OUSD Board Of Education

We'd like to welcome everyone to the April 23, board meeting of the school board. Tonight on our agenda oh, it's him. I'm sorry. Roll call to establish quorum, please. Mister Reichstroff, welcome back.

On tonight's, roll call, student director Simmons, student director Vasquez, director Lauder, director Williams, director Hutchinson, director Barry?

Yes.

Present.

You're you're present. Okay. Director Thompson? Present.

Okay. Vice president Bachelor?

Here.

President, Pearlhart?

Here. Form present.

Thank you. And can we have translation, mister Seche? Mister Alas, thank you.

Yes, madam president. For tonight, we have two languages available for live interpretation. They are Arabic and Spanish. We also have translation closed caption feature available on Zoom that you can use by clicking the closed caption feature on your Zoom taskbar. With that, we will, have announcements for live interpretation.

We will start with Arabic. I will lower all attendees' hands on Zoom. Please only raise your hand if you need the language that's being announced at this time which is Arabic and I will ask miss Saleh if you can come up on mute and give the interpretation announcement for Arabic.

Arabic is done.

Thank you, miss Ole. Checking the attendees to see if there's any hands raised for Arabic interpretation. Seeing no hands raised, we will not start with Arabic interpretation at this time. Moving forward to Spanish, I will lower all attendees' hands on Zoom. Please only raise your hand if you need the language being announced at this time, which is Spanish.

And I will ask Ms. Marcus if she can come off of mute and get the interpretation announcement for Spanish.

Of course. Thank

you, miss Vargas. Checking the attendees on Zoom to see if there's any hands raised for Spanish interpretation. Seeing no hands, we will not start with any interpretation at this time. That concludes the first interpretation announcement for this meeting, and I pass it back to you, mister Rick Straw.

Mister president, the first interpretation, availability and offer has been completed.

Thank you. Tonight in closed session, we will discuss labor matters d one twenty four nineteen twenty six conference with labor negotiators. Legal matters d two twenty four zero four three six, conference with legal counsel, existing litigation. D three twenty five dash ten fifty one, conference with legal counsel, anticipated litigation. D four twenty five ten fifty seven, conference with legal counsel, anticipated lit litigation.

And d five twenty five dash ten fifty eight, conference with legal counsel, anticipated lit litigation. We will also discuss public employee matters d six twenty five zero nine four three, public employment, discipline, dismissal, release, and pupil matters d seven twenty five zero nine nine zero, expulsion student s, d eight twenty five zero nine nine one expulsion student t. We will now have public comments on closed agenda items. And do we have any speakers?

Yes. For the closed session items, we have Sheila Haines and Osalo Lobala.

Okay. Two minutes each, please.

I foresee the possibility of litigation around a number of mandated policies that are not being enforced. One is related to the immunization policy that says that if you do not have records to indicate immunization that you are then excluded from the school. It says through the state that you may create online learning process

for those children. You're not doing that and you need to explain why you're not because there's too many children who are out of school for long periods of times because they have not produced vaccination records. The least you can do is investigate what this looks like in terms of numbers and how it's being followed or not followed. The other

thing is your volunteer requirement that you have background checks for all volunteers. You have implemented a process for which you do not have to have background checks if you're under the supervision of a teacher for a number of hours per week. You also have the issue of contaminated soil at McClyman's. I don't know if you're required by law to build on property that you have identified as having contaminated soil. Related to the D6, the public employee discipline, We all know that that is related to the superintendent.

You have failed to have transparency or the integrity to identify exactly what some of the issues are. You need to do that related to whatever you're doing because it's all over sporadically. People talking about different things. You need to make that clear. The confusion that has gone on was unnecessary.

Lastly, with the expulsion.

Sheila Haynes, if you're online, please raise your hand. President Brewhard, that conclude registered speakers.

Okay. Thank you. We will now recess to closed session when we turn at 06:00. Wanna welcome everyone to the open session of the four twenty three general, open, general board meeting. Mister Rick Stark, can we have a roll call to establish quorum, please?

Yes. On the roll call to establish quorum, student director Simmons? Here. Student director Vasquez? Here.

Director Lauter?

Present.

Director Williams? Present, sir. Director Hutchinson? Director Barry?

Present.

Director Thompson? Present. Vice President Bachelor?

Here.

And president Brahard? Here. Quorum present.

Thank you. And mister Hollis, can we have a translation check, please?

Yes, madam president. For tonight's meeting, we have two languages available for live interpretation. They are Arabic and Spanish. We also have a translation closed caption feature available on Zoom that you can use by clicking the closed caption icon on your Zoom taskbar. With that, we will move on to the announcements for live interpretation.

We will start with Arabic. I will lower all attendees' hands on Zoom. Please only raise your hand if you need the language that's being announced currently, which is Arabic. Also, if you are in person and you need a translation laptop, you can see the text in the back of the great room, with their hand raised, for a translation laptop. With that, I will ask miss Abdi if she if she can come off of mute and give the translation announcement for Arabic.

Yes.

Arabic instruction is done. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Abdi. Checking the attendees on Zoom to see if there's any hands raised for Arabic interpretation. Seeing no hands raised on Zoom, none in the room. We will not start with Arabic interpretation at this time.

Moving forward to Spanish, I will lower all attendees' hands on Zoom. Please only raise your hand if you need the language that's being announced, which at this time is Spanish. And if you are in attendance in the great room and need a translation laptop, you can see the tech in the back of the room with their hand raised for a translation laptop. Now with that, I will ask mister Copenhagen if he can come off mute and give the translation announcement for Spanish.

Yes.

Thank you.

Thank you, mister Copenhagen. Checking the attendees on Zoom to see if there's any hands raised for Spanish interpretation. Seeing no hands raised on Zoom and no hands in the room, we will not start with any interpretation at this time. That concludes this, translation. Oh, we have one for Spanish?

For Spanish? Okay. So we will start with Spanish interpretation at this time, and that concludes our interpretation announcement for this time. And I pass it to mister Rickshaw.

Madam president, the second roll call need for interpretation check has been completed.

Thank you, mister Rakeshtra. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize the importance of respectful decorum, communication, and engagement at our board meetings. The work of the board is serious business and impacts the everyday experiences of our students, our families, and our communities. In the interest of time, there will be time I'm sorry. There will be, excuse me, time for public comment at the the closed session was completed earlier after special orders of the day, and then all non agenda items within the subject matter jurisdiction of the district after the adoption of the people discipline consent report and after adoption of the general consent report, adoption of the general consent report facilities.

Please be aware that in compliance with the Brown Act, board members may not respond to comments during issues that are not on our posted agenda for tonight. Thank you. Report out of closed session for 04/23/2025. Labor matters on item d one number 24 dash nineteen twenty six, conference with labor negotiators. The board gave direction in this matter, and the motion was passed by a vote I'm sorry.

The vote gave direction in this matter. There was no vote. Legal matters on item d two number twenty four zero four three six. Conference with legal counsel existing litigation. The board gave direction on this matter.

The motion by director Lotta, second by director Thompson, and the vote was six to zero. Vice president bachelor recused herself. On item d three, number twenty five ten fifty one, conference with legal counsel, anticipated litigation, the board gave direction on this matter. On item d four number twenty five ten fifty seven, conference with legal counsel, anticipated litigation, motion by president Brohard, seconded by director Thompson, vote seven to zero. On item d five, number twenty five ten fifty eight, conference with legal counsel, anticipated litigation, the board approved the settlement in this matter.

Motion by president Brohard, seconded by director Thompson. Vote in favor, six to zero. Absent director Williams. On public employee matters, on item d six twenty five dash zero nine four three, public employment discipline, dismissal, release. The board took action to approve a voluntary separation agreement with superintendent Kyla Johnson Trammell.

Motion by vice president Batchelor, second by director Lotta. Vote in favor, four to three. Pupil matters. On item d seven and d eight, the board heard these matters and will vote on the matters in public in section k on the agenda. At this time, are there any modifications to the agenda?

I have a few, but go ahead. I want to withdraw item l thirty nine twenty five dash ten seventy nine tentative agreement between the district and AFSME Local fifty seven. I want to move the end item n student report to after the special orders of the day and move item t, the superintendent's report, after the student report. Are there any other changes to the agenda?

Yes, madam president. There is another change. There's a withdrawal. The item is MDotDash2250672. This is found on PDF page 48 of the agenda.

This is being withdrawn at the request of the administration. Yes. MDotDash225, 6, 7, 672. Yes. Yes.

This is the agreement for inspector of record services for construction Antonio at Roosevelt Middle School.

Are there any other items being pulled?

Yes. President Brohard, I'd like to, pull L25 and L30.

Alright. There are no other items. We have today, I think, something that the district is very proud to celebrate. For those of us who were teaching in in the early two thousands when the district went under state receivership, it was a very difficult time to be teaching. And it as of this June, we will be leaving the we will have total local control of our district.

I wanna give a special shout out to the person at the dais, miss Lisa Grant Dawson, and doctor doctor Kyla Johnson Trammell. I think the leadership in getting us out of receivership, I I can't say enough about how proud I am. Excuse me. Yes, sir. Excuse me.

So I'm gonna give doctor I'm gonna give miss Lisa Grand Dawson the dais and the chance to explain the fiscal audit, thank you. Good

evening Governing Board, President Brohard, directors, as well as community members. We are very excited to share that the work that has actually been going on for twenty two years, but with a different strategy and level of intensity over the last five years, to be able to give the district its own local control, and return that control after twenty two years of being under state and county receivership with changes in legislation. So the board agenda has the summary essentially of what that strategy was and what those key inputs were to include the board and the district understanding where we were with the loan payment, where we were with various components, and one of the key things that was resounding for me when I arrived was how much people felt that they didn't know or weren't informed about. So part of this started with a reminder at that time that we were five years away from paying the loan payment off. That led to additional discussion and strategy about how.

So again, time and an amortization schedule as far as a loan payment was gonna get you to the end of it, just like anything that you borrow, you'll get to the end of it. But it's really how you come out that is important and was a key area of focus for the superintendent and I, and several board leaders who continue to champion not only this effort, but overall the partnership to exit state receivership. So with that, we have with us Caroline Larson, who is joining us via Zoom. She is a CPA from Ida Bailey. We issued an RFP, a request for proposals for this to be done.

The California Education Code requires that a district has a fiscal systems audit prior to you paying your last loan payment. So she is going to review the report in her evaluation of the district and the recommendation therein, in addition to that with the cover sheet, though not specifically covered in the audit report, The other coinciding component with the strategy was that the district, would pay its loan payment off one year, early. So our last loan payment was scheduled for June 2026, and we developed a strategy to pay that off one year early, so therefore exiting in June 2025. So that is also coinciding with this effort. There are a few more steps to this process, but with all the partnership, the Department of Finance, with FICMAT, with the county, and CDE, the goal and the request is that all of these pieces would be complete by 06/30/2025, and therefore effective July 1, the district would formally or in days ahead have full local control.

So this report was very critical, not only to this step, but I believe it is brilliantly written to tell a very deep story, and as you heard President Burghardt share, so many people, including many staff members, grew up under this local, this state receivership. They don't remember a time when it wasn't there. Don't remember a time when there wasn't a county or a state present. Don't remember a time when the fiscal crisis management assistance team was there. Don't remember a time when we had multiple audit findings.

It's been that long, that ultimately there's been an entire adult raise within this community, many adults raised right, over twenty two years. So with that, I do want to say that I appreciate the way that this report was written. I think it stands as a very beautiful summary of the district's story to include what the district has the opportunity to do next as local control is being planned and partnered to move forward in that direction. So without further ado, I will yield the floor to Caroline Larson, and Caroline I will be your partner in moving your slides forward so you can just let me know as you would like wish the slides to move.

Joy, thank you so much. I really appreciate your kindness and your complimentary words. It's really a pleasure to be here this evening with you. Thank you for the opportunity to address the board in the Oakland community. You can move the slide forward.

And again

Oh, there we go.

And the next one, please.

There we go. This evening I will present the highlights of the fiscal assessment that is required by Education Code as part of a process to exit the state apportionment loan. Our firm is proud to be a part of this historical event. Thank you for including us. Our firm not only provides external audit services, but also provides unique consulting services.

Our consulting group helps districts avoid apportionment loans through assistance to accounting departments across the state. Our department and myself personally have provided fiscal assessments for West Contra Costa, Emory, Vallejo City, and now Oakland Unified. Each assessment was unique and has been tailored specifically to each district. Each report reveals areas of strength and areas for growth. Our firm worked with Superintendent Johnson Trammell and Chief Business Official Grant Dawson since October to deeply understand the district.

In the coming weeks, the district will be expected to act on the report findings and to interact with its oversight agencies to come to a disposition of next steps. This report is but one step in a multi step journey. Let's pause a moment to celebrate the successes of the district. Our report specifically calls out fiscally responsible actions. It is important to document the positive so that these actions continue.

Many times when the positive acknowledged, it is either taken for granted or unknowingly unraveled. The consistent leadership and the relationship of collaboration and support between the superintendent, the chief business official, and the interim chief financial officer is a key component of fiscal well-being. Our firm also noticed a high degree of insight that Oakland Unified employees have for the issues and culture at both the macro and micro levels. Superintendent Johnson Trammell is to be commended for keeping a focus on fiscal stability despite many challenges and pressures, external and internal, to the district during her term. Stable relationships throughout the various levels of the executive cabinet and its support personnel have only recently been achieved within the past five years.

Stability and competence are the reason the district can build systems that were not present at the time of the bankruptcy. Our firm created a list of observable habits of districts that do not place themselves in harm's way, one of which is the ability to respond to audits and to be audited. With thirty years of experience in this space, I can personally attest that this was not always the case for Oakland. Congratulations on a job well done. To prepare for exiting receivership, the following actions and attributes must be maintained.

Compromising any one of these basic tenets on these two slides jeopardizes future local control. Board members, administrators, employees, and vendors must act in the best interest of the collective, creating a culture that is supportive of laws and regulations. Transactions within the county treasury and utilize the financial systems of the Alameda County Office of Education. No district has the human talent to replicate the systems in place at a county office of education. The district needs to keep its process of transparency and detailed flow of information from administration to the board and its community.

The district agenda currently tells a complete story as to why the item is mandated or relevant, its fiscal impact, and the pertinent facts to act on the data. In turn, it is the duty of the Board to act on the data provided and be a resource for the administration. The district has minimized its financial risk by issuing secured debt called general obligation bonds to upgrade facilities and district property. General obligation bonds are separate and apart from the educational funds of the district. The district should never issue debt whose repayment schedule is dependent upon student attendance.

That is what is called non secured debt. Non secured debt adversely impacts the educational programs of the district. Additionally, by not allocating financial resources to retired employees, the district is allocating resources to active employees who are serving students. In a world where it is difficult to attract talent, the more resources that can be placed with active employees, the higher the chances of acquiring and retaining the talent. Even though there is much to celebrate, there is also more work to be done.

From a fiscal perspective, this slide is the most important one. Although the district has the right people in the right places, has improved systems and minimized costs, its inability to act on financial solutions put forth jeopardizes its future. Our firm has confirmed the gravity of the messages delivered by the district's first and second interim report. Over the next three years, the district must enhance revenue or reduce expenditures by the same $100,000,000 it was loaned in 2003. 75% of these changes must take place within the next sixty days.

Our projections mirror those of the district. These numbers were provided to the County Office of Education, the trustee, and the district as of mid March due to the urgency of the situation. This presentation is taking place one month early due to the gravity of the situation. Why is this so hard? In the 1990s, Oakland Unified began correcting overcrowding and student performance issues by welcoming the small school and charter movement.

The model was financially unsustainable at the time of the 2003 bankruptcy, yet the implementation continued. The public, educational visionaries and wealthy investors encouraged the concepts from the 1990s through 2010. The ideas may be sound, but the structure requires more financial support than ongoing funds provide. All the risks that caused the bankruptcy have been mitigated except for the small school concept and student attendance. The district must address these items with vigor to maintain local control.

These are the items to concentrate on. Oakland is operating the most schools per pupil in the state. 25% of student enrollment has been diverted from the district to charter school enrollment. The State County Office of Education and the district have authorized 37 charters as of twenty twenty four-twenty five. Oakland was already on this path as early as 2003 by authorizing 20 charters.

Oakland Unified is one of the largest charter authorizers in the state. Oakland students are also not enrolling in the district middle schools, making other choices for education at this juncture. And also another area to concentrate on is Oakland Unified student attendance is far below the state averages needed to be financially successful. As of the bankruptcy, the district had already opened as many schools as needed to be financially solvent, yet due to pressure from inside and outside the district, it doubled its number of sites making the financial situation even more tenuous. This slide provides a visual of the sheer number of charters with the state authorized one in purple, the county authorized ones in blue, and the district authorized ones in gray.

This slide visually shows the concentration of schools. This slide ranks the number of schools by the number of students. Oakland ranks number one ahead of all other regions and types of entities. Of the largest schools in the state, Oakland averages four twenty four students per site regardless of type. Oakland Unified operates as if it is one of the largest districts in the state with a very decentralized approach.

A decentralized operation fails to achieve the necessary economies of scale in purchasing facilities management and overall administration. As superintendent Johnson Trummel has shared many times, Oakland's challenges are no different than those of any other urban district nationwide. The district shares challenges with all types of districts within California. An Oakland 9% enrollment decline over the past seven years, although favorable compared to Los Angeles Unified's 24% decline, it lags behind some destination districts that show 15% to 20% growth. A positive trend for Oakland is that primary grade enrollment is exceeding graduating senior enrollment.

However, Oakland Unified is unable to retain primary school enrollment at the middle school level, thus losing the potential for sustainability. When students promote from grade five to grade six, the district is losing about 700 students per year. Charter school students promote and enroll at higher rates in the charter middle schools and high schools than the district middle and high schools. The charters are showing gains of four fifty students per year. The data demonstrates that the charters are not the only reason for the shift.

Other factors must be in play as students are leaving at a pace of 700 per year and shifting to charters at four fifty students per year. This slide shows, I think we're one slide ahead at the moment. There we go. This slide shows the constant stable percentage of 75% of available students choosing Oakland Unified and 25% choosing charters despite the overall growth the overall decline in enrollment in both districts and charters. This slide shows only two districts have more charter competition than Oakland, LA Unified and Twin Rivers.

