San Francisco Government SmartTranscripts:

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: PM. Roll call, please.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Commissioner Alexander.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Here.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Commissioner Fisher. Commissioner Gupta. Vice President of Healing. Commissioner Ray. Here. Commissioner Wiseman Ward. Here. And President Kim.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Here. That's four. Information regarding accessibility, translation services, and virtual meeting information may be found online on board docs under item a, general information. At this time, before the board goes into closed session, I call for any speakers to the closed session items listed in the agenda. There will be a total of five minutes for speakers. Are there any speakers for public comment?

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: There are none.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I now recess this meeting at 05:02PM.

[Dr. Harari (Curriculum & Instruction)]: SFgov TV. San Francisco government television.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: SF Gov TV, San Francisco Government Television.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: SF Gov TV, San Francisco government television.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: SFgovTV, San Francisco Government Television.

[Speaker 6.0]: SFGovTV,

[Emma Dunbar (Executive Director, LEAD – Middle School/K-8)]: San Francisco Government Television.

[Dr. Harari (Curriculum & Instruction)]: SFGOV TV. San Francisco Government Television.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: SF Gov TV, San Francisco Government Television.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: SF Gov TV, San Francisco government television.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Open session. Two, report from closed session. Item c one, vote on expulsion matters. I move for the approval of the stipulated expulsion agreement for one middle school student, matter number 2025Dash2026Dash05, suspended expulsion status for the spring twenty twenty six semester. During the suspended expulsion period, the student will return to Willie Brown Middle School. Can I have a second?

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: Second.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Roll call, please, miss Lanoff.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Student delegate oh, no. I'm sorry. You guys can't do the submission. Commissioner Alexander?

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Commissioner Fisher? Yes. Commissioner Gupta?

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Yes. Vice President Healy? Yes. Commissioner Ray? Yes. Commissioner Wiseman Ward? Yes. And President Kim?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Seven ayes.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I move approval of the stipulated expulsion agreement for one middle school student matter number 2025Dash2026Dash06 for the remainder of the fall twenty twenty five and spring twenty twenty six semesters during the suspended expulsion period. The student will attend CARE Bayview Middle School.

[Speaker 6.0]: Can I

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: have a second?

[Caroline Cochran (Parent, remote public comment)]: Second.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Roll call, please, miss Lanoff.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Commissioner Alexander?

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Commissioner Fisher? Yes. Commissioner Gupta?

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Vice President Heeling? Yes. Commissioner Wray? Yes. Commissioner Wiseman Ward? Yes. President Kim?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Seven ayes.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I move approval of the stipulated expulsion agreement for one high school student matter number 2025Dash2026Dash07 during the suspended expulsion period. The student will attend an alternative high school placement with credit recovery from two school options provided by SFUSD. Can I have a second?

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Second.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Roll call please, miss Lanoff.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Commissioner Alexander?

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Commissioner Fisher? Yes. Commissioner Gupta?

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Vice President Healy?

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Commissioner Wray? Yes. Commissioner Wiseman Ward? Yes. President Kim?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Seven ayes.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I move approval of the stipulated expulsion agreement for one high school student matter number 2025Dash2026Dash08 during the suspension suspended expulsion period. The student will attend a comprehensive high school from two school options that offer special education services as required by a student's independent individualized education planner IEP. Can I have a second?

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: Second.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Roll call, please, miss Lanoff.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Commissioner Alexander?

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Commissioner Fisher? Yes. Commissioner Gupta?

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Vice President Heeling? Yes. Commissioner Ray? Yes. Commissioner Wiseman Ward? Yes. And president Kim?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: The seven ayes.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I move approval of the stipulated expulsion agreement for one high school student matter number 20252026DashO9. During the suspended expulsion period, the student will attend a comprehensive high school from two school options provided by SFUSD. Can I have a second?

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Yes.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Roll call please, miss Lanoff.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Commissioner Alexander.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Commissioner Fisher. Yes. Commissioner Gupta.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Vice President Healy. Yes. Commissioner Ray. Yes. Commissioner Wiseman Ward. Yes. And president Kim?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: That's seven ayes.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Item c two, report from closed session. We have three matters of anticipated litigation. Student CF versus SFUSD, student RK versus SFUSD, student QE versus SFUSD. In two matters of anticipated litigation concerning CF and RK, the board, by a vote of seven ayes and zero nays, the board gives direction to the general counsel. In one matter of anticipated litigation concerning QE, the board, by a vote of six ayes and zero nays, with commissioner Fisher abstaining, the board gives direction to the general counsel. In the matter of Student OL versus SFUSD, OAH case number 2025090066, the board by a vote of seven ayes, zero nays gives direction to the general counsel. In the matter of Jane Doe versus SFUSD, SF Superior Court, case number CGC dash two two Dash six zero three five five one, the board by a vote of seven ayes, zero nays, gives direction to the general counsel. In the matter of OAH case number 2025080754, the board by a vote of seven ayes, zero nays, gives direction to the general counsel. The SFUSD Board of Education is committed to effective school board governance that centers student learning based on community input. The board has adopted our vision, values, goals, and guardrails. In order to increase the portion of board meeting time we spend on student outcomes, every other regular meeting is a monitoring workshop. Our workshop our approach to governance also calls on the board to empower the superintendent to take full ownership of the strategies used to reach these goals within the guardrail set by the board. As we implement our governance framework, the board will continue to adopt new systems, routines, and policies aimed at improving student outcomes. We encourage the public to follow this work on our website at sfusd.edu/governance as we commit to finding new and improved ways to more meaningfully engage with staff, students, and families. At this time, without objection, I would like to move item h two, action item two five one one dash one a s p two, approval of PIPs and waivers, out of order to follow public comment. Any objections?

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: The the my app closed.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: As did mine, so I'm trying to reset it.

[Elliot (General Counsel)]: President Kim, in this instance, we are legally required to pause until they can get the webcasting up.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Okay. Thank you.

[Elliot (General Counsel)]: My apologies.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: All good. Commissioner Fisher, do you have a do you have a joke you wanna share with us?

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: I'm actually gonna defer to commissioner Weisman Ward.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: That's right. This is a point of joke.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Well, I have a a chicken joke. It's not a I've I've shared it with all of you but I haven't shared it with the audience.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Please.

[Speaker 12.0]: Okay.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Yes. Yeah.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: There are there are kids here.

[Speaker 6.0]: So

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: It is definitely g rated, if not PG rated.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I guess I'll have to wait.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: So Okay. Why does the chicken only make couple oh, never mind. I'm gonna screw it up. Let me let me think it I'll I'll get it though.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Wow. Wow. Oh oh, commissioner Weisman Ward. Okay. Point of joke.

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: Yes. Recognize it. Point of order. Thank you, joke.

[Speaker 13.0]: Do you

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: know that dogs can't get x rays? Like CAT scan.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: And can't they both get PET scans?

[Speaker 6.0]: Wow.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Oh, we're back. Okay. Thank you. Same by miss Lenoff.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Same by miss Lenoff. Okay.

[Natalie (Vice President of Substitutes, UESF)]: No more laughter.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: All done. Okay. Alright. Item d, public comment. To align with our effective governance efforts, public comment will last for one hour or until 8PM. We'll we'll say 8PM, whichever is earlier. We aim to respect staff, family, and community time by beginning board business no later than eight. Our hope is to conduct board business in an efficient, effective, and accessible manner during reasonable hours. Each participant may speak for up to one minute. Staff will thank the participant at the one minute mark. At one minute and five seconds, I have asked mister Armentrout to please turn off the mic and transition to the next speaker. I ask members of the public to please respect that one minute limit so that we can hear from as many speakers as possible. I encourage speakers who are speaking on the same topic to collaborate and combine their comments so that the board can hear all viewpoints during our limited time. Please also note that the board accepts written public comments via email at boardoffice@sfusd.edu. We will hear first from students in person, the members of the general public in person, beginning with agenda items and moving to non agenda items. Regardless of whether in person public comment is complete, we will save fifteen minutes for remote public comment, so at 07:45PM, taking commenters in the same order as in person. To members of the public, on your right, you'll see signs that outline expectations for public comment and meeting conduct. We ask that all members of the public model the kind of tone, language, and behavior that we hope to see from our young people, respecting different viewpoints and allowing for all members of the public to participate. As a reminder, board rules board rules in California law do not allow us to respond to comments or attempt to answer questions during public comment time. If appropriate, the superintendent will ask that staff follow-up with speakers. Mister Armantraub?

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Thank you, President Kim. We will start with students first. Students can speak to agenda items or non agenda items in this section. We have five cards submitted. Please line up as I call your names and please excuse any mispronunciations on my part. First up, Toto Henibal,

[Speaker 6.0]: Connie,

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Charlie To.

[Elliot (General Counsel)]: President Keenum, I apologize. It sounds like we have another technical issue.

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: To whoever stole my glasses, I will find you. I have contacts.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: You are all in for a very special treat today with

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: One line. I got it.

[Speaker 15.0]: It's my superior lawyer voice.

[Speaker 16.0]: That's what I mean. That's what I like to say.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: You know, the only joke I have is when is the moon the heaviest? What? When it's full. Oh, come on. That was funny.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Which fruit has the most fun at the playground? The kiwi. I was and and for Thanksgiving. I was considering making alligator as our main dish for Thanksgiving, but I realized I only have a crock

[Speaker 6.0]: pot.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Why does the chicken coop only have two doors? Because if it had four, it'd be a sedan.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: And and we're back. Alrighty.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Okay. What's the student?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: We are going to resume public comment. Thank you everyone for your patience. If we can come back, that would be great. Thank you. Mister Ehrmantraut?

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Thank you, President Kim. Picking off, last person we called was Charlie To. Next card is read as, Fiza, Lucas, Max, and Nico. I'm sorry. We're very sorry to follow a

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: comment. Okay.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Last one is Mia Janelle. Each speaker will have up to one minute. Can we please begin with Toto Hanibal?

[Speaker 18.0]: Hi. I'm a student at the academy, and the main reason that we were given for a closure other than the falsehood that it's what's best for our students is that we are both overfunded and under enrolled. This is also an issue present within SOTA, and with that in mind, I'd like to call attention to a meeting held between the SOTA faculty and assistant superintendent Divina Goldwasser on October 28 where the plan to solve this issue was outlined. This plan is to expand SOTA, a contradiction of what is slated to happen to academy, and it was stated per Goldwasser's slides that she wishes to provide greater access to SFUSD students to take advantage and benefit from SOTA's program. This is yet another contradicting reason that was given for why academy must close. I wanna point out how hypocritical it is to expand soda while closing academy, and allowing them to take over our campus that we have provided many resources for that they have been able to use while we have not been able to use any of theirs. I would also like to point out how the school with a much less socioeconomic need and a much wider student body is being prioritized over our student body when historically we have not been served in the same way. Thank you.

[Speaker 19.0]: Hi. My name is Connie Sietu, and I am a senior at the academy. I like to question why we weren't told that the school was going to close any earlier. At the student council meeting that we had with Maria Sue and Davina Goldwasser, we were told that when they were developing the college and career program, that they knew that this program was never going to stay at academy. This could mean a lot of things, but the way I understood it is that they knew that academy was going to close, and my peers and I feel like we were treated as guinea pigs. It's very messed up that we were used to test this program out, especially since our sophomores and freshmen chose to go to academy. And we're excited, interested, and committed to do our college and career program at the academy. And now they are disappointed that they have to leave our space, and the same can be said about the juniors and seniors that chose to stay out of school despite the previous threats of closure because they believed in academy and its future. Thank you.

[Speaker 20.0]: Hi. My name is Charlie To and I am a student at Lowell High School currently. And I am here to talk to ask you to create a a JV girls sock soccer program for all. Around 50% kids showed up for tryouts this year, and that and only there were about 25 spots on the team this year, meaning 50% of students would be cut. This is incredibly demoralizing, and wait. This is incredibly this is incredibly demoralizing. And it is, and it lowers your confidence as when you see all your club teammates playing high school soccer because they those private schools and other school districts are able to provide a JV soccer league when we cannot. And we are a big school district, and we can do this. I'd like having a JV pro program should not be a problem as many other sports like football, who has a bigger roster than us, has a JV program. Thank you.

[Speaker 21.0]: Hello. Thank you for listening to into us today. We believe it is unfair that there is no JV soccer league for high school students in FSUSD.

[Speaker 19.0]: Can you believe that SFUSD is the only school district that doesn't have JV soccer? Many students love soccer and deserve more playing opportunities. Please offer a JV soccer league.

[Speaker 21.0]: Hi. My name is Mia, and I got and I go to Hoover Herbert Hoover Middle School. And in my opinion, I think a junior varsity soccer team I think we need a junior varsity soccer team because if you're just starting soccer and you want to be playing with your school, but then you see that there are more advanced players than you. So I think that it can be unfair sometimes if you can get on the team, but then you don't get to play or don't get subbed in. We should have more opportunities to play. Please consider a JV soccer team at middle school and high schools.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Marielle.

[Speaker 6.0]: I'm sorry.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: If he wants to speak, he can speak he can speak at the dais here.

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Okay. Go ahead. Go ahead.

[Speaker 23.0]: Go ahead. Go. Go. They're all

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: He He can he can use the the one right here.

[Speaker 15.0]: Yeah. Here. Go over here.

[Speaker 6.0]: Me? You can do it. If you have something to say, go ahead. My name is Henry. I'm the Rose, and I deserve a teacher.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: President Kim, that is all the student speakers we have. We are now moving on to agenda items. We have 12 cards. Again, please listen for your names. As I call your name, please line up. Our first one is Melanie Bauzan, Bernice Casey, Carla Rabadilla, Catherine Bac Bacne, Alexis Panzer.

[Speaker 24.0]: Oh, wow. My son attends Elder Rider Elementary School. I'm just here I am the CAC advocacy advocacy chair. I'm just here to make public comment this evening to warmly welcome and congratulate our new CAC members, Amber, Bernice, Bridget, Cheryl and Makayla. Lastly, I want to encourage families especially those who are new to special the special education process to attend a CAC meeting. This is a place to learn, ask questions and most importantly find your people. Thank you.

[Speaker 25.0]: Hello. My name is Carla Babadilla. That's a hard, hard word. I have many hats in SFUSD. My first hat is a parent. Second hat is a para in special education in a special day class. And one of my other hats is in the community advisory committee for special education. I highly encourage everyone who has questions about special education to come a meeting. It's on Zoom. But I would really like our board to welcome our new members that are gonna be approved tonight. It is a group of parents and staff that come together and get to meet with district leaders to talk about what's going on. There's not always a lot of movement but when there's a lot of volunteering with your heart and pressure, things do change and things do move. So please look up CAC SPED at s SPED SF. I'm looking at Sam as if she's gonna tell me through mental telepathy. But anyway, please look that up. We appreciate it and thank you so much for all that you do.

[Speaker 26.0]: My name is Catherine Bache, rhymes with h. And, I am the PTA president at Chinese Immersion School at Davila, and I'm speaking about the strong schools resolution. In our fourth grade kids, parent teacher conference yesterday, the teacher said that my kid was great at doing computations but not good at showing his work. And I was pretty disappointed by the town halls that we had where old numbers were presented, old tables were shared, and I didn't see anything new until halfway through that presentation. And I'm encouraging you all to show better work around these numbers, the budget deficit numbers, and also the enrollment expectations before we make these big decisions. Thank you.

[Speaker 27.0]: Hi. I'm Alexis Panzer. I'm a parent at Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy and I'm speaking on the Strong Schools Resolution. Let's be honest, this is a rebrand of school closures and for many families find it deeply insulting. We all know that closing school solves saves almost no money, and yet in just six months, somehow, the deficit has that needs to be cut has gone from 13,000,000 to a 102,000,000. I have no idea how that's happened. Please explain. And also, why are we talking about closing schools and putting campuses on starvation budgets next year? While the central office salaries grow and we continue to pay for a superintendent who's not even qualified for the position. To many of us, this feels like a racket. Families are being asked to sacrifice while leadership avoids accountability. And I'm asking the board to hold the district and the superintendent accountable. We voted for you to do that and we can hold you accountable as well. Our children deserve transparency, not rerunning exercises. Thank you.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: I'll now call up the next set. First one is Brandy Markman, Eva Donjicar, Alexia, Galen Spore, Joy Jones. Again, as a reminder, you'll have one minute to speak. Thank you.

[Speaker 15.0]: Thank you very much.

[Speaker 28.0]: I'm a public school mother commenting on the strong schools resolution. I actually think that it should be called a weak schools resolution because you didn't talk to any of the our our families about this. Our schools belong to the public. They belong to our families. Our schools are not your Monopoly board to do whatever you want to with them. I'm from Chicago, and I saw what happened when they closed schools. They put up luxury condos. They put up charter schools. We also know that five members of this school board got to their seats by being bankrolled by billionaire astroturfs. And I wanna remind you that we shut down this school closure process a year ago, and we will shut it down again. We need what they have in Chicago. Chicago is a sustainable community schools district. That means they have schools with wrap around services. That means they have schools with social workers and non profits in there. And that also means that families have a say. That in Chicago, because of their sustainable community role model, they don't have resolutions like this on their school board agenda. This needs to be severed from the agenda. Thank you.

[Lisenia Abiara (Bond Program Manager)]: Hello. I am a parent at San Francisco Community School, and I'm here to speak on this strong schools resolution. I'm saddened and frustrated to hear that closing schools is back on the table. First of all, school closures take more than a year, and I'm hoping that if this happens, it's not done that in that rushed amount of time. I also have concerns and questions about what guardrails mean, primarily what are the guardrails. There needs to be more specific explicit explanation of that. And my main point is that school closures disrupt relationships. They disrupt communities. They disrupt, networks of support that have been built over decades. And as a professional mental health professional who works in the city with the most vulnerable populations, I see how important relationships and communities are to supporting people, and I want this school board to put the resources upfront to support students and families now so that they don't end up in the situations that my clients are in, that this city doesn't like my clients. So let's prevent that.

[Speaker 30.0]: Hi. My name is Alexia Obo, and I have three kids at San Francisco community. I'm here to talk about the strong school resolution as well. What comes to mind is why. Why are we back here again? What are we trying to do that is new from last year? How are you going to do it? And, again, you don't close school in one year. Just putting that in the resolution or talking about it is insulting to the community. Closing school in one year is going to be extremely traumatizing for all the community, the families, and especially the kids involved. And we don't want to see that again. We need stability. We need to not be wondering if we have another school next year for our kids. And, and we need to focus on budget. Thank you.

[Speaker 31.0]: Hi. I'm Galen. I'm the president of the Parent Action Council at San Francisco Community School. I brought my daughter's sign from last year. I've got a fresh one for you. I'm looking at my notes and speeches from last year and I'm feeling so very disappointed that we are back here again. Phil, as I'm sure you are aware, we did not vote you into this board. You do not represent the will of these people. So how dare you as the architect of the failed outreach portion of the RAI, like, that was your job. That was your job. You got pulled out from under Matt Wayne and put in this position, and now you're trying to bring this back to the table with a one year deadline. Feels Orwellian at best with the name Strong Schools Resolution. It's essentially pulling the rug out from everything that we've been building. I would like you to please not pass this resolution tonight without much more community input and time taken. And I'm sorry Doctor. Hsu, I like you so much as a person, but I don't think we can afford two of you. Like paying for somebody with the degree that you need is too much when we can't pay for classroom teachers.

[Speaker 32.0]: My name is Joy Jones, and I'm a part of the PTA board at McKinley Elementary, and I have two kids at McKinley Elementary. And I'm coming here tonight to do the school resolution as well. It's shocking that we are still here. You've heard the line of people standing here to share their disregard, their disgust. But most importantly, when you look at all of these numbers that are being passed around, none of them are showing any growth. None of them are showing any type of hierarchical movement in any way. They are flatlined. So when you come to the table constantly bringing out numbers and they are flatlined, where is any of this helping our student community, our teaching community, our support staff community, our special ed community, and most importantly, our parent community. Our parent community who sends their kids to schools here at SFUSD to make numbers grow, and we are not growing. And we're now minimizing. And I hope to see these numbers grow in some sort of fashion, in some way, not just me, but I think everybody here.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Our final two speakers for the agenda portion, Emily Diallo and Lawrence Lee, please. For the for agenda item?

[Speaker 33.0]: Yeah. Mine too.

[Speaker 34.0]: Okay. We are living in an AI nightmare. The mayor is focused on his tech bro buddies with tax cuts and full prisons while we're over here begging you to keep our schools open. How is that not blowing your mind right now? The AI industry this year alone is worth $224,000,000,000 What are we even doing here? Seriously. And Maria Sue does not have a teaching credential and is not eligible to be the superintendent. I think your heart in your heart, you want to be good at your job, but I fear that you do not have the backbone to fight for us, and public education across the country is under attack. Your loyalties are clear. By closing schools, you're choosing violence, and we as a community are prepared for a battle. Know on the Maria Sue appointment, tax the rich, and go close some private schools. Shame on all of you for closing the academy. This meeting starts at 06:30, not 06:45. VVGG is silencing the people. Thank you.

[Speaker 16.0]: My name is Lawrence Lee. I'm an SESF USD alumni and a member of the Citizen Bond Oversight Committee which we'll be presenting later today. I'm speaking today as a board member of the Association for the Advancement of Asians, and we are we are in full support of having the contract approved by the commission for doctor Maria Hsu as superintendent. She has done a very good job this year and we are looking forward to continuing work that she's gonna be doing. Thank you.

[Speaker 35.0]: Good evening. My name is Rayna Tayo. I'm a community organizer here in San Francisco, but I'm also a parent of two kids at SFUSD. And I cannot tell you how disappointed I am to see the rebranding of the school closures come on the agenda without talking to parents. I don't know if you didn't learn your lesson about the negative impacts. I don't know if you know how many teachers we lost, how many students we lost, with just the idea of planting the seed of closing schools. And now here we are again a year later, and here we are again. And, mister Phil Kim, we talked about this, and we said that school closures, or whatever the rebrand is, it starts with talking to the people at SFUSD. Until that conversation happens, you should take this off the agenda. Because now the negative impact of just having this on the agenda, we won't know what that impact is for another couple of months. How many teachers are gonna look for stability elsewhere? And we know we need those teachers here. My kid is 13 and waiting to go to high school at June Jordan and has one message for you, and it's on the back of my t shirt. Safe small schools. Start talking to the community. You do not know everything. You there's not possible for you to know everything, and there's a wealth of knowledge waiting to help you make these decisions. So please take this off the agenda. Maria Sue, I just have to say that

[Speaker 30.0]: I'm sorry. Whether you've done

[Speaker 35.0]: a good job or not, the promise was that you were gonna go back to DCYF and we were gonna get a qualified candidate to come in. And I would like to see that qualification

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: I'm sorry your time is up.

[Speaker 35.0]: Okay. Thank you.

[Speaker 33.0]: I'd like to thank the CAC who's speaking tonight. The district advisory committees are extremely important and I appreciate my time, when I was a member of the CAC. For years, the CAC warned of a staffing stabilization problem and we are now in a crisis. The CAC has asked for a workload model for SPED teachers. The district has not been able to implement it and now the teachers union is asking for the workload model and the contract and there is now a declared impasse. We cannot have a stable district without a stable SPED staffing. Listen to the special education community and move the head of special ed into the executive board. That would be a sign that things are gonna be different now. Last time y'all tried to close schools, you had zero plans for special day classes. There were no appropriate facilities, no plan. That's inhumane. Listen to us. Thank you.

[Julia Martin (Special Education Ombudsperson)]: Hi. My name is Julie Martin, a special ed ombudsperson and our new one of our new CAC appointees was not able to be here so she asked me to read on her behalf. So these are heard words from this is from miss Bernice Casey. Good afternoon, commissioners. Unfortunately, I am unable to attend tonight's meeting based on other commitments. Thank you for your consideration of my application to the community advisory committee for special ed. Yesterday, my eldest child, a senior, turned 18. When Kurt and I reflect on the thirteen years thus far of public education, we've navigated as parents of two children, we see many divides within a public education system. SFUSD states to provide each and every student quality instruction and equitable support required to thrive in the twenty first century. Our eldest child is neurotypical and has made amazing strides in education based on staff at both Lowell and Buena Vista. Our youngest child is neurodivergent and as we have navigated his education, we have seen a deep divide within the system that is understaffed and appears to be ill equipped to educate children like him. Our family spent thousands of dollars on tutoring him as well as using private insurance. This is a burden to our family but we recognize that as English speakers, how is an employed

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: I'm sorry, time is up.

[Julia Martin (Special Education Ombudsperson)]: Is at an advantage. So, anyways, I just wanted to share her words, and I think she shared them with all of you as well. Thank you.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: President Kim, that is all the agenda item cards that we have. May we move on to non agenda? Thank you. Again, I'll call out the first five. Dennis Fox, Sarah Amnoff or Umnoff, Judith Gibbs. Gibbs. Thank you. Marilyn Laitlaw, Tianna Tylan.

[Speaker 37.0]: I'm Dennis Fox, a substitute teacher. Seasoned substitute teachers are being treated very poorly. There are experienced substitutes repeatedly hitting the refresh button on the Red Rover screen, looking for substitute jobs to accept, and only getting one day's work as a substitute teacher per week. This is not sustainable. San Francisco Unified School District is overhiring of substitutes in combination with abusive Red Rover substitute management systems have turned substitute teachers into gig workers without health insurance and few can live on one day per week salary. We spend hours and hours hitting the refresh button on the Red Rover screen looking for work. There are a few jobs, and when one appears, it disappears before you can accept it. And if you do lock out and accept a job within an hour, it gets canceled, and you're back to Square one repeatedly hitting the refresh button looking for work.

[Speaker 38.0]: Hi. I'm Sarah. Hi.

[Speaker 6.0]: I'm Sarah. I am

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: a substitute teacher as well.

[Speaker 30.0]: I've been with the

[Speaker 38.0]: district twenty five years. Also taught at City College College for Teens and various colleges. This is my MacBook. It does not work on Red Rover. My twenty twenty four PC does not work on Red Rover app. None of them do. So I don't get real time notifications. So basically, Red Rover has been criticized as a dumpster fire. Red Rover jobs disappear impossibly fast. They don't call out for one teachers at a time like Frontline did. Push notifications alert 1,000 other subs all at once for the same school job. Did a video game designer design Red Rover? People are calling this hunger games for teachers. Substitute submit to getting job assignments in the middle of the night. Well, taking a shower, while brushing teeth and texting while driving. The problem is that you must refresh it every two seconds. And I just wanna say in addition to transparency, fairness, and equitable access, how does SFUSD ensure the job access is not dependent on specific technology? I don't have access to the app.

[Speaker 39.0]: My name is Judith Gibbs. I've been a substitute teacher in California public schools for twenty eight years or more now, and I've worked for this district for seven. SFUSD has been my favorite place to work because of the professionalism, because this is the place that substitute teachers have traditionally been considered professionals in the learning community. And I feel that the present sub notification system is undermining that. It's leading to a level of competition. I don't know who all these other clubs are, who just got hired, what their qualifications are, how long they've been working with children. But I do know that there is so much competition for these jobs that it is undermining our ability to work together as a community with the teachers who are on contract, with the paras, with the administrators. It's gotta stop. I'm the one who's up at 04:30 in the morning and I see a job, but somebody else pushed the button a second before me. Today, I drove all the way from my home in North Oakland into San Francisco. About time to go. Yeah. Couldn't find a job. Hung out looking for one, hoping the middle schools would have one, had to go back and see a friend who just went into hospice. This is my life. I'm a professional I'm sorry.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Time is up.

[Speaker 40.0]: Okay. Good evening, superintendent and members of the board. My name is Marilyn Laidlaw. I've been in the SFUSD for thirty two years and subbing for the last twelve. The most important issue for veteran subs is the impossible job search on Red Rover. I've spent hours and hours on Red Rover constantly pushing the refresh button to find a job. This is anxiety producing and demoralizing. A large contingent of experienced veteran subs have dedicated schools to which they focus their work days. Dedicated subs at a school site result in greater student cooperation and more reliable delivery of lesson plans. These veteran substitutes were previously on a preferred sub list for their school sites. The subsystem offered the those site jobs to the preferred subs first and then to the general pool. The Red Rover set up manual available online clearly states, Red Rover will allow you to create a list of your favorite substitutes. I asked about the preferred sub list option and was told it was not possible. Last week, I learned that the preferred sub feature does exist in our version of Red Rover but the feature is turned off. Why is it turned off? I cannot find an answer to this question. Perhaps you can.

[Speaker 41.0]: Hey, y'all. Hey. My name is Tianna Tuller and I'm the vice president of paraeducators with United Educators of San Francisco. I'm here because the district decision to delay extra wages, to the tenth of the month is not just inconvenient, it's harmful.

