Study Session Meeting

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[3] Nancy Thomas: here this evening. Roll call, please.

[8] SPEAKER_26: President Rodriguez, Vice President Thomas. Here. Member Martinez. Here. Member Gutierrez. Here. Member John.

[16] Nancy Thomas: Here. I would ask that we have an approval of the agenda unless someone would like to make any adjustments.

[33] Elisa Martinez: I move that we approve the agenda.

[39] SPEAKER_24: I'll second it.

[40] SPEAKER_26: Please vote.

[57] Nancy Thomas: Motion passes, four ayes, member Rodriguez absent. We will entertain close, excuse me, public comment on board study session items. And so we have several people that would like to speak to this. Tony, Mr. Doot.

[88] SPEAKER_17: Good afternoon. Tony is fine.

[91] Nancy Thomas: I'm sorry.

[93] SPEAKER_17: Just very quickly, the concerns about the district office moving everything else. We could easily use the land at the junior high school and at Schilling, all that vacant land that is not being used now and not cost anybody anything because we wouldn't have to move. We could actually get to a point where we could afford to build at And I suggest that you give it some thought about not doing it until you have the funds to do it. Okay? We can't afford it. Thank you.

[151] SPEAKER_09: The district is considering a move to the Whiteford site at a cost of around $4 million. The fact that you can access the funds begs the question, is it a good idea? Is it ethical? Is it prudent? Is it a good time to do this? And most importantly, does it best represent the interests of the students of Newark Unified? We have portable classrooms with holes in the walls. They're rat infested. Sport facilities have flooded due to poor workmanship by the firms NUSD hired. Other structures including the very building you are considering for offices has had similar issues. We have broken desks in many schools held together by duct tape. This is because they are outdated and screws of all things cannot be found to repair them. Teachers are told when the screws fall out, take care to save them. We do, however, have two schools that received makeovers due to a model change with shiny new furniture, albeit that is not holding up as expected, a decision which has yet to prove itself and may have cost other schools the improvements they deserved. We started the school year under ordering crucial supplies for our classrooms, orders from the district office directly. Leaving our classrooms in a pinch, this board of trustees has elected to spend $75,000 on a revenue review from Ryland Corporation and now will likely be mandated to have a member of the county come and again advise us on how to spend money. We purchased a visionary program with ADIS at the cost of near to $500,000. I attended the original seminar and I spent my day making pipe cleaner people and was encouraged to dream of palm trees and beanbag chairs and what would be a perfect school. How far would $575,000 better yet $4 million go to enhance the existing houses of learning that our children currently occupy? Teacher housing is also a budding idea. There are numerous NUSD-owned patches of land available and suitable. It has been suggested that curb appeal from a new district office will be a factor in attracting families and their children when in fact test scores are what way a family's decision to come to Newark. I know it did in my family 42 years ago. Priorities are clearly confused. And now this board is entertaining putting a parcel tax on the ballot and USD is hoping that some 20,000 voters will trust this district to do a better job spending funds than history has shown. I have in the past walked the streets for a parcel tax increase. Today, this voter sadly gives a vote of no confidence. Thank you. Thank you.

[324] Nancy Thomas: Cary Knoop, please. Mr. Knoop. I'm sorry.

[329] Leonor Rebosura: I apologize.

