibly come back to us as an item on consent next time or could be brought up for discussion.

Yeah, following up on that, I mean, I would like to see what, I don't want to jump into spending the $40 million without understanding what else is needed in our district. What are the other options? You know, what needs to be done and what doesn't need to be done? You know, we're launching, we're starting to look at the strategic plan. We're going to make great progress in the next few months, okay? And we'll have a much better idea of what is needed and where we're going and how that's going to support our educational objectives. So, you know, doing this now, you know, coming back at a board meeting in another month and making a decision is, in my mind, just premature. We've just started this facilities process. You know, why are we spending money now before we've even started, you know, going through it? So... What's the point of doing it if we're going to, you know, jump ahead?

So, I guess, just to respond to Deliberate's thoughts, I think, to me, that was the reason that these two things are kind of are separate from the strategic plan. I do agree that there will be there will absolutely be things that we will potentially want to invest in that relate to it. I think that there's not a world where, I just can't imagine something in a strategic plan changing having a kinder, lower age group and upper age group playground on every campus. And so if it's clear that those need to be replaced, There's the, I guess, the open question is just whether some campuses might end up with some even younger kind of preschool age equipment at some point and whether that would displace something else. But I'm comfortable enough that we're going to need to keep those three age groups of playgrounds on every campus to start moving into looking at replacing them. And then on the science front, that is one of the reasons that I bifurcate the elementary versus the middle. I know that there will be things in the strategic plan that relate to science. But since we are not in the process of changing anything curriculum-wise for science, And this can be a question that comes up, I guess, as we're learning what the proposal is for FF&E, but I am least interested in pursuing what it is, particularly knowing that six years ago, science labs were one of the things listed in the bond measure. That was a priority then, but I think it's important to having bond money left, pursue that.

And to that point, I'll just remind the board that looking, I'm just scrolling through that June 11th presentation from this last school year. And in it were listed all of the priority two, three, and four projects. And we brought all of that back in just about every elementary school list. was playground replacement, playground modernization. So it's not like we're just coming. In fact, the process we went through was, after hearing, was looking at those items and determining what you need to revisit because after living in the facility for a while, is this still going to be of priority? So we did not bring those forward. But we brought playgrounds. And the only other thing we had mentioned at the time was the AV system upgrades and MURs because there's concern about the fact that it's not dark enough in there to be able to utilize AV equipment effectively, right? So that one we held on, but these seemed like obvious wants from our schools at the time, just to point that out.

I would just suggest as we move forward, because we've done master facilities planning before in the updates, maybe as we move forward when the agenda items come, we include in the cover sheet links back to the past presentations for the public as well, because it's a lot of information, not just for staff and the board to keep track of, but for the public to kind of follow along and see how it is developed over time.

And just in case my initial discussion was not clear, I think I do support extending the adoption of the update to June 2027. I think that's the right call because, right, like all of these things need to feed into each other in the right way and doing it ahead of when we planned all this stuff out is, I think would go end up with something misaligned. And then similarly, the playgrounds and the science equipment projects, I think with the Bifurcation for the kind of not emergency but urgent things we need to do, I think, is really again the right call for for us now.

Yeah, I think any further. So we'll bring this back for under as an action for board consideration at the next meeting and then continue discussion beside that.

Great. Thank you.

Any further discussion?

All right. Do you have what you need on adjusting guiding principles? We have that. Okay. Yeah.

Okay.

Great. We'll now move on to item 5C, demographic analysis. I'll ask Dr. Westover and our consultant to present. This is a discussion item. Again, no action will be taken tonight. Yeah. Demographic analysis. Thank you.

I'm going to turn it over to Rob Murray, who has done all of our demographic analysis attached to the agenda item. There is also a larger packet of information that Rob had put together based on the direction that the board gave at the end of last year.

All right, thank you and good evening. And it's great to be here in person. I know you were tolerated me presenting to you virtually last time, but I do always prefer to be in the room. So it's a pleasure to be here and good evening. Again, I'm Rob Murray, the Director of Demographics with King. And I'll go ahead and just jump into the material that I had to present tonight. And then we'll be very happy to continue the discussion, answer questions. And let's see. Oh, the down button. There we go, not the, nope, baby. There we go. So I always like to start these presentations off now that, again, I have prepared the full report, which we really just had some partial information last time I talked to you. You have, I believe, the chance to have seen that full report. And we're going to just spoil the ending of that and jump straight to our conclusions here. And then we'll go back and circle around to some of the specific points that lead to that. And the story in Mountain View-Wesman, as it is in most places around the Bay Area, around California, around the nation and large parts of the world, is a birth demographic story. There simply are not as many children as there were even 10, 15, 20 years ago. It is very difficult for enrollment to do anything but decrease when you're starting with a certain number of children and you're looking towards the future and this many fewer children are even available regardless of what programs, regardless of what reputation there is, simply fewer children to fill all of the seats that there are. And that really is the main thing and we'll kind of break that down a little bit more detail. There certainly as. Has been discussed in this district over the years, um, potential for new residential development that will bring families to enroll in this district who otherwise would be living elsewhere of those homes were not built for them to move into. That certainly is part of the factoring. And the extent to which those plans are certain or malleable is, I think, has already been a big discussion here. But we're really going to focus a lot on demographics and particularly that contrast of who you have enrolled now, who, because your teachers are doing their jobs, I think that would be an unpopular move to just hold back all of your fifth graders and all of your eighth graders and just retain them in your schools and not let them move on. That would certainly help your enrollment numbers, but probably not your popularity. So here's the historical enrollment. And one of the charts later on, we're going to throw a couple of other columns in there for, you can see 2017-18, that 51-32 represents the district's peak enrollment. If we go back further than this, you do get to, I believe, around 03-04-ish, somewhere in there. Your low points in enrollment, it's even lower than anything that's on this chart. So that bigger. Picture context is certainly important to acknowledge that, you know, this district has had a range of. Enrollments over the last few decades, but really what we're seeing now is. Very similar to what happened in many places, on top of everything else demographically, the COVID-19 pandemic going into the fall of 2020 school year had a profound impact. I like to think of it more of an acceleration of things. A lot of families that for various social and economic reasons might have over several years experienced trickled out in terms of moving away. There was this period of why I don't have a job right now anyway, or the kids aren't in person school anyway. So we were talking about maybe moving in a few years, maybe this is the time to do it. and particularly out of California to other states, we know it was a big theme during those times. I do not miss getting all the updates of the U-Haul statistics of how many trucks were leaving California versus coming in and all of that. It was very dispiriting. And a lot of that has since reversed, but this one-time impact was undeniable. And your district saw it, almost every district saw a drop between 2019-20 and then 2021. And then largely on the expansion of transitional kindergarten, you have certainly seen some increasing enrollment again, but keep in mind that caveat that you have also been enrolling students who were previously eligible to enroll and that we want to keep a close eye on what those age and grade cohorts look like in terms of their populations. So here are those kindergarten and TK trends. So again, you see this is now, also keeping in mind, this report was prepared at the end of last school year. We're still looking at current year, quote unquote, 25, 26. I will say from the last enrollment report that I saw, which was a few weeks old at this point, but our moderate projection was looking very, very solid, which was why I was very happy to come and present it to you here tonight. But looking at what we had going into the then current year, 25-26, you really see that difference of the total bar height in 25-26 as far as your smallest, youngest learners. Collectively, all the four and five-year-olds in TK and kindergarten, you had more of them than you ever had. But the actual number of just kindergarten students who were going to transition into first grade the following year is you know looking at a reduction of over 150 students from what it had been 10 years previously so that's really the story of what we're tracking as we look at this progression of things as larger older cohorts of students who will give way as they naturally age up and matriculate out of your district and being replaced by these smaller cohorts. So your bottom line was helped by TKA expansion. It wasn't really helping what's happening with any given year. When the next younger grade moves out to fill in the seats, there's fewer of them. Up, down, not. Nope. What did I do again? Dr. Westover, please. Apparently, I know a lot of things. How to operate a slideshow may not be one of them. So we'll do our best. So before we get into some of the other analysis, touching on that point of to what extent is residential development going to help boost these numbers? Because this is really the conversation. So for some districts, to what extent do you have these demographic population patterns going on? And then to what extent do you have factors that can help offset that? And usually one of the biggest ones is when there is a lot of residential development. almost every district has some amount. And when we look at what we call student generation rates, in this case, we really want to look at not using broad averages across states or regions, but really looking at homes that have been built within your school district boundary so that we can look at your student list and say, when this project that built 18 townhomes opened up, obviously this is an arbitrary number, so not referencing any specific project, but with 18 townhomes was built in, you had two students, who enrolled when you built this large market rate apartment complex with rents and sizes that are geared towards one or maybe a couple of working professionals, but probably Without the kids, you indeed see, if you look at that bottom line there in gold, I'm sorry, that says total K-12, that should say total TK-8. So there's one small typo that you pointed out by me to you for free. But what we're looking at there is you see it all in decimal places, but that 0.01 for multifamily SGR, you can also read as for every hundred market rate apartment homes built, you get one kid. And that, again, that is what we're seeing by looking at things that have been built and seeing how many units are in the building. Look at that student list. It's just as fun as it sounds. How many records are there with that address? And we get these kinds of rates of average. And I will say that is absolutely typical of that kind of housing, particularly in this part of the state. So this is nothing of like what's happening with ours. Is it just something particular with our workforce? That is just, if you want kids, you tend to look at single family detached housing, which this is not a place where you have a lot, you don't have big tracks and subdivisions going in, or you look at dedicated affordable or below market rate housing. We'll also, again, for those same kinds of apartments, particularly once you get above a one bedroom size, you will see a lot more children coming out of those. But that type of development tends to also be heavily, heavily linked to federal assistance programs or some other kind of funding initiative to get those penciling out for someone to move forward with building them. To the extent that you have some of those, or certainly the extent to which some of your other projects have an affordable component, it will certainly help generate a few more children. But what we're really getting at is And I believe some of this information that I was already bringing to you the last time I was here, so I won't dwell on it too much, but there was a lot of almost 10,000 units identified in the planning pipelines that could be served should they ultimately all be built by your district. But we're looking at about 550 or 549 to be precise of those that were under construction now that we're through the summer. Some of these may have gotten completed, maybe coming into occupancy already or imminently. But again, based on the types of that housing and based on those student generation rates you just saw, we were looking at 26 students, i.e. maybe, you know, if they were all in the same grade, maybe a classroom with kids, but they're just going to be dispersed throughout various schools at various grades. So you're not going to see an enormous immediate impact from what was under construction at the time superintendents.