[Speaker 42.0]: Let me be

[Speaker 41.0]: clear, Calling the pay that substitutes rely on as extra wages is an insult. There is nothing extra about the work that they do. They're in the classrooms every single day supporting instruction, special education services, and student safety. Schools just couldn't function if they didn't have substitutes there, quite honestly. Changing their pay date again with barely any notice right before the holidays shows a deep disconnect from the realities of your employees and how they're living. Many paras and substitutes and substitute paras survive off the paycheck survive paycheck to paycheck. Five days is the difference between paying rent on time and facing late fees, between keeping the lights on and going into debt. We are they're already rearranging their finances out there. The last change, there's nothing left to rearrange. We're not extras. We are educators. Please change it.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Thank you. The next cards, Beth Clendenin, Gabriela Lovell, Nancy Peter Cuppo, Natalie Garcia, and forgive me, Frank Lara? Laura?

[Speaker 43.0]: All right. Good evening. Thank you for hearing our comments. I am Beth Clendenin. I am a substitute teacher as well as a parent in SFUSD, and I have agreement with what's been said about the Red Rover system and a lot of the problems. It is a very exhausting experience to try to get jobs on there when you are available to work, but I'm not here to talk about that. I'm here to talk about a couple other issues. Again with the pay, changing the date of pay is a big problem, and the notifications on changes to pay are also very confusing. We've been notified of bonus pay, Friday afternoon that we would need to come down here to 555 Franklin to pick up our bonus pay for ten plus days of a bonus and that the checks would not be mailed out. So having to come down in here in person to receive the pay that we've earned is not right. Additionally, I was told that we have access to sub, sick pay for subs and yet when I was sick and had, notified the sub office, they said there's no way for them to access that pay. So sick pay is not available to us as substitutes.

[Speaker 44.0]: Hi. My my name is Gabrielle Lavelle. Besides the games we play trying to pick up our jobs and not quite sure what we're getting when we get a job on on Red Rover. I am I feel very disrespected and unappreciated after thirty years of subbing when with less a month notice, we find out not only not getting our extra pay until the fifth, it's now the tenth. And it's not extra pay, it's my only pay. Subbing is my only job and I'm depending on it. And, so I don't know what has to be done on the processing end but there must be some way. Just because there's a holiday doesn't mean that we need to get delayed pay. So I don't know what the solution is but I hope we find one.

[Speaker 45.0]: I would like to address the issue of Red Rover and the fact that each school has preferred list of subs that know their students and know their school program. And Red Rover or as some of us refer to it as Red Rotten, has a feature that could allow schools to, put in a list of, I think, 10, preferred subs. But the sub office or the software will not enact it react enact it. So, I wish that you could look at that and maybe, improve it because it's causing a lot of problems at the schools. Thank you.

[Speaker 46.0]: Good evening. My name is Natalia Garcia Pazmanic. I'm the mother of Nieves Lincoln. TK student at Mission Education Center. I understand keeping the mood light, but I have to say it it feels totally insulting to hear you laughing at the beginning of this meeting when we're here because we're so concerned that our children have been needlessly placed into an environment that is developmentally harmful and dangerous because of the understaffing at our school sites. We still don't have a principal and we still don't have teachers. We have three to five year olds in classrooms staffed by untrained substitutes and we enrolled in bi We enrolled in bilingual education or enrolled our children under the promise that they would receive bilingual education. District administrators have been dishonest with us and said things like having parents in the classroom speaking some Spanish during the day qualifies as bilingual education. This wouldn't be acceptable at other school sites and is not acceptable for our kids. Please do right by our children and set a precedent

[Speaker 38.0]: for public education. Please. It feels it's so hopeful to be to feel to be made to beg. Thank you.

[Speaker 47.0]: Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Frank Lara. I normally speak up here as the executive vice president of the United Educator of San Francisco. Tonight, I'm speaking as a parent because I have put skin in the game like many of our teacher educators who have put our children where we want which is public education. And unlike, right, the tendency in San Francisco which is that we can move to private, Our choice as families is to defend the public institution and make it better by people who are unaccountable. And it's gross to be having the comment of how understaffing has affected my own son in the program when they're talking about school closures. We keep telling this board that because there's no vision, because there's no future being planned, because there's no planning in programming, you have the situation like at MEC where you have programs that are filled to the max that families want to come to, but you have offered them nothing for kindergarten. You have now consolidated a classroom because of the conditions that they're in. So don't tell us about the budget cuts that you have to plan because you're offering nothing and no future for our students in this district.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Our next group, Jeremiah Mayfield, Mariel Reed Cohen, Maya Carwandy, Greg Dale, Alexia Martini.

[Speaker 48.0]: Good evening. My name is Jeremiah Mayfield. I'm the parent of a bright bilingual four year old TK at MEC. Like many families, we followed every rule the district set out in front of us. Then the first day of school arrived and the truth was revealed. The district made the intentional decision to triple the number of TK classrooms at MEC without securing principals, teachers, or aids to staff them. There have been no stable explanation since that day, not one consistent story. Instead, what we hear is shifting excuses and finger pointing HR is on it. Oh, we're waiting on the state. Oh, oh, we hired someone. They're onboarding. Oh, their credentialing didn't work out. Darn it. Parents across this city get to debate screen time, recess minutes, PTA enrichment. Our kids our kids are still waiting for the basic dignity of a stable adult in front of them every day. Okay? This isn't a staffing shortage. This is a failure of your planning. It is a failure of leadership, and it is, yes, a failure of care. So I just have one question for you all tonight, and I know you're not allowed to answer me, but just so you know, rhetorical. Right? Would you want your four year old in my kid's classroom? If your answer's yes, then maybe we should just all get over it. Like some of the district staff has seemed to

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: I'm sorry.

[Speaker 6.0]: I'm not

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: done yet. No.

[Speaker 48.0]: No. I'm not done yet. But if the answer is no, then you have the power to do something, so do it. Get creative, be bold, figure out credentialing because you're doing it for your superintendent, so do it for our teachers. Thank you.

[Speaker 49.0]: Good evening. My name is Maya Karwandy and I am also a parent of a four year old at MEC Spanish Immersion TK Classroom two zero two. My daughter doesn't have a permanent TK teacher, doesn't have a principal at our school, and hasn't since the first day of school. The situation at the school is currently that the early education classrooms are 25% staffed. That means one out of the four classrooms at the school has a permanent teacher. It has been that way since the first day of school. And it has there's been no improvement in terms of the permanent staffing of the teacher. And the only thing that has changed is that the district's support through instructional coaches has gotten worse. What has shocked me the most through this whole process is the denial of the problem from the district. In this time, the superintendent has sent out two different emails bragging that the classrooms were fully staffed. Please work to fix this problem.

[Speaker 50.0]: Hello. I'm, Greg Dale, father of a TK student in the 25% of the MEC that does have a teacher. So in many, many, many regards, we are much, luckier and more fortunate than some of those who are speaking. But I did want to add, sort of attest to it and add color around even in that environment without, sort of leadership from the principal level or stability throughout the site, stability throughout the school, that there's this constant uncertainty about safety, constant uncertainty about what's next. Are classes gonna balance? Or, you know, just sort of, you know, really don't know kind of what's coming even from the perspective of of sort of somebody that got lucky, so to speak, in the lottery. So I don't wanna speak, and I wanna let others take most of the time given that. But I just wanna add that color, and thanks for considering it.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Mom. Okay. That's fine. Mom, my bell.

[Speaker 15.0]: Okay. Hi, everyone. I'm Mariel Reid Cohen. I am also a parent of a TK student right here, Henry Cohen at Macaupin, Classroom 108, who has also been without a permanent teacher and had a rotating cast of of substitutes since before the beginning of the year. As a former, City and County of San Francisco employee and as someone that has built a company dedicated to serving public, agencies across the country, I feel extremely strongly that I want SFUSD to succeed. I want to be able to, instead of opting out of the system and putting my son into private school, to be able to invest in our institutions, which is why I'm here today. I have been extremely disheartened and disappointed by the reaction of the SF school board and SFUSD. It's taken four months to get on the agenda, and I I actually don't care that that we haven't been prepared for this crisis. I know that was not this board and not this current administration, but I am evaluating performance of the board and SFUSD leadership on the reaction, and I have yet to be impressed. I would like to work with you to fix it, but I need to see some action and some urgency, which our children and our families deserve. Thank you.

[Speaker 51.0]: Good evening. My name is Alexia, and I'm also a parent of a TK, student at MEC. As you understood, we are not staffed. But beyond that, I want to talk about the safety of the kids because I think that even if you are not staffing the classroom or you are still working on the hiring of the teacher, you are not doing the bare minimum, which is giving us the transparency of who is in the classroom with our kids. My son is asking me who is there tomorrow, I have no clue. And at the end of the day, we try to recollect among parents who was with them. So we don't know what is happening tomorrow. We don't know what was happening today or yesterday. When I read news about Calvin Chan or these kind of cases, I'm scared. So hiring is top priority, but what you can do today, you give transparency who is in the classroom. Who are the teachers? Who are the powers? When the permanent ones are not around, you send an email and you say, who is in the classroom that day?

[Speaker 52.0]: I'm sorry. I wasn't told that I had a comment on the TK. Is it okay for me to speak? No? Oh, okay.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: President Kim, being mindful of the time, may I call up two more speakers, move on to the UASF speaker, and then we'll transition to Zoom? Oh, sorry. Yes. We can. Absolutely. Okay. Then we'll have time for more co more in person. Next group, Molly Stirkle, Amy,

[Jess Reyes (Interim Senior Executive Director, Research, Planning & Assessment)]: Leslie,

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Joe Matthews, Susan g. Please line up in order, and reminder, you have one minute to speak.

[Speaker 12.0]: Hi. Good evening. My name is Molly Stirkle, and I have three children and have been an SFUSD parent for the past thirteen years. I'd like to take a moment to thank the board of education and SFUSD staff for your public service and commitment to making SF a wonderful city. As a fellow public servant, I know public comment can be passionate, sometimes hard to hear, but also sometimes impactful. So thank you for listening to all of the speakers tonight. I too am here tonight to appeal to your interest in equality and opportunity for all of our city's students, And I ask you to find a creative, but certainly achievable solution that funds junior varsity soccer teams at every high school. The largest schools should also have freshman teams. An important way to make the SFUSD budget more sustainable is to attract and retain families into the public school system. The SF Chronicle estimates over 35% of students are opting out of public school in the city, one of the highest rates in the entire country, especially at the high school level. There are many issues that need to be resolved, but I ask SFUSD to work with parents and help find a way to spend a little bit of money, less than a $100,000 to help all families know that their high school students will have sports opportunities whether they go to Target or public school. Thank you very much.

[Speaker 54.0]: Good evening. I'm here as a parent to urge SFUSD to add a JV soccer league because it's one of the most effective ways to expand opportunity and equity for our students. Soccer is the most popular sport in San Francisco, especially with the World Cup coming to our city next summer. Yet, SFUSD is the only public district in the region without a JV soccer league. This leaves younger athletes, new players and late bloomers without a fair pathway to participate and grow. A JV soccer program directly supports student development physically, socially and academically. After COVID, students need more connection, movement and school spirit. Studies show team sports improve mental health, grades, and attendance. Adding JV soccer also keeps families in public schools. Many middle schoolers leave for private schools that offer more athletic opportunities, draining enrollment schools and resources from the district. JV soccer is a small investment with huge benefits, equity, student wellness, academic engagement and community and school pride. It's time SFUSD makes it happen. Thank you.

[Speaker 23.0]: Good evening. I'm Leslie. I'm also here asking for your support to expand the soccer programs within the high schools to include JV. I'm a school based occupational therapist. I work in another school district but my whole job is about supporting students to access their program and participate. And I'm also a parent of a 14 year old and we've recently been touring high schools and I love working in public schools. I would love for him to go to a public school. I'm enjoying many of the schools, love Burton, love Balboa, but I'm also touring the parochial schools and the private schools to see to explore our options and to think that my son who has been playing soccer for years might not be able to continue engaging in an activity where he's collaborating and, you know, socializing is hard. And it's not just about my son, it's about all students pursuing this activity and having a well rounded education. So thank you.

[Speaker 55.0]: Hi, everyone. My son is a ninth grader in SFUSD. I'm also here to ask you to bring JV soccer to SFUSD finally. This is not the first time, this request has been made. I'm just gonna say that I am heartbroken that for my son, after being in SFUSD, since kindergarten playing soccer, that realistically, he has almost no chance of playing in the high school. And that's because only varsity soccer is offered. As you can see, every single other Bay Area school district is able to figure out varsity and JV, not us. We're the big red x. I don't understand why, you know, varsity soccer realistically is dominated mostly by kids and club teams. Well, not everyone can play pay those expensive club fees. And I'm sad and frankly frustrated that a sport that's so inclusive, that's so low cost to play, and that attracts such diverse players

[Speaker 30.0]: I'm sorry.

[Speaker 55.0]: It's somehow exclusive at SFUSD. It's against SFUSD values and it needs to change now. Thank you.

[Speaker 13.0]: Hi, everybody. So as this visual shows, SFUSD is the only district in the Bay Area that doesn't have a JV soccer league. This isn't a new problem at all. For many, many years, parents have been upset about this. So you in these large schools like Lowell, Lincoln, Washington, whatever the big schools are, you might have a scenario where 60 kids try out and only two ninth graders make it. Okay? This is a problem for a lot of reasons. Sports offer connection, team building, community. But it's a problem because we're losing kids to private schools. Throughout this year of advocating for this, I've met parents who and, you know, we can roll our eyes and say they're privileged, but that's just like that's a cope. That doesn't work anymore. We can't roll our eyes and pretend that we can afford to lose those families. And so we were told that initially the obstruction was money. We we were told it's $45,000 a year. It's money. We can't offer it. We said, okay. Well, we'll raise money with PTAs, alumni associations, parent donations, supervisors money, and then we were told, oh, oh, no. It's not money. It's this. So it's that. It's this. So you are losing money on prospective students

[Speaker 6.0]: in

[Speaker 13.0]: something that PTAs and alumni associations and parents were willing to fund. So please, please advocate for this. We need somebody to communicate and take this on. It's not acceptable. This list should embarrass us all. My husband and I teach in this district. I've taught here for twenty years. And this list should embarrass me. It should embarrass you. It really should. I'm sorry.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: President Kim, that's the time we have reserved for

[Speaker 55.0]: I also submitted a speaker card. I also submitted a a card for us to speak.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Many did. We we're not gonna be able to hear from everyone.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I think we're gonna move to online public comment for a little bit, and then we'll come back. Okay?

[Speaker 55.0]: I'll be quick. I'll be quick.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: How many speaker cards do we have remaining?

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Approximately a dozen.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Okay. We're gonna need to we'll go to online public comment, and then we have UESF who needs to speak afterwards, and then we'll come back.

[Speaker 6.0]: One minute.

[Natalie (Vice President of Substitutes, UESF)]: One more comment. Come on. Come on.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: There are many, many speakers, and I'm just trying to be fair for everyone who submitted a card. I apologize. Thank you.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: For the attendees who are on Zoom and wish to speak, please raise your hand, and we will go in the order that we have received those. Our first speaker is Caroline Cochran. And again, a reminder, you have one minute to speak.

[Caroline Cochran (Parent, remote public comment)]: Hi. My name is Caroline Cochran, and I'm a parent of a four year old at Frank McCotman Elementary, one of the five schools without a permanent TK teacher. It's been three months of a revolving door of substitute, some without skills to manage the the classroom. There are no consistent adult to even know our children's names. Our kids are facing increased behavior issues, and there have even been incidents of children leaving the classroom unnoticed. We're sent in circles between the school district, the principal, the state, but there's no accountability and no plan. I've become increasingly concerned about my own child's safety. And when I realized I was scared on what would happen to him day to day in the classroom, I decided I had to remove him from the environment. Sadly, I know not all families have that option. I urge you to take immediate action. Parents are becoming desperate, and these four and five year olds are suffering. Thank you.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Next person is Cleo Tilton. Cleo Tilton. Okay. We'll move on to our next person, Erica.

[Speaker 42.0]: Thank you. Substitute teachers are being submitted to the same unusual and cruel conditions that we see are happening to those families. They have not just no teacher to call their own in their own classrooms, but the substitute teachers are not the same substitutes that the schools are used to, that some of the students are used to. What's what's happening is that a 100 1,100 substitute teachers right now are being treated unfairly by a system of substitutes called Red Rover that does not allow for phone calls, that requires substitutes to set alarms at night, at three in the morning, four in the morning, and again at 6AM to have a lot to find a an assignment that does not mat materialize. On top of that, what's happening is, our sick leave, I complained about this about a month ago, We still didn't get any answer about what is going on with our substitute, substitute, worker right

[Speaker 18.0]: to

[Speaker 42.0]: a sick leave that's guaranteed by California Labor Law. When we're inquired, we are told by HR that we're waiting for

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: I'm sorry. That's all

[Patrick Wolf (Vice Chair, Citizens Bond Oversight Committee)]: the time you have. Fred Rover.

[Speaker 42.0]: Fred Rover is not mine.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Next speaker is Starchild.

[Speaker 57.0]: Good evening. Can you hear me?

[Patrick Wolf (Vice Chair, Citizens Bond Oversight Committee)]: Yes.

[Speaker 57.0]: Yes. This is Starchild, chair of the Libertarian Party of San Francisco, lpsf.org. First, some housekeeping items. Public comment is one of the most important things that happens at your meeting. Speakers should not be limited to a minute. That is not enough time to communicate much in general and people keep getting disconnected. There was problems with that at the beginning of the meeting. Also, the chat is not turned on. People can't talk to each other online as people in the room can. We should be able to do that. Also, we can't hear people in the room in the audience clapping. I can see them clapping on my video screen, but we cannot hear them. The comment I want to make is regarding I heard at the very beginning of the meeting when I first started broadcasting on the radio about expulsions. Now it's a myth that government schools do not have to you know, that they have to take all comers, but independent schools do not. And people say, oh, the independent schools are just cherry picking the best students. But you know, if people are getting expelled from the government schools and forced into other schools, then it clearly the government schools are also doing the same thing of choosing, you know, which students they're gonna educate. One third of students who are eligible in the district choose independent schools or homeschooling. This is an important constituency that should

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: not be I'm sorry. That's all the time you have. Our next speaker is Fernanda Chosa.

[Speaker 58.0]: Hi. My name is Fernanda Chosa. I'm a parent of a TK student at Mission Education Center where two out of three classrooms have been unstaffed since September. This is entirely a crisis of this board's creation. Two new classrooms were added after last year's lottery deadline, surprising all the parents who were admitted. Since day one, March 2025, parents from Mission Education have been asking how this increased class size will be accommodated. We were gaslit, strung along, strung along, promised answers. Now we're four months into the school year, and our kids have a rotating cast of substitute with no path forward. Let me be clear that these children are four years old. They are the most vulnerable group within your purview. They are barely potty trained. They can't write. They don't know their home addresses. They are developing behavioral issues. My kid comes home with soiled pants every day. Their safety is at risk. They are being failed by you. You are touting 97% of classrooms being staffed. You should be ashamed of yourself. How dare you tell a joke in front of us tonight? Staff our classroom credentialed those substitutes. I have heard some

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: I'm sorry. That's all the time you have.

[Speaker 58.0]: Thank you.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Next speaker is Jenna.

[Speaker 59.0]: Can you hear me?

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Yes.

[Speaker 59.0]: Hi. My name is Jenna Laslow, and my son is a pre k student at Mission Education Center. That's pre k, which means these are three year olds that we are sending to school every day and counting on the district to keep safe. From the very beginning of this school year, it has been an uncoordinated and under resourced mess. We showed up on the first day to a chaotic situation led by mostly interim professionals. Since then, despite the efforts of interim professionals on-site, we are still without permanent teacher resourcing, and we have a never ending rotation of subs that I can't even come close to keeping track of. This causes anxiety and strain for our kids and for ourselves. I'm worried every day about the quality of programming, education, care, and safety that my child receives each week. Our rotating cast of substitutes are usually warm, friendly people, but I'm not sure that they are at all well matched for this age group or program as I've witnessed ineffective conflict mediation, inappropriate device use, and many other issues. I'm also quite certain that we're not receiving sufficient Spanish instruction, which is something that's very important to everyone choosing to enroll at MEC. Beyond the issues of this year, we're anxious as we complete enrollment for next year as we're eager to remain at MEC, but we're very concerned that these issues are not being prioritized. How can we believe this will be resolved and that resolutions will be permanent and focus will be kept on keeping this sustainable? Finally, I also note that while touring another elementary school, I heard that school's principal telling parents that an advantage of enrolling at NEC is that it is quote unquote very well resourced. That felt extraordinarily inappropriate. Prospective parents across the district deserve to know about this issue as well, And we all deserve for it to be resolved. Thank

[Speaker 6.0]: you.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Our next speaker is Christian Florenza.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Hi there. I am the father of, three kids that are in the SFUSD system, and two of them are gonna speak right now.

[Speaker 52.0]: Hi there. My name is Marco. I am a high school junior, and I would like to speak in favor of the creation of junior varsity soccer teams in San Francisco Unified School District. It was, very hard to find ways to play soccer for myself when I wasn't able to make the varsity team. And I had several friends that did the same.

[Speaker 19.0]: Hi. My name is Elena Florenza. I'm an eighth grader. And when I go in high school, I think it would be really nice to have a JV team. So I'm also in favor of having a JV team for high schools in SFUSD.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Thank you.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Thank you. Our next speaker is Virginia Marshall. Miss Marshall, are you there?

[Speaker 60.0]: I'm here. Thank you so much. Our school district needs stability. We have worked closely with superintendent Sue over the past two years. The NAACP supports doctor Sue being named the permanent superintendent. However, we want her first priority to be student learning. We want to know how she plans to improve the academic progress of all students, especially African American students. A credential in education is fundamental. All of us attending college and universities at night and weekends to earn the appropriate credential necessary. No school closures, please. Red Rover, substitute pay. Every student needs a permanent credentialed teacher. The semester is almost over. Please get it right. Thank you.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Thank you. Our next speaker is John Tresvina.

[Speaker 61.0]: Good evening. Your most important decision is selecting a superintendent. Yet, you decided the public gets only three days notice, not twelve. And it's not on GovTV because this is a progress monitoring meeting not intended for major decisions. Transparency is not on the agenda. Community partnership is not on the agenda. Accountability is not on the agenda. There's no report on why you believe the superintendent's contract should be extended. That's not on the agenda. Or how the expected twenty six-'twenty seven budget gap ballooned under your watch from $15,000,000 last December to $59,000,000 in June to now $102,000,000 That's not on the agenda. If our school board doesn't do better, how can we expect our schools to do better? Thank you.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Thank you. Last speaker within the Zoom portion is Tina forget my name, for my pronunciation here, Perdicis.

[Speaker 6.0]: Yes. Hi. Good evening.

[Speaker 62.0]: Thank you so much. It's my honor to be the vice chair of the community advisory committee on special education. I wish I could have been with you in person tonight, but I'm so pleased that some of my colleagues were there with you, to help welcome five of our newest members. It is our honor and privilege to officially recognize them, and they will be confirmed by the board this evening. Amber, Bernice, Bridget, Cheryl, and Michaela have already contributed so much to our work. We are truly blessed to have them, Ed, as well as the district. Welcome to them, congratulations to them, and thank you all.

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: Thank you. President Kim, that concludes our portion of these, the Zoom portion of public comment. With your permission, we'll transition over to the UESF spokesperson.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Okay. Oh, Superintendent Hsu wanted to make a quick announcement.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Thank you, president Kim. I asked president Kim if if I could just make a quick announcement for families who would like to talk to our interim associate superintendent of education service to please you can walk out. We can she'll be standing outside the lobby here. Oh, there she is. So for those who who have concerns and questions, particularly our MEC parents, our McCaughton parents, parents who are concerned about the TK issues, please talk to Teresa Shipp over there and she can provide you with the latest update right now. Thank you.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: So, again, as as the board is not able to speak to items that are not previously agendized and noticed as part of our meeting. So we're not able to add additional new items. However, as I said at the beginning, the superintendent may choose to allow staff to speak and follow-up with certain speakers. The board, unfortunately, can't respond to individuals who speak at public comment. So this is an opportunity if folks wanna speak to members of staff. The superintendent has made that available on the lobby at this time. Otherwise, you are welcome to stay and take part in the meeting continuing. Council, anything to add?

[Elliot (General Counsel)]: No. President Kim, that was correct.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you. Hi, Reverend Brown. Did you had you submitted a comment card and you're looking to speak? Is that right?

[Rev. Dr. Amos C. Brown]: Yes, please.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Are you here to speak on superintendent Sue?

[Rev. Dr. Amos C. Brown]: That's right.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: So unfortunately, the comment period has has concluded at this time, and we have the USF representative behind you who needs to speak. May I connect with you separately online offline?

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Online, so then wouldn't that allow

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: That is correct.

[Moon-Hak Kim (Research, Planning & Assessment)]: The reverend

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Brown to have at least one minute?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I'm asking doctor Brown. Reverend Brown, if I may follow-up with you afterwards, would that be okay? Would that be okay with you if I followed up afterwards, Reverend Brown?

[Speaker 16.0]: I would beg of you that I'll be permitted to speak.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: We'll allow for a minute, Reverend Brown, and then Natalie

[Speaker 16.0]: I only have a minute, sixty seconds in it.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you.

[Rev. Dr. Amos C. Brown]: I didn't seek it. I didn't choose it. I must give account. If I lose it, I must suffer if I abuse it. I just rise to say, members of the school board, mister president, let's do the right thing and focus on coming to common ground and ironing out any challenge regarding the superintendent. She has proven herself to be concerned about all children. She has the right and the entitlement to to get additional credentialing. Don't change horses in the middle of the stream. We need consistency in this school district and excellence and achievement for our children.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you, Reverend Brown. We'll go to the UESF rep. Natalie, thank you.

[Natalie (Vice President of Substitutes, UESF)]: Hey everyone. You all know me because I had to come last time. I serve as the vice president of substitutes for United Educators of San Francisco, and I'm actually very frustrated to be up here again tonight, but I have to be, because we need leadership that we haven't seen. We need a vision that we haven't seen. And for the thousand plus substitutes that serve in u a NSFUSD, we've seen nothing. On Friday in the morning, labor was told that their pay schedules would change from the fifth to the tenth. In the afternoon on Friday, all employees were informed that substitutes' pay would change from the fifth to the tenth because they're considered extras. They're considered add ons. They are not considered worthy of the law. California education code requires that they be pay paid by the fifth of the month, and our contract is not worthy of respect. Because eleven point nine point eight says that substitutes have to be paid on the same day as certificated. Labor was informed four hours before substitute employees were informed. Employees that have no sick time required by California law, employees that pay has been messed up and unresolved for years. I have grievances from 2324 because social security is taken out of retired substitutes pay. Social security, from a year in which no educator received social security. There's it's still happening. And there's no urgency and no interest in fixing it. And many people can say, okay. Substitutes are considered at will employees in this in the state of California. Maybe they don't matter. Maybe they are extras. But what SFUSD does with substitutes is what they do with educators, students, and families. And I'm here as part of all of that. I've taught since 2007 in SFUSD. I have a student at Balboa High School and a student at Sunnyside. I'm a parent in SFUSD. I understand how these all connect together. So I'm here speaking specifically on the issue of substitutes because something is wrong in your payroll department. And we need to see the leadership required so that someone is there until it gets fixed. UESF spends hours and hours and hours collaborating with every single department in SFUSD. Every single one. The one where we can't get anywhere is the payroll department. Right. The one in charge of the money that we are then told you don't have to fund the special education workload. You don't have to fund fully covered dependent care. You don't have the money to make sure educators can stay for the stability that these parents spoke to in TK. The stability that is our enrollment, that will grow our enrollment, that will grow our funding. That starts with fixing the issue with substitutes and fixing it now. And it's not me filing a grievance three months ago and not hearing anything and then getting in the grievance hearing and no joke being told, oh, even though it's a violation of our contract to pay them on the fifth, you're gonna be really upset because now we're paying them on the tenth. That's what I was told Friday. Sorry, you're so upset. But we consider them to be extras. We consider educators to be extras. We need to see on the ground leadership to fix this now. There's nothing else we can wait for. We want stability for our schools. We want fully staffed schools. We want the schools our students deserve. And that starts with every single one of us.