To understand the magnitude of the amount of site and charters that districts must oversee, only 10 of the 58 counties have more charters in total than Oakland. Oakland is creating more responsibility and more complexity than most districts, diverting attention from the educational program of its own students and increasing administration and legal costs. K-twelve financial experts agree that the following sizes are optimal for schools, 500 students per elementary site, about 800 middle school students per site, and approximately 1,500 students per comprehensive high school. However, only six Oakland sites operate above these optimal financial metrics. Administrative costs, utilities, and insurance costs escalate with the number of sites.

General obligation bond dollars must be spread over more sites lessening their impact. The other area to turn attention to is student attendance. Oakland Unified could gain $5,250,000 of total revenue per year for every 1% student attendance gain. The district must achieve 95% attendance rates per student enrollment to stay fiscally solvent. This slide demonstrates the impact of labor unrest and the pandemic on attendance.

Oakland has not recovered sufficiently from these events. Again, the district cannot lose more than 5¢ on every dollar. Attendance under 95% is not a fiscally sustainable model. Our firm has provided detailed analysis of every grade in sight for fall and spring for the district to address areas of attendance weakness. The previous slide was for regular program attendance.

This slide is for special education attendance. Special education attendance pre pandemic used to be an area of strength for California districts. Post pandemic it is an area to strengthen. In conclusion, the district is in its strongest historical position to depart receivership with respect to process procedures and leadership. However, the district must do the following, increase student attendance, address the number of sites and charters it supervises, recapture students from competition, the other solutions are insufficient and incomplete.

The district must reimagine itself to operate within the financial model of California Public Schools. Again, thank you very much Oakland team. I appreciate your courtesy and attendance and I welcome any questions.

So president Burhart, if you wanna open for any questions.

I'm gonna open for public comment first, think.

Can the board please comment first? Since we we had a role in this and I would like the community to hear from the board before they speak.

Alright. Board comments first. Director Hutchinson, you wanna start?

Wow. You know, I I can't believe that we're here for the first public announcement that we're leaving receivership, but I sure didn't imagine it feeling like it feels right now today. We should be popping champagne in here. That's how historic this achievement is. And when I first joined the board a little over four years ago, didn't think we could ever get to this point, let alone get here earlier than we even planned.

And it is the saddest of ironies that on the same day, we're announcing this historic accomplishment of paying off the biggest state loan in California history. After twenty two years, when we see the districts around us going into the tank and we maneuvered our way out of the darkness. Of course, we wouldn't have been able to do that without doctor Kyla Johnson Trammell. And and of course, we wouldn't have been able to do it without our chief business officer, Lisa Grant Dawson. And I could have never imagined at the same time we were announcing leaving receivership, at the same meeting, a majority of the school board would vote to remove our superintendent.

And so when I first heard about this news a little over a week ago, I didn't even believe it till I talked to the trustee myself. And, you know, I know now, like they say in Avengers, we're actually in the end game now, y'all. We're finally free of the oversight of the colonial model that we've had to operate under for almost a quarter of a century, and we did it with our homegrown black and brown leadership here in OUSD. And now at that point, I can't even be smile today because we have four directors who are risking all of the gains that we made, forcing out the superintendent. And don't be confused.

The reason she's getting a payout is because she didn't resign. This wasn't her plan. It hasn't been decided just like the other votes that happened in closed session. Now this is now a fight y'all because I don't know how we reopen our schools in August with what they're doing now. Forcing the superintendent out, I assume many of our senior staff like miss Grant Dawson will follow our superintendent out the door because of how nasty school board directors have been to some of us.

And please know, and I'm gonna say it here in the open mic, they're openly colluding with OEA leadership. And so today, they also refused to vote to protect the district against a strike.

Thank you, director

Hutchinson. I'm to protect OEA. The same four directors forcing our superintendent out are colluding with other people. So nobody's gonna come save us, y'all. It is up to us as a community.

We elect the school board. And if they don't reflect our will, it's our job to force them out. So as of today, they have declared

Thank you, director Hutchins. For them. It is the need them.

And I don't care who you are. If you come and try to destroy my community, if you come and try to hurt us, I guarantee you, I will stand up every time till the end. So these people have been calling me liars out there in the public. Excuse me, doctor.

A hold of Hutchinson. Your time is up.

That's what I'm here for.

Father members.

And today, it starts.

I

wanna appreciate a really thorough auditing comment. I got a lot from this. I understand those those remarks were directed at me.

No. Fine. Directed at all four.

Excuse me. Court. Now and when election time comes, that can happen. But what I would like to really commend my commend I'd like to ask the question, I guess. There were some things in here that I thought were really I thought were really thorough.

I thought the memo was as thorough. I got through highlighted all of it under there. I think, again, as someone who taught, whose kid went to school during her whole time as many of the people in our our community has, that to leave this right now is is huge. And I think, again so some of the questions I I had, I I wanted to just double check on some of these things. To me, I thought I Bailey was very clear on charters.

And the number when I looked at the number of charters that we have 27 charters and we have 80 schools, that number was really shocking to me. And I think, again, in terms of our enrollment, I know there are people here tonight from a charter school, and I can appreciate their comments. But this really has been something detrimental to our district. And I'm not sure how to work together on that, but I think those numbers don't lie. I think the other thing that was really interesting to me, and I thought a lot about this, was the thing that Oakland thinks of itself as the top seven school districts.

And even if we got all the charter people back, students students back, we still would not be in that top seven. So I think as I started to think about our resources, I started to think about we can't spend like we're LA Unified. We can't we're not LA Unified, as much as I would like to, you know, think about that. So I I really appreciated the particularly the things we had to think about as potential risks. I I think as we go forward in our budget work, that's those I'm really keeping those things in mind, and I appreciated the way that they were clearly laid out.

And your just your explanation tonight is Carolyn, your last name. So, again, I really appreciate this, and I think this really sets the tone for our work forward in our budget work and in setting our priorities. So thank you.

I just wanna give you a shout out, Lisa, and give the superintendent a shout out for your leadership. It is quite impressive, and I know I'm not had nothing to do with all the work, but appreciate that I get to step into leadership at a time when we get to, you know, benefit from all that labor. This is I know it was not the mandate of the auditor's report to do this, so this is not a critique. I'm naming it just for the record for the benefit of my colleagues that I noticed that in the report over a 100 pages long that student outcomes isn't really addressed explicitly, right, and so as we move into work planning and establishing the budget for 2627, that rooting some of the future decisions, all of our future decisions and students and outcomes and how we wanna leverage resources to improve outcomes is gonna be really important. We have the opportunity to take a step back and do that.

Director Simmons?

I've known miss Johnson Tramiel for a while. Through her son, we went to middle school together. She's a she's a great lady, you know, and especially sitting on the board next to her, she always offered her help and insights and knowledge and wisdom. It was very open to ask her questions. She always made a safe space, You know, like a mom.

She was she was a mom. She is a mom. So, you know, it works out great. But, you know, y'all y'all know I like to get up here and preach about, you know, what we gotta do. But honestly, right now, it's really you know, my my voice is trembling and it's hard to speak because, you know, we did just have a major accomplishment, but it's real hard to speak on that accomplishment when you had to leave someone behind.

You know, we got to the treasure, but we lost some we lost some some soldiers on the way along. So, you know, it's real it's real saddening because I was just I've been told not to leave anyone behind, you know, so I really don't know how to how to process it. I'm at a crossroads right now because I didn't have a lot of information to go off of, and then it's just put all on me. So I really I'm really feeling for y'all because I don't I really don't know how y'all feel because because y'all ain't getting no information. I know I know y'all not getting no information because I don't I don't have any information.

So so I just I want y'all to know that the student directors are we right there with y'all. You know, I'm a I'm a always do my we're gonna always do our best to to speak out and to update y'all with what's going on and to keep y'all in loop. And but we really do have to find a better way of communicating. And there there is a lot of stuff that goes on behind that I'm that, you know, they might use it as an excuse as to not tell our community, but we wouldn't be here without our community. So I it just don't feel it's not fair.

You know? So I'm a just leave it there, but I'm really feeling for y'all right now.

Director Batchel.

Thank you.

Yeah. I think to your point around presentation, I appreciate the thoroughness of the report, and I appreciate the presentation as well since it summarized a lot of it. But something that has continuously come up in my engagements in my community is the number of charter schools and the number of public schools that we have open in Oakland. And to really see it in this report, really thinking about the slide that said the current if we had the current Oakland School District and charter enrollment combined, we would be at a higher rate than 45,000 students that we had in school year twenty two thousand and three when we went into receivership. And to me, that really showcases that we almost have, dare I say, 35 to 30 different school districts that we're trying to function within one jurisdiction, and that means millions of dollars are going towards things that are not supporting any student regardless of whether they're in charter schools or in public schools.

So to me, that's really a calling to figure out how do we ensure that those public dollars, those are taxpayer my dollars, all of our dollars, are being used in the most strategic way to support every single one of our students in Oakland. And having 35 different systems within one jurisdiction just does not have that sentiment in mind. That doesn't include the amount of attrition that we lose or the amount of folks that we lose to Berkeley, to San Leandro, to Alameda, and to charters and in those areas as well. So it's really concerning to me because I know when I, talked to folks in my neighborhood when Parker closed, they sent their kids to San Leandro. They're like, I'm done with y'all.

Y'all are a mess. I can't do this. So I know that we're losing students not only to as the presentations that are competing charters, but also now that we are having low enrollment throughout California, specifically in the Bay Area because of the cost of living, because there is lack of housing, because there is, like, income insecurity amongst our immigrant communities, because of the Trump administration and everything the federal government is doing, that is gonna be making it even more difficult to establish the enrollment and attendance that we need to. So I think director Burghardt and I, in our meeting with senator Jesse Aragine, really expressed upon them that we need to move from a attendance and enrollment to, like, give us the money for our enrollment because that is really, really key. We cannot do any of the work that you are asking us to do as LEAs if we do not have the funds to actually go grab those students and bring them into our classrooms and make sure that they are learning.

And so, again, it's I think those things are really the things that came out to me in this report and are things that I've continuously heard from members of my community that have engaged with me.

Doctor Moore.

Thank you, president Brohard. I just wanted to first begin by, thanking miss Larson and her team for putting together this report. Secondly, wanted to publicly, appreciate CBL Grant Dawson for, not only your expertise, but just your thoughtful leadership over the course of the five years that you've been here with the district. And, of course, to appreciate, superintendent doctor Johnson Trammell, who's not here with us tonight on a prescheduled, commitment. I wanted to share, the, the report is is 88 pages dense, and so I wanted to just share four key highlights from the report that, I feel like are important to just articulate out loud.

And, there's a a message on our website that that talks about some of those main points too. So, the first key finding is that the district is in its best fiscal condition in twenty two years, including a reliable general ledger and budget practices and minimal audit findings, plus the use of county treasury and financial systems. The second is stable leadership with the same superintendent and, doctor Johnson Trammell since 2017 along with, our chief business officer, Lisa Grant Dawson, and her accounting team. The third is no risky financial practices, especially, no no no nonvoter approved debt, no post retirement health benefits, no excessive no excessive executive perks, and no self dealing. And then the last one is effective community engagement and responsible bond issuance.

So just wanted to make sure that some of those key findings, were elevated from the report. So thank you again.

Are

there any other board comments? Director Wayne?

Sure. Just wanna say, miss Larson, thank you, and miss Grant Dawson, thank you, and and superintendent, thank you for the work that you've been doing over the years that you've been here. Just wanna thank you again for just being so thorough and using this, auto report as a way of giving us an overall view of the district. Hello. Hello.

Hello.

How

are doing?

Okay. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Did you wanna continue?

Hello. Hello. Once again, I just you know, we've come a long way, and, you know, with your leadership, you have put us in a good position and just wanna thank you for the authentic conversations in regards to how we need to move as a district, how we need to move as a board. I think that, you know, miss Grand Dawson, what you brought to us is very good perspective in putting our students first, and it hasn't been easy. It has been back and forth struggle, but your solid leadership in moving this forward and getting the audit done really says to your professionalism, that you brought to this particular position and to our district.

Just wanna thank you. There's I think that we have, you know, ways to go, but you have brought us, to this point of paying off the loan, which is taking some shackles off. Thank you again. Your leadership is, unquestioned. Thank you.

Thank you. Directors Vasquez.

Yes, thank you. I would like to first start off by thanking you guys for the presentation. I also like to thank former Doctor. Johnson Trimeau for the short time that I worked with her she was really sweet and amazing and someone I could really rely on and I couldn't Max said Doctor. Simmons said exactly what I was thinking as well but I also want to address that I also feel a lot of disappointment just like all of you guys right now.

Right now, we just hit a major milestone and instead of celebrating it, we're disappointed and far more disappointed. I think just saying this The word disappointment is not enough to describe how we're feeling right now, especially how I'm feeling right now. And just seeing the board behave the way that they just did a couple minutes ago is even more disappointing because we're here for answers, not seeing that. We're seeing more disappointment and more confusion. To So just my ask is for not just clarity for this, not just the student directors because we also have We don't have a lot of information to work on and also to report back on the students, but also just More.

Maturity in a way and just how you all are interacting with each other. Like I said, we're all confused, and we're all wanting answers. And we're and the more we see you guys interact with each other and just not really respecting each other just doesn't help all of us at all. So I hope moving forward, we could see you guys acting better or just communicating way better and just setting an example for future leaders. Thank you.

Director Thompson.

President Burhard, thank you very much. It would be remiss of me not to thank miss Larson for a wonderful presentation. So thank you very kindly also, for doctor Johnson Tramiel and also miss Lisa Grant Dawson. I thank both of you for your leadership. It was absolutely wonderful.

You. Miss Larson, speaking directly to your report, it's going to allow us, I think, to write the triangle. I've been saying for several years that our triangle is somewhat inverted. And what I mean by that is instead of, placing our academics at the forefront, making certain that our schools are providing our kids to be productive citizens in post secondary education, I think we sometimes, and I use this expression, we minor in the majors and we major in the minors. And so I think once we turn things around, then we'll be able to continue the progress that we all want to see.

And so, again, miss Larson, I wanna thank you for that report because you've identified salient points that actually point to the necessity of our writing the triangle and actually making certain that we put at the apex our student achievement. Thank you very

much. Thank you, director Thompson. Public comments? Do we have any speakers?

Yes we currently have three speakers. Kim Davis, Ben Tab Scott, and Asado Labala.

Two minutes each please.

First I want to repeat that a lot that was going on Oh, it's not on? It's on? It's the result of the superintendent's work And they they said that her work was due to this she created stability and incompetence in her work. One of the things that stood out for me, of course, you talked about the charter schools. You can't do nothing about the charter schools.

That's a mandate. You have no ability to do anything but you can do something about the recognitions that you have too many too many buildings. You have to do something about that. You have 20 over 20 schools with 300 students or less. You have to do something about that.

I saw in the document that you are dealing with $72,500,000 and you have to do something to eliminate that. And next year for Then I was concerned with the federal revenue of over $53,000,000 We know possibly we're not going get that because you are a sanctuary city and they're targeting sanctuary cities. I don't understand the indirect 2526, a deficit of $12,563,578. Somebody needs to explain to me what does it mean by saying indirect funds, what does that mean for the public to understand, please? You need to have some more accountability as it relates to how you approve agenda items.

We have an agenda item for which you are putting money into a school that has 300 and something students tonight. You can't be investing in schools with 300 students or less. But you're doing that tonight, and I'll identify it when we get to the consent agenda.

Thank you. Next speaker, please.

I don't understand what's going on. I I I don't understand it. Because just a short while ago, you extended her contract, gave her a raise, and then you're gonna go up there and discriminate and get rid of her? It doesn't make any sense. And I'll tell you one thing, I'm gonna call for a team out here to get rid of you, Jennifer.

We can recall you. We can recall you. You should be ashamed of yourself. And the other four of you, Valerie, I don't understand it. I don't understand.

All the work, we disagreed on a lot. That woman worked hard to get us where we are. And to just dismiss her, I don't understand it. And it doesn't smell good or look good. And you should be ashamed of yourself.

Ronald Mohammed and Kim Davis.

Greeting. My name is Ronald Mohammed. I am a alumni of OUSD. I two students in OUSD, and I'm on the alumni board from high school. What the superintendent was able to do hasn't been done.

So she was one of the first to bring us out, of receivership. And then to have her to be in a hostile situation to where there's a parting of the ways, I think that you're cutting your face off to spite your nose, not cutting your nose off to spite your face. You're killing your whole self. Everyone talks about her income that was she was, receiving from the district, but you never talked about what she was bringing in. The Salesforce, the Chase, the Warriors, the eat, learn, play.

So her income is really minimum to what she brought in. She didn't have anything egregious on her record. She didn't steal money. She didn't have any sexual get that. Anything that should be dismissive.

This doesn't seem right. This is the definition of an oxymoron. This is a paradox. This is a statement that contradicts itself. Congratulations.

You're fired. That don't make sense.

What kind of shit I mean, what kind of

stuff is that? It makes no sense at all. But I don't as a representative, you should represent the people and not your own not your own thoughts. So that means you you must have went to the people. I don't know what people that would be.

And talk to us first, and then you were to convey our thoughts. That's what you do as our representative, or you're doing your own thing. And this just doesn't go well.

Kim Davis. Kim Davis, if you're online, please raise your hand. President Bruhoyer, Deck and Klub, registered speakers.

Thank you. The next item on the agenda is, student report.

Thank you. Good evening to all the community members, students, teachers, board members. Here's our student director report for today. So we're going over student voice. We'll be talking about the Oakland Youth Vote delegation meetings, student leadership at Fremont High School and their Arab American Heritage Month celebration and student events.

We're going to be covering our youth action summit that happened Last week on Thursday. So for student voice, the Oakland youth vote students met with President Brohard and share updates on the Oakland youth vote implementation after their first youth voting this past year. They asked questions and tried to learn more about the school board and how OESD plans supporting youth voting in the future as this was the first time the youth were able to and vote for the upcoming district leaders. For student leadership at Fremont High, students celebrate the air the Arab American Heritage Month celebration. This event was done by our students with cultural performances, music, henna, and poetry.

The students from all backgrounds participated and enjoyed all the festivities. And this was also the first started this event was started at Fremont seven years ago, and it continues to be student led, which is amazing, and we love seeing that.

Hi everybody. So last Friday, we held our youth action summit where we come up with priorities that all that the All City Council governing board, which is composed of 11 students. Our priorities at this event we come with our priorities for next year and we also elect our new governing board for the following year. So we we did elect a new board but we have to turn in our report on Wednesday and the event was Friday. So we'll tell you guys who the new board is with a picture of them.

