San Francisco Unified School District Board - Regular Meeting

The regular meeting of the Board of Education for May 26, 2026 is now called to order at 504 PM. Roll call please.

Commissioner Alexander. Commissioner Fisher. Here. Commissioner Gupta. Vice President healing here, Commissioner Ray here. Commissioner Weissman Ward here, President Kim.

yeah. Okay, so if you see will provide childcare I just turn them all off yeah. Power. SFUSD will provide child care for regular board meetings and monitoring meetings on the first floor in the Enrollment Center at 555 Franklin Street from 630 to 9 PM, or the close of the meeting, whichever comes first. Child care is for families who will be attending the regular monitoring board meetings. Space is limited and will be provided on a first-come, first-served basis for children ages 4 to 10. For questions, please contact the Board of Education office at 415-241-6427. Or board office at at this time, before the board goes into closed session, I call for any speakers on the closed session items listed in the agenda. There will be a total of 5 minutes for speakers. Are there any speakers for a comment? No speakers and now recess meeting at 506 PM.

Biased Congress. They do not know our students, our district, or our community, and they continue to allow the federal government to fail to adequately fund public schools, especially special education programs nationwide, because they do not understand the needs of students or actually care about them. Please make sure to use every resource at your disposal, such as the expertise of our LGBTQ student liaison, Kenna Hazelwood, and content area experts to fight for our students. They need you to stand strong for them. Please don't fail them. I'd also like to comment about the disorder in HR regarding hiring, appointments to new positions, and voluntary transfers. Please remember that when people are unsure about their jobs, they leave. And I'm aware of a lot of people awaiting confirmation of their positions for next year's spots. I want vacancies filled for the start of next year, not to lose people to uncertainty. Thank you.

Thank you, President Kim. That concludes online public comment.

Thank you to members of the public for joining us tonight to share your experiences and perspectives. As a reminder, board rules in California law do not allow us to respond to comments or attempt to answer questions during public comment time, but we appreciate you being with us here today, both in person and virtually. The superintendent and her team are tasked with providing a draft of each agenda 12 days in advance for board members to review. Once that draft agenda is made public on our website, Board members have made a commitment to submit clarifying and tactical questions and staff have made a commitment to respond to those questions in advance of each board meeting. The Q&A doc is linked into each board agenda on board docs. We invite the public to review those answers alongside our discussions today. Additionally, to create more space to focus on student outcomes, we will be moving most of our items to consent and identifying only our highest priority agenda items to discuss. Board members are reminded not to restate questions answered by staff in advance, but instead to bring forward strategic questions that allow us to better understand our progress towards our goals and the underlying strategies so we can be better informed in our decision making and partner with the superintendent as we hold her accountable. um. Do we have a readout available for a closed session?

I'm happy to read it out on your behalf.

Thank you.

In closed session, the board authorized to special education matters to. settle with a unanimous vote of seven to zero, that was all the action that was taken in closed session.

Thank you very much. Moving. yeah nope. yeah okay moving to item E advisory committee reports and appointments district English learner advisory committee presentation I'll pass it over to Dr. Hsu.

Thank you, President Kim and it is my honor to invite our amazing DLAC volunteers and chairperson Ana Velez and the crew to come up to the dais and share your presentation. Oh, okay. I'll hand this over to you then.

Great.

Thanks. I thought.

Okay. Good evening commissioners and superintendent. Um, my name is Johnson. I have the pleasure of working with and for multilingual families and the students of our district as delays on to the district English letter advisor committee. Next slide. I want to recognize the parent leaders who are here today, Jeff, Myrna, Edith, and Anna. They will speak on behalf of our more than 12,000 multilingual learner students and their families in our school district. These parents are partners in the work and serve as leaders of their site ELACs and SSCs. Next slide. For the second year, DLAC in partnership with College and Career Readiness CCR has implemented the DLAC Youth Leadership Program to center DLAC's work for youth with youth voice. Tonight we have Kaitlyn, Jason, and Carolina with us, and they will share their experiences and student perspectives. Next slide. I also want to take a quick moment to highlight that for the third year, DLAC in partnership with other SFUSD parent advisory groups and CBO partners hosted the annual winter and summer literacy, math and science fairs. These events include hands-on activities, family workshops, and at-home learning resources. Organizing these fairs was one of DLAC's recommendations from last year and previous years. Additional recommendations and progress updates can be found in Appendix 17, slide 17, where you can learn more. Next slide. Before we get to the recommendations for next school year, I want to briefly share how DLAC developed these recommendations. The DLAC needs assessment is co-designed by each fall by the DLAC board and youth leaders. This year we gathered input from multilingual families and students, as well as cite ELACs during DLAC general meetings. In addition to providing feedback on the DLAC community survey and reviewing survey results and data, youth leaders conducted empathy interviews with multilingual learner students at their schools to help center student voice in DLAC recommendations. Next slide. And this process resulted in three recommendations for next school year effective instruction for multilingual learners school culture and sense of belonging and authentic family partnership. For each of recommendation, you will see which district goals that the like recommendations align with as well as the metrics the lack will monitor to track changes in student outcomes now let us hear from our dealer parents and students.

Good evening, Commissioners and Superintendent. Recommendation 1 is effective instruction for multilingual learners. We've been here before. By that, I mean the recommendation. And our recommendation is not necessarily new, but a natural evolution of prior year's recommendation. Since we are advocating for effective email instruction, I want to tell you a story. A young 12-year-old kid landed in the USA not knowing a word of English. In fact, he didn't even know how the alphabet or how it sounds. Yet he was placed in seventh grade due to his age and was told he has to catch up to seventh grade reading and writing level ASAP. Don't worry, there's happy ending here. Facing the seemingly insurmountable uphill battle, this kid carried an English to Chinese translation dictionary to school every day and used it for everything. He stayed up late past midnight learning English for four months straight. Homework that took him only mere hours for native speaker would take him four hours or more at times. But he persisted and would not stop until he finished his work. Seeing how hard his kid tried to catch up, his ESL teacher began checking in with the student constantly, asked if he had questions, taking a few minutes after class every day to help him understand whatever he is struggling on. She also identified this kid's interests and added relatable English material to help spark and strengthen his English further. Surely it was intense and difficult and a lot of things happened during this time. However, in the interest of time, I'll jump to the end of this tale. He was reclassified six months later and chosen as one of the ESL students of the year from that particular school site. now what that teacher did was targeted and differentiated instruction even though it was only a few minutes after class and a slight addition of instructional material based on interests but it was enough to make a monumental difference for this kid now imagine having it at a larger scale and at all the sites i can assure you that the ml success you seek can come true In short, targeted and differentiated instruction is the mean and the effective instruction is the end result. Effective instruction, if achieved, can change lives. And I urge the board and the superintendent to help make it a reality ASAP. Oh, and that 12 year old kid, you're looking at him. Now, I'm going to pass it on to one of the student leaders, Carolina.

Hi, my name is Carolina Cornejo and I'm a junior at Balboa High School and this year I served as a DLAC youth leader. I've been a multilingual learner my entire academic career and I've seen the in and outs of multilingual students. I am a reclassified multilingual learner and I speak Spanish as well. um in my eighth grade math class there was an influx of multilingual specifically spanish speaking students who were in my class and left unsupported the teacher was not supportive of the multilingual students in my class and told them they should learn english because they will have to learn the language anyways so she basically left them to conform to what was given to them From that experience, I realized that the district needs to provide more training to support teachers, especially in content classes like math, considering that math can be a rigorous subject for many, including native English speakers. and build a more welcoming environment and culture for newcomer students. Additionally, I've tutored a handful of students throughout the past three years in Spanish for mathematics. That would be Geometry, Algebra II, and sometimes Calculus AB. And each of their experiences, I was told, were not nurturing experiences for them, which leads them to be unmotivated and deprived of learning the proper content necessary to succeed. Because of my experience, this recommendation is extremely important since it allows for instruction inside a classroom to be transformed into an experience that students will feel inspired to grow from. Long-term learning begins in an impactful classroom, so in order to make that possible, there has to be an environment that strives for effective teaching methods. Thank you. For recommendation two, Edith will now share her story.

Good afternoon, Commissioner, Superintendent, Dr. Su. My name is Edith Vazquez. I am the mother of two children in the Leonard Flynn Primary School. I am serving at the DILAC table. I arrived at the Flynn School by recommendation when my daughter started school. The educational system of this country was new to me. y me involucré poco a poco a través de reuniones de padres. Supe del comité de ILA y que la mejor manera de apoyar a mi hija en ese momento era estar informada y formar parte del comité era la mejor opción. He estado participando como madre activa en el ILA por más de cinco años. Actualmente soy vicepresidenta del comité. El apoyo que FLIN proporciona a las familias para que participen en liderazgo escolar nos da sentido de pertenencia. Podemos ser parte de la comunidad escolar sin temor. Mi experiencia con el personal docente es que la diferencia de idiomas no es una barrera para la comunicación efectiva. Me siento apoyada, respetada, conectada y bienvenida. La escuela provee los recursos necesarios a mis hijos, por lo cual ellos se sienten apoyados como estudiantes del idioma inglés. Leonard Flynn demuestra un compromiso un fuerte y positivo en cuanto a la comunicación en una atmósfera de respeto y compromiso hacia los estudiantes y sus familias. Por eso, este motivo presentamos la recomendación número dos. para que todas las escuelas del distrito escolar incluyan un sistema de inclusión para todos los estudiantes multilingües. De esa manera, podrán tener el apoyo y los recursos necesarios para el éxito académico. Muchas gracias.

Good evening, Commissioners and Superintendent Dr. Hsu. My name is Edith Vazquez, and I am the mother of two children, Adelaine Erflin learner plan elementary school and i'm currently serving as a dialect board member i came to the i came to flint through a recommendation when my daughter started school the educational system in this country was new to me and i gradually became involved through parent meetings this is when i've learned about the ELEC committee and realized that the best way to support my daughter at this time was to stay informed and become part of ELEC. I have been participating as an active parent in ELEC for more than five years. I am currently serving as the vice president at Flint's ELEC. The support that Flint provides to families to participate in school leadership gives us a sense of belonging. We are able to be part of the school community without fear. My experience with the teaching staff is that language differences are not a barrier to effective communication. I feel supported, respected, connected, and welcome. The school provides the necessary resources for my children, which helps them feel supported as English learner students. Leonard Flynn demonstrates a strong and positive commitment to communication with families in an atmosphere of respect and dedication towards students and their families. For this reason, we present recommendation number two, that all the schools within the district implement an inclusive system for all multilingual students. In this way, they will have the support and resources necessary for their academic success. Thank you.

Good evening, commissioners.

My name is Jason and I am a senior at Mission High School. I serve on the DLAC board and I've been attending Mission High School since the 10th grade. I am a multilingual Latino student, son of immigrant parents. I would like to highlight the positive responses I received while conducting my empathy interviews. The peers I interviewed shared they consistently feel supported by teachers and staff. Educators at Mission put tremendous effort into planning cultural events and creating an environment where students would feel seen, heard, and valued. One of the biggest highlights my peers mentioned was our ethnic studies classes here at Mission. These classes have provided a safe space for students to explore their identities and share their personal stories with one another. They mentioned the overwhelming support they received from their peers during these conversations. It creates a sense of belonging and reminds students that their voices do matter and experiences do matter. That kind of environment is enriching and strengthens learning for all students. When our A-G courses and Ethnic Studies classes were being threatened with cuts, many of us became deeply concerned. Students came together to advocate for the programs and educators who made meaningful impact on our lives. Losing these classes would mean losing safe spaces where students can share their stories, learn from one another, and build empathy and understanding across different communities. We're also living in a time of uncertainty, especially for immigrant communities that are increasingly being targeted and attacked. Admission staff and educators work hard to provide safe and welcoming spaces where immigrant students and families feel protected, and most importantly, feel like they belong. The district's continued commitment to sanctuary protections is incredibly significant to many students and families at admission, and that is deeply appreciated. Personally, the vibrant and diverse culture at Mission has made me feel represented and welcome as a Latino student. Mission High actively embraces different cultures through cultural assemblies and events, along with inclusive staff who help organize these events and even individually support students that need extra support. Mission has also provided many English learner students with strong individualized college support through the AVID program, which students share that the support was truly invaluable, as well as the Future Center, which offers college and career resources both in Spanish and in English. These programs support all students in the college application process, which can be intimidating for many and empowers them in their pursuit of higher education. This all creates a meaningful sense of belonging that encourages students to engage in school, participate in class, and feel motivated to attend each day. More importantly, it empowers students to pursue higher education, strive to self-improvement, and use their voices to speak out against injustice, becoming change makers in their own communities. Thank you, Commissioners, for your time and attention. Now, DLAC board member Myrna will share the next recommendation.

Good evening board members, superintendent and community members. My name is Mirna Vasquez. I am the lab board member and a parent at Willie Brown Middle School. I'm here today to speak about the importance of attentive family partnership and straining multilingual learners family engagement. access to information. Through my work with multilingual families, both in my role as a DLAC member and as a CBO partner through Common Advocates supporting families, I have seen how important it is for families to know what is happening in their child's education. When families understand how to support their students, it can greatly impact student learning and educational outcomes. However, this is not always the experience for many of our multilingual families. In order to effectively support families, schools need to build a strong culture to uplift multilingual learning, students and families. Earlier, we heard from Edith and her ELAC experience at Flint Elementary School and from Jason about the welcoming and supportive staff and teachers at Mission High School. Those are great examples of authentic family partnerships, and I want to ensure that in the experience every multilingual parent and student receives. In addition, one thing the district can do is create centralized notification about ELPAC, testing days along with multilingual guidance, screening the purpose of the test, preparation tips, and how the results support students' learning. The strongly family-school partnership helps students succeed. When families are informed, included, and able to communicate effectively, our students, schools, and community all benefit and benefit. Thank you. Now we would like to hear from Kaylee, one of our DLAC students. She's feeling unwell today, and instead we are going to play her voice.

