Good evening. Welcome to the board meeting for the Pajaro Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees. This is June 8th, 2022. Thank you everybody for coming. Thank you to staff for being out in the audience. We're going to start out tonight with the Pledge of Allegiance, and will Trustee Shocker lead us in the Pledge? Thank you. If there's someone in the back, yeah, who can turn the lights on that would probably be appropriate. There we go. So first up tonight, we'll have our superintendent comments from Dr. Rodriguez. So as you know, one of the things that I try really hard to do is to find unique ways in order to be able to receive feedback and and just information from people. So I am out in the schools every day and then in addition to that, I'm at ELAC meetings, different other meetings. I do things called conversations with the superintendent. And so this is something new that we're going to try to do as well. So in English, we're calling it Talks and Treats and Talks. In Spanish, it sounds a little bit better, but palestas y prácticas. So basically what I am doing is we're notifying schools that I will be within the area. And Alicia and myself and sometimes Mr. Berman or Brenda Guzman is going to be coming with me so that we have a couple people and it will be my opportunity to be around families that don't necessarily come to conventional meetings. So, you know, we have a subset of parents that come to our parent leader meetings, but we also have another subset of parents that don't. And so this will hopefully allow us to be able to access those parents. If these work out well, so we have five right now scheduled, but if these work out well, then we'll expand that and we'll go to more areas and more locations. But these are pretty walkable locations. And so I look forward to being able to be out and listen to our students and families within their neighborhoods. So, thanks very much. Thank you, Dr. Rodriguez. Next, we'll move to item 3.4, Governing Board comments. And reports on standing committees. We'll start with Jennifer Holm, if that's okay. Thank you. Good evening, everyone. So, I attended the Innovator of the Year Awards for our Paro Valley Education Foundation, where we recognized the innovative, classified and certificated staff throughout the district. And I also attended several graduations and promotions. So, congratulations to everyone who is starting a new chapter next academic year. And I also met with a representative from Robert Reeves' office and also with Senator John Laird to advocate for funding in the budget proposal that will support the work we are doing in public education. So, that's it. Thank you. Tristee Soto. Yeah, you hold my comments this evening. Thank you. Hey, Tristee Roscoe. Welcome, everyone. Good evening. Just want to start off my comments by congratulating our high school graduates. And I'm wishing my very best on what their future endeavors are. I did attend the Innovator of the Year. It was nice to recognize both our classified and certificated employees. We recognized over 100 employees. So, it was a very lovely event. It's always nice to see not only our employees, but families celebrating with them. I do want to extend my gratitude to our executive assistants. I know that they invested a lot of their time and energy in putting together and helping with the Innovator of the Year Awards. So, thank you to all of them. I also got the opportunity to attend this with a while back at the grant opening of our Wellness Center. So, I think that's all I have for tonight. Thank you. Thank you, Tristee Shocker. Thank you. So, I also attended Innovator of the Year Awards with some of our fellow board members. So, congratulations to all our innovators. We're lucky to have many of our staff and teachers as innovators in this district. I also attended the grand opening of our Wellness Center. And that was great to see some community members there.  So, that was really nice to see how excited they are about having that in their community. Attended as many promotions and graduations as I could. Made sure that I got a visit into all my school sites the last weeks of school. So, it was very busy the last couple of weeks. Also, didn't get to mention last time because I was on Zoom. We had the Daylack End of the Year meeting with our parents and they showed their gratitude by giving us some beautiful hearts. So, that was really a nice gesture on that. So, thank you, parents and families. And last but not least, congratulations to all our students and families on the next chapter that you move on to. And thanks to all of our teachers and staff for your hard work this year. Thank you. Thank you. Like some of my colleagues, I did attend multiple graduations. I think we had I had five graduations on one day, including Aptos High, PV High, Aptos Junior High, and my favorite graduation every year is the post-secondary graduation of our special ed students, which is just so very touching if you've never been to that graduation. It's unbelievably beautiful. So, anyway, so thank you to the special ed department for making that so awesome for those young graduates. In the past couple of weeks, I've also, like many of the trustees, have attended the Innovator of the Year where we honored 104 exemplary teachers and staff. And thank you very, very much for your excellent work and your compassion. I attended the Queer Youth Awards and Happy Pride Month to all of our families and students who identify as queer. That was a beautiful night. In Watsonville, hosted this year and I was very proud of the way the campus looked and how it was set up. It was just really great despite the high-speed car chase that and the helicopter circling the campus during the awards. That was a bummer. But other than that, it was a beautiful night. We met with Edward James Olmos with the Youth Cinema Project and saw a bunch of unbelievable films at the Mellow Center and we thank him so much for funding the work that we do here with the students. It's just, and I'm hoping we can get some of those films up on our website, if possible, because they're really cool. So it was an honor to meet him and spend time with him. And it was an honor to see all the films and to celebrate our students with their families. So thank you to those of you who were able to make that. Attending graduations, serving on committees is one of the duties of a board trustee. And if there are a couple of trustees who don't serve on any committees and who don't attend any of these events, and I would just say that I wish you would because it's very touching and it's beautiful and it makes you feel like all of this is worthwhile. These long hours that we put in and the hard decisions that we make, it's a very important duty of a board trustee to serve on a committee or multiple committees and to attend these beautiful events for our students. So that's what I'll say about that. If anybody here tonight would like to speak on any of the agenda items, I'm sorry I was a remiss to say this earlier on, please get a yellow card in the back and you can give it to Eva who's sitting here on the end taking notes and it'll get down to us and we'll call your name with the appropriate agenda item. Also, if you need interpretation tonight, we do have an interpreter sitting here. What's her name? Orania. I'm sorry, I can never remember your name, Orania. I'm going to write it down next time. But thank you for being here. And with that, we'll move to item 4.1, approval of our agenda. I need a motion. Move to approve. Second. All those in favor? Aye. Anyone opposed or abstaining? Great. The motion carries. Next, we'll have approval of our minutes from May 25th, 2022. I moved to approve. Second. First and second. All those in favor? Aye. Anyone opposed? Motion carries. 5-0-2. Thank you. Next, we'll move on to item 6.1, public hearing. This is a draft of our 2022 local control accountability plan and presented tonight by our assistant superintendent, Lisa Aguirre. Thank you. Good evening, President D'Serpa, Board of Trustees, and Dr. Rodriguez. I'm honored this evening to present the draft 2022-23 local control accountability plan. This is the second year in the three-year plan that was approved last June. In putting together the plan, we took in a lot of input and we also had the opportunity to walk through data from this past year as our students returned. So I almost think of when we look at doing the update of the LCAP plan almost in three phases. The first phase is the launch, where that happens around February. We open, we start talking with our parent engagement network team to talk about the different ways that we're going to engage our parents and guardian and community to figure out what's the best way. Each year we try different different things to reach out to more parents and guardians to get as much input as possible. Conversations with the superintendent happen all year long, but during this time and on, Dr. Rodriguez, when she meets with staff, looks and asks them the questions on what are some things are going well and some things that we need to change to support our students. We launched the thought exchange and the thought exchange is the platform that we use to get community input and where also members that go on it can give ratings, which we'll discuss in a little bit. And then I also engage with two parent advisory groups and then during this time I was here in front of you presenting the mid-year LCAP report in February and to give to talk about some of our metrics and the action items and the budgetary items. Phase two, March to April, continue to meet with parent advisory group, reviewed some of the initial feedback that we had received through the thought exchange as well as from our parent engagement network and also when we're meeting with parent groups, not all of them are capable, all parents and guardians are capable of or want to use the thought exchange. So with the input that we gather, whether it's by written hand, our parent engagement team does an amazing job of reaching out to parents to make sure everybody has their thoughts. Held bilingual community meetings and then work to align services and needs with our expanded learning grant. That's when we started looking at how the expanded learning grant came in with our community, what they're saying about the expanded learning grant and making sure that we're aligning and matching the services. So there's no duplicate of services and that we're really thoughtfully putting in services for the needs of our students. Phase three, May to June, met with student groups. This was a lot of fun because it was in-person this year and then finalized the draft of the LCAP plan and then tonight is the public review of the LCAP plan and then also we have the LCAP plan where public can still give some review or input or questions on it on our website which I'll give that link in a little bit. So the thought exchange survey, this year we had 944 online participants but including other participants who didn't do the thought exchange, we had roughly 1200 people who participated to give us feedback with the LCAP. With the thought exchange we had over a thousand thoughts with over 23,000, close to 24,000 ratings. This is where you're able to go in and rate other people's thoughts. Some of the committee, the community groups that I met with and the parent, we met with the district advisory committee, the DAC, we met with them twice, the migrant parent advisory committee, the district English language advisory committee, the DLI, district SELPA parent engagement network and then we had elementary and secondary student focus groups so we also make sure that we included the elementary and then three community, the bilingual community LCAP input sessions. The question that was asked was as we planned for the upcoming school year and beyond what are the most important things our district needs to think about to support students? We had lots of plans in place and we just didn't know how everything would pan out when students return this year so this was our opportunity to say did we get it right and a lot of it we did get right and what are some of the things that we might need to adjust? The words in front of you, the larger the words, the more those words appeared in the thought exchange so bathrooms, qualified, usually followed by staff, food and then environment, those were the some of the words that were put in over and over. So these are the key thoughts, these are the overall key thoughts looking at all the different subgroups and all the different categories after this I'll break it down into the different subgroups as well as the categories. So the top key thoughts, we need to make sure students feel safe using bathrooms at their schools, bathrooms need to be updated and or monitored regularly. This is something a reoccurring thing that we have had that we have heard at some board meetings and then we need to have a teacher in each classroom, this is also a reoccurring thing that we've heard and then last night I think it's extremely important to have Spanish language electives and Spanish for Spanish speakers offered in our junior high and our middle schools. So we look at the different subgroups, the first one with the students, students had a lot to say per the number of participants versus the number of thoughts they had the highest ratio so they gave us the most thoughts per participant. Field trips, better food options came up quite a bit, feminine products should be in the bathrooms, this was also a reoccurring theme. Teaching kids about the real world and the problems they will face after they graduate is so important. Have languages available to take so this goes along with the other thought and then I strongly dislike desks that have chairs attached. This was given in multiple ways of it's hard for me to get into the desk when the chairs are attached. Parent and garden family members, we need to make sure students feel safe using bathrooms. I think it's important to have the Spanish language. Joy Asol please continue to support the advanced classes, committed credentialed teachers who hold students accountable, improve facilities and grounds with facilities and then the curriculum that my student uses is not challenging and some of his teachers are not up to date with effective teaching strategies. The top key thoughts for staff, we need to have a teacher in each classroom, increase the salary for teachers and staff, teacher prep periods need to be restored, we need all teaching assignments filled, continue to hire and maintain qualified staff for the sake of our students and full-time social emotional counselors. Community members, facilities continue to keep the goals of the equity audit, ensure safety of students, start preschool programs in Spanish and not English, more tutoring for students in the AP classes, keep all fruit and vegetables organic for improved health outcomes with the food. So now breaking down into the different categories, career, college, career and life readiness which is our LCAP goal number one, make sure academic level is strong and high in the area so that students are able to compete with the students throughout the region, teaching kids about the real world, more academic resources geared toward sciences, math and technology, balance with the art focus and then resources for struggling students. How are we accelerating struggling students? Class offerings, this that we already saw one about the Spanish, please continue to support the advanced classes, the AP, high school advisory period could incorporate more advisory type development and so what they're talking about is not just homework help but introduce study skills and time management making sure all students have access to classes and the opportunities that they need. Professional