Special Meeting

No content available.

[7] SPEAKER_24: Just 30 seconds so the YouTube can catch up and then you should be ready. Okay, you should begin.

[17] Bowen Zhang: Okay, good morning everyone. Welcome to the January 23rd Special meeting of Newark Unified Board of Education. Meeting is called order at 9.03 a.m. And due to the pandemic, you probably know all of our meeting will be completely virtual. There are two ways for you to participate in our meeting. You can watch the live streaming of the meeting on our YouTube channel, which will be recorded. You can also join our Zoom meeting. If you want to make a live public comment during our meeting, you will have to join the Zoom meeting. Instruction on how to do so can be found on our website. Okay, next item will be Pledge of Allegiance, and Ms. Gutierrez, could you turn on the national banner, and everybody else, please stand. Ready? Begin.

[67] Aiden Hill: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands,

[81] Bowen Zhang: and justice for all. Thank you. Next item, Ms. Gutierrez, roll call, please.

[95] SPEAKER_24: Okay, we have member Martinez. Here. Member Nguyen.

[103] Phuong Nguyen: Here.

[104] SPEAKER_24: Member Grindle. Here. Member Hill.

[107] Maria Huffer: Here.

[108] SPEAKER_24: Member Salami.

[110] Bowen Zhang: Here.

[111] SPEAKER_24: Thank you.

[112] Bowen Zhang: And I'm also here.

[113] SPEAKER_24: Oh, sorry. I'm President Duzon. Thank you. Sorry.

[115] Bowen Zhang: OK. Next one, approval of agenda. May I get a motion to approve the agenda as it is?

[125] Elisa Martinez: I move to approve the agenda as is.

[128] Bowen Zhang: Can I get a second? I'll second it. Moved by Member Martinez, seconded by Member Grundahl. Student Member Salami, how do you vote? Yes. Member Martinez?

[139] Carina Plancarte: Yes.

[140] Bowen Zhang: Member Grindel? Yes. Member Hill? Yes. Member Nguyen?

[146] Phuong Nguyen: Yes.

[147] Bowen Zhang: My vote is yes as well. Motions carries unanimously. Thank you. Moving on to new business. That will be the governance team training session. Ms. Gutierrez, I don't see an item for public comment. Do we allow public comment on this or there's no speakers on this?

[166] SPEAKER_24: No, yes. If there was public comment, they would request it and they would have selected agenda item 3.1. In this case, nobody made a request to speak.

[175] Bowen Zhang: Okay. Okay. So, okay, 3.1. Then since there's no public comments, I will turn it over to you, Superintendent Dr. Triplett.

[187] Mark Triplett: Thank you, President Jun. Good morning to all the board members and staff. We're really excited. We've been looking forward to this session. I do want to appreciate everybody for spending a Saturday with us. But really, really looking forward to this. I think it's such a worthwhile and important endeavor for us to come together and just discuss what are ways that we are going to make sure that we we are working together and acting as a as a team. So I'm delighted to introduce to you all. Some of you already know Miss Deb Dudley. who's going to be with us today facilitating. She does this for a living, so she's an expert at working with boards. I think she can tell you more, but I think that's what she does all day, every day.

[243] SPEAKER_14: All day, every day these days, Mark.

[246] Mark Triplett: So I know Ms. Dudley did a session with a previous board at Newark before I entered the arena. And so we asked her to come back to do the session with us today. And so I'm going to turn it over to Deb. Thank you, Deb, for being here.

[267] SPEAKER_14: Thank you for having me. So for those of you who don't know me, I'll tell you a little bit about me, make a long life story short. I do not come from a world of education. I come from a world of advertising and marketing. I owned a marketing and advertising company in the Lake Tahoe area for close to 30 years. Retired from that thinking I would have a good life just sort of hanging out and skiing a lot. And CSBA found me and I did some consulting for them and writing some policy. And then they needed some help in consulting with Ford's. This was almost seven years ago now. And I started just developing some curriculum because I had been a school board member for 14 years at the Tahoe-Truckee Unified School District and for two years before that in South Lake Tahoe. So I've been a board member at two different school boards in the state of California. And I had been active during that time period with the California School Boards Association. And so they asked me if I would develop some curriculum for training new board members, for training executive assistants, for doing board self-evaluation, superintendent evaluations, board goal setting, things like that. And so for the last almost seven years now, I've been working with CSBA. What started out to be supposed to be 10 hours a month turned into 60 hours a month. It's 80 hours a month. So I've been, I have been doing this pretty much full time for the last seven years. I've had the pleasure of traveling all over California, working with hundreds of boards all over California on a variety of different issues. And so I come to you today not with some rule book that's written by CSBA or some, you know, legal expertise about how to do your job, but what I come to you with is I'd like to share best practices of things that I've seen work really well in other districts. and some methodologies I've seen work well in other districts that I think I can help you do your best work and remove any impediments that you have from doing the best work you can do as a board. Thank you all for talking to me on the phone. We had some really thoughtful conversations with those of you who know me. We're a little more open because you know me and you know I don't share these things with anybody. I just talk to you and it helps inform the work that I do. And for those of you who I'm just getting to know, I appreciate what you shared with me on the phone. It was important to me to understand where you're coming from. And please understand that I know where you are coming from in terms of being a new board member. It's like drinking through a fire hose, isn't it? The amounts of information that are being directed in your direction, it's a little hard to understand it all and understand where you fit in the hierarchy of all the decisions that you have to make. So I want to help you with that. And there's some tools that we can use to help each other along the way to understand not only where you want to go, but where the district needs to go, the work that's happened before you, what you hope to accomplish as individual board members, because I know you didn't all get elected because you had nothing better to do with your time. You all got elected to these positions because you wanted to affect change in your district and you wanted to do good things for the children of your district. And so that is the point that I keep in mind in every suggestion I make for you Will this action, will this thing that I'm suggesting to this board have a positive effect on the children of your district and have a positive effect on you being an effective board member to make the kind of change you want to make for the children of your district? So that's how I come to you today. With your permission, I'd like to ask that all of you keep your cameras on. If you need to take a break, of course, turn them off. Or you need to walk away or answer your door or whatever, by all means, turn them off. But for the most part, when we're engaged today, I'd like you to keep your cameras on. I'd like to see your reaction. Also, if you raise your hand like this, then I can see who wants to speak next. If you're not speaking, mute yourself and then unmute yourself to speak. I'll sometimes ask for some input. From the board, I'd love it if you'd give me some. If not, I will call on you like a mean teacher and ask you to give me some input. So please, let's all participate in today's conversation, because that's the only way we're really going to make change. So I'm going to start sharing my screen with you, with your permission. And realize also that when I'm sharing the full screen, I can't always see all of you. Only six of you, six boxes at a time, will show up on my screen. unless they scroll down. So if I'm not seeing you and not recognizing you, just unmute yourself and interrupt me. That's fine to do. I'm very comfortable with that. Can everyone see that? Am I successful in my screen sharing? Good. So in talking to you, these are the things we have a long list, everyone. These are the things that came up that I felt we needed to address today. I'll just give you a little bit of briefing on them. The first one is talking about how we form a good governance team that has measurable goals and has trust relationships. and is poised for future action. So that's the first thing we're going to be talking about a little bit. We want to talk about what to do as an individual board member if you don't feel comfortable with making a decision on an item that's on the agenda. I think that's a really important one to talk about and I'd like for you all to share openly and honestly with me and give me some ideas of what you do if you're a board member and you're asked to vote on something and you don't feel like you have enough information or you don't trust the information or you're not comfortable with the decision. And we're gonna talk about some strategies that will help you make informed decision-making. We wanna review a practice that I honestly, Bowen, I don't know where it came from. The practice of making a motion before board deliberation. If you guys decide to do that, that's fine, but it's the first time I've ever heard about it in the hundreds of school boards I've ever worked with. It's not the usual way. of having something come to action. So let's talk about it and see if you are all comfortable changing it and then I'll put that in my report for you to take action on later of how you would change it. So I want to discuss that because that came up for a few of you. I want to review our governance handbook and revise it as necessary and this might be one of the revisions that we make about how we make motions and how we take action. I want to discuss the law and govern your individual board roles. And I'll tell you why that's important in a little bit. I want to talk about a few of you brought up your district brand and marketing plan. So how you feel your district is going to be portrayed by the rest of the community and who determines who's responsible for that? Who's gonna be responsible for that? How do we come up with a plan for how we wanna be perceived in the community? I just noticed a typo, discuss, meeting minutes, so the makeup of meeting minutes, and what are we required to do, and what do we want to do. So you don't always have to just do what's minimally required. You could decide what you're comfortable with with regard to minutes, because that came up from a few of you also. We want to discuss the board role in community oversight. We want to talk about agenda setting and how we get things on the agenda, what the agenda is for, who determines what's on the agenda, and what role the board can play in making sure that only the agenda items that you want to talk about and that you feel have the highest priority are what you discuss, even if they are agendized. So what oversight the board has over the agenda once it's presented to you to make sure that either your items are included or that items are not included that the board is not prepared to discuss. And then how do board members get something on the agenda? And how do we have, and a few of you brought this up, workshops or more casual conversations or more in-depth conversations about really important subjects? And is that appropriate to do outside of a regular board meeting? So I want to hear from any of you. Is there anything I missed in our conversations that you all wanted to discuss that I should add to this list? And I'll make note of it and make sure we get to it. Is there anything I missed?