[335] Cary Knoop: Good evening. Yeah, a couple of comments I would like to make about this workshop. First of all, is this the best spending of time? I know this budget is getting boring, but I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done. Add to that that neighboring districts, the unions are active. It's kind of the union's year. I don't think Realistically, Newark's going to be spared from that. We can't say, oh, we're different, and we're going to be fine with the union, and they'll accept anything. No, you've got to be realistic. Now, some of that has to be behind closed door, because that's a negotiation item. But you've got to understand, you've got to have a buffer for union, for raises and things like that that will come up. It's just a reality. Last time, it also came up that some software turned up that we don't need or we don't use. And I wouldn't be surprised there would be other things as well that we can find that we could drop and maybe some educational programs that we can drop. And again, I think it's important for the board to take a lead in that, that after the budget cuts were done, that you as a board member can be proud of saying I've done everything in my power to keep as much of the cuts from the classroom. And again, we all realize that cuts have to be made from the classroom. That's where the bulk of the money is. You know, it's not a, that's clear. But even if you can save something somewhere, that's so important to do that. Now, with respect to this move, you know, I think the best option is to stay here. Two years ago, the CBO at that time made an offer to the board saying, We need about $700,000 in roof fixes and HVAC fixes. It's probably a little bit more than that, but it's not going to be $4.2 million. Newark Unified is the district that has shrunk the most in the last 10 years in Alameda County, about 14% over 10 years. I don't see any way how you could use the developer funds for this because developer funds are for growth, and obviously we are not having any growth, so that would mean you would take $4.2 million out of the Fund 40, which, if I hear things correctly, there's a lot of stuff in the classrooms that needs to be done as well. If the furniture needs to be improved here, sure, we all need to have decent furniture and things like that, but a $4.2 million, I rather see that we rent Whiteford to a church or a local school or a daycare center or what have you and get revenue from that for the general fund rather than leaving it empty or thinking of these kind of plans. Thank you.

[514] Nancy Thomas: Thank you. Ms. Cindy Parks.

[528] Cindy Parks: I want to thank previous board member, Ms. Crocker, and current board members, Ms. Thomas and Mr. Rodriguez. On October 16th, U3 requested a more comprehensive breakdown before considering the district office move to Whiteford. At the time, the cost was estimated at $600,000, with a relocation of IT, print shop, and data center to be determined. Clearly, with the current price tag of $4.2 million, it was severely underestimated. And make no mistake, Teachers who have classroom furniture that is falling apart and have seen half a million allotted for the new district office furniture are wondering, how is that putting students first? If you move forward, how do you plan to pay for these renovations? Even though developer's fees can be used on the district office renovation, you would need to have the nexus of growth with the students from the new development, which you do not have. That leaves the Russian money. Are you willing to commit approximately half of the remaining Russian money to this building? That's not what you promised the people, the parents, when you sold the property. Perhaps properly maintaining the district office would have been a little bit more cost effective. The roof and HVAC proposal that was for the board in June of 2016 was only $669,000. To garner employee and public support for the move, at a few meetings the superintendent has mentioned the district office space being used for employee housing. Isn't that premature and a little manipulative? Plus the 2016 feasibility strategic plans you hired Dutra Sierra Graydon to draft recommends the underutilized property at the junior high for employee housing. Isn't your plate a little full at this time? balancing a three-year budget, completely restaffing the high school administration, closing or consolidating a school site because you don't have growth, spending Measure G down to $2.7 million, negotiating the 2018-2019 contract with your CSCA bargaining unit, negotiations with NTA for their 19-20 contract, and let's remember the real reason Newark Unified exists. It exists to educate the students who live here in Newark. The district is known for being impulsive, decision-making practices. I hope you will seek the community input before you undertake this expensive project.

[670] Nancy Thomas: Thank you. Is there anyone else that wishes to address this item? If not, Superintendent, would you like to introduce it?

[683] SPEAKER_06: Sure. With us this evening is Roberta Wall with an H. From Plum Architecture? Oh, sorry.

[696] Nancy Thomas: Excuse me. Did you want to address this item? Yeah, I did. OK, please. Well, you probably didn't know. That's all right. Yeah.