[Speaker 6.0]: Thank

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: you to members of the public for being here this evening to share your experiences and perspectives. The superintendent and her team are tasked with providing a draft of each agenda item twelve 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. This q and a doc is linked into each board agenda on board docs today under item k one. We invite the public to review those questions and answers alongside our discussions today. Additionally, to create more space focused on student outcomes, we will be moving most items to our consent calendar 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 goals and the underlying strategies so that we can bet be better informed in our decision making and partner with the superintendent as we hold her accountable. As previously mentioned, we've moved item h two to this point here, item two five one one dash one eight s p two, approval of PIPs and waivers. Can I have a motion and a second?

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: So moved. I move the approval of action item 2,500 and eleven-eighteen SP2, approval of pips and waivers.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Do I have a second?

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: Second.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: It has been properly moved and most seconded that the board approves item two five one one dash one a s p two, approval of pips and waivers. I call on the superintendent to read this into the record.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Thank you, president Kim. Before I hand it over to our associate superintendent of HR, I do wanna say that, we want our classrooms to be filled with a certificated teacher. We are trying really, really hard to do that. It is very unfortunate that we do have our mission economic mission education center, MEC, that is still looking for a principal. However, we have a potential candidate. That candidate is going through the process. And because it is an HR process, we can't share more. We actually also have candidates for TK for TK classrooms over in McHopping as well as MEC. And because those candidates are going through the hiring process, we cannot share more. But I do want everyone to know that it is our highest priority to have qualified teachers in the classroom, particularly to serve our youngest, most vulnerable students. I don't know if if associate superintendent Amy Bair wants to add more to that.

[Amy Bair (Associate Superintendent, Human Resources)]: Sure. So just to add

[Speaker 26.0]: a little bit more on the

[Amy Bair (Associate Superintendent, Human Resources)]: TK vacancies, as the state has expanded TK enrollment to all four year olds, many districts are experiencing a shortage of qualified TK teachers. TK teachers need to have both a multiple subject credential and units in early education. As doctor Hsu said, we are actively recruiting, teachers and working creatively to assist them getting through the credential requirements. We have identified candidates for three of the five TK openings and are in the onboarding process with the principal at MEC that we expect to start in December. We're also reaching out to non public agencies for these hard to fill positions, which is a last resort for a school district, of course, but we really are committed to doing everything we can to fill these positions.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you. Are there any comments or questions from the board? Commissioner Alexander?

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Yeah. I mean, I hear, what's being said here and I understand that there's statewide shortages. That's real. It's true in special ed as well as as well as TK. And I feel like I've been on the board now for five years and I always hear and this is not about assistant superintendent Baer. I think I I always hear the same response. We're actively recruiting. We're actively recruiting. We're actively recruiting. I have never seen a strategic plan for creatively addressing these problems. And I guess I wanna ask if we could perhaps agendize some time to really I mean, we've had every single year I've been on the board, we've had shortages. You know, we have the SPED shortages, we have the TK shortages, and it's always like, yeah, we're recruiting. Yeah, we're recruiting. But then I've also been approached by people, talking about, visas, providing work based visas for, you know, immigrants, what I know is harder in this environment, but there's there's creative solutions to this and I've frankly never seen a strategic plan that really lays that out. And so I'm wondering just to be accountable to the public finally on this if we if we could schedule some time to hear in more depth. I know that's not the agenda item here but on this topic and what are we really doing to address these vacancies?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Superintendent Sue, then commissioner Fisher.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Commissioner Alexander, thank you for that question because I agree we need to be more strategic. We need to be more proactive in seeking out high quality, qualified teachers to fill our classrooms because that is what our students deserve. And because of that, we have built a partnership with City College where we are working with City College to get to help our teachers get the ECE credits that they need. We're also building a partnership with San Francisco State so that so that we can start building that pipeline with San Francisco State so that our teachers can get the credentials, and then come to well, get the education, then come to us and get the credential. As a matter of fact, this weekend, I was with a bunch of teachers talking to them about joining SFUSD so that we can have more high quality high qual fully qualified teachers to join, to join our our school district. But I hear you. I we need to have some clarity around where we are going, how we are doing that, and and I know that our head of special education is actually thinking and and talking to, some of these international providers to see if we can bring some of, that expertise into into San Francisco.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Thank you, doctor Hsu. I appreciate that. And I completely agree with with commissioner Alexander's comments. I'd like to take it a step further because we also have the childcare planning and advisory council here in San Francisco that is working on baby prophecy. And and one of the things that are independent, many of them are small businesses, women owned, minority women owned businesses that run our childcare centers, family childcare centers here in San here in San Francisco are telling us is that RTK expansion is actually cannibalizing from the small businesses here in San Francisco. And that is troubling, on one hand, especially when we are opening programs where we don't have the qualified staff to staff them. And the the message that I'm hearing particularly from folks at the African American early childhood educators is families are telling them that SFUSD is presenting this as if the families have no choice but coming into SFUSD pre k and TKs when there is the option to stay in these home based centers. So what collaboration are we doing to make sure especially when some of our families need linguistically and culturally relevant services that we don't have the staff to provide, how are we working with these small businesses here in San Francisco to actually provide the children of San Francisco the education that they deserve?

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Thank you, commissioner Fisher, for that question. As a matter of fact, I was actually meeting with the head of the department of of early childhood. I don't remember which day now, but sometime this week. And and the head of the department of children, youth, and families, and the head of the Human Services Agency because we have to create a system. A lot of our preschool and childcare programs are jointly funded by multiple city departments. And you are absolutely correct that as SFUSD and quite frankly, the state expansion of TK, started several years ago, it is now our our our center based as well as home based preschool programs are truly feeling the pressure of that. Because a lot of these four year olds are coming into SFUSD and leaving their center based and home based set sites, which causes a huge economic shift for a lot of our families. And we as a city need to come together and have that conversation. Quite frankly, selfishly, I am having this conversation because I want to invite those teachers to come and join SFUSD and, hence, the partnership with San Francisco State. Because a lot of these teachers have the ECE credits already, They don't have the BA. And so it it will take time. It takes time, but we're doing the right thing. We're moving on in the right path to build that to build the bandwidth for that.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: So I we need to well, I want you to remind us that this item is our pits and waivers. The the question, I think, from a credentialing standpoint, maybe I'll I'll bring it to you. Sassy. Sassy. Sassy superintendent Bair. Can you just walk us through exactly what is the challenge here from a credentialing standpoint, and is there anything we can do as a board or individually in that regard?

[Amy Bair (Associate Superintendent, Human Resources)]: So, as doctor Hsu, shared, the the majority of the early childhood, providers do not typically have a bachelor's degree. We can work with people who have the early childhood units and the bachelor's degree. We can get them an emergency credential or an intern credential, but it's really the combination of the bachelor's, the multiple subject credential, and six a minimum of six units of early childhood education. We can we have been working with our partners at City College, San Francisco State. Those early childhood classes are very full right now because of this demand. So that that's been another barrier. But it's really the multiple subject credential and a minimum of six credits for early childhood education.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: And and I will just express. I think the the frustration that I feel, and I I don't think anyone necessarily at this diaspora there on staff were necessarily the ones who were around when this took place. But the the ECE requirement came, what, about three, four years ago?

[Amy Bair (Associate Superintendent, Human Resources)]: No. They've been phasing, TK in for many years now. So I I believe, 2015 might have been the the first year of TK. So this has been we've been knowing this is coming, but the state has been delaying it. You know, it was delayed again after COVID. So this is the first year that we're required to have these credentials.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I mean, just perhaps from an honest assessment, we weren't prepared for ECE's educators to support them to come into a workforce here. And and I think that's, I mean, there are so many things related to our budget that we just need to be honest about, own, and just accept the fact that we weren't prepared to have these conversations. And and I I don't think this is any different in that we we as a system, we just weren't prepared. I mean, the pop the pipelines that we're building right now with SF State and City College frankly should have been pipelines that we've been building years and years ago that we've kept maintaining, building, growing so that we have a pipeline of the early educators ready as we open the floodgates in a great way to to young people in our city. And I while this doesn't address the kind of realities of our challenge right now, I just think it's worth acknowledging that we weren't prepared. And to your point, commissioner Alexander, like, we need to be a system that actually anticipates the things that we know are coming down the pipe, especially if it's something state level where they've given us years to prepare for. Again, I don't put this on your shoulders necessarily or the superintendents, but but it is that kind of forethought that we need to get ahead of. And and districts generally, I I think, don't do a great job of planning beyond their next year, but this is partially what got into our financial mess and certainly is part of the reason why we're in our current mess right now. I just wanted to say that out loud because I think that it's something like hanging around and and and it's just worth naming that challenge that has contributed to where we are today and and and and we we have to do better. Just to share with commissioner, in a conversation I had with the superintendent today, for the classrooms that are affected, there is a desire to reach out to those families for a meeting that the superintendent is planning on having on Friday. And so to at least provide a direct update on exactly what's happening with the classrooms that are most affected by this right now, so just so commissioners are aware. We'll do commissioner Ray and then commissioner Gupta.

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Thank you, president Kim. I just have a brief comment. I wanted to express first how much I appreciate, president Kim, that you have named a feeling that I think so many people had and that folks have expressed in the public that we weren't prepared and that that is a failure on our part as a district. And I wish it were otherwise. We can't go back and, change what's happened, but we can do our utmost to make sure that we do much better going forward. And I deeply, deeply hope that we will do that and that we will solicit parents' you know, parents' input and comments about how best to do that. And also, the new information you just shared about the superintendent planning to meet with families. Thank you. Thank you for doing that, and thank you, miss Baer, for your work trying to get these positions filled.

[Amy Bair (Associate Superintendent, Human Resources)]: If I could make one comment in in response to both of your comments. As I I told you in in previous years when I've reported to you, this is my third year coming into the district. The systems in this district have been broken for some time. We are finally stabilizing some of the areas. I mean, things like a seniority list didn't exist. Right? Like, when you say we haven't had vision and planning, commissioner Alexander, you're right because we've been focusing on just surviving. We get you know, are finally getting some systems in order. We have a competent financial person in Chris Mount Benitez. You know, I think we're are in an opportunity to break down some of the silos, stop focusing on just survival, and do some actual planning so that HR business and Ed Services are working together to say, okay, we have limited resources. Where should we put the language pathways? Where should we open TK classes? Right? This isn't a conversation that's been able to be had in this district because we've been barely surviving. So I think that has to be a focus going forward.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you. Commissioner Gupta?

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Yeah. Miss Fair, I appreciate your honesty in that. And I also appreciate the assessment here that that gives words to the palpable tension that we feel. As you mentioned, we're not the only district facing this. Perhaps we're not the only ones that failed to plan in advance. Are you in contact with other districts? Have you seen any promising solutions that other districts have been able to conduct or execute that has been able to bridge the gap that they see in an accelerated period of time?

[Amy Bair (Associate Superintendent, Human Resources)]: I think working with the preschool providers has been successful for for other districts. Also, pipeline programs, you know, we've really gone away from some of our pipeline programs that we've had in the past and that can be a good solution for, TK, for language, classes and also for special education. So those are all things that the district should consider in the future.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: That actually segues right into the the reason I raised my hand a second time. I wanted to point out both from a lack of preparation standpoint but also strategic planning was that in short sighted budget cuts, we closed all of our paraeduche teacher, all of our pipeline programs. And we are literally paying millions of dollars for that now. Not only in, you know, the comp ed, you know, the having to hire outside instead of, you know so how do we undo that? Like, if we really like, is that part of the strategic plan to bring these programs back? What can we do to undo the sins of the past and fix some of these problems in in real concrete ways?

[Amy Bair (Associate Superintendent, Human Resources)]: Yeah. I I do think we would welcome, a conversation with different district departments about the long term planning, and and there's so many different things to look at. There's residency programs. There's, visas, you know, working with, companies to that that do do this work in other countries. HR cut a director of recruiting as a budget cut. Right? So, you know, this is it's something that really is a problem and and we're looking forward to working with with other departments in the district to come up with a solution.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Any other comments or questions? Okay. I do wanna thank you and your team. I think it's important to recognize that there are significant systems that we have put into place, and we have a lot of more work to do, clearly, I think the worst possible thing is that we don't ask the questions and we don't actually get to solutions. And so the fact that we're at least being able to have a conversation around position control is a way better position that we're in than years past. So with all due respect to previous boards and leaders, the reality is it's worse for us to not have the conversation. So I appreciate your your leadership. Thank you for your time, and please send our thanks to your team.

[Speaker 43.0]: Thank you.

[Amy Bair (Associate Superintendent, Human Resources)]: I still need to do the items too. Yes. Thank you.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Yes.

[Amy Bair (Associate Superintendent, Human Resources)]: So I'm seeking approval of two provisional, internship permits to allow one multiple subject and one special education teacher to be in the classroom while they complete their credential.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Roll call vote, please, miss Lanoff.

[Speaker 44.0]: Student delegate Munn?

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Student delegate Cruz? Yes. Commissioner Alexander? Yes. Commissioner Fisher? Yes. Commissioner Gupta?

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Vice president Ewing? Oh, commissioner Ray? Yes. Commissioner Wiseman Ward? Yes. And president Kim?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: That's six ayes.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Moving to NME approval of board oh, thank you very much.

[Amy Bair (Associate Superintendent, Human Resources)]: Thank you.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Approval of board meeting minutes. Item e one, approval of minutes. Special meeting of August, excuse me, 2025. Can I have a motion and a second?

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: So moved.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Second.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: It has been properly moved and seconded that the board approved board minutes special meetings of 08/24/2025. Any comments or questions from the board? Commissioner Ray?

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Good evening, everyone. I just wanted to take a moment to explain why I'll be voting no on the minutes for the August 24 meeting. At the August 24 meeting, which was a special meeting about governance, I raised a point of order about public notice since there had only been twenty four hours notice of the meeting, but our board rules require seventy two hours. General counsel indicated the meeting could continue under state law and that the conflict with our own rules could be noted for the record. When I reviewed the draft minutes for the meeting, I saw that they did not include the point of order, so I asked that this be included. Board leadership decided not to include it and also decided not to include points of order as a practice going forward. Minutes are supposed to be an accurate reflection of what happened during a meeting, and it is standard practice to include points of order in the minutes. Our city's own election commission states all points of order and appeals must be included in the minutes. I've raised concerns about transparency and following our own rules before, and I continue to believe that these issues are fundamental for good governance and public trust. Thus, I will vote no on the minutes. Thank you.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Any comments or questions from the board? Roll call, please, miss Lanoff.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Student delegate Munn? The minutes. Okay. Oh, August 24. Were you there? No. Okay. Commissioner Alexander?

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Commissioner Fisher? Yes. Commissioner Gupta?

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Vice President Healy? Commissioner Ray? No. Commissioner Wiseman Ward? Yes. President Kim?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: It's five ayes.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Item e two, reconsideration and correction of board minutes, regular meeting of the workshop corrected on 09/30/2025. Can I have a motion and a second?

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: So moved. Second.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: It has been properly moved and seconded that the board has reconsidered and approved the board minutes special meeting of 09/30/2025. Any comments or questions from the board?

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: I just wanted to double check on procedure for this, President Kim. This was, I I saw that the meeting minutes have been corrected. Do we need to make an official motion, or do we just go ahead and vote on the minutes?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: This is a revote readoption of corrected minutes for this, date.

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Okay. So no no specific motion is needed then. We can just go ahead and beyond the one that was just made.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I just called for a motion in a second.

[Speaker 51.0]: Okay.

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Thanks. I just wanna make sure we didn't have to have something additional.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: Thank you.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yeah. Wait. Did we get a second? Yes, sir. Okay. Sorry. Roll call, please, miss Leonoff.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Student delegate Munn. Yes. Student delegate Cruz. Yes. Commissioner Alexander. Yes. Commissioner Fisher. Yes. Commissioner Gupta.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Vice President Healy. Commissioner Ray.

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Commissioner Wiseman Ward? Yes. And president Kim? Yes. That is six sides.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you. Item f, advisory committee reports and appointments. Item one, community advisory committee for special education, CAC confirmation of appointments. I call on doctor Hsu to read this introduce this item.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Thank you, president Kim. I am so excited and honored to introduce Julia Martin, our ombudsman. And you've actually heard of already from several members of the newly appointed CAC, but I'm gonna hand it over to Julia to speak a little bit more.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Sorry. Point of order. Yes. I have an appointment to the PEAFCAC. Where does that go in this section?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: So the advisory council and committee appointments typically happen at the end so the advisory council and committee appointments typically happen at the end, under item under

[Speaker 6.0]: informational items.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Is that right, counsel? They're usually Yeah. Grouped with it's this section of the agenda is called advisory

[Speaker 6.0]: Yeah.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Committee appointments and appointments.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Because this is a workshop agenda, some of the items aren't on here. So, for example, the superintendent's report wasn't on here either. So that would typically be during a regular business meeting. Correct?

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Point of

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: But the last meeting, it wasn't on there either. And I tried to appoint someone to the PEAFCAC at the last meeting and it wasn't on that one. So I waited till this meeting. Oh. And it does say advisory committee reports and appointments and this is not a workshop item. This is like a regular

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Can I point of order just, the CAC is written into

[Speaker 61.0]: the noise is outside before too?

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Hi, Elliot.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Elliot, your mic is on.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: The CAC is written into Ed Code in the way that none of the other advisory committees and the Yeah. The way we have to appoint members is done differently than the rest of the other than I think the district English language advisory committee. Those are the two that are written into state Ed Code and that's why they're

[Speaker 6.0]: We

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: have to take

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: a stand up on this

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: item on CACs.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: No. No. No. That's fine. I'm just I just wanna appoint someone to the PCAC, which I've been trying to do for this is the second meeting I've been trying to do in a row. And there is an agenda item that says advisory committee reports an appointment. So I just I didn't wanna do it. I didn't know when in doing this agenda item I was supposed to do it.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Do we need does it need to be named?

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: We don't at workshops. The next meeting will be a regular meeting and you can do it.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: That's what I was told at the last meeting.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I know, but they did No.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: I I swear. I tried to I've been trying to appoint somebody to the feedback

[Speaker 6.0]: for a

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: month now.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Only having one meeting this month?

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: No. There was

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: One meeting in So why don't I as part of our agenda review, I'll make sure that it's on the agenda for the next meeting. Okay. We'll include that item.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: It's quite frustrating when we're trying to fulfill our responsibilities as board members and then, like, it's in it does say advisory committee reports an appointment. So why why is that on the agenda if oh, I can't I appoint it under that or no? Because it doesn't say detail?

[Speaker 6.0]: Can I

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: just do it?

[Elliot (General Counsel)]: No. The reasoning, I think, that was explained by commissioner Fisher is correct, which is that this is a different kind of appointment. And I think that for the other kinds of appointments, it seems as though this district vacillates between a workshop and a regular meeting. Under the law, there's no such distinction.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Well, I'm aware. That's why it's frustrating. Right. And and we're trying to have these community advisory committees. And so when we're asked to find people for them, and a lot of board members haven't done it, and I've been I did my due diligence. Now I got a person that I asked, I've spoken to, and they said they wanted to volunteer and I can't appoint them. So I'll stop talking because it seems like I'm getting overruled, but it's frustrating.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yeah. Totally noted. Part of our gender review will make sure that the next business meeting, which I believe is the a

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: The the ninth.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: The ninth. We'll have that as an item for you to point.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Can I ask a point of clarification?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yes.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Is it possible for someone to serve on the PCAC in an interim capacity, until they are officially appointed? Do we have any mechanism for that? If commissioner Alexander has a volunteer who's ready to go, more power to that person and thank you to that person for wanting to serve. Yeah. Well, I I mean, I I would hope our bureaucracy wouldn't get in the way of that.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yeah. I don't quite know the technicalities of how, I mean, counsel I

[Elliot (General Counsel)]: So number one, even if such an appointment possible, it couldn't be done on an in this agenda because it's not agendized. Number two, I would need to understand more about what the powers are, what the quorum requirements are this because, you know, if somebody wants to attend a meeting, they can attend a meeting. But if they're going to exercise power, I I would imagine that it would be more appropriate for them to actually be vested with that power prior to them exercising any power?

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: The reason I ask is because I was at the last PCAC meeting. And I understand that this meeting is gonna be a big discussion about the priorities and the recommendations of the past, and I think it would be important for commissioner Alexander's appointee to be

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: there. I think they can absolutely be there. The question is can they be there in a formal capacity for PCAC. Right? So, what I'm hearing from counsel is that we need to agendize this an item which would be typically standing for typical business meeting, and we we will do that for the next meeting. Right? Okay. Resuming the item Hi, Julia. Floor is yours.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Sorry, Julia. Thanks for your understanding. I apologize.

[Julia Martin (Special Education Ombudsperson)]: I I get it. We're actually supposed to be in August that we're doing this so I appreciate the frustration. And I appreciate the opportunity to be here before the board tonight. My name is Julia Martin. I am the special education ombudsperson for c for SFUSD and I am the liaison to the community advisory committee for special education. And tonight, we are here for the appointment of five members to our committee and we request that the Board of Education of San Francisco Unified appoint to the Community Advisory Committee for Special Education five regular members to serve a two year term beginning 08/01/2025. That is why the date's August 1 because that's when they were supposed to start. And the members recommended for appointment are Amber Abbey, Bernice Casey, Bridget Blount, Cheryl Theiss, and Michaela Estores. We are lucky to have some of them with hit with us here this evening as well as some of our existing members. We provided background information and are available to answer any questions that you all might have.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you. Counselor, do we need a motion to approve for this appointment?

[Elliot (General Counsel)]: I believe so.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Okay. Can I have a motion and a second to approve the appointments of the named individuals?

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: I move to approve the named members to the Community Advisory Committee for Special Education.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: Second.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Roll call, please, Pyslana. Sorry. We just already spoke so much already. Yes. Are there comments and questions from the board?

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Can I have

[Speaker 51.0]: a quick comment?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yes, please.

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: Just appreciation and thanks to those who are able to engage and support in this work that I know is challenging. And I know that there are lots of roadblocks, and we'll do our best to dismantle some of those and make the road pave the road and and and make it an easier path. So thank you so much for all of the work and support that you do for our our families and our kids.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you, vice vice president. Commissioner, Weisman Ward. Commissioner Ray.

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: I just want to second that sentiment. It's we have so much appreciation for folks who volunteer their time to serve on these committees. It's super important for our students and the success of our district. Thank you.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you. Commissioner Fisher?

[Moon-Hak Kim (Research, Planning & Assessment)]: Do you

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: wanna set the timer?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I yes. Ten seconds, please.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: LOL. You're funny. I well, I just wanna thank the CAC members. Over the past couple years, you have been our proverbial canaries in the coal mine. For decades at least the decade I was on, the CAC was talking about structured literacy before it was cool and, you know, getting real reading curriculum into the district and was a big part of the push. You all highlighted our budget catastrophe and understaffing in SPED before anyone else. And if we would have listened, could have probably saved ourselves a whole lot of heartache. You know, you've been raising tier two intervention needs. I mean, like, if there's anything that the CAC teaches us, it's that those who are closest to the problem are also closest to the solution and we need the flipping listen to our families. So thank you very much.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you. Roll call, please, miss Lanoff.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Student delegate Munt? Yes. Student delegate Cruz? Yes. Commissioner Alexander? Yes. Commissioner Fisher? Yes. Commissioner, Gupta? Yes. Vice President Haley?

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Commissioner Ray? Yes. Commissioner Wiseman Ward? Yes. President Kim?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yes. Seven ayes. Moving to item two, presentation

[Speaker 6.0]: oh,

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: thank you. Congratulations. Thank you so much. Presentation by the SFUSD bond program, Citizens Bond Oversight Committee, CBOC, on its fiscal year twenty four, twenty five annual report. I call on the superintendent to introduce this item.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Thank you, president Kim. I am going to invite our esteemed panelist to the dais here. I'm going to hand this over to our bond manager, Lisenia Abiara, who will introduce the current president?

[Speaker 6.0]: Vice

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: president. Vice president of CBOC.

[Speaker 59.0]: Patrick Wolf.

[Lisenia Abiara (Bond Program Manager)]: Thank you, superintendent. Tonight, Patrick Wolf, vice chair of the Citizens Fund Oversight Committee will provide their annual update to the board.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Turn on your mic, please. Thank you. Oh, is it on?

[Speaker 6.0]: Do I

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: need to

[Speaker 16.0]: do something?

[Speaker 6.0]: Do I need

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: to press Do you have to press You

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: have to turn it on by pressing the button. Is that better? Yes.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Oh, there we go. Okay.

[Patrick Wolf (Vice Chair, Citizens Bond Oversight Committee)]: Sorry. Thanks. Yeah. So here I am, vice chair. Chair, you could not be here. She's out of town. I will be stepping through our annual report. I do have a quick question to ask, and then I'd like to provide a little bit of context. I know at least two of you have read this report because I've had individual conversations with Commissioner Wray and Commissioner Gupta. Have any of the rest of you read the report? Okay. Terrific. I'm very glad to hear that. We also provide, or I should say, the bond staff provides a quarterly report now, that was instituted to work with, in collaboration with bond staff over a year ago. I highly recommend that you read the quarterly report to provide regular updates onto the bond program. Before I step through this, I just wanna give a little bit of context I think may be useful. SFUSD has two budgets. You have an operating budget and and you have a capital budget. The operating budget is larger than the capital budget, but the capital budget is significant. You're gonna be spending over $1,000,000,000 over the next several years. The operating budget has substantial oversight and points of transparency. You have the LCAP process. You have to provide interim forecasts. You have to interim next year budget. You have to provide multiyear forecasts. You have to demonstrate that you can meet a reserve level. If you can't demonstrate that, as you're all very painfully aware, the state can step in. And I'm only talking about the money you get from the state. I'm not talking about oversight that comes for other streams of funding. The capital budget, the Citizens Bond Oversight Committee is literally the only oversight, the only port point of transparency for the public that you have. I wanna make the I wanna really hammer this point home. The Citizens Bond Oversight Committee is essentially a toothless body that needs to work in cooperation with SFUSD and has no power whatsoever. All we do is opine on things, and we only we have no access to information beyond what the public can get. And so, I urge you to incorporate the, the, work of the Citizens Bond Oversight Committee and work in, and and reach out to us from time to time. We're not perfect, Lord knows. But we are trying. And we are putting in effort. And this annual report, in particular, represents quite a lot of effort. And so I'm very glad that a number of you have read through it. And I look forward to stepping through some of the basic points with you. So if I just may turn to the, narrative overview. I won't step through all of this, but if we begin on page five and I I do apologize I don't have a nice slide presentation. The reason for that is very simple. The Citizens Bond Oversight Committee only reads meets from time to time. And this is officially adopted by the Citizens' Bond Oversight Committee. We did not have a slot time to adopt a slide deck. So I'm only presenting to you information that has been adopted by the full committee. So what I would say here is, you know, there's a number of improvements that we note that the bond committee that the bond program has made over years, and we're very happy to see that. There's a set of suggested opportunities for further improvement I'm going to step through in a moment. And on page four at the bottom, we do highlight something that I want to call to your attention, which is there has been significant recent turnover in the executive oversight of the bond program in the last year and a half. Up to August 2024, the executive in charge of the bond program was Don Kamala Nathan. And then it was Michelle Huntoon. And then it was Millie Lau Smith. And now it's Chris Mount Benitez, whom the bond oversight committee has yet to meet. And so there are some things in here that we highlight as opportunities for further improvement that really do require that executive oversight and decision making, particularly in partnership with the senior executive superintendent Hsu. So I just want to highlight that I think there are opportunities now that, hopefully, we have a certain amount of stability that we brought to that executive oversight. So the major opportunities for improvement that CBOC has observed, I'll just step through them briefly on pages five and six. And then I'm happy to take questions and, any further discussion. First, in the performance audit, this is a detail. It's much less strategic, but it is something that we noted. The method used by the auditor to sample transactions below $100,000 is not a method that produces a random sample. And because of that, it could potentially be it's biased in ways that could potentially be exploited by a bad actor. The recommendation is simply to amend the process to select transactions for review under $100,000 for analysis, in a random way. Very, you know, fairly straightforward. Secondly, under deferred maintenance, as far as we can ascertain, SFUSD does not seem to have, or at least has not made publicly available, a comprehensive deferred maintenance plan, which is separate and distinct from the facility's master plan. So the facility's master plan is a ten years needs assessment, which is primarily focused on capital expenditures, which is excellent, which is important to have. But there is substantial amount of deferred maintenance built up across the entire plant. We don't think, at least, that there is some sort of comprehensive deferred maintenance plan. We think that's an opportunity. Next one, it's a bit of a sore topic, but it is important, the potential impact of school consolidation on capital projects. So I want to make something super, super clear. The CBOC does not, in any way, opine on what the district should be doing. We are not a policy board. However, it has been discussed many times that, you know, obviously, you were look you were considering, school closures. You've talked about it. It certainly seems like it's something on the agenda. Now, if you think about it, if you're gonna be closing schools and you have a capital project, if you don't inform the capital spending, budgeting, planning by, inform the capital spending, budgeting, planning by what you expect to do there, either you'll end up spending money on schools that you end up closing or you'll end up not closing schools that you otherwise should because you spent money there. Right? And either neither one of those neither one of those would be good. So it's something that, we think needs attention. The next is, coordination between operational planning and capital project planning. There are some specific areas that we believe we've identified where increased coordination between operations and the bond program could capture operational efficiencies. And we think it's possible that more such opportunities exist. And so we think that's something that is an opportunity. Next, in terms of change orders. So basically, a change order is very normal for a capital project, particularly as complicated as the large plants, old buildings. It's the most normal thing in the world to have capital project and then change orders. However, again, as far as we can tell, and we go into some more detail in the report, it doesn't appear to us that the bond program has a comprehensive analysis of change orders, including why they occur and how much they cost and what justified the necessity. And it's simply an opportunity for further analysis to just understand better how the projects were managed. Are there opportunities to do them better? Are there learnings to capture? And so forth. Again, it's not criticism. It's just a potential opportunity, we think we see. The next one has to do with the quarterly report. This is fairly nitpicky. It's just that and by the way, I want to emphasize I've said this before in front of the board we're super, super happy with the development of the quarterly report. We think it's a major step forward by the bond program. Oftentimes, and I'm sure you've seen this in many areas of SFUSD, the reporting seems kind of ad hoc. Lots of pretty pictures. But at the end of the day, it's sort of like, here's this, here's this, here's this, as opposed to a structured template that carries forward through time. The quarterly report provides that structured template carried forward through time, which is a major step forward in transparency. The bond program has told us that they consider it valuable. It's actually reduced work on their part because they no longer have to produce more ad hoc reports. All that is great. We just think that there's some opportunities for improvement, you know, further improvement online. And then the final thing is a little bit more, complicated. We have had some back and forth on it. It's possible we don't fully understand exactly, but I'm going to explain to you, as best I do understand. As far as we can tell, project budgets are estimated using and and this we go into more detail into the report, and so this is just a summary. Project budgets are estimated using generous gross up factors attached to the winning bid, then are expected to stay roughly within those estimates. So there's an enormous amount of analytics that's put into determining by the bond program, an enormous amount of analytics put into determining what the winning bid should be based on, analysis of the market and the types of, contractors that are bidding. And we're very impressed with the work that they put into that. And there's a lot of work put into determining that the bids that they accept are within the acceptable range. And that's great. But from that point on, in terms of then budgeting the remainder of the project, as we understand it, there's essentially a generous gross up factors that are attached to the winning bid. And then they're expected to stay roughly within those estimates. So the idea is that ensures sufficient funds to complete projects, but it doesn't necessarily maximize efficient or effective use of funds. So just so you understand, like, if you've got a pot of money and you've got your winning bid, and and then you sort of, like, gross up the amount of money you're gonna need for the project to get it completed, as far as we can tell, essentially what the Vaughan program has been doing over time is making sure they're always going to have enough money to finish each project, which obviously is a good thing. But not necessarily maximizing the efficiency or the effectiveness of the use of money. So there may be ways to save money. There may be ways to, to provide to get projects done on time, or more quickly, more expeditiously, more efficiently. So we think there's opportunities there. And then a corollary to that is, project schedules are not necessarily rigorously managed. So in other words, as we understand, the primary emphasis is more on ensuring schools are not unexpected taken offline, which is obviously a very important thing. But not necessarily, here is the project we expect to be done by date x. And, we're sort of holding ourselves across all the projects to making sure things are done on on time delivery schedule. And there was a time last year when there was sort of a claim made that, project capital budgets within capital projects within SFUSD had consistently been done, on budget and on time. And in fact, when we challenged that, the district ended up quietly sort of removing those claims because it turned out, actually, there wasn't really the, the, the data to back that up. So that's my summary, and I'm happy to answer, any questions. I know you have a lot more, in front of you. So don't need to take a lot of time if you'd like, but I'm here at your disposal, if you'd like.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you, mister Wolf. Appreciate your presentation. Other comments and questions from the board?