[794] Bowen Zhang: Actually, one small addition to the last item about when you say how board can get together and discover in a formal way or something. I was going to add that not necessarily discussing important things, but to build the camaraderies among board members. Is this a common practice in other district where let's say the board has annual like barbecue retreat or something where you really don't discuss any business, just life, family, that's it?

[828] SPEAKER_14: Yes, it isn't a common practice, Bowen, but it's a practice I encourage and I will talk about that.

[834] Bowen Zhang: Okay, thank you. Yeah, I would really appreciate that because I think many years ago, that used to be the case for this board. I mean, not the current board, but for newer unified board. And a lot of things stopped like a decade ago or something.

[849] SPEAKER_14: Yeah. Well, you know, there have been a lot of issues with Brown Act violations. and cases against board members in the state for Brown Act violations. But again, you're the police of yourselves. And I'll answer your question right now. As long as you don't discuss board issues or community issues or things that you're going to vote on in the future, and sometimes when you all get together, Because, you know, this is an arranged marriage. These are not people who were naturally your friends. You were all brought together by the electorate to have to spend time together and work together. So sometimes it's hard to refrain from doing that. But I'll give you an example. Like at a CSBA conference, very often boards attend as a whole with their superintendent, and they have meals together. But they have to be very careful not to discuss things they're going to vote on or board issues. I often encourage them to discuss what they heard in a workshop, you know, and really sort of bat those ideas around, because that's not directly related to, you know, a board, a particular board issue that you're going to be voting on. So the spirit of the Brown Act really just says, you're not making decisions behind closed doors. That's the spirit of the Brown Act, right, that you're not getting together to make decisions behind closed doors. But there's certainly nothing wrong with having coffee with a fellow board member or two and talking about your kids' soccer game or meeting up at a soccer game or a social event and just interacting. I think it's really important that that's how you develop relationships, right, by getting to know each other. So these are today's meeting guidelines to participate, actively listen, all opinions matter, be open and honest in identifying challenges, and more importantly, Let's all be ready to identify solutions to any challenges and assign responsibility for those solutions. I think that's a really important part of what we do today. I want to talk about our culture, the culture that you want to have at the district. What kind of culture do you aspire to have? What kind of, how do you want the community to think about you? And before we get started on culture, I'm going to stop sharing for a second because I want to see all your faces. And I would like you all to do this for me. I would like you to give me just a brief, a one minute if you would, or one minute and a half of what do you think brought you to this position of leadership on the board? And one thing in particular, if you were to look back four years from now, would you have liked to accomplished while you were a board member? Would you like to look back and say, I'm really proud that that happened while I was a board member, or I'm really proud to have been a part of that action while I was a board member. Can we start with Phuong? I'm putting you on the spot. So what brought you to leadership, Phuong, and then looking back a couple of years from now? I think I'm really- When you're off the board or when you've completed Proud to be a Part of.

[1034] Phuong Nguyen: So what brought me here was I'm truly vested in trying to help out as much as I can. I've always been highly involved in you know every step of my children's education and that that being like building relationships with their teachers starting from preschool level and then on to you know in elementary school and hopefully through junior high and then and to high school and so um I'm a graduate of Newark Memorial and I'm very proud of that. And so when I moved back into the district, I was questioning whether or not I was going to enroll my children here in the district because of the things that I've heard and also As a, you know, young parent, very naive about, you know, test scoring and how I value that. But looking at it, I'm so happy that I enrolled my, my children in the district and got to know all the students. I mean, all those students, families, and also the teachers and that propelled me. I saw a lot of disparities and wanted to continue to help more and that's why I joined the board to ensure that there's equity amongst all the students and families and ensure that we can rebuild some of the things that were going wrong in the district and so for me I would just like to I would be really proud if we can nail down our graduate profile and be part of that and starting programs in the district that really are unique to us and that helps prepare our students for the future in career-wise and also whatever they want to achieve in terms of their education. If they want to continue on to advanced degrees, that would be amazing. So that for me is what I would be proud of.

[1166] SPEAKER_14: That's great. Thanks for sharing. I remember, you know, when I first got elected to the board, I had a kid, a gardener, and a baby on the way.

[1176] Elisa Martinez: And I was... Is she frozen or is it me? I think she's frozen.

[1188] Mark Triplett: Deb, you froze there.

[1191] Bowen Zhang: Yeah, I think... Still frozen. Yeah.

[1197] Mark Triplett: Ms. Gutierrez, do you want to text her and let her know that?

[1201] SPEAKER_14: Am I frozen?

[1205] Mark Triplett: You're in and out.

[1208] Bowen Zhang: Maybe try turning off your camera, just let the audio go through.

[1215] SPEAKER_14: How's that? Is that better? Can you hear me?

[1218] Phuong Nguyen: We can hear you, but you're still frozen a little.

[1221] SPEAKER_14: Well, I turned off my camera. OK, yes, we can hear you.

[1228] Phuong Nguyen: Oh, Deb, we lost you again.

[1235] SPEAKER_14: Can you hear me now, everyone? You're in and out. OK, let me just see if my signal is good. My signal says it's great.

[1248] SPEAKER_24: Deb, you're good now.

[1250] SPEAKER_14: OK. All right, let's hope that was a glitch in the wind. Anyway, what I was saying is what Huang said reminded me of when I was a young board member. And it was really hard for me to focus on what skills my children.

[1274] Elisa Martinez: Still can't hear you. I think you can hear us. Maybe you need to log off and re-log on.

[1286] SPEAKER_14: I know, you know, what kinds of things they need, what kinds of skills.

[1293] Elisa Martinez: You've been gone for most of whatever you were saying. So I was recommending that maybe you log off and re-log on. I don't know if she heard that.

[1306] Mark Triplett: Yeah, I don't think she did. I'll give her a call and try to coordinate a little bit.

[1312] SPEAKER_14: OK. Can you let me leave the meeting and come back?

[1317] SPEAKER_26: OK.

[1328] Mark Triplett: We could drive a hotspot up to Tahoe and see if we can get her wired.

[1354] Terrence Grindall: The internet's not great up in the mountains. I have some colleagues that try to join meetings from the mountains, and it's always like this. Yeah, yeah.

[1366] Bowen Zhang: Yeah, internet signal in the Tahoe area is not very good. This actually gives each other board members enough time to think about what you're going to say about why you're on the school board and the goal. Enough time for you to make up good stories.

[1406] Phuong Nguyen: What are you saying? Mine wasn't good. No, but it's really hard not to be inspired by the teachers and the families.

[1423] Terrence Grindall: Fong, I thought your statement was perfect.

[1427] Mark Triplett: Me too. I was just going to say exactly what you said, Fong.

[1429] Phuong Nguyen: OK. Now you guys are.

[1436] Terrence Grindall: Exactly. I was going to start with what Fong said and then more.

[1443] SPEAKER_14: How's that, guys? Can you hear me now? Yes.

[1446] Bowen Zhang: Yes, this is good.

[1448] SPEAKER_14: That better? Okay. I just, my internet is going up and down because it's really windy here and we're satellite. So I just paired you with my phone. Let's hope that holds a little bit better. Anyway, what you didn't hear me say was, I was relating to what Huang had to say. And I said, it was really hard to know as a board member. what it was important for us to be teaching and for our children to be learning. Because I was thinking 20 years into the future, what kinds of skills would they need in order to be successful? And as it turns out, I was right. Both of my children who are now 30 and 35 are in careers that didn't even exist when I was a school board member. And so really, really hard to think about what should our priorities be with regard to what our children need to know for the future. think about a future mindset and have your finger on the pulse of what's happening in your community and the kinds of things that are important to your community for your children to know. You know, resourceful kids, kids who are creative, kids who are able to problem solve. You know, those are always skills that children are going to need. So looking at the future, having your finger on the pulse of your community and be thinking about the future. Bowen, will you go next?