Can you go back one slide? Of course. Do those student generation rates vary as the properties age?

Yes. That is a good question because, yes, what we're looking at here are things that have been recently built and looking at that initial occupancy and maybe over the first few years as things age, you will begin to see more students out of them. So that's a big point when you are having this conversation in the lens of mitigation with developers on total impact over the life of a project. You do keep in mind that once the shine is off of a brand new luxury themed apartment complex and it's 30, 40, 50 years old, it will absolutely become more affordable and more affordable. And you will see more families with kids coming into that property. This is mostly for the immediate impact of, hey, there's all these things under construction getting built. How many kids are we going to get? Is this going to completely pull us out of this demographic-based enrollment decrease? And the answer to that is probably not. And even with, again, a lot of the next wave of things, of things that had planning approval but had not begun moving dirt around yet, we're still looking at Again, something in the double-digit number of students for immediate impact. And then, you know, certainly over the course of everything that could be built, and this is probably, you know, at this point pulling out well past the 10-year window that we, is typically as far as we can safely look without me getting egg on our face in my line of work. We're still looking at a few hundred students and that's certainly for a district if your total enrollment size is not insignificant, but that's keeping in mind they're not all coming at once. Some of the students that are being initially generated by those projects that are under construction will probably already be older than eighth grade by the time some of these other kids enter the district. So you're not getting all of those 463 at the same time. So again, that section exists really to acknowledge that there is some impact from development and to more importantly, concede, is probably the word for it, that it's not going to drastically change the patterns that we're talking about. We have a little bit of spatial analysis, and this is one I, you know, we are certainly on hand this year. We're not planning to update this full report this year, but we are on hand to provide as support for the master planning process. just whatever information might be useful. And particularly, there's a lot of really good information that can be gleaned from this sort of spatial analysis. I know we've already heard some conversation tonight around the resident projections and who's actually living in boundary areas. So just a couple of examples of some of the maps we're looking at. Just with your overall student plot, just quick scatter map on the left. And then looking at your boundaries, keeping in mind that, yes, you have a couple of programs that are non-boundary choice programs. But this is just between the schools with boundaries. If you add all these up, this is a zero net. This is just looking at students independent of inner districts, independent of your choice programs. But just where are you seeing movement out of a boundary into another? There's lots of this in the report, various things. But I wanted to linger on this table because walls of numbers aren't fun. But I want to tell you, you can extract... All kinds of useful information out of this. If you look down any particular column, that's the school of residence. So you can say, just looking at the left-hand column and in AmyMI, all the students, there are 417 of them who were elementary age students, grades TK to five, living in that boundary. And then you can see what schools they're enrolled in. So the vast majority, just like the old AAA travel map with, you know, the from here to here, the big bold number going diagonally is the intersection. That's, you know, largely, and I think you knew this already, you are a district that serves a homeschool kind of mentality, neighborhood school. Most people will go to that. And then you have Mistral and Stevenson there at the bottom where you can see those enrollments. There's no bold numbers because every single one of those enrollments is opting in from some other boundary. But you can see exactly where those two schools are pulling their enrollments from, which is literally, I mean, every CEO, at least double digits from every single other boundary in the district. But obviously some based on proximity, you see Bistro has the highest number coming who reside in the Castro boundary, which is not surprising given the school's location and same for Stevenson and Theracourt. But again, lots of information that you can pull from this. The middle school one with your two schools is not nearly as exciting, but you do still see what the balance is of transfers between those two boundaries. And let's see if I can do it myself this time. There we go. And that gets us to the enrollment projections and Here's that first look of kind of going back to this century, but. The births and just a quick reminder, these births were sourced from the California department of public health. These are based on the. Zip code of residents of the person giving birth, regardless of where that birth occurred. So we should be capturing people giving birth. within your school district. And again, the zip codes don't always perfectly line up, but we are at least looking apples to apples and using this to correlate. If we know that there were this many births in a given year, how confidently does that tell us what's happening with kindergarten? And then, of course, we just know what those births are doing. Generally, as of last year, that green box was represented who was actually enrolled in your schools at that moment, the red box. is who we know had been born, who was still anticipating to reach school age. And you can just see, you can just imagine those boxes sliding over to the right. And you have birth cohorts that were in the high 600s, even above 700, that were still in your middle school. A lot of birth cohorts in the mid to upper 600s in your upper elementary grades. And who's coming in, you're suddenly looking at topping 600 being a good year, and more and more of your birth totals are far into the 500s now. So again, it's hard to generate growth with who you already are. Who you know you have and that's leaving is more kids than who you know that's been born. Again, this isn't the whole story. There's movement in and out. There's that residential development. Some of these kids that were born here aren't still living here when they're five years old. And that brings us to this rate out of the capture rate, the ratio of how many of these births turn into kindergartners. We certainly saw you had much higher ratios earlier. Interestingly, you kind of started seeing a dip there even prior to COVID. But what's really interesting, you've been kind of a textbook case of that birth ratio for kindergarten really bottomed out in the few years after COVID-19. Again, as I mentioned, talking about that in general, it was much, much more likely that a child born in 2017, 2018, 2019 was going to have left the location where they were born in 2020 or 2021. You had this sort of big chasm in the birth data, and on the other side of it, you we're much less certain to still have some of those kids. And then you're seeing, you kind of saw that rate trickle up. And 2026, doing that math is significant because your children turning five years old, the bulk of your kindergarten students this year for the first time are exclusively born after the onset of the pandemic. In other words, are much, much more likely, if we look at those births, to have been here. We looked at, we were kind of at a fork in the road, and the projection that wound up in your final report was the one that assumed you are probably going to see a bump at least getting back closer to that 0.8, kind of 80% level. And that is indeed what... what has happened now that you are fully past any pre-COVID or during COVID births. By that, I mean just the peak. We know those years. Obviously, it's still around. But we are seeing that rate has really jumped back up, and we will certainly keep an eye on that. But even if, again, you are getting a slightly bigger slice of the pie here, the pie is getting much smaller. So it still helps, but I would still anticipate that you will be getting fewer kinders. And we'll look at exactly what that looks like. The last one, and this one is encouraging, grade-to-grade migration, net cohort growth. What that basically means is if you were just in a bubble, And, you know, every year, your K through seven kids, you said bye for the summer. The next year, they all advanced a grade. No one moved in. No one moved out. We get those exact same kids back as grades one through eight. This would be flat zeros across the board. In reality, kids leave who you had the year before. New kids come in and we're looking at on net independent of, you know, the eighth graders moving out and the new kinders coming in. what's happening with your growth. You used to be a net negative growth district. You had more kids out and some of that is, you know, those transitions that sometimes means kids are with you for elementary, but they're bailing at middle school. Sometimes just means across a lot of grades, you're just seeing kids leaving. But since 2023, You have become, if not completely positive, I would say just kind of a plus minus half a percent kind of district. You're basically staying that neutral, which is a huge improvement from seeing basically the size of your cohorts consistently shrink. On top of having smaller and smaller Kendra's coming in. So that's again, there's some good news. And what this largely means is. This makes in the impact of new development. So one thing to the extent that you've had some of all those projects that we surveyed and said, you had this many kids from this many units, but every single one of those new kids who was not previously already in your district is helping bump up these net numbers. And also to some extent, probably not as many students leaving to go to other districts or private charter or whatever else they were making as far as decisions to leave. So the overall projection that we see from this is, again, trending down, but not drastically. And part of that is there's enough of those offsetting things to... kind of get you to a point where, especially after the next few years, you get some of those cohorts that I mentioned in your middle school, upper elementary grades, they're just a bit larger. There's enough balance between at least neutral cohort growth, a few more from development, and kind of anticipated stabilization, at least, where you're gonna ratchet down a few times because of that replacement of larger with smaller, But at least if we jump back real quick to your births, you're actually seeing that trending. You kind of bottomed out in 2023 and we're trending up. That's at least good. You're staying below 600, but you kind of have that point where you're going to stabilize. And so that's what you kind of see in the projection is you hit this point where we can say this is probably about where you bottom out and stabilize. And then to the extent that that pace of development increases for some of the larger projects, maybe this has potential to go up some to the extent. And President DeFazio, one thing that this can clear up one of your points that you brought up with Bob specifically. The report does show no TK at Bob because this is the first year that Bob had TK, and that was a gap in my knowledge when I prepared the report. And I will say there are some big numbers that I saw. My district-wide TK projection was about three kids off, so it was a matter of distribution more than the TK at Bob maybe driving extra gains. But to the extent as we see that for a couple of years, see if, again, you know, just a handful more families having the extra site where it's offered leads to a little bit of enrollment gain, but we're really looking at this level of, I mean, keeping enrollment hopefully above where you can reach during the lowest part during and right after COVID-19 pandemic. There's a lot of districts that are never going to see what they had in 2020 again any time in the next 10 to 15 years. So you're actually in a stable position all things considered, and a lot of that is the fact that while births are lower, you are not, you have reached the point where you have kind of, Again, not what happened when 2026 comes in, but seen gains in the last couple of years and are hovering around a pretty sustained level. So again, big wall of numbers. We really just want to point out some of the years where we see these things coming up. Based on that 2028, you saw 2023 was your low point birth year. So when those kinders come in, that's probably going to be you know, some drop across your, that'll also be your low point at the elementary grades, but then you always follow these down into the right, and you kind of see that that cohort kind of hovers around the 450 range, the cohort right before it hovers closer to the 500, 490 range all through, but as that really small cohort ages out, you will have the opposite effect for as long as uh what we know from births occurs you will keep bringing in at least something comparable to what you had last year uh with your kinder and here's where uh you know once we get past 2030 we are looking at absolute crystal ball territory where i am not only trying to extrapolate what the birth rate means in terms of how many kinders and TKs will show up. We're also guessing what the total number of births is even going to look like. So I don't like to show more than a couple of those years. We can certainly draw it out, but at that point, you're kind of making assumptions based on assumptions and it can fall apart very quickly if anything on the ground changes during that time. But with that, I think, and then of course, all of this is interesting, but putting this together with your capacities, these numbers are tweaked some from what was in the report, because we, as part of that master planning process, there has been a fresh update to the utilization based on what's happening at your sites this year, and based on how those were loaded for the requirements that Dr. Westover was mentioning with what the state is looking for, with the way that capacity is done for that their requirements for the master planning. So we aren't showing all the utilization rates because there's nuance there that just needs a little bit of careful unpacking because this isn't the fire marshal nailing a sign up on the wall saying exactly this many kids. It's heavily dependent on how you want to use those sites. All of your principals, all your teachers, they are not going to let a space set not being used for anything. And I don't see that backing up. You see back as far as 0506, down as low as 4321, up as high as 5132. That's kind of your historical range of about 800 students that you stayed within. So with a lot of these facilities, you know you have accommodated those very different levels of enrollment in the past. And it's just with your current, you know, realistic capacity, you're still looking at current and projected enrollments that fall very comfortably within that, and knowing that if you really needed to accommodate a lot of growth, i.e., a unexpected wave of development, you know, something that really triggers a demographic shift and suddenly a lot of families moving to this area, bringing their kids with them for any reason, and you see a surge in enrollment, you certainly have facilities that, you know, could reconfigure to accommodate much, much more enrollment. is really what we're seeing here so with that that's what i have prepared i certainly anticipate there being questions and i'm happy to answer them for you thank you any clarified questions from the board let's do lambert