development in this category we need to do a better job of teaching students how to write. I feel like teachers should check on students when they see them nervous or uncomfortable and I think they should make a better track which means that moving around within the classrooms I'm assuming and have students that care about having teachers that care about students and then quality teachers ratings on performance rather than tenure. School connected myths and positive culture, regulations about cell phone use during class, one of the things that we did notice that students they were used to having their cell phones with them when they're in distance learning and so the attachment to the learning and coming back to class they were used in different ways. Safety at school reduced violence providing a safe and productive environment field trips and having a safe and caring environment. Facilities there was lots of thoughts on facilities some of the things in a lot of it with the bathrooms or the desks so the first one's the bathrooms and proves the facilities and grounds and then the bathrooms and then the the desks and chairs and so there were some on the key thoughts. So these were just looking at the different thoughts that came across the different groups and then based on the different LCAP areas. So the draft LCAP the major change this year is the eighth goal which is so the the first eight the first seven goals are the same and the eighth goal the the additional goal is the support for students with disability and this goal we put in because it's required by ED code based on PVUSD's reoccurring eligibility for differentiated assistance. The eligibility for differentiated assistance under the California systems is if you have a student subgroup that is read in two or more categories on the 2019 California dashboard then we go into differentiated assistance. This subgroup the students with disability we were in the red with English language arts math and suspensions and graduation rate and so because of this we had to add a goal specifically for students with disability and that's the eighth goal that's placed in there. The LCAP draft some of the action highlights these are actions that either that are new or that there's going to be a focus or one that we didn't get to implement for this school year. So on goal number one the continued focus on early literacy we we saw that through we did we did a great job in distance learning when teaching teaching students with early literacy and how to read but it's not the same when you're sitting in front of a student as a teacher and so filling those gaps. Culturally responsive classroom and teaching this goes with all of our staff from our teachers our administrators and our support staff. AP course access and support that's one of the outcomes within the equity audit and it's something that we need to focus on is how do we increase access for students at the high school level and then our multi-tiered systems of support. We believe if we have a strong multi-tiered systems of support students who are struggling we can at first put in different assistance for those students before we just give up on the students and some students do as we know think differently and that this way allows us to find out which students might need something different than what's happening in the traditional classroom to help support them in their academics. Goal two, career technical education. A new action is pilot and build engineering and engineering technology pathways. That should say Watsonville High School. I don't know the D's there. Watsonville High School, Aptos High School, PV High School and New School. So this is one that we are going to be building out and for goal three it's to save the music expansion. We're adding four schools this year. We're adding Anseldo, Valencia, Rio de Mar and Eloni. This is in addition to the ones that we have in place which is Mesty, Calabasas, Bradley Hall, A.J. Hyde and McQuitty. Goal four, basic school conditions. This is a very important goal but it is the basic schools with making sure that we have appropriate credentials. We have the instructional materials and the facilities and so the school libraries is one of the ones that we added last year and we're going to continue to focus and build on our school library so students have a place during school and after school day. Goal five, support and accelerate English language learners in their academics. We're adding the International Academy at Watsonville High School and then also we've added additional English language development teachers at some secondary school sites. Goal six, the safe and supportive schools the climate. We've increased the number of social emotional counselors and the mental health commissions this year and within it we're going to continue to monitor our students needs and then the clubs and social activities extra work assignments for our school staff. Because of some of the COVID restrictions we were not able to fully implement the additional clubs and social activities and so this year there's going to be a large focus on making sure that we have money set aside for extra work assignments for our staff so that we can run the clubs and social activities. And then for goal seven, one of the items that we were not able to do this past year that we're going to have focus are family engagement plans. We're asking all school sites to complete a family engagement plan on what are the different ways that we are that we are going to partner with our parents and guardians to making sure that there we have empowered education with the families and it's more of a partnership. And then for goal eight, both the actions are new because it is a new goal. First one, support personnel for students with disabilities. This is the cost for the support personnel that we have within the classrooms. And then the second action is the inclusive instructional setting expansion with push and support services for students so that they're in the for our students to be in the least restrictive environment. So those are some of the highlights. The draft 2022-23 LCAP is up on the website and so if you on our main web page, there is a place where you can click on to where it says draft LCAP. And then on the draft LCAP, it'll take you to the draft LCAP that's both in English and Spanish. And then if any community members would like to ask questions or provide input, then you click the button on questions feedback about the draft draft LCAP and then that goes goes in and then I receive the questions and I will be responding. And what's next? I'm here for the public hearing and then at our next board meeting, we take it for for board approval. Thank you. And I heard McCona. Yeah, I thought he I thought he was timing you. That's funny. Do we do we have any public speakers to this? We do. We have two. We have Laura Asaro and Chris Webb. Thank you. Good evening, Dr. Rodriguez and everybody here on the board. It's nice to see you. And Lisa, I want to commend you on this report because I read through a lot of this LCAP control accountability and it's it's very involved. It's very involved. Um, so I'm Laura Azaro and I'm with H. A. Hyde Elementary School. I'm a reading intervention teacher and I was I am here to address the possibility of reading intervention teachers being pulled from elementary schools to fill positions that are not filled yet for next year. And this LCAP report took an incredible amount of time and energy and incorporated lots and lots of stakeholders as you can see. And the highlights of this report indicate that English language learners. I mean, one of the goals is to provide a multi tiered system to support our students at all of the schools. We have base funding for it. We got we received extra funding for it for three years. Additional reading intervention teachers were hired. Additional classified staff was hired. And I'm happy to report anecdotally and through our maps, our NWA map data of which is one of the data points that we used to see how we did this year after the horrific loss from last year is that it's working. We have a very tight multi tiered system working really hard on it. And it's been difficult to implement at times because of how much is involved. The multi tiered approach, the different reports that we fill out for the students during the year to make sure they're meeting goals, the ones that are falling behind. It would just be a shame to see people that are working so closely to our students for the last two years disappear in order to solve a problem that there might be other options for. Thank you, Laura. Hi, Chris. I wanted to thank the district for their their thought exchanges. I feel like that's a really meaningful way to get everybody's involvement. And I also want to thank Dr. Rodriguez for even besides that doing the Q&As. Again, I hear from all different staff and they do seem to take those to heart and appreciate it. A couple of things that I heard renaissance students like in person say that I saw echoed. I don't know if they did the thing or not, but they definitely do want a Spanish teacher, like a real person, not ingenuity. Also, the field trips. We had some success with that this year. Well, just historically we have, but then again this year. And we used to, way back in the day, pre-COVID, you could to have like a big trip or have more capacity. Teachers would sometimes employ their personal vehicle, you know, doing all the paperwork and everything. I'm not sure if COVID nicks that, but I would hope that that could be restored because I do have teachers coming to me saying like, hey, I want to be a part of your next one. And then a couple things for goal four, for renaissance, we still need a long-term water solution where we like not just the two ROs, but like where every tap that I wash my hands out of has trustworthy water, Soco Creek Water District, ideally, connect with them. And then goal six, seven, and eight, every single one of those would be served by our old, our previous award-winning system. You notice that they, part of the thing on here from a student, I think it was, was about accountability and standards. That goes with it. But then also there was all the opportunities that it brought. And you know, if you want teachers to not be drained, they got to feel supported. And I mean, the phone thing goes with that too. We need to make sure admin are going to be confident enough to do their part on phones to support teachers. Thank you. Thank you. That was our last speaker. Okay. And next we'll have any comments or questions from our board members? Jen, home. Hi there.  And other than listening to these reports, which I encourage, what would be the best way for members of the community to be involved in local decisions on a regular basis? If they are a member of their, of the school community, where they are and have students on the community, I would say is to attend the meeting school site council or attend parent meetings to give their input. There's also some schools offer coffee with the soup, coffee with the principal. And so that's another opportunity. If they are not part of the school and they're part of the school community, it's making sure that their voices are heard as we do the thought exchange and we hold the community meetings throughout the year. Thank you. Jen Schacher. I just wanted to say that I liked that we were able to do some online things this year with the LCAP. And I think that helps parents participation. And I was really happy to hear how much student participation we had, because after all, we're here for the students. So hearing their input and really invokes what changes we need to be made. And, you know, we've heard, like you said at board meetings, that some of these things on the LCAP are the goals of the community and students. So I think you did a great job in putting this together. And I definitely support our moving forward on a lot of these. Thank you. Trustee Roscoe, do you have any comments? No? Okay, I have a couple of questions. They're a little bit granular, so I apologize. But you said something about on the goal around school libraries. You said something about build out. And I'm wondering what is planned for the build out of our school libraries. So when I said build out, it's in two ways. It's looking at the library collection to make sure. So some of our library collections were antiquated. And so we're looking at the average, like the average, what is it? Age? Average age of the books that are in the, and then also we look at the average reading level. And then we look at that based on the school level it's at. So that's one thing is making sure that our library collections are up to date. The second thing is we're looking at to making sure that there are spaces within the library so that students can have a collaborative space or they can have individual areas. Rolling Hills is a great example right now where the librarian was one of our innovators of the year. Did an amazing and beautiful job in adding a maker space and adding, really looking at having a collaborative individual. And you can do even a litter, a lit circle within the library. And so it's just making them more up to date. So when I'm talking about build out, we're looking at the individual as we go along. We wanted to start with our secondary school sites because we need more spaces for students to attend after school for their tutoring and having a space where they feel like they want to be and not where it's just a... That's great. I know that some of our libraries have been updated and others have and it would be great to actually, let's put this on the agenda as a report in about what all the junior highs look like with pictures, what is planned, how much is allocated. I think that would be a great presentation in the future. And then you said something about adding an international academy to Watsonville High. Can you... I know maybe that's been presented before. I don't really remember the detail on that though. Can you talk about what that is and... So the international academy is for students who are new to our country who have been here within 24 months and so what it is is extra support services for both the students and the families. We currently have the program at Rolling Hills Middle School and this past year we've seen an increase in the number of students who are newcomers or new to our country and so because of this we wanted to add the services at the high school and so Watsonville High School was our choice of where this program goes into. It's not just available to students who are at Watsonville High School so if you're a student and you're within the Parro Valley High School attendance area we do provide bus services if you qualify for the program and your family want you to be part of it. Families it's not required for families to be part of the international academy and it is a family choice. Thanks for the clarification on that. That's really lovely. Years ago Catholic Charities used to run a group and have services for newcomer families and we used to fund part of that. It was a very small contribution like five thousand dollars and at some point when we got into budget problems we cut that funding to them. Be really nice to include some stakeholder partners in the community who are also serving that same population so I would encourage us to look for those champions out there in the community to help with this great idea. The Family Engagement and Wellness Center is a great connection and so our counselor who will help support students and their families will look for the services within the community as well. That's great. You said something else that I had a question about push and support services I think for for students with disabilities? Yes. So students with