[705] SPEAKER_05: Actually, I just came on. My name is Ramon Medina. I'm a parent at music school. I'm the PTA president at music school. And I think I've been here in Newark for about 14 years. My child is seven years old. She's in second grade. So I'm learning how this works. My wife was a teacher for 12 years at EPA district. And if you know how that works, in East Palo Alto, the district has been in a hole for many, many years, and there's been a lot of discrepancies. So she's worked there. She knows how sometimes, how tough it is for districts to work, but I think One of the biggest things that I've seen over the last four years that I've been involved, because my child was at Whiteford and I wasn't too happy about having such a school shut down and the way that we're spending money there. But I think my biggest concern is that many of the district, the staff here, the people here, they don't see how contracts are being done. And I think contracts are definitely not being in our favor. And that's costing. Some of you guys weren't here, and I can understand. I'm not going to blame you for all of it. But for those who have been here for a long time, I do have an issue with people like that. Because there's been chances where you guys can fix things and actually see things coming. So in reality, I come from the private industry. I've been in the private industry for 20-something years now. I have my own business. And I know budgets. And budgets are the number one thing to run any type of organization, non-profit, non-profit, or district. So I think you guys really need to understand how to negotiate contracts and to understand how to buy things. I'm in the electronic industry. And I work with Apple, Google's. No guys negotiate. They negotiate to the penny, to the half a penny. And they never lose. So I don't understand why a body like yourselves want to get in a game and lose. So I like to tell you to don't lose because you're losing for the kids. As a parent, I don't want you to lose. So it's time for you guys to understand that if you don't know how to do that, then instead of getting a consultant to tell you about a geographic growth that might take place, that you did spend money on, and they gave you an Excel report, oh, it's a software. To me, that's an Excel report that you spit out with formulas. A lot of teachers here are very professional. They know math. They know numbers. So they can do that for you.

[897] Nancy Thomas: Excuse me, could you wrap up? We have a three minute time.

[900] SPEAKER_05: I suggest we do some real thinking and how you can utilize your resources that you have available. Because if you're in a hole, getting yourself into another hole doesn't make it better. So thank you very much, and I'll be back. Thank you.

[924] Michael Milliken: Superintendent? OK. Anyone else?

[927] SPEAKER_06: OK. Roberta, you have the floor.

[931] SPEAKER_11: OK. So my name's Roberta Wall. I founded Plum Architects in 2004 and have done schoolwork around the Bay Area since that time. I do a lot of work. I've worked with the San Lorenzo School District for the last 10 years. This study was not a half a million dollar study. It was a $2,500 study. So what we're looking at first is my charge was to conceptually look at the changing the Whiteford building from a preschool, special ed into a district office for the superintendent's office, business services, HR, educational services, and special ed. And so the building is pretty much intact and can remain in the position that it's in. It has, it consists of five classrooms and a central work area with an area that was for changing and and a lot of bathroom facilities and then a small lunchroom. mailroom, et cetera. So what my charge was is to just conceptually work with the district to see if we could fit these departments into this building. And it's a 9,860 square foot building. And so I took the staff count that we got and did that. And so I just diagrammatically placed the departments within this building and put kind of like standard space requirements. If somebody was a director, they'd get an office this size and a few or not, you would get a cubicle this size and kind of populated the building. And then I go to this one. Oh, thank you. Sorry. So what we've done is with the pink, we've placed HR up at the front where the entrance to the building is. And there's a lot of public interface with the HR department as well. On the right hand side, we have the educational services department and the special ed services department. We have business services in green and then we have the superintendent's office in the orange. And then the gray represents shared spaces such as conference rooms and the lunchroom. And the center area is kind of shared by the various spillover from each one of the departments. So we were able to fit everyone in. The next charge was to look at relocating the IT department, the district server MDF, main server MDF, as well as the print shop. And what was looked at to do that is the existing locker room at McGregor, which is building 8. And we've done that. We took the showers out and decided that's a good spot for the MDF and then in green and then gave the IT the size to the left. And we gave the print shop the size to the right. At this point, I don't know what equipment the district has or anything. Again, this is conceptual studying. So I had done a print shop for another district and just placed all those elements in there to see that it fit, which it does. There's storage in there. So that's what we did with that. The district also requested that we put in a 50 stall parking lot that would start at the entry and pull off of the loop and go to the side of the building. So it would be on the west side of the Whiteford building for parking. And so that's where that is. And then we came to a budget and this budget again is very conceptual so it has a high contingency in it. It's also at this point somewhat high because I don't really know what all we're going to end up doing because this is conceptual. So I chose a fairly conservative square foot cost for a renovation which consists of taking the, right now there's like a curtain partitions between all the classrooms. And so I was going to put storefront in there. And then we have the conference rooms, making the offices, the upgrading of the staff lounge. And then the repairing of the floor, extending the lighting, fire alarm, HVAC system required based on the layout of the building, which will be minor. But we came in at 1.7, and that again includes a 20% contingency plus the 15% overhead and profit. We then took the locker room and used the same cost because we'll have to bring in a new T1 line with AT&T for that. And again, it may be less, but at this point, I'm being very conservative. So that came in to be $954,000, so $1 million. At this point, not knowing what all needs to go over there from the standpoint of district furniture, I put a lump sum of half a million in there for that to cover up all of that. Then the parking comes, the new parking comes to $174,000. And then there's minor signage and some landscape cleanup at $50,000. Included in that, you end up having soft costs, which are the T1 and any sort of agency that we have to work with, the bidding costs, the cost of the architect, the engineers, and to that, and the management. So to that, we end up with a total of $4.2 million, and that's where we stand. So again, this is preliminary planning that can be moved up or down or wherever you folks be fit to advise us.