Hi, my name is Kaitlin Lee, and I'm currently a senior at Lowell High School and a DLAC youth leader. I am a proud product of an SFUST education as a multilingual learner. From kindergarten to eighth grade, I attended Claire Lilienthal, a Korean immersion school. There, I had the privilege to learn from welcoming and inclusive teachers and families who listened to my struggles and genuinely wanted me to succeed as someone whose first language was Korean. Joining high school, I joined my school's PTSA board, where I currently serve as the executive vice president. During my years serving in this group, I've clearly seen that students, teachers, and families alike want to learn and lead with each other. I, alongside the PTSA community, have helped make school a better place for student welfare and fund beautification efforts. Yet the majority of the school community members don't know how to find such opportunities. Especially for multilingual learners, I've noticed that there is a double standard or an expectation that they will understand English decently and know how to navigate for themselves. Participation of multilingual learners has thus been low in high schools compared to middle schools where smaller groups of advocates have supported more cultural awareness events and language specific communications. My experiences throughout the years have shown me that communication can be effective and inclusion, even with just a small gesture. While high school has presented me with open arms and even more opportunities for giving back to my community, that small step can truly expand access and engagement for all.

Ana Aviles- That speaks to their students' dedication. Hi everybody, my name is Ana Aviles. I am the DLAC chair, and I have two beautiful children. One will be going to James Flick Middle School in sixth grade, and my daughter will be coming to Mission High School as a freshman. And I'm getting closer to the finish line. How exciting. So I'll be closing our presentation today. First, I would like to thank our youth delegate and all the families who are part of this board, those who responded to our surveys, attended DLAC meetings, and participated in their local ELACs. Your voice, time, and commitment to this work is making our work possible. we also appreciate our district staff for responding to our recommendations throughout the school year the DLAC board has continued to review the progress and implementation of these recommendations and we invite district staff to continue providing regular updates during DLAC board meetings as families we want to continue building strong collaborations and accountability to ensure our multilingual learners and their families feel supported informed and empowered throughout their education journey Thank you again to everyone who has participated, listened, and worked alongside us this year. Together, we continue creating stronger opportunities for all of our students and our families.

Thank you very much for your presentation. Similar to last week. I'm just going to quickly share the process that we went through for facilitation from the board's end. So you all aren't surprised. I'll put a 20 minute timer on commissioners. You have 3 minutes to ask your questions. So you do not need to use all 3 minutes, nor does everyone need to ask a question. Please don't take any offense to that. It is our Goal to be as diligent as possible in our facilitation of our meeting. Do we have a commissioner who's ready to start? And we'll do the whip around as we normally as we did last week.

Commissioner Ray?

Commissioner Ray, you can go ahead.

Thanks so much. And thank you all so much for taking the time to be here. I hope that we're going to be able to move forward with incorporating the advisory committees, yours as well as the others, as was suggested at our last meeting with meeting with the superintendent and being able to come up with a plan and so forth moving forward so we can have more practical discussions. um in the meantime i actually had a question uh i've asked most of my questions in the advanced q a but i wanted to follow up on a couple of things uh one thing was the the uh youth the annual needs assessment process that was uh that the dlac youth leaders did and i'm wondering um I understand that you conducted empathy interviews with ml students at your schools and i'm wondering like what. When you did those interviews did you have a kind of a how did you conduct them and did you also ask students about any concerns around like their reading or their math which are two of the major district goals and around any concerns around absenteeism.

um yeah thank you so much for your presentation really appreciate it i wanted to take the opportunity to ask a question about um newcomer programs which the superintendent and I have talked about um a bunch uh one-on-one but I wonder if you might take the opportunity to just briefly share kind of some of the um thinking that's that's going on in terms of strengthening newcomer programs moving forward um the um data shows that over the last five years the data that you all presented shows that there's more um or actually it was in the q a sorry that shows that there's more uh more and more uh lower lower level el students or newcomer basically new english learners um and i think that is reflected by the increase in newcomer students over the last five years and over that period we've also been enrolling fewer and fewer students in newcomer programs so five years ago 85 of our newcomer students were in newcomer programs and now it's only 46 And over that time, we've actually added over 800 newcomer students. So I know this is something the superintendent has been thinking about, but I would love to hear it for the public to hear a little bit about her thoughts on how we can do a better job of ensuring that newcomer students get the support they need so they can meet our academic goals.

Christopher McConkey- Thank you again for your presentation, my question was around so I actually I really appreciated the kind of blue box in the presentation around what do you like is monitoring. Christopher McConkey- Because it helps me just kind of attach some some numbers and data grounded in our outcomes to this work. Christopher McConkey- For recommendation one, maybe this is more of a question for the superintendent or Jansen the. Christopher McConkey- we're seeing a decrease. in proficiency. We're seeing a decrease in the percentage of ELs making progress. We're seeing a decrease in LTLs making progress. Not great to see. And my question, I think, is I know that there's recommendations around increasing engagement, making goal 1.3 a clear priority. Are there specific additional resources that we need to be considering looking out for, thinking about looking into? Sorry if I stole your question. That helps to address kind of the declining achievement that we see. It is both concerning and I'm curious both what is driving that and what is kind of our solution for that. The second question I had is building off of Commissioner Alexander's question about newcomers. There was a question I had around just how do families know of the options that are available to them? And how and what those options do to support their specific child. Given the myriad of programs we heard from Korean immersion program we've heard from Spanish bilingual program today. So I think this is somewhat related to kind of student placement, but it is a lot and i'm curious what we do to kind of like diagnose that and support families in their decision making around program access.

Thank you. Just adding on to President Kim's question, I also think, so first of all, thank you all for being here. Thank you for the information. Thank you for all the work that you all put into supporting D. Lack. We are grateful for it, and I think my questions are also going to be geared towards Superintendent and staff, because you all have made clear what your recommendations are. So just following up on President Kim's question about this downward trend. Um, resources, but also are there any specific course corrections that are being made, which may include resources, but may include something else separate from from sort of specific, maybe monetary monetary resources. um the second question has to do with measuring the coaching impact seems like staff agreed to provide more consistent coaching to reduce site variability and I'm wondering how how does the district measure whether the monthly eld training for instructional coaches is successful is successfully translating into these improved classroom practices

Thank you again. I'm echoing commissioner Weissman ward in my gratitude and directing my questions to the superintendent. Um, just actually building on. On commissioner Weissman words last question specifically if staff responses attribute the wider. Michael Meitner- ELPI drops to an influx of level one novice ELs. What concrete shifts are being made in those instructional coaching cycles? So in addition to how is this being measured, Michael Meitner- what shifts are being made this spring to ensure our educators are equipped to move these specific students towards English proficiency? And then the second question I had was regarding Guardrail 2.1. Guardrail 2.1 tasks the district with reducing chronic absenteeism to 20%. However, from this data and this report, if nearly 4 out of 10 of our long-term English learners around thirty eight percent are chronically absent, and we know belonging drives attendance. What precise data tracked interventions are being deployed right now for Ltl population around grade six through twelve? And how will site leadership be held accountable for targeting these students prior to the start of the twenty six, twenty seven school year? Thank you.

Thank you all for being here and all of the amazing feedback loved hearing the bright spots go mission bears, by the way. So excited to hear about all the great things happening at mission in particular. My questions again. I will to the superintendent. My questions are very similar to many of my colleagues here more from the standpoint of resources than anything else. A couple of the things that stood out to me is, as many of my colleagues have mentioned, chronic absenteeism, curriculum access, I saw something in there about the HMH in the question and answer document provided by staff that there were rollout issues with the HMH ED curriculum, parent view, Is, um, a continued area of access and request for our families. Um, and so I think it's my real follow up question around the curriculum is okay. There were rollout issues this year. What are we doing to course? Correct? To, um, Commissioner Westman Ward's point. Um, in parent view again, saying that. Something is too expensive to do while I do. respect that we need to find cost-effective ways to do things. Just saying that we're not going to provide families with the interfaces that they want because they're too expensive, I find that lacking as an answer. So I'm hoping that We might think if if the parent view option is too expensive, what are other ways? What are bridges that we can build that would maybe not be as expansive as rebuilding parent view? And then I really, really appreciated the targeted and differentiated instruction story, thank you for sharing you know just how a few minutes a day can make such a large difference to our students that was such a great success story to hear about so thank you so much. And that's my final question is how do we, how do we expand those targeted differentiated tier two supports. For better access and even stronger sense of belonging and stronger student outcomes.

My follow-up is also about ParentVue and about two-way communication. It's a two-part question, one part for the DLAC about what is the context in which you are requesting a two-way communication system with built-in translation feature? Are you specifically asking that that be like part of parent view because to me that was not necessarily implied um and if what you're what DLAC is really seeking is just a kind of live translation app to communicate with site admins or teachers or other educators that seems to me like something that the district can fulfill outside of parent view because What's up does that for free, for example, and in my multilingual school, and so. I want to clarify from D lack what the request is and also you know from the district about what whether I know we've asked, for example, for curriculum houses to translate entire curricula for us to get. A contract if there's something that we can do, if there is a request related to parent view to encourage them to do that. And I know we've talked about the frustrations of having. Sometimes not enough ongoing funds, but having many 1 time funds, it does actually seem like updating our technology to better serve our communities and help serve students is 1 of those things. So just wondering if there's any, um. exploration um from perhaps DT or the appropriate folks about how we can invest in helping all families support their learners student delegates okay hi thank you um my name is June and thank you so much for your presentation I'm always very nice to hear from the committees and um

Yeah, I heard Caitlin on the speakerphone. Caitlin's actually one of my very close friends. We do debate together, so it's very nice to see her involved in this type of thing. And thank you so much for sharing your personal stories. It really helped to visualize things and see things. Mission High School is popping off with these events. I'm like, wow, you guys are so cool. You guys have so many things. Um, and that goes into my 1st question is, um, I just wanted to hear a little bit about, like, either from the students or from, like, site leaders or, like, um. Whatever you've heard from from, like, surveys, like, who is responsible for, um. that sense of belonging at each school site like organizing the cultural assemblies and the events because i go to lowell i'm a senior at lowell and part of student government and like at low this like our student government and student groups like student cultural groups or like the world language department would be in charge of it but it's not entirely on the teachers to plan all that i feel like it's more like student focused at lowell um we host a lot like club fairs like culture affairs like showcases um at like night and like musicals and things like that so i just want to hear Um, like, what it's like at other schools, and if there's a way to, like. Not standardized it, but find a way that. Works for each school site that still ensures, like, a sense of belonging at every school, um, in their own unique way. And then my 2nd question was very similar to, um, commissioner officials and vice president hearings question about, um, the alternatives to parent viewer, like, adding something along to parent view. essentially like what is like two-way communication is very important and i was looking through like recommendation tracker at the end of the slideshow and wow you guys have been very busy very very cool a lot of things are like completed and ongoing and there's very few things that are like not started and things like that but i noticed that like the synergy thing um Like, it says, like, the synergy mobile app and the web browser can be, like, set to the parents preferred language, but that seems to only be for, um, documents and, like, big announcements and not essentially things like homework assignments and things like that. And, um, vice president hearing mentioned, like, WhatsApp and teachers communicating part of it. And I'm wondering if that's like. Like, the teachers communicating, it's like, part of, like, the professional development aspect or it's like. Um, it falls upon, I don't know, like, anyone else or, like, any other. avenues that we can investigate and explore further yeah thank you

Hi, so I'm Melanie. I actually used to go to Mission. I know Jason right there. And yeah, I mean, Mission's always had that sense of community. And it's just like I've always, when I went to Mission, I always felt like everybody had somewhere they belonged. And that is really important for a lot of especially non-native English speakers. Because I do see that. And I see what you guys are doing is really important. Because it does... have that effect on a lot of teachers and students in general. I just really much just wanted to know what in depth like what that coaching and cross sides would look like and what's the progress within that and just like the resources that we need to make sure so teachers and students will support it halfway and just to make sure that this does go in effect and that we can provide the most that we can because I do know that this is really important. This is not only something that's happening at high schools. This is also happening at middle schools and it starts in elementary schools. So it's like this support shouldn't only be applied in high school. This should also be applied throughout elementary for a lot of students because a lot of students do our newcomers from the age of five so not having that support at home not having that in general from your own parents can be really really hard so having that support in high school and knowing that you can have that and not feeling like i can't go to class because i don't understand what they're saying is really important and it does have a lot of effect on a lot of people including teachers so um I do think this is really important and just wanted to know like what that would look like because I know a lot of schools have different levels of necessities. And I just want to know what that would look like and what resources or what different teaching methods would be taken input so yeah, thank you.

And it has a lot. If you need a moment to kind of process and put your responses together with the superintendent wants us off, but we'll pass it on to you both.

Do you want us, there are some questions that went directly to you like members so maybe you all can answer that particularly around the survey the empathy survey. I think Commissioner Ray was asking specifically what else did you ask in the survey is that correct.

I was trying to trying to get at a sense of whether or not. Whether in asking the questions or expressing answers, students were talking about, uh, their experiences with reading and math and, you know, what would help in that regard and around, uh, chronic absenteeism and what would help with attendance.

yes um we had a question um what was concerning for these students and some students expressed that that their english levels may not be at a level that was one that was a major concern i already gave you whatever it is that you don't have oh baby you're not muted Yeah, so that was a concern. And from there, we also had a lot of questions on, you know, what was making students feel welcome that school? What were things that were working? What things that, you know, were of concern? And that was pretty much our questions. We also, it was a part that they wrote, and then another part that I actually asked them, and then I recorded down the responses as well.

Do you have some sort of I mean like I looked briefly at the attachment there, but is there sort of like a summary or tabulation of the responses. In these regards.

Yes, so our DLAC youth leaders did an amazing job in really trying to bring youth voice and one of the exercises in our DLAC youth leadership program was to do these empathy interviews and The purpose of that was to really understand also was focusing on guardrail to more sense of belonging for high school students. And I think Jason's statement here today really wanted to highlight that sense of belonging. Attendance is driven by sense of belonging. And programs and supportive staff like admission definitely would help our long term English learners, you know, come to school more. And yes, so we do have the link there where you can learn more about each of the interviews and Um, there, uh, you can read about some of the challenges our students are facing in terms of reading what resources are needed. Um, and a lot of that, um, uh, in 1 of the interviews, a student talks about having a peer who understands the struggles they're going through who, um, uh, uh. also didn't have english proficiency when they came to the united states and so those are that some of the things that helped our students come to school is their friends oh i did i'm sorry i did realize my thing was on um um excuse me could i say something

So just in regards to the interview, as Jason already stated, one of the questions was like, what's a concern for you? And the person that I interviewed actually stated that they didn't feel there were concerns with their own absenteeism because they felt like a strong sense of belonging at Galileo High School. That's the person I interviewed. And he said that due to the fact that Galileo has so many systems that are extremely supportive for multilingual learners and different types of cultures that go to that school, he never faced a problem with absenteeism, nor did many of his peers. So therefore, they were able to catch up on their proper English, their proper mathematics, because I know one of the questions he had was in concerns to reading and math, if I'm not mistaken. And that can all be seen through my interview.