disabilities in the in the there's pull out where students are segregated and separated from the rest of the class. Push in if students push in services is where students would attend a general education classroom. Sometimes students depending on where they are may need an adult instructional associate or somebody else to attend the class with them to whatever supports are needed. Sometimes it is it can be anywhere from like a differentiation in that and when there are assignment that's being asked of them but the push in is that students aren't separated and instead they are with students in a general education classroom. So I could be a student who qualifies for SDC services but my math level is actually higher so I would go to if I was in middle school I would go to a general education classroom for my math but it doesn't mean that I could survive on my own and I might need someone to go with me or I might need to make sure that I have a calculator or something else that I would need so that I am supported within the classroom general education environment and so this would be the least restrictive environment because yeah it is yeah. So we're going to be funding extra aids. We already fund. No so this is we fund so within it we fund the aids and this is we're not adding additional aids. We add personnel or services based on students individual needs which are in the IEP which is a team decision and so we don't add. So we're just simply then calling out something we're already doing but we're not it's not an ad correct. So we're it's services that we're already doing. Okay then my next question sorry to interrupt you. The next question is about I know we get concentration grants for foster youth concentration funds yeah sorry concentration funds for foster kids and I'm not sure we've had a report recently about what how much money is being spent on that particular group and what the outcomes have been. So maybe that can go on the agenda too and for future. Yeah what we can do is we've been asked during the data special board study session to do subgroups so we'll make sure that foster youth is included on that data set. That's great. Yeah and I'd like to talk to him potentially and that well I don't know if this is the right but you said something about we're in the red for for children with just students with disabilities and foster kids for suspensions expulsions and something else. It was just students with disabilities. She mentioned foster. Yeah we are in the red with foster but for the students with disabilities we have it it's from the 2019 California dashboard uh-huh because then the CASP testing was suspended and so the metrics will are it's one of the metrics and it shows it's broken down by subgroups within goal one and also goal five and so we do make sure that we break down the subgroups as well and so in the meeting the data meeting when we come into August we will. Okay yeah it'd be great to hear more about that and help to understand better. Thank you. Okay any other questions from board members? With that I'll close this public hearing. Thank you Lisa. Next is Mr. Clint Rucker our Chief Business Officer who will be presenting on the 2022-2023 proposed budget and the 2021-2022 estimated actuals. Thank you President D'Serba. This is also sorry this is a public hearing as well so sorry I need to open the public hearing. Thank you. You may proceed. Thank you President D'Serba, Board of Trustees and Dr. Rodriguez. So what a year it's been I mean we're already back in June doing another budget and I'm excited I do love doing budgets but I thought I would share a little fun picture this is my wife and I on a roller coaster which is about how I felt this year has been and also how this budget process has been typically the budget process is a little bit more normalized this year it's just it's been nothing but crazy this I think the last week I spent probably about 30 hours just reading different budget documents seeing what people are saying seeing what the legislature wants to do versus the governor so it's been quite the experience so go ahead and jump into it so we are going to talk about the May revise because again that is the budget that the governor actually proposed back in May we didn't do an update because we are going to share it today so I'll start there so in the actual May revision this is what we had that was new from what we saw actually in January so we saw a 6.56 cost of living adjustment that's the statutory COLA so that's what's owed to the district regardless of what the governor wants to do with any additional funds that is what's actually owed to the district very nice to see that they are including special education there's oftentimes that we see special education isn't included in that full COLA they are included in the full COLA we see a 5.38 COLA in 2324 and a 4% COLA in 2425 so those of you have been following budgets for a long time know that those are pretty high COLA numbers to see three years in a row so exciting to see that in the budget exciting to see that the governor is putting that money towards schools again statutory COLA is required by Prop 98 so it means the state's doing very well right now we also saw the proposed declining enrollment relief which was seen in January that's that average to kind of smooth out that transition as we see declining enrollment each year we also saw a brand new proposal in the mayor's vision which was ADA relief specifically for 21-22 so recognizing that statewide we're down about six percent in ADA across the state so pretty significant drop from what we normally see so just giving us a quick dartboard projection you see up above that's January 2022 that's what we used to have in at first interim that's what we had and at second or at secondary room excuse me and then May 2022 so this is the May revised we see those new COLA numbers coming in so increases across the board see about a 1.3 increase in 2223 almost a 2% or just over a 2% no just under 2% in 2324 and then just a slight increase in 2425 so declining enrollment relief let's talk about that really quick what does that look like for our district so what what the proposal is is that beginning in 2223 right now the district has two options for calculating our average daily attendance for funding so our ADA our actual funded ADA one is that we can use our current ADA for the year or we can use last year's ADA typically if you're declining enrollment you're always using last year's ADA because it's higher if you're increasing in students you're using current your ADA that's always for since I've been in school is the only way that the state has allowed you to use ADA so actuals from 2223 or actual ADA from 2122 they're now adding a new option which is our average ADA based on the prior three years so similar to what we do with our unduplicated percentage they're saying knowing that the state is in declining enrollment we want to smooth that decline you'll probably all remember me talking about 2223 having that cliff that ADA cliff where we kind of lose the whole harmless this is kind of changing it from a cliff to more of a slope so now it's slowly we continue to see that decline but doesn't hit us all in one year so what would that look like for us using this type of model so you see our ADA from 2019-20, 2021 all the way through 2223 we did have that hold harmless which is why our 1920 and our 2021 actually were pretty high and then our 2122 you see that big drop drop that's because of that we didn't quite get a six percent we did see about a four to five percent decrease in our normal ADA and then you see that actually 2223 we expect would have been higher even though we're declining enrollment because we expect ADA to get better as we kind of move away again a lot of that not our fault right we had quarantines that were required by the state wasn't something that we were wanting but again we are also encouraging families if you have sick children we don't want to spread the virus we don't want people in school when they're sick so again a noticeable decrease in 2122 but understandable why so using that average we would actually take the average of that 1920 through 2122 and you would see that current law we'd be picking 2223 our current year because that would actually be slightly higher but using this average we'd actually be able to pick the 16124 so we'd actually see an increase of about 900 ADA and I highlighted that it wasn't actually highlighted originally and I'm highlighting it for a reason and I'll get back to it just remember that 942 number so the governor's May revision had another proposal in it so this proposal was what everyone's everyone in our world has been referring to as the attendance yield solution so what he said is we recognize that in 2122 you had historically low ADA so you can see our ADA in 2122 is 90.82 percent in 1920 which just was about our last normal year we can look at right now 94.63 percent so about a four percent drop so what the governor recognizes that 90.82 percentage really isn't accurate as to what probably would happen in a normal year typically to get to that percentage you take your ADA you divide it by your enrollment that's your percentage what the governor has said we could do for 2122 is actually say take your old ADA percentage and multiply that by your enrollment to actually come up to your ADA so rather than using your actual ADA use what you normally would get in a percentage and multiply it now I don't expect the board to remember all of this or understand all of how to calculate it just want to show the transparency of what the governor's kind of been proposing now using just this model you could see that our ADA for 2122 would go from 15074 up to 15669 so about a 595 ADA increase so to make it more confusing the governor decided well it's not enough to give you ADA relief and give you an average you actually use the ADA relief when you calculate your average so now we have an ADA relief on top of our average so to do the funding calculation Colleen and I worked together and we sat there and Colleen actually got a video of me doing it I was trying to get down the numbers and how it all works it was actually a lot more confusing than we thought it would be I'm the worst part too is we actually reach out to the COE and I'm like hey we're doing this this is how we think it's done what do you think they're like you're the only district who's actually putting in the work to do that calculation and I'm like oh Leanne should I not be doing it she goes no it's great that you're doing it she goes I'm just surprised that our biggest district is actually putting in the work to do them that so a lot of fun actually doing it we got to kind of use that unfortunately normally you use the LCFF calculator to put in and so it does the calculations and you can ensure that what you're doing is correct unfortunately the LCFF calculator always wants to take the greater of the prior or the current year so you can't actually do the average because it'll always end up picking the current year because that average will keep going up or the prior year so we actually had to do it manually but we we did end up going through and doing it manually so we use that 21-22 with the ADA relief that 15669 and then we took the average based on 1920 and 2021 so we actually averaged it out to get our new average ADA for this year we also did that for that two out years as well we calculated out that average each year so again quite confusing I don't expect you to fully you know remember it and also I will put in this caveat legislature actually says we want to do away with that ADA relief so we did all this math and all this work and now the legislature is like well let's not use that ADA relief so we're going to probably end up at 45 days seeing a different number coming through but what you see is it would have been an 1140 increase realistically if we take out that relief it's going to be a still about a 900 increase that 942 you saw earlier so just know I think the big takeaway is there is ADA relief proposed in May as well as declining enrollment protection when you combine them we could see anywhere between 900 to 1100 more ADA so which is great for us I will say that the legislature budget that proposes removing this ADA relief does propose using that money to increase the COLA so it's actually not a bad thing for us and budget budgetarily it will not be a decrease for us if anything we'd see an increase from that so getting into multi-year just to again clarify these are based on that ADA relief and that declining enrollment protection so again just that just for transparency that's how we built it out you can see our beginning balance we do see a big decrease in 22-23 that is spending down a lot of one-time money we did have one-time funding that we spent down so that is where you see that in 23-24 that decrease actually goes down significantly to about 477,000 and then you'll see that spike back up in 24-25 and you might ask well how's it go back up we're continually getting COLA as well two things one that kind of ADA cliff we talk about well they've pushed it back to 24-25 so we're still seeing kind of that big drop in the revenues the other big piece that we're seeing too is all of the one-time positions that we added using our ESSER funding so that's the IAS our reading intervention teachers virtual academy teachers we also had social emotional supports mental health clinicians a lot of great things we did for students and I know the board wants to find a way to continue those so being that we know there's a 45 day revision coming this is going to change drastically we didn't want to make any drastic decisions and talk to the board about where do we reduce if we want to reduce that deficit spending because I think it's premature to do that until we actually see what comes from the governor's office unfortunately with school finance we have this odd cart before the horse build a budget even though you don't have the governor's budget to actually build a budget off of you have nothing signed so we're doing the best we can with the information we have but we know it changes and this year in particular has been a very strange year and some of the differences which I'll get to later from the legislature's office are it's a little insane to see what they're proposing versus what's in the budget normally we see very small differences we see the legislature sticking their heels in on a small amount of money for the entire state right now they're sticking their heels in about really big dollars and we'll kind of get into what that looks like so just to always go through we always do look at our contributions you'll see contributions our special ed contribution continues to stay pretty steady they are getting a cola which helps it from increasing but again as they do get that cola they do see increased cost as well and in 2425 that extra jump is due to the some of those positions that we added for special education as well that were one-time positions that would end up coming off the books off of general fund and into or off of our restricted and back into our general fund restricted routine maintenance based on our expenditures that's why it ends up going up our scholarship is as always our personnel commission is generous enough to donate their what would normally be their stipends to a scholarship so we actually move that to a separate fund DTI does have a contribution it's one of our only charge that does they are working on reducing that they were of course hit hard by COVID as well they're getting some ADA support in the budget in the new budget and hopefully I know that Marcia has been at it you know very very passionately advocating for students and trying to get her numbers up so she's hoping to work that down as well and then healthy