[1528] Bowen Zhang: Yeah, so I wasn't originally intended to serve on the school board. It was a rare occasion, and there was a board vacancy. So I have a friend that sort of encouraged me to apply. So because of his encouragement, I applied to the school board, and then I got on. So it was never really my design or intention or a long plan to join the school board. And obviously, we are. there are challenges in the school board that I think I might be able to contribute to help solve. So that's how I got onto the school board. I think in the past two years, I've also learned quite a bit. I think I grouped both professionally and from a personal perspective after getting on the school board, because it is a very good and rewarding learning experience serving in the public, as an elected official in a public capacity. what I want to accomplish during my tenure on the board is I hope that when I first got appointed to the board that this district was truly heading towards some financial cliff and fiscal insolvency. I hope that during my tenure we can probably say that we have consecutive years of balanced budget with surplus and we gradually build up our reserve to 17% rather than the past 3, 4% on the brink of bankruptcy or state takeover. So financial prudence, fiscal discipline, that's one thing I hope we can accomplish. Second thing I hope we can accomplish is that our academic performance can surpass that of New Haven Unified because New Haven Unified was pretty, demographically speaking, very similar to our districts. And in the past one or two decades in the Tri-City area, like Fremont, Newark, and Union City, Newark has been consistently at the bottom of the Tri-City area. So we can surpass the New Haven Unified School District and no longer at the bottom of Tri-City. Even symbolically, that's a big morale boost for my entire community. because we're no longer sort of the embarrassment in the Tri-City area or in the South Alameda County. So that's my, that's the hope I have from our academic performance. Yeah, so that's true. And on a side note, somebody else mentioned that to me when I applied for the board is that The only reason that the homes in Newark are selling at a much lower price than Fremont is because of our school district. Although we have better climate, better access to the freeway, even better business environment, safer neighborhood, but for some reason it's because of our lagging academic performance, the homes in our city are not selling at a premium price. So I guess that's a by-product if we can improve our district. So that's what I hope to accomplish. For me, my social justice is I hope, because we are a traditionally working class blue collar town, I hope most of our parents, once their kids get out of high school, head into college, they all can sell their home in Newark and then just retire at the age of 50 or 55. That's what I hope for, for the owners in this city.

[1730] SPEAKER_14: Thank you for sharing that, Bowen. And it just goes to show the comments that you made, how much the work that you do impacts your entire community, whether you're retired there and you have children in the district or you don't have children in the district, right? It impacts your entire community and physical solvency should be one of every board's top issues because if you're not physically solvent, as you know, you're taken over by the county and then you don't make any decisions. You can't make any decisions for your board that you might wanna make and you're helpless in terms of having steering your future. So physical solvency, very, very important. I've worked with some boards who were really had great intentions and became physically insolvent, were taken over by the county, and then it was several years until they even had a voice in what they could do in their community again. So that's where the physical solvency is a very important issue, and I'm glad it's at the top of mind for you, Bowen. Aiden, would you share with us next?

[1789] Aiden Hill: Sure. So yeah, I just want to echo both. Can we use first names? Are we following formalities here?

[1798] SPEAKER_14: Please let's be informal today.

[1800] Aiden Hill: Okay. All right. So I want to echo what both Fong said and what Bowen said. I want to have a caring community for our kids. But also, as Bowen said, I think that we've had many issues with our district for many, many years. And that quite frankly, Newark's a diamond in the rough. So I've lived in Newark for almost 20 years. But I think that the one thing that's really held us back is that we haven't had a high performing school system. And I've lived in Newark here for a while. I've kind of observed from the sidelines. I've spent almost my entire career in business, but I recently decided to make a change and become an educator. And so beginning this year, I'm a high school teacher, I teach business. But I really want our school district, and the reason I signed up is I want us to be not only the best in the area, but the best in the Bay Area, the best in the state, the best in the nation, and competitive on a global basis. And that seems like, you know, a crazy, you know, statement. But what I found is, is that high performers always set extremely high targets for themselves. And, you know, it will take us a while to get there. But, you know, that's really my goal is how do we make our school system a model? And then as Bowen's described, it will have all sorts of ripple effects and benefits for everybody, not only the kids, but everybody. And so that's really my goal.

[1901] SPEAKER_14: Thanks for sharing that, Aiden. And you're right, you need to have it. And that's one of the things we're going to be talking about today. The most important thing a board can do is set high aspirations, set goals. Because if you don't have a target, how do you know where to aim, right? So to have a target that you all can get behind, that you can get your community behind. Because in order to change to really take hold in a community, it really has to swell up from the members of your community and the members of your businesses. And they have to want it too, as much as you want it. Because you can't do it alone. You really can't do it alone. It's going to take your community, your staff, And all the resources that you have at hand to build to make affect the kind of change that you want that you're speaking.

[1944] Aiden Hill: Deb, if just just one more thing. You know, I think that in order to achieve that right there's lots of building blocks that need to go into that. And so it's going to take time. And so some of it's academic, some of it is culturally within our school district. And so we can't ignore that. We can't just have high aspirations, but not say that these are the fundamentals and the prerequisites that are going to get us to that level. And that's it for me.

[1984] SPEAKER_14: I'd like to hear from our student board member. And I'm sorry, I don't know how to say your name. Is it Wahab?

[1989] SPEAKER_36: Yeah, it's Wahab. I think for me, since I was smaller than I am now, I always hesitate to say I'm small in front of adults because they laugh at me. But smaller than I am now, I was always, even in sixth grade, when they asked, you know, what do you want to do when you're older? I never knew what I wanted to do. And I still technically don't know. And I always said, I don't know, but I just whatever it is, I want to be able to help as many people as I can. And I think being a student in school, and I think that's always been one of my roles, just trying to help as many of my peers as I can. And so when this opportunity came in front of me, I was already on this, I already had these other roles, but I've always found this interest in politics. that side of things so I took it up and you know there's kids that they don't eat food after lunch until the next morning when they come and they don't have clothes and they have mental health problems that hold them back and they're students that have so much potential and school is that way that we can unlock that potential and potentially help those students that are struggling in those ways and I know when we um especially any government um you know, a body, it's a lot of bureaucracy and it's a lot of business talk, right? When, remember Martinez was the president, she would always say that it's a lot of business and how do we get, how do we get off from that business side and make it more towards that, you know, what can we do for the students? So, and I think that's the role I play here and that's why I, you know, took it up and I'm not going to be here for four years, maybe a couple of months or another year at the most, but I think what I want to see is just create a culture where we are encouraging students to take up roles like this and really listening to them, because that's, we were all talking about academic achievement and all these different goals, but how we get that is tapping into what kids are saying, because we have to really make these plans, you know, surrounding them and their, challenges. So I think that's just what I hope to get out of this.

[2138] SPEAKER_14: You're such an important voice. You're such an important voice in this board because you are the voice of the students. And whenever you decide to run for political office, you let me know. I'll come out of retirement from advertising and run your campaign. I love your thought process. You put the passion in the heart. that you speak with. So thank you. Thank you for contributing to the board and taking your time to do this. I personally appreciate it. I'm sure your board members do too. Terrence, would you go next?

[2173] Terrence Grindall: Yes, I always hate to follow members telling me he's, he's so amazing. So, I have my career has been in community development and urban planning, and I've always been sort of interested in seeing the communities, grow and expand and get better. I've always been particularly interested in education I believe that. quality public education is what makes this country great. And in fact, what makes democracy possible. And in fact, the trials that we just went through in terms of democracy really does tell you it's a fragile thing. And if people aren't educated and taught to think critically, not just memorizing, but to think critically, our democracy really can be in danger. So I've always just been, fundamentally interested in seeing quality education. In my more than a decade working for the city of Newark and working in the community, always saw the opportunities. Let's just say that there were a lot of opportunities for improving the school district. So when I saw the opportunity, I'm working for a different city. Well, while I was working for the city being involved directly with the school board wasn't really an option. But now that I'm working for a different city and and looking at retirement, the opportunity to be directly involved in improving the district was was compelling. what I'm what I'm I really have to echo my other board members hopes for what they're hoping to achieve. One of the things that that I want to that I want to make clear is I I agree with I would I agree with the others have talked about making it you know making it a great a great school district improving our improving our performance but also making sure that the community is aware of it. there's a negative perception in our schools right now, and there may be some reason for that, but I think some of the negative perceptions in the community are unfair and may be the root of why we're having enrollment issues. So I'd like to make sure that we're very proactive in celebrating our achievements, making sure the community is aware of our benefits.