A formal introduction.

Yeah. Next next board meeting. And we came up the students told us some issues at their school sites and some things that they believe we should prioritize for next year. So once we go over with our current governing board and come with priorities for next year, we will share that with you guys at our next board meeting. But overall the event was really great.

It had a really good turnout. A lot of students and a lot of representatives from each school showed up, from each high school showed up. It was a very good day. The students became very comfortable. You know, it was one of those things where you see some sometimes the people sometimes people will be a little shy and a little nervous to start the day off, but then they're really they're really loose and then they're really excited when the day is over and they don't really wanna go home.

So it was just very good to see that. And especially every year more and more students want to be a part of All City Council which is such an amazing thing because that means students are finally beginning to see the power that they truly hold, and they're beginning to understand the importance of telling your own story and being able to speak out and understanding yourself, but also the people around you and your community.

We'd like to thank CCPA, Fremont, Claremont, MetWest, Oakland High, Oakland Tech, Skyline for showing up and just coming and being a part of the Youth Action Summit. We also had new members from, all these different schools be a part of now are going aboard. So it's really nice seeing these schools that used to not be represented or represented as much now being equally a part of our team and now being able to share their voices. It was really nice to meet everybody and seeing everybody follow along, participate, share their opinion, share their voices, and I can't wait to see this new governing group of students govern for the upcoming school year as well. So it was really nice, and I really enjoyed that day as it was my last time being a part of this event since I am a senior.

So I feel very happy to see everybody getting along. And that concludes our report, and thank you so much to everybody for listening, being patient as this meeting goes on. Thank you.

Are there any board comments?

Just shout out to the Youth Action Summit. That was awesome. I was only able to be there for a hot minute, but it was amazing. I did hear some really good feedback. I don't know if you all can share any of it, but one thing I will call out that I did hear was transparency was something that I heard from every student in the group that I spoke with.

And so the fact that y'all mentioned it tonight, it's sitting with me, and, you know, let's keep talking about I don't even wanna talk about it.

We should do some we should do we should

be better. So let's connect about how we can make that happen.

Yes. Thank you for showing up and also for director Williams for showing up as well. I feel like transparency has been said a lot, but at the same time not enough since we keep on seeing current patterns just keep happening happening again, and I'm glad that you were also able to talk to students in here that it's not just something that we are seeing, it's also something that students outside are seeing as well. So hopefully, can also work about that and make sure that this issue gets resolved as well.

I actually enjoyed it too. I it was, I think with both the vote group, I think it was, a really, different experience for me to really just listen. And I think that just hearing what the students were saying, the issues they were talking about, and just their real honesty with that in the, small group. I also like the walk through, the gallery, thing of the different events that were, different movements that were student led. I thought it was it was also, really good.

And I appreciate it. And then congratulations on your end of year moving on to college.

Thank you. And also thank you so much for coming to the Youth Action Summit as well.

Thank you. I first wanna start off by apologizing for missing the ACC meeting. I don't know what happened in my schedule, but I was unable to attend with director Brohard, which was my plan. I do wanna give Fremont a huge shout out. I was honored to speak at the Arab American Heritage Month celebration.

It was such a wonderful event with a diverse group of students, And there are middle schoolers, high school students, which I thought was really great, and then they were enjoying music, dance performances, food. I wanna give Sana a big shout out. They have some amazing chai that I was able to try out, and I have yet and I have purchased much of it. And one of the best things that I saw there was the showcase of the robotics team. They were able to take down a wall with their robotics that they had created, and it was just, like, such a beautiful, joyful experience.

And I want to thank the students and their adult allies for continuing to host events like that at our school sites. And I look forward to many more events like that throughout the next year.

Thank you, president Brohart. I think one of the things that we wanna do is when we have our next retreat is to make sure that young folks is a part of that so we can actually set out like our agenda and set out our code of conduct, rules for engagement, you know, and opportunities to see where all these transparent conversations can happen. I think one of the things that we've been struggling with on this board over my last four years is that our board orientation has not been very strong at all. And so, a lot of board members get elected, and then they're given responsibility to be a board member without actually the onboarding and the training and orientation to really actually be fully engaged in how their behaviors on this board affect young folks and how it projects out. And so what I've been hearing time and time again from you is that, there's a level of expectation of student directors you have of us, And I think we all just need to come to the space and just really kinda lay it out and figure out where where we need to be, so you can feel supported.

I think that would be, you know, a little disheartening when you show up every board meeting and you kinda like, you know, I'm not understanding what's going on, what the dynamics are in play here. And I think that one way to really address that is to have that meeting for us all to kinda see how these relationships are and and what we actually are standing on, but also to get what your expectations are as student directors. Right? What would make you feel like, this would be a better experience for you. Because I think what what what tends to take place is there are conversations that happen in closed session.

It's sealed by the Brown Act, but when we come out there, it's still folks are still affected by it. Right? And so it creates this type of energy, and and it sounds like y'all, you know, y'all look at and be like, what's going on here? And it doesn't actually it doesn't really, you know, make sense. So I think we really need to have those conversations to be like, you know, how do things roll out and what is our expectations all of us together as a board?

And I think that begins with with the restorative justice that you've been talking about. Right? Like that's phase one. You came in. We did phase one.

We should have one that's just constantly regularly going so we can get some understanding of how our joint cooperation of working together will actually make for a better board experience for student directors. I look forward to doing that. I appreciate, attending the youth summit. I just really like the democracy in that. I like how y'all engaged.

The students made the speeches. You killed it. Congratulations. And congratulations, Michelle. Can't wait to see what you're doing in your life because you're doing some big things.

Congratulations. I look forward to working with you next year, brother Mann.

Thank you. Are there any other board comments? We have ten minutes of public comment. Are there any speakers on this item?

Yes. We have Ben Tapscott and Asolo Labala.

Thank you two minutes each please

I wanna know why president Thomas hasn't been fired. He knew about lead in the water. 40 schools. And he didn't say anything for nine months while those kids are drinking that water? And he hasn't been fired?

And, Van Sedgwick, I'm not happy with you even a little bit. Took the boiler away from McClemmons and took it to another school that had a brand new boiler, and we have no warm water in Mac. The discrimination continues. Even this issue we're talking about, is it race? What is it?

And it doesn't look good. How can he do a charter school four weekends by my house painting Saturday and Sunday overtime? Who authorized that? And we got a black garbage bag over a drinking fountain for two months, Saturday and Sunday. And it goes on and on.

You have closed seven schools. You have destroyed the pattern that parents put their child in an elementary school, then they go to a middle school. You keep lying. Not you, the board, keeps lying about schools. They lied about Lakeview, said the air is not healthy for children.

They moved over for a short period of time, and then they turned around and moved all those people out, and now it's a charter school. I guess the air got better when it was a charter school there, not a public school. How do you close seven schools in one part of the city? Seven. And you called yourself a board?

Preston Thomas needs to be fired. Now.

Thank you. Next speaker,

Yeah, next speaker, Saul Oballa.

She said no. Okay. Is there anyone else?

Yeah, that includes public speakers.

You. Okay, the next item is the superintendent's report and doctor Moore, who was filling in for the superintendent, will be getting that report along with, I believe, some guest speakers. Thank

you, president Brohard. Good evening, board, community, staff. Beginning this evening, through the next four, board meetings and superintendent reports, we will be having, some updates presented by our network superintendent leadership teams. Each of those, teams will have about seven minutes to present. They'll present, together.

So there'll be one presentation followed by another, and then followed by board comment and question. So tonight, we're pleased to welcome, our network three and our middle school network team. And so at the podium, we have, doctor Monica Thomas, deputy chief of continuous school improvement, and Kate, I'm sorry, and Kate Sugarman, our deputy network superintendent of, network three. And then we'll have, Cliff Hong, our middle school network superintendent, following that. So, we'll go ahead and kick it over to you.

Do you like the

Okay. Thank you so much. Good evening, board. Nice to see you all this evening. We are here representing network three and excited to talk to you just for a very short amount of time about the incredible work that our teachers, our principals, our support staff, our students, our families are doing across our network.

I do wanna do a special shout out for our support staff in our in our front office as today is Administrative Professionals Day. And I encourage everybody if you have not spent a day or even just an hour running a elementary school office that you should do that. It's a really amazing experience, and we have just we are so blessed to have incredible staff across network three. So, who do we serve in network three? We are, the leadership responsible for supervision of schools.

17 out of our 49 elementary schools, and 5,600 students out of our 17,000. 15 are TK five and two are TK eight. We have three dual language schools, and we have schools across our across the city, of course, in Districts 2356, And 7. We serve 63% Latino students and 18% black African American students, 87% of students receiving free and reduced lunch, 17% of students with IEPs, 44% English language learners, and 18.5% newcomers, the highest in the city. Our North Star as a network is really student outcomes and the student experience, and our both our vision and our values aligned to our district vision and values showcase that.

We are focused on students first, on equity, on integrity, and joy. And as we think about how we're serving and supporting our schools, as network superintendents, we do a lot of things, but the majority of our work falls in three big buckets. Bucket one is providing on-site, side by side coaching and leadership development for principals one on one, but also for their teams. The instructional leadership teams, culture and climate teams, attendance teams, school site councils. And we do not do this work alone.

We our second bucket is the work that we do alongside our network partners where we strategically align our central services to the support that is needed at schools across networks and departments. We work with academic partners as well as operations partners to deploy support as needed to schools based on the needs that they have around their vision and their own values, mission, goals, priorities. And finally, we act as daily first responders to all of our network schools for safety and community concerns. As we think about the work that schools do around improving student outcomes, their own north stars around instructional improvement, we set goals annually, which we call lagging indicators, indicators that are only experienced once a year, and we set goals to progress monitor students across the year, which we call leading indicators. We help schools set goals for these lagging indicators to show year over year progress and also grade level proficiency, as well as setting goals for leading indicators to monitor progress along the way.

Our implementation framework is how we are organized to help schools implement their own vision, mission, values, priorities, And it's grounded in the moral imperative that schools have about what should be right for students and the student experience. It's also bridging the gap between the experience that is happening now and where we wanna go and the priorities that are needed at a school in order to achieve that. So for the leadership work, that's about ensuring high quality systems of standards based instruction, developing teams, strengthening multi tiered systems of support, and leading for effective operation organization. These are the priorities that we develop across leadership with our network principles in order to help them achieve their vision, mission, outcomes for their students. I'm gonna pass to Kate now to share a little bit about some of the progress that we're making and highlight also some of the challenges we're facing.

Okay.

Hi. So first, I wanna talk a little bit about early literacy, and our leaders and teachers are so deeply invested in this particular strand of the strategic work plan around building strong readers by the third grade. We are excited that in the network, have more than half of the first and second grade students on track to meet their growth goals this year, which is an improvement over the past. And we have seen a lot of good progress from our tiered reading support system that we've been using around providing small group tutoring and one to one tutoring to help accelerate students who are not getting what they need in the classroom experience. We are really leading the way in this network with five schools who have been piloting different foundational skills programs to help bring our district towards a place where we can adopt a new foundational skills program.

And in all of these schools, the teachers have been really invigorated by what they've learned through implementing and also the improvement they've seen for students. Another area that we're looking at is joyful schools, really focusing on a joyful experience for staff as well as families and, of course, students. And we have a great partnership with Yale Education at Burkhalter And Hoover where the staff has been engaged in some deep professional learning that has been really invigorating to those communities, and they have become lab schools that other schools can visit and learn from, which has been a great inspiration for other teachers. The family engagement work we are doing with community schools has really brought parents in to be partners with the schools in focusing on their student learning. And a great example of that has been these exhibitions of student learning that have taken place across our network where families are invited to see the amazing work that teachers and students are doing and really appreciate and celebrate their students as scholars and artists and researchers.

And lastly, I really wanna emphasize the importance of professional staff. This is something we've been caring deeply about. We know that we cannot achieve results for our students without the adults who serve them. And so two times a year, we've been holding ILT summits, bringing together leadership teams from schools across the network to meet together to make sure that we're aligned on common vision, common values, common goals, and really build a shared sense of efficacy. Sometimes it can be very lonely in your own classroom or as a principal of your own school and really being in the work together and feeling like you have community with other schools has been a great experience.

This year at the midyear, we honored 40 teachers whose students had made more than the average growth at midyear in ELA and I Ready. And we know that these teachers accomplished this through deep relationships with their students, high expectations, and just incredible planning and execution every day, and we really wanna celebrate them. And lastly, we have, a really unique and special community of principals in our network. We have a very high principal retention rate around 90% year over year that has really built a very deep community amongst our principals, and allowed them to feel that sense of shared purpose and shared community and has really led to some stability in the communities that those principals serve and building trust with parents so that they are willing to send their children year after year and build relationships with those principals. So Monica mentioned our leading indicators, and I just wanna lift up some of the progress we've made in the network has really been around growth, and growth reflects students learning across the year.

And so we're proud of a lot of the growth that we've seen. However, students are still not proficient at grade level, and that is something that we must still be focused on. It's wonderful to see growth, but we need to help all students reach the goal of being college and career ready. We are seeing a great, improvement in our attendance in this network, which is really encouraging that students are at school to get the benefit of the strong programming that's there for them. And the low suspension rate just really speaks to the strong culture and restorative practices in our schools.

The only other thing to note here is that curriculum embedded assessments were really a priority this year that teachers have really been leaning into and have been a authentic way to monitor the student learning based on the content that they're teaching and adjust and make changes based on that data. This last slide here is really just to say that everything we've been focused on in the network and across all the elementary schools is, of course, connected to the LCAP. And all the priorities that we have across our schools connect to the priorities that the district has as a whole, but every school is still able to personalize them for the students that they serve and the communities that they're in. Alright. Thank you.

I'm going to pass it over to Cliff.

Okay, good evening directors and citizens of Oakland. Nice to chat with you all. My name is Cliff Hong and I am the middle school network superintendent with the Oakland Unified School District. So many of you know me but for context, this is my nineteenth year in Oakland Unified School District. I was a teacher, was an assistant principal and a principal for ten years at Roosevelt Middle School, and this is my fifth year in this role.

I also have a sixth grader and a ninth grader enrolled in our schools, and a fun fact, I taught President Brohard's daughter and she taught my son in school as well. So I'm pleased tonight to present on the success of the middle school network and I will be addressing intended outcomes, our theory of action, our results so far. So firstly, I want to give a little bit of context for how I think about the work. I start and end with student outcomes as we all should. We are here for students and society and our city, our city of Oakland is that unit of change.

We defeat fascism by ensuring that all of our students can read, write, and do math. We beat racism and oppression when our students can think critically so they can see through false and hateful narratives. And and we win when our students collectively adopt a higher purpose and a beautiful vision, which is to ensure that the earth is healthy and all people thrive, especially those who are disempowered and have been historically marginalized. That is what this work is about. That is what the middle school network is about, and that's what our district should be about.

So, with that context, let me tell you about the work that we've been doing. So, our mission. So, let me start with our headline here. The middle school network holds a laser like focus on student outcomes and uses an MTSS framework of strategies to deliver results. Here are the three takeaways.

Number one, student outcomes should drive all of our decisions. Every decision we make here should be about student outcomes. Equity means all student groups achieve at world class levels and have a joyful experience, and success requires a commitment to the collective, a focus on student outcomes and alignment of all stakeholders. A brief so our mission here is to provide all students with a world class education of a joyful experience. So every student, all students, that's where the equity comes in with a world class education and a joyful experience.

And our vision is that each year, the middle school network is the best we've ever been. The only way we can do that is if we know what we mean by being better. These are our metrics. So our key performance indicators are these ones that you see here. So we have a few under world class education, we have a few under joyful experience.

We measure each one of these so that we know we're better every year. So here's some more details around our leading and lagging indicators. Happy to go into more detail at a future time. Our framework. So here's our basic theory of action.

So for every one of these key performance indicators, every site has a team. For example, the cost team for student wellness, culture team for suspensions, ILT for instruction, we have an attendance team as well. Each of these teams sets metrics and goals, they set strategies, and they progress monitor. It's just a basic cycle of improvement. So we have that for every one of our KPIs, every one of our schools.

For instruction, because we know that, again, we're all here for students and the most important staff members are the teachers. So we all exist for the teachers and students to have that great relationship. And so the focus of our instructional priorities are what's happening in the classrooms, specifically with that relationship. So standards based lessons every day, every class, student to student talk at least once every 15 minutes. Students shouldn't be talked to, they should be talking to each other to construct knowledge.

Also, frequent checks for understanding and feedback. And every teacher is part of a improvement cycle through professional learning communities using student data to know if the students are actually learning something. And then finally, for 2025, we're adding scaffolding for rigor, which is about keeping standards high and providing support so that all students can meet those high standards. Alignment to district initiatives, so joyful schools. You'll see that up here we've got some examples of activities that we're doing at some of our schools.

Every month at our principals meetings, we feature some of the the joyful activities happening at every school to make sure that we encourage and we expect that our schools are joyful places for all of our schools. We also have an alignment to district initiatives around the empowered graduate section of the plan. So the focus on math, the math KPI is about empowering graduates. Finally, we want alignment with the state of California as well. That's why most of our KPIs are actually indicators that are on the California dashboard so so that we hope we can deliver on those as well.

Vertical alignment. So we've already heard from one of our elementary networks and then you'll hear from high school next time, as well as the other elementary networks. We are aligned with them as well because this has to be a TK-twelve experience. We're all in this together and and we're all in a partnership with each other. So impact data.

So before I get to some instructional impact data, just wanna share about suspensions. And I actually didn't have slides for this because I wanted to give you the freshest data. So as of today, so this is compared to April 23. So our network has had 45 fewer students suspended compared to last year, that's an 11% reduction. We've also had 95 fewer suspension incidents compared to last year, a 15% reduction.

Attendance. At the end of last year, we had a thirty four percent chronic absence rate. Our goal was to drop that down to thirty one percent and as of today, we're at twenty eight percent. So we feel like we're making progress and we're very excited about that progress even though there's a lot more to go. Finally, instructional progress.

This is our, fall interim math progress from, comparing last fall to this past fall. Last year fall fall last year to fall of this year. And you'll see that we have, scored more proficiency in every one of our grade levels compared to last year. So as you can see with the commitment to the collective, a clear mission built on equity student outcomes enjoy, a commitment to collaboration and kindness, a mindset of teams, not factions, and with hard work and accountability, We can, we are, and we will be successful. Oakland should be a model and a proof point for the nation of what works because we build our society on love, respect, and kindness.