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Thank you so much, mister Wolf, for being here and for all the work that you and the committee put into this report. This is really, really tremendous, and I deeply appreciate it. Something that I wanted to bring to folks' attention, I'm not sure if folks know, is in the past when excuse me. When committees or advisories have given us recommendations, the staff have sometimes provided, their response to those recommendations. So I asked about that in this case, and if folks take a look at the q and a document that's on the agenda, there are staff responses to each of the recommendations that mister Wolf went over. So, I just wanted to draw folks' attention to that, and, I also I have some questions, actually, that would be related to those responses, but I'm not sure if I can ask them here or if I would need to ask them through another forum.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: What kind of questions? Sorry.

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Okay. So so the response to the first recommendation, for example, was about the random sample and staff generally it was agreeing that the sample should be random, but was speaking about the scope of the audit and a plan to it sounded to me like narrow the scope of the audit. And so I wanted to ask about that.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I see. If staff are prepared to speak, you're welcome to. I I think this item was meant for CBOC to be able to present to the board, their report. And so I would say if there are follow-up questions about where staff perspectives are, it would be a follow-up email unless there are comments that you wanna make right now at this time.

[Patrick Wolf (Vice Chair, Citizens Bond Oversight Committee)]: So I don't want to try to advise you how to use your time, but, I guess I guess I will. Which is that, probably now is not the time to go through this in any sort of detail. But what I would really strongly recommend and urge is that the board establish some way of establishing like gaining oversight or some kind of interaction with the bond program. Because I'm just gonna be pretty blunt here. Like, from my experience of being on the bond oversight committee, with the exception of some discussions that we've had around procedure, right, in terms of the actual substance of engaging with and overseeing a billion dollar plus capital budget, We have basically not seen the board. And I'm not suggesting that you should be micromanaging anything. But this is your fiduciary responsibility. It's part of the funds under management. And there should be, I think, some kind of interaction, and but not at this moment. I think here is just sort of to receive the report and any sort of high level things.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you. Commissioner, before you move forward, the student delegates, I just wanna I know it's 09:00 and one of you guys migrated. So thank you so much for being here. Are there any comments that you wanna make before you head out? Okay. Thank you.

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Okay. I'm happy to send those separately or if we have I don't know if there'll be another meeting where there's discussion about the staff's recommendations or not. But if if that's the case, then I'm happy to bring them forward there. The other question that I have right now for mister Wolf is about the committee membership because I understand that it is at the the statutory, I think, I believe, minimum of seven members. And I know that there have been discussions about other committees also, being able to have an appropriate complement of members. And would the board I mean, excuse me. Would the CBOC welcome additional members? Because I understand there have been more applications than candidates that have been submitted to the board for, for appointment to the CBOC, and I'd like to get a sense of what the committee would like to see, especially given that there are interested candidates. Thank you.

[Patrick Wolf (Vice Chair, Citizens Bond Oversight Committee)]: Yeah. Absolutely. So, seven is the statutory minimum. I would suggest in terms of getting work done, nine might be, like, an optimal number. And the reason I say nine is because the quorum is the same for eight or nine. But when you have nine members, you have one more person who can show up at the meeting to make sure that you've got quorum. So that's sort of a good number of people to get the work done. I think there has unfortunately been kind of like a lot of back and forth between the board and the CBOC in terms of establishing the bylaws and what those bylaws how those bylaws should be established and how members should be selected and so forth. I would say, again, please keep in mind, we are the only oversight that you have. Like, we are it. And we have no power. So I think it would be beneficial to make sure that you have members on the CBOC who are engaged, who want to do the work, and to allow them a certain amount of leeway to get that work done, effectively. I think it I think I'm not just speaking for myself. I'm not speaking for the CBOC. I think that it is absolutely, appropriate for the board, to be selecting the members of the CBOC. You're elected by the people. You have appointment power generally. I think that totally makes all the sense in the world. I do think it would be good to do good to do that to some degree in consultation with CBOC. Because, again, like, if you wanna cut us off, sort of cut us down, you can. We have no power. But, like, our whole function is to try to provide, transparency, information. And I think insofar as we can work in collaboration with the board, that would be, really beneficial. So I guess that's what I would say to that.

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Thank you.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Commissioner Gupta? Yeah.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Thanks so much, Patrick, for being here and presenting these findings. I echo Commissioner Ray's, point that we really appreciate the work that the CBOC puts into this, and the importance of this work. I I am I I'm not going to get into the responses that were provided. I don't know if you've had an opportunity to to see them.

[Patrick Wolf (Vice Chair, Citizens Bond Oversight Committee)]: I haven't. Sorry.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: For no problem. And for those who are interested, they are public and available in the agenda. You know, I know this is not the the time to talk about that. And I, you know, we can talk about it at some other point. But one of the responses that that is pretty brief is the district produces an annual update on the Facilities Master Plan and tracks deferred maintenance in the Facility Condition Assessment. Annual Facilities updates have been provided to the CBOC. So in the general gist of this, it sounds like there is a lot of information that staff have indicated is provided to the CBOC and I I and to the public because it sounds like the CBOC only receives information that is public in nature. So I'm I'm just trying to get at perhaps where there may be I don't know if it's miscommunication or, you know, if you're saying you're not getting this deferred expenditure, you know, just just trying to pinpoint where that that may be happening from the CBOC perspective.

[Patrick Wolf (Vice Chair, Citizens Bond Oversight Committee)]: So I'm gonna be 100% completely, honest about this. So, I'm the person who largely produced the annual report. Like, it was a it was a collaborative effort, but this time around, I probably put in about 80 plus percent of the work on this. The deferred maintenance point is the one point that I have not actually like, it's it's I can talk much more about pretty much the other points because the deferred maintenance point is much more certain other members of the CBOC. This is just the this is just true. I think that what may be the disconnect is probably more in maybe. It's just more in terms of the presentation, just in terms of, like, we here's all the deferred maintenance that we are tracking across the, you know, the facilities, etcetera, etcetera. Like, but that I won't bore you with this, but this is a long conversation that certain other members have had that goes back actually some period of time, and I've been much more substantively involved with pretty much every other point in here except that particular one. So I apologize for the non answer, but that's that's God's honest truth.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: I I appreciate honesty. So thank you.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: I actually wanted to follow-up on, Commissioner Gupta's, and I think my question is more for staff and again, doesn't have to be answered here today. But the deferred maintenance recommendation caught my attention too. And in going back through some of the information that I have, the last time I could find and and I haven't seen everything that CBOC has I haven't been to any CBOC meetings. Haven't seen the same reports you get.

[Patrick Wolf (Vice Chair, Citizens Bond Oversight Committee)]: You should come there. A blast.

[Lisenia Abiara (Bond Program Manager)]: Right. I I

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: mean, I am a data nerd. I'm sure I would totally love it. But the I remember back in 2022 when Don, Kamala, and Nathan was, was head of operations. We got the facilities condition indexed as part of the, as part of the materials that were shared with us in planning for the bond. And so I'm just just strategically, I think to take that deferred maintenance question, I would love to I think I would love to know more about, you know, there were some talk about using that and taking the red schools and a lot of planning around that and some of that led into the projects that are part of now the the bond that's passed. I think there is an opportunity to share some of that more publicly. I know that the plan is is there. If the CBOC has seen it, great. But one, how do we share that more more more publicly and effectively? You know, I don't know. We're we've talked about dashboards for other things. Maybe a dashboard for for some of our facilities and upgrades and deferred maintenance and how we're addressing that would be helpful. And I think the other thing that I struggle with here, as I struggle within my my role as a commissioner here is the difference between our governance role and oversight versus the actual operational work. And and I I think there's a lot of tension in the work that the CBOC does. You know, it's oversight. Yet we've got a lot of really passionate, committed advocates who wanna do the work of of really getting into the operational weeds with the district. And so, I know we see that in our other advisory committees too. So I'm just I've mentioned this before when we've talked. We showed our community engagement matrix and I think one of the the tensions here particularly, I see it in the CBOC, I see it in the SPEDCAC, many others, but like what is what level of community engagement? Where where where do we draw the line between engagement versus collaborative decision making? Right? I think there's there's a lot of tension there, like, how I hear as a bigger ask from the CBOC for more engagement that I think a lot of our advisory committees are asking for in other ways too. And so, superintendent, I defer to you like, that's one of the tensions that we find. Where where does where does that line lie? How much decision making authority are we giving our advisory committees? And I think that's something we'll be exploring. We'll talk about later through the ad hoc committee. But I just that's one of the tensions that I think we, from a leadership standpoint, really really have to define. You know, how do we make this more than just perfunctory?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Do you

[Patrick Wolf (Vice Chair, Citizens Bond Oversight Committee)]: wanna speak to that? Sorry.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Well, I was just going to share with commissioner Fisher that we are working on a list of all of our advisories and what what what birthed them, what were the the policies and the charter requirements that we have to follow. And so we will be sharing that with the board soon. I think this was this came at the request of commissioner Gupta. Thanks.

[Patrick Wolf (Vice Chair, Citizens Bond Oversight Committee)]: And I I can provide probably a little bit of context there. So, it used to require a two thirds, vote to approve a school bond, and that was changed, I forget when, in the early two thousands, and it made it a 55% threshold instead of sixty six and two thirds. And one of the things that came with that was that it was required to have a CBOC. And that CBOC, again, it it's not a policy board. Right? It is to is to make sure that funds are, correctly expended, but it in no way opines on how the fund should be expended. And it's also backward looking, not forward looking. Right? It's what did happen, not what is going to happen or what should happen. There's reason for that. I mean, if you look back twenty plus years in SFUSD's history, there was a fairly substantial scandal about, you know, funds illegally spent. And then in 2000 I forget, '17 or so, 2018, SFUSG just literally stopped producing audited financials for several years. Like, for eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty one, like, you just stopped producing audited financials. And the oversight is so lax that there was essentially no consequences for breaking the law. You also stopped, having CBOC, you know. So we're past that. Thank goodness. We're we're, you know, producing audited financials, CBOC's operating, so on and so forth. There is some tension in the understanding of CBOC's role because there's because the ed code is actually not super clear on this. There's one interpretation of the ed code that says the CBOC is only purely about making sure that funds are spent for capital projects only and never for operating project. And also, there's no misappropriation of funds. And then also, there's an interpretation that says, and there's more transparency provided. Now, I totally understand. If I were, in, you know, if I'm in a job, I probably don't want extra sort of transparency brought to bear. But, again, I mean, of course, I'm on the Seabox side, so I'm going to argue for more transparency. But, again, I'm going to emphasize, we are the only oversight you have, period. Pam and Elliot don't have anything to do with the capital budget. Right? So I think that so long as it's a healthy, productive relationship, the improved transparency has just gotta be a positive thing. And so I don't know. It's up to you, Alita, to figure the the board, I should say. Excuse me. Not just you, Commissioner Fisher. But, it's up to the board to figure out sort of how to foster that. But I would definitely urge that sort of, like, transparent that transparency serves a really vital function. So long as it's a it's a productive, healthy relationship, it's everybody's gotta benefit from that.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Vice President Huley.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Hi, mister Wolf.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: I just wanted to thank you and all of your fellow Seabok members for your volunteer efforts in preparing this report and for providing us, with this insight into the bond program and the transparency. And also just acknowledge that many of the current CBOC members are those who really did the heavy lift of reconstituting the CBOC after

[Patrick Wolf (Vice Chair, Citizens Bond Oversight Committee)]: 100%.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: It was not functioning for many years. So thank you for that. And also, I appreciate your comments that you're the only oversight, but I also wanna make sure that it's just stated on the record that it is our job on the board also to provide that oversight. Totally. And so thank you for assisting us in doing that. I just don't want anyone to have the impression that we, do not also engage in that in that oversight.

[Rev. Dr. Amos C. Brown]: Oh, thank you.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: Thank you for bringing this information for us to help also discharge our duties and responsibilities.

[Patrick Wolf (Vice Chair, Citizens Bond Oversight Committee)]: Thank you very much. And if I may, I'd like to actually put an exclamation point on what you just said. You're the ones with the authority. Right? You are the ones with the ultimate oversight, not just responsibility, but authority. All we do is provide information. So 100%, I couldn't agree with you more, Commissioner Huling. Thank you.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: And I'm also glad that you enjoyed your visit to the Denman project and got to be at the groundbreaking for that and it's very exciting and I think, it's gonna be a really wonderful addition to the neighborhood.

[Patrick Wolf (Vice Chair, Citizens Bond Oversight Committee)]: I'm done after this. You guys are the ones who have to go late into the night. So

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: We're not done, Patrick.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: So this is actually a a question more to superintendent Sue and and our wonderful team. Is there you know, I see a lot of recommendations in here, a lot of which are agreed with. I'm curious if there's an opportunity for a follow-up much like we have with other recommendations from our advisory committees working with staff to not only get the responses, but then also to see how we're doing, say, six months down the road.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: I I I think the majority of the recommendations, really leans into deeper engagement and collaboration. And

[Patrick Wolf (Vice Chair, Citizens Bond Oversight Committee)]: and analytics as well, analysis, I would add to that.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: And and data and sharing of data. The dashboard is a great example of something that we can come together and work on. I will talk to our deputy superintendent of business services and, and and see what we can I'll I'll talk to him and and talk to the team about what that would look like.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Vice chair Wolf, if you could please share our gratitude with your members for the work that you all do in supporting this. We're very grateful for your leadership and for your time spent in doing this work. Thank you. You feel that you have great access to our staff who are able to partner with you on the work for CBOC, and we look forward to hearing, from you and the superintendent. Thank you.

[Patrick Wolf (Vice Chair, Citizens Bond Oversight Committee)]: Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Appreciate the the nice words and appreciate the opportunity to present here this evening. Thanks. Thank you.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you to staff as well for being here tonight. Appreciate it. Moving to item G, workshop on student outcomes. Item one, goal one, one point one, African American Pacific Islander kindergartner language and literacy 1.2, grade one literacy or language and literacy 1.3, grade three EL language and literacy. I call on the superintendent to read this into the record or to introduce this item.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Thank you, president Kim. As staff is making their way to the dais, I just want to share that this evening, we are providing an update on our progress towards goals one and two within our district's vision, values, goals, and guardrails. The VVGGs, which truly anchors and frames the work that we do here in the district. And so okay. So soon, the team and I will will share with you the progress that we're that we've been making towards these two goals and just know that it is truly a critical tool that the way that we are using the progress monitoring workshop to help us continue to improve. I hear an echo. Is that is that just me? Okay. So using the progress monitoring workshop as a tool for continuous improvement is extremely important. It's something that I recently learned at the progress monitoring ad hoc meeting that commissioner Alexander chaired. It is a way for us to stay focused on those foundational goals that we have set for ourselves. And we are going to try to we are going to try to continue to push towards achieving these goals and making sure that we have the programs and services that our students need that's going to move us closer to achieving particularly here for goals one and and goal two. So with that, I'm going to hand this over to our wonderful staff. I don't know which who which one of you all I'm handing it over. I'm handing it over to Jess Reyes from our research planning and assessment team.

[Jess Reyes (Interim Senior Executive Director, Research, Planning & Assessment)]: Thank you, Doctor. Su. And good evening, board commissioners and members of the public. My name is Jess Reyes, interim senior executive director in research planning and assessments. On behalf of the team here, we are grateful for the opportunity to share this goal one progress monitoring report. Next slide, please. The goal one theory of action provides a road map connecting our strategies to meeting our desired student outcomes. At every step along the way, there are a range of data sources in which data collection is crucial to monitoring progress, identifying bright spots and opportunities so that we can continually improve. Our aim is to build our data collection in such a way as to provide a more holistic review of our, initiatives and how that's going. For this report, we'll hone in specifically on coaching logs as a major initiative and investment and tie them to our recent fall star results. And I'll hand it over to my colleague, Moon Hak Kim.

[Moon-Hak Kim (Research, Planning & Assessment)]: Good evening, commissioners, doctor Sue, and members of the public. I'm happy to share, some of the interim results coming out of our, STAR assessment. Next slide, please. And it is not often that we see this pattern of, positive differences from the year over year, assessment comparison. So this is something definitely to celebrate. Thank you very much, Vice President Heuling. And the school sites, have already had a chance to celebrate this at our cohort meeting about two weeks ago, pointing this out. So as you can see very well from the charts, as summarized on the bottom, we have had significant gains for goal one overall, grade three literacy. Even though that goal is tracked by, end of year SBEC outcomes throughout the year, we pay attention to the STAR reading assessment, as a tool to progress monitor and that and that is what the results are showing. Goal 1.1, the each and every by name initiative driven kindergarten, African American, and Pacific Islander students are also off to a strong start with the the slight increase from last year. 1.2 is, overall grade one all students, and that is up by almost two percentage points. And the last one, goal one point interim goal 1.3 with our EO students in grade three, We totally recognize that their performance is not where it should be, but they are also up by about almost a percentage point as well. So definitely some things to celebrate, and I would be happy to say a little bit more about the third graders, about how the cohort compares in the q and a section. But for now, I will just wrap up this part by saying that, as many of the commissioners have been asking for, for goal one, as represented in the far left panel, the difference between this fall, the cohort from this fall's performance compared to last year is, in fact, statistically significant. And for interim goal 1.2, the difference between this fall's performance and last is just outside of the conventional level of statistical significance, and I'd be happy to talk more about that if we need to. And I'll pass it on to miss Krugman.

[Ms. Krugman (Curriculum & Instruction)]: Thank you so much. If we can go to the next slide, please. So with regards to goal one, one of the most significant investments that we make as a district is in that of instructional coaching at the elementary level. We have a robust network of instructional coaches who are now in their second year with a high rate of retention, who support instructional coaching of elementary school educators. And in analyzing the impact of that instructional coaching, we look to a number of factors. One of which is the connection between the coaching logs that coaches submit and the star data at their respective schools. So as highlighted by the report, that analysis is meant to help us better understand the connection between coaching implementation efforts and the impact on both instructional practice and then following student outcomes. So as highlighted in the report, we analyzed the coaching log data from a number of different angles in order to better understand connections between specific coaching practices and schools where those teachers and their students had significant gains both in practice and corresponding student outcomes. We looked at frequency of coaching. We looked at longevity of coaching, the balance between individual or one to one coaching with teacher collaboration support and whole staff professional learning facilitation to better understand that connection. Next slide, please. And in that analysis, identified a key set of trends. So at subsets of schools where student outcomes demonstrated significant year over year improvement, we saw a number of trends in their coaching logs and coaching practices. So the first one is with regards to consistency. As part of the coach network, coaches do facilitate one aligned professional development module per a month that's centrally designated. However, schools that, we might say either consistently implement month over month or go above and beyond that with a more expansive professional learning plan at their site demonstrated outside gains. In addition, focus was another area. Sites where instructional coaches maintained support with a core group of teachers over time also had significantly improved student outcomes. So we might say they did multiple coaching cycles or focused on a small set subset of teachers at the school for a longer frequency of time. And then the last piece is frequency. And this is a specific connection to 1.3, which is gains for multi lingual learners. So where sites had the highest number of weekly coaching cycles, so we would see, like, a rapid rate of re of return of touch points between coaches and individual teachers. We did see increased gains for 1.3, which is third grade multilingual learners. Next slide, please. So in analyzing this data, there were a number of things, that we wanted to both respond to and change and shift around this investment of instructional coaching. Mhmm. The first is actually sort of related to a data point, which is a shift in the coaching logs. So when the coaching logs were launched actually last year in the 2425 school year, there was a practice of revising those logs over time in order to gain a better snapshot as to understanding that connection between implementation and student and impact on student outcomes. So based on the data that we looked at, we had a couple of questions in order to better understand impact. Some of these areas are providing clear identifications between individual coaches and individual teachers to better analyze specific student impact on a classroom level as opposed to a school site level. In addition, there are specific practices that coaches might engage with, either in one to one collaboration or in grade level collaboration. So we wanted a deeper dive in updating the coaching logs with greater specificity so we can better analyze how much of, let's say, GLC time is spent with less than a unit internalization as opposed to analyzing student work samples or with one to one coaching. How much of that time is spent on individual preparation versus post observation meetings. So revising the coaching logs has been one impact of this analysis. The next piece is around teacher collaboration. In looking at, the coaching log data and in analyzing the corresponding site plans, there is a significant difference across sites in terms of their structures, systems, and frequency of teacher collaboration or GLC, grade level collaboration time. So a key part of that is aligning site expectations to make sure there is consistency and adequate meeting time in alignment with the contract as well. And then the last piece is this tiered coaching model. One of the things that coaches spend a lot of time working on is trying to figure out this balance between the amount of their time that's spent supporting teacher collaboration versus one to one coaching, how they have a tiered coaching model and identifying which teachers they work with for what length of time and with what frequency. So one of the ideas that we wanna provide a revision to the guidance on is how coaches go about getting support to make those strategic investments of their time and resources in tiered coaching and how to tighten our particularly tiered coaching or one to one coaching, cycle so that, we can see more traction with individual practice. So these are some of the changes to the coaching network that we are currently working on after analyzing the data in relationship to student outcomes.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you very much. I'll open it oh, sorry. I'll open it up for comments and questions from the board. Commissioner Weisman Ward.

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: Thank you. I feel like we've been seeing a lot of you all, which is good. It means we're talking about outcomes. So it is nice to see some different trajectories in terms of lines. And I wanna I guess, I I have a question that relates to to some of the last the the sort of three different plans that you were describing. So given the still off track off track status for goal one despite what is clearly we hope to be an overall strong start to this school year and considering that the preliminary data patterns linking instructional coaching structures like the weekly PDs and small group focus to positive student outcomes, What do you all think is the most critical immediate action that we can take to leverage these affecting coaching practices and accelerate the progress as we move forward? And I I know that you you described sort of three planned items, the data collection, collaboration support, and the tiered model. But if you had to, like, sort of identify, like, the most critical immediate action, do you have do you have an opinion on if there's one? I mean, I know they all come together. So I'm not saying like, take one and leave the rest, but but we are having this sort of think about sort of triage and and how to focus and and how to, think about where we might leverage more or leverage less depending on what our resources are. So

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: I saw that.

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: And if the answer is, like, no, we have to do them all, then I think that's important for us to know as we're thinking about budget and and and allocating resources.

[Ms. Krugman (Curriculum & Instruction)]: So one of I'll sort of start with the less strategic answer and then get to the other one, which is, I think, doing one does not prevent us from doing the other two is sort of the short answer. I think it is actually possible to do all three concurrently. And one of the things I'll say I believe really firmly is that saying that coaching is the right investment does not mean we can't update the systems and structures for the way coaching is implemented in the system. So our focus is how to improve those systems and structures. I would say all of these have, site implications, site differences, but one of the things that I will highlight that I think, we've seen a lot of traction on is is in regards to teacher collaboration. Teacher collaboration is built into the UE contract. It's a sustained practice. We see a we see a high connection between strong student outcomes in schools with really strong teacher collaboration models. And so I think getting right, clear, consistent expectations and oversight in terms of teacher collaboration, is one strategic plan that we get a lot of bang for our buck out of when it comes to shifts in teacher practice and student outcomes.

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: Maybe also teacher retention. I know that when I have colleagues that I'm learning from and growing with, I enjoy my job more. So

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yeah.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: But I think this is the reason why we were so intentional in last year's budget to not cut instructional coaches? Because we knew that having instructional coaches there providing the support to our teachers was what was going to be necessary for us to move the needle, and it's showing here. But we need to stay consistent. We need to stay focused. It can't just be a one and done situation. We have to keep at it so that we can have coaches that have the tools necessary to be successful so that they can then provide the supports to our teachers so that they can have the tools necessary to be successful.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Commissioner Fisher.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: I appreciate this report. Thank you so much, and thank you for the all the work always. So where do we find the disaggregated data for all of this? For the different focal populations and the I I appreciate seeing our our goal 1.1 students data here, but where's where do we find everyone else?

[Jess Reyes (Interim Senior Executive Director, Research, Planning & Assessment)]: In the, actual full report, there is a, hyperlink within the, I believe, the interpretation section in the second line that actually, gives you that information.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Okay. I missed that. Thank you. You're welcome. Appreciate that follow-up. So when we say that we saw the strongest gains in I've which the the when we say in frequency, the evidence frequency, sites with the gain the highest number of weekly coaching cycle saw the strongest gains with the third grade multilingual learners. Are we was that corollary or is that because we're providing targeted coaching to our bilingual teachers? What is there particular coaching for some of our targeted populations like SPED teachers, RSPs, special day class teachers, you know, bilingual? Do we have additional coaching for the the differentiation or for the the, the multilingual edge the bilingual education that has to happen in in some of those classrooms, or or is this just the coach in general for the school?