start you might wonder why it's coming off the books in 2425 when we've had it for so many years this is really just an accounting process typically we have employees who do work for healthy start but we have them to make them full-time employees we also have them do some work that's really more general fund activities so we end up contributing to healthy start to say we'll pay for our share of those employees we're going to actually start coding them 5050 or 4060 depending on what they are so you won't see a contribution but that's one of those other reasons you see general fund go up a little bit so what's not in our budget that was included in the May revise so as we're looking through the May revise one thing I want to remind the board and one thing that we hear a lot from the COE when I'm talking with them is the May revision is a proposal it's not law so everything in this budget other than the statutory COLA which pretty consistently is what it is is a proposal by the governor the legislature is then going to take that proposal look at it and propose their own budget they'll meet again and then they'll sign off on a budget so some things we didn't include the big three really were the additional COLA of 3.3 percent so again that's not a statutory COLA that was a governor's proposal the one time discretionary block grant which was proposed by the governor we didn't include that and I'll get into the reasons in a little bit and then the facilities funding that we've heard about there's a over three years funding provided for facilities and then the unknown we also didn't include so one time ELOP infrastructure funding this was first brought in in May revised there's been very little information about it we don't know how the funding would be allocated we don't know if it's by ADA we don't know if it's an application process so we did not include that TK add-on funding this is again a brand new proposal in May revised we don't know if it'll pass through the legislature it does offer an additional 2800 per TK ADA so great news for us for our TK going towards universal TK however it's unclear if the legislature will actually support that and then lastly is the transportation grant that is simply because we never include the grants that are included in the budget because they are by application and you're not guaranteed the money even though this one is the governor is planning to guarantee an set amount per school you still do need to apply and ensure that you actually qualify so let's talk about the big three first so the LCFF funding proposal you can see these are the three that actually um when we looked at May revised this is what we are hearing so the May revision included 2.1 billion for ongoing funding that translated to that 3.3 percent COLA that was part of it um the assembly actually wanted a 15 percent total COLA and they wanted to increase um the number of students identified as low income by increasing the poverty level to 250 percent of the federal poverty level and then the senate wanted to do five billion of ongoing growing to 10 billion well we actually did see the legislature's proposal they met with the senate they talked and it looks like they're actually their solution is 16.2 percent COLA and removing that ADA relief so we won't see that ADA being able to use our old percentage for our average we're just going to have to take our actual um ADA for 2122 now that being said I can tell you doing quick math a 16.2 percent COLA is much better than ADA relief because while the ADA relief is great for three years that fourth year that ADA relief goes away that COLA doesn't go away unless they reduce it so that COLA is ongoing so we would actually love to see the legislature win over on this one and have the governor go with their proposal discretionary block grant so the main reason we didn't put in the discretionary block grant is for us in finance discretionary means discretionary we spend it on whatever the board has determined the best use of those funds is the assembly has said we want it to be a learning recovery block grant and we don't specify an amount they actually didn't know what that amount would be and the senate wanted um a little bit more confusing of a formula that they spread it over for COVID related learning recovery what ended up happening once again is it seems like the assembly in the senate kind of met in the middle and they're proposing 8.5 billion so they are increasing it for something they're calling the learning loss discretionary block grant which honestly is one of the weirdest title it's either a discretionary block grant or it's not so a learning loss discretionary block grant it's a little odd sounds like they want it to go towards personnel as well as increases in purse and stir so we didn't put that in the budget because again we don't feel it's a fair representation of where those dollars are going to go if we don't know the parameters of where we can spend them so to say we received you know for us I would guess by quick math over just over 20 million dollars I don't want to put 20 million dollars in revenue and say here's where I'm spending it just to find out that the governor ends up saying you can't spend it in any of those areas so we did leave that out but again that's what our 45 day revisions for and again it's it's a little bit odd of a budget where we'll see a lot of changes at that 45 day revised and then lastly is facility funding one of the biggest pieces in facilities funding that I was excited about was the 1.7 billion of one-time money for deferred maintenance so that's going towards our maintenance department to kind of do some of those ongoing repairs of our facilities not necessarily brand new projects but just ongoing repairs that we see with aging facilities is super valuable unfortunately after the Assembly and the Senate met they did not go with the fully funding TK and childcare they actually went with pretty much what the Senate wanted to do in going with 4.5 billion they are not doing the TK and the deferred maintenance though they're planning on doing 4.5 billion over four years instead of over three years so again more money for facilities but not necessarily money for deferred maintenance so we'll see how that pans out with the legislature and the governor on this one I would hope we get a little bit closer to what the May revision is it gives us more money immediately to work on facility our aging facilities as well as three years of facility funding so what did in looking at what did I find and when speaking with Colleen what did we think and kind of agree on what did we think was missing from the May revision so what did we want to see that the governor did not include so one is purses and stirs pension relief so the state's no longer subsidizing any pension increases so as they increase the district will be eating all of those costs purses actually for the first time in a long time going to increase employee contributions for their new members so you can kind of see how bad really the increases are being when they're actually pushing it off to members because they know it's such a large amount and we'll see some pretty significant increases in 22 23 transportation funding I'll get to that soon that's one that I know when I learned about it and kind of saw how underfunded transportation was it was a huge shock to me and then unduplicated pupil percentage I won't go into much detail on this one I went into detail in January this is where you see the universal meals coming through which is again I can't express enough how great that is for our students to be able to get meals regardless of their their income at home to be able to get a free meal when they come to school however knowing that we use some of those applications for free meals to be able to determine eligibility for unduplicated pupils how are we going to be able to continue to do that and emphasize the parents the importance of filling those out to get more funding for their schools and their students and then ELLP funding allocations which originally May revise was considering taking it from a 2,500 and a 1,500 model so any district that was over 80 unduplicated like ourselves would get 2,500 anyone below that would get 1,500 per student they the governor actually proposed doing 2,500 for all students regard all districts regardless of how many students they had in the unduplicated count so while that's great for other districts does not help us at all and its money spent that doesn't help us the legislative legislature is actually proposing increasing that 2,500 to 3,000 so we would actually see an increase in the legislature's proposal not in the May revise so we'll see how that one pans out as well so just a quick look at our what do our employer contribution rates look like so you can see the big one in 22, 23 is PERS going up about 2.4% so about a 10% increase on PERS pretty significant STRS goes up about 2% as well 2.2% but they actually stay steady and it's projected that their rates are going to stay steady all the way through 2046 so great news actually on that STRS side with the exception of next year where we do see a pretty significant increase so transportation funding so transportation funding is severely underfunded we talk a lot about how severely our special education department's underfunded and how it is at the federal level underfunded transportation actually has not changed their funding formula since I think it's 1983 1987 around there it's been it's been over 30 years and they haven't changed it because they haven't required home to school transportation so while we receive about 2.6 million dollars in transportation funding we spend about 11.2 million dollars to transport the students we transport because we do transport a lot of our low income our students that we know need to get to school that's one of the priorities is making sure they get to school so they can be educated so we do invest that much the board has continued to support investing that much in transportation what we are hearing is that the legislature is actually proposing a 2 1.2 billion dollars and they're going to start requiring home to school transportation starting in 2728 so that'll mean is any tk6 will need to be transported as well as any low income students so for us while a lot of districts are looking at this and saying oh god how would we ever do this for us it's actually great news because we're doing a lot of this we're providing a lot of these supports it just means they'll finally be funding us on these so again fingers crossed let's hope that the legislature wins out on this one because we could really use some transportation funding and then what are some of our upcoming budget challenges again no relief on the purse and stirs those continue to rise so as we continue to do raises or we continue to hire staff each time we're paying those statutory those purse and stirs and as those continue to rise it now means purse is almost going to be rather than about 35 cents on the dollar so every time we spend a dollar we actually spend 135 for purse it's going to be a closer to 40 percent so that kind of hidden cost when we look at salary and we say it's 50,000 we say well got to pay all the purse on it you have to have 40 percent to that so it starts to really be significant um we are continuing to see increases to help them welfare um specifically 22 23 we're estimating around a five percent increase I believe sys has us estimated just below five right now but again that's their estimate so we did estimate at five percent and then the expiration of that esser funding so you saw that third year where we kind of see that jump one thing I do want to clarify is it may seem like you're not very concerned about that esser funding expiring in that third year I just don't want to count my chickens before they've hatched right I I really want to look at what happens with the legislature's budget and what happens at our 45 day revised let's see really what happens if we get that either that 3.3 additional cola if we get that 16.2 cola do they do the ad relief we have a lot of questions in the air right now that we want answered but again I'll be presenting that to the board we will be doing a 45 day revision and that'll be either July or August depending on when the governor signs his budget and when we have to actually provide you with that 45 day revision so then lastly our next steps at the 22nd meeting so in two weeks we will be proposing this budget for adoption to the board and then the 45 day revise which we're estimating right now August 10th we think I mean it will be pretty miraculous if the governor and legislature actually sign on June 15th rarely ever see it done they always seem to find a way to extend it and then get it right before they have to get paid in July so then you'll see our unordered actuals and then of course first interim kind of giving you an update of where we are so just a note that August 10th is usually the special board study session for my evaluation so what we would have to do is make it open session for the 45 day revise we did this actually two years ago 45 day revise at that meeting and then go into closed session at that point so I just wanted to make that note in case later on you guys say hey that's not an actual regular board meeting that is accurate we would have to convert it to be partial open session and then that's it so I'm happy to hear questions from the public as well as the board thank you are there any speakers to this item we do not have speakers to this item okay and questions from the board members Jen Holm thank you Clint much appreciated so this is more of a statement than a question but I think it's important that we as a board and the public be aware of what you know the current LCFF proposal means and you know when I was speaking to our state legislators in the last couple of weeks I spoke about the need for addressing like the COVID-19 ADA pitfall better support for PERS and STERS you know our retirement plans and fully funding the transportation proposals and basically as the assembly the senate and the governor are wrangling out the final details you know we need to be aware that one school of thought is to have that larger LCFF which covers some of the unfunded or partially funded mandates or to parse out funding to specific programs and when things get finalized we will just need to be mindful of what strings are attached and how those knots are tied this part is a question and that is that when we get to the 45-day revision just if you would please include in your report like how much of you know whatever the final you know LCFF is is how it's utilized by some of these unfunded or partially funded mandates I would appreciate that absolutely yeah and just to speak that briefly some of those we've heard a lot about the community day school is that unfortunately is one of the ones that would be unfunded in the legislatures proposal because they're using some of that money to your point to fund their other proposals so absolutely I'm happy to include that in the presentation okay of course I have a question so it looks to me like we're going to get potentially a bucket full of extra money that we didn't have before which is exciting and we have so many competing needs in this district right so my question for you Clint is can any of this extra money received be used for one time off salary allocation to teachers or staff so under both proposals both the governor's current one was the legislature yes there is room to be able to use that one time funding and if the board so wish to commit funding to salaries one time we would be able to do that we would of course have to negotiate it with our union CSCA and PVFT as every salary increases negotiated but if the board did want to use that funding