Let's do it.

Public comment? Do you have any speakers? Mister Hollis.

Yes. We do. We have Ben Tapscott and Asado Labala.

Excuse me. We have parents who've been waiting for hours to speak. You have moved this agenda around. We have little kids. We have students.

This is so disrespectful. Put non agendized public comments on the agenda. Respect the public. This is their opportunity to speak to you as a board. Let us speak.

We have public comment on the superintendent's report.

For superintendents, for public comment, we have Ben Tapscott, Sala Olabala.

I won't speak so you can I won't speak so you can move to just allow these parents to speak who are here with their children? So could you do that and move forward with with it? What item y'all talking about? Jay? Yes, Okay.

Could we move to j madam chair?

I'll check with the board. I understand that they're making reports about our schools. So we'll is the board in agreement it is the next item. With the board right now.

In the audit report, it says something about people are not enrolling in the middle schools. They are leaving the district and not enrolling in the middle schools. So I hope we address that issue that was brought up in the audit report.

Thank you. We're going to continue at the the comments on the superintendent's report. Further public speakers?

That concludes speakers.

Okay. I'm sorry. Thought, mister Tapscott was had signed up as well. Are there any board comments on item on the the superintendent's report? Jensen?

So,

you know, a month ago, I started sounding the alarm about what was happening in closed session. Two weeks ago, I went public after and I appreciate the media in the Bay Area putting it on. When I went public, some of my colleagues on the board were actually out there publicly calling me a liar. Now I don't really care if some of the people up here call me a liar because I know the reputation that I've earned with the community that I come from.

Mister Hutchinson, we're talking about

know exactly what we're speaking about. I think in respect to our network You can try to cut me off, but this is the only director that you've done this to all night, and all of y'all talk off topic. So I have two minutes and nine seconds left. Now it is offensive to have a superintendent's report tonight when everyone up here knows exactly what just went down a couple of hours ago. So let's not get this twisted here.

And so if if if the union leadership in the back wants to yell voluntary, then I'm gonna say then why did the board pay her out? So there ain't no way around this. And it is offensive today when we came downstairs as we're talking about the superintendent's report. Not one announcement from anyone up here on the board about what they just did. They think they can hide it from us.

They think because they've been telling everyone, no, it's not true. That now when it finally happened, people are just gonna say, oh, they said it wasn't true. Now there is there is a real racial context to what's been going on. And there's a real attack on those of us actually from here invested here in what's going on. Now I'm gonna tell everyone the truth, and I got my first interview lined up tomorrow morning on KTVU at 10:30.

So let's be real about what's been happening. We have four school board directors who don't belong here on the board. These four school board directors have been so disrespectful to our superintendent that the superintendent would rather just get paid out than to deal with it anymore. Just clean house. And so, unfortunately, it is up to the community to address the board because we elect them.

Nobody else is gonna come in and save us. You didn't hear anyone up here announce a plan for what happens next. They have no plan. You didn't hear them talk about the other staff that are gonna follow Kyla out the door because they have no plan. Because these folks are trying to hurt us and set up an indefinite strike for their teacher union allies.

So let's just be real. Starting tomorrow morning, I ain't holding back none of the truth no more because it's me or them. I am from here, and I know my people elected me to do just this. So I don't really care what the rest of them do. It's up to us.

And if we take

it, we

just So

tomorrow, it's on.

Director Batchelor. Thank

you. I'd like to be respectful to the folks that just presented and speak to the item that's on the agenda. So I would really appreciate

Don't put your finger up to me. Speak to the truth. How about that?

If I'm allowed

to speak back those doors. Come out the ladder. Excuse me.

So let them tell you they're lost.

Excuse me. Director Hutchinson. Director Hutchinson, you're out of order.

Thank

well, there we are then. So, yes, I'd like to thank the presenters that spoke earlier. I guess I just have, like, a quick naive question around how the elementary school networks are put together because I do know that some of my school sites are in network three, but like I said, two, three, five, six, and seven are all put together. So if I could just get a quick answer to that question. And I would really like to thank director Hong for for his words, not only around, like, the meticulous work that your network is able to do with our middle schools, and I can't wait to continue to showcase that because I think families would really understand the supports that they have in our middle schools if they knew more about those programs.

And I've seen that firsthand at Urban Promise Academy and at OOPA and at other places, so and that's the same school. At United for Success and other places, so I really want to appreciate you for that and just bringing that perspective to the work that you have going on. So yeah, if you could answer my quick question about the networks.

Hi everyone, I'm Sandra Aguilera. I'm the Chief Academic Officer for our district. And the networks are three elementary networks. They have been historically formed in the way that they are formed now. We wanted to make sure that there was a mixture of schools in each of the networks, and so I've got distracted.

So that's how they have been historically formed. We do make changes. A couple years ago when we had some leadership changes at the network level, I did, you know, make the change to have a couple of the networks, move into a different network, because we needed more stability and some more support for certain schools. So because we had a vacancy, I did recommend to our superintendent to move a couple of schools around. So it's usually not done like that, but we have traditionally wanted to have networks be a set of diverse schools.

It just has been.

And just one last question. I see that our CCPA life and the other, like, six twelves included in the middle school network, or are they part of the high school Okay. I'd like to see how our middle school network can support them as well. Because again, I just love the energy so much and all of the different pieces that director Hong presented, and I think it would really strengthen their networks or their school sites

if they were able to have some of

that support. I'm sure when the high yeah. School network comes up Yep.

Are there any other board comments?

Yeah. I just wanted to congratulate you all for the work that you shared today. I know there's a lot of work to do, but we can't do the work we have to do ahead without acknowledging and celebrating the the wins and, you know, leveraging the those lessons for future. I I have a question along the same lines, which is how do the networks collaborate with one another given that elementary schools and middle schools and high schools are represented through each network. And specifically, I noticed in the slides that there are different set of priorities for every network, and so how do you sorry.

You were gonna say something.

No. You I was jumping in before you finished your sentence. I apologize.

Just wondering how you, maintain alignment when there's you know, it seems like there's a different focus for each network.

Just one, piece for the last part of your question. These are different grade spans. So you you'll see for our k five networks, they'll have the same priorities, and then middle school is more particular to the middle school context and the same for high school, so you will see differences around the grade spans. Same general areas, but different targets because they have a different context, but all of our elementary have the same, priorities that you saw today.

The the same, essentially. We have the same priorities. We have the same coherence framework, and we do we deliver the same professional learning, but it's a little differentiated depending on what schools need across our elementary networks. We do a lot of work to align TK 12 PK 12, actually, where we, do alignment with both, cascading priorities or thinking about, like, what would this look like at kinder entry level, a fifth grade leaving middle school, an eighth grader leaving middle I'm sorry. A fifth grader leaving elementary, an eighth grader leaving middle school, and then a twelfth grader.

We try to cascade it all the way down through work around our graduate profile, and that's the work that all of the network team, does together to try to have that coherence and also consistency for student experience.

One last area is that I do have some, particular structures in place, to work on these alignment, efforts. So I have what's called a division meeting that brings all of our, networks and central partners together to ensure that we're all furthering the work around the strategic plan. So many of the updates that you receive from or in the superintendent's report come from, that work, and we have to have some intentional structures in place. So that happens on Mondays. With the CSI division meeting, and then I also meet with the network superintendents to ensure that we're furthering the work addressing any issue that's coming up.

In our schools, and that's where, we tend to do the most collaboration, to ensure that our network soups are aligned in what they're doing.

Director Thompson.

Yes I'll make this as quick as I possibly can. I just appreciate, the report necessarily and especially the concentration on the North. The North Star being academic outcomes. I really, really appreciate that. I noticed on slide 12, you showed a great, great piece of data as far as I'm concerned.

It talked about half of the first and second graders actually making tremendous progress. So I really I really appreciate that. And many individuals talked about something that I really believe in that's vertical alignment. Well, I call it vertical alignment, but I think someone just called it alignment. But but we all we know what we're talking about, and the fact that you're actually preparing elementary students to actually be successful in middle school, middle school students to be successful in high school high school students to have a positive experience in post high school academics.

So I really appreciate that. I'm kind of dating myself a bit, but one of the one of the, the best books I've ever read was good to grade. And I appreciate, superintendent Hong when he talked about the fact that there is more movement that has to take place. And so we never want to stop at good. We always want to be great.

And we're talking about strategies to entice people to come to our district. I think if we move or if we have that mindset, that would be part of what we would do, and that would be the guiding light that would propel us forward, and then would also entice more students to come to this district. So thank you very much for leading a wonderful department.

Director Lada?

Yeah, think I want to also just appreciate the very clear outline about like leading and lagging indicators and kind of where we're at in terms of progress in the elementary school and looking forward to seeing more from the other networks. I also wanna, you know, shout out the middle school network. I have a seventh grader at West Oakland Middle who I have seen the changes over the last two years at that school, and we've had a huge decrease at that school in chronic absenteeism, which I think has really made a huge difference in kind of just the cohesion in that school. And having been at the Taste of the Black Diaspora event and a bunch of the other events, I think it's also a great example of a lot of the work that is happening at a lot of our schools that is really not highlighted enough. So I appreciate you all bringing that, some of those specifics, and looking forward to more.

And thank you all for the work.

I just wanna say thank you. I think, having more of these presentations, I think, really brings out not only highlights our work, but highlights our thinking about the work. And I think hearing from the network superintendents and the I know Kate Sugarman, I think really centers the work. I think it's something we've been working on in teaching and learning, and something we hope to bring to the board is more discussion about student achievement. So thank you.

I really appreciate it. And, Cliff, I do actually see that my daughter is a teacher in at Brewer, and I think she's been pretty excited about some of the things that are happening as well. So great work. Thank you. And with that, we will move on to j, which is public comments.

And I understand that you have a a group of speakers. So how many speakers do we have, mister, Hollis for public I'm sorry, mister Sejia?

Oh, we have 24 speakers.

How many?

24. 24. We

can give a minute each. Yeah. A minute each for the speakers. Thank you.

The first five speakers are Oliver Brennan, Kim Davis, Sheila Haynes, Cecilia Perez, and Diamond Craigs.

Can can I ask I know that that they've waited, so would it be possible to have the speakers yeah. Yeah. Miss Keene, if you have can garner your speakers together, then if you guys wanna come up first, that's fine. And, again, I'm looking forward to hearing I'm hoping that this these presentations also highlight the work that OUSD is doing as well. Thank you.

First speaker, please.

Good evening. My name is Cecilia Perez Cervantes, and I was born and raised in a town, and my family have no plans to leave anytime soon. We are here as FIA, Families in Action for Quality Education. President Brauhard, when I reached out to you to give a courtesy heads up on what we were planning to come tonight, you told me not that it would be inappropriate for us to come as a united community of hundreds of Oakland parents, grandparents, students who are concerned about the quality of our kids education because there were other important things on the agenda. We came anyways because 80% of our black and brown students are getting left behind.

They can't read or do math at grade level, and we're calling for that to stop now. This is deeply rooted for us as many of us did not get a quality education, and the same remains true for our kids that give up on school, feel left out, not seen because the education system is not set up for them to succeed. We are called to lead because our kids are brilliant, but they deserve to be able to read and do math at grade level and to be prepared to go to college when they leave Oakland Schools. Board members, we need courage and your leadership and your willpower to reach these goals. If we continue improving at our current rate, it will take four generations for all of our kids to be at grade level.

We cannot wait. We will not wait.

I'm really gonna ask that people honor the one minute so that we can entertain all speakers. Thank you.

Okay, Diamond.

Speaker, please.

My name is Diamond Griggs. I'm an eleventh grade student leader with FIIA for two years, and I worked on the resolution to advance black and brown student achievement last year. Last year, we worked with you to pass a resolution for black and brown student achievement, which promises that OUSD will double proficiency in math, ELA, and increase a through g for our students to 80% from 50% currently. We thank you for your support of these goals. This year, our leadership team conducted research action meetings with six policymakers and school system leaders to understand what is needed to reach these goals and what is getting in the way.

This year, we also studied the very difficult academic budget facilities and enrollment challenges that we are facing in OUSD, as well as the recent actions to prematurely remove superintendent Kyla Johnson We want to be clear. We support keeping stability in the district in keeping superintendent Johnson Trammell in her role. So after all of our research, we came up with solutions and evaluated them for how much impact and effort each takes. Tonight, we are here to share our top solutions with you and ask for your support. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker, please.

Good evening, board members. My name is Corwin Foster, and I'm a father of four students in OUSD. As a parent in elementary school, I have dedicated myself to making sure my daughters and son receive a different experience than I did. Yet I did not know much about my child or how my child's school is performing through lit literacy and programs like FIIA. I've learned so much more and learned how to help them and help the school help them succeed.

That is vital information that should be easily available to every parent and this is why support demand number one, parents must know. Four, we call on you to adopt the policy so that all Oakland schools have an expectation system and supports for establishing parent teacher relationships and homeschool collaborations. Our schools also need data transparency. We ask that all schools post data on their front doors or school website pages. None of us can do it alone and we can take act we can't take action unless we know the reality.

Board, we need you to set this policy so that all schools can put their attention towards helping every parent become a parent, a partner in their child's education.

Hello.

My name is Tanisha Harris. I'm a native of Oakland, a parent, and a product of OUSD. President Brewhar, we as families expect all schools in Oakland, traditional district, are chartered to discuss academic outcomes in math, ELA, and a through g outcomes every month. You know, you value by how you spend your time. Our school board does not spend enough time on what parents care about.

Our students reading, writing, math, and a through g. This is why we are we as families support demands too, transparency and accountability. We call on you to make sure that the board is publicly discussing our district academics every month. That is the only way to be transparent in how we are getting or how we're gonna get to our goals. And last year, I was here advocating for the advancement of black and brown students, and I didn't feel welcomed by some of the board members.

Matter of fact, you and the vice president and mister Van Sedgwick both said no to the advancement of black and brown students. Transparency as well is not in making decisions behind closed doors. Transparency is including us in your decisions, and I need all the adults in this board and in this room to get comfortable with being uncomfortable because that's the only freaking way we're gonna have change. And you gotta go, lady, because you're not for our babies. I'm done with y'all.

Good evening, board members. My name is Sophia Allgood, and I'm a single mom of three black and brown sons. Board, did you know that there are 28 schools in Oakland that are

in single

digits in their math performance. Bet you didn't know that. As a parent, I think it's crazy that students are not performing well, and the district admin and staff are not being held accountable, but here we are to bring solutions, and that is why we're demanding too transparency and accountability is key. Last year, my son's school had to go through a renewal process and prove that we are serving all our schools equitably and providing quality education. We are demanding that Oakland Unified School District schools, especially underperforming schools, go through a renewal process for schools that are not providing quality education.

They should be redesigned and or merged. As a parent, we know our kids only have one chance to get their education, and we won't wait four generations for all these schools to be improved. I call on you as a board, as a school board, to hold all schools accountable for the student outcomes. Thank you.

Can we have a translation, please? Just a minute. We're gonna have a translation. Thank you.

Yeah. Okay. Good evening. I am parent leader. My name is Katia Caballero and I am a parent leader mother leader in community high school in Greenleaf.

And I know that we need to establish and I apologize. We need to we have students at Fremont we have schools at Fremont. Fremont the school district in Fremont has 40 schools, meanwhile Oakland has 80, and so and yet they have the same funding. And so today we need to, sorry the interpreter has a little bit of technical issues. I apologize.

Okay, so we need to establish, we need the board to consider a realistic number of schools so that we can obtain the funds that we need. Our district budget is in a deficit and we are spending more than we earn every month. In order for our students to benefit, we need a system that is more realistic. Only to I work in my school and in order for our students to read at a grade level, we need to do something. We really need to change things at a different level.

I work as a parent leader in my school and I inform parents about how only less than 20% of our students are reading at grade level and so we really need you at a higher level to do something, to take action because if we continue having this system and this same number of schools, things are not gonna work. We really need to recognize and make changes.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Thank you. Good evening, board. I'm not even gonna bother introducing myself. This minute is not for me. It's for one of my students that didn't have a chance to speak tonight because of changes to the schedule.

And I will wanna say I appreciate most board members at least looking up at us while we're speaking. Valerie's been on her laptop this whole time while we have parents up here speaking. Hello. My name is Sarah Raines, and I'm a Oakland c I'm a senior at Oakland Tech. I am here because I care deeply about making sure every student in Oakland has access to a high quality education.

I've been fortunate to be part of programs like Peer Forward that help students prepare for college, and those supports have made a big difference in my life. But I know too many students who haven't had the same access to resources, and that's not fair. That's why I stand with demand three, we can't wait, redesign for the present and future. Imagine if every OUC school had 400 students, that would mean 16,000,000 in funding. With that, our schools could have could finally have, things students need.

More mental health support, restorative justice programs, college and career guidance, after school programs, art, music, and sports, and better pay for staff who show up for us every single day. We're asking you to re redesign the system not just for the future but for right now because students like me and so many others can't wait. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker, please. And can we have translation, please? One moment, we're going have translation.

Hello, I am a mother leader at CCPA and we really we have been studying this subject for more than two years. A couple of years ago, you proved the resolution for improving the outcome academic outcome of black and brown students, and I congratulate you for the improvement in the results for of A to G requirements. However, math is still a stock for black and brown students. And tonight, I ask you to be brave and to prioritize reading and math for students and the A to G outcomes for students. And tonight, I ask you to support our demands and to improve the collaboration between parents and teachers in all the schools and also provide parents with all the data.

We need to work together and you need to have these conversations on a monthly basis. If you want change, we need to change.

Next speaker, please.

This is a call to action. I am Leila Wiley Booker, a part of Oakland Public Schools including Emory Cox, Elmhurst, Casamont. And I thank each of you for your service. However, it's time to make a change. As a mom, I'm coming to you and sharing that I'm making a change and getting more involved in my kids' education.

Can you make a change and put your kids reading our kids reading math and college access first? Making a change is hard, but you can do it. We call on you to implement a renewal process for all schools, especially ones that are not doing well. Merge and redesign schools so they can better serve students. Except that Oakland needs less schools than it has today.

Why are we starving and cutting school budgets when we could increase resources if we have fewer schools? Additionally, we are in support of prioritizing as much stability as possible at OUSD and keeping superintendent Johnson Trammell in her position and being transparent with families and communities when decisions like this are being made. Board members tonight can be the night for board members to change the benefits for all all kids. Do the right thing. When family rise Open rise.