[Moon-Hak Kim (Research, Planning & Assessment)]: Thank you for the great question, commissioner Fisher. So I I I think the preliminariness, nature of the the analysis is is stated in the report. The short answer to your question is that no. We do we do not make that direct connection between actual content of the coaching, and and the outcome. So what we try to the step that we try to take in the analysis is let's identify some patterns that we see so that we can delve in deeper, with our lead partners and with the school sites to see focusing on those sites about exactly what is how the coaching is taking place and what the coaches are working on. And then with that, I'll I'll pass it on to miss Quirkman.

[Ms. Krugman (Curriculum & Instruction)]: So one of the things that's highlighted in the report in the analysis, is both the frequency but also what that might speak to in terms of the competency of the individual. So in that specific

[Mr. Armentrout (Public Comment Facilitator)]: section, I think what

[Speaker 6.0]: we see

[Ms. Krugman (Curriculum & Instruction)]: is individuals who have a high individual competency in comparison to some of the other schools who don't have that match between frequency and student outcomes. Schools who don't have that match between frequency and student outcomes, such that we might assume that those individuals are able to balance the needs of multiple teachers, potentially have more touch points, so deeper coaching. There is an assumption around a certain number of coach a certain amount of coaching expertise in that. But all of those question marks are part of why we're connecting back to revising the coaching logs in order to better understand the content of those individual touch points to better make that connection. So while we see some trends, we also recognize a need to revise our data collection to have a deeper analysis.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: I appreciate that because the details you're providing you're you're referring to sections of the report, but I didn't read any of that in the report. And so I think some of this analysis, especially considering we're discussing this here at 09:30 at night, you know, and this context would be really helpful to have included in the report. And I know you all have a lot going on. But to go back to my specific question about, you know, the coaching and the co planning, we have so for example, special day class teachers that might teach kindergarten through second grade classroom. Right? Are they included in the co planning time between the kindergarten, first, and second grade or are they completely left out to do? Because, the our SDCs are supposed to, for the most part, be teaching curriculum aligned material as well. So and our special day classrooms very often have our teachers who are not fully credentialed or, have the least amount of seniority. So where are they getting their coaching as well? Are they included in all specifically, where are they included in this coaching model?

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Can I make an observation? Point of information or a quarter maybe? I don't know. I feel like this is that's a very tactical question and it just as part of the ad hoc, I don't I just wanna, like, lift that up. And I'm not saying you shouldn't answer it, but I just like, I I think if the board is gonna really try to focus on strategy and making sure that we're talking about strategy, that was like a very, very tactical question and it's okay to ask it, but I just wanna note to my fellow commissioner that if are you really do you really wanna go down that that place or or do you do you know what

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: I'm saying?

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: I can reframe strategically, you know, especially from the teacher retention, from the sense of belonging, you know, we hear so this is a tactical question. The strategic point I'm trying to make is SPED is an afterthought, first of all. SPED is not resourced the same way, that gen ed is resourced. And we see that in the outcomes, in the student outcomes. If we want our students with disabilities to if we want to improve the reading levels and test scores of our students with disabilities, many of them do sit in a gen ed environment but also a lot of them also do get specialized instruction either through their special day class or from their RSP. And if we're not providing the same level of coaching, to those teachers, how the heck are we going to see the same gains? So it's it's a it's an equity equality and just doing right by our students, strategic concern. So that's where the tactical question is coming from. But I think you could apply that same level of logic across everything. So thank you for the clarification.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Yeah. No. I would and so I would just I don't know. Maybe, like, if if the if the question really is like the strategic question is like how are special ed students and students with IEPs being included in the in the planning as pointed out by the that that's kind of the more strategic question. Right?

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Can I just start and then you all can talk about, like, how it looks like on the ground? I think I think that you are right in terms of us needing to make sure that our instructional coaches have clear direction, number one, to ensure that they are coaching all of our teachers and that all of our classrooms are included in that engagement. I am really, really hopeful in terms of just looking at the data, and I I I acknowledge that it's embedded inside a report that we're seeing actually literacy improvements or literacy attainment in across all of our target populations. I'm seeing a two percent increase in SPED. I'm seeing increases in our students who are homeless and in all of our focal population. So I think we're we're starting to see that improvement if we are really intentional about what we're doing, as well as making sure that as we're engaging with our principals and our school community, that they are clear that a coach has to be integrated inside. So maybe, doctor Harari, you can talk a little bit about what that would look like on the ground. How is that gonna be perceived and felt?

[Dr. Harari (Curriculum & Instruction)]: Thank you. So I think there is a a we expect our coaches to support all their k five classrooms that are implementing curriculum. So that would mean a mild, moderate SDC, an inclusion program, RSP program. So some of our coaches have more experience in SDCs than others, and so it's about us meeting where they're at and supporting them on what they need to feel confident to coach in an SDC classroom. So that's on us through the coaching models, through the training that we provide them. But we see that in a variety of ways. We have PK through five classrooms on our campuses. We have early ed coaches that teach that coach PK and TK, and then we have our k five coaches. So what that looks like on the ground is a variety of areas of maybe they have a three five GLC that they're running and that three five SDC teacher is in that GLC with those teachers, thinking about mainstream opportunities, inclusion opportunities, how can they modify the curriculum so that children have access to that. Then maybe the coach might also run a k two or a one two, GLC at the same time throughout the week to support those teachers. So we see in a variety of ways. It's looking at accommodations, mainstream, and inclusion, making sure that children have access to the curriculum. And so our coaches are really coaching our teachers to make sure that's happening. And that happens in a variety of our classrooms and our schools. However, the truth is is that some of our coaches don't have sped experience and so we need to give them that support. Just like we're differentiating for our students, we need to differentiate for our coaches as well.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Any other comments or questions before I opine? Yes. Vice president Huling? Strategic opining.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: I, one, just want to really take a minute to celebrate the fact that this is the first time our literacy numbers have gone up basically since pre pandemic era, that we have been either on a flat or negative trajectory for seven years since 2018. And to turn that around, to turn the corner, to be moving in an upward direction just represents a huge and heavy lift of so many people throughout the district from the superintendent to paras, and everybody in between who interacts with kids and evaluates curriculum and has been working on developing these strategies. So it's really wonderful to see that alignment coming together to get progress for our kids. I also super appreciate the fact that it was identified as statistically significant because, that's always my question. It's like, is this within the margin of error? And so that is huge. I also wanna acknowledge that, you know, now that we're moving in the right direction, it's you know, hopefully, we will continue to see gains, but we're not, you know, likely to see them at the rate necessary to meet our goals on the ambitious timeline that we've set. And so I did want to ask the superintendent as we talked about in our progress monitoring committee meeting, strategic questions should be directed to the superintendent. It looks like we're seeing progress from our instructional coaching and our new, evidence based literacy curriculum being rolled out, but not equally for everyone. And in particular, we haven't seen as, high of increased gains on interim goals 1.1 for grade k African American Pacific Islander early literacy, and, grade three English learners for interim goal 1.3. I'd love one I guess, tactical question I have is when will we see can we expect to see a monitor and report from staff kind of evaluating the specific targeted initiatives that we have for those populations so we can evaluate the what what is happening currently and its efficacy. But to the superintendent, you know, when can we see a more comprehensive strategic plan, from you and from the interim deputy superintendent of schools about what more we need to do and what more resources we need to free up to invest in targeted interventions for our focal populations to help raise their raise their scores as well.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Thank you VP Healing for that question. I I really do think that we're we're starting to see the benefits of having a coach. I think that we need to, number one, stay focused and and consistent in in having that coach so that we can continue to see these gains. What I've heard from administrators and and educators is that it's very helpful to have colleagues to talk to, to brainstorm, to really plan with. And so I think what we need to do is make sure that we set up and create those learning opportunities, which quite frankly, we are doing and perhaps we can do more of. But in terms of us continuing to to to focus in on our focal population, I think we need to continue to double down on on being more intentional with allocating our coaching time, which could mean needing more coaches in some schools based on the data, Meaning, maybe figuring out ways to increase instructional time in some schools based on the data as well. So things that I've been talking to staff about already.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: Excuse me. This is the ASL interpreter. I don't believe we've had visuals on us for this meeting, and currently, you're just looking at a picture of my team that is

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Oh, no.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: I'm sorry. I've had a problem getting ahold of my contact.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: She's in

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you for letting us know. We'll have, staff follow-up. Appreciate it.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: Just, To Steph, do we know when we'll get a monitoring report on, for example, each and every by name or the impact of moving to fifty fifty model or other specific targeted strategies that are already underway for

[Jess Reyes (Interim Senior Executive Director, Research, Planning & Assessment)]: the different topics are coming up. So give us one second. March 24 for Goal one and goal. For goal one and goal two.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I just oh, go for it. Did you have a question?

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Yes. Thank you. I'll I'll try to make it quicker. I have a something of both a follow on and a, separate question, from, from commissioner healings, and it may be best directed to you, superintendent Sue, or if staff is more appropriate to answer it. I'm not sure. But from the coaching from the coaching that we've received, there's this kind of tiered section of, like, board sets goals in conjunction with what the community wants. The you know, you, the superintendent, then set interim goals, for example. And then senior staff below is supposed to set a series of, you know, of of smart, like, smart strategies or initiatives in order to reach the interim goals that the superintendent has identified. So in a sort of, like, a very fundamental way, what can you identify for us what those for the interim goals that you've identified for the census, what are those initiatives or strategies that would have been identified by by senior staff to, you know, to look at. And I I I'm guessing that that is what we would be monitoring off of as well. Sometimes I've wondered how do we come up with the measures that we're looking at at any given report. Like, how is it decided this time we're gonna look at, instructional coaching or professional development or or whatever it is. Mhmm. So does does my question make sense to you?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: So before I pass it to the superintendent because I I so that was exactly where I was gonna go down, and and because I'm hearing certain things from other commissioners that I think are relevant to bring together. And and actually, this is, I think, less feedback per se for staff right now and it's more of an observation of just kind of our moment in time. So later on, we're talking about our strong schools resolution that in part asks the superintendent to build a strategic plan. Right? In our recent conversations with AJ that I think many of us have had several different kinds of touch points in, the thing I really appreciate about this is the and and what I've experienced over the time so far is a continued emphasis on coaching that is very loud and clear and I appreciate that emphasis. I think the question that I had just building off of what commissioner Ray just asked was like or is, is is that the the initiative that we are saying is moving outcomes for kids? And well yeah. Thank you. Like, is that the initiative that we are saying is moving outcomes for kids and therefore is the thing that we are putting all of our resources to? Right? Because I think the the question that I'm trying to build from is if we have our goals, these progress monitoring reports based on those goals are meant to illuminate what exactly are the strategies initiatives that are supporting that goal. Yeah. And then well, you know where this is going. Right? Then it's how much do those things cost so we know exactly the resources that are going to them. And that's I think that last part is the part that's that's somewhat missing from this. And this is, again, less feedback around the actual progress monitoring of the initiative and the things that are taking place and more of a question of how are we being how can we be more strategic in tying the things that we have with our goals, the strategies that we're seeing are getting contributing to those goals with what we're about to undergo with a huge conversation about resource allocation for ourselves. And and that through line is really important. Right? So so I don't mean to, like, completely take over your question, but this was

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Totally fine.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Exactly the direction I was trying to I was thinking in my head to going down of what is that? And do we have, like, an amount that we know that is going into supporting these things? And how do we ensure that that's being accounted for when we talk about our resource allocation work that we

[Speaker 6.0]: have. Yeah.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: I know. Those are great questions. And for commissioners and for viewers who've who've been following us on the budget town halls, we have slowly started to to transition to showing some dollar numbers, amounts of money towards some of the key priorities and strategies that we're we're we're funding. So for example, mapping the LCAP fund the LCAP priorities of high quality instructions to our goals one, two, and oh, ones and two one and two. Right? So we're slowly starting to build that budget that will tell the narrative of of how are we using the money to move towards the VVGGs, similar to what commissioner, you know, Alexander's been asking for. But but I I hear what you're saying in in terms of what are the strategies that we want to focus in on to move the needle in this case for third grade literacy. You've already heard we're focusing really hard on in into literacy coaches and something that we've already I've I've made the commitment to continue funding. There is a question of, should we do more? And what does it what would it look like if we had more literacy coaching supports in lieu of other positions? Because at the end of the day, we are talking about reduction. And that's a that's a tough conversation. And I think this board, we together need to have that conversation. The other initiative that we believe in is having high quality curriculum. And we did pivot and purchase a new curriculum, but we also need to continue to invest in training and professional development for our educators who are delivering the curriculum. It is not enough to say, great. You got this curriculum. Good luck. Because we need to continue to come back and continue to make sure that our our educators have the resources and tools to be successful. And that doesn't mean that it's you go to this professional development training and you're done. It's not a one and done situation. We have to keep at it. We have to keep providing the supports to make sure that we're using the curriculum for all of our students. How are we ensuring that there is fidelity to the curriculum? So that's another part of of of of goal one that we have identified as a key strategy, professional development. And then the the other one is is our each and every strategy. Meaning, we need to focus on our focal population, particularly our African American students. Because we need to make sure that the students who are furthest from academic success gets our attention, gets to have have us focused and do all the data collection and the conversations and the supports to make sure that we're doing the right things to move the needle for them. How much all of that costs? We haven't we haven't done that analysis yet. But at this moment in time, it is our best thinking in terms of how do we move to the 70% proficiency rate by 2027.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I that yes. I I appreciate that. I think even just even the last part that you named around you know, one of the interim goals is around African American achievement. I I know that that is a partnership between Ali and LEED and CNI. And and it again, going into just a season of talking about budgets, it it begs the question of, like, for us to do that well, what is the what are the resources that it takes to actually implement on that? And can we see that in the budget, protect it, and say that this has to happen? And and I think that's maybe part of the the narrative element of the report itself that I think is just harder for me to see, track, and draw a line to and and that's just like a more of a formatting communication thing, but just wanted to

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Well, I I don't think I think it's bigger than that. Yeah. And we actually just talked about this earlier today in our planning meeting for the next ad hoc. I think there's a question of, like, the the level there's like strategy and there's tactics. Right? And I think there's a question of like what what level do these reports need to be at. Yeah. Right? Like these are these reports have sort of picked and then picked a piece like coaching and gone deeper on them, but maybe they need to be more strategy level. I don't know. That's again, these are these are I think conversations that that I think the committee will think about and staff needs to think about. But just I wanna acknowledge, I think there's been acknowledgement from from staff that, like, that sort of a somewhat of a work in progress of, like, what's the sweet spot in terms of us having here a strategic conversation. Obviously, they need this level of detail and depth, but but then I think it feels like that strategy piece is a little bit like, we wanna have more of that conversation with the superintendent. Am I am I right about that?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yeah. I think less to be able to dictate exactly what programs are there and here

[Speaker 6.0]: and all that stuff and

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: more about understanding the coherence that here and all that stuff and more about understanding the coherence that leads to that work. Right? So, like Yeah. What what is the through line there

[Speaker 6.0]: Yeah. Yeah.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: To our then resource conversations that we need to have that is a conversation we have as a board. Less of, like, yes, this strategy, know that strategy, and more about what tell us what the what the what what is the coherence that brings all of that together. Right? So because that, I think, is the bigger conversation that I would imagine it you know, all of you have a role to play internally around informing what those strategies are. We I would imagine have questions around how do we communicate that strategy outward and then resource that appropriately. Right? And so yeah. Sorry. I know there's a lot of questions and we also have another report to also talk through. So just wanna do one, two, three, and then we'll move forward. Commissioner Fisher?

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Well and to tie into that, our our job as commissioners in this vision, values, goals, and guardrails process is to reflect the values of the community. Right? So to take the Ali example further, the that is a huge reflection of the values of the city as a whole such that Ali is not just funded by San Francisco Unified dollars, it's funded by grants from the city, you know, like tons of partnerships out there. A fraction of the funding actually comes from SFUSD. Right? So how are we as we move forward in this planning and particularly the budget planning, how are we doing it in a way that honors the values that we have been elected to uphold?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Miss Preston Healy.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: So one other thing I wanna call out about this monitoring report that I really appreciate is the updated theory of action, which I think is much more aligned to, like, the specifics on the ground of this strategy and what we're trying and, therefore, what we expect to see out of it. And I do think that president Kim's call for how much does this cost is really important because part of the purpose of monitoring is to say, we're trying a strategy. We've invested x amount of money in it. Is it working? Does it need more resources to work better? Or is this actually theory of action not at working? And so we can take that money and just try a new hypothesis. Try a new theory of action and not just say, well, we need to keep doing this because we've already done it or we've made this investment, but really continue to push ourselves as a district, as a learning organization to keep learning, to try a new hypothesis until we get it right. And so I would love to know not just, like, what the financial impact is, but also the financial impact per pupil. Because, you know, for just to take one, like, for each and every by name, we're not seeing, at this moment, increases in that early literacy. And so, do we wanna take those Ali funds and do we want to invest them in something else to reach that same focal population more effectively and just keep trying? And that's one of my questions about, like

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Or the opposite.

[Speaker 20.0]: Right.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Do we need to actually double down and invest more? Because the resources that we have are insufficient and we know that staff are already tied.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: So And to me, that's the strategy conversation that we need to get to. Yes.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yeah. Exactly. Commissioner oh, so sorry.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: I I also just wanna point out to sorry. But, like, we know the data from the state

[Speaker 6.0]: continue talking about that.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: The data from the state shows that well, from everywhere. It costs three times as much to educate a student in special education as it does in general education. Does that mean we cut the funding and we stop doing it? No. It's a mandate. Not only is it a mandate from the state and federal government, at least federal for now, but it's also the right thing. It's the equitable thing to do. It's it's it's part of our mandate to support

[Speaker 6.0]: all of our kids.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I'm gonna I'm gonna bring this over to commissioner Ray just if you can there we go. Thank you. Yes.

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Okay. Thanks. I I also appreciate this discussion around figuring out which things are effective, how much they cost, and where we need to invest our resources. Because while we would all like money to be unlimited, it's not in the the world that we live in. So, in order to sort of better understand this, first, is there somewhere where we can find an articulation of what all the strategies or initiatives are at that sort of, like, senior staff level that support the interim goals that the superintendent has identified? And are, you know, are we going to be able to to to measure, like, to actually address those particular measures that we're not just looking at something and going, okay. Like, if if, you know, perhaps, in this case, I think four coaching logs or something like that, you know, per cycle or four teachers. There was different measures around coaching. But take whatever the particular thing is and see, have we achieved that? What impact, if any, did it have? And, like, draw the connection, if we can, between the the success of that particular input and ultimate outcomes for students. But at least measure the the success of the input so so we can see if we're if we're getting anywhere there.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Absolutely. Absolutely. And and, again, if you drill down into the report and I apologize. So, folks, next time we let's make let's make sure we lift the data points even further up. You you will see that because we are really intentional and focusing on our African American students, because we talked about Ali, you'll see that actually our our African American students increase in literacy proficiencies by 5%. And that's because we are being really intentional, very focused. We're doing a lot of additional supports for our African American students like our Saturday schools, like our intentional mentorships for our African American students as well as intentional literacy coaching. Combined, you're seeing this this increase. And because of that, I firmly believe that we need to continue to do that. But you're right. We need to then part pair this with a a not a budget per se, but a cost analysis for it. Because we wanna be able to say, okay. With this level of investment, we see 5% growth in our African American students. Imagine the level of growth we would see if we did double or more or whatever. So then we can then start projecting out. The same for our our SPED students. Based on this, we're seeing a 2% growth for our SPED students because we're being intentional, because we're staying focused on supporting our teachers. So

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Where, like, where can we find, find, though, that sort of information so that we can use that as a base for tracking things? Do we have such a compilation of strategies and or initiatives that support your interim goals

[Speaker 6.0]: so

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: that we can, like, we can look at those or use those as a basis for monitoring?

[Jess Reyes (Interim Senior Executive Director, Research, Planning & Assessment)]: I can speak to that. So those are basically the pieces that are that were developed in the the the progress monitoring workshops in which we were developing and sharing the updated interim goals and the interim guardrails in which those initiatives were outlined as the the major kind of strategies and and pieces that would support those. So that is actually found, in in the board docs, but it's also what we've, hyperlinked onto the website and what we are using as the basis for a lot of our products monitoring reports. Now true, we aren't providing basically a holistic overview of every single initiative and rather are choosing the the deeper dive in, in coaching, for example, in this one, but rather there are a wide range of other initiatives that are supporting each of the goals and the interim goals. And that is found as part of those documents previously to try to tie all the pieces together.

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Okay. So if I'm understanding correctly then, like, the initiative or strategy in that sense is named as, for instance, each and every or coaching or something like that.

[Jess Reyes (Interim Senior Executive Director, Research, Planning & Assessment)]: That's what

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: This was presented to us in the spring.

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Right. So I've been I I'm thinking back to that Yeah. And trying to connect that with what what I've heard from AJ, which is that my understanding from talking to AJ is that he was advising that we have smart like, that that seniors that senior staff have developed those initiatives, not just with, like, a name like that, but with a smart format to them so that we can actually measurably track the progress. Is that something that we have somewhere and that I just haven't seen, like, that sort

[Speaker 6.0]: of,

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: like, more specific thing, not just the general name of the initiative? Or are we gonna develop that?

[Jess Reyes (Interim Senior Executive Director, Research, Planning & Assessment)]: It goes into the level of providing the specific metrics that we're looking for. And then behind that, a little bit more deeply, like, what are all the different aspects that we're looking at? I can't recall. Yes. The interim goals are defined in smart terms, but not necessarily the, the specific, initiative versions of the, of the specific strategies that were that were the implementation pieces that I think you're describing. But those are the pieces that we're building kind of the infrastructure and base for, and and that's why we're reporting those pieces at this point in time.

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: I'll follow-up further with you later. Thank you.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Can we go ahead and vote to extend our meeting past 10:00 because it's already past ten? So do I have a motion and a second?

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: So moved.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Second.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Just extension. Roll call, please.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Commissioner Alexander. Yes. Yes.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yes. What's that? No? Not at all. Right? Oh, yeah. We're good. We're good.

[Speaker 6.0]: Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Do I have a first

[Speaker 18.0]: hand up?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Is it so wildly urgent that you have to ask? Is it is that a handout?

[Speaker 6.0]: It is.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Okay. Yes, Commissioner Gupta. Bring it home, please.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Hey. I haven't spoken yet.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Oh, really? At all?

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: At all? No. This is my first comment on this issue. But actually, I mean, it it I I really appreciate this conversation. I think it's a really important one to have to hopefully clarify for staff because I I I mean, I've been on the other end and it's confusing and sometimes frustrating when it's sort of like, I don't know what you want to see. So hopefully, we're we're honing in on that and and getting to a better place. And I I do appreciate, Commissioner Wray, your comments on how do we kind of connect this all together a bit more. And, you know, I think it goes to Vice President Huling's perspective of, you know, the last piece of this theory of change is really kind of what are the resources that are needed and then connecting that back to initiatives so that we understand what is a so what for us as a board so then we can then make the calls that that are going to be necessary. Doctor Herrera, it's great to see you up here. I love it when we have kind of a mix of all of our staff from different departments together, because that's how school districts should work. So, I I do have a question in terms of the data. Is the data one of the questions I had a long time ago was with the new system of tracking data and I was very appreciative that the data then was something that could be you know, people can take a look at online. One of my requests was to have that data available for download for our school community in in general so that they could then, you know, play around with it. We see a lot of creative folks across our district. We're fortunate to live in San Francisco where a lot of people are very, are able to utilize data in a lot of different ways and demonstrate a lot of interesting things. What is the status of that?

[Jess Reyes (Interim Senior Executive Director, Research, Planning & Assessment)]: Currently, we have it available at the aggregate level similar to what you are seeing on the report and that's essentially the forum in which we share the data at this time.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Okay. Is there a plan to make it downloadable? I think other school districts do so, if I'm not mistaken, including Oakland. Maybe I have that wrong, but it

[Speaker 6.0]: Are you

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: talking about school level data?

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Yeah. Or or I I understand once you get to a certain point, you can't necessarily, you know, you don't want it becomes identifiable, but that's pretty deep into it. And so I'm looking at, can we get the data where one can download it? Anyone in our general populace can download the the an aggregate level of data.

[Jess Reyes (Interim Senior Executive Director, Research, Planning & Assessment)]: It hasn't been a practice in the past to do school level data for our interim assessments rather than it is for the state level summative assessments. Okay. As we know that those data are basically being used more in the context of continued improvement and planning at the school sites and that the subset that we are really highlighting and supporting is in the context of the goal monitoring. But we are we are continuing to look into what the school district's practices are in this regard.

[Moon-Hak Kim (Research, Planning & Assessment)]: Okay.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: So I'm here not yet.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Well, and I would just name I have concerns about that at the school level data. So if we're gonna have that conversation I think we should talk about it as a board because I think it impacts staffs I mean, it impacts internal ability to, like, have us environment where people really are engaged in honest reflection. Like, the more granular the data gets, if it's you know what I mean? So I don't know. I just think there's at least something we should talk about.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm just thinking about it from a transparency and, you know, trying to be be as transparent as possible. Okay. Yeah. I think that's that's good for right now.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: I just wanted to thank doctor Sue for raising the, increase in African American literacy scores that we've seen and I don't don't mean to, like, besmirch the work that each and every is doing And I think that goes to commissioner Fisher's point around the importance of getting disaggregated data because for this monitoring report, all we have is the interim goal data which doesn't.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: It's it's there. I

[Speaker 6.0]: don't know

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: if I see it.

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: There's a spreadsheet? Yeah.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: Oh, I need to click into the spreadsheet apparently. That's my bad. So I just wanna apologize for that because I overlooked that, but I'm very glad that we're celebrating that improvement.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Sorry. Can you can you clear just because, again, you know, if we're expecting the general populace to then double click in, can you can you explain the comment that we're actually at a 5% increase rather than I think what Vice President Heuling was just referring to is a point 3% we see here?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Under the oh, well, staff.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: The data that was shared in the PowerPoint was an aggregate of all of our population. If you go into the report itself and click on the link that is I I've lost it. I don't

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: know what it is. Under the interpretation section, goal one worksheet of this report.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: From page two. Yes.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: You will actually see the breakdown by population, and you'll see there's the total aggregate. You'll see actually African American, our Asian students, our Filipino students, Latin Latinx students, multiracial. So you can see all the different target populations broken out. And you'll see overall, all of our population, all of our ethnic groups have increased from last year to this year. And that it's just something really great to celebrate.

[Speaker 6.0]: And I

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Which I think is worth mentioning this is cohort data. Right? No. It's not. It's fall to fall. Oh, I see. I see. I see.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: It's third grade.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yes. Oh, yes. I got so excited, but

[Moon-Hak Kim (Research, Planning & Assessment)]: this is equally But it could reflect.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: No. No. No. The second graders now are doing better in third grade than last year's third graders.

[Speaker 39.0]: Yes.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Right? So yeah.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: We have historically That's not gonna work. We've historically seen really amazing data for our kinders and our first graders and have struggled to to lift that data, particularly our African American students. And it's great to see our director of our African American Achievement and Leadership Initiative, Leticia Irving here. Leticia, do you wanna speak about this?

[Speaker 24.0]: Yeah. I just also wanted to note, when we look at all students who came in, the numbers are a little lower. But if we look at what has happened for the last couple of years with each and every, you have seen a consistent growth. Right? Where our students started off at 39 something percent and moved themselves up to 52 something percent proficiency in our STAR. So give them time. They are brilliant. They came in brilliant. And I'll tell you even more so about coming in brilliant. The highest growth of any major subgroup in kindergarten readiness were African American students and our special education. So I wanna acknowledge that well. Special education had the largest gain district wide, but our highest growth among subgroups in kindergarten readiness were your African American students. That means they came in strong. Give us give them a bit of getting into the curriculum, us doubling down on our each and every efforts. We know that it works. We're moving from proof of concept to systematization. We're gonna systematize this so that every single black and Pacific Islander child will get exactly what they need in SFUSD, and we will see those numbers grow. I'm confident in that.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you so much. I mean, I think a huge part of this question is, like, what are the elements of each and every that we can learn from and and actually just adopt as practices, mindsets, beliefs, strategies that we have for our students generally? And and I I I think your message around the time is critical here. We know that I mean, year within year growth of students, we will we have summer loss. Year over year growth is important and and, like, layer on top of that the implementation of new curricula, teachers who hopefully we retain and stay and are able to build on their practice. I just think that that, like, time component is, like, really critical for us to consider especially as we're looking at we look at our budget over multiple years. We should look at student growth over multiple years.