[2319] SPEAKER_14: So you brought up the concept of democracy, Terrence, and I think school boards are the democratic process in action, aren't they? Where you all come together with different skill sets. I mean, Bowen's got his eye on the numbers, right? And you come with a great background in city planning and some, I'm sure, invaluable contacts with regard to who to go to for what when you wanna change something at your district or within the city confines. Aiden comes with a business background. You know, we have Fong, who's a mom, and Elisa, who has incredible knowledge in the business world, too, who's the voice of the students. You all come together, and you probably would not have come together to work on anything in the real world out there. I can't think of a company that would probably employ you all for your skill sets to do what you do. But because of the democratic process, you come together with all different threads, of knowledge and threads of expertise, and that forms a really strong fabric. It weaves into a really strong fabric of diverse people who can really use their skill set for change. And so I love the model of the school board. I love that people come together with different, you know, different talents and different passions, because I think that makes us stronger and really allows us to excel and achieve the things we want to achieve. Last but certainly not least, Ms. Martinez. Alisa, would you share with us?

[2405] Elisa Martinez: Hello, hi, Deb. And good morning, everyone. You know, a few years ago, one of my one of my kids, or two of my kids at the time were affected by a school merger. And, and that was really the time that I started to pay attention in terms of how decisions were made, and how things were being communicated, and started to pay attention. and go to meetings and listen to meetings. And the more I paid attention, the more it felt like some decisions were being made at an emotional level rather than a discipline process driven level. And like Aiden, I come from a very business process background. And so that's kind of how I started to become more engaged eventually, obviously, I wasn't happy with some of the ways or some of the decisions that were being made. You know, I'm definitely one of those folks that says, well, you know, kind of, well, if if you don't like it, get in there and try to help change it. And so I think many of us, you know, that's really, you know, what the different drivers, but that's kind of why we're thinking that we arrived here. And, you know, always from the outside looking in, it's a lot easier. Right. It's a lot easier. Well, let me go in there and let me let me teach them how it's done. And, you know, and coming back to this democratic process, you know, it's messy. Right. We're learning. And in you know, in my second year where I was hoping there was a lot be a lot of learning to improve. You know, we were faced with this unprecedented situation. But at the end of the day, I mean, it really brings us back to process, right? So that if we develop processes, whether it be for financial solvency, so that academics never goes to the back burner in the first place, right? If those processes are in place, then I will feel like I've had successful impact. Having said that, and I think Terrence, or no, Aiden, you mentioned about building blocks, because you could have very high aspirational goals, but that doesn't happen overnight. We've made some very difficult decisions. And I have this huge sense of urgency that sometimes I feel we just can't get there fast enough. And it's not that we don't want to. We're battling a lot of different things. of sometimes a very small community members of the community that derail and cause us to go in different directions that invest energy instead of coming back and saying, why aren't we spending these hours focusing on and money that we have to pay lawyers, right? So there's all these different forces causing us to try to push away. So sometimes, Deb, I'm perceived as just I'm a driver, I don't care, that at least it doesn't care, that at least it doesn't care. But I have my eye on the prize. And the prizes that, again, when I heard all, back when I was motivated, there was only those same voices or a handful of voices. And not everybody is a homeowner in Newark. In fact, those are the most underrepresented folks in Newark. And that's what I felt is that there's a lot of voices that weren't being heard. And I still feel that. So until we get these processes, and so I ask our community who is listening and our fellow board members is, let's keep our eye on the prize and that's building those processes so that we can get, can we get there? It's boring. Process is boring. It's hard and it's boring. But if we don't get there and we don't keep our eye on the ball, then, you know, 10 years will go by and, and, and And it will still be talking about how, you know, XYZ, we're still in this situation. So sorry, it's kind of my, I wanted to use this at a moment to talk about how process can sound so boring. But man, as you can see, I'm very passionate about it, because I think everything else will come about it. So

[2673] SPEAKER_14: Elisa, process is not boring. For those of us who like process, it's very exciting stuff. And I'm a process-driven person. But the point that you make is a really important point. And I had this conversation on the phone with Aiden, I don't think Aiden would mind me sharing, when I said, the number one thing I see derailing boards is elections and changes in superintendents, and that we don't have this long-range goal, right? that you see a board decide on things that they really want to have happen. They get community input. They get going down the road. The train is on the tracks. It's headed 100 miles an hour in that direction. And then suddenly, someone stops it, whether it's a community group or a new board member who has a different idea. Or the average tenure of a superintendent in the state of California is 19 months. That's it. That's how much we play musical chairs with superintendents. So you get a new superintendent who says, well, hey, wait a minute. I'm not even comfortable with that train going that fast because I don't know how it even got on the tracks. Right. So we change our minds and we have different ideas about things. And so that's why. And that was part of my frustration. I think after 14 years on a board, it's like, really, does it take 14 years to get this done? But, you know, it did. In some cases it did because What we learned from this situation with COVID is we didn't know we could pivot this quickly and that we could be this nimble. No one would have, if I would have heard this 14 years ago, I would have said that can never happen. To be able to have teachers suddenly go from in-classroom learning to online learning, to be able to train them to do that, to be able to get the technology to make that happen. I mean, we had a factory yesterday that made rocking chairs and we opened it up the next day and it was making rocket ships. It's unbelievable to me how nimble we've been able to be and how quickly we've been able to affect change. And I think that's a lesson that we all can learn from that. We can, if we are thoughtful and we have the will of our board as a unified group and the will of the community who all wanted kids to keep learning behind us, we can be very nimble and we can affect change quickly. But you're right, Elisa, it does take a process. Sometimes that process is fast because it comes out of a necessary need like we just had. And sometimes it's slow and thoughtful because it needs to be slow and thoughtful. But it all takes trust. It takes trust in one another. It takes trust in your superintendent. It takes trust in the process. So we're going to talk a lot today about unity of purpose and trust, because I think that's our foundation. It's the foundation for everything that we do. So last but certainly not least, I want our superintendent, Mark, to talk a little bit about why you came to Newark, Mark. You were in Oakland. Why did you come to Newark? Why did you make that change? And remember that when I talk about the governance team, that includes your superintendent. The governance team is the whole board and the superintendent as one team. And I think it's really important to put that in your mind before we move on today, that we're talking about the governance team and your superintendent is part of that team. He's not apart from that team. He's not over here with the rest of the staff. He's part of your team. So Mark, would you share with us?

[2878] Mark Triplett: Thanks, Deb. And good morning again, everyone. So I was wondering if I was going to get to talk. I'm chomping at the bit. But I actually think that what I heard all of our board members say really, really resonated with me and was part of what I was thinking as well. I'm in this work, a product of public education. I've devoted my entire adult life to public education, and in particular, two things, equity and excellence. So as a white male in public education or just in society in general in a society that clearly has significant issues with racism, oppression, and even white supremacy. As a white male, if I do nothing, then I'm part of the problem. I'm contributing to the perpetuation of the status quo. And so being in education to me is the opportunity to change that and to really ensure that we have equitable outcomes for all of our students and families, in particular those that have been traditionally underserved. I came to Newark, I was attracted to Newark first and foremost by the diversity and the possibilities. Because I think that we're clearly a district that is not there yet, but absolutely can get there. We're capable of greatness. And we have the community, the students, the families, the teachers and staff that can really make that happen. And so I really feel like it's up to us. to make that change. We know that every student is capable of greatness and excellence and so it's really incumbent upon us as the adults to support them to get there. So I really appreciated what Aiden, what you said about about excellence and greatness in that way, I think we can become a destination district. And like you said, Aidan, not just for our local area, not just for the Bay Area, not just for California, but I think we can become a destination district for the nation. And also part of that is I'm really interested in In order to do that, we have to be innovative. And we have to be at the forefront. We have to take risks. But we really need to push the envelope, I think. So that's part of what I'm interested in doing, is thinking differently. And then the other piece is what I appreciated Elisa mentioning around systems. And I believe that we have to create a district that if all of us leave, because all of us are going to leave at some point or another, that the systems have been set up so that the district can continue to really excel. A former colleague of mine, a principal, he used to refer to the fireproof structures And to me, that's what it's all about. How do we build processes and structures that are fireproof so that no matter what the crisis, because we are in crisis and we will continue to be in some form of crisis in the future, how do we create those systems that are pervious to the crises and the fires?