When family rise Open Open rise. Rise. When when family family rise rise Open Open rise. Rise.

Thank you. Next speaker, please.

Hello, board. Thank you so much for your time. My name is Vivica Ikoy Walton. I am a parent, community member, and a family and community organizer with Families in Action for Quality Education. I'm speaking today as a very concerned member of this community, deeply upset by the recent decisions made by the school board to force out the superintendent without any form of public transparency or input.

This decision made behind closed doors raises serious questions about the integrity of this board's process and the trust that we all as constituents have placed in you as public officials. Removing a superintendent which is who is a key figure in shaping the direction of the district should not be done lightly. It is an action that impacts not just this administration, but the entire educational experience of our children in Oakland. You owe it to us to justify your actions thoroughly and openly. Without this transparency, it's hard not to question the motivations behind this decision or the allies that paid for your campaigns.

Not having parents involved with such a critical decision undermines the very foundation of the public education system. The community should have a voice in this process. To operate without our input is a disservice to the people who voted you all into leadership. We deserve clarity, honesty, and above all, accountability in all decisions that impact our children's education. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker please.

Thank you, OUSD parent of two. Last August when Superintendent Johnson Tromel signed a three year contract which was a two year extension from this school year, we were fortunate that we could use these two years to do a deep and wide search to find a successor, a robust succession plan. What is happening now? The joint statement email arriving in inboxes all over the community right now is a load of baloney. It's sugarcoating the termination of a three year contract we signed just nine months ago, as if it's all a happy agreement.

Will we find a new property qualified person to succeed our superintendent by July 1 in two months instead of two years? What does an interim superintendent mean? Will this person become the actual contracted superintendent? When? Will it be a three year contract?

Will you terminate it after nine months? Will we stay solvent after July 1 with lots of challenges still remaining as mentioned just now in the physical systems audit report? If we do not because of instability, we can look back to a very poor decision taken tonight behind closed doors.

Thank you. Are there any other speakers?

We have one online as well who's been waiting.

Do we have speakers online?

Yes, next speaker are Kim Davis, Sheila Haynes, Carmen Jimenez, Stafija Ikoy Walton, Jorge Lerma, Ben Tapscott, Carrie Kaufman, Ronald Mohammed, Asalo Labala, Ivy Ranger, Martel Price, JD Willison, and Jack Nelson. I will go ahead and allow Sheila Haynes to speak if you can unmute yourself. Miss Haynes, if you can mute yourself to speak.

Hi. Can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear you.

Hi. My son and all children like him, they have suffered so much. They're not even allowed the opportunity available to them. He still hasn't recovered from the board's actions a decade ago, learning online for five years. Ms.

Batchelor, although I appreciate that you returned my email, what I wasn't told was that the $1,000,000 block grant for music was actually taken and used already. The fact that this grant was intended for music and arts funding and you found a way to use it for lead abatement, I'm upset at the board for passing this. The funds could have been taken from another source. This is a serious attack against our students. As this marks autism awareness, the actions of the board continues to prove most harmful to our students with autism and other disabilities who rely on music for learning with the pathway to gain other skills.

And I'm still waiting to hear back about my resolution. A million in funding could have funded several schools and service hundreds, if not thousands of students who greatly benefit and help with the consistency that they desperately need. My son and children like him have suffered enough. They should be able to get the services that they need available to them without the need of an IEP. Prop 28 funding funds for so much, but to not provide the sub resorts, to not provide the supports necessary to our students when the funding is there, you keep taking and to take in this way is very harmful.

I hope, surely hope that the board does better. We need a board that's not gonna keep causing harm to our most vulnerable students.

Steffisha Ikwuwalton, if you can unmute yourself to speak.

Thank you. Good evening. My name is Steffisha Ikwuwalton, I'll just start by saying that it's already widely known that Black women in executive leadership positions are held to a higher scrutiny and that they face harsher cultural or perceived shortcomings. But like now, it's your turn. Jennifer, Valerie, Cedric, Rachel, there's gonna be a lot of faces on signs.

Y'all said y'all didn't like y'all faces on signs last time we came, but we coming. I would like to say that like, your actions are weak, but like, that's a little bit too kind. I'm realizing that it's really your character that's weak. And the necessity, like, for you guys to remove Kyla, it really just perpetuates a cycle of the presence of a black woman being perceived as a threatening power to a white supremacist plan.

And for

me, that's a plan that, at this point, includes an Uncle Tom. And so I'm sorry for my harsh words, but I've got to point out the fact that less than 2% of superintendents are Black women. And before y'all spoke today, that 2% number, we just had to deal with. After y'all spoke today, that number went down a little bit more. This reminds me of how pioneers like Septima Clark and like Mary McLeod Bethune were like dismissed and marginalized despite all of their historic contributions.

That's exactly what you guys are doing. And like the last thing that I'd like to say to you guys is that like the representation of black women in leadership, it really does lead to the improved outcomes of our students, especially our black students. So you gotta ask yourself if what you have just done is truly equitable. And when you go to sleep tonight, I want you to ask yourself, do you really care about black kids? Do you really care about brown kids?

Because your actions don't say that you do.

Next speaker, please.

Hi. My name is Carrie Kaufman. I'm the president of the United Administrators of Oakland School. I come here to speak to you guys concerns, UAOS members have been experiencing all year. It has persisted and it has gotten worse.

OEA leadership has consistently and inappropriately targeted site administrators in serious and unsafe ways. Site administrators have been intimidated, retaliated against, had campaigns targeting them, providing false and inflammatory information, and threatened them with physical harm by OEA leadership. Our members have been targeted with language such as, I'm gonna kick her ass. We will find you in the community. And more recently, we control the board.

We got Kyla fired. We can get you fired. These behaviors have been conducted and encouraged by OEA leadership. It has led to multiple complaints being filed, multiple workplace violence claims being filed, and has created unsafe working conditions for our members who don't feel safe walking to their cars at times due to this. They make threats, and then they return to our sites and intimidate our site administrators.

It happens over and over and over again. It is wrong and it takes the focus off of our students. OEA leadership has asked for de escalation, but all they have done is escalate it. OEA leadership has targeted our black administrators at an inequitable rate in an attempt to intimidate them. This has been pervasive and it has been ongoing.

The district leaders have not responded to the complaints. OEA has made it clear that they have control of the board so the board won't support our principals. Today is just another day. Nothing will be done by this by the school board. Nothing will be done by senior leadership partly because they don't have the board support.

It is a very sad state of affairs, and the ones who suffer are the students. Finally, UAOS is very concerned about the firing of Kyla. We are very concerned about the negative impacts this will have on our students and the lack of clarity of a plan for transition, and generally, no transparency at all. Thank you.

I

am deeply concerned and disturbed, about the actions and behaviors of adults on oh, Carmen Jimenez speaking as Carmen Jimenez. I am deeply concerned and disturbed about the actions and behaviors of adults on our campuses. As a former student leader who has sat on the school board, I am well aware of the actions and behaviors of adults that manifest during times of great stress and uncertainty like now. But even so, this is this does not justify them. In my senior year of high school, I was grabbed by a school board member when their emotions got the best of them.

Luckily, I had a community school manager who made me feel safe. It was a traumatizing event and, in all honesty, made me want to never return to this space. I am noticing similarities and recent altercations, and I am disappointed at how adults, colleagues are choosing to act. It is important to protect all staff, including our principals. I do not want to normalize this behavior because it is not normal, and we as adults need to model how to navigate through conflict respectfully and safely.

Just as we continue to hold our students accountable for their actions, we need to hold ourselves, the adults, accountable as well. I choose to return to this space because I do not want anyone to attack, threaten, harm anyone. We need to do better. How dare we encroach in the safe spaces of our young people? I do not want OUSD to become a space where students and adults feel unsafe and belittled.

It is not normal to want to threaten people. Thank you.

Praise god. Thank you. Greetings. My name is Martel Price, and I'd like to say that I've been associated with OUSD for thirty eight years, thirteen years as a student, seventeen years as a teacher, and the last eight as an administrator at Oakland Technical High School. I came here this evening to state today or this evening to express my dismay and sadness around the attacks on one of Oakland OUSD's own, Nydia Baez, the current principal at Fremont High School, who I personally believe is one of the best principals in OUSD.

It saddens me that one of Oakland's own principals, a former student at Fremont, a former teacher at Fremont, is being vilified around the decision that was made in the best interest of our children and the school. The fact is Nydia Baillaz bleeds green and gold and cares more about that community more than anybody I know except for this man. And to hear her motives and decisions be questioned is sad and upsetting. As a former teacher in OUSD and a current parent and administrator, I would rather see those who are selling her abilities and job performance to focus on ensuring that all of its members are fully and properly credentialed. As we all know, this is such an important requirement for teaching as it is a profession where training and professional development and growth and success are critical for success.

Please stop or cease with the attacks unless focus on our energy elsewhere like on our rogue president or on how we can improve literacy rates for all of our students across OUSD, not tearing down one of our own. Let's go OUSD. Appreciate y'all for being here and taking it all.

I I I really appreciate that people want to be fair. And so in being fair, we quite often say we want to take care of our black and brown students. And we really do want to do that. But we have some inequity going on related to our black and brown students. So you have a department of English language learner administrators.

You have 23 administrators related to serving our brown students. You have five language specialists. You have a director of coordinator in multilingual programs. You have seven newcomers focus administrators. We have an interpreter.

You have a Spanish literature specialist, a business manager, an executive director, all related to our brown students. You have an unaccompanied immigrant youth specialist. You have a curriculum for newcomers. You have schools for newcomers. You don't have anything for black kids that are specific to their needs.

So we can't say black and brown because there is no sharing of the issues. Black and brown students have needs, but you're not addressing the needs of black students in this district.

Next speaker, please.

Hi. Thank you. I think one thing, you know, that allows for any public body to maintain its legitimacy is for that body to be able to explain its decisions to the public, especially a major decision like separation with the superintendent, especially when that contradicts a recent board decision just nine months ago. So can we expect an explanation? Because I'm trying to figure it out.

Right? I mean, don't think it's because of performance. All the numbers that we see continued bend upward. The report from the financial auditor specifically mentioned, you know, long standing and stable leadership is one of the attractions of of this, district. When you read the, report from the bond agencies, the same thing that they mentioned, that's an attraction, you know, that keeps our our borrowing costs lower.

It's actually the capriciousness of the board that raises the borrowing costs. And just from a common sense perspective, I mean, there's a huge complex organization would seem like institutional knowledge and, you know, long standing relationships are essential. So I can't figure it out. We had one director up here saying that it was for the political expediency of some of the board members. That's the only explanation we've heard.

Please disabuse me

of that.

You know, I hope that that is not the reason. That would be a shock. That would be a scandal. And don't, you know, don't let us leave here today thinking that, please. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker, please.

Hi. I'm JD Wallachian. I'm a parent of two, sixth graders in OUSD, and, I know there's obviously a lot of people here that are believing the narrative that's been weaved by the board member who violated the Brown Act and manipulated the press. And the announcement tonight of a voluntary separation and the joint statement sent out on Parent Square tells me that there was indeed no actual ousting but a voluntary separation. And, I I am also wanting more information, but I think that this accusation that this board has been nasty coming from the one person on the board who has displayed nastiness and disrespect is laughable.

And so I just wanna say that you all should be proud of yourselves for bearing this with such grace and nonreaction, because I don't not sure I could do the same.

K. This is our last speaker. Hi.

Tough meeting tonight, but, at least, mine's mostly positive. I wanna thank, he's not here, Mike Hutchison, John Suzaki, and mister Dexter Moore, and, of course, miss Kyla Trammell Johnson for, she wrote me a thank you today. I got money sent from one school where it didn't belong to McClymonds, Casselmont, Skyline, and Oakland Tech. And I'm very happy about that. Very happy that it came out that way because I lost a lot of sleep over it.

This took over a year, but it's done, and I'm very happy. I'm also miss Barrett and miss Batcher, appreciate the facilities meeting last week. It was really good. And I hope that you guys talk over the beam John Beam, Fardella possibility for the naming of the, complex up at Skyline, and, look forward to, to, hopefully do a presentation maybe May 13 or twenty seventh. Thank you.

Thank you.

Checking if Ben Tabscott is still here. Okay. Thank you.

That's it. That concludes public comment. Our next item is the vote on the student consent report. Do we have a motion to accept the student consent report? I mean, discipline report.

Sorry.

Yes. I motion that we accept the student, discipline report.

Second.

I'm assuming there are no there's a public comment on this. Do we have any speakers

on Yes. We have Salu Labala and Bem Tapscott.

Two facility items l l one which is for urban promise. It's three seventy one students. L three is Emerson with three thirty two students. And for that one, that is a roof replacement. And that is over, that is a half $1,000,000.

So I don't know if you are considering at least before you vote or should we be investing in schools with low numbers of students if we're going to have to eventually close those schools? I'm looking at item L 12 which is a service agreement which will generate solutions related to disparities and disagreements. I don't know what that's about. I would love to know. L 13 is for McClyman's about bias training.

I don't know what that's about. What kind of bias training we need at McClyman's. In other words, I'm trying to get to the point, you are proving stuff, but you're never having a discussion that asks questions on why or when or is it enough. You don't say anything. You just rubber stamp.

And you got the nerve to talk about the superintendent. You do the worst job. You do the worst job when you automatically approve all of these items and you don't ever vet anything concerning any of them. To any substance. Then you have Rugsdale and that's L 27 and L 37 enrichment at the international school.

That goes back to my point. You spent a lot of time embracing, helping our newcomers, our refugees, but you don't ever have anything of substance that collaborative looks at what we can do to have help African American students. Then you have the proposition 39, that school Jefferson, an excellent school. Why don't we have a school for the placement of Bush students? Why do we not have a place for them?

That school was supposedly closed on 03/31/2020. You never officially closed that school. But you have on paper that the school has been closed.

I want to apologize. I think I said consent items and I meant the student discipline. I apologize. So we're actually on item k. I I I that was my fault.

I said consent items, so I apologize. Item k. And and I said instead of discipline. So are there any comments on item k, which is student discipline?

Yes, we have Sala Labala.

Missed Labala, do you have a comment on item K?

For item k with Asado Dabala and Ben Tapscott.

So that's the expulsions, madam?

Okay. And I apologize. That was my fault entirely for saying consent items.

That's okay.

I

cannot I will repeat myself. It is absolutely necessary that you consider that students who are being expelled have an opportunity to set up at Sojourner Truth online classes. Is something that can happen and we should not be turning these students over to the probation county of Alameda probation department to handle helping our students be their best, have an opportunity to come back, we are not working on that. And we did have it at the community school. And we dropped it.

So for whatever reason, you need to reconsider helping students being expelled have something of substance so that they can return back to the district. And if you are not doing that, you cannot say all students because are part of this no matter what behavior, what circumstances got them in that consequences, we give them a chance. Give them a chance and they're not having the best opportunity to come back and be successful.

Thank you. Are there any other speakers on this?

No. President Deck and Cooper, I'll be speakers.

Thank you. Can we have a roll call on the vote, please?

Yes. On the motion to adopt the pupil discipline consent report, moved by director Thompson, seconded by director Barry. Student directors, would be recused. They're absent. Director Lotta?

Present? Okay. Alright. Sorry. Alright.

Director Williams?

Abstain.

Okay. Thank you. Director Hutchinson is absent. Director Barry? Yes.

Director Thompson?

Yes.

Vice President Bachelor?

Yes.

President Burlehard? Yes. Motion's adopted.

Thank you. I'm gonna pass this over to director or I'm sorry, vice president Bachelor.

Thank you. We do still have quorum, so we are all set. And I believe before we move on to item l, is the adoption of the general consent, we do have a translation check. Is that correct, mister Sejal? Wonderful.

Let's do that.

Yes. So trans or interpretation announcement for this part of the meeting. We do have two languages available. I will start with Arabic. I will lower all attendees' hands.

Please only raise your hand if you need the language that's being announced, which is Arabic. And I will ask Ms. Abdi if she can come off mute and give the interpretation announcement for Arabic.

Thank

you, miss Abdi. Checking the attendees on Zoom to see if there's any hands raised for Arabic interpretation. Seeing no hands, we will not start with or we will not yeah. We will not start with Arabic interpretation at this time. Moving forward to Spanish, I will lower all attendees' hands.

Please raise your hand if you need a language which is being announced at this time, which is Spanish. And I will ask mister Copenhagen if he can come off mute and give the interpretation announcement for Spanish.

Thank you, Mr. Thank you.

Thank you, mister Copenhagen. Checking the attendees to see if there's any hands raised for Spanish interpretation. Seeing no hands, we will not start with Spanish interpretation. We will not have any interpretation at this point of the meeting, And that concludes our interpretation check, and I'll pass it back to mister or madam president.

Thank you. So now moving on to L, the adoption of the general consent report. Is there a motion to move this item forward?

Yes. I move the adoption of the general consent report.

Thank you. Is there a second? Second. Great. Thank you.

I think that's minus item 11, l dot 25 and l dot 30.

Yes. Thank you so much for that. Yeah. So that is minus l 25 and l 30. Are there any public speakers on this item?

Mr. Hollis. Yes, we have Asada Lobala and Ben Tab Scott.

Asada, come on up. I

needed to know, I had I was gonna speak on those two items you just pulled, so should I wait until they come up?

We'll do we'll do com public comment on those items when they come up.

Thank I wanted to direct your attention to l six, which is the personnel report. And within the personnel report, it it has a new assignment to the central culture climate as a central culture climate administrator at coal administration. And I I thought culture keepers were supposed to be at schools with children, and I I might be wrong with that. But and the other part

of the

report, identifies 71 people going on leave and 70 people separation from the district. And when you look at reports like that, it needs to be discussion. We need to have some kind of, discussion on why out we're losing people, why are we putting people on leave, for what reasons, and just stop rubber stamping stuff. L 12, a service agreement, proactive generating creative solutions on special education disputes. This is absolutely necessary because we have too many parents who are saying their special education children are not getting their services or IEPs are not being correctly dealt with.

And so we need to have this in place. And somebody needs to speak to that. The next one is L Okay. That proposition where I talked about that already. I don't want to repeat myself.