[Jess Reyes (Interim Senior Executive Director, Research, Planning & Assessment)]: Yeah. Just a a real quick comment. I just I wanna appreciate really the question around looking more deeply at the data and all the different pieces that are in there. And commissioner Fisher, it was actually a comment that you made in one of the more recent workshop meetings in which Moon Hawk and I were talking very deeply about how is it that we can in the context of, I think, our own learning around the progress monitoring and the different examples that we see where we're supposed to focus in specifically on the groups that are identified by the goal and the interim goal levels. So that tension of trying to make sure that we represent that level as, like, what is the examples that we've been looking at in terms of progress monitoring, yet at the same time, trying to uplift kind of the more granular aspects of the sub of the disaggregated data was is is something that we're still trying to work through. So we hope that at least this represents a step forward in trying to, you know, just kind of build and evolve our way through both kind of balancing that world of what we should what we need to report on in terms of the goals and the interim goals, while at the same time attending to some of the more detailed data that we tried to integrate, though it was in a hyperlink. I apologize. But within the report itself. So I just wanted to just acknowledge that we are in a in a state of kind of our own growing in in this work and that your comments specifically helped to spurn this kind of latest iteration of how we're trying to toe the line and balance those pieces.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Thank you. I appreciate that. And targeted universalism is is the strategy you named there. Right? My one struggle with hyperlinks, especially for reports like these, is when we we print them out and put them out here for our audience members, those hyperlink you can't tap on the paper and get to the hyperlink. So, you know, having the having the the data as a, you know but I do appreciate, you know, like, growth mindset, you know, it's all of us gotta have it. Why do pencils have erasers? You know, because, you know, we all all of us need them.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: It's pointless. Pencils

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: But this pencil is not broken.

[Speaker 6.0]: Oh my gosh. Thank you

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: very much.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: It's too late.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: But can I just say, like, also this this point I think is really important around data that we're also not our job as a board is not to, like, make sure the staff gives us every little piece of data? Like, it really is to make sure they have a strategy. And so I think I just wanna encourage us also to focus on questions that, like they need to present the data that shows they have a strategy. Like, we're we're not here to like dig around and found find data that may not be necessary to that.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Correct. And this is not about picking and choosing the initiatives that we feel like we like or don't like. I think the question is, does the data build confidence that the plan and and and interventions and strategies that are taking place give us a line of insight into the work that is gonna actually move the needle for kids? And it sounds like initiatives like each and every and Ali are actually doing that work. So I think that's where the confidence building needs to come in, and we need to do that not just for ourselves but for the public too. So I'm gonna move us on. This is a very rich conversation into now goal two. So thank you so much to the team for being here. No. Yeah. It'll come with their recommendation that we'll do. Yeah. You know, it's just we're easing into the mindset. That's it. Goal two, two point one grade six, African American math. Two two point two grade seven math, 2.3 grade eight, Latinx math. The titles are strange, but we'll go it. I call on doctor Hsu to introduce this item.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Oh, I am going to yield back to the amazing team.

[Jess Reyes (Interim Senior Executive Director, Research, Planning & Assessment)]: Thank you again, doctor Hsu. Slides, please. In this goal two report, the goal and interim goal results from the Fall Star assessment are positive as well. Against this backdrop, we're gonna focus more deeply on the implementation and impact of professional development for teachers, which is critical for a successful curriculum implementation, especially since we are in the first year of our new math curriculum. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to my colleague, Moon Hak Kim. Next slide, please.

[Moon-Hak Kim (Research, Planning & Assessment)]: Good evening. Similar patterns as goal one that we have just reviewed. So except for interim goal 2.1, we see generally green and positive changes year over year. It was so we're off to a strong start, and especially goal interim goal 2.2 with our seventh graders. They're showing significant, gain, this year compared to the last two previous years. And, again, vice president Ewing, the difference is statistically significant. And and just to say a little bit about kind of the the the maybe is this a cohort effect? So I've been looking at some data looking at the trajectory of this specific group and to the best of my ability. In many ways, this cohort is very similar to the cohort that comes has come before and has and it still comes after. What seems to stand out is there was something different that happened last year where, traditionally, some of the cohorts have, previously dipped in performance, during the year. But with this group, during their sixth grade year, we did not see the, traditional pattern that we have seen with other cohorts. Of course, we don't yet have enough data to be able to exactly pinpoint why the difference occurs because we cannot yet tell whether it was the math curriculum that was being piloted or whether, it is something that is specifically to the fifth to sixth grade transition that happened. Right? Now we just haven't had enough of the STAR data and the Aspect data going through the transition same transitions for us to make the comparison. But the emerging data seems to indicate that in many ways, this cohort is similar to other cohorts. But there is something different that is starting to emerge starting last year, both for the current seventh graders, as well as the current eighth graders. So we are hopeful, and we look forward to continuing to pay attention to how they evolve, as the curriculum implementation proceeds this year. And with that, I'll pass it over to miss Quirkman.

[Ms. Krugman (Curriculum & Instruction)]: So somewhat different, than the presentation that we just shared around significant initiatives related to goal one. For goal two, at the middle school level, there is not an instructional coach model in place. And so from a centralized and so from a centralized perspective, our strongest touchpoint is both in the realm of a monthly training for administrators, but an ongoing set of professional learning engagements for middle school math teachers that includes both general education and special education, middle school math teachers. And so in order to understand the relationship between the professional learning that middle school math teachers experienced and the impact associated with both the shift in practice as well as student outcomes. We wanted to understand how their experiences within PD impacted those outcomes. Next slide, please. So So we looked at this from a couple of different perspectives. The first is in relationship to, our professional learning attendance data and some of the trends related to the size of a math team as well as its relationship to the attendance rate. One of the things that we wanted to highlight, and we've touched on this in various ways before, specifically just now with goal one related to teacher collaboration, is that we do see and we'll talk about this in a second, the connection between teacher collaboration and student outcomes. And specifically, we see this show up in p d attendance in terms of the attendance rate for a school in relationship to their the size of their math department, if

[Emma Dunbar (Executive Director, LEAD – Middle School/K-8)]: I said that all correctly.

[Ms. Krugman (Curriculum & Instruction)]: And so one of the reasons this is important, just to give a little context, and we'll speak more about this in a second, is that because there is not an instructional coaching model at the middle school level, we are relying on the teacher professional development to take the centralized learning and carry it back to site practice. And so that rate of the percentage of the team that attends their opportunities to collaborate together does impact how it comes back to the site. If we can go to the next slide. The next thing we looked at was more of the experiential data. At this point that the data was pulled, there were three full day opportunities that are two of which are highlighted within this data. So teachers had an optional summer training. They then had what we refer to as centralized buyback day on August 14, which is a virtual with site based support training, and they had their first of four release days in October. There have been shorter touch points across that drop in office hours, virtual learning sessions, but those are more in the one to two hour virtual. These are the full day opportunities. So we looked at the degree to which participants believed that the PD supported their ability to implement challenging and engaging student centered curriculum, as well as supported their ability to implement culturally responsive and differentiated curriculum. You may recognize this language from guardrail three. And how that qualitative experience related to the content of the training. Next slide, please. A couple of the pieces that we did wanna highlight in this relationship of teacher experience and professional development in connection with shifts in teacher practice and corresponding student outcomes, is that we do have a strong belief that when PDs support teachers to implement these strategies, that create stronger pedagogy, stronger practice, and increases in student outcomes. We saw that at a couple of sites that were highlighted, particularly those where we saw a strong connection between a large percentage of the team attending, positive experience of the team at the training. One of the pieces that we are on the lookout for a little bit is the shift in the content of the professional development over time. So whereas, we do have essentially two cohorts running concurrently, those that piloted last year who do have that baseline understanding, and those that did not who are attending together while receiving some experience, some differentiation based on their experience. Those initial trainings that are represented in this data are focused more on introductions and baseline understanding. The the shift that is happening currently throughout November and into December is where those trainings become more targeted on things like strategies for integrated English language development or ELD, strategies, for UDL, supporting differentiation. So we are trying to make sure that the content is responsive to the teacher needs highlighted. But we do see positive correlation between strong attendance, positive experience, and student outcomes. So I'm gonna pass it to my colleague to talk about the plan in connection with site supervision at the middle school level.

[Emma Dunbar (Executive Director, LEAD – Middle School/K-8)]: Good evening, Doctor Su, President Kim, and commissioners. My name is Emma Dunbar. I'm executive director for middle school k eight lead and I work alongside Doctor Steiner, our assistant superintendent. And as we think about professional development, I just want to ground us in in the thread that is is running behind the professional development and the structures that our teachers and our site leaders experience By sharing with you a little glimpse into my day today, one of the schools I visited was MLK and I was able to go with the principal as I do frequently to visit classrooms. We went to seventh grade math and a group of scholars welcomed me to sit with them at their table as they were doing their opening warm up. Three boys very kindly included me in their discussion and helped me revisit proportional reasoning. And they represent our focal students, a black boy and two Latinx boys. And they talked me through how the x and the y related to each other and what changed and why that was proportional. And then their teacher elicited information from them. So that they shared their thinking with the class. And they

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: were

[Emma Dunbar (Executive Director, LEAD – Middle School/K-8)]: demonstrating, like, their acquisition of ownership of the curriculum. Because, we have a consistent curriculum that our students are experiencing across all of our schools, having this conversation with them connected me to conversations that I've had with students and teachers and school leaders across our schools. I was able to see the thread of what I saw kids doing in the first and second week of school as they started playing around and getting into Amplify Desmos. And I was like, oh, when you did you guys do the balloon activity? Like, way back a couple months ago and they're like, yeah, yeah, we did that one. They could tell me how the X and the Y today connected to that. And so, when we are when we have a chance to look at a midyear data point like our STAR data that we've just collected or we've had a professional development as we had in October. It's it's not the one time only as doctor Hsu said earlier. It's how do teachers take that thread of the one day professional development experience back to their teams, back to their schools. How are they supported by their administrators to have time to make meaning together. So that when they are in front of their students, they are prepared to think about, like, what is the question that I'm gonna ask or what is the move I'm going to make to invite you to own this material. We're seeing really strong implementation of essential content. We're seeing the Amplify Desmos curriculum throughout classrooms. What we've realized over these first couple months of the school year is that we need to refine our data collection tool that we are using with our site leaders to understand the link between the, essential content and then the academic ownership piece. And so as teachers are going to professional development and and unpacking that and then coming back and being supported by their principals to engage in common planning time, to engage in department meetings where they do things like looking at student work protocols, understanding focalist student experience, connecting all of those dots. We need a sharper tool to see what's happening in the classroom so we can have the feedback and coaching conversations with our teachers and departments. So we've adjusted our data collection tool to be able to really look at that academic ownership and essential contact piece in a more refined way. So that as doctor Steiner and I and our colleagues in, CNI, this plan together, for our principals and assistant principals to come to their monthly professional learning, we can build a bridge between what teachers are experiencing, the information that principals are getting so that so that we're creating that thread of deepening the experience to get closer to what we think needs to happen for that instructional leadership and support so that all of our students feel confident that they are developing the skills and the confidence to be math people. So those are some of the adjustments that we are making at this point in the school year to support progress toward this goal especially for our focal students.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you so much miss Dunbar. I'll open up for questions or comments from commissioners.

[Speaker 6.0]: Go

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: for it. Commissioner Weisemore.

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: Thank you. Having a middle schooler who's learning lots of math. This is neat. He's taking math eight and algebra this year and actually doing quite well. And I wonder if part of it is just how much math he's getting and all of the exposure. So I think lots of exposure, lots of minutes is a good thing, which is separate from what this is. So let me ask a question though. And I can't help him with any of it. So maybe I need to go back, get an instructional coach of my own. But speaking of right. Not our job. Speaking of instructional coaches and I I want us to this sort of ties back to we just had a really long conversation about the incredible value of instructional coaches in their literacy context. And so one of the things I'm seeing in the report is, only a few middle schools have instructional coaches. And so the plan relies on revising support for site administrators to observe and coach these key instructional practices. And I guess I'm I'm wondering, one, is that, like, should we be thinking about having more instructional coaches in middle school? And if not, how are we going to ensure that the administrators have the time, the bandwidth, the specific content expertise to effectively implement the coaching model? Because it seems you can't actually coach unless you understand and know how to talk about it and and share and teach. And so, yeah, I guess one question is, like, should we be having more instructional coaches in this space given that we see that they're helping a lot? And and two, if not, how how do we anticipate administrators taking on this this role?

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: For those strategic questions, I'd encourage them to be directed to the superintendent.

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: Yeah. Well, yes. So okay.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: You know, since Is

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: that a that's a strategic question?

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Sorry.

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: I mean, strategic or technical? Because it's not technical.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: And sorry. Just out of for transparency, like, so one of the conversations we had in ad hoc committee was that we need to start directing our conversations in the board watering sessions to be more strategic and to be directed toward the superintendent. So just to be transparent with colleagues who that's why we're

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: I'm like

[Moon-Hak Kim (Research, Planning & Assessment)]: so Yeah.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: That's where that was coming from.

[Speaker 6.0]: So if

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: I was looking another okay. So I wanna I'll ask you to answer. But I also I'm curious from from lead perspective and from CNI perspective, if you're seeing certain trends of things working, are there recommendations or insights? So whomever.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: So thank you. I can start and and, of course, Emma, because you're the one that's on the ground, you can maybe add more context to it. Truth be told, we just changed to a new curriculum, a new math curriculum. Yay, us. And it's it's going to take a while. It's going to require us to do what Emma was just saying. We have to provide the professional development for our teachers. We gotta do regular boosters. We have to continue to push and make sure that our educators feel comfortable with the content. I can personally say when I'm walking into math classes and I'm observing kids playing with the manipulatives and struggling trying to make the angles work, it's really great to see that. It's also really great to see their their their teachers guiding them through the course. And and I will say, I've heard from a lot of teachers actually that they like Desmos Maths and Imagine Maths because there's actual clear cadence of of lesson plans and that that the lessons plans are are connecting with each other. Now the question about instructional coaches and whether or not we should have instructional coaches to to kind of help accelerate this. I I don't know. I I I don't. And maybe I can go back to staff and and ask you, like, are are our teachers using any of the instructional coaches, and have they benefited from that? Because I don't think we've again, because we have a new curriculum, I'm not sure how we are allocating our math coaches. We have we actually have some in in elementary school, but not in middle school. Sorry.

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: Can I so just so I think and maybe I can be a little bit more specific because I think that that is I guess, one of the re maybe the reason for the question is, in part, if we know that they're working in one context, do we want to is that am I doing it okay? Yes.

[Speaker 6.0]: You are.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: I think you're no. No. I think you're I was saying I think now you're framing it as the strategic question, which is really good.

[Speaker 6.0]: Now I

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: forgot what the question was.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: No. You're doing it.

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: If we know that we're work if we know that the coaches are working in one setting I mean, this is, I think, where we don't necessarily the district has not done a good job of, like we'd like, oh, it works there, but then we don't think to apply it somewhere else. If we know it's working in this sec in this one setting, are we consider or should we consider having more of them in this other setting? And it seems like they are not there's not very many of them in the middle school setting.

[Emma Dunbar (Executive Director, LEAD – Middle School/K-8)]: Alright. So I I believe that doctor Steiner may have shared this last time and she when she was in front of you. We have historically never had very many coaches across the middle schools as in having a coach specifically assigned to a school. And in the staffing model last year, principals felt very nervous about waiting to be able to hire a math coach last knowing it was only funded for one year. And coaching is incredibly dependent on relationship. You have to build trust with a teacher in order to, engage in a vulnerable conversation with them about their practice. Every single teacher is trying to do the very best that they know how to do in in front of children. And and to say, like, did I make a misstep or can I have some feedback requires really courageous conversations? And so I think something to think about is were there to be a math coach in every school? Like, could that be resourced in such a way that leaders felt they could trust that it was going to be there for long enough to take effect? There have been different models of coaching over time in middle schools, where departments have been coached. And I also think that that's a key difference to think about when we consider elementary school coaching versus middle school coaching. The majority of our sixth through eighth grades work in departments. And so you're with subject specific colleagues. You've gone together to a professional development. You're coming back to the school site. Many of our, middle schools have designated common planning time. All of our schools have Wednesday early release and our principals plan very intentionally to support math departments to engage together during those times. The principal sit in on the meeting, they co facilitate, they check-in with a department lead, They have a math teacher sitting on their instructional leadership team and they have specific instructional goals. One of our school sites in particular, that has very strong gains in math in this last, star. Their math team is modeling how, every single department should operate in the school. And they are they their plan for student growth is to scale from how their math team has been working together. So so that's some some nuance and difference to consider in how k five teachers experience professional development and their teams and many of our comprehensive middle schools may operate. It it is different for our teachers who are teaching six eight. In k eights, they are much more isolated. In one of our k eights, there is only one math teacher. And so when you think about how how they might be supported, then that touch point with the coach who is assigned because our k eights do have coaches does become incredibly important. Do you wanna add anything?

[Speaker 68.0]: Thank you. I appreciate that. Good evening, everyone. And I think this goes along with our ad hoc committee kind of conversation that we were just having earlier as well as during the ad hoc committee. We need to invest in our strategies. If we're saying that this is the strategy that is going to make positive impacts on student learning, then that is what we need to do, and we need to double down on it. And we need to make sure that our communities know that we will keep these promises, that this isn't going to be a one off initiative, and that we need to invest in it. Back to your point of, like, so if if we know these initiatives are working, what is the cost of them and how do we protect that? And so that is really where the conversation needs to go and and really looking at that. And I appreciate the insights kind of also into the historical way in which we've gotten here, knowing that we're in our second year of really investing in this. We're a learning organization, so we're gonna learn from what we did last year and make it better for, you know, this year and future, and really considering all of the different vehicles for positive student impact.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Commissioner Fisher?

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Okay. So in this vein, what we're talking about here kinda reminds me of lesson study, Right? Lesson study seemed to be our previous model of coaching which was funded frankly by Hillary Ronan's office. We got city funding for that and when that funding went away that right? It's DCYF. And DCYF. Sorry. Sorry. It was DCYF money but championed by supervisor Ronan. Thank you. Thank you, Director Sue at the time for DCYF funding. But I

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: It's still being funded through Student Success Fund. It has not gone away.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Okay. Thank you. I I just this is where I think I struggle, you know, because under doctor Matthews, we had pitch. Under doctor Wayne, we had each and every, you know, thank you superintendent Sue for doctor Sue for for keeping some stability and continuity and not developing a whole new something something. Right? But, like, I I think that is a big part of my struggle having having having watched board meetings for almost a decade now. Like, we keep the pendulum keeps swinging. You know, and I just like so I the the importance of the data and the coherence and the consistency, I really, really appreciate that you're naming that and lifting that up and that hopefully we're gonna find something and stick with it when we find success. And it sounds like we all missed a heck of an ad hoc committee on progress monitoring. I'm just gonna say for those of us who couldn't be there. But the other part of what I'm not doing time management wise when we do get to the point of this, like what I what we are supposed to be doing for progress monitoring is scribing the questions that we all ask and then, grading them based on whether they're strategy focused, measure focused, ask oriented, results focused, and time bound and then giving ourselves a grade and then that goes into our self evaluation. So to tie it all back together, hopefully that'll be part of what y'all are doing. And if you want a copy of this.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Yeah. I appreciate it. I actually was thinking about that as this discussion the last discussion was happening that I probably should have volunteered to do that. Maybe

[Speaker 39.0]: I can't

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: volunteer my colleagues, but maybe we could take that on as the committee members to in the while the committee is going, we could we could do that analysis because we're already sort of naturally starting to do it because we had a conversation around, you know, what you know, and obviously we're gonna make some recommendations formally but we also thought it would be helpful to just start talking about it.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: I am happy to share all of this with anyone else. Anyone else can have it.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: B plus. Anyone else? Missus Rosen Healing.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: I have a question about kind of how the data looks. Like, are we continuing to see a bell curve for our math proficiency, or is it more bimodal? And how does that like, do we have, you know, a group of students who are maybe performing far under grade level and a group of students who are performing above grade level or do we have kind of a cluster at one place and everybody's moving? Because I feel like that actually informs what strategies are most effective to raise scores whether it's heavy investments in the, you know, if it's bimodal in the in the portion of the bell curve that's under versus, like, district wide strategies, which are mostly what we seem to be seeing so far. And I didn't pre ask this question. So if you don't know, that's fine.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Well no I

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: think the data question is but then

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: the strategy question is

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: for the superintendent

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: one and it's when vice president healing you've asked before which I think is an important one is are we doing district wide strategies or are we targeting particular schools with particular strategies? Why or why not? I think that's a I think that's a really critical strategic question that obviously is based on your data question.

[Moon-Hak Kim (Research, Planning & Assessment)]: In the spirit of transparency and levity, I'm gonna say I'm embarrassed to say that as a person who works with data, I've actually never created a histogram of students' distribution. So that's a great suggestion, and I can certainly work with doctor Hsu to have that conversation follow-up conversation about what the pattern looks like and what the strategy could be.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: Yeah. I would be really curious to see that in future monitoring because I have heard that in at least higher education, there's increasingly bimodal distributions of student achievement, which definitely then affects how you're going to invest to bring folks up. And so I do think it's worth it's like directing to the superintendent question of, you know, are we going to continue to see district wide strategies or are we going to see perhaps, like, targeted investments in certain schools in the way that we have lesson study in, like, five schools? If that's working, do we wanna extend that to 10? It is investing in our k through five or p k through five math part of this investments that we wanna make toward our eighth grade math strategy even though it will take longer to bear fruit in the eighth grade numbers? Or do we want to do something like lesson study invested at the middle school level?

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: I think that oh. Sorry. There's a lock on this. This is great. I think that's a great question. And I again, because this is a new curriculum that we're asking all of our teachers to engage in and learn and feel confident and comfortable in, I I do feel that we should continue to provide the professional development for our teachers to to to really dive into into the curriculum. In terms of lesson study, I I I I'm waiting to see the evaluation back about about its effectiveness and and the how you know? Because the investment into lesson study is significant. There are a lot of staff that's connected to it. And and quite frankly, I wanna see if the level of staffing that's connected to it will yield the exponential growth that you would expect. Or like the conversation we just had about literacy where you have one coach that is able to move a target population forward or one coach in a in a school. So I think that that is definitely something that we need to continue to to drill down in. And, again, because we currently don't have a coaching model that is established in our middle schools right now, I think that would be something that we need to start thinking about. Honestly, we have started thinking about how do we ensure a school staffing model that has, instructional coaches in all of our schools? Because we have taken and seen this huge amazing growth in literacy and want to see if we can extrapolate that to to the rest of our our cohorts. We don't have it mapped out yet and hopefully, we can start planning on that.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: I appreciate that and I think thinking about the cost and the cost per pupil is really important in terms of thinking, like, if less than study cost x amount, like, can you get, like, high intensity tutoring for how many for more students for that same amount? Or is that a more expensive strategy? Just thinking about as we're or are can you get the same outcome for less money with an instructional coach? Just thinking about how we can use our resources to create the most change for the most students academically.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Well, yeah. And what I appreciated about your strategic question, which I'm not sure we totally got to, was the notion that you could do something for the whole district. Right? And say we're all doing this and or you could say or and also you could say and we're going to invest in these five schools or these 10 schools where in a particular way. Right? So those are just I just think those are important questions to keep asking. Like, from the for the to me, those are very, like, strategic level questions the board should be asking and we're not saying there's a right answer or a wrong answer, but that you all should have an analysis of that based on the data.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: That is what lesson study is. Right? Yeah. Where we are providing the level of PD, professional development, across all of our schools. And lesson study comes in and provides even more intentional one on one professional development and coaching force for teachers. So the question is, with that level of intentionality, with the level of staffing resources, are we getting the yield that we're looking for? Right? And I think that's a that's a very important question to have, particularly as we're grappling with our budget.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Commissioner Fisher?

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: So first of all, I nominate commissioner Alexander to be our strategic translator. I'm just gonna direct my questions at you and have you reword them strategically, please. No. But seriously, going back to the ELA conversation we had earlier, I mean, frankly, as a district, sometimes in the past we we take a long time to get up to the the best practices that we know other districts are implementing. It took us forever to get to the point of a structured literacy curriculum even though the research has shown for twenty twenty years that, you know, foundational skills are are what we should be teaching in the classroom. What are we doing now to make sure that the practices that we have internally are aligned with what the research shows, best practice like, things that we're learning from the districts around us? How are we making sure that what we're doing is actually to the point of best bang for the buck, you know, that like are all of our practices now officially research aligned? You know, how are we monitoring ourselves to make sure?

[Ms. Krugman (Curriculum & Instruction)]: I don't wanna speak for the division that has research in their name. So I could speak for CNI, but I'll default to RPA to start maybe.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: I can so so I particularly for literacy and for math, for sure. We just adopted new curriculum that is that is aligned with state standards, that it's used with a lot of success in other school districts, that that, we are slowly seeing ourselves here. So that's huge. I think what we need to do is continue to to, what, just stay focused. Right? I like like, common practice strategy means we just do common sense work. Right? So we continue to just focus on supporting our teachers, making sure that we don't halfway through, we pivot to something else because that's what that that causes that level of confusion. So if we can stay focused, if we can stay committed to to training, stay committed to using this curriculum, I think we are seeing that that yield that we want to see. In terms of other things that we're doing, that other school districts that we're seeing that's that's that's best practice, I I can't speak for at this moment in time.

[Ms. Krugman (Curriculum & Instruction)]: Yeah. I I think I'll speak to a couple of things real quick which is and maybe some of this is like professional or personal perspective too. But I think one of the things I just wanna speak to the strength of the research planning and assessment division and particularly the amazing work that they do in cultivating research partnerships, both in terms of our ability to, you know, have connection to researchers, but also the level and just the depth and breadth of research that's conducted within the district provides us, not just with sort of like an industry standard benchmark, but also provides us with a key level of insight into our practices and an analysis beyond what we internally conduct. And so I just wanna lift that up as one piece of their exceptional work. I think the other piece I'll name that, you know, I'll say at least in curriculum and instruction, we really take as a point of pride is I think, we've worked really hard to shift this culture from this idea of San Francisco and SFUSD as a very isolated special snowflake into a a standard of, like, nationally benchmarked quality. So I think, you know, one of the things I'll just highlight is we've worked really hard over the last couple years to introduce things like curriculum evaluation tools that are nationally normed, instructional practice guides which are part of our the basis of our learning walk tools. There is a just an amazing amount of depth and breadth of research nationally and sets, networks of high performing districts that we are a part of that we can share best practices with. We were recently invited by Gates because they wanted to highlight the strength of our curriculum adoption work for districts across the state. So we presented we were invited by them and presented on our curriculum adoption work. And so I think that level of national networking in addition to state from my perspective is imperative. There are districts which we'll hear in the next ad hoc progress monitoring committee. Meaning, there are districts that are similar to us in size and demographics who are doing exceptional work, who are tackling many of the same problems that we are around early literacy, around eighth grade math, around adopting high quality instructional materials. And so I think, you know, for us, being much more connected has been a big shift in addition to all the research work that RPA has taken on.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: I I really appreciate that. And that was a very detailed answer, and I a 100% agree on, the studies that have been done and seeing some of the name brands in terms of universities. I I wanna double down on the question because one of the things that I noticed that I haven't seen as much is sort of when we look at the school district. So the studies I noticed tend to be longitudinal in looking at our data over time, but I am curious if we do look and and maybe this is directed at RPA if if there are other districts that you look at as peer districts and, you know, and and therefore would come forward and sort of say, Hey, here are other things. And and this is in the the strategic question of, you know, understanding other other resource yeah. I know you're the police now, Matt. Commissioner Alexander. So, you know, in in the context of, you know, when when we look at other districts who are similarly facing the same constraints, who has been able to figure some of this out and how do, you know, how do we evaluate, you know, looking at peers?