Great. I think there's a series of questions regarding both the newcomer program as well as maybe connecting to chronic absenteeism and sense of belonging. I think that as this board and we have talked a lot around, how do we ensure that students feel that they are welcomed, that they belong, that they are cared for, that they are missed when they don't show up at school? Because all of that together will increase not only sense of belonging, but a desire to come to school because there's a caring adult at school. And it connects to what Jeff was talking about of his experience. It actually wasn't a tier two intervention. It was general ed. It was a wonderful teacher who said, I care about you, and I just want to know how you're doing. I see that you're trying really hard every single day, and it's just spending those extra few minutes to connect with a young person. And I think that is the beauty and the power of our educators. and what they do each and every day. We need more of that. So in order for us to really address the chronic absenteeism issue is we need to know where the students are that are not getting engaged on a regular basis. We need to know what type of supports, what's the reason behind them not being able to show up for school every day. Is it because they are caring for a perhaps younger sibling or perhaps a guardian? Is it because they have transportation problems because they're traveling, taking multiple buses? Or is it because there's something else going on in their lives that they just cannot get themselves out of bed? So those are really important questions that we need to do, we need to ask as a community. So this is where we have coordinated care teams in all of our school, particularly middle and high school, where we identify, our staff identifies students who are missing a large number of school days, or minimum three days, um and they come together to figure out what are the strategies is a simple phone call enough perhaps maybe engaging a community partner or having a more in-depth intervention is necessary so those are strategies that we are currently doing Clearly, we need to do more of that. Because we continue to see a very high number of our students not showing up, not coming to school for a variety of reasons. So, uh, in the next school year, we're looking at having, um, a data dashboard, um, that will show us where these. The chronic absenteeism are. and continuing to build capacity within our school community to have more robust coordinated care team conversations. I do want to just speak very quickly around the newcomer work. As many of our community members have shared, and the data is showing, we do see a lot of students entering our school district who would qualify as technical newcomer students. And that's because they are recent immigrants to our country and they speak a different language. Um, over the past several years, what we're seeing is that these families are either choosing a school that maybe not. Designated as a newcomer school, um, or not aware. Of the robust newcomer programs that we have. And so I am working very closely with not only our enrollment Center team, but with the Community i've already started having some conversations with site leaders, as well as Community leaders parents young people. and including some of our labor partners so that we can have a clear understanding of how we can support our newcomer students at the point of entry. So when families and young people come to our doors to ask for help in enrolling their student, we want to make sure that they are fully aware of all the different types of programs we have and not leave it to chance or not leave it to, Well, my neighbor goes here, right? We want to make sure that families and young people know all the different types of services that our newcomer families are entitled to. Wraparound supports, language supports, instruction in language, additional supports from external partners. These are all the things that we provide our newcomer families if they choose to go to a newcomer school. And so we're going to do the really hard work of developing what this newcomer pathway or model could look like. Because what we see now is that over the years, it has eroded. And so we need to do a better job to really think about what would it look like for us to really truly serve our newcomer community and newcomer families. And what I have committed to is working with our community over the next several months excluding our summer months uh but the next several months to really build up what this pathway could look like um and then and then share that back with the community but i'm really excited about this work because this work will then lead into the other work that our commissioners are asking about how do we increase instructional quality, how do we increase student outcomes well, we can do that when we are providing services to our students, the with what they need. If they need instruction in language, we will be able to provide that and we will be able to support them so that they can come to school every day, so that they can then engage in the in the curriculum and, more importantly, so that they can then. Increase in their knowledge and then be able to be able to to to move into general and when they are ready. So that was a lot i'm going to pause for any additional questions.

I mean, I think this, I appreciate that, Superintendent. I think this probably comes back to seeing what that materially looks like in terms of what are the investments we make, where are we allocating our funding versus other places. And I recognize we have the conversation around the budget and so forth, but really being able to see what that looks like, I think is what will be critical for us to understand fully what you mean by that.

And thank you, Commissioner Gupta, for bringing that up. I've been thinking a lot about our conversation last week at the dais here, at the board meeting here, about just how we are connecting the advice that we're getting from parents and experts on the ground with building our budget. And I think we need to, I need to sit down with our team and really think through how do we gather the advice from parents and from students and from our educators and site leaders, so that we can we can start building that budget it's it cannot just be this moment in time where we're building the budget and then it's and then it's done right. It's an iterative, it's a process that we keep working at. Many of you have heard that in December and January, we were building the budget. It was called the budget development phase. We've slowed down on that budget development phase. I think that there is value to us continuing to talk about what it looks like as we're building this budget. The budget doesn't get done until June. And so there's a lot of iteration to the budget, but I don't think that we have not, I have not done a good enough job of bringing the voices of the community into how we build the budget. So I think that there's, we're gonna look at the timeline, we're gonna look at how we do these things so that we can hear from the community earlier in the process so that then that would help inform how we build this budget, along with our educators, along with our administrators, along with all of our staff.

I would like to speak on some things. In regards to newcomer programs, I've spoken with SFI, MAC, and a lot of the families, they want to send their kids there. And it's, I believe there was something in central office that was like, there was no spot or that cap. And so there's, I think there's has been either miscommunication or misunderstanding. And I'm just going to leave it like that, right? Because I'm not going to make assumptions. of what happened. And so I want to point that out. Where do families get information is through the entry point. Where is our entry point? EPC, Education Placement Center. Cutting resources from EPC and reducing staff that speaks English Spanish Chinese Arabic all their major languages that's not supporting communicating and informing our families that's actually reducing the ability to really understand what are my options as a parent to send my child to x y and z school um so I would say that we need to invest in EPC as well as a way that and I remember My daughter's in eighth grade, and I remember talking about EPC since she was in kindergarten. She's in eighth grade now, and we're still talking about the same thing, information, EPC. I feel like there's always rush, go, go, go, and it really doesn't give the opportunity for family to sit in with that information. Giving a booklet is not the answer to informing families. That's a check the box. I provided the information. You go ahead and read it. I hope you know how to read. If you don't know how to read, good luck on you, right? So I just want to be very specific on things that I've heard our family express their concerns in regards to attending the newcomer programs and access to languages. We have a lot of access and a lot of opportunity, but it's too much. Sometimes the families don't understand how to go about it, right? There was questions in regards to parent view and two-way communication. Parent view has been a one-way communication. Teachers speaking to families, families do not have the right to speak to teachers, or if they do, it's just directly to the teacher. But guess what? answers to our families questions are within our own community right why do we want to bombard our teachers if our teachers in middle school and high school has more than 100 students imagine 100 families emailing you every day when families can communicate with one another get the answer they need as simple as a graduation or field trips i feel like those are the community, we want community schools, right? How do we build community? By speaking with one another, building each other up and having that conversation. And we've been asking for two-way communications for years now uh and parent view we said parent view is not the answer let's look around what is the answer and the answer has been we're at capacity which is understandable but also when are we going to get into actions in regards to two-way communication translation into documents those documents that our families receive coming from the state there are either in english or english right and so having a document in english i don't understand even for me that i'm like bilingual speaker i'm like what does this mean like what does this score mean was it like how can i get a teacher to help me once again teachers are our capacity how do we create those centralized uh information sessions for families at our own local schools community school coordinators family liaison pta um ILAX and other community events. I feel that there's opportunities, but we're not using them wisely to reconnect with our communities. I got a lot of notes here. I'm going to stop and then have someone else share if they want to share anything.

Um, just on the, uh, parent view, um, I think, um, to commissioner healing's point of what does D lack 1 and what in context, uh, the current synergy system, or in my understanding with education point does not. Have the 2.2 away communication. Tool within it, um, and, uh, in partnership with other departments has proposed different apps that supports that 2 way automatic translation interpretation that are available. But due to, um, funding issues, those are not, um, able. And in my discussions, DLAC discussions, we've had DOT come to our board meetings to provide updates on the revised versions of the parent view interface app, which DLAC welcomes those changes. However, in those discussions, DLAC continues to ask, what are that two-way communication? And The answers that DLAC receives is it's maybe not a technology discussion. It is more about communication. So I think that calls for cross-departmental discussions around how do we want to see this communication with our families. I think that's where we need to start is talking about communications, not with technology.

Thank you very much. I also noted that recommendation 2.2 is for the district and board of education to reaffirm our commitment to sanctuary policies and protections and just wanted to give you an update and board and public and update because. A while ago, President Kim tasked myself, Commissioner Alexander and Commissioner Weisman-Ward with updating and reaffirming our sanctuary city policies. And that work has been ongoing. There is a hopefully soon to be brought before the board draft of our sanctuary policies that preserves the protections of the previous policy, which were very robust. It also incorporates the additional changes that were negotiated with UESF in their most recent labor agreement. and we are awaiting the meet and confer process with them to be done because we think as commissioners want to make sure that the policy meets not just the district's view of what is promised under that MOU but meets UESF's view of the protections that they fought for for the community and it also goes further by expanding protections into areas that have not previously been part of our policies basically to go as far as the city and county of San Francisco have been able to, including with new legislation this year. So we're hopeful that that meeting confer process will be successful and that the new policy will come to us hopefully by the end of our meetings this year before the summer recess. So thank you for all of your work on that issue as well.

All righty I want to thank you so much for your presentation today appreciate all your work, and thank you for your time.

Thank you, thank you.

Moving to item F1 goal one and goal goal one and guard with the progress monitoring report back to.

Yes, at this time, I would like to invite. Our staff up to the dais let's see leticia Irving the director of the African American achievement and leadership initiative as well, as well as Dr Christy Herrera Devon krugman josh Ray. moon hawk Kim and Dr Jen steiner. Who will go over a brief presentation. For the committee.

I know our student delegates also are dispensed at eight o'clock today right so want to just thank you in advance for being here and have a good evening and we'll see you at your graduations.

Thank you. Dr. Sue and good evening board commissioners and members of the public. My name is Jess Reyes from research planning and assessment. And on behalf of the team here, we are grateful for the opportunity to share this goal 1 progress monitoring report. Um, next slide please. And the 1 after that as well. Thank you. So we begin with our vision, values, goals, and guardrails, grounding the update in goal 1, grade 3 literacy, and interim guardrail 3.3, which is around professional learning impact. So this report brings together some key data sources, the spring star results, The educators survey data, Amira tutoring usage data, and the 2025-26 instructional walkthrough observations per grades K and 1. The intent is to connect instructional practice to student outcomes by examining patterns in classroom practice and how they align with our student literacy results. And so with that, I will hand it to my colleague, Moon Hop Kim, to walk through our data.

Next slide please um there was some healthy debate among this team about how to pronounce the word that's up on the screen. Some of us prefer to pronounce it data, I prefer to say data so i'm going to be presenting you the data. Thank you next slide please. So summarizing the data that you sell for interim goals 1.1 and 1.2 on the left side is the kindle partner African American and Pacific Islander students. Results on the start early literacy and on the right side is for interim goal. 1.2. 1st, later start reading. So, let me just address each 1 at a time. So, it is a little bit of a dense visualization, but the point is to show 3 years worth of data in 1 graph for each of the assessments and interim goals. The latest result is shown in bright blue. last year's results are shown in darker shade of gray and then from two years ago is in the lightest shade of gray. And what we see with the this year's intro year within your growth is we've had a healthy growth of 10.9% from winter administration to spring. But at the same time, what we see is over the years we're seeing kind of the end of year results be ending up at similar points. So this year we ended at 53.8% of proficiency rate, which is just 1 percentage point above last year's. So it's great to see these strong growth happen within year year after year across 3 years. On the right side, moving on to the first graders, we'll start reading again. That chart is set up exactly the same way. We did not meet the end of your target that we have set, but we do still see the first graders having grown throughout the year consistently ending at fifty nine percent proficiency rate, which is just zero point one percent shy of where we were last year, but still two point six percent higher than where we were for the winter administration. Next slide please. So slightly different and simpler, and this is the interim graduate three point three, which is looking at our way of trying to look at the effective and one aspect of the effectiveness of instructional coaching. So the data is gathered through a survey that is done at the end of each semester. So the current survey is being administered right now. It's in progress until through the end of the school year. and the question asks how strongly they agree with the statement of that they have implemented a strategy they learned from their instructional coach and only the teachers who have an instructional coach I encourage to answer this question. So about this time last year we were at 62% of the respondents saying that they implemented a strategy that they learned from the coaches the target that we had set for this year was 65% a modest increase. But as of the fall or December administration, so just about five months ago, we had already exceeded that target by reaching 69% of the respondents saying that they had implemented a strategy that they learned from their instructional coach. The results could be different depending on how the data come back from the spring test, but it is still heartening to see that a very large sizable majority of the respondents are saying that they are trying out doing something that they're learning from the instructional coach. So it is based on these outcomes that we are going to talk about our implementation in the next section, and I will turn it over to Rukisha.

Thank you, Moon Hawk, and I also so say data. So thank you for the data. Um, next slide please. Thank you. So, family engagement has remained a core part of the each and every by name initiative. And this year we focus on equipping our equipping our families with literacy tools, strengthening home to school partnerships. and increasing access to culturally affirming resources. That work was done in partnership to the spirit of the village and that this is going to include all of us to do this work to support our students and their families. We engage with the San Francisco Public Library to help us host book clubs and to provide some of the literature for our scholars and their families. The Matua and the Fa'a Samoa Initiative partnered with the APAC and with Ali to make sure that we had literacy nights and we were able to distribute culturally affirming decodable texts to our scholars in pre-K through third. We hosted family meetings to make sure that our families were familiar with tools like Amira and other platforms that can help support their students' learning. And that was held during our Saturday schools and some of the other work that the Fa'a Samoa Initiative produced. We also worked with our family liaisons and our community school coordinators To do professional development to make sure that across the board, everybody was engaged in how we can support families and reach them at the site level. We're doing things at the district level, but the real work happens at the site. And so working with the people who are on the ground with them, and we're really proud to say that we started to work with our Excel program and working with after school programs to ensure that they can continue to purchase materials and supplies and to remove the barriers for families who may not have home access. Next slide please. A mirror, there are challenges with the mirror. There are usage and there's many barriers to using a mirror, whether it was technology or access with their logging for their clever badges or family's use of a mirror and how to access it. And so we understand that that was true. Our teachers have cited technology challenges, but we know that it works. We have done professional development with a number of folks with across the village and the support of our teachers. Our assistant superintendents are after school programs just to make sure that we are giving more attention to a mirror because we know that it works the usage among each and every kindergarteners peaked in January at an average of about 12 minutes per student that month. Not enough. We recognize that, but greater use associated with stronger assessment outcomes. We know that if our children use a mirror more, they will have stronger outcomes. The data tells us that. And so we're going to continue to double down on each and every, because we've seen the results of it. Next slide please.