And I'll wait for the other two items to come up. I'm going see L thirty seven enrichment academies academic support and mental health resources during the summer for the international school. Can we get the same thing for McClymans? That would be great if we could have academic support, mental health resources during the summer. Like I said, you are doing a lot and that's beautiful to help our students who are newcomers create that balance for black students as well.

Thank you. Any other public comments on this agenda item?

No, that includes public speakers.

Wonderful. Any board comments on any of the adoption of the general consent report? Alright. Can we get a roll call for a vote on l?

Yes. On the adoption of the general consent report minus the item stated, director, Thompson? Yes. Director Barry?

Yes.

Director Hutchinson is absent. Director Williams?

Yes, sir.

And director Lauder? Absent. Okay. Vice president Bachelor?

Yes.

And president Burghard? Okay. The, general consent report minus the two items are is adopted.

Thank you. Now we'll go to each individual item. So that's l twenty five first. Any is there a motion to move this item forward?

Make a motion to move to pass this item.

To move it forward.

To move it forward.

Great.

I second the motion.

Move to adopt the item.

Great. Then does that second still hold up? Great. And then I believe, director Williams, you also were the one to pull this item?

Yes. I actually sent in my questions to the to the chief academic officer, and they were answered. And so I'm satisfied with that, and I just rather move forward. My concern again is that as a district, we're trying to create best practices, and one of the best practices is to to to look at our in house labor and really use the labor that is actually doing the job to move our work forward than actually contracting out. We have many times, there's many instances that we quickly contract to a vendor where that money can be actually saved and used in house and within our district as well.

Those are many opportunities and we just have to actually be more conscious and aware as a district of what our practices are, and so I really want to talk to board members about a policy that says we should be working in house when there actually are opportunities to work in house then contract out. Thank you very much.

Thank you, and I'll just say as well when I met with the principals the other day there was concerns around or not concerns, there were they would like to be a part of these conversations when we talk about contracting out because they are intimately aware as to the reasons why they do contract out some of these positions. But I also do agree with you that we need to have this in house. So there needs to be some sort of combination there or some sort of conversation, and I'm hoping that the task force that we've established can have part of that conversation, can bring something to us, and that we can have further conversations around this because I do feel the tension. We heard it today even between some of our staff around specific issues, and I wanna make sure that we're listening to folks, but we are also ultimately using our public dollars for public good while also supporting, you know, the working class people of Oakland, making sure that their salaries and their wages as a part of our school district are are kept up. Any other board comments on l 25 before we move to public comment?

I would say same exact thing. Thank you.

Miss Asada, you wanted to speak on this item? Is there anybody else?

I will recommend extending the, invitation for speakers because this honorable pool.

Yes. So any other speakers that would also like to speak to on this item? I apologize. I didn't make that clear earlier. Miss Asada, go ahead.

My concern with l l twenty five is that this is online one on one opportunity. And I think it's been demonstrated that online teaching or relating is is not work has not worked well. And so did we have an opportunity to have in person rather than online? The other concern is that, you have the identification of the number of students, I think 60, but you don't identify how the students will be chosen from what schools. And we wanna make sure that everything that happens has an equity component that we don't repeatedly have the same schools having opportunities and other schools not.

Those are my concerns.

Thank you. Any other public speakers on l '25?

Congratulations. You have approved this before the contract is put

in place.

Thank you, miss Isotta. Alright. I don't see anyone in the room. Is there anyone in the Zoom room?

No speaker.

Great. Thank you. Let's take a roll call for this item.

We're on the roll call to adopt item l dot dash 25. Student directors are absent, director Lauder is absent, director Hutchinson is absent, and president Brohard is absent doing the roll call for this item. Director Williams?

Yes, sir.

Director Barry?

Yes.

Director Thompson? Yes. Vice President Bachelor? Yes. Motion's adopted.

Thank you. Now moving on to l 30, same deal everyone. Is there a motion to adopt this item or a motion to do something

with this item? I motion to adopt.

I second.

Wonderful. Any board comment? I believe director Williams, you also pulled this as

well? Yes.

You know, my question really is about again, you know, late contracts coming to the board. I think what we're really talking about again is starting to move to our best practices. And if we if we don't call out these late contracts then they will continue to happen. All I ask is district staff to submit the contracts on time so we can actually do the job of the board. Thank you very much.

I concur. Any public comment on this agenda item? Oh, I'm sorry. Any other colleagues? Any public comment?

Miss Assata, I know you wanted to speak to this item.

Yes. Two two points of concern. The Spanish speaking unity council. Spanish speaking unity council was accused in '20, '11, I think, of misusing funds. Neighborhood Works America, the funds were supposed to be used for opportunity with housing.

They had problems with paying off their maintenance and rental, whatever it was, and they used that money. They had to pay back over $500,000 to the Neighborhood Works America. And that that kind of said to me why are we not holding them accountable? We never were held accountable by the city. The other thing is this is a subcontract.

They are dealing with head start as a concentration. This is preschool, I understand. But, what are you what have you determined that they're doing that you, agree that you wanna see it being done with them in charge. I don't understand. And I do know that they have the Spanish speaking unity council.

I've met with black parents who are saying they are not letting them into the head start programs. They are denied opportunities for black parents to be. They concentrate on the Hispanic community. So it's just a lot of stuff that has to be considered and I don't see you guys betting items and I understand what you are talking about but there is more in-depth to this. They have head start programs in Concord that they run too.

Thank you. Any other public comments on item L30 in the room or on the Zoom room?

No Zoom room.

I don't see anyone rushing to the front of the room. So let's go ahead and take a vote on this item.

Alright. On the roll call to adopt L dot dash 30, it is noted that student directors are absent. Director Hutchinson's absence and president Burhard is absent during this roll call. Director Ladder?

Yes.

Okay. Director Thompson? Yes. Director Barry?

Yes.

Director Williams?

Yes,

sir. And vice president Bachelor?

Yes.

Motion's adopted.

Great. Now moving on to m, is the adoption of the general consent report, general obligation bond measure b j y. Is there a motion to move this item forward?

I motion that we adopt the general consent report, general obligation bond measures b j and y.

Is there a second? Second. Wonderful. Public comment on this agenda item?

Yes, we have Fassala and Ben Tapscott.

Is coach Tapscott online by any chance?

Think at some point you need to make it clear.

No, he's not.

You ready?

Yes, go ahead.

You need to make it clear when you have identified renovation funds, a specific amount of money and then schools who are in an agendized item to get more money, where is that money coming from fund twenty one and measure y? Extra money. What you say, oh, that's the money. Some people say it's the money that was already there. If the money was already there, why do they have to come to you?

This is extra money that you are giving to Garfield, Roosevelt. Going to the three items that are related to the turf and you have M ten, eleven and twelve that is designed architectural services for turf and field replacement projects. If you are just at the stage of designing and the architectural service for McClimmons, we need that football field ready for September. We need to be able to play on that field and you are approved the money sometime ago timely enough to get that project started. We do not need to have that turf put down there on contaminated soil.

The soil is contaminated. That the turf has to go down. If you found it necessary to do coals elimination of the contaminated soil, you have to do it for McClyman's. You can't do coal. The soil has to be eliminated of its contamination.

And McClyman's, we're not going to do it. We're just going to lay this turf down on contaminated soil and the kids can play because the mat is going to catch the contamination. That's crap. You have to move to remove the contamination and you got to get that field done. Is anybody going address that, mister Williams?

Are we gonna address that, sir? You talk to him. Okay. Yeah. Did see you did talk

to him about it. You're right.

But they're not doing nothing. Somebody's gotta do it. We will not accept you putting a turf down on contaminated soil at McClomons. Somebody speak up and address it.

Thank you. Any other public comment on M?

No, that include public speakers.

Okay, any board comments on the general consent measure BJY? Okay. Let's go ahead and take a roll call for a vote.

Alright. On the roll call to adopt the general consent report on general obligation bonds measures b j and y. It is noted that the direct student director Simmons and Vasquez are absent. Director Hutchins absent, and president Burhardt is absent during this roll call. Director Latter?

Yes.

Director Williams?

Yes, sir.

Director Thompson?

Have conversation about anything. That's why this it's not the superintendent. It's

you. Director Thompson?

Yes.

Okay. Director Barry?

Director

Barry? Your vote on the general cons obligation bond consent?

Yes.

K. Vice president Bachelor?

Yes. Motion's adopted.

Okay. And thanks for everybody hanging in there. I see you, Killian. I I see you here. And the SCIU folks, so collective bargaining units are up next.

And AFSMEED, I can't forget AFSMEED. So folks wanna line up and come on up for our collective bargaining unit reports.

Good evening board. My name is Dana Wood and I am the president for AFMI. I'm coming this evening because we spent nearly two years in bargaining back and forth and we finally get our TA turned in. We get it back from the county and now we hear that it has been pulled. I don't understand how we get this far and all of a sudden now our TA has been pulled, the county sent it back, That means that it had to come here.

Somebody had it and it got pulled. The sad part about this is we didn't find out about it until tonight from another bargaining unit. We were so disrespected that no one had the decency to reach out to AFF me and say look, your TA have been pulled. So we've been sitting here all this evening so we can get a chance to figure out what is going on. I was told that the county did it, but then I heard that's not true.

One of the things, and I've listened to it, there is just too many lies coming and it just looks like it is coming from you all. This is not fair. We worked hard. We worked tirelessly to get this thing done, and here we are two and a half almost two years later, and we're still fooling with the same foolishness. When are we going to hold people accountable for their actions?

This doesn't make sense. Now, we have to go back and talk to our members. We ratified it. We voted on it. We approved it.

Look at where we are now. Who got the answers? We got the question. Who got the answers? When are we going to stop this?

I heard everything everybody said. The common denominator is there's too many folk lying. We need to get the liars out. They need to be checked out of this system. It's not fair.

What are y'all gonna do about it? Now, do I have to do we have to just everybody coming in at one time? Because the labor coalition is real. And I am tired. This is new for me, but I'm tired of being screwed over because folks are not doing their jobs.

I hope we don't have to wait till the next board meeting to be pushed off again. If that's the case, there's going to be problems. I promise my people are ready. This is not going to we're not gonna stand for this anymore. You all have dick assed me around too long.

I'm here to tell you all tonight it stops now. Or you all will be cleaning schools on your own, wiping kids behind because we're not going to take this no more. This is it. Figure it out. Again, I don't want to have to come back here at the next board meeting.

Shouldn't be, I shouldn't be having this conversation right now. We should be in here excited about our TA and what's going on now. Go home and get ready to go to a school site knowing that the work we do is unappreciated because look at where we are. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. And I'm I'm sure general counsel will be will be in touch with Joe Bates, soon. Next.

Hi. Good evening, board. Trish Bellinson, SEIU chapter president here with our leadership team. Contract negotiations have finally commenced. The SEIU bargaining team formally met with OUSD last week to establish norms and presented a few of our opening proposals for the Oakland School Employees Association and Oakland Childhood Development Paraprofessional Association contracts.

The proposals center around nondiscrimination, including honoring free speech in compliance with the First Amendment rights and increasing new hire engagement with the union. Despite the district's roadblocks to start our overdue contract negotiations, the ball is finally starting to roll. The SEIU bargaining team is united and focused, and we will continue to prepare, plan, show up at the table, and fight for what our members deserve.

We offered the district seven bargaining dates, and the district only agreed to two and a half. SEIU has been working with an expired contract since October 2024. We seek a robust calendar that demonstrates the district's intent to bargain in good faith, and we want a contract that addresses the long standing needs of our members in a timely fashion. We will not tolerate delay tactics, unresponsiveness, and any actions that disrespect our members.

We wish the board had pulled item l 17, a service agreement 24 twenty twenty four through 2025 with JCC of the East Bay under Community Schools and Student Services Department. This agreement is coming before the board late as contract work was initiated on 04/01/2025. Will OUSD ever have their own after school programming complete with district staff who know our kids? There are many safety gaps in outsourcing after school staff. It also seems strange that OUSD, public school district, would be willing to contract with a religious affiliated organization, especially one who has their own agenda and provides their own school opportunities, not to mention the exclusionary nature of this particular organization with its unwavering support for Israel.

Lasting lastly, this part of the contract was concerning considering a contractor would be able to decide on current and future staffing. Many district employees take on work with after school programs to make ends meet. As indicated in the contract, JCC will consider hiring current staff for employment with their agency offering pay ranges, job descriptions, benefits, personnel manual, professional development existing staff have experienced, and determine with the principal which stakeholders should be involved in the selection of site coordinator as well as the hiring protocols.

L 25 is a serious, agreement, for open literacy and summer learning programs under the community schools and student service department. One on one tutoring services are already provided for free through the oakland public library and tutoring.com. Why spend money on the this when we are cutting district jobs elsewhere because of lack of funds? L 30 is a service agreement for the Spanish speaking Unity Council of Alameda County in early childhood education. The contract would subcontract the Spanish speaking unit Unity Council of Alameda County with a portion of the district's fiscal year 2425, child development funding for the provision of child development services in an amount not to exceed $381,067 for the term of 07/01/2024 through 06/30/2025.

Late. This contract comes before the board almost one year late. Why can't our district Spanish translators and interpreters do this work? With the school board with this school board, we are hopeful that we'll be able to not have to endure what our previous bargaining team had to endure to reach an agreement or what our union siblings and ask me the, whose TA is being voted on or was supposed to be voted on by this board today but has not been voted on. Thank you.

Just wanna make it really clear. We stand with AFSCME, and we find that this is super disrespectful considering how long they've been at the table with the district and how hard their members have worked for well overdue raises. And now those retro payments are going to be pushed back for a lot of workers and their families. So as you digest that, please consider, you know, maybe hosting a special meeting to get their TA ratified. It is it's an injustice to AFSCME employees.

Like they said, like, these are our custodians who clean our schools. These are folks who take care of our kids and make sure that their safety and health needs are are take care of taken care of and that their IEPs are being implemented. There is no reason whatsoever that TA should have been pulled. It's unacceptable, and we stand in solidarity with AFSCME.

Are there any other bargaining units online?

That concludes the bargaining collective bargaining units.

Okay. Moving on to new business. Item s one report board policy. Students b board policy of 5115 enrollment stabilization. And I believe we have a presentation from Killeen Betlatch.

Good evening board. President, Brohard, Doctor Moore. It's great to be here this evening to present to you the annual report of enrollment stabilization board policy fifty one-fifteen. How much time are we allocating for this? Because I can give you short, medium, long, depending on your mood, your appetite, the hour of the day.

Oh, goodness. All right. So my name is Killian Betlock. I'm the Executive Director of Enrollment for the Oakland Unified School District. I've been in this role for three years.

I've been in the district since 2009. Prior to that, I worked as the proud principal of Elmhurst Middle School. I have two children who attend school in District five. So we are here to talk about the enrollment stabilization board policy. This is a portion of the work that the enrollment department does, which we'll talk a little bit about.

We want to cover kind of five overall topics. The enrollment stabilization generally, three strategies that our team is undertaking pursuant to this board policy, and then some challenges and kind of forward and future thinking. So just kind of grounding us with what the enrollment stabilization says and what the policy is. It came out about in April 2021 and just positioned and reminded and grounded all of us in that enrollment is a chief driver of revenue for the district. We need we love children, and then they're, absolutely more than dollar signs, and they are also part of our revenue and how we have funding from the state.

Right? And the and the, board policy is really clear on that. It also said that the board policy also called for funding to engage in promoting and supporting enrollment work, right, and to not just kind of turn maybe a blind eye to the fact that schools were deeply engaged in this work, and instead to help them from the central office perspective and to engage centrally with funding and with support. And there are kind of four categories, right? That We all have a collective responsibility, all of the stakeholders in the district to engage in enrollment and to promote and support it.

That there's going to be direct support from the central office to schools to support them in their enrollment efforts. That we're going to increase accessibility for families in our enrollment system and that we're going to stop giving resources for competing systems. Right? And this kind of seems like a little bit of a long time ago, but we used to have this like joint enrollment system with the charter schools. We used to advertise them in our systems and we used to talk about them.

And there were some attempts to kind of have a unified system with competing systems. And we don't do that anymore pursuant to this policy. So I also wanted to name that when I came into this work, were people would talk about how's the enrollment office? And I would say, which one? There's nine.

Because there were all of these different teams that were directly enrolling kids into schools. And there's not that there's anything wrong with any of these teams or people. They were working hard and they loved kids. However, when we think about accessibility for families and we think about a quality experience, it is impossible to have anything like a unified experience if all of these different teams are doing that work desperately and on the side and over here and over here. Right?

And this is actually one of the root causes of some of the complaints and concerns that came out of the enrollment that came to the enrollment department because there were so many different folks that were doing enrollment with kids. Right? And so some of the work that came out of the board's passing of attachment A and then over interdepartmental collaboration and cooperation and just bringing this back together to say if we're gonna have an enrollment department, we should have a enrollment department and not many, many, many enrollment departments. Right? We now have primarily one enrollment department with collaboration with the DHP office for obvious reasons.

Right? And then a very, very deep collaboration with part of the Elma office called the refugee and asylee office that works with students seeking refugee and asylee status that is located in the main enrollment office at Lakeview. Deep collaboration, we work together. It's almost a part of enrollment proper. Just as a quick aside, what this gives us, particularly when it comes to the special education part, and I just want to lift this up briefly.

When special education and other departments like it are running a shadow enrollment office, they're not attending to quality. Because they're running enrollment. And so when we were able to kind of shift our systems and be able to say special ed and with them, right, it was in partnership, you don't have to do that anymore. We would then say, what did you get back? And one of the things that they self reported was like, look, from a coordinator to a director, it was anywhere from thirty to three hundred hours each of time that they didn't have to do enrollment and could then do quality.

Right? And that's what you want. You want the folks that are doing program and student support to do that Program and student support because you have enrollment department. And so that was one of the things that I was really looking at, like where can we do this? And where can the department that you want doing the work does the work and other folks do their work?

So we have three teams. We have the Student Welcome Center which is doing TK-twelve enrollment and you see kind of their core operations there as well as the FTE and the change going into twenty five-twenty six. We have the early childhood enrollment work, which also includes our family navigators who are an amazing team that are working both at Lakeview and then often the sites and supporting families, as well as the change in FTE going to twenty five-twenty six. And then we have our strategic outreach team, our enrollment marketing team, that is really working on Board Policy 5,115 all the time. And so there's portions of BP 5,115 that everybody works on, but I really wanted to talk a lot about the enrollment marketing team today.