[3096] SPEAKER_14: Thank you for sharing, Mark. That was good stuff. So I hope you all have a sense now of where each other's coming from. To Bowen's question earlier, I think the most important thing that you can do, especially as a new board member, is get to know your fellow board members. Understand what they're passionate about, not only in education, but in life. Because I think, again, this arranged marriage that you're in takes work, just like any marriage. And you do have to form relationships, get to know one another. And only once you know one another as people can you really have trust. in what each other says, in what each other wants to accomplish, and in your motivation for doing things. So I really encourage you to do that. Okay, now I'm going to start my screen share again.

[3141] Bowen Zhang: I think there's hands raised by Aiden.

[3146] SPEAKER_14: Okay, Aiden, did you want to add something to that?

[3149] Aiden Hill: Yes. And so I agree with you about the importance of getting to know each other. And if you can, during the course of this, maybe talk a little bit about ways to do that, that also don't, you know, violate things like the Brown Act, etc. You know, and that allow us to have conversations and to get to know each other. If you can talk more about that, that would be great. And then another question for you, and I don't think we need to like decide it right now, but have you ever had boards before that have actually gone and actually done some personality assessments so that you can actually see where different people are coming from. So, I mean, we do it a lot in business, right? So, like Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram, you know, and when you understand that different people are actually coming from a different perspective, that's just kind of the way they're built, you can then be able to relate to them better. You don't get as frustrated because you can understand where they're coming from.

[3202] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, Aiden, we used to do that. And I still do it in my board self-evaluation personality types. And, you know, if you're, are you a driver? Are you an empath? Are you a, you know, there's tests. And, and we've done them in our trainings before. We've also done them in, sometimes we do them in the, when we have a very new board, like three or more new board members, or we do them before the board self-evaluation. So we can, or after the board self-evaluation, so we can see maybe why we're having some stumbling blocks that we're having. But I'll answer your question in a real simple way with regard to without a violation of the Brown Act. As long as you're not making decisions for the board behind closed doors, you're not violating the Brown Act. Now, that doesn't mean that there isn't going to be perception in the community if they see all of you at dinner one night, that you're not making decisions behind closed doors. So what you need to do is be careful about the perception, right? Be careful about the perception of the community. But no one can take you to court or call the grand jury, if you were having a dinner and you're all together and you all attest when asked the question, what were you doing at that dinner together? Or what were you doing at that barbecue together? And you said, we're just learning about each other as people. If that's what you're doing, and that's honestly what you're doing, and you have to, again, be self-disciplined to make sure that that's honestly what you're doing. Lots of boards do that lots of times. One board that I worked with in the Central Valley in a very small district was eager to get community input. They weren't getting people coming to their meetings a few years ago when they were developing their LCAP. So they hung out at soccer games all together on a Saturday, every Saturday, when their community was having soccer, you know, tournament stuff with their kids and gave out bottles of water in exchange for community input. And they were all there at the booth together, right? Could that have been in violation of the Brown Act? I guess on the surface, if you looked at it, they were all there together, but they were just listening. They were very careful to just get the community to come to them, give them their opinions. They did not all speak up or or they said, you know, if people asked them questions, they said, well, we can't do that because we're not in a meeting, but we want to hear what you have to say. And they did that every Saturday for a few months, you know, because that was the only way that they really felt that they could get community input because a lot of their parents were afraid to come to a school site because some were undocumented. So, but at the soccer field, people felt comfortable and the whole board was there and they got the best input from their community by doing that. Again, it's the, you know, you do want to avoid those perceptions of impropriety, but if you know in your heart and all of you agree that all we're going to talk about when we get together is ourselves and our kids and what we do and our hobbies, then you're good to go. You're good to go. Okay. Let me start my screen share. If there's no other questions and they alert me, I miss them because like I said, when I'm screen sharing, especially I only see six of you at a time. Okay. So we were on the culture part. What items help shape our culture? These certainly are a few, but what other things? I'd like you guys to speak up. What kinds of things that go on in a school board or in a district shape the culture of your district? What do you think? Speak up. Elisa, what do you think? What do you think helps shape the culture?

[3413] Elisa Martinez: Sorry, I'm not sure that I, so what kind of things shape the culture?

[3416] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, what shaped the culture of your district? I mean, obviously the culture of the board is shaped by your unity of purpose. Are you all behind one or two or three things that you really want to accomplish that's reflected in your mission, vision, your norms, your protocols, your goals? But what other kinds of things do you think shape the culture of a district?

[3437] Elisa Martinez: I mean, I think just how we speak about one another. Not just our fellow board members, but our staff. Like, how are we communicating about it or, you know, outwards to the community about who we are?

[3458] SPEAKER_14: Well, you know, I watched your last board meeting. So I observed some things about your culture. And so I don't know what kinds of things do you think, what kinds of observations do you think I would have about your culture if I watched the last meeting?

[3477] Maria Huffer: Anyone?

[3479] Elisa Martinez: This last meeting? This last meeting. Let me think about the topic. Maybe, well, is someone else trying to speak? I want to. No, go ahead. I mean, there were a couple of topics that I think that I will say that we weren't showing that we trusted each other. I mean, and I participated in that, you know, in with regards to some of the high school processes and where we were in the decision without reviewing. getting there.

[3520] SPEAKER_14: I want to be careful. I don't want to talk about specific subjects. Okay. I'm glad that you brought up trust. There was, and here, I'm an outsider, right? You guys, I'm an unbiased outsider. I'm not even, I'm a member of your community. I just watched it because I need to know what I'm working with. There was the perception that maybe there was a lack of trust. I'm being honest with you. So there was a perception that maybe there was a lack of trust between board members and and maybe between some board members and the superintendent. And so I think that's something that's really important to understand that as a community member, if I were watching your meeting and I felt like you wouldn't trust each other, then I don't know that I would trust in the decisions that you're making. I don't know that I would trust in the work that's being done. So I want you to be aware of that because it's something only you all can change. It's something only you all can change. What else?

[3571] Phuong Nguyen: What else? Our attitudes?

[3576] SPEAKER_14: attitudes. Tell me specifically, Fong, if you're comfortable.

[3580] Phuong Nguyen: I think, you know, just I think a lot of times sometimes we can come in there with a negative attitude on certain agenda items and not really thinking that there's a possibility for resolve and seeing it only from our perspective and not actively listening to our board members or even our staff in terms of like where it's coming from and finding clarity in it. And I think from the last board meeting, I appreciated that on the same topic in terms of what Elisa had brought up, I appreciated the fact that we were able to come to a resolution with compromise. And that's because, you know, of Bowen, he recognized the situation, he recognized the importance of what we needed to do in order for staff to achieve their own goals. And so that, and then for us as board members have to be open and remember to be open to those kinds of processes in order to make the final decision. And we did, we did that. So there was some positivity, not all negative, but I think us coming into the meeting and just recognizing that, yes, we have our perspectives and that we need to also listen to others' perspectives and not just have, hold onto that negative attitude because it can change. So just be aware of the fact that those kinds of personal attachment to things can change if you allow yourself to be open to it.