[1323] SPEAKER_06: So part of what staff is bringing to the board per board request is what would it look like? What are closer to actuals? We know that now may or may not be the time. It's up to the board. So there's nothing that's being voted on tonight. There's no action or recommendation for action tonight. It's purely just here's a ballpark of what that would look like. And I think the other part of it is if the board ends up saying, well, we want to know more. We want to know maybe what would it cost to fix existing, stay where we are, if now's not the time or if it is the time. But that's kind of the ballpark of what the estimates would be without knowing more detail. We didn't want to go deeper into it without having more of a consensus or direction from the board. But if there's any questions for Roberta, that's her presentation. OK. Okay, thank you, Roberta.

[1381] Nancy Thomas: I think maybe at some point in the future we might want to discuss this. From my standpoint, it's far in excess of what the original estimate was, which I felt, based on the needs for this building, might be closer to, not necessarily a wash, but much closer than the estimate that's here. And I understand we've got furniture here, and if The furniture is usable. It seems to me that we should be using the furniture we have. We shouldn't be upgrading furniture for staff before we do it for students. So there's a lot of things to be discussed. And I think my thought would be for staff to think about a wash. What would it be like to bring this building up to standard versus moving over to Whiteford? Because we did defer. cost for this building. When we did roofing next door, we deferred the HVAC. We know that there's a lot of difficult unused space in this building. So, you know, maybe staff can put their thinking caps on and come back with something that's a lot more reasonable. Okay, we can do that.

[1464] SPEAKER_24: Just going along with Member Thomas, I would like if you guys could provide us with numbers in regards to the cost of improving this current facility compared to the move. And I know that these numbers that are currently given, the 4.2, it's rough. It's too general at this point, I understand. So I'm wondering if maybe if you have, Superintendent, if you can discuss this better with Roberta, maybe a more specific number that you can say, you know, this is pretty general, but actually with some further discussion, if you guys can maybe get us a better number. Like Member Thomas says, if maybe furniture is not an issue, then that would easily cut $500,000 from this estimate. So even if you can give us a better idea. And then maybe the pros and cons of the move, whether compared to staying here.

[1530] Nancy Thomas: Thank you. Ms. Martinez.

[1533] Elisa Martinez: Yeah, you know, as I was listening to some of the public comment, I think that we do need to be careful to staff in terms of adding one more thing to go do. I think that, you know, it always comes back to what's the cost benefit. So there is, if there, and I'm not as familiar as Member Thomas with whatever was deferred for repairs So there is something around making sure that your facilities are a place where we can inhabit and work. Aside from that, I'm really struck by the disrepair of our classrooms and bathrooms in the high schools. So I'd be hard pressed to be able to support enhancing the look of our offices without first looking to our schools. I think let's just be smart about our time and how we're using it.