Thank you. Concurrently to the initiatives that were just spoken to, we have throughout the year worked with TNTP to conduct a series of learning walks on high leverage instructional practice in a representative sampling of classrooms across the district. While the report itself included the overall or aggregate data, which had a total of 120 classroom observations for K-5 language and literacy, In the context of this specific report, we pulled out the kindergarten and first grade data. And so while in these cases the end sizes are much smaller and so we don't want to draw the same level of conclusion as the overall aggregate, there were a couple of key trends that we did want to pull out in particular. Um, so the data that is up on the screen, um, is the 1st set, which are from kindergarten classrooms, um, and the comparison between our 2425 data and our 2526 data. Um, so overall, we've seen fairly steady trends with regards to use of materials and culture of learning, um, as well as foundational skills, making sense for the time of the year. So that's sequential. Um, following up the scope and sequence. However, unfortunately, we have seen some noticeable declines in, for example, leveraging of routines or having students have the ability to practice newly acquired skills within a decodable text. This matches the overall aggregate trends where we see some strong use of material, but a dropping off in the opportunities for student practice for academic ownership. And for students to have what we've often called in the context of progress monitoring multiple app bats to develop proficiency and fluency and automaticity in their reading. Next slide please. Again, this is first grade with a similar data set, and we see some of these same trends in terms of more strength and use of use of materials. But not again that what we would call like a complete use of materials. So we may see the lesson plan or components and slides in play. But those opportunities for student independent practice are not yet in place in first grade as well. And so to relate this back to the data that was spoken to earlier, we do see some of these aspects of use leading to some of this growth associated in kindergarten and first grade with proficiency. But we do, because we aren't seeing those opportunities for student independent practice, and in particular those related to foundational skills components associated with fluency or automaticity, we then start to see ACM Conference 29th, Sarah Mastrianni, Ph.D.: grade over grade interruptions and proficiency and so therefore these areas of student independent practice and academic ownership are some of our target focal areas in terms of both strategic planning for next year, as well as things like professional learning and coaching and I will pass it on to Dr Herrera. ACM Conference 29th, Sarah Mastrianni, Ph.D.: Okay, Dr steiner.

That was a sudden change, so I apologize. No, no, I can do it. Sorry. I just was surprised by her sudden exit. So as we think about where we should focus our efforts, we really want grade level collaboration to specifically focus on first and second grade. We want the coaches to spend their time there because we know that that's what's going to make a difference in supporting our students with their foundational skills. And then, obviously, as As teachers are onboarded, we want those same coaches to be focused on newer teachers more than experienced teachers because we know that those folks are going to need, they're going to learn strategies from those coaches and be able to apply them if they're getting more support than their experienced counterparts. I think I'm passing it to you.

Next slide, please. And the one after that. So, the plan, we know that a mirror can be used in many settings. We talked about some of those settings, but where we have the most control is when it happens in our classrooms. And so we survey teachers carried out the survey and our teacher respondents told us. That we had to work on technology, improving the technology information on how a mirror connects to into reading curriculum and ongoing professional development. So that is what you will see going forward. Stronger site level troubleshooting systems, clear expectations for consistent usage prioritization of device and headphone access, making sure that we remove that barrier. and dedicated implementation support for our schools experiencing challenges. We also know that going into next year, we're going to have to make sure we do more use of data for instructional improvement, making sure that we are all data literate at every level in our district. So supporting our educators to guide instruction for each and every identified students using STAR instructional planning reports, which include skills that students have already mastered and focal skills that students need bolstered. The reports will tell us that and how we work with our teachers to use that data is incredibly important, thank you next slide please.

The final slide I get. As you, as you can hear, we need to do more and emphasize more on foundational skills. And so the plan for next school year, 26, 27 is for us to significantly focus our energy towards the strategy of improving the coordination, the conditions at school site that enables high quality curriculum and instruction to thrive. While we have centered the implementation of our new curriculum over the last two years, we know that new curriculum alone will not achieve the outcomes that we all hope for. Changes requires strong systems as much as it does high quality materials. We must improve the quality, consistency and coherence of instructional leadership, intervention, teacher collaboration and coordination, coaching and professional learning across all of our schools. um across all components our implementation metrics will be focused on aligning community and tools around shared instructional vision and codifying learning and embedding routines into daily practices for our students, we are incredibly excited for this next stage of this work, because we really do believe that we have now set ourselves up for the next phase of curriculum true curriculum attainment. And we are on the path to achieving goal one. Uh, with that, we conclude our presentation and open it up for questions.

So, um, similar format, I'll put 20 minutes on the timer. Uh, we have blown past it every time, but I will continue to put 20 minutes on the timer. Uh, we'll do it up around again. 3 minutes each per commissioner. You do not use you need to use all 3 minutes. I will say for this 1 strategic questions only please. I'll do my best, and you all can hold me accountable to shutting each other up if they are not asking surgery questions. Okay, we'd like to begin. Go for it.

Commissioner Alexander will tell me if it's not. Thank you. It's nice to see a monitoring report and really appreciate how detailed both the slide presentation and then the accompanying report is. And now I don't know if I say data or data because I can't. I feel like I want to say it both ways, but I'll think about it tomorrow and let you all know. So my question is about 3.3. And instructional coaches, and it's in the we talked a lot about instructional coaches and the real value add and and we, in the context of budget, we're talking about where to where to. Have more instructional coaches, so. It's concerning to see over 30% of teachers indicating that they're not implementing strategies. They learn from instructional coaches and that's not I don't want to make any assumptions about. ACM Conference 29th, The why so i'm just going to ask you do we know why, if we do we know why they're not implementing strategies, it makes me wonder. ACM Conference 29th, It makes me wonder why and and if we're going to say we really want to put resources towards instructional coaches, but then the folks that are supposed to benefit from them are not actually using and implementing the strategies that it's it seems concerning so.

I'll go next, just because I'm building off of what Commissioner Weisman-Ward was just asking. I'll approach it from a slightly different perspective. My question is also around 3.3. Is have we looked at overlaying this data with student outcomes and if 69% of our teachers are responding that they've implemented a strategy which is excellent, my question is, has that actually changed like has implementing whatever strategy shown to change anything. In terms of our student outcomes relative to the 31% of teachers who had not like i'm just it gives us an opportunity to ask some questions here on what that looks like. Because then my question becomes what are those strategies and should we invest in those strategies right are those specific things about are we seeing trends across those strategies that we like and want to replicate are we seeing practices that are. That are just not working if not right around that so that's one question I have around guardrail 3.3. Around the interim goals 1.1 and 1.2, I really appreciate this kind of information, the way that it's overlaid around just being able to see winter to spring and spring to spring growth. What we can see from this, though, is that it's going to take us presumably eight years for goal 1.1 for us to get to our target if we're continuing with a 1% year-over-year spring to spring growth. and we talked a little bit about how our goals are already off just in terms of our ability to reach them um my question is so across those three years because now we have three years of data between 23 24 24 25 and 25 26 is there anything that we've learned across those three years that tell us that this is not working because our practices our outcomes aren't changing Or is there something in that or or do we need to the opposite, we need to actually like double down and invest more because we're not seeing the kind of data that we want to see. Given the investments that we've made like I don't actually know so i'm curious what your set what your take would be on that is it some because now we have three years of data that we can stack on top of each other. And it's resulting in a similar trend line with a with a be at a 1% increase for 1.1 just like what would your response be to that around the things that are working or not, now that we have three years.

I'll build on that because I was President Kim was asking about outcome data at the classroom level and linking it to the implementation teacher implementation. I'd like to ask about school level outcome data and linking to the plan on the last slide around enabling conditions for high quality implementation. Are there schools that are doing those things well and do we see improved outcomes there um you know or not and if so what are we learning from the places where it's working i mean i think it's that's sort of the big picture strategy question i guess is what are we learning from places where it's working i think vice president healing's asked about this a number of times too um in past sessions i think it's really important like what there's obviously differences among schools right and some of that has to do with different student populations but are there places where students uh holding constant for inputs in terms of looking at student income or other factors that may impact student performance coming in are there places where we have you know similar student populations and one school's showing a lot of growth and one isn't what are we learning from those differences within the system i think that's something i'm just curious about because again this makes sense sort of logically well these enabling conditions like as an educator it resonates with me but it's not really backed by David Price- Data from schools that's why that's why i'm asking the question I would love to see like kind of how is that influencing the strategy.

So just continuing to build. So from Commissioner Alexander's question, I'm also curious because I saw, you know, it seems 34% of all our API students or kindergarten students are highly concentrated across six specific school sites. So to that point, I'm curious. I mean, it would be wonderful to have one of those principles or a few of those principles in to talk about some of this in terms of what's going on at the site. why do we see some some of this disconnect in terms of you know what whether uh educators are picking this up or not what might be some of those reasons what are some of the challenges that they face especially with say Amira and the use of technology I mean I feel like a lot of this can be driven by what's going on on the ground and just those six I mean filling this right here would give us the answers to a third of our African American Pacific Islander population if they're here again. I know we're asking them to come in the evening, but you know that that that feels like we can get at some of this data. So I I am curious, you know, if if there is something, you know, what are the school by school implementation metrics at these 6 sites, and how do they compare?

I love geeking out on our literacy data. Thank you so much for all being here. I appreciate the hard work and the heavy lift and that you're such a strong collaborative team on behalf of students. So thank you all, appreciate it. I think I have similar questions, but kind of in a different frame. And of course, I'm gonna pick on Amira a little bit because I'm just not sold on the technology based on what I'm hearing at the school sites from some of our educators. So I do appreciate the data and seeing that 100 minutes of usage on average led to 29 points increase in start early literacy tests. But I think my question is, on average, like, if we had 100 minutes focused on high dosage tutoring or other strategies, like, could, how, like, would we see a larger gain, right? I'm not sure that this is the, like, I guess I'm really wondering, you know, like, where are the other investments that we could compare? 100 minutes per year also in a 10-month school year is only 10 minutes a month, right? And so if in the flip side this is the strategy that we want to invest in like I mean structured literacy for example when we do in a tier three you know when we when we use our tier three instruction those are 45 to 60 minutes blocks per day that we're talking about as far as needing to when we're talking about someone who requires tier three intervention so I'm, you know, I'm just wondering, either if this is either if this is the right strategy or two, if it is the right strategy, do we really need to go all in on it? You know, and if so, how do we, how do we do it across the board, but I'm not sure it's the right strategy yet. I'd love to see similar data to some of our other, um, like, we've got tons of high dosage tutoring programs and pilots happening. Like, I'd love to see some of that data incorporated into a monitoring report and maybe compare some of our other strategies. Um, and then the, the last part I will say, um, I appreciate our partnership with and some of the, I feel like they're a great accountability check to us. And for me, accountability means when we see something's not working, it's not heads will roll. It's how do we put the right resources in place to make it work right?

I'm getting there.

I know that there's some sensitivity to the word accountability, so that's why I'm framing it this way. Thank you, President Kim. But some of the numbers this year in our literacy core rubric observation summaries really do kind of like, it looks like we do need to put some more resources into making sure that we've got coherence across the system too. And will that drive the outcomes we see as well? So I think that's where I'd love to see some more specificity in the recommendations for next year. And thank you for the work.

Hi, everyone. Thanks again for being here tonight. I just really appreciate the progress monitoring sessions, even though I think sometimes we may all find them frustrating in a way, especially if we don't necessarily see big gains in the data that we're tracking and the outcomes. But in the spirit of continuous improvement, we persevere. I have a few different questions. A couple of them are fairly general. So one question I have is just thinking around absenteeism or chronic absenteeism, which I know I keep bringing up a broken record on this. Have we considered adding this type of data essentially to all of our outcome reports? It seems like such an important factor. So just thinking around whether we think it would be worth including chronic absenteeism numbers when we do reports of this nature. and what your thoughts are on that. Next, I have a similar concern, as Commissioner Fischer had raised, about AMIRA. I asked a lot of questions in the Q&A about them in terms of AMIRA, the technology versus high-dosage tutoring. So page 14 and 15 have some of the staff's answers on that. I'm particularly wondering about the high drop off here that we saw in middle school and what we think accounts. When I looked at the table or the chart in there, there are quite a few, many, many more students using it, it seems, in elementary school than once you get to middle school. It seems to fall off a cliff there. So I wondered why that is the case, if we know. And finally, I've been thinking about, because some of the staff answers here talked about small end sizes, like small number, and therefore being careful about what conclusions we draw. And that plus some discussions with educators that I've had around various matters have made me wonder how confident we are, broadly speaking, in the information that we're getting from the walkthroughs. By the way, I absolutely think we should continue doing the walkthroughs. I think they're great. We need to have that information. But they are like point in time things. So with something like curriculum usage, for instance, if we see something that says 67% or 77% or 89% or whatever, How confident are we that that's actually truly representative? Is there some other way? Are we tracking in some other way to determine whether teachers are using the curriculum? Similarly, with opportunities to practice, which I've raised over and over again, too, because those numbers I see are so low all the time, and that's very, very worrisome. But I'm just, I'm recognizing that staff is noting that there's a small end size here. So indicating that change might not, or, you know, changes might be due to sampling and may not represent a statistically significant challenge. I guess I would like folks to speak to that, like our level of confidence in the data. But there's also some substantive answers around there in terms of like quality of teacher preparation and planning and educator mindset and expectations. So thank you.