[3691] SPEAKER_14: So two things that helped me tremendously, especially with the first time I became board president, and I had a wonderful mentor on my board. His name is David. And David said to me, you know, Deb, I noticed that when you come into the board meeting, and back then we had paper agendas, right? So that's how long ago I was a board member in the 90s when we had paper agendas or paper board packets. I would have annotated in my board packet all the little notes that I had taken from talking to the superintendent, my own personal feelings. And I would have like a yes or no often next to an action item before I ever got to the board meeting. And I thought I was doing a good job. I thought I was doing my homework and I was doing my due diligence and had my mind made up when I came to the board meeting. And David said to me, you know what Deb, I encourage you to continue to do your due diligence and get your questions answered. Also encourage you not to come into the board meeting with your mind made up because you're the board president now and it's your job to listen very intently to what everybody else has to say, to what your fellow board members have to say, what your superintendent has to say, to staff reports and to public comment. And only after you've listened to all of those opinions, allow them to sink in, allow them all to have equal weight and allow them to potentially change the way that you're thinking of things. Because every single one of those people is looking at this issue through a different lens. It's like you're all wearing a different pair of glasses and you're all looking at it through a different lens. And really let that come together and let that sink in. And only then, after you've listened to all those opinions, then make up your mind about how you're gonna vote. Because as board president, You have to bring all the conversation and board deliberation to consensus. You have to say, what I think I'm hearing going on here is that we're swaying this direction. And does somebody want to make a motion about the way the conversation is going? So as board president, you really have to distill all that information before you can decide how you're going to vote. And if you come in with your mind made up, it's hard. It's hard to open your mind and open your heart to what you hear. And so that piece of information, that piece of knowledge from my past board president really profoundly changed me as a board member. It changed the way I voted most of the time or many times. And it really made a difference, I think, in the work that we did because it became much more collaborative. Because everyone knew I was listening to them and everyone knew that they could sway, we could all sway one another. based on open listening and being able to be aware of how each other felt. And the other piece of advice he gave me when I became board president is that good leaders come at issues from the affirmative. They don't come at issues from the negative. And really, really important that whether you agree with what's being proposed or you don't agree with what's being proposed, that you come at it from the affirmative, that you ask questions that bring clarity not that make people feel like they're being accused or like make people feel that they're being questioned or they're not trusted. So coming at it from the affirmative really really important. So those are two really important things you could think about that will help shape the culture and It starts with you guys. I can't stress this enough. And there have been studies done. If you want to look up the Lighthouse study, the Lighthouse study was the first study done specifically about school board behaviors and if the way a board worked together influenced student learning and achievement. And what it found out is that boards who understood their roles were collaborative really did affect student learning and achievement. They had positive influences on student learning and achievement. Even if they didn't agree, if they agreed to at least what their focus was and what their protocols were and how we do things, understanding their roles and how they do things, it really did affect student learning and achievement. It also affects teacher confidence and the confidence that your community and teachers and staff have in you, the way that you talk to one another, the way that you talk to your superintendent and the way your meetings. And I often suggest to boards, 48 hours after your meeting, just go watch 15 minutes of it on YouTube. You have it recorded. Watch 15 minutes of it and self-assess. Say, you know, could we have done this better? Is this important? Could we have done this better? So I want you guys to just shout out for me. What do you think some qualities of good leaders are? Don't make me have to call on you.

[3996] Mark Triplett: Build the capacity of others.

[3998] SPEAKER_14: Build capacity, great.

[4000] Mark Triplett: Of others.

[4001] SPEAKER_14: Of others, okay. What else?

[4004] Terrence Grindall: We already said listening.

[4007] SPEAKER_14: Listening. What else? Bahab, do you have some? What are qualities of good leaders? They unite. They unite. What else?

[4022] Aiden Hill: Ethical.

[4023] SPEAKER_14: Ethical. Very important. Ethics are very important. Anyone else?

[4035] Marie dela Cruz: So not open mindedness, open mindedness.

[4042] Terrence Grindall: Logical.

[4048] SPEAKER_14: I'll give you some, um, inspiring, you know, my husband just retired from the air force after 30 years. He retired in October. And he was a wing command chief of the 144th in Fresno for the last four years. And his name's Clint. And Clint always said to me, you know what, honey, the people who are the best leaders and the best generals are those who didn't want to be. They're guys who never aspired to be a general or wing command chief, because my husband certainly didn't aspire to. He was happy to be a master sergeant. He didn't really want to go on beyond that and stay in for 30 years, but their behaviors, cause people to want to follow them. The way that they work, the way that they do their job on a daily basis inspires others to greatness and to open-mindedness and outside-of-the-box thinking. And so the best leaders, at least in his opinion in the Air Force, were those who didn't aspire to leadership, but those who were driven to leadership and promoted to leadership positions, because of the way they inspired others and the way that they were collaborative and the way that people trusted them and wanted to be led, made them be leaders because they wanted to be led by them. And so I think inspiring and leading by example. And all of you are the example. You're the example that Wahab is looking at for leadership. You're the example that your teachers and your other students are looking at. So very in the way that you lead What are some qualities of bad leaders? This is always easier for everyone. I don't know why. Okay, speak up. Bowen, what are some qualities of bad leaders?

[4155] Bowen Zhang: I would say probably being stubborn and very close minded.

[4163] SPEAKER_14: What else?

[4166] Aiden Hill: Not listening.

[4175] SPEAKER_14: Lisa?

[4177] Elisa Martinez: I'm thinking that they're right all the time.

[4183] Phuong Nguyen: Someone who doesn't empower.

[4189] SPEAKER_14: That's a good one. You know, they say to lead, you empower, and then you get out of the way, right? The best leaders And I love, I always love this quote, I don't remember who said it, but that you find, oh, I know who said it. The owner of the Chicago Cubs, and I was from Chicago, so I'm a Cubs fan, he said, they asked him why the Cubs won the World Series a couple of years ago. Why did they win this year and they never ran one before? And he said, because I hired a good guy who hired good guys and let them do their job. And you know, play the game and play the game. I stood up, I hired, I empowered, and I got out of the way. I gave him the money to hire good players and I got out of the way. And so, uh, you know, the best leaders empower, hire the best people, empower them and give them a direction and then get out of the way. And so, you know, the owner of the Cubs just wanted them to win world series. So he hired the best people, put the money where his mouth was and got out of the way.

[4249] Phuong Nguyen: Yeah, and bad leaders don't see potential in others.

[4258] SPEAKER_14: Yeah. Okay, that's a good list, you guys. So think about that. Think about what list you want to be on four years from now when people look back at your, your board meetings and look back at the work that you've done, which list do you want to be on? Here are the realities of school board governance, guys. I'm going to get really real with you. And I almost knocked over my table. You campaign as an individual, but you serve as a member of a team. I think you're all realizing that now, if you haven't realized it already. As an individual board member, you don't have the authority to fix anything you might fix. you know, relate to a campaign, anything that you might've talked in your community that you're gonna change or fix. As an individual, you don't have the power to do that. It takes a board of three. Successful board members, their success is tied, your success is tied to each other. There are no successful board members on boards that aren't successful. You're either successful together or you're not successful together. That's the truth of the matter. I have never encountered in all the years of doing this, one board member who made a difference on their own, right, who was able to unearth something and make a difference on their own. Successful trustees are mindful, they're focused, they're prepared, they come to the meeting prepared, their questions are answered before they get to the meeting. Now that doesn't mean you don't ask the question again in the public meeting because if you were confused by something or you felt you needed more information, chances are the public would be confused by it or need more information too. But so that makes everybody prepared. You're prepared. Staff is prepared to address the situation in a way that the public can understand it. They're prepared with public questions. They're prepared to answer your questions in public. Again, an important part. So preparation, really important for your meetings. Recognizing that this is a human experience. And like any human experience, like any human interaction, it takes work. It takes work and it takes thought. I'm showing you this and I'll let you read it because this is a real life situation. This is the work I do. I do this work because I want to keep boards out of this situation. I think the big and this is my passion. I think the biggest waste of money in our state is lawsuits from district employees. and from the public that take money directly away from students, that take money directly away from the classroom and children. And realizing that when you have a lawsuit, the money that you pay out from that lawsuit comes from your general fund, which directly relates to student learning and achievement. And so this board member in California served a little less than one term. He resigned at the end of his first term. but cost the district in total now, it's up to about $4.2 million in lawsuits. I can tell you that when he did the things that he did, he did not feel like he was doing anything wrong. He thought it was perfectly, he was elected. It was perfectly within his purview to what he was doing and suits ensued. So this is an example of the ramifications of an individual board member stepping outside their role as a board member. and how that can affect a district. Now, I don't think, well, I've talked to him since, so I know he didn't mean to do this. He didn't mean to cause this district the kind of irreparable damage that he caused. He, again, he was a businessman. He owned four companies. He was used to saying, I want this done and it getting done. He acted out of frustration. He acted out of, in some cases, you know, his own belief system, not congruous with the community, community's belief system, and just really didn't understand why he couldn't do the things that he was doing as a board member. But who did this hurt in the end? It hurt the district, it hurt the children, it certainly hurt the reputation of this district. I can tell you when the superintendent left following this situation, They advertised for the position of superintendent, one of the highest paid superintendencies in the state, and no one applied. So not only did this hurt the district from a financial situation, but the reputation of that district is still recovering, right, because the actions of a board member. So that's the reality of what, you know, how powerful your actions can be. And it's my job to keep you out of this situation, out of the courtroom, away from the, you know, we don't want the grand jury looking at your district again. And we want to make sure that you all operate in a way that is above board, really transparent, and is Congress with the beliefs and values of your community. Okay, any questions about that? So we're going to talk a little bit about effective governance, you guys, and then we're going to review your governance handbook. I want to talk today about unity of purpose, why that's important, and do you have one? I don't know if you do. You all talked to me about things you wanted to accomplish. I heard some common threads, but I think it's important to identify what your unity of purpose is. We're going to talk about your norms, and I helped you guys develop these the last time I was there, about how we agree to work together. And then your protocols, which are really how we do things, like how do we, how do we do the agenda, how do we motion, et cetera. So we'll go through those one at a time. And they're important to review because you do have new board members who inherited all this stuff. So your governance handbook, which I think you were provided with this morning in which we are going to review page by page, was not a document that Aiden or Terrence had any part to didn't take part in because it happened before them. But it's really important because it becomes their document that they have the opportunity to weigh in on the norms and the protocols that were already developed. Because only you guys can police whether or not you're keeping within these statutes that you've developed. And so they need to be yours in order to feel like they're rules you want to follow. They need to be your rules.

