OUSD Board Of Education

Like to whoops. Good morning and welcome to the special board meeting of the Oakland Board of Education. Mr. Rakeshtar, can we have a roll call to establish quorum, please?

Yes. On the roll call to establish quorum, student director Simmons, student director Smith, director Lauder, present director Williams, is he on line? Yeah. Present. Present.

Thank you. Thank you. Director Hutchinson? Director Berry? Present.

Director Thompson? Vice president Bachelor? Here. And President Brohard? Here.

Quorum present.

Thank you. Mister Sejep, is there any translation today? Mister Hollis, sorry.

There are no translators for this meeting.

Madam President.

Thank you. And with that, we will get started with today's agenda.

I'd like to make a motion to take all items together, but recorded separately. Second. Hopefully, you want. All full approval and take and voted on separately, recorded separately. Second.

Is there a motion to approve all items under She just made

made a universal motion, which is effectively like consent, to take them all collectively. So that's fine as long as we take public comment.

Alright. Is there public comment on these items?

And and I would say allow more than two minutes. Mhmm. If needed.

Miss Sotter, do you have public comment?

Yes, we for public speakers, have Assal Ola Bala and Sheila Haynes.

You. Miss Assalta first and.

She should be speaking on all items at once. So, understand. She understands that.

Missus Sato, we're speaking on all items at once.

Yes, ma'am. Okay. So, I just arrived and I didn't get a chance to go over the agenda but I'm just going to write down what, when I went over all two sixty something items, what I pulled as areas of concern. There are several items that involve student data sharing and I don't know if this board has confirmed if that data sharing is an issue for which we need to have a discussion. There are items related to lead abatement, sewer repair, environmental service plans, environmental assessments, hazardous material abatement, All of these are environmental safety issues for which I'm sure board members have considered the legitimacy of what's going on related to those issues.

What concerned me was the item that has portable removals from Skyline, 88,000 and it's coming from the children's initiative. The children's initiative is the funding for early education and the other part of that funding is for Oakland Promise Career Readiness and College Assistance. I don't know how you're spending 88,000 for portable removals from the children's initiative. You have an AC transit MOU from Skyline that started in January. You just approved this.

You have items that multiple funding for sources across the district that have to do with bus transportation, but no clear identification of where the funding is coming from. We have revisions of job descriptions. You have several items that amendment to policy. Amendment to policy dealing with child abuse, prevention, promotion, acceleration retention, administrative non discriminative issues, English language learners. And all of this a policy issue you could rubber stamping without going into any detail of what's going on related to these policies amendments.

You also have creation of new jobs within these two sixty items. You have development of a crisis response manual. You have all of the student achievement plans. That's very serious. Very serious.

You have the teaching of trade skills which I think is something that needs to be brought under the umbrella of let's look at this more because right now it's being said a lot of the trade jobs you're gonna be making more when you go to college for four years. And we need to look at that. Last, is my time? Lastly, support for students who have experienced abuse. I mean there's just too much on this agenda to have this rubber stamping initiative in place.

Thank you. Ms. Haynes?

Looks like Ms. Haynes is not online. So that will conclude public speakers.

And are there any board comments? Director Hutchinson.

Thank you. First off, we shouldn't even be here today but for the fact that the board has been mismanaged all year long. You know? And now we're at a meeting where most people in the community don't even know about it. There wasn't even an announcement set out by the district to say that this is happening.

Everyone's on vacation. We announced the meeting last week as our final meeting of the year, and here we are again. Now a number of the items that are here on this agenda. This is actually now the fourth time that some of these items have been on agenda. It was on our original board meeting agenda, and we never got to the consent report.

Then after the retreat, these items came forward and were not done. Then last week's board meeting, we never got to these. And now here they are at the fourth meeting, and, the board just wants to lump them all together to decide altogether. Now if you look at the items altogether, they total just two items on here basically total $300,000,000. So these items collectively total well over $300,000,000.

Most of them don't have a fiscal impact analysis. And as we learned last week at our final board meeting, our budget for next year has what's being called a plug. And I don't think staff even realizes when they presented last week the plug. That was actually the document that showed on budget line forty three ninety five, somebody inserted a minus $30,000,000 fraudulently, and now they're calling that a plug. You don't load minus $30,000,000 onto the budget when you haven't even made those cuts yet, and now that designation is not listed anywhere on the budget.

So because of that mistake, expenditures in the unrestricted have been artificially lowered by $60,000,000. So if somebody says that this has been budgeted for, they're not being truthful because in the budget, there's a minus $30,000,000 that hasn't been accounted for. So by definition, how can we afford these? And, again, this board's cynical attempt to just push stuff forward when we obviously can't afford it and haven't even made a full agenda is scandalous. Scandalous.

So like I let everyone know, when I'm done with this meeting today, I'm gonna be reaching out to multiple state agencies to file a complaint, both complaints around fraud and complaints around duty of fair representation. I've never seen anything like this, and this just continues the pattern where these people would show up and immediately say, let's do it together so we can get out of here in five minutes.

Are there any other board comments, director Barry?

Just that I do think, I think this was mentioned, if not the last board meeting, the board meeting prior, but if either superintendent you or staff who are online can share the extent to which the expenses on our gen consent agenda are accounted for in the budget that we just reviewed for next year.

We're checking to see right now if miss Garda is online.

No. But there because there's there's so many. But, I mean, if Preston wants to speak to the facility items, that could be a proxy for the others.

And point of clarification at the retreat, the special meeting afterwards when, miss Garr wasn't here, the superintendent stated that these things were budgeted for. And let me just state unequivocally, it's unacceptable that the head of the financial department is not available for this meeting. That's why senior staff is salaried at a very high rate. And if she wasn't gonna be available, then this meeting shouldn't be scheduled now. So this isn't this isn't good enough at all in terms of ensuring that things have been budgeted when we know that they haven't been.