Hi, I really appreciated the responses regarding where our African American Pacific Islander kindergarteners are. We want to get support to meet Interim Goal 1.1 and noticed that in the question and answer that they're concentrated at six schools, or at least a third of them are And was wondering if there are any strategies that are being developed to invest in these particular schools where students are, because many of the strategies that we hear about our district wide. But if we want to meet this goal, we know where the students are. What focused targeted supports are we providing for the students at those schools? And also some of the larger instructional strategies, it seems, are focused on instructional coaching, cross grade level team collaboration related to that instructional coaching. But several of those schools or those students do not have student populations sufficient to support multiple teachers at the same grade level. So the teachers teaching the students who are trying to focus on to meet this inner guardrail actually don't have a system that meets the strategy that we're applying. Danielle MacRae- district wide, so do we have an alternative strategy to support teachers in those situations and those classrooms to meet those students, especially given that the. Danielle MacRae- superintendents proposed timeline related to you know potentially combining schools. is pushed out to 2030, what are we going to do to make sure that the kids who are there now and in the interim are learning how to read and getting the literacy supports that they deserve? And then my other question related to A mirror access and I know a few people have, um. Noted that 75% of teachers surveyed indicated that the technology was a big, um. Barrier, and I appreciated the response that student success fund and spark funds have been used to provide headsets and other technologies. But is there actually like a. Point person or a strategy for ensuring that. Systemically throughout our district if 75% of teachers don't have technology that that is actually getting addressed, you know, because it may not be. headsets don't work if you don't have wi fi, for example, so who is responsible for actually ensuring that students that teachers have the supports to implement this amira strategy. physically and technologically.

Just simple questions. And so, do you want to take us some time, or Superintendent Su, do you want to kick us off, however you'd like to facilitate that?

Maybe I can just take a couple of, I really love the beginning questions around the connection between instructional coaching and student outcomes and what's going on there, and then the connection between whole school outcomes. you all can help me with drilling down by the schools, particularly for our African American Pacific Islander schools, and then for Amira. And I actually asked the same question regarding Amira and high dosage tutoring, because we have to make a decision around a budget allocation. And so we're gonna have to think through that. So I can speak a little bit about that. And then you guys can, take some more of the technical ones. So in terms of instructional coaches, first and foremost, we do allocate instructional coaches to all of our elementary schools. However, the coaches do not, they're not serving and spending time with all and every single one of the teachers. So teachers go through rotations and We believe that that has an impact on the number of teachers that instructional coaches are providing support for which is why you see a number that is closer to 69% or 70 70%. I know that we should definitely do more, and I think, as we get better. at instructional coaches and get better at training the instructional coaches and supporting the instructional coaches who then will then in turn support our teachers we're going to start building that culture of practice, which then leads me to there are some schools Commissioner Alexander that I. have gone in and observed this culture. It is truly a culture shift, a shift that starts from the site leader that says, we are all about learning how to read. Every single kid is going to learn how to read in this school. um and they do everything everything is wrapped around reading even soccer like when they're out on the soccer field they are talking about literacy um they're they're reading different types of books they're integrating um reading into every aspect of the school day and it it takes that type of shift um it also takes the shift of the curriculum But, as I shared earlier, just because we have a new fancy curriculum doesn't mean that it's going to yield the result that we want, we really, really need to provide going back to. Strong instructional coaches instructional coaches that are going to be there that's going to be welcomed by our school community by our educators. that's going to truly provide that level of support to then move the needle. Again, this is year two of this brand new curriculum, and we've got a long way to go, but we're seeing slow growth. So I feel really optimistic about that. about that we're seeing that growth we're seeing actual statistically significant correlation between students that participate in Amira and yes there are concerns around Amira however students are not spending 20 minutes a day on Amira they're spending 10 minutes a week 30 minutes total a week on a mirror, but that that 510 minutes a day helps solidify the learning that they're receiving in the classroom. And they get to then demonstrate it through practice on a mirror and that's how they're gaining that confidence, so when there's an there's an assessment, they are actually demonstrating competency. So yes, a mirror is you know, a tool that we use and. We are going to continue to use it because we see we see the increase in our students ability to demonstrate competency at the same time we're still bringing on some of our schools have. High dosage tutoring and we're seeing the impact of that as well, I will say that there are some concerns that some some of our students are getting pulled out of classroom so pulling getting pulled out of instructional time for the high dosage tutoring. Which I think we need to think about how what does that mean how does that impact and we're really fortunate that we're partnering with Stanford. Yes, we're partnering with Stanford to help us understand the impact of the high-dose tutoring and then see how this will improve our students. So yes, our goals are set very high, President Kim. Very, very high. I think I've shared with the board before, if we were to hit the 70% goal of all of our third graders reading at proficiency, 70% of our students reading proficiency by third grade, it would put us at the 99th percentile in the state of California. And actually, as we were talking about this the other day, we're talking about even higher than other states. So yes, it is very high. I think what is more important for us is to really think about the growth our students are making because it demonstrates effort. It demonstrates what's happening in the classroom and how our students are taking that in, absorbing it, feeling confident about it, and then demonstrating their abilities around it. So I would love to engage with the board around a conversation on how do we measure growth, the growth of our students and their abilities for the next iteration of all of this. I'm going to pause there and I'm going to hand it back to the team for any technical questions.

I was just going to round out your story about coaches because this week kicked off leadership evaluation. So we meet with our leaders to go over their leadership goals. And I happen to be meeting with a couple of leaders of the pre-K-8 schools today. And one of the things one of the leaders said that sort of exemplifies the questions that were coming up here, but also what Dr. Su just said was, you know, when I'm thinking about what my coach is doing in the school that I have from in this case pre-K all the way through eight. How do I make sure that I'm maximizing the time that this coach has? How do I make sure that they're both facilitating grade level collaboration, but also coaching particular teachers and which teachers make the most sense? And how do I know that coaching is going to be taken up by those teachers? Like all of that is, it's not an exact science, right? Part of this is that resistance comes for all sorts of reasons from teachers, right? If we have veteran educators that have been using particular approaches to the way they've been teaching literacy for years, it is harder sometimes to get a shift out of somebody until they start to see the actual results. So coaches are not only modeling and demonstrating for new teachers who tend to uptake what they're being given, but they're also convincing folks that have done what they've done for a long time that this shift is going to be really good for the students in your class. And so that conversation came up of like, how do you strategically share leadership, support your coach, make those decisions inside those schools? And this happens to be a school with very high enabling conditions and very high outcomes. So we were having that conversation even in that demographic of school. And then, you know, we switched to another conversation where the coach was new. The coach also was having some difficulties because new to the community was having some trouble getting into classrooms because some of the teachers there felt like, well, we know more than you because we've been teaching longer than you have. So all of these things take time and not to say that that means we can't do it. But I will say that sometimes when I feel like we're having the conversation around, well, does this outcome match this outcome? It's not an exact science. And so we have to be having both the, like, pull the outcome out, match it to the enabling condition, and then look at the humans behind those to say, where do we see those types of things shifting practices and where don't we? And in a conversation with the team that supports the coaches, they're having those kinds of conversations too. So as they onboard new coaches, what are the new coaches need? As they have the veteran coaches there, what do veteran coaches need? And what do the different types of schools need? So just kind of a, someone asked for a story. So there was a story I was thinking of from today.

May I just kind of build on that about what we abandon and what we double down on? How do we know if something works if we have not fully implemented it? It fails on implementation for all of the reasons that Dr. Steiner just said, but like we don't know if a mirror truly works if we're not seeing it fully implemented. So I don't think we abandon it. I think that it is a tool that has science behind it that says it works. So how do we double down Our supports that we've said we were going to do, how do we make sure it's happening in our coaching cycles, how do we make sure that we remove those barriers. So that we can our students actually have the technology and all of the devices and the routines and all those things so that they can try it. So I don't want to abandon something our students haven't had an opportunity to try. And it is not on our students that they did not try it right, so it means that we as a system have to get a little bit better on how we do some accountability, how we offer the appropriate supports. to our educators and then how we monitor it. So I don't say abandon the MIRA, I say implement it fully and let's see what happens. And when the data tells us that does not work for our children, after we have fully done what we were supposed to do, cool, let's figure out an alternative plan. Cora Bennett , Or let's look at some of the other opportunities of high dosage Tutoring i'd also say that about each and every and our strategies for each and every. Cora Bennett , What we're doing is just good teaching guys it's quality tier one instruction that's good teaching that's nothing. separate and a part of. And I think that for each and every, it complements what already happens or should be happening in the classroom. It is not to replace it. It is not to say it is the magic bullet. It is to go deeper on a strategy that should already exist. High quality tier literacy instruction, increasing our opportunities for our students to practice with those decodable and complex text right give them more opportunities it's implementation that's where it's failing um improving our instructional coherence as you all have said thinking about everything that you see thinking about strengthening our mtss alignment expanding the coaching and professional learning and then making sure we do things with fidelity that's just good teaching and i think our kids will benefit we will see the results in uh president kim eight years That's a long time. Our kids are capable of 70% proficiency, and we know they can do it. They just have to have all the proper inputs to ensure that they can reach it. And I think that we have the strategies. We know what works. We have some brilliant folks sitting at this dais who have just developed an amazing plan moving forward. So let's do it.

Can I I so thank you very much miss serving it okay i'm sold let's do it so now and yeah now i'm so superintendent what resources do we need to allocate to do it, I think that's really like the plan that I would love to see moving forward right and the budget behind it.

And if I could just add to that. So yes, also let's do it. I think the question is, so in addition to just the resource allocation, I think what I'm trying to understand is for every resource that we're spending on, for every strategy that we believe is contributing to the success or the long-term success of our students or leading to our outcomes, um being able to draw the brightest line possible right between that strategy the resource being spent on it and the ultimate outcome for our students to be able to know whether we are on or off track is the question that i have right because i think the challenge with this and this is why i appreciate seeing winter to spring data layered over a year over a year because then you can see quite literally visually we're we're not necessarily moving the needle per se the last three years right it's informative it's helpful right it's just a data point right within year but even year over year i mean we have three years of information overlaid on top of this right and so i think this goes back to my question of okay so knowing that right what has happened over these three years that we can look to and say hey we want to we want to keep on track with this Right? We know we've spent this much money. We've know we've invested in these systems, but we need to keep on track with this because we anticipate this will still make an impact at some point. Even if we're not seeing it right now. Right? I think that would be my question, right? Because I think what's really tough. is and i've kind of felt this way about a lot of our progress monitoring reports is that we get them in reports a single report in isolation not that y'all are looking at an isolation but we receive it in isolation so it's like how do we see that right and and build that for ourselves so we can monitor it right and before uh superintendent responds i just want to say that that is one of the teachings of that we learned in the committee is that the board should really focus a lot of our attention on past

David Price- track like past performance and talking about the question you just raised like what's working what's not what's the evidence for that and to resist the urge to go. David Price- too quickly to the future because that's all speculative right, I mean we can all hope and pray that it's going to be better, but but really looking at what's already happened in is happening now, I think. David Price- Just for all of us to think about like those are the sometimes the best questions.

Yeah, no, I think, first of all, I just have to say, I really love this conversation. I love the format of this. This is really helpful to, to kind of have this conversation. Um, I, I mean, I think reality is yes, a mirror is working when students are, are, are exposed to it, um, when they have the opportunity to spend, you know, the 30 minutes per week on it. because they will then have the opportunity to demonstrate and to demonstrate competency. So, or practice, I'm sorry, to practice what they learned. I think the reality that we're seeing this is because because we just introduced a math curriculum this year, and we're asking our teachers to learn two new curriculums when it's a struggle, it's hard. I mean, just the reality of learning new curriculum, it's really hard. They've spent two years, and if you look at the outcomes here, you'll see that there was a huge jump for our kinders In it over in the initial year you see that jump because our teachers were embracing that new curriculum, we were really delivering that true parent partnership and true family engagement that was focused and. And then, in the second year it's it's slowed down because we introduced a new curriculum and we're asking our teachers to learn it so. Again, I think we're moving in the right direction, but it's going to take time because now teachers have to feel confident with both of these curriculums moving forward. In terms of what I think what we need to continue to do is just to continue to stay persistent. We need to not stop. I think we have to keep pushing forward. The data is showing that we're moving in the right direction, although small and slow, but we are moving in the right direction. And I think we need to continue to stay persistent in that. Having more funding for AMIRA doesn't mean that there'll be more AMIRA uptake. I think making sure that our schools understand the importance of it and creating opportunities for it to show up in our classrooms, meaning that we have instructional coaches that bring it into the classroom, building the relationship between our educators and our coach, creating the culture within our school. Those are the little things that's going to start building out to long term sustained student outcomes.

Christopher McConkey- Can I I very much appreciate that. Christopher McConkey- If there's like one example, I think that i'm like the story that's playing out in my head, right now. Christopher McConkey- And so, you know i'll build on a little bit of what Commissioner Alexander said, I think it was maybe Commissioner fisher mentioned this so coaching we know is an enabling condition for high quality instruction or implementation of our work. specifically one on one coaching cycles for lesson internalization that makes a lot of sense to me as a coach myself, I get that the interim guardrail 3.3 is. it's a guardrail for pk five right so it's all pk five teachers, I think the question that I have is you know. Because I was trying to figure it out, if I could see in the guardrail goal on a guard with a report like what percentage of the 69% are our first grade teachers. Yeah, because, and I just I don't think I even need the answer right now but it's just I'm follow my logic here right like if we know that coaching is a huge lever that's critical as an enabling system, but we know that not everyone has a coach. Right, because we only 70% of our teachers have coaches, which again makes sense, every school has a coach, but not every teacher is getting coached.

Sure. Yeah.

Right. So I don't know there's probably a new answer that I'm getting wrong, but the way I internalize that statement was we have a coach at every school. There's no guarantee that every teacher is getting coached by that coach. That's there. Right so then my question is, if our strategy, if we know that enabling condition is high quality coaching, that 1 on 1 coaching is. Paramount and we know that. that it works because, hey, if you get coached, 70% of our teachers who are getting coached saying that they're using that lesson in their classroom, then my question would be, what do we know about the first grade coaches and the first grade teachers who are getting coached? Do we need to double down on coaching and say, actually, maybe one coach at one school is not enough? that we actually need to add more coaches because our goal is actually not every school is a coach, but that every teacher gets coached and they're gonna get coached once a week through a lesson cycle, right? So like, cause then that raises up a resource question of how many people do we need to hire as instructional coaches at a school, right? I'm just trying to like go down this path here of trying to understand what that would look like, not to suggest that like, you know, Well, I guess that's my question would be like, what of these things are things that we are saying we want to do differently to double down on? Because the data that we see, we know is telling us that we need to go down that pathway, right? And that's just for coaching. I have a question for, and I'm interested that MTSS is here because we talked about this a little bit last week of like, do we have a clear picture for MTSS implementation? And if we're naming tier one, two intervention, right? So I'm just trying to bring all the pieces together in that way.