So I just wanted to ground us in that kind of structure and orientation of the enrollment department. These are some enrollment, just kind of also trajectory and numbers. I'm not going to read through them and belabor them, but I am going call your attention to the elementary enrollment number for twenty four-twenty five because it is higher than the elementary enrollment number for twenty three-twenty four. And I think that that is significant. Right?

We have been struggling with declining enrollment as a city, a region, a state, and a country. And if we're able to start gaining that enrollment back collectively and at a level of an entire grade span, not just individual grades like TK, that is significant. And you do see the five year change and the one year change. It doesn't represent line going up, but it does represent a stabilization, which is the name of this policy. I am showing you the numbers of TK, which has been an important driver of enrollment stabilization.

And we've been very aggressive and thoughtful about making TK accessible to families. And you see the five year change both as a number and a percent and then the one year change both as a number and a percent. And then also just to name, and you've been in some of these conversations, that we are fast running out of the spaces that align with demand. In other words, the places where families are asking to go to TK, we can't offer spaces in those places. And that's going to limit our ability to continue to offer TK.

So let's talk about these strategies. So the first strategy I wanna lift up is this idea of fostering an attitude of yes. So we know that in education in Oakland, in across the nation, and in the enrollment department, so much of our work is driven by this kind of reliance on middle class, English literate, tech dominant values. And we said, look, in the enrollment world, what if we just said no to that? What if we said let's just orient and center multilingual, lower income, working class, tech timid families and say let's build a system out from there as opposed to maybe thinking about those folks as an afterthought because that's who our community is and that's who's growing the enrollment of this district.

And that's also who's asking to use our services. It seems like a no brainer. It's not always who we center. Right? And so when we do that, we make different choices.

And so some of the choices we did around this idea of an attitude of yes is we moved out of our old enrollment platform into a newer one. Some of the key things about this platform, it's mobile enhanced. Why does that matter? We found from the pandemic, lower income families, they're not sitting in a well appointed den in a plush leather chair getting on a device. They're gonna be on their phones.

So we need tools that are always mobile enhanced so folks are getting on the Internet there. It has special features where it's like if you need to pull up a document, it's gonna go right to your photo library, right? Because that may be where your birth certificate is, not like in your pocket because who walks around with your kid's birth certificate in your pocket, right? So those are just some really key things if we're talking about access, Right? Lakeview is is an interesting place to have an office.

It's you know, I don't know how many months or years have been taken off my life being that close to the five eighty fumes. But the it's also not terribly accessible for lots of our community members who rely on public transportation. So we established four satellite offices across the district that are open from December until May. They're currently at West Oakland Middle School, Urban Promise Academy in the Fruitvale, Coliseum College Prep on the Havens Court campus in Elmhurst in the nineties. And so what these are is bringing enrollment services closer to where the community who needs those services are.

They're also selectively chosen because those campuses are very, very close to the places where we see families enrolling in charter schools for elementary and coming back into our district for middle schools. And so if we're putting the satellite offices there, we're facilitating that move. Right? Because we're asking people just to like be right there and we're maybe growing that. And helping gain and bring back that enrollment.

Significantly increased training and communication. This is not about just enrollment staff. We have to have all the stakeholders know how to do stuff because families are still going to talk to people in the front office and the front offices have to be experts. So we're just training, training, training, training, training. And we're training across lots of job classes.

So clerical, community school managers, school counselors, principals, right? And doing it multiple times per year. Okay. Enrollment windows opening. Here's what you got to know.

Offers are going out. Here's what you gotta know. Intent to return is coming. Here's what you gotta know. So I'm always showing up at people, showing up on the Zooms and then trying to be available so that folks can get this information so that they can be expert too.

And that we're not just holding this on our team or me, but that like as families are going to the people they trust, those people have the information. And then just removing arbitrary barriers. I think one of the key things we've done is we have a two step process where we're not saying to a family, have every single document perfectly ready and ready to go before you can submit an application. Because that's a barrier. First we're saying, look, submit your application.

You can't get an offer until everything's perfect because there's some legal stuff. But we have your application. We can case manage you to then get your stuff. So we're not gonna say, if you don't have an IEP, you can't submit an application. Mark that your child needs IEP services.

We'll help track that down from the school district that you're coming from or the other community or the preschool. And that really makes a difference because it brings people in, and then we can help solve and finish their application. Right? We're not putting up those barriers. We're looking at alternatives for birth certificates for communities for where those are not common or where folks have lost them instead of saying pound sand, go find one.

Right? We're not asking people to pay money to pick up like there's there's still school districts. I think this is actually illegal in California, but in other states folks have to pay to get their their documents, to get their transcripts. We buy those for folks if they're in our office and sellers they can't afford them. It's like what do we need to get to yes?

What are the impacts? We just have more applications. We're just seeing more folks apply because they can, because it's easier, because we're showing up to where they are. And the people that they talk to who aren't the enrollment staff know how to help because they've been trained. Right?

So even where we have fewer kids in our system sometimes, we're getting more applications and we're getting more on time. We're also seeing our stakeholders tell us that we're doing a better job. Right? So every year there's this quality services to schools survey that goes out to all the stakeholders in district. And what we're seeing is the green bars represent people saying good job.

Right? And we're seeing that over the last three years, those green bars are going up. Right? So that's the that is the the OUSD, community saying you're doing a good job. And that's important because those folks don't hesitate to tell you that you're not doing a good job when you're not doing a good job.

And you know, look, there's some orange on there and there's some red and some of that feedback is actually like the good job is nice, but like the where you messed up is better feedback to grow. And one of the things we took is there were some newer principles that gave really good feedback and it was clear they weren't kind of understanding what this did. And so then we got in front of them and we helped them. And then we had some press, right? We had some good press and that's always edifying.

So strategy two, increase visibility and brand awareness. And this subtext is like, OUSD needs to be a first thought, not an afterthought in all of our schools. And so there are things that we do literally better than everybody else. We have to name those and be proud of them. There's stuff that we can do better.

There's places where we can be self critical, but we can't be so self critical that we fail to acknowledge the places that were great and growing and even better. So it's diverse and inclusive schools.

It's our

early literacy support, dual language instruction, the vast expanse of opportunity that exists in middle school. People think about middle school as this opportunity wasteland. In OUSD, there are arts and athletics and computer science. The world class college and career pathways that we have. We need to say these things and we need to not wait for someone to tell us about ourselves.

We need to tell our own stories. And we need to keep telling our own stories. And we need to get better at that and more better at it and help our schools get better at it. So what do we do? We broadly promote our enrollment deadlines.

And we do that through the lenses of those things. Right? We table at events. We get out in the community and we say, like, look, we're OUSD and we're not, like, gonna apologize for that. We're gonna be out there and we're gonna be proud.

We're at all these events. We're connecting back to to to the world. We established our social media brands to help tell those stories. So Town Sprouts for elementary, Oak in the Middle for middle, The Link for high school. One of the innovations that we did this year is we started bringing in interns at the high school level to help tell those stories.

Particularly Skyline and Castlemont, they were doing amazing jobs. Because also they're there. So of course they know the stuff. So we're expanding to Madison Park 612 and McClymonds next year. And those are just the nuance stuff that is not gonna show up in the media, but it's the good stuff.

And then we have our podcast, which is both super fun, but also another way to tell stories. That's the way people get their news. That's the way people get information and being able to curate those stories around the things we do well. Super critical. And then we're just using new tools to get our message out.

We have some tools that are really letting us map to where people live who may not be in our system by zip code, by census block, by attendance boundaries. And we're really upping the amount of direct mail that we're putting out. And so what are impacts here? This data is not yet up to date. It's little bit, it's one year old because we're waiting for official data to come out.

But what you're looking at is like a pie chart by different systems. And what we're seeing is that over time, the size of the pie chart is shrinking, but OUSD's share of the enrollment is growing. So we're reclaiming enrollment as we are growing by 1.5 percentage points. And so that's not massively changing, but these are big numbers. So 1.5 percentage points, we're talking about 53,000 kids, that's a lot.

And we're getting it back from charters and we're getting it back from privates. And that matters. Right? Because in a context where fewer kids are born and people are moving out of our city, how we understand growth? This is one way.

Because we're gaining back the total share of enrollment that's available to us. Right? You can understand this on a line graph if you want. We're the green going up. Chargers are the purple going down.

Their share of enrollment is going down. I do want to point out it's stabilized. Right? Now we're gonna have another year of data we can add to this, and we might see another data point there. The gold is inter district transfers.

So that's families who live in our city who are leaving our city to go to other school districts. That's going up in part because those cities, one, are advertising hard. And two, they have their own declining enrollment issues. And where they said no for two generations, all of a sudden they're saying yes. The other thing we're seeing, and this is, oh my gosh, there's a lot of lines and it's like midnight already and you're like, I can't believe we're looking at all these lines and data.

So what we're seeing is each line represents a year of enrollment and the percentage change of enrollment. For big urban school districts, school districts our size, California as a whole. And what should draw your attention to it is the big dip where everybody goes down. And at the very, very top is a green line where Oakland where we basically just kind of go a little bit flat across the top. So what you're seeing is about the time that we started investing in enrollment stabilization, all of these other school districts and the state and the county took this massive drop and OUSD stabilized.

Yes, we went down a little bit, but we didn't fall off a cliff. And that matters because huge drops in enrollment are incredibly destabilizing. That means that that many more people are getting dreaded pink slips. That means that many more people were scrambling to figure out where the money's coming from. And we didn't.

If you wanted to see that in another way, you could look at it in this bar graph. So this is the cumulative enrollment change during the enrollment stabilization era. Right? Relative to some other, you know, I've picked some school districts. You can pick lots of them, and they're all going to look similar as long as they have a reasonable urban core and a reasonable number of charter schools, right?

Then they're going to look like this. Like we could include other, Grove or Unified, etcetera, etcetera. They're all going to look in this similar pattern. And the pattern shows that OUSD, in part because of these investments, stabilized its enrollment, declined less while everyone else was falling off of cliffs. And then we have a couple other graphs I just want to lift up that you're basically seeing a line of enrollment and then you see the line split.

And the line split's where the enrollment stabilization started. And so the bottom line is where we were headed. And then the top line is where we started to go after enrollment stabilization started. And so had we continued on the same trajectory, that's where we would have kept going. And then enrollment stabilization started and this is where we started to go.

And so it takes us on a difference of about nine ninety two students. Now some of this is projecting, right? So this is not all actuals. I wanna be very transparent about that. But I know we've all done the kind of the student math on our fingers of like nine ninety two students multiplied by XXX, dollars 12,000.

That looks like a large amount of money, right? TK played a big role in that. If we want to take TK out, those bars shrink together but there's still an effect. So it's not just TK. It's part of it, but it's not just.

I'm sure you're gonna have some questions on this, so I'm just moving. Strategy three, our enrollment focal schools. So this is a huge part of of our work. What we do here is and and our and our focus here is just to focus on the fact that our schools are better than people know. And our schools are working towards excellence and almost everywhere they are better than the public perception of them.

Right? And what we believe is that if we tell those school stories and we promote them to the public, we can bring a greater awareness and therefore greater enrollment to those those schools. Right? And what we also hope to be true is to not have inclusion in this group be permanent, that there's lots of interventions in the education world where, like, you get into the intervention group and you just never ever get out. And that's not what this is designed to be.

Right? And so there have been some schools that have exited the enrollment focal work. And that's not a punishment. That's like good. We don't want to be in this work permanently.

So how did this work? We built an enrollment health dashboard. Because if you're gonna give some schools something more or different than others, you have to have a reason. And you have to be able to defend it. And I imagine some of my former principal colleagues coming to me and being like, why didn't I get that?

And I needed to be able to have like a reason. So we have the data that's there. One year enrollment health change, three year enrollment health change. What's the rate at which a kid starts in kids starting kinder and stay till fifth grade, starting ninth grade, stay till twelfth grade. What's the percentage of kids who go to charter schools in the attendance boundary?

And then we put all that together and give those things point values, and then we take the schools that need the help. And I I defined these in the appendix so you can you can look at them, if you want to really dig into. And then we look at the schools that need more help. And originally I was thinking like, let's do 10, and then we saw the numbers and we're like, we can't do 10. We have to do like more.

And so we had to figure out how do we do 20? How do we do 25? How do we stretch? How do we give more supports? Right?

And so this is the list of our enrollment focal schools by by board member district, as well as some of the ones that we that we exited, either because they were receiving supports in another way, or because they were reaching enrollment goals, and we wanted to give support to other schools and make room for that. Right? So what happens when you're an enrollment focal school? We give that school assets So tangible assets to support with enrollment. So branded materials, the pencils, the stickers.

When families accept their offers, we send those families, I chose Prescott so that they can put those up on the refrigerator, put it on the car. We've helped schools make new logos because some of the logos that we had were old. Some of them were clip art. Some of them were trademarked by other organizations, and we should not have been using them. Then we've, like, put up murals on the walls of those new logos, like the ones at Horace Mann.

We've put up, or the ones at MLK. We've helped schools, brand for curb appeal. Like, if you look at if you drive on McArthur, it wasn't clear that that building was Bret Hart maybe. And now when you drive by, you see Bret Hart's new logo, like, bam. You can't help but My wife was like, oh, that's where Bret I was like, yes, that's Bret Hart.

And we've done site specific advertising like billboards that are up. Choose this school. I'll never forget when we did our first one and it was a Prescott student. And afterwards the young lady who was on the billboard told us, her mom told us that. She said, Mama, we got to go to school every day and drive past my billboard.

Right? And so doing those things to be out in the world and make sure people are seeing our schools and seeing and promoting them and knowing that we are proud of those schools. We've done some promotional videos. We've done social media promotions. We also provide technical support.

So this is some of the back end stuff that's not always visible, right? If families get offers to go to our focal schools, our staff is helping call those families. Hey, you got an offer. Can we help you accept? Do you want to know more about that school?

What's going on? Provide curated lists for the help with recruitment or families. If they missed their offer and it was expired, we're gonna send those out to those focal schools so they can just reengage with those families to try to get that enrollment back in. So there's some technical stuff in the back end. And then adaptive support.

Engaging with the leaders of the schools around, let's talk about your enrollment. So everything from how are we going to think about recruitment strategies, what's working in your community, what did we try last year, did you actually do that thing I suggested, you didn't, cool, let's try it this year, to things like more nuanced conversations like the one I had with a high school principal yesterday where we were looking at enrollment data and she said, Look, we're getting kids in eleventh and twelfth. We're losing kids in ninth grade. So let's talk about what do we do. I need to change my staffing in ninth grade.

I need to change the ninth grade experience. I maybe need to be the ninth grade administrator. I need to watch the ninth grade thing because I don't want to lose any more ninth graders. And I want them to have a better experience. Provide coaching at three schools to those principals about stuff that's actually more than enrollment, but kind of everything's enrollment and and helping them.

And then we also provide stipends and a PLC to a a a principal selected, staff member at every school to do social media work. Right? So not just saying like, go put stuff on the Internet, but also giving them support on both the technical stuff, what makes a good story, what have we seen people pick up on, what are our messages, what are your messages, what do you want to say about your school, how can we help, right? So this is the one of the things that we track is first choice rank, right? And kind of a long time ago, this demand rate got a bad name because we were only looking at the on time rate, which was not representative of the community.

We now track that for when the on time window opens all the way to the last day of school, Right? So it is much more of a wider range, more representative of who's applying. Right? And so these show what is the change in families' first choice ratings for the schools when they join and when they become an enrollment focal school? And these are like the ratings of our highest growth.

Right? And so what we're seeing is that when schools come into this work and we give them that stuff, the assets, the technical support, the adaptive support, families are choosing those schools and ranking them first at much higher rates than when they weren't. And you can see some of the examples. Top, I think I gave you the top two, four, six, eight, 10 that were there. Horace Mann, Reach, Allendale, Highland, Casselmont, Oak, McClymans, Hoover.

These are significant percentage point growths. The unweighted average is about eight percentage points. There's some schools that got caught in a TK thing and they were a little bit flat. But it's a significant change. And when your families it is such a difference.

And I know this is a principal. When I be my first year as a principal, I looked at this data and I had like thirty percent first choice, which is I'm walking the hallways and one out of three kids wanted to be there. I was like, no. Like that's that's a no. And worked for years and years and years to get that up to 80.

And I think the school I left is now at 102. And that's great. There's such a difference when families are choosing a school as their first choice. They're going to volunteer. They're going to say, Can I be on the SSC?

Go to the field trip. They're going to be tolerant of when a school stubs its toe on something because they chose it. So this is super significant. We've also seen I want to give you a case study of a school that was an enrollment focal school. So I know a lot of our schools are in Deep East Oakland and they're in West Oakland, I wanted to show Laurel for a second.

This was a school that was an enrollment focal school who we exited. So in 2016, a long time ago, were a 700 elementary school. In 2016 that was kind of a high point for them. They had five fifty nine kids. When we brought them in as an enrollment focal school, they had four twenty four students.

So that's significantly lower. They had three straight years of decline. Some of the key actions. Deep engagement with the principal. He asked me 47 questions and was like, I don't even know if I'm gonna do this.

But once he committed, they committed, did all the stuff. We gave them the full range of assets. They really said, I'm doing this thing. We gave them a new logo. We engaged with a corresponding beautiful mural on the wall.

They also had some other things that were adjacent to this work with a new playground from Eat, Learn, Play, the Curry Foundation. Their CDC, beautiful CDC opened. And then we start seeing some calendar things. They had a teacher consolidation before we started. Their first choice kinder rate was 52%.

Then it started growing up to 69%. Then it started growing up to 76%. They added a second TK because demand was so high. They added a fourth and fifth grade teacher because demand rate was so high. Now we're like barely into the enrollment window.

Both TKs were full right away. They're on pace to exceed their projection. And the principal was like, When do we get more stuff? I'm like, You're out, dude. You have gotten everything and you've done everything and now you're just gonna go.

And so what we see when we have this, net gain of 51 students and two teachers, Right? They have highest enrollment since 2018. Their first choice kinder rate, 52 to 76. TK rate, 67 to 208% of capacity. Right?

Which means they're turning people away. Their neighborhood enrollment rate, so that the percentage of families who live in the neighborhood are going, went from from 30%, a little 31%, you know, up to 35.8. So like, this work is not also about it's also not not about neighborhood schools. So it's bringing more folks from the neighborhood into the school. So I just think that's a really, and that's a story that we could tell about other schools is what we tell it about REACH, we can tell it about Frick.