for one time increases absolutely the funding would be able to be used for that okay thank you and and I think we're looking forward to hearing the proposed budget in 45 yeah because this it's just it's very confusing I mean I watched a video from the capital advisors group on the May revise which I was going to send through you guys all both saw it yeah but it's so different even today than it was presented on absolutely it's it's I mean I was talking with my brother about it and just sharing the frustrations of like I have to present a budget that I know is almost now wrong because the governor's come out and said here's what I want to do and the legislature said but we want to do all these other things yeah and typically as I noted you see small shifts you see a 300 million dollar statewide program that gets shifted from one to another you rarely see an eight billion dollar change of we're going to change it from here to there I guess I'll say it's a matter of perspective because I've been sitting in the seat when it was a horrible horrible news I mean this is actually good news just we're not quite sure how to you know the piece of the pie like how it's going to be split so anyway thank you for your presentation and this public hearing is now well actually Jen shocker do you have anything any questions no okay public hearing is now concluded thank you yeah okay next up is item 6.3 a special education local plan and this is this a public hearing as well yes so we're open this public hearing hi Heather like Heather Gorman good evening president to Serpa Dr. Rodriguez board of trustees thank you this is another public hearing to present our local budget and service plan and I'm in charge so we have three sections to go over tonight with the annual budget plan and I did want to go over some grants that we received and then this section E the annual service plan so a little bit about the special education local plan area or people refer to as SELPA special education we have some requirements on how we are supposed to use our money and these are some of the areas where we're looking at child find that means like really looking at what students do need special education services we have assurances policies and procedures that we have the CDE comes in and looks at and make sure that we have those we have our annual service plan and our budget plan which is tonight and then we have our state and federal program and fiscal reports so our annual budget plan so each SELPA must have a responsible agency or an administrative unit and because we're a single SELPA district that is Dr. Rodriguez and then I would be one of her designees so that's um we get the funding from the state from federal funds we have local contributions that comes into our SELPA we have the RLA and the U unit and then we have to provide the services to support the students so about this special education budget you may have heard some of this from Clint's report when you're looking at the general education we're all starting the same so we have the same amount of money for both students with disabilities and students without disabilities to start and then we have our state contribution and then we have our federal contribution and then the local contribution so you may ask why does it cost so much to fund special education so some of this is because general increases in staff and staff salaries and pension costs account for about a third of the recent increases in special education and then the remaining two thirds are due to a rise of incidents of students with relatively severe disabilities and specifically autism so as you can see here we have had an increase in autism from the 2000 to 2001 school year where we had basically one in 600 students in 97 to 98 compared to one in 50 students and the 17-18 school year and pvusd you can see that from the 19 to 20 school year we have 176 206 and then to 19 students and this is just students that have the primary disability of autism not a secondary or doctor's diagnosis so this is how our budget is kind of breaking out when you look at it we have most of our budget is going to certificated and classified salaries and benefits with the benefits and the salaries almost half of what that total cost is and then we have about eight percent going to services and supplies and then they put it this way so I just put it how they did the other out go and financing is about 2.87 percent oops so this year we did see some small increases 10 percent from our federal revenue our state revenue is at 35 percent and then our local contribution is at 55 percent of our total budget and I looked back from last year compared to this year and you see it's about the same even though last year we were at 9 percent and we went up to 10 percent in our federal and our state did about the same our local went down but it was up a little bit more so we're staying pretty much the same when you're looking at that from year to year and the one thing I did want to note unlike our our general declining enrollment special education is not declining we're staying pretty steady in our numbers okay so I wanted to talk a little bit about some recent grants and grant overview that we've had in special education so we have one time funds with learning recovery funds and this is additional support for students with special needs we had eight different areas that we needed to look at to say that we were supporting our students in those specific needs some of them were child find activities catching up on testing looking at how we're supporting our students with learning loss so we have those funds they will end in 2023 and then we also have a grant that's called the alternative dispute resolution which they actually increased this year so that that money is really based given to the SELPA to really focus on parent relationships building parent relationships and helping us support if we are in dispute with for any reason and how do we support staff train and hopefully not get into dispute and then the last two are about our infant are zero to three population that we serve in our district and so we were looking at having to have a decrease in funds right now our general contribution to the infant zero to three population is about a half a million dollars so we didn't want the decrease to happen so we filled out the infant waiver and we did receive that and there's also an infant grant that we can receive I did fill that out and apply for that grant we can get up to a hundred thousand dollars for that I just don't know and I can maybe report back hopefully with good news at some point that we did get some or all of that grant and then the last part of this plan is the annual service plan and this is just basically we have to go through every single service that we provide in the district do a description of the service and then we have to do a description of any service that we don't provide so the plan includes a description of all the services we provide for students age zero to 22 and the services and any services that we don't have or we don't have the need for at this time and why we we maybe wouldn't have the need at this time and so this is just a snapshot of all of the services that we have I'm not going to go into all of these and their descriptions because we would be here for a lot longer than you'd want to be so you know I for a couple examples we have like the 330 which is almost you know in every single school is that's the other part of it it's looked at by every single school what services you provide and so that specialized academic instruction and this means adapting and the instruction to address the unique needs of children with disabilities but then we have some that maybe are not in every school like 735 or we have rail transcription for visually impaired students visually impaired students are students with low incidence disabilities so we don't have as many students that are visually impaired along with like deaf and hard of hearing some of our low incidence students so we have all of those and in the actual report it talks about you know where this where the services are and a description of all of them and this is my report are there any speakers to this item we have no speakers okay are there any comments or questions from our board oh sorry yes Jen yeah um if you don't have this information right now I'm fine if it's you know communicated later but I'm curious do you happen to know how our percentage of local contribution compares to districts with other with similar characteristics yeah we I actually did that last year and I didn't do it this year so I can go back and look from what I presented last year it was very similar and it's very similar throughout the state that you know we compare about the same you know in the state of California with the local contribution being about half of no so I bet I can go back and get some specifics thanks I'd appreciate that any questions on the side no okay um do you write all the grants in your department for the SELPA I have for the last couple of them they're not um the they're not intense grants like ones that Andrea Willie would help support I mean they haven't been like they they involve some some you know putting things together but I wouldn't say they've been real intense to write because you know I've done a lot of grant writing and I know there are there are monies out there that we could apply for as a district um I think offset some of our costs I'm just wondering if you do need more support in your department to apply for these big grants at the state and federal level I have been applying for the ones that I've seen and known about that come through like state SELPA reaches out and says oh there's these grants let's go for it so those are the ones that I've done this year um like the ADA and the infant grant and so okay thank you there's help we can always take it yeah thank you I just want to make sure we get every dollar we're eligible for okay thanks very much great report the conclusion of the public hearing thank you one more public hearing this is item 6.4 public hearing of board appointed personnel commissioner opening the public hearing hi Pam good evening president to SERPA board members and dr Rodriguez um yes the item before you tonight is the public hearing for the board appointed personnel commissioner it does give the public the opportunity to express their views on the qualifications of the person that the board has announced as their appointee to serve on the unexpired term of the personnel commission mr Ocasio bryan was announced at your April board meeting as your recommendation and later in the agenda I will ask that the board approve him appoint him to the position of personnel commissioner are there any speakers to this item none and any comments from the board no okay great thanks Pam public hearing now closed next up on our agenda is item 7.1 our visitor non-agenda items this is two minutes each and this is a public comment time to talk about anything that is not on the agenda okay it's under this item we have four speakers so we have Bill Beecher followed by Lucia Herrera Veronica Gallagher and Chris Webb good evening madam president dr Rodriguez trustees and staff um I really enjoy the early part of these meetings where you discuss what you've been involved in and engaged in because it gives us the community a sense of how engaged you are in this district unfortunately only four of the seven really report on anything substantive about education several of the three who aren't engaged talk about being you know going to social functions flipping hamburgers that bothers me I'm a taxpayer we're all taxpayers almost everybody in this room is here because we want to see better education for our students so my question is is what the heck are the other three doing here is it for medical benefits they sure as heck aren't here to promote better education because I don't see any engagement and we have two that aren't even here now I proposed several months ago that you amend your bylaws to actually take steps against those who aren't actively engaged I would suggest that you look at that again thank you thank you next uh it's Lucia Herrera here she comes good evening good evening I'm Lucia Herrera Baba teacher at Ames elementary I'm requesting that virtual art teachers Baba teachers have no more than 10 classes when we have 11 or more classes we have to prep for 264 potential students I may have this year this coming year about 250 potential students and that is a lot we do not have enough time to prep especially with no subs available like this year those who know me they will know that I'm not afraid of working hard but yes I'm afraid of not being able to give our students what they deserve due to our workload due to our workload I had this problem before and I know that this is not doable by doing this we are set to fail not for success I was able to deal with this in the past thanks to Dr Rodriguez who opened her door and gave a solution to our problem I'm very very very likely to have a great administrators in our site and that is also thanks to Dr Rodriguez who also opened the door for that problem but this problem has to be solved at the district level not at any site you have to change your contract if you want to keep teachers in our district especially Baba teachers thank you very much for your time thank you thank you so we have Veronica Gallagher followed by Chris Webb hi I'm Veronica Gallagher I work at HA Hyde elementary school I've been there about 26 years teaching second grade and you know it's been the honor of my life to work with the students we have they're amazing they're brilliant and the families are so hardworking and dedicated and it was their positive attitudes that helped me through these last two years these last two years have been very very challenging um anxiety has been extremely high for all of us so many students and staff members including myself got COVID there were so many student and staff absences in addition we had very few substitutes teachers who were able to come were called on regularly to cover other classrooms taking on extra students even in the special ed classes which is very dangerous and um also losing prep time and my daughter works at at Watsonville high school as a math teacher she missed prep time so often she was having mental anxiety over it and she really wants to quit both my daughters work for this district now and they are talking about quitting and they're just getting started on their careers once a special ed teacher all of the issues and and my daughter's math teacher you need math teacher she's experienced 10 years experience but called on so many times to take no subs so when no subs no prep time so then they're working I mean teachers already work over time new teachers especially over time if you don't get prep time you're working way into the night it's just you can't sustain a profession like this teachers are leaving teachers I know left early because of all the issues we have so many vacancies in our district so what have you come up with to help this situation I'm hearing that the reading intervention teachers might have to go to different sites to cover all the vacancies you know these reading intervention teachers were hired to help the youngest students who struggled the most during distance learning and you know I better put my glasses on here um these students now desperately need reading support to accelerate their learning all of the sips data and the Dibbles data thank you elected show how low they are even still they need more support we cannot lose these reading teachers you need to get substitutes pay them more money pay them more money you have to thank you for your time you go on the website and you see how low it's paid people aren't going to take it