[4649] Aiden Hill: Right. And Deb, just to kind of confirm or what I think I hear I'm hearing you say is that obviously we have pre-existing, you know, pre-existing governance handbook and protocols. But we as a board have an opportunity to revisit those at any point.

[4665] SPEAKER_14: Right. Yes, you do. And I especially I encourage them to be revisited right after you've gotten elected, right right at the very front because it's really important that you give input into them, that you understand where they came from and why they were developed. If they're necessary, like I'll give you an example, a board I worked with two nights ago decided that there were four norms in their set of norms that were no longer necessary because honestly they were developed with one particular board member in mind. One of the norms was We only speak three minutes during deliberation. Well, they put that norm in there because one of their board members like to speak for an hour and a half on subjects during deliberation. And they had a new board. It was no longer necessary. They took it out. It wasn't something that was necessary to have. They used to have a protocol in their governance handbook that said only the superintendent and board president will determine what's on the agenda. They decided, they had two new board members like you guys do, that they didn't want that to happen. They wanted the board president, the superintendent, and rotating in one other board member every month to be part of agenda setting. So they decided that was their new protocol. They wanted to do it that way. So yeah, it's really important that you don't have to inherit these rules, these protocols or norms. that you guys get to weigh in and you guys can come to consensus on which ones you want to keep, which ones you want to throw away, which ones you want to change.

[4752] Mark Triplett: Sorry, Deb, just to be clear though, you're not advocating for that to be like a regular practice that the board is all the time revisiting and changing governance handbook, but rather- No, only when you have new members join.

[4765] SPEAKER_14: Only if you had new members join next year, Mark, I would suggest that you review it again. It doesn't have to be in a formal way like this. It could be one-on-one with those board members if you just had one new board member. But I think since you have two, it's important that we revisit them. I think it's because you know, that's almost half the board. And so it needs to belong to them. No, usually most boards only revisit the governance handbook when they have new board members come on board. And sometimes they do that just informally.

[4795] SPEAKER_26: Great. Thank you.

[4796] SPEAKER_14: Okay. So the responsibility of the board, I said this earlier, set the direction, establish the structure. What does that mean exactly? Establishing the structure. What do you think that means? Once you set the direction, how do you think you establish the structure? for that direction. Elisa, do you want to give a shot at that one? How do you think you established the structure?

[4822] SPEAKER_19: I think by working with the superintendent to understand how we're going to actually execute against that direction.

[4833] SPEAKER_14: Correct. Yeah, that's absolutely right. So the board determines the what it is we want to accomplish. I like to use a real simple example. Let's say tomorrow you decided you wanted your schools to be safer, that they were too many expulsions, too many instances of bullying and violence, you wanted your schools to be safer. So you all said to the board, our number one priority is we want our schools to be safer. How are we gonna do that? And then the superintendent and staff would come back to you with a report saying, okay, we think if we put these four things in place, whatever they may be, metal detectors, police on campus, I don't know what they might be, that the structure is going to make our school safer. So you establish a structure for what you want to accomplish. You provide support, you get behind, you know, or make changes or make suggestions. But eventually, you have a structure in place to that you're going to move forward with that's going to accomplish your goal. Okay, so you provide support. You also provide support by making sure that everything that you adopt is in alignment with that structure. So you can't make schools safer without a financial plan to do so, right? All the new things you want to do take money, so you have to make sure that you provide support by making sure that if it's a priority, a goal priority, it needs to be a budgetary priority. So making sure the budget aligns. And you can't make schools safer if teachers aren't aware that you want to make schools safer and you want teachers to report any instances of bullying on the campus. So you make sure that your teachers' contracts or your conversations with teachers or whatever it takes to get teachers to agree to do that. is contractually in their contract or is an understanding that you want them to report when there are issues like this. So again, you provide support by making sure that everything aligns with the structure that you agreed to to accomplish the goal. And then in the end, you ensure accountability. This is a really important piece. For every goal that you have, it's up to the board and superintendent to decide how are we going to measure this goal. How are we going to ensure that the money we're spending and the time we're spending on the school are accomplishing something? And it's your job at the beginning of every goal, and I think it's really important to think about when you set a goal, also set measurable examples of how you're going to measure that goal. So let's go back to school safety. If it's school safety, how are we going to measure if our schools are safer? Some schools would say we're going to say if we don't expel as many children, our schools are safer. If we don't have to call law enforcement as much, our schools are safer. If we don't have as many instances of violence on our campus, our schools are safer. Some schools that I've worked with have said we think school safety is directly related to absenteeism. So if we don't have as much absenteeism, our schools are safer because kids are feeling safe enough to come to campus. So we're going to track those things. And we're tracking all those things as a data dashboard to ensure that we're making progress towards our school being safer. So when you set the goal and you set the structure, you make sure that you have a measurement method as part of that goal, as part of that structure, so you can ensure accountability.

[5039] Aiden Hill: And then you, yes, go ahead. Just quick question, just kind of in your experience, and I'm sure that it varies depending on the goal and the topic, but how often usually are, you know, at a minimum are these, you know, dashboards sort of revisited? And, you know, and is there any kind of way to kind of provide at least some real-time, you know, tracking or some more frequent tracking that, you know, maybe isn't necessarily discussed at the board level but that maybe is posted on the on the board, you know, on the district website or anything like that. What sort of your experience as we put programs in place, how do we see the measures that are going on?

[5077] SPEAKER_14: So Aiden, it all relates to a really important part of your job, which is superintendent evaluation. So The way that the dashboard is looked at for, if you're doing things in a way that really can make effect change, your superintendent has no more than two to three areas of focus. I mean, yes, they're doing a lot of things related to your LCAP. They're doing all those things related to your LCAP in the background. But most boards give the superintendent two to three solid areas of focus that you want to see tracking mechanisms on. it could be, like I said, it could be school safety, it could be things like, you know, test scores, it could be A to G requirements, how many kids are completing that, it could be how many children are going on to graduate or go on to higher education. Whatever the goal may be, it's really, really important to put the tracking mechanism in place. And I would say, at a minimum quarterly, You're looking at that data quarterly. And it's usually done in a couple different ways. Either the superintendent gives a physical report and public session on here are my three goals. Here's the progress I and staff have made toward these three goals this quarter. I'm going to give you some examples in a little bit of how superintendents have done that. Some boards feel like they would prefer to have those conversations in private. in closed session, you can have those conversations because you agendize in closed session superintendent evaluation progress toward goals. You can agendize that in closed session. Sometimes that's more comfortable for a superintendent and board to talk about if they're not making significant progress toward those goals. Like let's say the school safety goal. That's going to take a while to really show up on the dashboard if the work that you're doing, what you put in place, is effective. You're not going to be able to see the results of that right away. So sometimes you may want to have those conversations in private, and you're allowed to, in closed session, discuss the superintendent evaluation, and if the superintendent is comfortable in letting you know the progress that they're making toward their goals, because the superintendent evaluation should never just happen once a year. I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself, but You asked the question, so I'm trying to tell you how they all relate. It shouldn't just be once a year. It should be a conversation, not a report card. It's a conversation the board has with the superintendent on a regular basis to ask the question, are you making progress towards your goals? Can you show us the data that supports that? And if you're not making progress toward the goals, what do you need from us to get there? What do you need from us as a board to get you there? Or let's talk about it. Was it a realistic goal? Let's talk about what we have to do. It's easier done in a session.