You know, just really quickly, and then you look like you want to say something and you always say something brilliant. So I don't want to take up your time. Let's see, coaching. I agree. So there's a couple there's, again, we have a coach at every school, and it is the site leaders responsibility to identify how to deploy the coach, and a coaching relationship, as you know, you know, it takes takes Building that relationship, building trust, there's a lot of things that happen in building that relationship. We could just deploy a coach everywhere, but I'm not sure if that hypothesis is going to pan out. I'm not sure if we're going to get to the outcome that we're looking for, because at the end of the day, in order to, going back to Commissioner Alexander's comment or question, is what's going to create the whole school change? And the whole school change is going to require a a culture change. And the culture change means it's not because you have someone watching you all the time. It's really about self-regulation and making sure that you're teaching the curriculum to fidelity. But that the lessons are infused everywhere. So yes, we could have more, but I think we need to really think about how do we strategically deploy coaches to to where students needed. Now, the other part to this is that, unfortunately, we also have in some of our schools high turnover rates of teachers. And so, because sometimes some of our teachers do not stay, it is really hard to build a. Long term relationship to the school and and and I think this is a huge problem that we need to tackle if we're really if we if we're saying look we're going to embrace our schools and and really support them through. To get to these outcomes we That means we really need to also support our educators in those schools, so that they can see. themselves in that school for a very long time. Again, the school that I was talking about earlier, where I visibly saw the culture, I could like literally touch the culture in that school. Is because you have teachers they're educators they're who've been there for a long time or new ones who come in and they're like Oh, this is how we do things here, because this is, this is the culture of this of this school, and so I think it is it's going to take time. But we need to be more strategic and how we allocate our our coaches Devon do you wanna.

I'm actually going to pass it to Jess as a follow-up to that, and then maybe Adam at the end. Thanks.

So I think Dr. Su had mentioned earlier in one of the closing slides the piece around the exciting shift that we feel like we're undertaking in that We're emphasizing the enabling conditions around high, high quality implementation. And I know commissioner Alexander, you had mentioned the piece around being able to identify schools and, you know, as much as we can look at the various types of data that we have 1 of the things that is really. Easy to do is to find kind of like all the outcome data that we are able to collect. That's that's the easy part. The much more difficult and challenging part, to be quite frank, is how we collect implementation data. And so the reason we're really excited about this shift is that what we're really trying to do is amp up as part of like this year three kind of layering on of building the initial kind of onset of the curriculum and trying to build some of those conditions is now saying we've got certain investments. There are five of them that are outlined on that slide, coaching being one of them. Um, another, um, commissioner, uh, President Kim that you had mentioned earlier that are that are these enabling conditions that we're going to try to track much more deeply as a way of being able to say, if we're doing this, um, very intentionally having that shared accountability shared responsibility around this, both at the instructional cabinet level, all the way down to our school level and being very intentional about how we're collecting that data. Then we're able to identify some of those pieces that you mentioned earlier, which is like, how do we know how can we draw the line between when schools are doing pulling on all the levers that we are theorizing are the major pieces that we feel will lead to. The, the improvement, or the outcomes that we're seeking, especially when we can compare them to similar type schools. So we're excited about that layer. But I feel like the challenge has been in collecting that type of implementation data. And I think what we're trying to do now is make that shift to where that intentionality is really starting to bubble up. So we're excited about that kind of like evolution in our work and the next step in our journey.

And I would build on that to say, relatedly, I think one of the things that we are trying to do is better understand as Dr. Sue spoke to that culture of instructional leadership that you can touch and feel when you're in the building so that we can help identify how to coach and support schools and working towards that. So, for example, if we have a heat map structure where we can understand schools that have really strong functioning, consistently engaged grade level collaboration, we can lift that up as a lab site that other schools can come learn for so we can better identify these components. I would say at this point in particular, it is a really exciting place of being two years out from implementation of a new curriculum. It is an appropriately timely switch. Um, 1 of the, um, the things I'll say is we've been looking at a lot of case studies similarly of other districts at this point in their adoption journey, um, to really focus on systems coherence. Um, and so, as just was naming the collection of that school level data, the heat mapping of that school level data, and the development of, um, more strategic support for school sites, um, is a focus of our planning and progress monitoring for next year.

Can I add one additional piece, which is that one of the pieces of data that we're not discussing, I mean, I think relates to, you know, if you ever look at the researchers around leadership frameworks, right, there's a researcher that, his name is Kenefen, I think I say his name wrong a lot, but anyway, he looks at the difference between like simple, complicated and complex problems. and says don't try to apply a simple solution to a complex problem. And I think sometimes when we're saying what's the thing, we're missing something, which is that, you know, in many of our schools, especially schools with high turnover, which Dr. Su just mentioned, we have What we call temporary teachers, right? Those are teachers on temporary contracts, and they match the number of folks that are returning from leave or the number of folks that are coaches or TSAs. And so at schools with high turnover, we have higher numbers of temporary teachers than when consolidations happen in the spring. We have new folks going to those places in those places. Those folks are just displaced. And sometimes they end up in other schools and sometimes they don't. And so we're coaching folks that sometimes we can't retain because of a system that we need to have in place because of a a match um and there it's not an easy like well let's just fix that right because when we don't offer those temporary contracts if we then have a large amount of consolidations at the end of the year then we have no place to put folks that need places to go back and then we have a layoff issue so while this does not directly relate to why curriculum isn't being taken up in every classroom, it is related. I think similarly related are issues that when we asked leaders to pick a goal, every leader picks a goal in addition to instructional leadership, which every leader has to pick. Lead picks a goal for the leaders and then they pick a goal. Almost every single one of the veteran leaders that is in the middle school K-8 cohort picked 1.1, which talks about resiliency. so i think there's a there there that we're not talking about which is that the humans that lead these systems are like utterly exhausted they're exhausted by the strike they're exhausted by an algebra implementation they're exhausted by three new curriculum they're exhausted so they're really really tired and how do we continue to pour into them so that they can do this really important leadership is a question that i know that the executive directors and my colleagues and I are constantly asking ourselves so that we can lift them up so that they can lift the teachers up. And so I just wanted to bring a human aspect to the like, we're so excited about the number of implementations and metrics that we can look at. And sometimes when I look at it with somebody, the person in front of me just starts crying. and that's real right and we have to like hold them and say all right it's okay and some of the best leaders that i've ever seen really just very exhausted at the end of this year saying we're trying so hard but i've lost this person and i can't keep this person so we're going to continue to question why not and we're going to continue to to to pull the string and figure out what to do but i would say that sometimes it's not as easy as just saying if we just coach all the first grade teachers that this will change because if half of them turn over it won't make a difference so

I don't I just I really appreciate you naming all those things. I'm Dr. Center and I don't think I hear the board asking for simple solutions. I think what and that's why I love this conversation. I think the board's asking for that like real, real. conversation. So if the strategy for goal one is we one of the strategies is we actually need to focus on retention of educators. And that means we need to do X, Y and Z. That has nothing to do with curriculum and instruction or anything, but is some other strategy. I think the board would be delighted to hear that because, you know, I think in the past we've been super siloed and it's like you know, oh, we only can talk about this one thing. No, that what you just talked about. Absolutely. Anyone who's worked in a school knows that that's going to have a huge impact. I mean, and you just as you mentioned retention, right? If you coach a teacher and then they leave for whatever reason, you've just invested all this time, energy, effort and money, frankly, that now has to be reinvested. So retention of educators is hugely beneficial, right? So I personally, I would love to see a strategy that has nothing to do with curriculum and instruction, but that is actually designed to address staff stability, for example. Why not? You know what? But again, open whatever you all we're not. It's not our job to tell you what to do, but I think you should know. I think the board would be really open to that type of strategy related to the goals.

Because here's what I would say. I think the enabling conditions for high quality implementation is actually I mean, the reason I'm a little giddy about this is because this is like a very early indication of an instructional strategy that actually tells us what we believe is sustainably needed in a school to be successful, which is great. I mean, like, I think that's amazing that we're at this point right now where we're starting to talk about this. My question would be like, Right now we're looking at certain data points around our benchmarks towards a goal. What I'm most curious, and I think this is what you were talking about, Jess, was are frameworks around like coaching forth like guskies i i just keep bringing up gussies because i brought up gussies last year too i'm so sorry but there are frameworks to operationalize things like this right and and so what are those frameworks that we're looking at and then how are we setting goals around those things because then that tells us whether or not we're actually operationalizing these essential systems that we're saying are necessary for a school and And if that's leading to retention going up or down, I think my question would be, can we look at a map of schools and start talking about. Where is retention high and where is retention low and why? And, like, I think this is partly why now I'm, I will just turn to Dr Sue and say, I think this is partly why a conversation around our resource allocation around our schools is so. There's an urgency of this board, I think, to address some of those things, because we don't want to build a system that we can't sustain or a portfolio that we can't have, because we know that that the reality is that we can't sustain the systems uh that are necessary so I I think I actually think we're quite aligned we want to get to that conversation and that would be ideal to have um and I think that's partly the urgency of some of the questions that you're hearing is like wait yes like oh we we do want to talk about that so when are we going to talk about that right so I think that's the question I mean sorry and that maybe that's more of a question for you of like that I think that energy and momentum and desire is there

And just to echo what President Kim said, I mean, and also Dr. Shiner, what you said, I think a lot of the reason I kind of keep asking about, like, what are our school and site-specific strategies for targeted investment where we know our students who have the most needs are is because we, as a district, I don't think can necessarily sustain the pace where If some students need something, then every single educator at every school, regardless of whether those students are there, has to change the way that they do everything. And I know we've had a lot of kind of deferred maintenance, we'll say, in catching up and having some things like our curriculum and having a school staffing model. But when we're talking about investments, I don't necessarily think we need to change the school staffing model for every single school. I'm just saying we've got six schools where we know more than a third of our African American Pacific Islander kids are. So what can we pour into those six schools to move the needle for over a third of our focal population for one guardrail? And so for one one interim goal. So that's that's why my question, I guess, remains like, what is our strategy for those six schools? And and like, genuinely, it doesn't have to be it. Actually, I specifically am like not asking for a district wide strategy. I just what do the

educators and administrators at those schools need um and what where how can we support them in bringing those resources to them just just add on that i mean that's why i think it would just be so instructive to have the principals here even the site administrators here to be able to inform that i completely agree with vice president hewling where you know one of the most effective salons i'd ever been to was actually one that i think sf ed fund put on where they had three principles just sit down and just break down what was needed why things were the way they were the good the bad the ugly so um if there is a strategy maybe you all already know what it is for those six schools with a third of our population but we don't need some you know highfalutin fandangled uh strategy it's just more of what do we need

That's fantastic. No highfalutin, anything. I, again, I just really appreciate this conversation because I think we are now, we're circling around something that we've been percolating in our heads for several months now of just how do we wrap our arms around a few schools? There are some schools that need that extra TLC and and figure out how do we support those students there? How do we support the educators there? And don't I again as this at the start of all of this this conversation I was talking I was alluding to just the sequencing of these conversations seemed off to me I feel like we should have had a lot of these conversations before um the budget developments on school sites because um because we've already we literally just went through consolidation just a couple of last week or two weeks ago. I see our site leaders back there nodding. And it's hard where I think moving forward, as I shared last week and earlier today, we need to change the budget development conversation and have it even earlier in the year. If we are aiming for us to finish our budget by January, that means principals need to have their budget by December, meaning we need to have these conversations as early as August and September. just so that we can have this information and we can share it because we are beholden to a March 15th date, notification date, and then a May 15th notification date. And these are structural budget timelines that we can't control and we have to work around. But I agree, I think we need to start planning now

for next year's um budget um we'll we'll look forward for that to be reflected in the multi-year governance calendar I um I know we're we're we're long past time that was allocated for this so I will move us on um I I will say the I think the last comment I would make around that Dr sue is is there is a a significant resource in budgeting question to be. Oh, did you want to ask? Hold on one second.

I would. Can I make two questions for an answer?

So I would like to get some answers. Thanks. I feel the same way that I my questions weren't rhetorical. I genuinely want to know what the strategy is for those schools and for technology.

So sorry. Hold on. Multiple things going on in my head. Once again, we can come back to this. I do want to decouple a little bit the budget development process and what needs to happen for sites and budgets and for us to approve something. And then I think what we're saying we're excited about is understanding how sites and the district is developing a strategy that meets the educational needs of our students in our schools, which they are. tied and related to each other because we have to resource that vision with what actually happens. We already felt what happens when we bring a budget process really early. And so the last conversation we were talking about this, you were like, oh, we might have done this too soon. And I actually think that's right. We may have actually done it too soon because in part there's like a foundational conversation around the instructional work that needs to happen with our schools and for us to build that strategy so that we can then resource it. And I want to like decouple that a little bit and allow us to kind of sit in the space of thinking through what schools need and bringing that kind of plan vision forward. Then the question of execution, because I think again, I think we've talked a little bit about this of not wanting the budget process to dictate our strategies, but that our strategies are the ones dictating where our budget resources go. So just wanted to say that out loud. So sorry, there were certain questions that that folks wanted to bring up again again, I will say we're not going to get every question answered and that's Okay, I think the question is, are there things that are urgent that are needed right now.

I think my questions, I asked three, none of which really got answered, but two of them are more important to me. And the first is whether or not to consider absenteeism, what people think. This crosses every single thing we do, and I ask about it regularly. So I would like, it's so important to all the work we do on all the goals. The second thing is about this, the comments that the staff made on end size and so forth, which I am trying to incorporate or think about in my thinking. If end size is an issue and it's not statistically significant potentially for things like the walkthroughs for observation of who's using curriculum or for things like practice, then what else are we doing to actually know whether or not folks are doing these things in any event? If we're getting data, but it's not actionable, there's a very, very fundamental question about what we're doing with progress monitoring. So I think both of those, they're very important to me, and I think they underlie all of our work that we're doing on goals.

I can answer the question related to the learning walk data. And so the first piece that I want to say is that when we talk about a representative sampling, we are talking about data that provides us with information that is directional, but maybe not necessarily exact. So while that representative sampling with 120 classrooms might have an average use of 86%, In reality, on a day to day that might range from 70% to 90%. So there is a little bit of fluctuation. However, it tells us what some of our areas of need are such that we can make it actionable. We can, for example, redesign our coaching cycle to focus on a smaller subset of high leverage instructional practice. We can redesign our professional development to focus on opportunities for independent practice. We can focus our purchasing on the expansion of decodable text sets. So what we can do is use that as directional to inform some of our planning. In addition, What I would say at the site level is we have always structured those so that there's individualized site feedback at the end of every set of walks. So every single time we schedule this representative sampling, the day is laid out. So we start with an introduction with the administrative team and the instructional coach. If desired, that team walks with the TNTP folks through classrooms and does calibration, and then we end the day with a debrief. Ideally, the coach and the administrative team attend, and they work with the folks who conducted the learning walk to get individualized feedback on practice, suggested foci for coaching or professional development or the work of the ILT. So all of that are actionable next steps. What I will say is that for the last two years, so last year and this year, we have externally contracted with TNTP for that work. We might say it's sort of like having our training wheels on as we get our calibration up and running and our systems for learning walk work up and running. Our hope in looking towards 2627 is to collect that data ourselves and to have data visualization and systems that support site leaders to work as an instructional leadership team to again, take that data and make it actionable in all of their site based instructional systems that we just named as enabling conditions.