[1596] SPEAKER_06: If I may, and I agree, I think one of the next steps is definitely to see what would it cost to just get this up to the same standards as the schools, not greater than. And what is that about? Because there has been a lot that's been deferred. And not a lot of extra has been put in here. And we do have a few issues. Let's see what the two big numbers are, because it may not be worth the brain damage. So OK, we could do that. Thank you.

[1626] SPEAKER_24: I just have one more question. Sorry, I lost my train of thought. Oh, Superintendent, this is just maybe on an education basis for me. Can you, the funds that would be used for this, are they the same or would they be different for improving the classrooms?

[1645] SPEAKER_06: Would they come from the same location? This couldn't be bond money. This would not be allowable for the bond.

[1651] SPEAKER_24: So if we're talking about preparing classrooms compared to a move here, we're still talking about two different funds or budget statuses?

[1659] SPEAKER_06: Generally speaking, yes. I think part of what we have to be thoughtful of is whatever we spend on central office will definitely not be out of the bond. It would have to be a different account. depending on what the board chooses to use. But what I'm hearing from tonight's study, and that's the point of the study, is, well, that's a little bit of sticker shock. We weren't really thinking it'd be that number. Bring it back to us. Look at existing repairing that. Maybe that's a lesser number, or kind of comparing both pros and cons. And we'll do that work and bring it back to you. But it would definitely not be Measure G dollars by how the measure was passed. And it might be Russian or could be Russian. But that's to be determined yet. We're not that far down the road yet.

[1708] Nancy Thomas: There's another thought, too, and that is that the square footage or the land that's vacated here could be sold. And what would be the value if we sold it? It's not that this is something that would ever be used for a school site or that we do have lots of, as Mr. Dude pointed out, we have vacant land. over there by the junior high school. And there's other opportunities, I think, to look at our land usage and maybe consolidating schools, which I think we need to do, that could make sure that we're not putting ourselves into a hole in the future for land that we might need, but to use this land to augment the cost of moving the district office. this building is not very nice. It's not very conducive to good morale and good work being done. So, you know, I don't think, I think at some point the district office staff needs to have sort of a nicer environment.

[1782] SPEAKER_06: Okay. We can do that. And I know that the other part of that question that kind of is not part of the study, but is really this whole question of Area 3, consolidation of schools, what's the larger picture of our property, and that's something that staff is working on that's coming down the road.

[1800] Nancy Thomas: Okay, thank you. We will be recessing to closed session, but before we do, we do have a member that would like to speak to an item in closed session. That's Ms. Eustis.

[1818] SPEAKER_15: Good evening, board. I am Sue Eustis and I'm president of the California School Employees Association, Chapter 208. Before you go into closed session, I would like to remind you that CSCA Classified has always tried to work with you as partners in educating our children here in Newark. No one group is more important than the other. As you can see in the report that was given last board meeting, that Classified has taken over a period of the last 10 to 15 years, layoffs and reductions in hours, and we have never gained those back. We have not been treated, to be quite frank, as a partner, yet we continue to support you. What also is not remembered is that we have to pay rent or house payments. We need food to eat. We need to be able to have gas to get to work, and we need clothes for our backs. We cannot do this unless you move in a direction of a fair wage for classified, actually all employees, but I can only speak for classified. Please consider this in closed session. Please take a step in the right direction. Thank you.

[1909] Nancy Thomas: Yes, as we go into closed session, we will be talking about employee performance and evaluation. Superintendent, we'll be talking about public employee appointment, discipline dismissal, conference with labor negotiations, NTA and CSCA, conference with labor negotiator NEWMA. a conference with legal counsel regarding existing litigation, and conference with legal counsel regarding anticipated legalization. So with that, we adjourn to closed session.

No minutes available.