pay the starting teachers hire salaries Gilroy pay 60 000 a year uh that would be respectful of the time ah so thank you so much we have to do something we can't continue another year like this thank you and we're you're not going to have teachers do you see that was one of the things they said here thank you teachers in our classrooms my dear that should be in your comment now thank you thank you for coming Chris Webb I want to thank PVFT and Nellie for helping support Renaissance with the recent field trip and I also want to thank Clint Rucker whom she reached out to for additional support when Clint and Rich Arianos came through with the level of support I didn't even know it's possible I never felt that PVFT cared more than I did in that moment so on behalf of my students and I I thank you I also want to thank Dr. Rodriguez for the the little things of the screen cleaner and the cookie the cleaner is actually useful for me and I love some baked goods with my morning coffee so thank you for coming on time um also I want to thank trustee to Serpa for doing her duty and living up to the mantra of whole community by allowing my student to be heard at the last board meeting um I think that was the right decision for for multiple reasons and especially considering we've had board trustees zoom in this year and also there's the fact that um she was basically calling for teachers to be allowed to do what Shocker is doing right now um and just to her point like that was the single biggest positive intervention I think I saw at Renaissance this whole year and it was like an accident I never saw more change in students so quickly and you could hold higher expectations and they were going with it because they understood you as a human and they were they wanted to do right by the next generation so I really um think that we ought to consider what that student said we have some really great I loved hearing the students last year or last meeting and not just that student but all of them and Rafael or Edmond Rafael Guzman love hearing him I hope I hear him again here or as an elected official of some kind but um our students have really good ideas and I feel like we should move forward with them and if we do we can become an even better district and I'm already looking at taking my kids here because of how responsive we've been already thank you thank you very much do we have any more public speakers okay next up we have item 8.1 um employee we'll check it out so you only submit it one speaker card but you had both numbers in it okay come on down all right thank you Jennifer I want to thank you personally right now for keeping your arm into the legislature of our government I really appreciate that um I'm trying to stay very involved in that too through our union um so getting back to the reading intervention teachers um yes I am one and I love my site I've been there for 24 years but I'm not here to tell you how much I don't want to leave my site to go help in another school for vacancies that's not why I'm standing here I would do it if if I was really needed to do it even though I completely disagree with it and I think it's just basically the dog chasing this tail because I have filled in uh when subs haven't shown up regularly this past year so that would be gone but I do have another idea I've been talking to staff members over the last week when I got this news about you know is there anything that we could do differently to help solve this problem and one of them that kept coming up these this is a friend of mine who doesn't work for our district but tried to work for our district um is kind of tighten up the human resources department and I'm not finger pointing at any person at the human resources department I've walked in there numerous times I've talked to them on the phone the people that work in there are wonderful they're friendly they're professional they help when they can but the systems and the protocols really do need to be looked at in our human resources department um you know over the last it it kind of goes around it's just the bottom line is when people get into adjoin and want to become a teacher at our district they're get the gateway as human resources and many times the biggest problem is getting that interview it's the response at that first step there's just too much of a lag so to wrap up just I think we need somebody to take human resources and just help them tighten up their protocols there's other districts that do it better and maybe it's already years time to thank you thank you can we pick up our teachers quickly okay thank you um now we'll move on to employee organization comments these are five minutes apiece and we'll start with 8.1 pvft or the paharo valley federation of teachers good evening board dr. Rodriguez um so I thought my message tonight would be more relaxed but nope the sunshine that we've been having has not been able to break through the shadow this administration casts over as educators I do want to say that it's nice to see our teachers that show up and make sure to say something very positive because I know that they all experience something positive but I see things from a different perspective as I represent all of our members so last time I stood here I spoke about the reassignments the SELPA and the ECE were conducting while they have the contractual right the underlying reasons lack integrity these rash decisions which are then delivered by personnel who lack any respect for their staff or lack some respect for their staff person only do harm to our professional and learning community recently HR informed us as you heard that they could temporarily place intervention teachers is what we did with our toses this last year the intervention teachers work directly with students on a daily basis so very big differences that they do work with our students daily with our students their contracts range from 40 percent to 100 percent so we have many we have some that are 100 percent FTE and then some that are only part-time and they work in small and large groups teaching math and reading and are an integral part of facilitating students progress and supporting the classroom teachers program the support helps classroom teachers as it can allow for a double dose of sips while helping the student achieve a year or two of quantifiable growth and reading skills so that's a couple teachers who have communicated with me I've said that this is the data that they've seen that has been very promising for them this year but that's because they were there they were they were there to help their students pulling intervention support would hurt our most most vulnerable students and jeopardize their growth and we the PBFT do understand that this is that we're in a precarious position having to decide to either have a vacant classroom which we're always advocating against or no student intervention so it is yeah what is we don't it's just such an ugly position to be in but these moves definitely cost some to reach their breaking point and quit so you heard one teacher express how her own daughters are considering quitting this year just for the total for this year running record is about 121 educators have either resigned or retired during the course of this school year and then so we still have very many vacancies to fill this summer and we still have resignations coming in so you know we're going to still continue to see more as departments to continue to feed there and I so you could take it as the way that I'm going to say it but I see it as it's here's this power position that I'm in and I'm going to make this change and you need to accept this decision because it's what they deem best and so I hear it from our members who call in and as an individual or communicate with me as a group and say this is not how we see it and then I don't know how much time I have Maria can you give me my time a minute and 30 seconds okay so on occasion often actually I do bring up that some of the decisions that are made are made sometimes because those members happen to be treated differently so I will definitely point out the ECE department on that one and so these are teachers or members who are experiencing those microaggressions in which I also as the president of the PVFT experienced these microaggressions from our administration when I speak to them so being told you're just you know you can't always rely on the race card because why because I'm brown being told that despite the person not being a person of color being told that they are just as Mexican as the people that come here to our country for my equal so again a microaggression that still the power play of I hold something more over you so this so I bring this up because I have over the course of this year actually the past couple of years have suggested that management be trained on anti-bias and anti-racist have received that kind of training I think it's important I think it's important that our management communicate to our employees with respect and value the positions the skills that they bring to our our district because we don't want to see them quit this is a teacher's market right now it's an educator's market so thank you okay animate point to see se a point of order we do have a speaker oh sorry it'll be sure I was going to have Clint do the numbers because people get emotional when I get up here it's obvious from all the data we've got more teachers retiring than we can hire and it's not just true for our district it's also true for the United States as a whole I've talked about this in the past well you can't keep trying to teach the way we're teaching today when you're not going to have enough teachers on average we're going to lose 50 teachers a year going out over time that means we're going to have lots of problems with not enough teachers and classrooms I met her several students and one of them came to me yesterday and talked to me about the math three pre-calculus the teacher wasn't very good they went to the principal they didn't get any results eventually the teacher quit the math department had came in and couldn't teach the class the students weren't allowed to get out of the class and so they blew one whole year in a class that it's a shame but this problem is going to get worse and worse because this student won't be the only student that has those kinds of issues we've got to weave the board pbft everybody has to start looking at how the heck do we teach in the future when we're going to have fewer teachers for the students that we've got you can't use the old paradigm all of this my poor teachers they heard yeah well yeah everybody's hurting i mean the administration's hurting just trying to be able to put teachers in a place i mean everybody's hurting from this but this is insanity you can't keep doing what you're doing and expect different results thank you thank you are there any more public speakers not to this item okay next up we have csea california school employees association doesn't look like anyone's here tonight maybe from csea last call um okay we'll move on to pavam the pahero valley association of managers is anyone presenting tonight it doesn't appear so okay and last we have the communication workers of america cwa representing our substitutes okay moving on to item nine report and discussion items um we'll start with nine point one culinary garden and teaching kitchen project status update good evening thank you president diserpa and trustees for having us tonight i'm linda bixby my colleague nancy shared and i are really excited to be here um to not to tell you what you already know about the wonderfulness of emerald's culinary garden and teaching kitchen which is under construction now at starlight elementary but to give you a bit of an update really quickly on our on our campaign um which as of today we have raised 890 thousand dollars from community donations and we'll talk a little bit about how unusual that is to be going out to the community and asking for donations um but who are the community who is this community that that are providing these donations that's kind of what we want to share with you about a little bit um as i think you know we've led many tours of the site um taken people to starlight let them look at the project site and learn from dr rodriguez and many of you who have attended thank you those of you who've come and been very um eloquent advocates for the project during some of these tours so over 250 people over the last 12 months have come in small groups to the site to learn about the project and to and to learn about the the district much more deeply just from dr rodriguez from starlight principal jackie medina um from julie edwards talking about career technical education and michael rousseau talking about the integration with science curriculum so it's been a very rich almost discussion groups that happened during these tours where most of these folks who come to the tours have little or no connection with the district prior to their visit so sort of reaching out into the community in a very different way and the people who come to the tours are elected leaders and community members businesses business owners and um educators a lot of retired educators donors and so forth and so this is a first introduction to them to really what pvusd is all about so um that's a quick snapshot we've had 26 of these tours as i said 200 and over 250 people have come and many of of the donations that have come have have originated from these these small tours in the garden so of our million dollar campaign goal having raised almost 90 percent of that we're very excited about that but we're really here to talk about the other result that we're really excited about which is the community engagement that is happening um and the education that's happening about how education is being done in in the school district Nancy so um you know as we all know as engaged um board members that you are you know that this was the first time that the school district made the effort to do a community fund development campaign and as Linda said we're going to talk some about what we've learned in this process but the first thing that we did is we did um about 30 zoom meetings with community leaders just asking for their advice and listening to them to find out what their questions were about the project um so that we could kind of tailor how we were presenting the project then as another step so in those listening that we had some of the questions were well why is this school been chosen and how are other students in the district going to benefit from this um and if I could also just say a huge uh congratulations to you for um now um having the gardens by 2024 in every one of your elementary schools I mean it's quite extraordinary and your district is shining I think with some of the wonderful work that is happening and just again on another note as Linda said we've had all these tours and Linda and I have attended all of these tours and honest to goodness I get inspired every time I go to a tour and I learn something every time I go to a tour so we have had now these 240 visitors but when you think about it it's a multiplier of times 10 because those are the people that are going to go out and talk about your district and because they've learned about your district so that's been a wonderful thing those advice visits that we had at first again that same sort of thing in-depth one-on-one conversations and we we just found out that um we could really kind of scope the campaign in a way that helped to elevate the district in some really significant new ways so our little campaign team lots of familiar names um it really has taken a top-notch team and we've we've been really privileged to work with um the pvusd folks certainly dr rodriguez and jackie and andrea carlos willey who