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Thank you for that question. Number one, I do agree commissioner Alexander should be our strategic, question police. You're the you're the strategic enforcer. But that's a great question because, again, after this riveting ad hoc meeting that we had that it it was it was amazing. It was really great. It it literally just like light bulb. I actually started calling around

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Front line.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: It was it was recorded. I started calling around to other school districts that were similar to us and started to ask them, like, what what what were they doing? And then started to talk to lots of different folks. One of the person I talked to said, you know what? You need to you need to check out what LA is doing. And they they do something called the data dig, where they they do kind of progress monitoring like us. And they did what AJ was coaching us on, which is they have but they go further. They have principals come and present their data and talk about what's happening on the ground. And then they have the senior leadership team sitting around the principal to say, well, how are we supporting you? How can we support you? And the senior leadership team are not just only on the ed services side. It includes our operations. And I'm pointing back there because because we do have our loan operation person back there, Katie. Because part of it was was was a principal saying, yeah, I you know, we're we saw this much growth in literacy for our African American students. But do you know what? We can't if we could do more if we could get the windows fixed because kids can't get into that particular classroom and so they're all squishing into this other classroom and we need the window fixed. And in that conversation, the superintendent or the leader would say, well, operations, can you get can you get the window fixed? Right? So I think there's that that takes that takes progress monitoring for us even into the next step and could be something that we could strive towards where, you know, something that I know that leadership has talked about of we wanna see more educators

[Speaker 6.0]: in

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: the room. We wanna see more principals here. We wanna see young people here because we wanna hear their experience of what is it like to either be observed by a coach, to be coached by a coach. And a young person, what is it what is it like to to experience the curriculum that we're delivering? So, yes, there's a lot of work that we can do and I've, again, started to have these conversations. I've actually asked the superintendent of LA if I could come down and observe one of these types of meetings and, you know, we can all do a road trip if we want to in January because we can do it, because we we should definitely admire and acquire. There's no reinventing the wheel for

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: us. Yeah.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Commissioner Ray?

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Thank you. I'm wondering how equipped we are to determine or how we could determine whether a strategy like high dosage tutoring or pressing on attendance or pressing on professional development or coaching or whatever else it may be, how are we going to be able to actually compare those things and determine where we have the most leverage, you know, to achieve outcomes, like, with the resources that we have.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Yeah. So, you know, I I think, like, I think there's a desire to want to do everything. And I think that's a that's a that's a desire for a lot of people. But I think we need to be very disciplined and try to do a few things really, really well. And we need to have that discipline to do that. So, yes, we we need to do a good job at at assessing all of the different strategies that we currently are employing and then make that very difficult determination to be focused and intentional and to strategically abandon some other things so that we can then pull those resources because we firmly believe at this moment in time that if we double down on lesson study coaching or instructional coaching or whatever it is, that that's going to move the needle for third grade literacy, eighth grade math, and college career readiness. So so I do believe that that the the work for those for us, for me and the staff would be to do that full assessment of all the strategies that we have and then make the determination on which ones we want to go hard into, drill down, focus for a year, and and see what that yields.

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Do we have a a a plan in place to actually do that and we identify the things that we're gonna compare in order to make this assessment?

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Yes. Well, yes. We're gonna have to do that as part of the budget process. Yes.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Any other comments or questions? Alright. Thank you so much. Very much appreciate your time this evening and for staying up extra late on school night to teach us.

[Speaker 60.0]: Thank you.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Moving to item h, action items. Item one, two five one one dash 18 s p one, employee contracts for district executive employees. Can I have a motion and a second?

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: So moved.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I need a second. I'll second. It has been properly moved and seconded that the board approves item two five one one dash 18 s p one. I call on the general counsel to read this into the record.

[Elliot (General Counsel)]: Thank you, President Kim. The board will consider approving an employment agreement with doctor Maria Sue for superintendent of San Francisco Unified School District. This agreement will commence on 01/05/2026 and run through 06/30/2028. The annual salary for doctor Maria Sue will be $385,000.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Are there any comments or questions from commissioners? Commissioner Ray?

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: I I do have a comment, but just wanna note something really quick first. That I just noticed that the contract has is signed 11/14/2026. That's I just assume a typo, but I I wanted to bring it to folks' attention. Okay. So I okay. I just wanted to make, a short statement about this, about this item and, how I plan to vote. I will be voting yes on the superintendent's contract, but I do just want to acknowledge the concerns I heard from folks and that I have, you know, that I've had as well about the process with regard to transparency and trust, which I had mentioned earlier tonight as well. There really hasn't been an opportunity for the public to weigh in on this decision apart from learning on Friday that this contract was up. And it is a core responsibility of the board to foster community engagement. And the choice of a superintendent is the most important decision that the board sorry, the most important decision that the board makes. So we have, I think, just a long way to go to improve our community engagement, and superintendent Sue, through no fault of her own, came to this district under very difficult and unusual circumstances. So there wasn't any regular process then, and now we're moving forward with essentially three days notice to the public, which I know has been troubling to many people. I think we would all benefit from getting broad input and having two way discussion, which I recognize is often messy and takes time, but I think it meets a really important, human need to be heard. It helps ensure that we're hearing a broad range of viewpoints, things we might not otherwise consider, and I think it ultimately builds trust. So, fundamentally, we need the support of our whole community, like, whether it's parents or students or teachers or administrators, community partners, other folks to get things done in the district and improve student outcomes, which is our ultimate goal. So, I wish that we had had, processes. There are certainly many ways this could be done, but processes to have had real community engagement on this decision. Thank you.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Commissioner Alexander.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Thank you. Yeah. I, share, some of Commissioner Ray's concerns, and I also wanna specifically address some of the concerns that have been raised, about superintendent Sue not being an educator. So I was board president when we hired superintendent Sue and I believe in her and I believe in her leadership and I still believe in her leadership. And when we hired her thirteen months ago, we knew very well that she was not an educator and that it was not why we hired her. At the same time, in fact, we created another position, the deputy superintendent for schools and appointed Caroline Aguilera Fort, a veteran SFUSD educator in that position to serve alongside her. The over the past year, superintendency has made real progress on a lot of issues and I think, you know, and I'm very grateful for that. But I do think there are concerns and there are legitimate concerns that have been raised sort of around the educational leadership piece. You know, the partnership between her and doctor Aguilera Ford did not work out as intended and sometimes that happens. You know, he announced early this year that he was leaving in June. We still don't have a permanent replacement for that position. And perhaps more importantly, I've received many unsolicited complaints from school based educators, teachers, principals, and others saying that they feel like the superintendent may not be listening to educators. And I think these complaints matter, and I think this by the way, I wanna say, I think the superintendent is taking these seriously and and I and I I know she knows about them and we've talked about it. And I think these complaints do matter because our educators are the ones doing the work day in and day out in our schools. And frankly, as commissioner Ray pointed out as well, a superintendent really can't be effective without the trust of broad broad trust in the system including especially, I would say, school based educators. I I think also as we've seen tonight, we're still in progress in terms of developing a real educational strategy around how to how to achieve our very ambitious goals. And so I think the concern around educational leadership is a is a valid one and it's a real one. And I think we have all these amazing educators here in SFUSD, but unless we can create a collective strategy and coordinated supports at the district level based on feedback from the bottom up, we're never gonna see significant progress toward our goals. And we've set really ambitious goals. Right? So we've said as a board, we wanna do something big here. And, again, I believe superintendent Hsu has the the vision and the spirit and the kind of desire to do that as well. And so that's why I think, you know, those are some of the leadership characteristics she brings to the district and it needs to be done with our educators. So I wanna also say, as an educator, I do not believe she needs to be an educator to be an effective superintendent. But I do believe she needs to listen deeply to educators and trust their judgment and build a strategy based on that expertise. And I have faith that she can do this. I think I know that superintendent Sue has humility and she deeply cares about SFUSD. She's willing to continue to serve in a very challenging role with a contract that is basically an extension of the current MOU. There's no expensive buyout that many superintendents demand. She said, I wanna serve this district, and I'm committed to this. I respect that. I'm grateful for her service and I look forward to the board supporting her and holding her accountable to build stronger partnerships and to really build out that educational strategy and create the the schools our students deserve.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Commissioner Fisher.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Well, I agree to thank you both for your comments. Appreciate everything you said before and I, I second all of it or third all of it. I would like to thank you Doctor. Hsu for coming in in a time of great instability. I mean, we were reeling from the RAI process. That that process destabilized a lot of school communities and and frankly communities beyond the schools as well. It had huge impacts. You know, I live in District 11. I felt like the whole district was reeling from the RAI process. So, I did a huge amount of work to help get us back on track. And at the same time, we had three three of our top leaders in our business and budget services department leave or go on leave and get you and Meli basically pulled off miracles to get us to the point of, of being able to pass a budget by June. I think there are major holes and a lot that we have to do and a lot due to cuts, we've we've decimated certain budget or certain departments that are very, very necessary as we've discussed here tonight. And through it all, I think you've been a very steady and consistent voice. And one of the things that we're hearing from the CDE is in order to get back towards to a positive budget certification, stability is a huge component of that. And so really thank you for not only bringing your fortitude, but, a lot of your city partnerships and relationships and everything to bear to help, to help bring to help right the ship. And so thank you for your work over the past year. Thank you for not running away after lifting the the hood on the car and realizing that it's not just an oil change but a whole transmission rebuild, and getting in the driver's seat and and doing doing the work anyway. So I look forward to working with you, over, throughout the rest of your contract and beyond. Thank

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: you. I'll echo, and and maybe just share so I am I'm looking forward to continuing to working with you, and really appreciate the humility that you bring to this position. I think we all need it. I think this is hard work. I think you have an impossible job, and we're grateful that you are willing to to to continue at the helm and look forward to continuing to supporting you. And I think just one one anecdote that sort of really showed me the different ways that that that you bring really incredible value was when we were we we continue to be under sort of general threats of immigration enforcement seizures. But when we were really feeling the pressure in the Bay Area in San Francisco, I really appreciate your leadership around communication in a way that was steady, but, present and and really appreciated how you immediately engaged with all of the partners that we needed to engage to in order to make sure that our communities, our students, our staff and educators and families, had a plan and that we were working with our partners because we cannot do this in isolation, in terms of protecting communities, from really problematic and and and sort of horrific state sanctioned violence. And so I just wanna I I think one of the things to to commissioner Fisher's point, your the relationships that you have in the community and with the city and county county, really showed themselves in that moment. And I think I look forward to other don't look forward to to you having to tap into those in in these types of crises, but, I'm really grateful that you do, that that's a big part of, those are attributes and and different skill sets and relationships that I think are incredibly important to us in this moment. So thank you.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: I will be voting yes. Superintendent Hsu, I'm thrilled that you will you are willing to continue. I appreciate you listening to the board, being open to feedback, and stay stabilizing the the ship and and continuing that that important work. We still have a long way to go. I look forward to doing that work with you. I know one of the first events we attended in this tumultuous time together was reaffirming our support for LGBTQ community alongside the city of San Francisco, also affirming the SFUSD stands with the LGBTQ community. So especially in this tumultuous time as commissioner Wiseman Ward has noted, for so many of our communities, it is important to have stable leadership and and I look forward to continuing the work to make SFUSD boring with you.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: A year ago, superintendent Sue was in this position, but I was not in line. And it's really amazing to me to think, how far the district has come already in this year. We have so so far to come. You know, I think that trust was broken between the district and community during COVID. And we have a lot to do to commissioner Ray's point, and commissioner Alexander's point, to rebuild that trust with our families and our communities and our educators. But we do that by just being consistent and consistently improving and learning and holding ourselves accountable to be better, holding the district accountable to be better, and making progress. And I know we can't make all of the progress that we need to make overnight and we haven't made it yet. But I am really gratified to see that we are on the right path, that we, you know, we still have issues with Red Rover, but we have put Empower

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: to rest. It does

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: not exist anymore, which is a huge, accomplishment. And I look forward to, you know, at the end of this year, potentially having and hopefully having positive fiscal certification from CDE. And to be to think that, you know, in a year and a half, we could go from where we were last fall to not bankruptcy, not complete state takeover, not continuing falling scores, but increasing student outcomes and balancing the budget at the same time and being able to, you know, be financially independent and then also have an opportunity, I think, to have this moment of alignment as a board with our district leadership where we're all really clear eyed about the importance of the work ahead and of moving together to make really profound investments in the future of the children of San Francisco Unified and of our entire city to really, you know, end the death by a thousand cuts and start making investments and really seeing the fruits of those so that we can continue to improve opportunity is really it's really an amazing chance that I don't think we should let, pass us by. So I'm very glad that we will be able to continue to work together, to achieve that.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Any other comments or questions? Roll call, please, miss Lanoff.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Commissioner Alexander? Yes. Commissioner Fisher? Yes. Commissioner Gupta?

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Vice President Nielleng? Yes. Commissioner Ray? Yes. Commissioner Wiseman Ward. Yes. And president Kim. Yes. Seven ayes.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Thank you. Thank you so much for the kind words as well. I fully recognize that there's a lot of work ahead of us. But thank you to president Kim, vice president Huling, and, of course, all of our commissioners. I do not take lightly the opportunity that you all are giving me, which is the opportunity to continue to serve our our children, youth, and families here at SFUSD. You've already alluded to, I've taken a very different path to becoming a superintendent. But I want to emphasize that I've spent over twenty years in the city that I love. Actually, twenty five years in the city that I love, very much dedicated to children, youth, family, and community issues. I want to continue to commit to SFUSD. I will work closely with our educators, with our administrators, our families, and, of course, our students to make real and lasting progress because we know our student outcomes have stalled over the last ten, fifteen years. But that doesn't mean that we stop. It means that we work harder. We push harder. And for those of you who know, know that I don't give up. And so I am really excited to roll up my sleeve and and really dive deep into some of these very, very stubborn student outcomes. Everywhere I go, everyone I talk to, there's consistent themes that I hear. That we need a stable school district, a financially stable school district because we need to focus on stronger instructions in every single one of our classrooms that we need to have meaningful family and community engagement. We need to be rebuild our relationships with our families and to deepen our commitment to equity, especially for communities that have been historically underserved and have experienced furthest furthest access from academic success. These expectations from our community is clear. And I welcome everyone to hold me accountable to achieving these things. I also know that progress happens at the rate of trust. So every day, I'm committed to working with our community to rebuild that trust. I also know I need to build a strong team. We're almost there. But I will be going out and doing a national search for a deputy superintendent of educational services that our students and our staff deserve because we should never settle. Never settle because our students deserve the best. So if we want better outcomes for our students, we will have to do something different. I am committed to that change, and I'm committed to our students. I'm committed to making sure that we continue to push the needle forward. I can I am committed to working with all of our staff, from our administrators to our educators, to all of the amazing custodians and security guards who keep us safe and make sure that our schools are welcoming? And to, of course, all of our central office staff who really are the backbone of our school district. I thank you again for this opportunity. I thank our community for this opportunity, because if if it was not to serve, I don't know what I would be doing. So thank you so much.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you so much, superintendent Hsu. And we will move forward to item I, discussion items. We have two items. Item one, ad hoc committee on public engagement. This is more of a FYI that we are beginning our ad hoc and public or rather, we have begun our ad hoc and public engagement work. What we are doing is going to launch our first meeting in January, but there's some prework that the members of this committee have that will start or rather have started already. I've asked commissioner Gupta to step up as chair of this committee, and then commissioner Fisher and I will join as his Sidekick. Bodyguards, sidekicks. And we have already begun conversations on how we can best operationalize this. Commissioner Gupta, do you wanna say a few words?

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Yes. I'll be brief. So public engagement has already permeated this entire meeting in almost every single item that we've discussed. And I want to clarify, there's a difference between public engagement from district staff and public engagement from the board. Public engagement on the Board is meant to represent the values of the community. And much like the school district has to rebuild trust, we as the Board, as a body, must also rebuild trust with the public when it comes to the public feeling like we are truly hearing and engaging our public. And the goal, if you will, the informal goal of this is when and where possible, we don't want families or community members to feel like they must come to public comment at a board meeting in order to share their point of view. This should be something where we are in community, we are at events, we are alongside our community to be able to hear them and their concerns and be able to telegraph how public engagement will be handled so people understand, know, and trust what that looks like. As President Kim already alluded to, we have already begun this process. We as a board have been, coordinated by staff to be able to attend various advisory committee meetings, various town hall meetings, and various public events and there will be more, but we've, in a way already soft launched before our formal start in January so that we can already start engaging community members, start to be in community in a coordinated manner that then hears concerns being raised and understands the values that our community is expressing in advance of strategic decisions that this body will be taking. So we look forward to it. I'm incredibly excited to work with my fellow commissioners. We have a dream team of commissioners. I'm not gonna say who has a better ad hoc committee, but

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: No. We know. We already know.

[Natalie (Vice President of Substitutes, UESF)]: We've set a

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: pretty high bar.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: But and and and we have some pretty amazing district staff that we'll be working with and engaging throughout this process. There are some district staff listed on this, but know that this process will be one in which we're engaging deeply with our district staff partners who are in community, to make sure that we we are not leaving any stone unturned. So we appreciate the public's, trust. We know we have to rebuild it, and we look forward to that.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Thank you, chair Gupta. Commissioner Fisher, do you wanna say a few words or are you good? Yeah. Wow. Okay. I I will move on. That would be great. Thank you. So thank you thank you, chair, for stepping up for this. I also wanna just thank you, commissioner Alexander, for stepping up and helping to lead the ad hoc on pop or progress monitoring. I know that you have already started to seep a lot of your learnings and takeaways into this into this group. There is actually there is a a timeline and a deadline by which deliverables are due. There is no expectation that necessarily things get adopted immediately. What we want is a plan. Right? A set of tangible actions that this board can use and take, deliver, adopt, and move forward. And so the whole purpose of creating these ad hocs is to bring recommendations to the board so that we can consider those for full adoption. And so thank you both for your leadership. Thank you, the board, for for your participation in these committees, and we look forward to hearing more. One thing that we will do is try to think through ways to incorporate just kind of report backs during the board meetings so that we could stay abreast of what's going on. More to come on that soon. Any questions for, chair Gupta? Awesome. Okay. Moving to item I two, this is the first reading of the Strong Schools Resolution. I wanna begin by just adding some context around what this resolution is, how it came to be, and what it is doing in front of us today. So this is our first reading of the Strong Schools Resolution and that it is meant to be a continuation and an affirmation of the conversation we've been having ongoing about the types of decisions that the board makes. You'll see that document as part of the attachments in the agenda. Additionally, the hope here is is this. We have done our part in having conversations around types of decisions that we wanna be making as a board. Two of those things were around school reorganization and enrollment, two priorities that we have named and and kind of, like, implicit direction we have given through this framework. What this resolution is intended to do is to essentially build a path forward on what it means to actually operationalize a plan around this. A couple of things to note. I wanna thank staff who kind of created the original language of this resolution and the superintendent for her time and attention in kind of bringing this to us. Part of this exercise was vice president Huling and I helping to refine the language and and and ensure that the language and content of this matches kind of what we believe the spirit and intent of this board to be. What you will see in this is several whereas clauses that try to lay out why we would have these conversations. And perhaps most importantly is that what you see in the resolved clauses is an ask for the superintendent to develop a plan. Right? Today, we've had a lot of conversation around what it means to match resources to the very things, initiatives, strategies that the superintendent and her team are are tasked with in doing. What this asks is to develop a plan that we can see how our resources, how our assets align to the things, the strategies that the superintendent and her team are delivering on. And so that is the spirit behind this resolution. This is also the first reading. So the purpose of this time is to really hear your feedback on this resolution so that staff, the superintendent, and leadership can take it back to make revisions and come back on December 9 with the second reading and consideration for adoption. So I will leave it at that. And if there's anything else that you want to add, superintendent Hsu, if you wanna add, please do and we'll open up for conversation.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: I will say I've already gotten, I think, just some feedback and things that I've heard not from board members, but from members of the community more generally that, you know, we may want to revise the resolution to make as clear as possible that the the reason that we want the superintendent to develop a plan here is to improve student outcomes. It is not to balance the budget. The budget will be balanced at the end of this year based on input from the ongoing budget town halls, and the budget will be adopted for 2627. That balanced budget will be adopted for 2627 with the current school portfolio that we have. So school closures or mergers are not kind of part of a butt of the balance the budget balancing plan. However, we do know that we're going to have to make some cuts and we do know that we have promising strategies that are starting to, show fruit. They're starting to, turn around our student outcomes. And we need to double down on that. We need to invest more and more in improving our student outcomes so that every student can go to a school in their community that will serve them and will serve the whole child and will give them every opportunity that they deserve. And so, you know, I really welcome thoughts from commissioners about how we can make sure that we're, communicating to the public transparently why we're asking for this plan. You know, we want to know what do we need to do to make every single school an excellent high achieving school, and make sure that we are putting the resources toward that. And we've also heard for many, many years that families want more predictability in school assignment, that they want to be able to go to that excellent school close to home. And so we also want to rebuild trust with the community in terms of delivering on that plan that has been delayed and deferred you know, for at least, I'd say, seven years, by my maybe present count. So as I said before, like, we do have this moment of alignment. And for me, I feel like that is not something that you can take for granted in government or in politics, that you have a group of people who are all really clear eyed moving toward this goal. And I think that we owe it to to the city and to students of SFUSD to do everything we can in this moment of alignment to improve their schools.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Sure. So I think at the heart of this resolution is really about how do we do exactly what, vice president Huling talked about. How do we center our students in all the decisions that we're making? Making sure that we have and continue to have high quality instruction that is supported in schools that support students. And right now, we are experiencing a declining enrollment, that is not unique to San Francisco. We're seeing it up and down the state of California. We're seeing it throughout the the country, and we need to grapple with that fact. We need to figure out how to balance all of our schools with the dwindling number of students that we have while we we work to move the needle on on high quality instruction and centering our students' experiences. So this resolution is the start to that conversation. This resolution allows us as a governance team to work together to bring our bring our best thinking to the table to really map out what that school portfolio could look like, should look like, that will, again, ensure us moving the needle on our third grade literacy, math eighth grade math and college career readiness. This resolution is going to allow us the flexibility to to ensure that families have predictability when they enroll at SFUSD. So there is there is a lot of work that needs to happen after this resolution has passed, But it's not just work that happens here. It's work that happens with our community. We need to go back out, have deep conversations with our community about what is it that you want. How is it that we're gonna be able to best serve our students? How do we ensure that our teachers truly have that co, learning, co co planning time together? How do we ensure that our students will have what it takes to succeed? And so I look forward to implementing this curriculum with our community, with our staff, our educators, our school leaders, so that we can truly set up SFUSD for our students for generations to come.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Comments or questions? Commissioner? Oh. Fisher. Commissioner Ray.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Okay.

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: My question relates to the to the description here regarding the enrollment system. There the plan is asking sorry. It's hard for me to look both ways at one time. The plan is asking about developing a clear and transparent enrollment system that balances predictability, diversity, and proximity. And my question basically related to the fact that those are the same three factors that were previously identified and that, you know, that I've been told at various points no one has been able to effectively use in order to come up with workable maps for the district. So, my question is if if unless something has changed, how are we going to be able to use these same factors that have created unworkable systems for everyone who's tried this? Are we going to change the factors in some way, whether it's the actual factors being listed? Are we going to change the proportion in which they're weighed? Is there some other idea around this? So, like, kind of for for clarity around what we plan to do, this looks a lot like what we already did, so I'm trying to determine what the change is. Thank you.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yeah. I think it's a great question. So the board policy exists five one zero five one zero one point two, around enrollment policy. It currently exists. I mean, that is our policy. What we have not done is been briefed as a board on that policy. What is it? How did it happen? What is possible? What's not possible? What does this data show? We as a board have not had an opportunity to get briefed on that. Right? And so this policy is or this resolution is not meant to override policy. It's meant to say we're ready to have a conversation about it. Right? So that's really all that it says. That language is actually from that policy. We need to ask ourselves if if it's not operationalizable, why is it not operationalizable? We as a board need to understand the conditions and why that's the case. And what it does is it says that if it's not possible, we need to have a conversation about it. Right? So, again, this is not meant to dictate. It's meant to open the door. Right? We need to have a conversation about it. We've talked about how it's a priority for us. Now it's a question of superintendent, please bring that to us so we can have a conversation.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Okay. Well okay. I gotta start by apologizing to Vice President Ewing because you just talked about our alignment. I'm gonna talk about how I don't like this. So but I actually think we are aligned around what the way you were talking about it. I just have some I have real concerns about the transolution. And maybe I'm just the crazy one but I'm gonna say it and then like I don't so one big one is well, I don't understand why we need this resolution because I don't understand what it allow like what door it opens that's not it not already open. Right? I don't understand why with our current goals and guardrails, the superintendent can't just go forward with these initiatives and then come to the board whenever she needs approval for anything.

[Speaker 6.0]: Right?

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Like so, for example, to to the point commissioner Ray raised, I had the exact same question. I was like, it lists those three factors again. My understanding is they're unworkable. So the board's probably gonna have to make a decision which is more important. Why not just bring that resolution to us, have that discussion and make a decision? Like, I don't understand why we need this resolution. It feels, like, repetitive. It feels like it's I mean, it it it may violate our board policy on agendizing governing by resolution which says we're not allowed to agendize board member resolutions. So it's like, I guess the question and then and then it uses the other other issue I have that was related to that is it it uses language that's slightly different from the guardrails but sort of similar. So I'm like, well, does this override the guardrails? Like, why does it use this phrasing instead of the phrasing that's already in the guardrail around public engagement? Right? Like so I don't like, I don't understand what it adds that the goals and guardrails don't already cover. And then it, like and then, like I said, it sort of sidesteps some of these big decisions like the enrollment one. I think it mentions facilities use and it talks about leveraging the real estate portfolio. What does that mean Selling our land? Does that mean, you know, for profit development? Does that mean housing for teachers? Does that mean nonprofit community uses? Like, those are real decisions that I think the board needs to make, but I wanna have that conversation and make the decision. I I so I don't I guess I don't know what passing this resolution even means. Like, what am I say what am I asking the superintendent to do that she can't already do?

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: All of that and I think to the extent that resolutions I understand this is the first read. We're not reading on it. But to the extent that I agree. We're not supposed to have board resolutions. But to to extent that resolutions are coming before the board, they are suggesting, I think, something that should have community input. And even though this isn't saying these are the decisions that we're making, so it's not saying we're not saying there are not decisions being made that don't yet have community input but it is there sort of optically, it feels like we're being asked to do something in a little bit of a backwards fashion. And to the extent that we are really trying to rebuild trust, especially based on the RIA process first time where community did not feel like they were meaningfully engaged in a timely manner, but also sort of in a substantive and non superficial manner. I worry that this is we're gonna be on the back foot again trying to say, well, this doesn't re really mean that we've made a decision without taking your input. Well, then I guess to commissioner Alexander's point, then why are we doing it? Yeah.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Great questions. And I think from my from my lens through my lens, I I know that we've we, the the governance team, have started to have some of these conversations. But I I think what we wanted to do was two things. One is just say publicly, this is what this body is going to work on for the next year to two years. That together, we're going to have these really tough conversations. We're going to engage with our community around these really tough conversations. And then number two, it will then initiate the start of it. So what I've what I have what I've been saying in in all of our budget town hall meetings is that the budget town hall meetings are very much about budget and that school reorganizations and all these things are not connected to that. They're dotted line connected because, yes, it costs money to to open a school and and, yes, we may recoup dollars when we close a school, but we're not gonna be able to realize those dollars right away. We realize those dollars a year to two years later. So this resolution allows us to to say, and now we're gonna pivot and start this separate process. So that to me was the benefit of having this resolution.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: But well, you you should

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: I I appreciate going after the the two of you who spoke last. And commissioner Ray, I I also wanna echo some of what you said as well because yeah. I keep like, the the question that I had written down here to ask was how do we not repeat the sins of the past? Cock is cheap. You know, we've, you know, we have a a big history of going out and and asking community for feedback and then completely ignoring it. Right? And specifically going back to the 2018 resolution, all of the advisory committees wrote joint letters to the board at the time saying, please don't pass or adopt this resolution because, it's not fair to families that live in the Southeast part of the city to to to slot us all into zones where you have historically under resourced the schools in there. The schools are not of the same quality. They're not staffed the same way. The facility buildings, I'm not talking about the the people in the buildings. But, like, why if you're going to force folks into geographic zones within the city, we have a lot of equity work to do first, frankly. Right? And and especially as we're trying to attract folks back. And if we want to repair and rebuild trust, we have to do that through a lot of intentionality. And frankly, even when we pushed forward with the zones, we couldn't figure out how to do it in a way that was inclusive of language programs that families want and SPED programs that were mandated to to do. So, like, to everyone's point, like, in the definition of insanity is is, you know, doing the same thing over and over again and trying to and expecting different results. So I guess my question is, what is going to be different this time? But I I do and we're we're hearing that there is still a lot of PTSD around the RAI process. So I I've I'm hesitant to okay. We're gonna set that aside. But I I do wanna say that thinking strategically, I really do like, the under enrollment is real. We we do have a lot a lot of capacity in our system that is problematic for bringing the resources to the students that need them. And frankly, we are missing a lot of programs internally and we're spending a lot of money to send kids outside of this district and outside of the city to get the programming that we not just as a an LEA, not as a district, but as a county office of ed Like, if you look at Marin or if you look at San Mateo, they have county programs for special education that we don't offer. The same way we offer our county our court and, our court schools, but we don't offer any of our county special ed programs. And we wonder why our sped budget is ballooning? So I I so I think there is a huge opportunity to to do some reimagining and strategic revisioning, but I'm not sure if a zoned enrollment system is the way to do it.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: So I think there's a valid question here of, superintendent, is this actually helpful for you? Right? Because I think to everyone's point here, the the impetus for this resolution did not actually come from board members. This was a request from the superintendent to kind of kick start this process.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Yeah.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: So the hope of this was to create clarity, alignment, and clear expectations. If that's not actually helpful for you or for this board, that is a different conversation. Well, it's a related conversation, but is it but we need to have a conversation around whether whether or not that is actually what we are wanting the superintendent to do. Right? So going back to the original purpose of this, right, the whole purpose of this was to say, build a strategic plan. Right? And again, what goes into that, who goes into that, how the resources are allocated around that is a question for the superintendent. But if that's not actually being reflected in this resolution by the board, that's one question. If it's not helpful for the superintendent and your team, it's another conversation. They're all related to each other. But here's what I will say. Right? We just went through an exercise the last three meetings or so talking about types of decisions that the board was saying that we want to make. It was pretty unanimous. I mean, not pretty. It was unanimous that we wanted to have conversations around portfolio and enrollment. As you all may know, one of the biggest risks in undergoing such significant efforts like that is that we are unclear in exactly what we are asking for and by when and then are unsatisfied about whatever happens the next few meetings or the opposite. We're incredibly clear and the superintendent doesn't deliver. Either way, not great. Right? And so there is an honest conversation to have of how honest are we about the things that we said were the major decisions that we want to make. And if that is if those things are not it, then we have another conversation to have around major decisions and what we wanna do. Right? So so I just I bring that up because it is I think it's really important that we are just clear, right, on what it is the board is asking for. Right? Whether it's a resolution or not is is kind of secondary to us meeting needing to be really clear with what we are asking the superintendent for. And then the question becomes, superintendent, what do you need to get clarity? Board, what do we need to build confidence?