With regard to the absence of I'm sorry, did you want to okay with regard to the absenteeism data? Yeah, no, it's it's I think that's an important piece of data. Um, but those are in kind of encapsulated within the guard rails. And so there's, there's a number of different guard rails that have different data points that a number of the commissioners were touching on earlier today, even when it comes to resource allocation, or when it comes to staffing and things of that nature. And so, while. those data can be cross-tabbed in ways that we can consider in the future. My concern, honestly, in the end ends up being the extent to which that then might detract from some of the instructional strategies that are trying to take root at the same token. That's not to take away from the fact that absenteeism or attendance is an extremely important metric for us to pay attention to. But I wonder the extent to which looking at a number of different cross tab measures that aren't necessarily the instructional strategies that we're trying to tie to these may or may not help support kind of like the movement of those instructional strategies moving forward, rather than them being conditions that we want to constantly work on as part of the guardrail work. So I think it's an open conversation in trying to think through this the right way.

Okay, well, thank you so much for your presentation, thank you for being here and i'm well. we'll see you next week soon. Thank you for all your work. That next week next week is graduation. We will see you next week, probably at school yes.

hey.

Moving to Item G, Discussion Item, Major Decisions Update New Special Education County Program. Dr. Hsu?

Yes. Thank you, President Kim. I am really, really excited to share this update with the board and our community. We are actually joined by several members of the County Office of Ed site leaders in the back there and our County Office of Ed leader over high school. No, all things County Office of Ed. Yes. Rachel Noto, as well as our head of special education, Jenny Jimenez-Payne. and our head of governance and communication. I'm going to hand it over to them to walk you through the presentation. But I will say I'm just super, super proud that we were able to do this because over the years, over the years, over the year and a half that I've been here, I've heard from so many of our special ed families of just Can you please try to make things easier for us and try to help us receive the care that we want here safe closer to home, and I believe that we are moving in the right direction to provide that for our families so i'm going to hand this over to Jenny.

Thank you, Dr. Su. Good evening, board commissioners, Superintendent Su, SFUSD community, our team behind us, and members of the public. I'm Jenny Payne. I'm the head of special education and director for our special education local area plan for SFUSD. And I'm going to turn it over to my colleague here, Rachel Noto.

Hi everyone, I'm Rachel Noto. I'm the executive director for our alternative schools and county programs. I actually am a San Francisco native myself. I went to SF USD schools K-12 and I have 10 years working in non-public schools along with Matt. We actually started our first jobs together at 22 and 23. So we are, this is something that we have a really vested interest in is bringing this programming. To our county office and to our school district, and I did want to say a huge appreciation, most of my all 10 both district and county office leaders are here tonight to support and we'll i'll tell you very briefly about them momentarily. Next slide, please. So our board actually, you all serve both SFUSD and SFCOE. San Francisco Public Schools is actually one agency encompassing SFUSD and San Francisco County Office of Education. Our County Office of Education operates alternative education schools and programs for the youth of San Francisco who are expelled, referred by probation, SARB referred, foster in transition and or homeless, We also have one program currently with special education services for students with social emotional needs and two opportunity programs, one for pregnant and parenting teens and another for newcomer youth and i'm going to dive in just a tiny bit more to that as we go. Next slide. So SFCOE, we actually have our own mission and our own vision. We even have our own logo. It didn't make the cut in the 10 slides, but if you want to see it, it looks very similar. It's tiny, but there is a bridge under there, or rather a net underneath the bridge because we are the safety net. The county office catches the kids that fall out of comprehensive schools, out of district schools, and that's our goal. And really sort of backing up and kind of explaining alternative education is the umbrella and each school serves a unique population, a very specific population in both our district and on the county office side. Next slide please. So we have three district schools, and I'm going to let our leaders wave at you just so you get a sense of who they are. We have two continuation schools. Both of those leaders were not able to be here tonight. They are intentionally in different parts of the city so that youth can go to school closer to their own home. And because our youth have significant safety needs, so they could not possibly all go to one continuation school and this allows them to graduate either on time or closer when they're behind in credits and we have one independent study school independence hi. Anna's going to wave at you. And I wanted to highlight, particularly for independence, because it's relevant to the topic tonight, we actually have two counseling-enriched classrooms there that are also a partnership with special education. We are opening a third for the fall, and that is already full. And all three of those counseling-enriched classrooms support students that would otherwise need a nonpublic school out of the district. So they actually it's a wonderful program because the kids get to stay right here in San Francisco. They don't have to go anywhere else. And it also obviously saves the district money. We have nine county schools and programs. They share three CDS codes, which is the county district code that the CDE uses, meaning they are the same school in several locations. And this is a design that is common for county offices so that students across large geographical areas can still be served by the same type of programming. So two of those are Hilltop, and El Camino serving our pregnant parenting teams and also a newcomer youth program that has historically served primarily older newcomer youth. But this year we actually have been supporting students who are longer term and younger, but cannot attend our comprehensive schools for a variety of reasons. Civic Center Secondary, which is middle and high school, primarily expelled youth. Our satellites, which is our county satellites that are connected to Civic, which is Care Middle, Care Bayview, Care Buchanan, and Youth Chance. The care programs primarily support students who have dropped out entirely or have significant truancy issues. Sometimes three, four, five years have not been in school. And then Youth Chance, which is our oldest group of students who want to work and earn their diploma at the same time. Macaulay-Seap, our special education program. for students with very significant mental health needs. Woodside Learning Center, which is our court school inside juvenile hall. And then coming soon is our new county program at Edwin and Italy. And I'll pass it back to Jenny.

Thank you. So as Rachel mentioned, we already have we have two special education county program that serves basically are are more mild moderate with social emotional behavioral needs. This is the first time that the district in partnership with our county program is going to open a special education programs specifically for our students with complex academic, behavioral, and communication needs that are what we considered extensive support needs students, primarily with an eligibility of autism and intellectual disability. Currently, we do not have a non-public school that serves extensive support needs within the city limits. In fact, Our kids, our students, SFUSD students have to travel three to four hours round trip per day to access the non-public school outside far, outside of the city limits. So this is a strategic opportunity for SFUSD to develop an ESN county program that will increase our local capacity and aligned with student-centered norms. When I came back to San Francisco, I always like to say this in November, I had the marching order from Dr. Su and said, Jenny, we gotta open a county, an NPS program to serve our students locally. And I took it to heart and here we are. The program was also, this program was directly recommended by FCMAT in their report in 2025. to improve our capacity and expand our continuum of services to serve our students here in San Francisco. So our program goal is to reduce reliance in non-public school, avoid lengthy travel for our students outside of San Francisco, and to offer the continuum of service. Current data, and I know this was asked by the commissioners, current data indicates that our biggest need currently is a program that will serve our extensive support needs. I know that we also have a need, as Rachel mentioned, that our C programs, our CEC programs are full, and that's our next project. um next step next slide please so what is this program um this is going to be a self-contained extensive support needs class designed to be enriched with social skills and behavior-based support to facilitate the development of our students by hiring our teach teachers who have behavior background and experience teaching this population of students, we will incorporate evidence-based strategies and positive behavior intervention within the class. It will focus on generalization and maintenance of skills that are taught using ABA strategies. And we will utilize direct explicit instruction for social skills, pragmatics and communication which often includes group sessions for social skills and co-facilitated classroom. It will include use of appropriate academic instruction using TeachTown, and it will have a high to student ratio to ensure that students with high academic and behavioral needs can safely access their education. and be ready for college and career. We hope to actually give them alternative pathway to diploma.

Next slide, please. So, as you can see, in April we spent a lot of time on the building preparation. The planning process was extremely collaborative, working between special education facilities and the county office. We had occupational therapists and several board-certified behavior analysts consult on the environment to ensure that it would be therapeutic, accessible, and really support our students to be able to self-regulate. So again, they really focused on interior painting, reinforcing the glass panels and the windows, some minor electrical work, updating technology. And then this month, we've started on the hiring process, which has been really exciting. We have ordered furniture both indoor and outdoor, making the facility beautiful. Jenny has connected with the Lee family. They are very excited that the building is going to be in use again. and the summer is going to be the construction phase we're really excited to make sure that the build out makes it a wonderful space and like i said having rooms that are going to be accessible for the students to use to help self-regulate the building is planning or the construction is planning to be done 8 28 as it says in the timeline and we really want it to be a robust opening where the building is ready before we're touring families so that they can see the campus fully ready to go and make the decision to hopefully accept that placement. So our goal would be to have students by October, given that timeline. Next slide. I really want to highlight that we're grounding our environmental design decisions in evidence-based practices that Jenny mentioned, specifically centering neurodiversity, sensory regulation, and student well-being. The really important critical piece for me was that the classrooms allow movement to happen in the room. So it's not just an add-on, because if kids have to leave, they're missing instruction. So giving them that movement in the classroom so that they can self-regulate before escalating was really critical for for all of us on the team and specifically for this this population of students so you can see this is what it looks like right now nice and clean and then they're going to work on the construction piece and i think that is it so next slide is questions

Thank you so much, I appreciate the presentation, I will open it up or Commissioners similar as we've been doing with the other previous discussions will do questions and then we'll have an opportunity for staff to respond superintendent respond. You want to kick us off. Not everyone needs to ask a question and we don't need all three minutes. Anything. Sure right.

City Council Chambers, hi I just wanted to thank you really, really appreciate this exciting opportunity we have to bring kids back into the district. City Council Chambers, I. City Council Chambers, I asked questions in advance, but I have one other thing I wanted to follow up on which is with regard to hiring if we have difficulty hiring folks. City Council Chambers, So what is our plan in the event that we have difficulty hiring folks to staff, the school thanks.

Well, I'm sorry. Okay.

Um, I asked in the question, uh, the advanced questions, um, kind of what the max capacity to grow was. And the answer was that the max capacity of the building is 11 classrooms. But my question is like, what is the need of our population? And is this a plan to meet it? How many students are we currently sending out who would be better served in San Francisco at this school? Um, and what is our plan to actually. meet our need locally?

Love it. Full support. And I actually don't have that many questions. My primary question is around staffing and knowing the challenges that we have ahead of us with our staffing work. And so what I'm about to ask has actually nothing to do necessarily with the accounting program at Edwin and Anita Lee. Um, but, uh, I, I, I continue to think that we're there's a part of this conversation that's missing a little bit around our enrollment strategy and the conversations, because this is coming in the context of. Of our major decisions work and. There's no board action that's needed on this because it's a program that's opening up in an existing school site that's sitting vacant right now so there's no school ID that's coming on or off. But this is more or less a portfolio conversation just we're talking about it in the context of a single program and. And I and I still feel like we're not quite getting to the conversation around the elephant in the room of of the enrollment and the portfolio conversations that we're going to need to ultimately give direction on. At the last meeting in June in June, and so I saw that the supplemental student assignment briefing packet was attached but. But no. There's nothing set up necessarily for us to talk about that right now. And so I just think there's a mismatch here between the thing that we're talking about now, which again, full support. And I mentioned this at the top of our meetings a couple weeks ago. I don't think any of us are opposed to and are quite the opposite, very excited for and love the work that's taking place. but it does seem misaligned to the conversation topic here of our major decision work. So I think I continue to experience that, and I don't know if there is an intention to lean into that conversation right now, or if we're prepared to even have that. But I am concerned that we have essentially one more meeting before the final meeting, where then we have to make some sort of call on this long-term trajectory of a timeline that seems rather significant for us. i'll just i'll leave it at that it's not really a question because i again i full support of everything y'all are doing i think this is great uh super excited and it's been a long time coming we've been talking about this so thank you for following through jenny on this work uh both of you on this work in your teams um so that's all i'll share it for now

Actually, that was my question, President Kim and Superintendent Sue, whether right now, given the supplemental enrollment piece of information that we received, which is a great resource in terms of all the information, there wasn't a so what, there wasn't a memo attached to it in terms of what we're supposed to do with that. If we are to come up with our own conclusions from that or our own analysis, then we can do so. I have a couple of questions on that. um appreciate all the work that's going on here in a way i mean the only real question i have is why didn't we do this sooner and a little bit of a shout out to united educators actually because i think they've been clamoring for this for a while and i know that was part of their collective bargaining uh agreement or something that they put in there as well so um uh so nothing really specifically on this but if the floor is open later to talk about structurally or strategically what are we doing in terms of some of these major decisions I would certainly welcome that conversation and um if not today I'm still unclear as far as when are we going to have these conversations because we really have to have them soon

Very excited to be here and having this conversation and miss noto I really appreciate your pointing out the safety net in the logo because that's so true that our county schools are absolutely our safety net and. Unfortunately. it's true that you have to fail in some cases to actually get access to that safety net. And so I appreciate that this is one of those opportunities to prevent failure and set our students up for success, first of all. And the focus on the alternative pathway to diploma and just so many different ways we can set our students up for success here, I think is awesome. I think my question, just looking at the staffing model, you know, we have seen, like, for example, when we opened Willie Brown Middle School, right, that I think we underestimated the staffing needs and the requirements of students at the school at the time, and it took quite a few years to stabilize that school, right? And especially when we're talking about, you know, students that fit the stereotypical profile of both autism and ID, you know, we would expect some big extinguishing behaviors as they transition into a new program and a new space. And so I wonder if one BCBA and even, I mean, the S10Q, I understand that is the SOAR, the code for our paraeducators who do have additional behavior training. um you know but i'm wondering are these staffing levels going to be enough to set our kids up for success and launch them i'm wondering if we might need to put a little bit additional support in place additionally it to ensure success and then hopefully fade it back quickly but um uh like i just I wanna make sure the school succeeds and these students are given all the opportunities for success in the world. And I really appreciate that hopefully this is the first of many. I think my question to follow up on Vice President Hewling is we do have a lot of students out at non-public schools who could absolutely, and they are spending, as you said, up to three hours a day in the bus every day. So what else? What's the next step? How much farther can we take this to actually bring our kids back into the city? It's really, as a parent who's put a kid on a bus in the past, like I mentioned this when we were at Zoom, it's a leap of faith. And it's a much bigger leap of faith when you're sending your kid across a bridge, you know, or yeah, it's a lot. So it can be very, very difficult on the families as well as the students to go that far. So The more more the merrier let's keep going, so there were a few questions in there, President Kim for what it's worth of above and beyond the monologuing so yeah.

i'll leave it to Dr so however you want to manage the time and support.