I have several clarifying questions. First of all, thank you. It's a really excellent report, and I spent a lot of time looking at it, but I'm afraid I just scratched the surface, and I will go into it in great detail later. And during my comments, I want to specifically talk about one of your slides. But before that, what is the difference between an estimated capacity of a school and the realistic capacity of a school?

So estimated and realistic, or is maximum one of those, or just estimated and realistic?

Your slide said estimated and realistic, right?

I think – or sorry, estimated maximum and estimated realistic. So the estimated is on there just to demonstrate that this is – based on kind of uniform loading numbers and that those are subject to negotiations with the teachers. So those are things that can potentially shift from one year to the next, depending on how many students at a grade level you're putting into a classroom. So that's why I caveat that with estimated, just kind of based on assuming that you're using the classrooms this way with this many kids, this is what it looks like right now. But the realistic would be, with all of the classrooms basically used the same way they're being used now, i.e. resource rooms do not contribute to the loading because that is a space that is available for students who spend most of their time in another class having some additional resources that are available to them as essentially kind of a pullout to the extent that you have art or music spaces that maybe kids are using them continually throughout the day, but they are not contributing to how many kids are in the school because they're all kids that are leaving their first grade classroom to go spend some time in another room, Makerspace, Steam Lab, whatever that looks like, coming back to their classroom again. But In the future, it flips to the maximum capacity because you say, if we needed to, and it has been this way in the past, we could also put a teacher in there and load a classroom. And similar to some sites, to the extent that you have any special education spaces or any kind of program that loads at a lower level for any reason, the maximum capacity for any given site Could be, you know, if we move this program somewhere else to Matt, you know, because we have development or some reason to really how many kids can we fit at this site if we need to, to accommodate who lives in the boundary. That's what that can look like. So, you know, there's capacity is the trickiest one because there's just lots of variables and lots of ways you can go with it. But yeah, but to your question, the word estimated there is really to acknowledge that, you malleability and then the maximum and realistic is kind of based on what you have now versus what you could have.

Okay, thank you. Another question I have is, I think it Sort of I thought about it while I was reading your report. My overall question is, in your experience as a demographer, how does the employment infrastructure affect Attendance in schools and a little where I'm coming from with this and I think about it a lot is that I see Silicon Valley changing quite a bit right now. I'd say for the last 20 years we were, you know, a startup area, many small companies being spun out of the universities and really on their own. And, uh, venture capital and private equity funding, a lot of these startups, some failed, some didn't people's very fluid people moving around. Um, but what's happened clearly over the last decade, we're now basically a company town, maybe not one company, but it's turned into a very large employer environment with very few startups. And, um, Not that that means there's any more employment security, but I think it changes the dynamics of the market and how static people might actually be. I'm not asking for an answer. I'm asking for sort of your comment.

I think it's fascinating. There's a lot of that's the sort of thing that I think to some extent, gets baked into some of those kind of capture-all numbers of things like the kindergarten ratios and the grade-to-grade migrations. But yes, we try to look at, I would say... That and the level to which that sort of drives what we're seeing with some of the overall population metrics, not just the number of school age kids or births, but just what is your split between, you know, late teens to 20s versus 30s and 40s versus more of what you started calling the empty nest age or the fully retired age. And a lot of that... certainly correlates with what we're seeing. I would say directly looking at employment data, not so much in a district like yours, particularly in a lot of my rural districts where a single employer either opening or closing something could lead to a 10% swing in how many families are living in that community. From one year to the next is something we try to talk to the folks who know the towns and just, are you hearing anything that... we would want to account for, obviously, in your case, you know, with a couple of those big names that everyone's heard of who are based around here, you know, certainly, I know, you know, there certainly have been some decisions, especially around, you know, some of the housing that has been discussed at various points that obviously some huge swings based on decisions made at a I don't see in this case, though... I love the way that you phrased that of kind of the transition from a kind of... very fluid startup culture to, I wouldn't have thought of it, but yeah, sort of a company town mentality of just, you're going to have a lot of people who in a vacuum would prefer to live closer to where they are probably going to be working for the next several years. And to the extent that any of them want families that would come with that. So that's something I would love to do a little bit of a deeper dive and see if there's any data that, uh, paints anything when we're looking at it through that resume.

It's a different kind of company town too. It's not like a coal mine or a steel mill that you're going to be there for decades. It's the kind of company town that can all of a sudden pick up and move to Texas or overseas. One sort of final, there's two questions, but I think they're related. So you have this medium projection in 3032 timeframe of about 4,500 students.

um that makes me feel very comfortable however your um your highs and lows of about plus or minus a thousand students either one makes me sort of gasp and okay yeah i definitely want to speak to that because thank you for actually bringing the highs and lows because i like to put those in and i might start only showing them for two or three years at most because the methodology statistically behind those is we're looking at all those birth ratios every single year, you know, K to first, first to second, second to third, what is the highest or the lowest variable that we had? And let's line them all up and say, yeah, this would be precedented. If all these things happen, nothing that's happening is unprecedented. They just haven't all happened at the same time. Here's what that could look like. Because that kind of sets to me your goalposts of plausible precedent and outcomes. And after one or two years, I mean, it's not super likely it happens overnight. even in one or two years but certainly after that we're changing the whole script if you keep lining up on the very lowest or the very highest end so we're yeah so once you're saying we're a thousand kids up or down once you go out seven years that's I should probably quit showing it out that far for those high and lows because we're really looking at... For me, what that says is... It happens occasionally, but I do a projection for a district and they land above the high projection or below the low projection. I say something literally unprecedented has just happened. I need to circle back and see what that was. In your case, like I said, from what we were looking at last spring, you landed very, very close to your moderate, and that's great, but those highs and lows still show you... a sort of what's the playing field of not reality, because things can happen outside of that, but of what we would really statistically say is likely to live within.

Could you state the sort of the main driver of the high and lows? And then also, when would you recommend the next update be done to understand what trajectory we are on?

So, I'll answer the second part first, because that one's a little more straightforward. I think certainly, I mean, I have districts that I come in for annually, and I certainly love doing that. It keeps me kind of on the pulse. But really, every couple of years, I think, is quite good, because then it gives you some time for things to have, you know, Especially because you occasionally have a blip or a dip in things. And then if you go back and you, of course, pull out and look at it long term, it's like, huh, that was weird. But then we got right back on trend. And so sometimes not always reacting to the immediate noise and the signal. is helpful. So I think every other year is good. And then for precisely what's happening with the low. So for instance, typically I'm doing a weighted average, you know, say I'm looking at you, you have this many kindergartners, how many first graders are you going to have over the last three years? You know, I'll get more weight to the more recent years, but you went up by 3%, you went up by 5%, you went up by 7%. And that was in order towards most recent. So I'm going to call this like 5.6% growth. And I'll apply that to most years, knowing that some years it might be lower, some it's higher. That's why the moderate projection is nice. But the low is going to say, we're going to grab that three and we're going to do that every year. And so for next year, absolutely, it could be going from kindred to first that three percent growth and that would be well within bounds it might even be two and a half but that's where the low is saying every single grade we're going to take whatever your lowest rate was from the last three years or maybe even more because sometimes it's like oh that was a weird year and we're not that's never you know just maybe there was uh you know a program shift or something but like you picked up 20 kids between third and fourth grade at the school and That's never happened before and it hasn't happened since. So I'm just going to exclude that one from my weighted average and move on to four years back and kind of toss it out. But maybe, you know, maybe it goes into the high in that case because it's just, it is a data point that has happened. So that's why I say just kind of plausible and precedented. And so that's why... So you might have a couple of years might hit below the low, but since all eight of your transition years had more of a range of reactions, you wind up hitting closer to the moderate. And so the low is really saying like every single thing lines up with the lowest rate that we've seen. Plus, we take your TK ratio. So again, I thought you were going to pop up closer to an 80% capture rate, but we would have looked at going back to that. I think 73% was your lowest rate you've had in recent years. So saying we know this is the birth pool. What does the kinder look like if only 73% of them show up? So that's where a lot of those are coming from. I try not to get too wonky and data-oriented, but love to answer it if you ask it.