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: And just to also remind everybody about kind of the process that we've gone through to get here, last, I believe, winter, we adopted superintendent's short term metrics. The superintendent, presented in the spring a response to those including essentially assigning herself the tasks that she would complete and the timeline by when. One of the superintendent structure metrics was to identify major initiatives. Basically, what if you were to ask a member of the public, what are the major things happening in SFUSD? What's going on? Those would be the, you know, one, two, three things at the top of everyone's mind. These are the major things that are gonna imagine and define the future of what our public schools are gonna look like. And we wanted those major decisions to be identified so that we would be all in alignment and have clarity around, what the major decisions are that guardrail one applies to. And we had expected, major decisions to come to the board and be announced to the public and rolled out in June. And that didn't happen and we've had a number of conversations amongst the board about then what are the major decisions, what decisions does guardrail wanna apply to. And we brought forward as leadership the decision making matrix and said, okay, well, we're going to say there's some board led this major board identified major decisions that we will then identify so that we all know what guardrail one applies to. And we also had a conversation, an open session about, you know, what suggesting what those might be. And as Phil said, I think we had unanimity that, school portfolio and organization was one of those and basically moving toward fulfilling the promise of changing the assignment system was the other. We also suggested facilities didn't sound like there was as much alignment on that so that's why you don't see it in this resolution. Open to feedback on that. But that was just a conversation that we didn't take any board action. We didn't direct the superintendent to do anything. We didn't make any decisions. And as Phil said, I think it's really important for us to if we are going to embark on these tough decisions that are gonna involve a lot of community input, a lot of guardrail one, activity, at all levels, that we're in alignment about what they are. And I think that we it's helpful from in my view, the the resolution is helpful to communicate to the public essentially a timeline of at least when are when is there going to be a plan, when will the board when will the board take action by? We do govern our own governance calendar and so we can't tell the superintendent what to do, but we can say if there isn't a plan brought to us for a vote before the enrollment fair, we're not gonna make any decisions changing the school portfolio or changing how families are gonna be assigned to schools because it's important for us that those decisions be made before people start making their decisions about schools. And so that's what this is intended to reflect. And I think it's all of our hope that this is done with the sole focus of improving the quality of our schools and improving the resources that we're able to put into the schools that we have so that we can achieve our student outcomes. So I don't know if that is what we succeeded in articulating, but that is what we hoped to articulate and to also just as as president Kim said, make sure that we are all in alignment and that we we have this first reading. So if there are things that you think, for example, commissioner Alexander, where the language deviates from the language of the guardrails, that's, I think, just because of paraphrasing, and not intended to change or supersede any guardrails, just to reference them so that it's not a giant dry document that, you know, regurgitates the guardrails that are already defined. But that that is the purpose and I I do really welcome and encourage and request that commissioners provide any edits or changes that they think would would improve our communication and transparency with the public.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Comments, questions?

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: I think I think what I'm I agree let

[Speaker 6.0]: me let

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: me start with the places I totally agree. I I totally appreciate, vice president Huling, your recounting of where we've come from. I think that was a really good description of it. I think the the only place I might deviate is I think we identified major decisions that if they are to occur need to be approved by the board. But we didn't tell the superintendent, you have to go close a bunch of schools. Right? We also didn't say you have to do the the student enrollment thing. Right? Like, I I mean, I think some of us have said that, but we never made the board never made a decision. So if that's what we're trying to do, then I feel like we're putting the cart before the horse because I wanna hear the soup my I wanna hear the superintendent's plan that's aligned to the goals and guardrails to do whatever she believes is necessary. Like, she know like, I you know how I feel. Everyone, I think, knows how I feel about the student assignment system. I'm like, I think you'd be crazy not to address it because I think we have all this evidence that it's reducing enrollment in the district, which then reduces our ability to and it's also making it's also really unpredictable. It's you know, because it's this open choice system. There's all these things that make it hard to enroll schools and have stable enrollment and provide it kids with the best education. So if I'm thinking how am I gonna achieve the goals and adhere to the guardrails, like, guardrail four talks about predictable resource alignment, I might wanna address the student assignment system. You know what I mean? But but if it's not done in the context of the goals and guardrails, then it's just why are we doing it. Right? Similarly, with any potential school, and I would argue, for mergers, like, if those are gonna happen, they have to happen with community buy in and with people being convinced that this is gonna be better to achieve the goals and guardrails. Right? If you have all these people being like, nah, that's gonna undermine education, again, we know. It doesn't save very much money at all, so why would we do it? Right? So the I guess that I would like to see and I thought what was gonna happen was the superintendent was gonna go back after we said we were clear, these are your decisions you need to come to the board about, that she would come and say, okay, here's my timeline. I wanna address the student assignment system. So I need to know before I do that predictability, diversity, and proximity. Thank you. We can't do all three, board. Here's the here's the briefing, which you gotta pick two or whatever it is. Now, give me a resolution on that and make me make a decision. Right? Or board, I wanna approach I really think we need to have no elementary schools that are smaller than 300 kids for this reason. And I'm I've gone out, I've consulted with community, and I think I can get buy in on this. I want your approval to move forward with a plan that asks schools to merge or whatever, if that's really what it is. But, again, I I don't wanna vote on that before she's had a chance to go and do that work. Like, it's just putting us in a position of, like, I don't know what I'm I guess, then my other question is what am I authorizing here? Am I am I voting for school closures by approving this? I gotta you know what I mean? Like and if and if those aren't linked to the goals and guardrails, why would we do them? So I think those are some of the questions that sit with me and so I just I'm just I'm like, I'm not clear, like, what again the like, she can make a plan. We shouldn't have to tell her to make a plan. That's her job. She's a superintendent.

[Speaker 43.0]: So You know?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I don't know.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: I I completely agree with everything that you just said and I I wanna be absolutely clear that in no way, shape, or form is this resolution intended to pre authorize, you know, any closures of schools, pre authorize any adoption or change of the admissions policy. It really is just to say, we are making a decision in public, you know, before before the public that these are kind of the major decisions that we're charging the superintendent with and we want her to bring us a plan for each of these things that we will vote on based on its merits. And so we're not saying that we are going to, you know, adopt any particular school portfolio, but we want her to come to us with a plan, with the strong rationale for student outcomes, with, you know, an explanation of why it's better for students and more fiscally stable for the district. And same here, like, the reason that we included that balances predictability, diversity, and proximity, the existing policy actually, like, ranks those very specifically and defines those very specifically. So it says, like, diversity is number one and diversity is defined as the diversity of SFUSD students within a particular zone and every single school needs to have, like, x y z types of diversity within it, and that has proven rather unworkable. So what what we're trying to say, I think, through this resolution is, generally, as a board, we express our agreement that we want a policy that moves toward predictability that continues to value writ large predictability, proximity, and diversity, but it may balance those in different ways. And if the existing policy is not workable, bring us your proposal for the new policy that you actually can implement for us to evaluate and vote up or down.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: But I I think that doesn't quite address what Commissioner Alexander's foundational question is. What does this resolution actually authorize? Right? Yeah.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: I think that's my question. Like, what

[Speaker 6.0]: what I mean

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: voting for? Totally

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: fair question. So I because I do think that that question can only be answered by the superintendent. Right? Like so I think the question is, what is it that you need? I think that's the bigger question of, like, what is it that you need to be able to do this work given the conversations that have taken place over

[Speaker 6.0]: types of

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: decisions that the board wants

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: to make.

[Emma Dunbar (Executive Director, LEAD – Middle School/K-8)]: Mhmm. Well And

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: then and then, Alita, if you wanna I know. Yeah.

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: I know. I'm gonna leave at 12:15.

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: Okay. So again, I I think it's it's about making sure that we have these conversations out in public so that public folks understand these are the conversations that we are grappling with. Because a lot of times, we're we're we're sync we're having them one on ones or we're having them in smaller group settings. And and and I think it's it's just really difficult where I feel strongly that we need to signal to our community because that we're gonna take on these really big, very difficult, and at times, painful conversations. And we're not going to be able to do this if if it's if it's bifurcated. It has to be us as a united governance team that's gonna do it together. Now I will say, and I, you know, I know that I see a young person in in the room here, that what I have been saying is that reorganizing our schools does not necessarily mean closing anything. It really does mean how do we think about where should we put our new k eight Mandarin immersion school? Where and how should we serve our our special ed students so that we can bring in specialized services into SFUSD as opposed to having these services and programs all over the Bay Area. So there are those types of conversations and questions that we are grappling with that I I want us to be clear that we together will be moving towards this because we know at the end of the day, this is what's going to help us move the needle for our students in terms of literacy and math and college career readiness. So this resolution or maybe even just this conversation in public has been is helpful just to get it out there.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Commissioner Gupta, commissioner Fischer.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Yeah. So I mean, in I appreciate that. And I wanna separate out the what we need to focus on and how we focus on it. Because I feel like we're kind of conflating the two and talking about how, school consolidations and refiguring of programs might happen. And I think that's way premature right now, especially given that we haven't engaged the public, as a board or as, district staff. And so what we're talking about is what I think we've all coalesced around. And I could just speak for what I've certainly heard from community when I was running, which is a recognition that we do need to figure it out. I mean, what what's happening with special ed? What's happening where we have some schools that are fairly empty and other programs that are incredibly hard to get into, you know, where it's just sort of we need to figure that out. So in addition to not having skeleton crew staffing of schools that then affects our student outcomes, we need to figure out a student enrollment system that is driving so many away. And so the what we focus on and and and I'd remind my colleagues to that conversation we had where, as Vice President Huling pointed out, you know, we're expecting kind of a, you know, what are the major things that we will focus on initiatives from the superintendent in May. And I feel like there's been this kind of dance as far as, well, you go first. No. You go first. Well, what do you guys wanna focus on? What will I focus and and it was a helpful comment from AJ, I think, a couple of meetings ago where you sort of like, at the end of the day, the buck stops at the board in terms of what what we are ultimately going to hold the superintendent responsible for and what we hold ourselves responsible for. I feel the pressure of the time that we have and we already heard from community members that a year to figure out how we're going to reconfigure programs across sites, figure out how we fully staff schools to get the best student outcomes is something that is going to take a lot of community input in. And so to me, we can't have this conversation and this decision soon enough so we can already get started on it and hear the superintendent's plan as far as how do we figure out the challenges that we have to overcome when we think about enrollment? How do we try to staff and try to minimize harm and increase outcomes for our students when we think about reconfiguring programs across our different sites? And so to me, if this is a conversation, if this is a resolution that helps to get us across that point so that the superintendent has feels like she has the backing she needs from the board to be able to do this, I am more than happy to vote for this resolution.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: But backing to do what? I mean I think that's the thing. I wanna know what I'm being asked again to because I I think it's important to be really clear like what are what is what are you asking for? Because I know again I don't to me you have the authority and if there's a real decision to be made, I don't I guess what I see, I don't see a decision point in this resolution. I see all the stuff we've been talking about just put on the paper but then it's it's like what's it what are we saying?

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Can can I real quick. Can I because I think we're all saying the same thing? I I I I we're saying a lot of the same things. I think where I'm stuck though is words are cheap, you know, and what has been lacking in the past is the action to actually bring community along. Right? And so and and unfortunately, I think this resolution makes assumption that we've heard for years and we heard again tonight, community isn't ready for us to make. So what I would suggest is we start conversations in community. Maybe what we need to do since the superintendent has met some of the short term objectives that we've given in the past, maybe turn some of this into short term objectives that the superintendent can work on through the end of the school year. And then at the end of the school year, once we've done the community engagement, then we write the resolution that actually makes the authority. I don't know. I think that might be an elegant solution as we've heard in the past.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: will just share for myself that what I see is the value of voting for this resolution or voting for any version of any resolution is that the superintendent, of course, has the authority to do any of these things without, board direction. But if she is going to start this process, we we all know what an incredible minefield it is. We know that the community is on edge about it, that, there are are more questions than answers. And we also know that only a majority of the board can direct the superintendent to do anything or anyone in the district to do anything. And so, I think it's very, very vague and undefined for us to say the major decisions are school portfolio and assignment system. And I think that this at least helps articulate shared goals and shared vision and shared expectation in providing clarity to the superintendent about what where where the board is now in terms of what we value and what we expect. And so the, you know, the whereas clauses are really intended to describe, like, what where where are what are our considerations in bringing this? Like, where are we as a district? Why do we need this? And the, you know, the therefore, be it resolved. Right? What we are directing is we're just directing the superintendent to develop a plan, and what the six elements of that plan are that we're basically bringing this draft resolution to the board to ask our fellow board members, are these the important elements of a plan? Like, when the superintendent is developing a plan, should this plan ensure that every school is financially sustainable, academically excellent, and equipped to serve the whole child, support family trust by creating a clear and transparent enrollment system that balances predictability, diversity, and proximity, etcetera? And that the plan should come to us for a vote up or down, which is not to say that there wouldn't be I mean, we expect that this plan will be and must be informed by a full guardrail one public engagement process. That's why we're defining these as the major goals. And so, I don't think we're directing her to create any sort of plan before she listens to community. What we're saying is go out and start that process.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Okay. Just ask, like, for example, you just read the first resolve. Mhmm. The or the one ensure every school is financially stable sustainable academically excellent and equipped to serve the whole child. So like that to me echoes the language of guardrails, two, three, and four.

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Mhmm.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: So but how is that different from saying, like, you need to meet the goals and adhere to the guardrails? You know, there's been all this conversation in in the from the board and the community saying one way to do that might be to redesign the enrollment system. Okay, superintendent. What do you need to know? Oh, well, I need to know I need to make some decisions around predictability, these things. I guess I guess to me I'm like, why are it feels confusing. Like, are we really adhering to the goals and guardrails process or are we directing the superintendent to use a different set of criteria that are sort of pretty much related? That's the part that's confusing to me.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I hear that. I I actually if I could just do a thought test. If this was one paragraph and it said, whereas we establish goals and guardrails for the district around third grade reading, eighth grade math, college, and career readiness with these five guardrails that we have in place, be it resolved that the superintendent shall present a plan that meets these goals and guardrails for consideration by the board as soon as August 2026 and no later than no later than the twenty twenty six enrollment fair. Would that resolve it?

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: A plan for what? But that gets that would get a lot closer to what that would feel a lot more aligned.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I know. And But I

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: would depend on I'm

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: not mad about that

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: at all.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: And people know that I had a lot of feelings about how many whereas clauses there were from the beginning. Right? But, like, if that was the resolution, just simply saying, build us a plan that gets us to our goals and guardrails. Because the resolution just

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: to be clear around our school, our school enrollment and portfolio?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I mean, we just had a whole meeting today for hours where we talked about the lack of a strategic plan. Or a

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: strategic plan for the whole district?

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: For the whole district.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Yeah. Well, okay. I mean I mean Sure. It's I mean, this is Yeah. If that's what it is, but that seems

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: What's that?

[Speaker 20.0]: Clarify the question. Yeah.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: So first of all, like, part of what we're supposed to do is just do not come focus governance with all of our resolutions. We're supposed to do a policy diet. Right? We're supposed to do a resolution diet. And, frankly, having been through the training and if we were to use this resolution as an as part of the exercise, it wouldn't pass. Like, we would be told to gut it. Right? So I'm wondering, like, could we run this by AJ? Could we have him help develop a a version that to the so maybe to your point. But I I think the other point I really I think really what I'm struggling with here, to be specific, you know, and give specific feedback on this rather. I struggle with the fact that engage the community is number six instead of number one.

[Speaker 49.0]: They're not

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: I mean

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: But we're virtue signaling. I mean, like, okay, what we intend versus how the community reads it, especially based on our past history and some of the trauma that we induced, Like, if we rank community engagement as number six in here, doesn't matter what we intend, it's intent versus impact. Community is gonna rank this.

[Speaker 35.0]: Happy to take that edit if

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: you'd like that to be number one.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Well, I mean So that's with my saying that this specific but, again, I'd say this wouldn't pass the policy guide.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yeah. So I I don't wanna spend a ton of more time on this because it's already I'm uh-uh. I'm leaving. So because here here here is the thing. And and if I can just do a moment of just honest conversation among us squirrels here. Like, what what I what we really need to do is ask ourselves and just have a genuine conversation of what it is that we are asking the superintendent to do. Just like what is it that we want? Right? Because we just had a whole meeting talking about how we lacked the strategic plan of the district. And if I were the superintendent and we can ask her in a moment. But, like, if I were the superintendent, I would wanna know what is it do you want and by when? And so if if if the resolution if the guidance, if the feedback here is, listen, we have goals, we have guardrails, this is simply a question of how do we get to those goals within the guardrails that are set, build a plan, and really the thing that we're asking for is by a certain date, then I think we should be really clear about that date. Right? But but what I what I what I will say as as president that I experienced in having working with all of you is that there's seven people with seven voices talking about seven different things with a superintendent who's not getting any clear guidance on and which one of those seven things am I supposed to be doing and a and a board who gets mad about all seven things not happening. Right? So, like, that, I think we need to we need to get clear on that. Right? And and that is is really why I was initially against any resolution to begin with and kind of understood why the ask was to build a resolution because I get that. Right? There are seven of us. We're asking for seven different things, and our own good governance tells us she doesn't have to listen to any of them. Right? So so this is the question. What is it that we're asking for and by when? And what I'm hearing is that we want a plan that helps us reach our goals within the guardrails that are set by August. Yes.

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Yeah. My concern is if we're gonna use that governance model, which I think we were using and trying to make work, then that has the only thing we should be asking for is a strategic plan to do that. Right? And we can say, as we have, we think and what we're hearing from community is that the enrollment process is really important. And we think that, you know, some of colleagues may feel stronger than others about the school mergers or whatever. We think that's something you need to at least tell the community. Are you gonna do it or not? What's your what's your plan? That feels right to me. But I don't wanna go to the I don't want us to be directing the superintendent, you know, go reorganize a bunch of schools if then she comes back and says, look, actually, I've done an analysis and the harm that's caused by merging schools or or forcing people to close schools is worse and is gonna reduce and reduce student outcomes. So I'm gonna actually spend an extra $5,000,000 to keep these small schools existing for a few years and figure out how to increase enrollment.

[Moon-Hak Kim (Research, Planning & Assessment)]: You know

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: what I'm saying? Like, I don't I'm just giving a hypothetical. I don't I don't wanna I don't want her to think that that I am directing even with student assignment, something I feel passionate about. If she comes back and says, look, that's just like such a crazy thing and I have I'm gonna try to prove to you that we could actually improve enrollment with it within the existing enrollment system, even though right now that I'm, like, very skeptical, I wanna be open to be convinced if she's gonna say, look, this is my priority to meet the goals and adhere to the guardrails. And I feel like if we're not if we're directing her to do something specific, it treads into that territory of how is she really making a strategic plan. But I do wanna see a plan.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: Is there something specific that you think that's being directed by any particular language in this that you have concern about?

[Matt Alexander (Commissioner)]: Yeah. Because I feel like it mentions a bunch of stuff but then doesn't mention other stuff. Like, that's why I feel like this there's a lot of words here and I feel like there's just so many words that it starts

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: to like And and I think what vice president Huling is trying to articulate is then what is the purpose of saying major decisions?

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Well, so what I would say here, if there's anything like to be to answer your question, vice president Huling, I would say number two and three are overly prescriptive. When we say support family trust by creating a clear and transparent enrollment system that balances predictability, diversity, and proximity, we've proven that we can't do that

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: over right? So we Well, we've proven that we can't implement the exact specific micro set of rankings.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: May I finish?

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: But we're just trying to move it broader.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Well, you asked for my feedback. So I'm trying to give you my feedback. Okay? So maybe support family trust by creating a clear and transparent enrollment system, period. Right? That's a lot less prescriptive than adding the predictability, diversity, and proximity. Reorganize the district's school site portfolio. I think the superintendent assumes, and is heading towards the direction of reorganizing but I don't wanna be prescriptive and that's the two Commissioner Alexander's point that that's actually what she has to do. Completely agree that we need to focus resources where where they make the biggest impact on student outcomes. And, five, I think, is vague enough to be to give her the leeway she needs to do the job. And like I said before, six should be one. That so if we want to make it more aligned, that that would be my very specific feedback to make this workable within. But I think it also needs to be rewritten as you were saying to make it more focused on the goals, and meeting student outcomes.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Commissioner Rae, did you have a did you close your hand up?

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Yes. Thank you. I, I appreciate Commissioner Fisher's suggestion about, about checking in with AJ about this. Something I had brought up before around the tiers of the, you know, the goals, the interim goals, and then the senior staff initiatives or, strategies that they want to adopt. Having a having a, like, a clear delineation of what those things are beyond just, like, the name of an initiative, like, understanding what the actual inputs are and how they'll be measured. I just I think having those kind of, like, three clear tiers there would would help would help determine how and, like, why we need to go about making changes making significant changes in the district. So I just I I would like to see some kind of, like, very clear, strong undergirding. And we have our goals. We have the superintendent's interim, goals. But I don't feel like I have nearly as much on how we get to those things. So, I I would just I would like to see something about that, like, something that we can look at, show people, post on the website, in conjunction with with anything else or or in some sense even maybe Yeah. As as part of a basis for doing all of this because all this ultimately is about student outcomes. We wouldn't reorganize the school portfolio if it didn't somehow better serve families and students.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Yeah. So just given the time did you wanna say something? No. You're good. Just given the time, I'm gonna wrap this conversation. This is genuinely board work. We need to have a conversation around whether or not we as a body of seven have clarity on exactly what it is that we want. And I think we're all aligned at the highest level of wanting to reach our goals. That's a very easy thing to say. But the question is I mean, we just had three meetings talking about major decisions for decisions that we wanna make, and it's unclear to me right now, frankly, whether we're ready to and and wanting to have those decisions made. So I think there's a conversation to be had around what does it mean for us to set major decisions if we're not gonna ask the superintendent to follow through on producing plans specifically for those major decisions. Why did we set major decisions then? Right? He set

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: the major decisions. What's that? The superintendents set the major decisions.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: No. Those were board decided.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: The three that we

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: The two things that we talked about in the last board meeting, school reorganization and enrollment.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Okay.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: And so my question is

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: But the but the superintendent's actions and how she gets there are hers.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Correct. But if we're gonna say that we wanna have a conversation about this and make a decision around these things, the question that I have is, so what are the expectations that we have around these things? By what? That's the critical component. Right? If we're not willing to give a date, then I don't understand why we even say anything at all about why we want her to do something.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: That's why I'm proposing that we do it as a short term metric instead of as a board resolution.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Again, I I think this is going back to what the best venue is for all of this so we can talk about that. But what I'm hearing is there's some work that we have to do to make this more aligned to our BBGGs, point taken. And so we will take that feedback and bring you back.

[Lisa Weissman-Ward (Commissioner)]: Yeah. Thank you for the work

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: on this though.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: And I guess I'll just say I I I wanna just name something, which is that I think that in one on one conversations with the superintendent, there's general alignment from the board. And I think that ultimately, we are elected to be leaders of this district and to transparently communicate with people the direction of this district and what we wanna see. And to me, I think it's very disappointing when people talk a big game in a one on one conversation behind closed doors and then aren't willing to stand up and say in open session, this is what we want done and this is what we need to do to have a better future for our kids. And I think it's actually I think that the the purpose of bringing the resolution is actually to foster exactly the conversations that we're having here to be to be like, we think we have alignment and let's actually, like, literally articulate what we think that alignment is so we're all starting together on the same page. But I think that we are at risk of setting the superintendent and the district up for another round of painful heartache that we can ill afford if we can't even start this process aligned on what we're looking for and what we are asking for and valuing in making those decisions.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: Please don't conflate my disagreement with this resolution as my not willing to step up and make tough decisions. Been doing that for years in this district.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: Not particularly directed at you. Well, it felt personal

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: the way it was phrased and the way you were looking at me when you were stating it. So if I took it in a way other than it was intended, it felt like a pot shot. So I'm

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: I'm I'm not Maybe it's my It's my twelve thirty attitude. Continued frustration over, I would say, a number of months that we've been having these conversations to try and actually move them toward a more transparent public venue to articulate what where the district is going so that the public can understand.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: And this is not a conversation. It's so

[Speaker 6.0]: In a minute.

[Alida Fisher (Commissioner)]: We are like we we're about to lose quorum if because you have to walk out of consent. Can we

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Correct. I'm gonna bring this to an end now. Thank you for all the feedback. Very helpful. This is the reason why we don't have meetings past midnight. We're gonna move to item j, consent calendar.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: President Kim has a standing recusal from the consent calendar due to his employment with the City and County of San Francisco, which is a frequent contractor with SFUSD to avoid the appearance of any impropriety. Superintendent Sue, do you have any modifications to the consent calendar?

[Dr. Maria Hsu (Superintendent)]: I do not have any. There are none.

[Jaime Huling (Vice President)]: Alright. Can we please have a roll call vote then? Is it miss Linoff? Can we have a roll call vote on consent, please?

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Commissioner Alexander. Yes. Commissioner Fisher. Yes. Commissioner Gupta.

[Parag Gupta (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Vice President Healy. Yes. Commissioner Ray.

[Supriya Ray (Commissioner)]: Yes.

[Ms. Lanoff (Board Secretary/Clerk)]: Commissioner Wiseman Ward. That is four eyes.

[Phil Kim (Board President)]: Alright. Today, we are gonna close by honoring the life and legacy of Alice Wong and organizer cultural leader and now a deeply respected disabled ancestor. Many knew her as the founder of the disability visibility project, but to many of us in SFUSD, she was much more. A sharp and principled advocate, a strong voice for diversity in the disability movement, a devoted cat mom to Bert and Ernie, and someone who loved cooking, an anti genocide activist, and the cofounder of hashtag cryptevote, and as always appreciated a good red lip. Her activism touched every part of her life, and she centered disabled people of color long before most institutions paid attention, pushing forward conversations like disability to white. She fought for infection control and masking at UCSF, supported disabled journalists at the sick times, and challenged policies like plastic straw bans that overlook disabled people's needs. She funded artists, commissioned to suck at ableism pin, kinda want one, and urged all of us to approach activism in ways that felt right for us. During the ADA thirty celebration, she reminded us, don't feel like there's only one way to be an activist. People should do what is right for them. Losing Alice is a huge loss for the disability community and for everyone who learned from her leadership and generosity. Even as we grieve, we are grounded by the work she created and the communities she built. Her writing, her imagination, and her commitment to do stability justice will continue to guide us. As we mourn this profound loss, we return to her words from the year of the tiger, the real gift any person can give is a web of connective tissue. If we love fiercely, our ancestors live among and speak to us through these incandescent filaments glowing from the warmth of memories. Alice Wong changed what many of us believe was possible. Because of her, we will keep imagining, keep fighting, and keep caring for each other. May her memory be a blessing, and may we carry her work forward in everything we do for justice, creativity, and community. With that, I adjourn today's meeting at 12:37AM.