Um, yeah, so this is really exciting. And honestly, I would love to have more. But just learning from the past, we have to go slow to go far. Because we cannot you brought up Willie Brown. We cannot just say we're opening up a school and it's fully opened to full capacity and then struggle to staff it and struggle to Make sure that our students have what they need to be successful, which is why we're going to be very methodical very intentional in ramping up. This is the first time we're doing this, so we want to do it right and why we haven't done it before I don't know, but here we are and we're so excited that we're doing it now, because our students deserve it now. Um, and, and so you're gonna see the slow ramping up of this. Um, I will say that I've already been contacted by some other schools that we have that says, Hey, look, I, you know, there's two separate entries to my, to my building. Maybe you can take another part of the building to, to, to expand, um, so that we can use better use our facilities to meet the needs of our students. So, so there are lots of principles coming to me to say there's you know, would this be appropriate for my school. And that's exciting that's really exciting to see the partnership in the engagement. In terms of the hiring hiring plan yes hiring is a is a concern, which is one of the reasons why Jenny when she when we got really close to a point where we said, this is a green light go worked very closely with amy. uh associate superintendent of hr to make sure that we can hire uh that we're um i think it's priority first in line to hire um uh are the staff and i believe you have jenny identify we have staff identified so where we um believe that we have the staff ready to go and we will for all the positions or just for some of them

Can I jump in at just the time? I just wanted to go back to what you were saying, Commissioner Fischer, about wanting to make sure it's successful. The nice thing is about the county network is really tiny. So we have two BCBAs already and three registered behavior technicians who are supported by the BCBAs. and they can kind of flex a little bit. I don't want to pull them out of my other sites so that the other sites struggle, but they definitely can flex to support a new program, and they want to. They all want it to be successful. So I'm not as worried about that part. I've also opened three other tiny programs at this point, so I feel fairly confident, and I can always lean on Jenny and Matt of like, Okay, you know we're not sure this is working like where can we reallocate resources, if needed, just because we do want it to be successful for sure. And I can just jump in we have several paras sort of like tentatively. interested i've had multiple people reach out, particularly in the last two weeks and folks with really good experience either who are our bts themselves. Maybe some of them are coming from other non public agencies and currently work in our classrooms. And teachers actually have identified like this is a really strong staff member, would you be interested so that's exciting news, but so they're not all hired. We have an assistant principal also tentatively identified still working through the process to support the school and the ap will report directly to me, which is a structure, we have in county where we don't necessarily have a principal who's supporting that so exciting progress.

And then to Vice President Hewling's question, do we know what the actual need is?

Well, currently we have 162 students placed in non-public school. Around, potentially around, I would say 50% maybe, plus extensive support needs. But our first year, because we're opening two classes with 16 spots, there are 26 students that are in that pipeline, right? And then we'll increase again for the second year to open up to four classrooms, which is going to hold 32 students. Now, obviously this will not all be the first year, not all 16 students will not be coming at the same time. Just like non-public school, it will be a rolling enrollment. And so they start, maybe we'll have two students, then three. So it also gives our staff a chance to strengthen because this will be a new team, right? Two new teachers. And as I mentioned to Dr. Su, we have six who said, I would like to apply internal candidates. And we narrowed it down to two. And so, and this too, Janet Padgett- folks are very experienced and, in fact, one of them is about to become a BCPA. Janet Padgett- So. Janet Padgett- But in the event that we have hiring challenges we do have to non public agency agencies ready that I have lined up to work with us.

Can I just ask a follow up around that? So we have eight students per classroom. So in two years, we'll be at 32 students, which it sounds like is 39% of our 81 student demand of students who are in NPSs with extensive support needs who would benefit from this model locally. So do we have a plan to... continue to expand to serve all 81 students. So we've heard, I think, that you know, right now, when we send students to Npss, we are paying quite a lot like $200,000 plus expensive transportation in some instances per year for those students. And we've heard that we may actually be able to enroll students from outside districts who Are closer to come to San Francisco, then send their students the same 3 hours that we're sending ours round trip. But it sounds like if there's only 11 classrooms here, the maximum capacity. Would be 88, so it doesn't actually sound like this building has. Capacity to really take in outside students. I guess I'm just wondering if we have a long term plan to meet our.

our own need as well as expand to potentially meet other um like localized needs outside of ourself well um yeah so that's why I I referenced earlier that there are lots of principles who are reaching out to me saying I think I might be able to host or house This type of program, because I have 2 separate entrance to our building, or they can take a whole wing of our building, or they can take a whole floor of our building. I think I think people are just excited and energized by the fact that we're bringing something that people just know our students need, and they want to be a part of it. And so But but we don't want to go too fast because serving these students are really, really complicated and it's very complex. And so we have to do it right. We cannot, cannot rush to serve and then end up, you know, accidentally causing more harm than good. And so do you want to speak about just the plan for rollout?

Yeah, and I guess one of the success factors of non-public school schools are because they're small. So we truly do not want to open a big program because that makes a non public school. And what we're trying to create here is like a very low staff to student ratio. Right. So, yes, we can open up to 11 classrooms, but we really shouldn't like we will make that decision after year two and see how we're doing. Uh, and not, like, necessarily open just to open.

I appreciate that and I'm, I'm really glad that we are opening this school. I think it's a long time coming. I think it's great that the district is. Doing strategic planning to meet the needs of our students and is, um, you know, responding to audit findings from the report and things like that. But I think as a board, it's incumbent upon us to ask the questions about if our strategies are actually sufficient to meet the need. And I think similar to last week when we had a TK expansion proposal that seems to fall 300 students short of our current TK demand, I just want to make sure that When we take on this challenge of right sizing our portfolio that we are actually meeting the needs of our students with our investments.

I have one follow up question. Especially because this is going to be a program that's going to be focused on students with autism. ABA is a bit of a flashpoint in the, in the autistic community, right? Can you, so when I see BCBAs and, you know, our S10Qs, can you help us understand a little bit more about what ABA is going to look like in our, in this new school? If it will be there at all?

For sure, and I do think that that's going to be part of the iep iep process is some families are not going to want to choose that they may want to stay with our nonpublic schools. And you know that's a consideration that we obviously have to to take into account right now the evidence base shows that that is what's appropriate, and I think one of the biggest pieces and actually are one of our current bcbs has done a lot of research on this is how to support. people who are neuro spicy in a way that feels appropriate for them, and really engaging with kids with young people and what do you want like how does this feel for you, what are the ways that you feel like your needs are met. And not having it be this kind of like clinical sterile process and in our like our one BCBA is like very, very talented at that and actually we are. she's done some research on the ethics around this and we're actually looking at it tomorrow it's very timely, so I think it's kind of a it's a twofold thing it's like making sure that it's the right fit for every student and family. You know this particular school and then also making sure that the way that we do the aba is is well done and is taking into account student needs.

And recognizing the change in ABA over the past 30 years and the move towards ethical, as you mentioned, you know, affirming the person, you know, and yeah, not trying to un-autism them. Right. So, yeah. Thank you.

I'll just end with just an affirmation of this work. I think it's super exciting. We've been talking about this, I know, for some time. And as others have mentioned to both labor parties, labor partners, staff, the board have all been super jazzed and energized by this work. So I just want to thank you so much for these plans. um as i move to action items h1 um superintendent staff is it okay if i combine h1 and two is that okay so i'll combine thank you so much council i'll combine action item h1 uh 265-26 sp1 approval of resolution authorizing documents for the issuance and sale oh you can go oh sorry um issuance and sale the samsung unified school districts general obligation bonds in an amount not to exceed 270 million dollars by negotiated sale 2024 sale 2024 bond series b and item h2 26526 sp2 approval resolution and authorizing documents for the issuance and sale the samsung unified school districts general obligation refunding bonds in the amount not to exceed 235 million dollars by negotiated sale do i have a motion and a second so moved second I will pass it to you, Dr. Hsu.

I'm actually going to hand it over to our very amazing bond staff.

Thanks. Good evening, Commissioners. I'm also going to defer, but I want to introduce to you Ariel Espiritu Santo, Executive Director of Bond and Facilities Finance and Administration, to present the item.

Ariel Espiritu Santo, Good evening Commissioners, my name is Ariel Espiritu Santo, so we are here tonight to discuss the series B issuance for our 2024 bond next slide. So to remind you all in 2024, a bond measure passed authorizing $790 million to invest in our facilities here. We issued series A, which was 160 million in April 2024, April 2025. Sorry. And we are here now to talk about our series B. Um, series B will fund projects that will span 2 years worth of work starting this fall, and those funds are needed as early as January of next year. We are also in the items tonight going to discuss a refunding or refinancing opportunity, so this is part of our strategy that whenever we go out for new money, we also look for opportunities to essentially refinance our outstanding bonds, therefore saving money for our taxpayers. So tonight, there are two action items in front of you, the first is to authorize our series the issuance, which is for $270 million. And the second is to allow the district to take any refunding opportunities, depending on what they see in the market at the time of that sale note that in the attachments to this item, there are some blanks, which will be filled out as we get closer to the financing. Next slide. So this is just to give you a bit of an idea of what we'll be paying for with this next issuance. With these tax exempt bonds, we are required to spend 85% of the money within three years of issuing. So we've looked at two years worth of cash flow. Just so you know, cash flow is the actual money that we are spending on invoices. This isn't just making a construction commitment. So you can see here for the 2 year period starting this fall. We've called out. There are many more projects that are on this slide, but we just wanted to show you at the bottom. There are a number of large projects that are currently underway that will be completed during this issuance. So you'll see projects listed there that you're already aware of construction happening and in the ground. At the top, we have several called out as key project drivers. These are large projects that are going to be entering construction during the 2 year period. Our largest 1 there is the hubs and shops project, which we expect to enter construction and you can see that it will be ramping up to spending almost 20Million dollars per quarter. So that project alone is making up over 110Million dollars of the 270Million dollar issuance. So we have chosen this two-year period, which gives us some flexibility. If it turns out that our projects are moving faster than intended, then we kept the opportunity to come back a bit sooner for our Series B, Series C issuance. If we find that there are unanticipated delays in spending, then we'll still be able to meet our spending target within the three years. So we look at that full need of 450 million across the two years, subtract the money that we currently have on hand, and that is how we got to our $270 million figure. Next slide. High level here is our schedule of between today and getting to the actual issuance of our money. So we are here today getting your board's authorization. In July, we will be going to the city and county to get their approval. During that period, we'll also be going through a bond rating process. We have tentatively, assuming you all have a July 28th board meeting, I'm seeing shaking ahead of no. So we will adjust the schedule accordingly, but we will need to come back to you all to get your approval of the preliminary official statement. Once that is posted and distributed to potential investors, We will then move forward with bond pricing and then be able to close the bond issuance sometime this fall. And with that, we will close it and open it up to any questions.

Thank you very much. Commissioners, I will open it up for comments and questions. Comments and questions that may influence the outcome of your decision on this vote. Seeing none, I will, hold on, sorry, I need to go back to my script here. I am now gonna do this from memory. Seeing none, I now close discussion on this item for item H1 and H2.

I just closed it. Thought you were gonna ask.

Oh, no, no, we can bring it offline. I will motion for or ask for roll call vote, please.

Oh, no, it was seconded. I moved and Commissioner Fisher seconded at the beginning. Roll call vote, please.

Commissioner Alexander?

Yes.

Commissioner Fisher? Yes. And thank you for being here tonight. Commissioner Gupta?

Yes.

Vice President Hewling? Yes. Commissioner Ray? Yes. Commissioner Weisman-Ward? Yes. President Kim?

Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much for your work. Super exciting. Moving to Item H3, Employment Contracts for District Executive Employees. Dr. Hsu?

I'm going to hand it over to Namita. Um. Thank you, Madam Superintendent. So the government code requires that the Board provide the public with an oral summary report of the cost of the employment agreement. This is an employment agreement for the assistance technology, and so the agreement would be between the San Francisco Unified School District and Ranganathan Sundaram, an individual who would be assuming the title of the Assistant Superintendent of Technology. It's a two-year contract starting on July 1, 2026, going through June 30, 2028. The contract calls for placement of salary on Grade 6, Step 8 of the management salary schedule, which is $248,112.01. It's a 260-day calendar with the employee getting benefits with respect to vacation as well as health and welfare benefits in compliance with the classified management employees across the district. And the buyout provision in this agreement is for six months. It's a six-month buyout provision. Uh, the rest of the provision, um, article, uh, the rest of the articles, uh, in the agreement are very standard, uh, basically protect the district and, uh, ascertain that if parts of the, uh, contract are struck as, um. Illegal the contract, the remainder of the contract stands as is. So that is the total benefits package and term of the agreement that you are voting on tonight with respect to the Assistant Superintendent of Technology. And the applicant's name is Ranganathan Sundaram.

Thank you. And sorry, this is a little out of process here. So I will ask for a motion in a second to introduce this item. Thank you. I'll second. I just kind of make it faster. Any questions or comments from staff that may influence the outcome of your decision? Seeing none, roll call vote, please.

Commissioner Alexander?

Yes.

Commissioner Fischer? Yes. Commissioner Gupta?

Yes.

Vice President Hewling? Yes. Commissioner Ray? Yes. Commissioner Weisman-Ward? Yes. President Kim?

Yes. Thank you very much moving to item I consent calendar, I will.

President cam has a standing recusal from the consent calendar due to his employment with the city county of San Francisco, which is a frequent contractor with SF USD in order to avoid any appearance of a conflict. Are there any changes to the consent calendar superintendents there are none Thank you, and I move approval of the consent calendar is our second second. We have a roll call vote, please.

Commissioner Alexander? Yes. Commissioner Fisher? Yes. Commissioner Gupta?

Yes.

Vice President Hewling?

Yes.

Commissioner Ray?

Yes.

Commissioner Weisman-Ward? Yes.

item j information can be found on our agenda under item j and this meeting is adjourned at 10 0 1 pm