without whom the initial five hundred thousand dollar grant wouldn't would not have been granted to the district so life lab educators and um and we we realized early on that because we didn't feel a lot of people understood a lot about the district outside of the education community we needed some community connectors so we recruited some people that who know lots of people and they know lots of other people and we recruited them as volunteers to work with us and um rob alan and um amy herrington leola lepetis jan may you who you may remember from working on the pvpsa uh project really hardworking folks started helping us bring people to the tours and and and then we we realized that in order to kind of launch the campaign we needed a big funder we needed someone with a high profile in the community that could be our anchor funder and really sort of validate um the the idea of of the community coming behind us and and making you know donations out of their own pockets so we made a proposal to the health trust board i'm sure they might wish to claw some of that money back now but they made us the largest um grant in the history of the the health trust and became our anchor funder and many of their board members and certainly their executive director deandre came to tours and spoke also very eloquently um about the value of the project and the integration that the project would have with their own mission in the community and so that was a big boost for us and the pahroni and covered it and that was really um that really kind of got the campaign up and running so um some of the things that we have learned already about um these from our tours and our conversations is that um tour attendees tell us how impressed they are that a program like this was being established at the earliest grade levels and would create such a rich foundation for students as they advanced through middle and high school community members also really resonated with the life skills and social emotional learning and whole child whole family that the district's embracing um as we mentioned we had some incredible staff that came to many of our tours mike rousseau he was so wonderful at articulating the value of experiential learning in the sciences and julie edwards was such a passionate and effective speaker in explaining all the connections happening with with cte career tech education that was something that really resonated with people we also um have some advisors such as susan true and hillary bryant at the community foundation they've attended tours and the foundation granted the project fifty thousand dollars and then through their donor advised fund folks we've added another hundred and thirty five thousand to the campaign um from community foundation donor advisors and those are people from all over the community so it isn't just folks in the pahoe valley so it's it's a wonderful um statement of commitment to your district so you recognize a lot of the names on this list um we started connecting with some of the really long time businesses and families of agriculture um and really felt you know that can be kind of a tough nut to crack the agricultural community in terms of um just just getting getting connections there can be sort of insular and so we were able to get a number of tour visitors coming from ag families and they really loved they loved what they were hearing they loved what they were learning george crocker who grew up uh just right around the corner from starlight elementary school when starlight was a drive-in movie told a great little story about when he was a little kid and used to jump over the fence and sneak into the drive-in and then at another tour one of the ag uh woman from an ag family a retired educator told us about how she used to ride her horse through that property before it was ever a starlight movie theater and ride through the fields that became what is now starlight elementary school and there there was just genuine joy on the part of these families to to know that such a large chunk of property was going to be restored to growing food and nourishing the the minds and the bodies and the spirits of of your students um and they began making generous gifts so it's it's interesting to think about how the tours of course we would take people out to a big a huge big dirt lot and and still your staff and the people that were there were able to inspire so many donors and of course the wonderful little current garden um that that dr. Rodriguez would always tell our guests wait until you go into the little garden and listen to your listen to your heartbeat and you'll probably see some change and and so we all we helped everybody connect to the wonderful things that can happen um in this kind of a learning space so um i'm sure you've all seen this photo and you may know this but the roof is is being um right now put upon the kitchen so we're we're so excited i i stopped by the other day just to see how things were looking and we're going to talk a little bit later about about the development of the actual garden also but um so one of the things of course that you do in a capital campaign is that you have naming opportunities for different aspects of of whatever it is that you are are building so i think in your packet we've we've also included not here on the slideshow but in your packet a list of the naming opportunities and um they range from ten thousand dollars to a hundred thousand dollars in the kitchen and um eight of those have been taken uh out of the ten and um you also may have heard that the city of Watsonville gave a a gift of a hundred thousand dollars and that's going to put the city's name on the outdoor garden classroom which is really exciting and actually i'm sorry i misspoke a little bit um of the 25 naming opportunities in the garden there are only five that are left so we we're certainly still working on all of that but it's pretty gratifying to see um how some of these wonderful um businesses and and donors have stepped up and are going to also be honored within within this project we've also been working on on getting in kind donors and have um granite rock donating materials and we have also hopefully a landscape company that's going to be involved we also have a couple of employee groups that want to come out and help to plant the garden so lots lots is still going to be happening so this is just a really quick little timeline as we near the end of our presentation these are just kind of seminal moments along the campaign journey um i'll echo what Nancy said about the decision to expand school gardens to all 16 of the elementary schools that was extremely motivating and a powerful statement of commitment to experiential education which as everyone knows is so critical and so effective um so that was a super important benchmark for the campaign so i just want to say a word about and beyond um because one of the things that that has come from this one of these the other results that that we wanted to share people people want to be connected to the district people want to be part of the project people want to learn more about what's happening here excitement has really been generated from from just what they've learned from from Dr. Rodriguez and the staff during these visits those of you who attended have seen it yourselves um donors are we've got had almost 100 individual donors have made gifts now to this campaign um and they all have different reasons for wanting to support it there's so many facets of this project that um that there's a lot to love and some donors just simply want to support the children and the families of agriculture others come from as we said very they have their own very deep roots in in agriculture others for them it's about equity and and access to high quality programs they're so thrilled to hear about the the depth and the aspirations and the intentionality of of the goals of the way education is being done in in pvusd now it's truly generating enthusiasm and as we've mentioned a couple of times but it can't be overstated the career technical education aspect really makes sense to people people are excited for the employers who are going to be benefiting they're excited for the students who are soon to be citizens who will be earning uh living wage living wages supporting their families and contributing to the community that's a nugget that really makes a lot of sense so the and beyond is that people are coming forward wanting to partner with the district new nonprofit partnerships uh volunteering time and ideas and resources and I know that with the uh budding industry partner relationships that are that are being built um more beneficial connections and resources are going to continue to flow to the district so as we already mentioned we are at about 90 percent of our community fund development goal of one million dollars and we are very confident of reaching that million dollar goal but we are also um wanting to continue to work really hard within the community to raise as much as we possibly can so we're certainly not stopping at that and we have several um potential wonderful donors um that are we're hopeful will join the campaign um and this is kind of a common thing that does happen with capital campaigns that last part um takes a little while and we're going to talk also about the community campaign yes so so far we've done what we call a a quiet campaign which is we go out to you know individual major donors and and businesses and kind of do it you know on the down low a little bit and um once once we reach a certain level of the campaign and we're pretty close to it then we go out into the community and solicit donations of all sizes so that everyone in the community can contribute at a level that's comfortable for them and can have be a part of the project so we are waiting for a couple of large pending donations to come in we hope they're going to materialize that's going to put us to the point where we can go out to our community and and raise the rest it'll be splashy and wonderful way to kick off the the community campaign and we hope that can happen in the next month or so we've already made arrangements to start tabling at farmers markets and just kind of dovetailing on other organizations activities to start getting our word out and getting a lot of media because as i said we've been kind of on the down low this is an area when the community campaign launches where the board can be extremely helpful and and just continuing to talk about it and i'm sure you're going to be interviewed because we're going to start really beating the bushes for some major media coverage and be be aware so the donor wall I just share really quickly you may know artist Kathleen Crochetti who is a just a fabulous mosaic and glass artist and she is going to design the donor appreciation wall which is nine feet by five feet it's going to go right there on the front of the kitchen building and it's going to utilize Spanish tiles which is a motif that's going to be carried out throughout throughout the project and all of the signage and the naming opportunity sign so it's going to be really beautiful Kathleen actually went to fire clay in aromas and got most of the tiles donated these are hand painted Spanish tiles it's going to be very very special yeah so donor voices that's our that's our our campaign presentation for you again these sort of reflect some of a lot of what we hear these these kind of exemplify what we're hearing is that you know people are people are inspired by the project they're excited by the project and we're going to continue to work hard to raise the rest of the money and as much beyond I mean it happens in capital campaigns sometimes that you exceed your goal and we certainly hope that that's going to be the case with this one thank you so much for having us and we're here to answer any questions that you might have thank you are there any speakers the new speaker so okay any comments or questions from the board jennifer hall I just want to say that I love this project particularly how it connects you know school to community that was something that was really important that had me decide to be in the seat you know it makes a difference when our community sees how the schools serve the entire community so yay that would be great that's it thank you trusty shocker well they already know that I love this project and I've tried to go do as many tours as I possibly can at at the garden and tell everybody I can about the garden so I just appreciate all the hard work thank you Dr. Rodriguez and board for standing behind this project and there's a lot of excitement not only at the community level but from families especially starlight families that are very excited to see the progress on the kitchen they've watched it from nothing to like you said the roof almost going on I got a chance to see it last week so it's amazing to see and it's something that is only going to be joy and it's going to further different aspects of education for our students so thank you thank you for your presence and enthusiasm too and and there are a number of people up here and on the staff who have made monetary contributions as well personal donations which we're extremely grateful for also that's a very strong statement too thank you thank you and thanks for all your hard work soliciting all those donations and making those special connections stay with it yeah okay thank you we'll see you at the ribbon cutting yeah okay next up is uh item 9.2 a wellness policy tri-annual tri-annual assessment this is our director linda lew yes good evening president de serpa board of trustees dr. Rodriguez and cabinet my name is linda lew and i'm here to present an update on the pvusd wellness committee and the tri-annual assessment process and results so i've brought a team of presenters today who partner with my department in various wellness projects and whose organizations or departments have been longtime participants in the wellness committee it's great to have that team and also this you know wonderful presentation before about the emerald agasi kitchen it's it's all of those projects that help improve on what students want to choose when they come through this the lunch line the breakfast line so um we're always trying to partner with and and really encourage that we support programs like that so a little bit about the um the wellness policy and because we have um our limited presentation time today we're going to move quickly through the information but please any more details can be provided as as people request so school wellness policies were first required by usda so the federal government in 2006 there was the healthy hunger free kids act of 2010 that um had some updated uh stricter rules and so revisions were required and our latest version was approved in 2018 a an assessment of your policy is required every three years and we had the disruption with distance learning and so there was a waiver that was given to due to covid delays but this year as we returned to instruction in person um our wellness committee made the assessment the main goal of the year in our meetings and so we worked very hard on the assessment process and I want to say thank you to um Kat Satterley of Alliance for a Healthier Generation and Crystal Caballera from Santa Cruz County Public Health who worked hand in hand with us on that want to talk a little bit of some of the goals that are set forth in the policy so the first section of the PVSD wellness policy um is about school meals and so I wanted to give an update on some of our um how our department programs support the goals that are set forth in the policy so supporting access to school meals so um this is one of the goals in the policy and you know one of the main goals of our department so um we can run several meal programs