It seems like in the high and low, like a helpful piece of data, not even if that is possible, but just kind of sensitivity, right? Like the high has a 2% chance of occurring. That changes the way I look at the high, or the extreme low has a 2% chance of occurring.

Yeah. And that's why if your actual total comes in lower than the low, which, again, was not remotely the case for you, I hope it doesn't happen to me very often, but every so often it does. What that tells me is something has happened that is outside of what we've been looking at, and I need to look at something new. And so... But generally, yes, I would say I don't quite have the statistical chops to throw a number at you, but 2% sounds pretty good in terms of the extreme up to the high and down to the low, and you're mostly living in the middle there.

When I've done this previously, I used to ask them to model it a bit like a hurricane path, right? Yes. Because that straight line is the middle, and the further out you get, the less likely it is, but it is possible.

Yeah, I grew up on the Gulf Coast. Yes, you're putting plywood over your windows, and you're just going out for bread and milk because everyone just goes out for bread and milk before the hurricane. I don't know why. Yeah.

Trustee Conley?

Well, I mean, the question is, has the Waffle House closed? Having also grown up in the South and having family on the coast. So I very much appreciate this discussion and I echo Trustee Lambert on the detail in the report is extremely helpful. I have a question that might be a little bit more for staff than for our presenter, which is, could you talk a little bit about the interplay between our district finances and the size of our student population as a basic aid district? So for example, we see LCFF districts that are, closing schools and really struggling with their budgets because their student population is dropping, we are different because we're a basic aid, but I'm curious about, there are some boundaries too.

Yeah. So in a basic aid district, our funding is not connected to the number of students that we have. However, what's important to keep in mind is once we reach a certain size, we stop having... efficiency so when our classes are 20 students and as opposed to 24 and we see that across the district it costs two or three million because of a loss of efficiency so I think there's multiple layers to the question so is it is our funding connected to the number of students we have it's not can I add a little bit to that

Yes, I just might take issue with calling 20 students inefficient because I taught in both periods when the K-2 class sizes used to be 1-20, and then they became 1-24. And I have to say, as a teacher, 1-20 was much better than 1-24.

So I think looking at this at the elementary level, right, we have... Right now, our school size average, average across nine schools is 352 students. That's, by all counts, pretty small. Within that, we have generally two strands at every grade level. Some we have three, there's a couple places we have one, but generally two. Across the nine campuses in the TK-5 classrooms, because of our wants to keep kids in neighborhood schools, and I guess I understand why, there becomes an efficiency that develops in that, right? So not only do we have small schools, but we also have small classes in small schools. We have about 552 empty seats right now, TK5. That's about, I know we could never make it exact, but just for a mathematical exercise, that the number of, additional classroom teaching staff we are carrying is somewhere around four to four and a half million dollars worth of staff, right? Because of number of schools and class size and efficiency. So it's not insignificant.

Thank you. That is exactly the type of information that I was looking for in the sense that, yes, our population will hopefully continue to hold stable. And I think we're very fortunate in that. But also, how does all of that interact with our budgeting? Another question I had, and I'm not sure who can answer this. It might be Ms. Bauer. And I know that I think in the future we're gonna have a discussion item about our choice schools and our lottery system. But the choice schools were founded for very different reasons, Mistral and Stevenson. And I am curious when I have read about dual immersion programs being, because it was before my time when Mistral was founded and then also when Mistral and Castro were split off. when I look at the research on dual immersion programs, it is purposeful to locate them in a neighborhood where there is a high student population who would benefit from a dual immersion program, especially when it's targeting our Spanish speaking students. My assumption is that locating Mistral within a neighborhood that has a school catchment area that has a very high number of Spanish speakers was a deliberate choice to provide that dual immersion option for that population, because in theory, those students should be performing better in the long run than their peers who are not in a dual immersion education.

So I think what you say makes sense, but the schools were founded before my time as well. So I don't really have that. I know I'm old and I've been here a long time, but I don't have that institutional knowledge. But it does make sense because you do want to make sure you have that balance of you try to have that 50-50 balance of native speakers, non-native speakers, that you have a good balance for kids to have models to be learning both languages.

okay and well you do have some expertise in this area um and so the other thing that i've been reading is that um it's actually when you establish a dual immersion program you want to see the students in the local catchment area attending it and not being displaced from that opportunity as well that if you establish a dual immersion program that only brings in students from outside the students that it was located for, the Spanish speaking students that it was trying to target might not be served.

And that would make sense for us. I mean, we would, it makes sense to have Mistral where it is because it's drawing from the neighborhood, correct? I think that if we ended up, there was some decision to move Mistral in order to continue to have that 50-50 balance, we'd have to consider transportation or something else. I think having it in that neighborhood is purposeful.

Because it's the target population. Okay. Thank you.

Other questions?

I just had two small ones. Do we have similar analysis that our EAR districts have done, like Los Altos and MVLA, where we all kind of feed together? Do they do it on a similar cadence or regularly?

With regard to demographic study?

Demographic study, yeah.

We did it annually. I don't know what MVLA does. I don't know if MVLA, or if Los Altos still does it annually.

I did a study for MVLA two or three years ago, but that doesn't mean that they haven't done one since then with somebody else. And then this is just minor.

But I think the statement of every couple of years keeps our finger on the pulse of what's going on. Yeah.

And then I think you mentioned it you alluded to it somewhat in like the student generation rates for the different mix I assume it's. The market rate housing production is going to be unit mix that's mostly driving. like what the generation rate, I imagine if there's the limited number of three bedrooms that we produce in here are going to have more students coming in than a studio.

Absolutely. And, uh, yeah, we're, we're keeping this at sort of a 10,000 foot view, but when you really want to get, uh, and again, that you usually are doing that when you are in mitigation talks or things like that, where you're really getting into, uh, how many of these are studios, how many of these are... Once you're doing three- and four-bedroom things, that's a whole different... I mean, you're probably directly marketing to families with kids at that point.

And then historically, we've just not developed a lot of those in Mountain View relatives in what the projects look like.

And that's where, I mean, certainly, if we were to see that you had... a lot of the market rate things that we'd been surveying were one and two bedrooms and you were going to have something built that was half three bedroom units. When we're looking at, especially if it's just a 30 unit thing, maybe not, but if it's one of those multi-hundred unit projects and it's going to have that kind of size to some of the units, that would absolutely factor in, but I'm not aware of that in any of the things that are in your You know, under construction and approved five line.

And then I think the other the other access, I guess, that it works on, I think, which is with affordable and age rate is like as price goes down relative to the local income rate.

Exactly. Yeah. Because, I mean, just once again, kind of once the shine is off of something, you know, just apartments kind of that. there's always some level of kids there and you will just kind of tend to see it go up as the newer things become the most expensive things and the things that used to be the the hot flashiest item become more of a, this is suddenly a relatively affordable option. So come move in here with your kids.

Have you statistically tracked that to understand how that student generation moves over time as you just described?

So, I mean, yeah, certainly in some places, I mean, for your study here, no, we have not gone back and done the deep dive, but that's, you know, and a lot of that is Particularly the extent to which we have some of your student information system supports going back and looking at, hey, when this was built 20 years ago, the first year after it opened, you had this many kids in there. Now, 20 years later, and maybe with a couple of stops along, 10 years later, 15 years later, you can just see the number of kids in the exact same apartments again. inching up, yeah. So some of it comes down to how, you know, because we just know these things go out to bed every so often, every few years, sometimes your student information system changes and suddenly you don't have a huge backlog. But yeah, because I worked for a school district when I first got into this industry where we still had giant files full of paper records dating back to the 60s. And I only overlapped that way a couple of years, and I think they are all long gone. And now if anyone wants to know what was happening in 1980-something at a school, it's largely a mystery.

Thank you. Any further questions? All right. With that, I will open public comment on this item. Any member of the public in person wishing to speak, please turn in a speaker card. Anyone online, please use the raise hand function. I will allocate time accordingly when I see how many speakers we have. So one in person and one online. You'll each get three minutes. I'll start with the in-person speaker. Mr. Nelson, you have three minutes.

Okay, this comment is actually to answer Devon's question about what was decided when Mistral was put where it was. Mistral was, the dual immersion program was initially part of Castro. And Castro got to be a pretty big school because it also had Um, the other, uh, program, which eventually got made its own school of Stevenson. Um, the reason it's covered really well on the voice articles on where the dual immersion school should be put. And I definitely remember having a. My favorite thing, clashing heads with the superintendent. I don't remember who else, what it was. This was, was Goldman was coming up with the idea, and I wonder if this is coming back to Trustee Lampert, of putting it out where we now have Vargas. And there was a couple of trustees who were supporting that. But the problem then, of course, is the group that you really want to put this in because of the education issues you mentioned would have to be economically disadvantaged usually, and they would have to be transported all the way over to where Vargas is every single day. And these are parents that can't provide their – many cases can't provide their own education. ability to get to school during school time or some other time. And so it really was not advantageous to the demographic that the board wanted to make sure was well taken care of. So there is a bit of a fight over that, but the way you do fights is you have votes, right, your board. So we had votes and direction from the board and eventually we ended up both being put there. And the issue also came up of whether there should be two totally separated campuses. At one time, the new superintendent, Rudolph, tried to convince the board and he only, convinced two of us to actually have less complicated construction and allow the administration building to stay the same, which actually both principals wanted to have happen too. Occasionally the board goes against what people recommend, but it ended up we put Mistral there on purpose.