We could tell it is a story that's ongoing at Prescott. Right? It's a story we could tell about Allan and others. Right?

I really love your enthusiasm.

And I gotta be quiet because we gotta go.

Alright. Because you are such a middle school beat you and Cliff were like, you know, it's like, woah.

Yay. Alright.

Let me give

you let me just give you a couple of things. So I'm gonna pass through this. Birth rates are going down. People aren't having babies. That's a problem.

Everyone's enrollment is going down everywhere. What I do wanna point out in this is if you look at this thing very, very carefully, you see that that enrollment in the state is going down, but charter and private enrollment is going up. But we know in our city, we're working to reverse that trend and that's significant. Right? And that's part of our work.

These are some staffing and budget things which you guys can look at later, but I think what's significant about that is that we are running out of dedicated funding and the funding that we are kind of running on has been curated carryover because kind of the context in which I've been working is you never know when the money's gone. And so I've been trying to kind of put it together, keep it together, find some grants. We a grant with the federal Department of Education that has a name that had the word diversity in it that they changed that word and the money could get gone at any moment. And so I think there's just there's some things that we need to think about for the future around potentially this is new work. And when we have new work, we sometimes need new job descriptions to keep up with the evolving work.

We've done that when we did African American male achievement, and we needed new job descriptions when we did community school managers when we did restorative justice. We haven't done it to date. And it is a challenge. Also just naming and I recognize maybe the situational irony that when we have all these controversies and on stableness. Hear it from families and the things that collectively as leaders on the board in labor and senior leadership can do to support enrollment stabilization is to seek stabilization.

In our interpersonal relationships, in our leadership, because that type of safe and stable district is what families want, and they want it replicated at every level. If we can And that is another thing that we can go for. So, I really appreciate this time. I'd love to answer questions. I also recognize the hour.

So thank you so much.

I I really appreciate your enthusiasm. Are there any questions from the board?

Thank you. Yeah, I really appreciate and I will save some of my questions for an email to you later. Sure. But a couple things that or one thing that I noticed was your need for multilingual staff. And can you express, like, specific languages or specific communities that you are unable to tap into at the moment because of that lack of diversity?

So we have

we've we've right now we have, bilingual staff who are bilingual native speakers of of Spanish, Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Vietnamese, in our office as well as mom. And that's great. And that feels like super fortunate because none of those positions have a bilingual tag to them. So I'm just naming that like in the absence of that. That's not necessarily something that Is a guarantee to always continue.

I'm

proud

of that, and I'm glad it's there, and I want that. I want us to always be able to offer that and to never be in a place where we're like, we can't serve you because of language needs. Right? Because that shouldn't that's a part of this board policy that says provide access.

And one thing I was also going to ask about because it's been named a couple times when we talk about school enrollment is the phrase that school is full when it's a low enrolled school and we know it. So what has your office done to change language, think about you know, enrollment differently to support those school sites.

Yep. I mean, I'm gonna draw your attention back to just like that slide all the way back here is like, one, when we centralize the enrollment office, we have a lot easier time. Providing training and giving information out. When you had nine different groups giving that information to families, your chances of giving inaccurate information about the status of a school went through the roof. So I think that we're giving much more accurate information.

We have internal documents that have every school and every grade level at every school classified green, yellow, red. Green means you can an enrollment specialist can enroll family with at that school at that grade level without checking because there's enough space. Yellow means we might have one or two seats. So you check-in with myself or the director and red means that that grade level is full. We also have, There have also been like I can't tell you how many times I get asked, what's the class size max for my school?

Right? And so that's not you'd think that'd be common knowledge, but there's a lot of misunderstandings and misknowledge. So what somebody may think something is or what it was once or what is is and and so that drives misunderstandings too. I think also I put the slide fostering attitude of yes is like if we had an enrollment office that starts with no, And I'm not saying we did, but I'm saying that this enrollment office starts with yes. And that's deliberate, and it's said, and that's an attitude, and that's the one that we're gonna continue going with.

Two questions. You don't have to answer them right away. I'm embarrassed that I have not met with you one on one, especially because I think this presentation was amazing, and I wanna know know more, learn more, and do more on behalf of enrollment. My first question is around how you might measure or share with us some stories around the impact of focusing on enrollment for these local schools and sort of, like, the potential unintended positive impact it might have on outcomes. Culture is really important.

I do think there's a direct relationship between school culture and outcomes, just if you're spending all this time with communities designing logos and doing murals, I know that that affects how people feel in a place, and so I'm just very curious how that shows up in the data or just even in your anecdotal conversations with folks. And then the second question is around one of the slides you presented around cost. And because thing there is a little bit of, like, uncertainty around budget, and revenue and how we might continue to cover the cost of these things, I'm curious what parts of what you're doing you consider essential, and how much everything cost, but especially the things that feel essential so that as we continue doing budget, you know, having budget conversations, we can be mindful of that because this seems seems like work that we wanna protect.

I think the I I really I really like your first question. I really agree with it. I have some I have some opinions, you know, with my old principal hat on, but I think that what you're sparking in me is a desire to loop back with some of those schools and ask those questions. Right? And to be intellectually honest, some of my statements have them tell their story.

Right? Because I do think, Yeah, because I think the story about the Prescott students said, Mama, we're gonna drive by my billboard every day to school. That does more than just enrollment right to a community and and, there was a principal when we put the mural up at At her school. She came to me and said, I can't remember the last time someone did what they said they were gonna do. Right and one that should be rare, but also that matters right and And I had another their front office person said.

I love seeing this. Right. And so, yes, I think those things really matter. And, of course, we're not the only team that does stuff like that that and nowhere near so I don't want to position ourselves anywhere near us. Your second point.

I would love to really do some thinking about that and get back to you if like, you know, and if we were if we were kind of posed with that, I think we've reduced staff and you can see that in the slide by more than 50%. And so that's also constrained some of the things that we can do. That often we're asked, Why aren't you beating the bushes and knocking the doors? And have one staff member on this team who's doing a lot of social media, and we have one staff member who's doing literally everything else, like graphic designer supervision, strategy, data, implementation. You know what I mean?

And then there's whatever portion of my time when I'm not managing all the other teams plus the larger department. And so there is some trade offs there around that. But I'd love some opportunities to give you a more nuanced answer, particularly if we wanted to, like, be very, very clear. But I think the last thing I'll say is when we look at the behavior of our competing systems, they also tell us what matters too. Right?

Like drive down 880. And we'll be up there in a second. Like, we've we've actually been delaying based on what we know about our families enrollment patterns. Like, when they spent money was I was fine with that because that's not when I wanted to spend money. Like, I'm because I have the data.

But when you see what they do, they're telling us what part of our playbook they wanted to emulate. And I do think it's our playbook that they're emulating. And I'm happy with them spending money. I think that's good. But I think that also gives us data back right about what we should continue to do, and it also gives us data back on what parts of this initiative that we were out ahead of.

And we were innovators around. We shouldn't back away from Right? Because other folks have filled the space.

I'll just make a couple of quick comments. I mean, I'm you know, I think I also really appreciate the work. And I you know, as you know, full disclosure, a person who was on the enrollment working group where this work grew out of and a person whose kids are at focal schools that I've seen grow from this work and a person who enrolled my kids on my phone and my friends, you know, on their phone. I and follow Town Sprouts and Oakland in the middle and the link. I just wanna say that I think that this work is important for two reasons.

One is it is revenue generating. Like, much as we sometimes, I think, like, they're my kids in these schools, it's also that those kids make schools more stable. Right? And they make and they and it's every kid that comes into our schools and the family that joins our schools makes the school better and stronger. And and I think this work is also just so important because it stabilizes our budget, but it stabilizes our schools.

And I also, full disclosure, like last meeting, introduced the, you know, the resolution to fund enrollment stabilization because that while we didn't, you know, kind of break all of the odds and grow our enrollment by 10%, those graphs tell a story about whether where we the the much harder decisions, even harder decisions we would have to make if with this work didn't exist. And so to your point, director Barry, that's the the ongoing funding, at least in the resolution that I think is that it should live in the base because this work is is really, I think, really fundamental to the future of our district. It feels really and and again, I think the capacity building is huge, but also the ways in which it has changed our framework in our own minds as OUSD around, you know, we're the place where you send your kids. Like, we are the best system. We don't have to apologize.

So, again, I don't you know, I could probably let this go on for like two more hours, but thank you for the work, and and I look forward to the conversation with my colleagues around the resolution when it comes back. Thanks.

Thank you. Are there any other? Director Williams?

Director Killian, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Really like the data. It's all coming together now, so really appreciate it. Love the engagement you've been doing with the schools and just really spreading that message.

I think the the one to one conversations as you're checking in with the administrators and really trying to get a sense of what they need has really been helpful. I've heard that from a number of administrators in district three that you've you pick up the phone and you talk to them and that hasn't happened. So, you brought like a real fresh approach to our enrollment policy, and so I just want to thank you for that. Secondly, I just really want to continue to to push us in communicating with our parents. One of the things we do have is Parent Square which goes out to our school community but there's also a community of parents out there that don't have Parent Square and I've talked to administrators.

They don't have a good idea of how to make that connection, right? And so, I think that's something that either schools and the school sites have to really incentivize staff and teachers to go door to door to talk to individuals or, you know, I think you did mention there's some direct communication that is going out from now on. So that trying to connect those two is going to be really, really important because I think that again, we tend from what I've noticed is that parents want to chase the best opportunity for their child and they have every right to do so but sometimes they just don't know right within their neighborhood is a good opportunity. And so making sure that they know that there's an option there. Not just filling out the enrollment but actually know like you can go visit, you can talk to folks, this is what we're doing, and looking at the profile of schools, being able to gather that data and then directly send it to parents so they know what actually is happening at the school would be really helpful.

I know you've been working on that. We've talked about it a couple times and I definitely want to finish up on that conversation. And lastly, knowing that you're doing a fantastic job even though we have this kind of school choice policy. You know, I continue to, you know, prod you a little bit about that. I think there's a conversation there, because what you've done is you've looked at the data.

You created the reflections. I think we need to look at the policy and do the reflection, look at the data, and see how successful it has been and what the original intent is and then see if it actually, accomplish what the intent was or do we need to actually make some adjustments, a little reflection? So I wanna keep that on your radar as well. I'll be coming to you, soon about that. Thank you, sir, for a great job.

Appreciate

you. Thank you. Yeah. I just wanna say thank you, Frick. I mean, I remember doing the fifth grade enrollment in paper, handing over notebooks, and making triple copies because they got lost.

So, moving to a phone, think, is, like, amazing. But I also really appreciate the focus and switching that around to looking at our our students that that need the most, that that being the focal part of our of our enrollment. And, you know, I'll be talking to you about Las Cruelita too. Thank you. The last thing we have on here is the application for for for provisional I have

to have public comment, president Brewer.

Comment. Sorry, and you waited,

so Thank you.

No, I know it's late, and I won't take too much of your time. I don't know why everyone else isn't still here. Obviously, this is a very important issue.

For public speaker, have Ben Tab Scott, Asalo Rubala, Avery Ringer, and Shiona Mohammad. I

just wanted it does seem like money well spent. I mean, right? These are people that are that are bringing revenue into the district. So I want to thank, thank you for that presentation. I just wanted to highlight one piece of data that I've been exploring that that was brought up in the presentation, and it's the percentage of kids in an attendance area that are going to that neighborhood school.

K? And it was mentioned. The data I was able to kinda construct through the LIVGO data that's out there include you can include charter schools in that. When you do that, there are over 20 elementary schools with fewer than a third of the eligible kids in that neighborhood going to that school. So, you know, it seems that from an enrollment perspective, we wanna target those neighborhoods and understand why it is that those parents, those families have lost so much faith in those those schools.

I'm a parent at Laurel of a kindergartner, so I guess we were, you know, some of the ones brought in by that by that focal policy. But I'll tell you why we're there. It's because, you know, we're in one of those neighborhoods where, the number that that spit out of this analysis is about 20% of my neighborhood actually goes to our neighborhood school. That's global family. So that's why we're at Laurel.

I mean, we're very happy to be at Laurel, but it's not because of the new logo or the the new mural. It's because there are neighborhoods very close by where people, for whatever reason, don't wanna go to those schools. So I wanna thank, thank you guys, and I'll I'll leave it there.

Thank you. Next speaker, please.

Hello. My name is Shayana Mohammed. I'm a parent, former commissioner with OUSD, and former director of North Oakland Community Charter School where both of my children were students there at some point of their education. We experienced an unethical closure at that time. Much of the fumbles regarding the voluntary separation of miss Tremell echoes what happened to us last year.

A lot of those things like the violation of Brown Act, the improper votes and discussions and announcements to the public that was happening is happening again. So it's rather disappointing to know that this is still a behavior that's being encouraged and overlooked amongst leaders. There was no transition plan that happened with us as well, so our school records, we had to go figure out how to get it to OUSD. There was no proper pass off from office of charter schools nor no oversight from anyone that was within the Charter Matters Committee. During the time that you all were were still in active committee, we reached out to you personally, Clifford Thompson and Valerie in Broussard, and it was flipping behavior amongst Valerie and Broussard during that time in a complete overlooking of a direct request from you, mister Clifford Thompson.

It's very disappointing that these things are still happening. You can shake your head and say you didn't, but records don't lie. Recordings don't lie. And at the end of the day, it's very disappointing that these things continue to happen. And it's like things are on record, and it's still like, oh, well, can roll our eyes, we can sip our water, and no one does any follow-up later.

And then when you get a bunch of mad family members, then you don't know what to do. So at some point, someone should take the charge and it shouldn't be a disjointed effort of who's on what side and what looks good to the public. And then for people like Lisa Grant Dawson to continue to do little side comments and huffing and puffing and just being funny. Janelle Ruelly, same thing. It's just very disappointing that this is still a behavior amongst OUSD when you all are teaching children to be educated, inquisitive, and informative individuals that are supposed to respect each other.

It just makes no sense.

Thank you. Alright. Next item on the agenda is s two twenty five zero eight eight nine, application for provisional internship permit, California Commission on Teaching, credentialing named employees for the school year 2425. Is there a motion to adopt this?

So moved.

And is there a second?

Second.

Thank you. Is there any public comment on this?

Yes. Miss Osolo Labala. I believe that she's not here. That conclude public speakers.

Okay. And can we take a roll call on the vote, please?

Student directors are absent. Director Hutchinson is also absent. On the remaining roll call, director Ladder?

Yes.

Director Williams? Yes, sir. Director Barry?

Yes.

Director Thompson?

Yes. Vice President Bachelor?

Yes.

And President Burlehart?

Yes.

The motion is adopted. Do do anything else? I suggest a motion to extend.

Is there a motion to extend the clock?

Motion to extend for ten minutes.

Second.

Second. The motion to extend the meeting, student directors are absent. Director Hutchinson absent. Director Ladder?

Yes.

Director Williams? Yes, sir. Director Barry?

Yes.

Director Thompson?

Yes. Vice President Bashford?

Yes.

President Burghard?

Yes.

Motion's extended to I mean, meetings extended to 11:10.

Next item on the agenda is you, which is the president's report. I will make it really short. I had a longer statement, but I'll shorten that. We received a letter from the county office of education certifying our second interim budget as qualified. And while the certification reflects progress, the letter outlines several concerns that we as a board must address in our upcoming budget development process.

I strongly encourage everyone to read the letter carefully. It's attached to the agenda. This past week, Vice President Badgeland and I had the opportunity to meet in person with our elementary principals at Brookfield, as well as virtually with elementary, middle, and high school principals. These meetings were candid and at times difficult. Our principals expressed several pressing concerns, including district leadership stability, staff conflict at school sites, budget uncertainties for the next year, and the critical need to address literacy challenges, equitable access to curriculum, and effective literacy instruction.

These conversations were painful but necessary, and as board directors, it is our responsibility to listen and act with empathy and integrity and purpose. As board president, I want to emphasize that for our students to learn and thrive in a joyful school environment, we adults must model the behavior that we expect from our students. Respecting our collective bargaining agreements is not only a legal obligation, but it is foundational to a strong and functioning school system. These contracts are living documents that shape the working conditions of all of our employees, and when honored, they make our schools stronger. There has been much attention in the media regarding the superintendent's contract, and his joint statement has been issued to address many of the concerns.

Unfortunately, confidential close discussions were inappropriately shared publicly on the dais, social media, and the press. This breach of trust can created confusion and distress among our staff, students, families, and community members. Due to Brown Act limitations, we were unable to respond as openly we as we would have liked, but still I must clearly state the illegal release of closed session information undermined the stability of our that our community depends on from this board. What we owe to our staff, our students, our parents, and our community is steady, responsible leadership. Leadership that ensures every student in OUSD graduates career, college, and community ready.

On another note, I'd really like to close celebrating again, once again tonight, a historic milestone and the return of local control to our district. Thank you. And are there any board reports? Director Thompson.

Yeah. I just want to mention, that the annual, Marsha Rines writing, scholarship has been extended to April 30. And so if there are any principals online who are listening or counselors, you can let your high school students know, juniors and seniors, that that scholarship is available. First place is $5,000. Second place is $3,000.

Third place is $1,800. Also, honorable mentions, and there's a special outstanding, $1,000 award given to a junior who writes an outstanding essay. So we want to make sure that our schools know about this.

Could you oh my goodness. Could you text us that

Could you send us that information?

Yeah. Yeah. I can. ECC. Yeah.

I'll send it. Yeah.

I'm yielding my report time just to say shout out to the GOAT superintendent Kyla Johns of Trammell. This meeting was chock full of things to celebrate, and leadership makes things like that possible. Obviously, it's a team effort, a village effort, but I just wanna give her a shout out today. I remember the first time that I saw her in a room. I was staffing the mayor at a time, and she's just always been so big to me.

Big heart, superpower grace, holding a lot of challenging situations with poise, and, you know, I just just wanna lift up the awesome work. Someone send the superintendent a highlight reel of tonight's celebrations because I think, you know, we owe her a great deal of gratitude. That's it.

Yeah. Just super quickly, I wanna acknowledge the graduation ceremonies that are happening sooner rather than later. So I have them booked on my calendar, so I will be there. I am also asking specifically our elementaries and middles any any promotions and graduations you have coming up in my district. Please, please, please let me know because I would love to celebrate our littlest to our not so littlest anymore folks.

And yeah. And that's it. Yeah.

Alright, and with that, we're adjourned.