and we try to access every single program that we can qualify for every school we're able to serve breakfast and lunch every day of the school calendar even when they leave on field trips and also on Saturdays for Saturday Academy and then also during the summer we try to run as many summer locations as possible and we can feed anyone age one to 18 in an open site during the summer um also with eligibility so um one is just having the the offering of the meals but also eligibility for free meals so prior to 2020 we applied for as many provisions as possible so that this would allow students to automatically qualify for free meals um not have to do the paperwork or have any stigma tied to it or any kind of paperwork um red tape um so we would apply for the provisions um but this kind of all changed with COVID so um everyone realized how how important school meals were to everyone during emergency and since March 2020 um federal government waived eligibility for all children so everyone was able to eat for free in the past few years this is now ending as of this month um but fortunately state of California moving forward um there's money in the budget right now money in the budget right now um and they are um creating a universal meal program starting the new school year so meals one breakfast one lunch will still be free um for our students in the new school year a little bit of um stats from our meals so prior to COVID this was kind of our average um year um a little over a million breakfast um a little under two million lunches and about half a million after school meals during distance learning there were a lot of waivers to allow for take home uh allowed to feed on non-school days to allow to feed weekends holidays spring break winter break so we try to take you know advantage and make sure that we offered all of that to as many families that wanted to come and pick up and so um we we saw some increases in breakfast and after school meals because we were able to give all three meals at one time so that's why you see kind of that's why you see kind of increased numbers there and now um in the current year um obviously a little bit of you know declining enrollment um absences with ongoing COVID issues we do see a bit of a drop this year um in the in the meals served so some photos about let's see our our school meals so prior to COVID we're working really hard on expanding kind of fresh options salad bars implementing that so here's a pv high where we did a california thursday's um meal for all the students um and because of provision all the students ate for free so just trying to let them know they can eat for free and this is what we have in the cafeteria um adding salad bars to the different schools and then this is calabasas um salad bar um that we were able to add so that's what we were doing prior to COVID um you know everything changed in 2020 and we switched to parent pickup so this some examples of what that looked like um um you know everything had to become packaged um but there was a lot of you can see spirit with our cafeteria staff and trying to make pickup fun and keep that connection going for students um for the students and the parents when they came by because uh with school closed um that daily interaction with their cafeteria staff wasn't there so um they try to make it as fun as possible for the for the families and then here's a pickup at um Buena Vista migrant camp um in the evening so trying to have um a pickup time that worked for um families that worked in the daytime but could come a little bit later in the day I I know throughout my presentation there's like oh and the COVID interrupted but on a on a positive note um some wonderful partnerships came out of that time so um this is a Elkhorn slew foundation raised money and was able to purchase produce from local organic farmers and they would donate it to us and our staff would package it and pass it out this is um hall district on the left and then partnership with um second harvest food bank um we did partnerships both with uh food bags for the families to pass them out at the same time as our food but also with their cow fresh outreach so they're able to set up resources for families and they can come and get qualified when they came to get food um so now we're back in school and it was a very important year for us we wanted to reconnect with the students um we wanted to get them excited and announce the fact that meals are still all free for everyone and you know come to the cafeteria and and join us and so here's some new menu items that we started this year um and it was quite a challenging year because we were so excited to reach hopefully more students now that everyone was free um and then just the the supply chain issues made it so that the things that we put on the menu did not always arrive um all the ingredients did not always arrive um different packaging did not always arrive so it got a little tricky um but we're hoping for a better year next year um there was uh there's a few times where we were allowed to still do parent pickups so during winter break we were able to do this um the first day of winter break so I thank our staff because we offered out extra work and we had enough people that um agreed to do it so we were able to pass out the first day winter break um for families and then we did the same thing this past monday so after all of our cafeteria staff had their last day last friday we had a group that agreed to work extra this past monday and then we passed out meals from the parking lot here so families to cover them for this week um so here's a slide kind of like about how we make menus um I can I want to make sure and I I didn't even remember to start my timer so I'm not exactly sure where I am so I'm just going to go quickly through this um mainly we you know our goal with the menu is to make sure that students have choices um that they have healthy options um but in the end it's a tricky situation because unlike the classroom if adults feel this is the curriculum they should have and this is the level of challenge you should have they are in in the classroom and then that's what they will be doing the tricky part of us saying this is what I want the students will eat they can decide to eat it or not and I think that's that's why I'm seeing that partnering with these different um educators about nutrition and wellness and them learning about school gardens the more that they get the students get educated about healthy eating it makes it better for us because once we put those items on the menu they'll actually come and choose it because um that's the trickier part about us is they can choose and say I don't want that salad so I'll just eat something else of course being um producer of food and using packaging um we're always trying to care about waste reduction um this is um two of our food and nutrition services staff who receive the um uh the award at the board meeting earlier last last month I believe for their work with the city of Watsonville here's an example of a share station so with the federal guidelines on what they need to take to be a complete reimbursable meal if a student has to take the minimum that we require if there's something that they don't choose to eat they can share it with their their other students and that's what we have the share stations for and again prior we were making share tables at all schools and labeling them and making them nice and compliant with the health department rules and we were starting to use bulk dispensers for for um service wear we work with Aptos High um Environmental Science AP class and we started a pilot for bulk condiment dispensers working with city of Watsonville on pilots for food separation a lot of different things and then COVID and everything had to be wrapped and it was very painful to see that happening um but we're trying hard this year to get that reversed and um and and hopefully next year again we'll be hoping for a better year in the wellness policy there's also language about um purchasing local so um Watsonville Coast Produce is our main produce distributor and they provided the data for this so local produce definition as within 250 miles and they provided the the statistics and we were able to meet the goals at forth in the policy of over 40 percent purchasing and Patrick Littleton will also speak to our um FFVP recess grant purchasing which is from a different distributor and he'll speak about those statistics um Farm to School is highlighted in the policy as well um we love to highlight local produce we are surrounded by farms there are large farms but we also try to find those small farms that um maybe have like that small that small apple that um doesn't sell um to the commercial market but is like the perfect apple that can be on the school breakfast school lunch so um this is some examples of that we've done a lot of this work over the years but I'm trying to keep it going so just a quick photo of um trying to bring a farmer highlighting things during farm to school month in October um harvest of the month which is what I'm talking about next so harvest of the month uh we try to put something on the menu every month that's in season and if we can it comes from a local um farm organic if we can and then trying to educate on the name of the farm and where it's coming from and trying to partner with these different agencies to all repeat that same messaging of great this is in season you're going to see it here you're going to cook with it here you're going to hear some math lesson about it here and and maybe like we did here with the um the cooking lesson for families maybe your parents see something about it too so now everyone in the family has heard heard about it and it's on the school lunch menu for that month so um maybe we did organic strawberries this is um Javier from JSN and um we have the starlight kids that that did a cooking video if you want to check it out it's on the PVUSD streaming channel um lastly oops oops I'm sure I'm pointing this okay so this is not in the policy but I'll I just want to do a quick thank you to my um my uh my office staff my supervisors because um over the years I've been able to gain this team um that wanted to work together and go out and do fund promotions with our students and so we have like our warehouse our buyer our supervisors and you know like I guess we're leaving the office unattended but we go and we try to get out there and do things with the students um and so uh this is just a quick example I have years of photos but um to keep it short on time um this we went to PB High and many some other schools this year um juicing this produce and then putting the juice on the menu and then this is at Radcliffe um and trying out these blender lists uh smoothies but because we want to do a fun activity with the kids we brought the smoothie bite so um and I'm not gonna go over food sales because after we reopen after COVID we have not been selling snacks which we are allowed to sell compliance snacks but we haven't been selling them since March 2020 and right now I don't have a goal to start that at this moment so um I think most of what I'm doing now is just answering any questions for principals or anyone that's doing food sales if they want to better understand the USDA guidelines on what they're allowed to sell so there's USDA state and then our wellness policy guidelines on what we can sell so I hope that was in time uh next I'd like to introduce Patrick Littleton. Good evening thank you uh president Serpa uh Dr. Michelle Rodriguez PVSD trustees I appreciate this opportunity I would like to talk about two programs this evening that support our PVSD wellness policy the first is our fresh fruit and vegetable program at 12 grant funded elementary schools we serve four days a week during the morning recess it consists of primary local California grown fruits and vegetables 30% of it is organic and 60% is locally grown within that 250 miles over 200,000 fruits 200,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables were served this school year thanks to our one to two staff per school site fitness for life through extended learning has also helped cover some of the staff vacancies this year to keep the program up and running nutrition education happens through eating a rainbow and a lot of other fun promotions we do throughout the school year this is what a typical cart looks like as it is getting ready to roll out for that morning recess this is here at Radcliffe Elementary thanks to Erika who does an amazing job being able to fully illustrate the benefits of eating specific fruits and vegetables here at uh Hall District Nefri's does an amazing job being able to make things super exciting for our students wanting to be able to pick up that day's serving of fruits and vegetables and that mix of really fun fruits and also nutritious veggies to really encourage students just to be able to try a bite and say hey maybe I do like Rob Broccoli we've also been able to work with local growers as Linda mentioned Javier through JSM in prunedale we did a really fun promotion this fall with being able to get a butternut squash or some variety of winter squash to every student at those 12 elementary schools along with a bilingual harvest a month flyer that had a really fun recipe my kids that go to Calabasas Elementary we're so excited to bring home their winter squash and wanted to cook at that night. Pivoting to a different program we have the WCSA cooking and garden program supported through extended learning fitness for life and the sage garden project out of Encinitas. This allows us to be able to teach weekly K through five garden classes where we do hands-on cooking lessons fun bite-sized recipes alongside of steam garden enrichment opportunities the garden is campus wide if you'd ever like to go for a tour happy to show you around but we've done a lot of fun things this school year to be able to promote eating seasonal fruits and vegetables some of the parents have reached out to me separately saying hey what was that recipe that my child came home wanting to be able to cook at home we've also done fun Friday promotions where we'll cook either the harvest of the month or other seasonal vegetables or produce from our garden whether that's a citrus variety taste testing or being able to try a broccoli stir fry another project at Chavez Middle School we've established this project way back in 2009 about the same time that started this starlight school garden and we've been able to do a lot of fun stuff since that time the students have planted that food forest every tree that you see there has been planted by a different group of students over the years in the after-school program we do a lot of fun stuff after school including cooking where we prepare culturally relevant nutrient dense meals where we all share together at the end of class alongside of steam focused garden projects and with that I'd like to introduce Ashling and Alejandro from LifeLab hello everyone thank you so much for this opportunity I'm Ashling Mitchell I'm the Lifehab Partner Schools program leader and this is my colleague hello my name is Alejandro Choa and I am the garden and cooking instructor right now at Starlight Elementary and we're here to give you a snapshot of how LifeLab cultivates children's love of learning healthy food and nature through garden-based education in deep partnership with PVUSD currently LifeLab has full-time garden instructors at seven PVUSD elementary school sites and we're growing to all 16 PV elementary schools by the school year 2024 to 2025 we celebrate all the people and the folks involved in bringing food from farms to our plates including our families our farmers and our community partners as you've heard from today and our food education lessons are fact-base