Thank you, Mr. Nelson. I'll now go to our online speaker. Nell, you'll have three minutes.

Hi, thank you for the presentation. I especially love the data of the headcount of the student by the school. That's very helpful. I see the number of the students in this district that zone for them. I don't know if it's relevant, but there are a number of, like, within that population of, you know, these kids age for that zone for the certain school. How many of those go to private school? Just curious. I don't know. And then another thing is I hope that the main purpose of this study is not to close down the choice for options of the district. Because I think that family deserve to have choice in, you know, choice in their public school options. Without choice, it's just, you know, it sucks that you will have to, that the school have a monopoly of how they want to run their school and they don't have, you know, there's this not... there's not a need to perform better. And also, I just wanted to point out other districts, Palo Alto, Cupertino, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, just all the neighborhood, all the neighboring districts have choice options and have had choice options for 50 plus years. So I just hope that this study doesn't incite in, you know, or doesn't encourage people to close the choice go option, because I think that's the wonderful thing about the district that parents are given choice. That's it, thank you.

Thank you. Now I'll return to the board for discussion. Trustee Lambert.

As promised, could you please bring up the enrollment residence matrix slide? Okay, this slide is near and dear to my heart because in 2017, I made the same slide and even additional ones with demographic analysis on it. So in 2017, the district, superintendent Rudolph, put together a task force to try to sort of balance out the population of the schools and specifically address what was going on at that time was that there was a huge amount of intra-district transfers. And, for example, a student could be at Mauna Lama and then be transferred to MI if there was room. And in this process, you know, we came out making charts like this, that some schools had 50% of the kids actually who lived in a school area going to a different campus. And other schools had as few as 10% going to other school districts. I'm sure we're going to be talking about this a great deal, but I was shocked and dismayed that things really haven't changed. Almost 25% of our kids go to the two-choice schools. I did some quick analysis. The neighborhood schools that are most impacted by the choice schools are not surprisingly the schools that are adjacent or nearby the choice programs. And the main Castro, Theracoff, and Mauna Lama and... So what has changed in the analysis is that there are much fewer intra-district transfers that occur. Almost all the transfers are going into the choice programs, which as we've been repeatedly reminded during board meetings for the last several years, have just continued to grow in size and to absorb more and more students. I would, those are observations and I'm sure we will discuss those as we talk about facilities plan, but I bring that to the attention really of everyone in the public to take a look at this carefully. One question I do have, I think is for staff, is what are the reasons for the fewer, much fewer intra-district transfers to our neighborhood schools?

Might I help with that just a little bit?

Well, let's give them their... Well, I think a great deal of it is driven by the fact that we have a neighborhood school policy where students will go to their neighborhood school by and large, with some exceptions. I will comment that that is also what... drives up the excess capacity within the TK-5 continuum.

What are those exceptions?

Parents could request it. Or there may be a program that exists at a particular school. It could be a special education program that exists at a school. TKs are grouped in different areas around the district.

Just historically speaking, there was a period when Mountain View was not a basic aid district. And also when APIs were, the average performance index was implemented across the state of California. And if a school was not meeting its projected API growth and was put into an improvement plan, students within that school were allowed to transfer. And so out of that school within the district. And so I think part of it too, I remember there was a distinct, going back to Mountain View Voice articles, there was an article when I think Craig Goldman, a superintendent, made the decision to end the interest, to stop taking, it might have been like a federal funding, Title I funding, yeah, Title I funding, so that the district no longer had to allow those interest transfers.

And it was Dr. Rudolph, too, in the 2017 timeframe, where we basically... pulled all that back together and made it much more structured. And people, students had to have a good, and families had to have a good reason for the transfer. It used to be there was space available, you can go. Anyway, thank you very much for putting this slide together. We will be talking about it a lot. Thank you.

Trustee Conner?

Yes, I think there's a lot of food for thought here. I agree that slide 12 really jumps out at me as well. And we're going to have to have more discussion about the choice programs. But I think if we look at, Mistral actually hasn't grown and grown and grown. It's gone down since 16-17. It was at 394 students, and now it's at 372. So it actually has an increase in size. Stevenson has. But they were founded for very different reasons, located where they are for very different reasons. They have very different programmatic structures. There's just a lot of things to take into consideration and discuss about them. And I look forward to that discussion. I also think boundaries become even more important if we're looking at a somewhat static population in terms of population growth. And we're talking about efficiencies and school size and classroom size. Do our boundaries fit the student population that we have now? The previous boundaries or the current boundaries were drawn in the 17-18 school year, I think. when none of us were on the board. But Trustee Lambert probably has the most insight into that because you're part of the task force that worked on it. So we do have a resource there for kind of some history around how the boundaries came to be. But when we look at this student population over time, something we might want to investigate is growth within the different boundary areas. I saw some in transfers and out transfers, but if we go down the line of wanting more maps.

So we are bringing at the October 7th meeting, we're bringing an enrollment update just that we do each year. If there was additional information that you'd like included in that, it would be good to hear that now.

I would love to see, and I don't know how feasible it is, or how expensive to ask for, so feel free to say no. These projections applied based on each school catchment area.

the one we call resident projections. So just looking at the students who reside in the boundary area and just how that pocket, you know, so doing it like the enrollment, you have this many kinders, you will have this many first next year, but regardless of where they're enrolled, looking at who's living in each boundary area. Am I understanding that correctly?

Yes.

Okay, great.

That is similar thought, I think, right?

Can I just point out that's something that King is able to do, but So yes, and if there are enrollment information for current year enrollment that you want, we would like to hear that too.

Yeah, I think what I was thinking through when I was looking at this was, I think it's slide... 20 21 or 22 when we're looking at the capacity um seeing the utilization and capacity we see a projected we see it current we see projected forward for the 2032 year based on enrollment but i would love to see that back with the resident population as well because i think that helps us a figure out if our boundaries need to be adjusted and what that looks like um and then kind of going up one more from that and keying back from our conversation earlier about the facilities planning i think we should be periodically reviewing what these enrollment assumptions are that we're making for like how this looks and baking that into the facilities planning, right? Like that should be part of that. It feels like part of the recommendations for us to bake into this. Cause we were talking about TK, we're talking about things like that. Those assumptions that we bake into what the layout looks like should probably be part of that review process. Trustee Reid.

Slide 12. The in and out migration is helpful. I'd also like it broken down by grade level to see if there's any peaks at certain grade levels or if there's dips or grade levels where it's not really being affected.

Yeah, that's certainly possible.

Just because this topic has come up on for me and for others. I think the answer is going to be no, but is there any, do we have any knowledge of how many kids actually live in these various boundary areas? Like, no, versus who actually goes to our schools. So, you know, the kids who are homeschooled, the kids who are in private school, things like who go to a different district, because we probably do know if they go to a completely inter-district transfer rate. But as far as, do we have any knowledge of the number of kids going to private school or things like that.

So we have some, and it's something in the full report. I did not put this slide in the presentation tonight is for the private schools located within your district, what there are trends on enrollment are, because that is data that CDE reports annually. So enrollment by grade for every private school with six or more total students is What we don't know from that, though, is how wide is their net that they're pulling in kids from? Are there certainly some of your residents that might be going to private school but traveling to one of your neighboring districts to a private school that isn't actually located within your boundaries? Same thing for a lot of the independent charter schools and certainly for the homeschool. What we can often do is... The census population data is great, because certainly we have this great snapshot, aside from it being COVID, but in 2020, when you have the decennial census, which is a full headcount, as well as anyone can do, and with detailed age data, so we know how many students of an age where they would be enrolled with your district were living there at the time, and we can then see from your enrollments that year with precision, kind of what You know, we can account for this many enrolled with Mountain View Wiseman. We can account for this many through our inner districts that we've allowed out because we know exactly who they are. And then we have a certain number that we assume of our local private schools are also potentially in our district. And whatever, to the extent that there's any delta left, that's where you're looking into you know, those kind of large online charter school programs, those, uh, and of course the homeschool that is the hardest one to track down every so often. I just got lucky in San Luis Obispo County with the district I was looking at where there was a sort of, uh, homeschool consortium that filed an affidavit as a private school but you know you look up the address and look up their website it's like okay this is just basically like a homeschool resource kind of thing but you know a lot of family you know about a hundred kids were registered through it and so that was suddenly a like wow this is a great little data point here because i can see what they what their enrollment has done over the now that i know that this particular quote-unquote private school is really a collection of homeschoolers uh but aside from stumbling into something like that you're really deducing it from, we're pretty sure we have about this many kids, and I say pretty sure about this many, because in between the decennial censuses, the Census Bureau publishes data, but they're based on, if you ever get the American Community Survey in the mail, please fill it out and turn it in, because it's the best demographers have in between the multiple of 10 years, but it's still relatively small sample sizes that are extrapolated out with a pretty hefty margin of error. And so We kind of look at it from year to year, see how much it's bouncing, have an idea of what your school age population might look like, and then deduct all the known quantities and see what we have left. But it's an emphasize science for sure.

Yeah, no, I'm just thinking, as you speak and then reading your report actually what you have to say to us is very reassuring. And it's reassuring in the following sense that every day here in Mountain View, we get alerted to another builder's remedy project. We get another SB 79 legislation from the state that allows developers to build huge buildings in residential areas. We get rezoning of R3. We get all these projects in the pipeline. We just get constantly slammed with this. what really your report is telling us that, yeah, this is important, but this is not the main driver. So don't, you know, we can be calm about that, right? And focus on other things, right? So to me, this is wonderful, right? Great news. You got me?