Preston Thomas, the chief systems and services officer. I can attest to the fact that in the consent report, there are multiple funding sources that are utilized under my control. All of them are either budgeted for in the general fund or in the spending plan related to the bond program. So they're all currently budgeted under capital programs or in the general fund, particularly for some of the maintenance items.

But that's not what's listed on the memo. And so for somebody to say it doesn't matter. We've had the same memos for these art for these items. This is now the fourth time.

We're we're not debating, director

Hicks. That's I know you're not debating anything. I know what you're going to do. But I'm pointing out that that was not clear. And if we had this information, it would be in the packet, and we wouldn't have to ask questions.

So to have somebody stand up here and say something that they couldn't include in the packet the four times this has been brought forward, Call shenanigans.

Okay. I'm gonna address this in just right now. And that I did I wanna note that as these items came up in the the last agenda meeting, I did discuss all of them with director or I'm sorry, Assistant Superintendent Gard. She had many phone calls. I called on to make sure that there was, the resource code was listed, to make sure that the master, so make sure that all of it was clear.

I also want to say I have never witnessed a meeting where the entire consent report was pulled. So I want to go through a few things that are in here that are essential to our students. Number one, R9 and R10, which are tree, cutting trees. These are fire hazards in many of these schools. And again, I think they've spoken to the fact that we don't have the staff to do this in buildings and grounds.

I certainly, excuse me, I certainly would not want to see a fire take place at any of these named schools and there's quite a few of them. Also, item R27 and 28 are fire protection controls. Again, in a school, I would want to see, or in any offices, are fire controls working appropriately. Number I'm gonna go through and see another one here. The extension of our workers' comp contract, again, as many of our workers, particularly in buildings and grounds, I would assume, file workers' comp claims.

I would not want that expired. We can go through here the installation agreement for the grading, the turf replacement. Again, where we've placed an emphasis on joyful schools, all of our schools deserve to have turf that is not ripped up and the kids can play on. When I go through here, number r 13 one one three, our non public, non sectarian school agency services, master contracts. Again, we have students in all of these schools.

The contracts, excuse me, need to be in place. Here we have an agreement with Row Health and Special Education providing nursing behavioral and therapy staffing solutions to support our students. Those are just a few of them. So I think again, I have never seen the politics played with a consent agenda item. And with that, I'll ask if there are any further.

And mister Rakeshaw, can we take a roll call on the vote, please?

Yes. I'm sorry. I I have my hand raised.

I'm director Williams. I didn't see that. I was watching the screen there. Thank you. Go ahead.

Thank you. I I will be moving this forward, but I really wanna express my concern because, r nine and r 10, I don't know, you know, why that was an issue for you, was an issue for me because we are talking about, the practice of, riffing, releasing district staff members for budgetary operations to reduce our expenses. And instead of actually finding ways to utilize them, we contract out those services. The services in R9 and R10 are services that are building the grounds folks do on a regular basis. What we really have to do is evaluate the department to see who's gonna be able to handle those services.

It's easy to just send them off to a vendor to do it. So I really want to, address that as concerns that we have to talk about. Really, it's evaluation of the department. We've already had an ad hoc committee on having labor at the table and looking at these contracts. And it just, again, we're gonna have to do a better job at that and look for the solutions in there.

R2728 is very similar. These are very, you need certificated individuals to do certain work and then you need just regular staff people to do that work. We have to go ahead and look deeper into these contracts so we know which ones our departments can do and which ones do we contract out. And I do have some concerns with that. I think that's gonna have to elevate our conversation again with having our labor partners at the table so they understand what we need to do.

Also, we really are talking about becoming more efficient, then there has to be an evaluation or an assessment in these departments to see what can get done and what are we contracting out. In addition to the Zoom and all the additional transportation services, we did have a conversation with the director at the time, but there are some, escalator clauses in there that need to really be looked at and we need to really have a better understanding of how our particular transportation system is working because committing, thirty years is not a very good policy on my behalf. We are at a year to year, moment in our particular budget. We're gonna be battling to make sure next year is right and having a commitment of over thirty years and pulling money out the system is not what we really need. We should have a deeper conversation on that.

So I think there are some things that should be further discussed. I'm gonna move this and support, but I do have some deep concerns in the practices in which we're moving forward in this budget. I'm expecting our district staff to be more diligent and actually having these conversations that, oh, and the Brazefield Dunleavy, we have expenses of $250,000 of folks flying in and out and all this stuff. I travel on a regular basis and I know that expenses can be high at times, but we don't have no mechanisms in these contracts to track the expenses. And that's a really big concern for me.

And lastly, we have community outreach with our KDL and our other communication staff to do some of that work. And again, I would like to see our districts come back to the table and work it out with our staff to get this work done, to keep our people working and not put them on the sidelines through layoff notices. We're gonna have to change the way we do business moving forward. Thank you.

Thank you. Mister Reichstark, can we have a roll call and the vote, please?

Yes. On the motion stated proving all items at once, student directors are absent. Director Lauder? Yes. Director Williams?

Yes, sir.

Director Hutchinson? No. Director Barry?

Yes.

Director Thompsons absent. Vice President Bachelor? Yes. President Burghard? Yes.

Motion's adopted.

Okay. Is there any new legislation?

It's a special meeting.

Special meeting. Okay. And with that, I would like to close in honor of two translators that have had over forty years of experience. We will miss them, wish them the best luck in their retirement, David Ewan and Angel Ho. And with that, we're adjourned.