Yeah, thank you. So, Superintendent Barry, you made the mistake of asking what other information would we like. So when I'm looking at the enrollment and residence matrix, some of the questions that I have And also looking at the data in the report, which breaks out like our free and reduced price meals rates, the student ethnicity rates, multilingual learners, I would like to know what is our actual completion rate for the easy meals application? It used to be that families to qualify for free food had to complete a form, and it was only available to certain students who qualified. But now we provide free food for everyone. And people are really concerned about public charge. They're concerned about the federal government trying to access their information. There's a lot of fear. So what is our completion rate on the Easy Meals application? Because while our Spanish-speaking population has gone up, and it's now about 30% of our Hispanic-Latino population, it's about 39% of our district, Pre-reduced price meals has dropped in percentage to 28.6%, and it used to be higher. But the question is, is that reflective of the economic circumstances of our students, or is it reflective of not as many people participating in the mechanism by which we measure that? Right, for whatever societal reason. And then I would also like to know more. We don't call out here our McKinney-Vento students in this analysis, which is fine. That's very granular. But moving forward, having more specific data about our McKinney-Vento students, a similar grid like this that shows us which schools they're at and which areas they're living in or which type of housing they're living in. And... I would really love to see this matrix where we see transfer rates also includes some disaggregated data about, my apologies, socioeconomic status and race and ethnicity. Because a goal that we've had for our Stevenson Lottery for years now, and we just haven't achieved, is to help Stevenson be a more economically integrated school site where that opportunity is accessible for any child in the district, but also our underrepresented students who are not attending that school at the same rates. So I think that information about who is applying to the lottery, maybe that's also the separate agenda item when we get it, but it's good to have it in our enrollment information as well.

Any further discussion? I agree from remembering the past, splitting this down to the demographics. And all that is very, very telling. And I think it really helps us. We have certain objectives in our district and those districts involve knowing what those demographics are.

Yeah, I think if I recall from the report, we have free and reduced price meals, EL, and unduplicated at the district level for historical. It would be useful to see that broken out by the school sites.

In that case, it's just a matter of when I request my student information, we just make sure that we are appending all those relevant fields on, and then all the mapping, everything that we're doing, we can break out by any number of those other demographic characteristics.

And then And then, Superintendent Behr, your hurricane plot had me thinking, and there was a trustee question about this for, and I think as my colleagues noted that, choice programs have, some have grown and some have contracted seeing like, I think the assumptions that we're making are that everything's gonna stay fixed from the out migration rates that we see today. If the uptake of them increased or decreased by like some boundary, maybe like I think 10% was in here, how would that affect the site capacity at all the different sites we have, right? Like that's a useful thing for us to understand the footprint for facilities planning. A further Discussion, we have everything we need. All right. Thank you so much for all the great analysis.

Again, it was my pleasure to be here. Thank you very much.

Yes, we'll take a five minute recess 829 All right, we've returned at 8.39 p.m. We've returned at 8.39 p.m. And we'll now move on to discussion and action item five D, reserve levels. CBO, Dr. Westover, once again.

All right. Good evening. So this presentation is coming to the board because there were questions about why we hold reserves. So we'll talk a little bit about why we hold reserves, a little bit about cash flow and how that works for a basic aid district. Some of this will feel very familiar to the board, but some of the topics I'm touching on just so it's cohesive as we talk through the different topics. So reserves are a large number that shouldn't be seen as extra. Every budget cycle, you could look and ask, why is the district holding millions of dollars when it's cutting positions and programs? The reserves are not all savings. They're there to do specific jobs. It helps us make payroll. Our property tax money arrives two times a year. Our people are paid every month, and our bills come due every month. It also absorbs a bad year. As a community-funded district, when assessed values stall or fall, we covered ourselves out of what we have set aside. And it buys us time to plan and gives us flexibility when needed, which is what we're doing right now. Reductions made carefully over two years protect students. Reductions made in six weeks do not. Also, if there's an urgent need, the district has the ability to make investments in students, for example, training for teachers or a large purchase during COVID. How we are funded. So we are a community funded district. Most California districts are LCFF, the state sense of funding target per student under LCFF. Local property taxes count toward that target first and the state pays whatever is left to reach that target. If local property taxes fall, the state makes up the difference. So it means that an LCFF district is consistently funded. However, we are community funded, which means our local property taxes exceed that target, so we get to keep the difference. About 90% of our revenue comes from local sources. If local property taxes fall, we make up the difference. Being community funded means that we keep the extra, but it also means that we absorb the sudden expenses or drops in revenue alone. Approximately half of our tax base is commercial. Our revenue depends on the property inside the district's boundaries. The residential half is thousands of small parcels. Sales happen steadily and values move more gradually. And no single outcome moves the revenue or decline. I'm sorry, neither moves the revenue up or down very far. In fact, typically when parcels sell that are residential within the Mountain View boundaries, we end up seeing an increase in our AV because people hold on to their homes here for a long time. The commercial half is a smaller number of large properties. Office and R&D buildings are valued on what they earn. A handful of them can move our entire tax base in either direction. Residential value is considered diversified risk, where commercial value is considered concentrated risk. Both halves are roughly equal in dollars, but they do not behave the same way. This is what separates us and makes us different from the districts that are around us that are also basic aid. Why are revenue swings? So Prop 13 caps our increases, not our decreases in revenue. When a value is set, a property is assessed at the market value when it is sold or newly built. That becomes its base year value. Then it barely moves. After that, the AV can rise no more than 2% a year, no matter how much the market raises around it. It doesn't raise until it changes hands. The value resets only on a sale or new construction. Our revenue growth depends on transactions, not on the current market. Unlike Prop 13 revenue increases, there is no similar break for falling revenues. So it increases a maximum of 2% per year, but there is no break for how fast it can fall. Commercial reassessment is the volatile half. The value follows income. Office and R&D buildings are appraised on rents and occupancy. When vacancy rises, market value can fall below the assessed value, since many companies are offering work from home, which increases vacancies. Owners can also ask for less. So under Prop 8, the assessor may temporarily enroll the lower market value, even without being asked, or owners can file a formal assessment appeal. Reductions also reach backward. A successful appeal applies to a year already assessed. The refund comes out of the revenue we have already budgeted, and in most cases, already spent. So the scale magnifies everything. Because we are 50-50, as opposed to, let's say, 80% residential, 20% commercial, a small number of large properties carries half our base. One corporate campus reassessed downward directly reduces our revenue. And we can see that it's already happening. So Mountain View's role assessment grew by 1.79%. This is Mountain View-Wisman, not Mountain View totality. The slowest growth for any major city in the county and well under the countywide rate. Our neighbors with a greater percentage of residential in their tax base grew faster. The difference is not geography, it's the mix of what they're assessing. Something to know is that the cash doesn't arrive when the bills do. We get our cash mainly from property taxes, which come in in December and April. The money going out is every month, payroll, benefits, utilities, and all of our other contracts. Our payroll is approximately $9 million each month, and our utility bills are almost $200,000 a month. So in the months that we're not receiving cash, we are using cash that is in our reserves to make payroll. We know the money's coming, but we need to have the cash in the bank in order to make payroll. Some districts don't have enough cash in the bank to make payroll. So what happens? They know they're going to receive the money, but they don't have the cash yet to pay their employees. So in this case, if we didn't have the cash, we would need to borrow it. And it's called a trans, a tax and revenue anticipation note. It's a short-term loan against taxes we know that are coming. It's borrowed at the start of the fiscal year and repaid within 13 months for that year's receipt. It requires bond counsel, a financial advisor, a rating, and both board and county action. And every dollar must be paid back with interest. So what does it cost? So for us, we estimate that a 12.4 million note would cost about $446,000 a year just for us to take out the loan in order to make payroll if we only needed 12.4 million. This is inclusive of the interest cost of 3.15%, which is based on a recent trans that was taken out by a similar district, also with a similar rating as us. As of June 30th, 2026, Santa Clara County treasury pool was earning 3.92%. Instead of earning money, we would be losing it. So what is the right amount? Different organizations have recommended different amounts. And most of the organizations, when they write about how much, what the reserve level should be, it is very unique to that district or that entity because each entity is different. Their cashflow needs, when they receive their taxes, and the volatility that they could anticipate having. So the reserve level, they can't say, so for an LCFF district, the state says, you have to have a minimum of 3%. That 3% is supposed to cover kind of maybe small swings. You need a little extra cash here and there. It is not intended to cover anything else other than that. So the state says for an LCFF district where you are guaranteed a certain amount of funding based on the number of students you have, 3% is the minimum. FICMAC, because of the, I'm gonna read this one because it's pretty good. Because of the cyclical nature of property values, property taxes are highly volatile revenues, difficult to project with certainty and can be subject to dramatic fluctuations from year to year. Projections of property tax revenues are based on estimates received from, the tax assessor's office, but final numbers are not known until the end of the fiscal year. Basic aid districts need higher reserves because of the uncertainty of tax collections. These districts have no safety net when taxes decline until they are no longer in basic aid status. And even then, they must be sufficiently out of status to provide protection. We are not going to fall out of basic aid status. We are so far into basic aid status that That is not a reality for us. What is a reality for us is the volatile revenues with a 50% being commercial value. School Services of California says community-funded districts need a separate reserve on top of the 3%, and they suggest 33% as a recommendation of the bare minimum that should be set aside. The Government Finance Officers Association says that we should have no less than two months of regular general fund operating revenues. So for us, that would be about 17%. So why we should think about adjusting the way we look at our reserves. Our current policy sets one reserve level and that one number is doing four different jobs. The same figure has to cover monthly cashflow, a decline in property values, unbudgeted emergencies and multi-year revenue leveling. Those are all different types of risks and they shouldn't really share a single line because their purpose is different things. The current policy does not state how we may spend reserves, for what purpose, how quickly, or what the district must do if the balance falls below the threshold. A community-funded district carries the risk that state-funded districts do not. We should delineate what our reserves are for as opposed to pooling them all together. we should think about our minimum reserve. So the minimum reserve for economic uncertainties, the state requires for every district calculated a budgeted option and updated at every interim report. The state suggests 3% for an LCFF district, but looking at the other entities, they suggest a much higher one. So this would be the basic aid reserve. Protection for the portion of our revenue no one else guarantees, available only after other reserves are exhausted, only for one-time costs and replenished the following year. The portion needed as a basic aid district. So we have our minimum reserve from the state that the state sets, our minimum basic aid reserve. Then we have unassigned or unappropriated In-year working cash for what a budget cannot predict. An emergency, a revenue shortfall, a cost that arrives after adoption. Not for closing long-term gaps. So this would be, for example, we need to hire two more special ed teachers. We have an overflow of students at one school, because remember, budget adoption, we do most of the work in April, May. So by the time we come to school in September, October, things have changed. Quite a bit over the summer, so this would be our unassigned unappropriated where we use this to kind of cover those fluctuations. And contingency reserve held in a separate fund built deliberately in good years and released only by board action so that students receive does not depend on what year they enroll. So each component has its own purpose its rules for use and its own replenishment expectation. So the guidelines we should consider, measured as one total, the four components are added together as a total fiscal reserve and measured against the total general fund spending. So there's a single number the public can follow. Then going below that takes a board vote. Following under the threshold requires a board resolution so it's intentional. So it's not something that we just walk into accidentally. I don't think we would do that, but this formalizes it. A limit on how fast. No more than a set share of total reserves may be used in any single year without separate board authorization and a required road back. If reserves fall below the threshold, staff must bring the board a restoration plan by the next required financial report. Our reserve isn't a budget solution. A reserve policy is a guardrail. Reserves are one-time money. Spending them on ongoing costs moves the problem into the next fiscal year and makes it larger. We are spending more than we take in. Our 26-27 adopted budget projects 122 million in revenue against roughly 131 million in spending. Our reserves only make sure that we can pay our bills as we plan. We're stable today, but not stable long term. And the reserves is what gives us the time to fix that on our own terms. So staff recommend presenting our reserves in a format that illustrates what the different components of a reserve are for. Staff also recommends that the board consider updating the reserve policy to address the four different needs and specifically how reserves are spent and recovered. Any questions?

Thank you. Trustee Lambert. So last board meeting, we presented the reserve level at roughly $63 million, I think. I don't recall. Yeah, whatever. It doesn't matter. Whatever the number is, not important. At least that number. So then you mentioned during the year reserves need to be withdrawn to pay certain expenses. How low does the reserves actually go during the year?

We could pull, we have a cash projection that we do every year. So month by month, we're looking at where's the cash. So offhand, I don't know month by month, but we do have a cash projection. Thankfully, we've never had to, in the recent memory, go out for a trans. So we have a cash projection. Yeah, information I can bring back.

Okay. So we really, it doesn't change, you mean?

It does change.

Does it go down to $55 million or $40 million?

So when we budget for the year, we have the total that we're expecting from local property taxes. That's baked into the budget. We get paid twice a year, so we kind of refill our coffers, and then we wind it down, refill again. So there are points that cash in the bank is lower than that reserve percent. but we count it because we know the money is coming. But we can give you, I can bring back a report to show you how much cash is actually in the bank month by month.

Okay, so I just let them understand this. So the reserves is not just a separate pool of money. It's the reserves is our ongoing money we have in hand.

So there is a chunk of money that we have-

Your chart 11.

Yes. So there is a chunk of money that we have on hand that is literally in the bank.

Yeah.

That number is going to fluctuate because we're using it to pay bills.

We pay it out.

And then we have money that comes in twice a year.

And the reserves are...

So it's like you're getting a paycheck two times a year as opposed to every month.

Can I try to help?

You want to try it?

I can try.

Do you want to go somewhere? I mean, I'll try it again.

You're talking about the things that impact the level. I think it is that like month to month cash, but maybe separated by sort of in whole terms, like what's the savings account and what's the like checking account to be spent? Like how much do we dip into savings along the way to pay?

So one way of seeing that might be a projection of what, although I don't see it, we don't see it, but the reserve level over the course of the year goes down and up in reality.

Yes.

Right from month to month.

If we're talking, yes. Cash in the bank changes.

Right.

Month to month.

So is that... The checking account, right? Sure. And that goes up and you call that in this one snapshot in time, which in my checking account, I call the balance in on September 15th. Yep. You call the reserves.

I don't want to make this more complicated.

So when we calculate the savings account.

We have cash, so we always know how much cash we have. But that's not the same as your reserves. Because when we look at our whole year, we have cash that we are anticipating getting, and we're going to count that cash, which then goes into the reserve percentage. So at budget adoption, we say our reserve level is going to be X. We are expecting the money to come in. That reserve percent does not, it just assumes we get all the money.

Maybe one way of looking at it is we spend $9 to $9.5 million a month, right? Over 12 months, that's going to be $120 some odd million, right? There is a reserve amount, a percentage of our existing reserve that is there that allows us not to have to take out trans.

Correct.

Right? Yes.

Are you asking what is that amount?

No, but I'm just thinking that's a percentage of that reserve, right? So if you do nine, if we get it twice a month, then there's, I know it's not broken evenly because it's April, December, right? But if it's a six month, that's $50 million, right?

Is it also feasible to say just a percentage of our budget? So if 17% is two months payout, any one month, we're paying out, what, 8.5% of our annual budget. And we've been trying to maintain a reserve level. I think right now it's around 36% is the current reserve level. And so at some points, what is in that bank account will drop down below 36% and maybe as low as, that's the question. Where does it drop down to?

So we also have cash in other areas that we access that are restricted sources, but we borrow. So in the beginning of the year, or I can't remember, beginning or end of the year, you give us authorization to borrow from other funds. So we don't actually have the cash in the bank to make payroll the whole time. We're also borrowing from other funds.

So there are even points in the year when we might not have a full 8.5%. in the bank, but we are borrowing against other funds. Correct. But we would still say our reserve level is at 36% because it's an overall annual projection based on revenues. Yes. Okay. Thank you.

Can you clarify questions further? I had a couple. I guess the big one is When you're planning on like sizing these tiers of usage, are you going to individually size them for what you need and then our total reserve level you expect to be the sum of all those? Or is it going to be we start from a sum and then we break it down into those?

My recommendation is we look at each four separate components that then add to that number.

So we might end up with something that isn't our 17 to 20% range that we currently have because we'll have derived it and kind of work through that. What area would like a pension contribution increase go or like if state law changes, right? Like I think folks have talked about community funded districts getting different shares and what would that, where would we kind of put that into our tiers?

Maybe help me understand what you said when pensions change.

If we have to do more contributions, right? I think we've done that in prior years where we have a higher responsibility.

So if CalSTRS or CalPERS changes their rates, it comes out of our general fund.

Yeah, we're in our reserve. Would we want to bolster for that, right? This is something in the future, yeah.

I think a lot of districts probably ask that question of how much do we need to guard against

I'm more like thinking which of the kind of breakdown of components would we want to bucket that into, right? I don't expect any numbers tonight of what the appropriate amount is because I think you have to do a lot more study on that.

Right. I think what I'm hearing is what are the, as we decide on, as the board decides on an amount, what are the what are the sensitivities that are going to play into that amount, right? And it sounds like it doesn't need an answer now, but that would be something we'd want to discuss.

Yeah, sorry, two seconds to think about it. I think if there was a large increase to STRs and PERS, I don't believe LCFF districts can handle it. They are already very, very tight. So I would anticipate that that would also come along with a bump in their allocation per student, just like they're seeing for TK. We are not receiving any extra funding for TK, but the LCFF districts are receiving additional funding. Um, so it would probably be in that basic aid reserve, um, portion of it, because that's a cost that we're absorbing because we are a basic aid school district. Um, we also see this with, uh, so we see with TK, we see it with. Yes, with the pregnancy leave, because all the other all districts got a super Cola. Um, and we're, we're not getting anything.

And so that kind of helps us bridge to when we built a sustainable way to manage these programs. Okay, great.

Thank you. Questions.

I'll now open public comment on this item. Any member of the public in person person wishing to speak, please turn in a speaker card. And if you're online, please use the raise hand function. I'll wait to see how many speakers we have before allocating time. one member online and one person in public, so I will allocate three minutes. In person, I'll start. Mr. Nelson, you have three minutes.

Thank you, President. This is a plus, plus, plus excellent summary, particularly the commercial versus residential, and I'll send some, which I've never seen explained anywhere near as well as that. I'll send a What I think is confusing about the way this district has always done its reserves since I have been here is the state says your reserves are how much there's left in the general fund at the end of the year. plus how much you have in one of their SACS designated fund numbers that says something like Fund for Economic Emergency or Fund for Economic Reserves. That I've been trying, if you ever read my emails, to get the CBO to actually move some funds from the general fund into that separate SACS fund. Minimum, it should be the 3%. Maybe it should be the 6% for the basic aid. Maybe it should be the 17%. But one of the reasons in our previous CBO Dr. Clark listened to what particularly our three new trustees said the reserves were getting out of hand. There was so much money left over at the end that it wasn't available for spending on learning. We were holding much more than ever needed to be held and we were holding it because we had a previous banker as our superintendent, which was, You would have gone crazy if you'd had to borrow money to get through the payroll. But we have other funds that we can adjust. You could even have a lower number for this special fund. And I'm gonna submit something for a discussion, actually a discussion and action item for you guys to have a resolution to move 3% of your budget into this special fund next month or the month after that. And then you'll have that 3% put away. If you want to increase it to 6% or 17%, great. And then you'll have at least two places, the leftover in the general fund or a designated fund for fiscal reserves. I don't know why, Our current CBO hasn't listened to that suggestion, but I'm glad it's part of this package and it can easily be implemented with a resolution from you because it's public policy. And you said we don't want to keep extra money with the county treasurer. We want to spend it on learning in a responsible way.

Thank you, Mr. Nelson. I'll now go to our online speaker. Ms. Goode, you have three minutes.

Thanks. I wanted to say I certainly agree that having healthy reserves are important. And I like the idea that we would be separating it out into categories, that we have an understanding of what is allocated to what. And conceivably that there could be one category that would account for the challenging historical ability to effectively project what the actual budget will wind up being. that there could be a category that would have some level of flexibility built in for the idea that it is there for a year that turns out better or worse than what may be realistically predicted. I'm highly disappointed by the fact that the district continues to present data that they know is not accurate. from last board meeting where they presented that there's already a knowledge that there's $5.2 million additional of revenue is known, but we still quote the $122 million instead of what should be $127 million. So by continually projecting data that underestimates revenue and overestimates expenses, we're not having an accurate idea of what our reserves will actually be year by year. So I recognize that there will be an interim budget that is presented that will have different numbers. But when we already know that the numbers that we're presenting are wrong, that should be a part of the discussion. Thank you.

Thank you. That's good. All right. Now we'll return to the board for discussion.

Christopher McConkey I was just gonna ask, would you like to bring up the slide where you're looking for direction from the board. Christopher McConkey Because right now there's a recommendation. I'm assuming you want direction from the board regarding the recommendation. Yes. Thank you. I agree with the recommendation to present the reserves in a format illustrating the different components of what the reserves are for. And I also am open to updating our reserve policy. I'm wondering if that is in part for discussion and then going to the policy committee and then coming back to the board. I don't know what the process for that would be.

That, hmm. That one's, this is probably when we would talk about it. I would think at, I'll look to the policy committee, but at the board level, right? But this is something other than a typical update. I don't know. Is there?

I'm open, but. I assume there's some lead work you would want to do for... putting together what these things should be, and then like the policy committee hammers out the language and how it actually gets executed?

Yeah, so I would think in broad terms, we first want, if the board would like to go in this direction of having four different categories, right, I would think next step would be that we would bring back some recommendation of what the levels would be in each of those, and the 3% is pretty straightforward, but the other three categories, because there'll be some discussion, no doubt, on on what the percentage level should be at each of those. And when Rebecca brings it forward, well, there'll be rationale for each that then you can discuss and push back and forth.

I'll just finish off that point real quick and then pass it off to Trustee Henry. I think when that comes back to us, it would be very helpful if there are examples from other districts that have done something similar. So we're not just kind of, you know, in the dark. And I also think at some point, my long-term anticipation is that I have seen districts where reserves have been considered restricted in one becomes a very contentious negotiations issue as well. And so I'm wary of that pathway. And so trying to figure out how we do this that allows for healthy contract negotiations as well.

Vice President Hendridge?

Yeah, the flow question, I like that suggestion of bringing back the substantive discussion of what the components would be so that the board can discuss and land on consensus of what that would look like. And then if the board would like the policy committee to take a look at it from a sense of what staff drafts, if to make kind of make sure that fits with the understanding, you know, fits with the board direction. It's up to my colleagues of whether you want to send it in that flow, but then to kind of come back with a, just to have that opportunity to important board discussion, look at the actual language separately, maybe once it's proposed, bring it back again, just as a proposed flow.

Mr Lambert.

Yeah, I'd also like to see how restricted and non-restricted funds are folded into this.

This would be all unrestricted. Reserve levels are calculated only on the unrestricted funds because you can't use restricted funding to cover shortfalls.

Okay, fair enough.

I think one thing that I think probably having just from policy committee seeing the language that we have in there, I think the other bit that is that probably we would want to see is what kind of our rules we have for use, what actions the board would have to take, I think, which touches a little bit on your Your kind of restricted this and also like what how replenishment would go right because I think those those are in our policy right now but it's left understated and so some sense of what we would what that would look like for different types of events, I think, is helpful for us to make deliberate thoughtful decisions about how we use this.

Sure. You can find an example of this from Santa Clara Unified, speaking with their CBO the other day, and I think they may have made some recent changes, but the concept is very, very similar. Basic aid districts across the state have all different reserve levels. I mean, you can tell from the four different agencies that we took information from. Because every district is so different, you look at us, we are 50-50 between commercial and residential. Our volatility is very different than Los Altos, for example. So there is not one, I have not found one guiding, this is how you should do it. So it's a little bit more complex, but Santa Clara Unified has one, and I can pull some other ones where they separate out how they show their reserve level instead of one big chunk.

And if I could just comment, just because based on a couple of comments, the revenue, yes, is different than we're talking about, right? It's going to change. The expense is different also, right? So we have to choose points in time and the interim points in time are where we use for those measuring sticks. They're always different, right? And I can promise you the budget will always be not exactly 100% accurate because we can't tell you which kids are gonna show up and what needs they're gonna have, and that's how we choose to spend, or not choose to spend, but are tasked and need to spend. The other is continuing to think about, because I think it's what has led us to this place, right? That fantastic property growth over many years, kind of masked, is that We need to be, and I know you know this, but I'm going to say it out loud because I don't think we can say it enough, is that we want to match ongoing expenses to ongoing revenue sources, right? And recognize that reserves are one-time monies, right? And we don't want to be spending those on ongoing expenses. We may choose to spend it on five years of an ongoing expense, but we want to have in mind exactly what we're going to spend for how long so that we're willing to make the decision that, no, we said five years. And now we're going to stop this. Or we're going to choose to keep funding it. But making those conscious choices and not just making decisions to spend on ongoing costs without having it match ongoing revenue is just really important.

Trustee Hahn?

If it's at all possible, and I want to be respectful of your time to just include the links to those district sources in a board update or something, because I think if we wait for the agenda item to come again. Granted we get our agendas out on Friday, which is great, but that's not a lot of time to kind of dig in and and really pour over things and that would give us some more thought time to have that ahead of time.

I think. One other minor added benefit of having this policy constructed this way is I think it'll, if I remember the budget forms, there is a place where we have to describe why we're holding reserves. And I think this will help more clearly elaborate on that for the people that review our budget and helps us communicate that publicly what we're doing this all for. Yeah.

I think stating the obvious that under this format, where we have an understanding of the variety of categories, we're in a time right now that we would choose, right, this economic time, we would choose to spend down our reserves to a certain level with board action, but then also have a plan to replenish it, right? And I think that's the It's kind of the difference that we're looking to achieve here to just leave us in a long-term stable financial situation.

All right. Any further discussion? I think you have the direction you need. So with that, we'll now move to board updates. Trustee Connolly?

Yes, so I went to, on the 12th, the Santa Clara County School Boards Association had its fall reception and brought in the CEO and Executive Director of the California School Boards Association, Vernon Billy, for a discussion with trustees. There were trustees from 30 different districts in the county, which was great. And frankly, the discussion was fascinating because he has been working in education for over 30 years. And so I highly recommend if you're able to go to any of the county association events coming up, there's going to be a fall dinner in a few weeks that you go. Let's see, the fall dinner is Wednesday the 23rd. Oh, is that correct? No, that's the evening meeting. That's the evening meeting. The County Association evening meeting is Wednesday the 23rd. That one's on Zoom. But the fall dinner is actually the 14th of October. It's the same evening as the League of Women Voters candidate forum. So Bill and I will not be attending the fall dinner, I assume. But just to have so many different perspectives and experience brought in for discussion is incredibly helpful. And then I had a question. Actually, we have a trustee engagement calendar that has a parent town hall listed on September 24th, which is a Thursday. What is the parent town hall?

town hall for um that doctor uh that director salvaggio is holding for our parents of students with disabilities ah okay is it possible to include that information somewhere in the calendar um that's great to know thank you any further updates all right now move on to future items for future agendas uh anyone post topics for the future agenda

I was just going to flag that I think that there are some policies that we did on for first reading in June that haven't come back yet for second reading. So to make sure those come back for second reading. And then also just under this item last year, we had a link to the governance calendar and it was nice to be able to find it there. I have it downloaded on my computer and a paper copy in legal size, but it was helpful to find it there.

There's a public comment on items for future agendas. Wishing to speak. Anyone online use the raise hand function. Seeing only one member of the public in person. Well, three minutes.

Yes, this is particular to board president and the secretary of the board. There was 15 minutes, 14 or 15 minutes, I documented it in the letter I sent, email I sent to you, of where you discussed having the board updating its governance calendar. And the superintendent at that time says, I'll have a draft, I'll have those things you were talking about, and I'll do it. And he hasn't. And so this agenda did not have a governance calendar item. The previous agenda did not have a governance calendar item. And it does make a difference to us, which is why I'm going to moan and groan and complain to you every single meeting until you start doing it. And the reason, Charles, is questions that get asked, when is this thing coming up? And the superintendent tells the trustee, oh, by the way, next meeting is going to be the statutory, or is it the statutory required first interim? And what else is going to be there? We don't know in the public and the trustees don't know, unless you happen to have talked to the superintendent and he's told you personally, that is not the way to run good governance. According to the California School Boards Association, better governance workshops. And that is not what you guys said you were gonna do after you spent 14 minutes talking about it in your special meeting. that you had. That is not what the Secretary of the Board promised he was going to do with this institution. And I'm saying this institution is just you guys, the elected people. This is meant to be the board's governance calendar. It lets the board know what's happening. It lets the board know if Devin asked for something to be put on there and there was a rigmarole and essentially dental agreement, it will go on that governance calendar and she'll know she's going to get the update on the lottery in this month. It doesn't have to be the particular day or what day, but at least it'll be on this month. So I support Devin on trying to get this thing done on there, but your secretary isn't doing what you asked him to do, and he isn't doing what he said he was going to do. And it really does affect the community interaction with what's going on, because we don't know when what's going to come up. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Nelson. We will now move to future board meeting dates. Texas regular meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, October 7, 2026. Additional upcoming meetings include October 22, November 5, and November 19, 2026. Any further business?

I apologize. I should have mentioned this earlier. We have lost two trustees in our county in the last couple of months, Renee Lowe and also a trustee with the Cambrian School District. And so I'm hopeful that maybe we can have a recognition of them at a future meeting.

Yeah, I think so.

Thank you.

All right.