[5249] Aiden Hill: Let me ask just a clarifying question. As I mentioned, I spent most of my career in business. I've worked with lots of different companies and their executive teams and their boards. As you describe, boards will usually have some you know, big goals that they're asking the executives to accomplish and some key metrics that they're measuring them on. And that's usually the primary focus, but there are, will sometimes be issues that pop up that, you know, require, you know, a more granular look, you know, at certain other metrics. And, you know, so I don't, I'm, I'm hoping that you're not saying that, you know, we're only going to be as a board only be looking at three metrics and that other things that are going.

[5290] SPEAKER_14: No, I said three goals, two to three goals. You determine the metrics together. Mark tells you, if you say, okay, Mark, how are we going to measure if this is working? Mark can come up with 10 things he wants you to look at as a district, or he may come up with five and you guys as a board might come up with five others that you want to look at. But that's determined together between the board and the superintendent to determine what you want to look at. Now, I encourage you, to not have 12. I encourage you to have a few, because I want you to share this with your community. I want you to do this in a transparent way. It's really important that your community understand what your goals are. And remember, they're not in this every day like you are. So the community understand what your goals are, and they understand how you're going to accomplish them in simple terms. And they understand how you know whether you're going to making progress toward them or not. And So school safety, ask me the question. What's your goal, Deb, for your board? It's school safety. That's a number one goal. How are you going to do that? We're going to put metal detectors on schools. We're going to have law enforcement. We're going to have dogs. I don't know. I'm making things up. How do you know that it's going to be better? How do you know if it's getting better? We know because we're going to make teachers report any violence in school campus. We're going to report bullying. How many we know how many times we have to call law enforcement. We know how many. these four things, and we're going to see if in six months, they all go down. That's how we're going to know if we're making progress. Right? So I just articulated that in a way that anybody, the guy at the dry cleaner, somebody at the grocery store can understand. And so you don't want to go down to such a level that your community can't understand it when you're reporting on these things. Yeah, you might as a board member, meet with Mark and say, but what about this? What about this? What about this? or have these things changed, but you want to make sure that both your goals and your measurement metrics and your how you're going to accomplish it are things that are easy for everyone to understand, including your community.

[5416] Aiden Hill: And I think what you're also saying is that, you know, whenever we're going to launch a new program, you know, that, as you say, right, we've got a clear goal around the program that we've got, you know, essentially a financial, you talked about the structure. So, you know, a financial measurement around that, how much it's going to cost, you know, what's going to be the payback. and then also any other, you know, softer metrics. And then those will usually, you know, cascade up to the larger, you know, three goals that you have as a board, but that each sort of sub-goal that is tying to that larger goal, it's got its own set of goals and budgets and metrics.

[5456] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, usually. But, you know what, Aidan, I encourage you to Not look at that stuff, because I want you to look at it. I want you to know how to explain it to your community. But it's really up to the staff. It's just like if it's your business, you know how to measure whether or not it's being profitable or not being profitable. So it's really, really important that the staff take ownership, that the staff take ownership in, this is how we're going to prove to you, board, that it's either working or it's not working. And that's why I say sometimes it's easier in closed session to have progress towards superintendent evaluation, because you have to have courage, the courage to say, hey, we asked you to do this thing. It's not happening. Why isn't it happening, Mark? And Mark would say, well, the teachers are adamantly opposed to it. I can't get it in their contract. They won't do it. They think it's unnecessary. They've got the community behind them, guys, and we need to rethink this. So I think where I've seen boards go astray is waste too much money on something that was board-driven, not community-driven, and they were afraid to step back and say, we can do this or we can do this goal. And so that's why I think it's important to really check in on it, not let that go on too long, to make sure that the goals that you're giving the superintendent are attainable. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about smart goals and attainable goals and how to measure them. as we go forward. The last part of this is act as community leaders. It's important, and I already kind of explained that, it's important that you understand, you determine the what, but you understand the how. You don't determine the how, the staff has to live in the how and make the how happen every day, but it's important that you act as community leaders by understanding the how and being able to distill down big pieces of information into little sound bites that your community can understand about how you're going to accomplish something. Did I see a hand up? Maria, did you have something you wanted to add?

[5581] Marie dela Cruz: Yeah, but I think you just covered it right there. So I think it's important to kind of see the distinction. You know, when we say we set the direction, the board sets the direction, doesn't necessarily mean that they tell us the how.

[5598] SPEAKER_14: No, they don't. Good words don't tell you the how. That doesn't mean they don't share their opinion about the how. Like if you said to me, you know, Deb, I want you to start, I'm the superintendent, I want you to start a school safety program. I want your opinion. If you're in law enforcement and I'm not in law enforcement, I'd like to know how do you think we can make our schools safer? If you're a board member, one of my board members and you're in law enforcement, share your expertise with me, share your experience with me. I want to know I want to hear what you have to say that doesn't mean that that's going to work for us, you know, you might say, yeah, that's something that works in law enforcement but you know we can't have teachers have guns on campus it's not right so. You want to share your expertise with the superintendent and help them in letting them know what your specialty might be in developing the how, but it's really important that the superintendent and staff determine the how. And again, I'm going to go back to a sports analogy. You hire a good football coach, right? And you let them decide who they're putting on the field and what play they're going to play. And if they win the game, great. If they don't, you say, maybe we should have done it differently or rethink it next time. But you don't hire a good football coach who's your superintendent and tell them what people to put on the field and tell them what play to run and then blame them when they lose the game. It has to be their game plan. It has to be their game plan with the players they choose, the best players to execute that plan. And then you guys come in by ensuring the accountability and acting as community leaders to support them.

[5695] Terrence Grindall: Okay. I wanted to say that I think there's some there can be gray area in that in in in the board's role and looking in commenting on and directing the how. So I wish the guidelines were more clear about what what the role of the superintendent is and how the board influences or guides the how?

[5726] SPEAKER_14: The board, Terrence, the simple answer to that question is the board does not guide the how. The board can influence the how by expressing to the superintendent the wishes and the feelings of the community. So give me an example of something that you are sort of thinking about that might come up that you don't know how to participate in or what your role should be?

[5753] Terrence Grindall: Do you have one? Well, I'm thinking to use an example that happened the other night, but maybe that's not a good idea. Maybe a hypothetical would be better. Let's talk about a marketing effort for the community. That's a good one. I have some strong ideas about how that gets done. I think some basic hows of that are the difference between success and failure. And so I wonder where the line is, where the goal setting is, the goals are detailed enough so that the how gets you where you want to go. It's still not part of the how, but there's definitely more than just you know, one goal can simply be, we want to have, you know, we want the community to have a better opinion of us, right? That's the goal, and then the superintendent runs with that, and we don't really see any of the, except for it being reported to us, we don't guide that how at all. Another way would be to have a more detailed goal.

[5839] SPEAKER_14: Really, really good example, and it's a real life, I'm going to give you a real life situation where that just happened. So I was working with a little district called parlier in the in the Central Valley and their biggest competition was they were losing students to the next door town Clovis because Clovis had a really good reputation for student achievement really good reputation for lots of offerings for their students. Well, Parlier had better student achievement actually than Clovis in terms of test scores. And Parlier actually had as many programs, if not more, than Clovis, but they didn't tell anybody about them. Nobody knew about them. So one of the goals that the board had for their new superintendent is we want you to develop a marketing plan so we're not losing students and so that the community knows the successes of this district. They understand the success of this district. And so the superintendent and staff came up with a plan. It didn't include social media. One of the board members who has a specialty in social media said, well, that's a great plan, but really, we need some Instagram images of what's happening in our district. We need a Facebook page. We need a Twitter feed. We need to, I feel like most of our community is getting their information on social media. And we need to include social media as a big part of this plan. And the superintendent said, you know what? Great. You have an expertise in social media. Come on board. Come along with us. Why don't you develop the social media plan of what you think we should do? We're going to hire a communications person that they hired in the district. Let's hire somebody who also has a strong background in social media. So that's how the board influenced that plan, Terrence. They shared their expertise. The superintendent was open to that because they're like, yeah, we thought about that. But none of us really had an expertise in that. They decided as a team together that they needed a communication specialist. and they wanted someone who was strong in social media. And so they collaborated on what the plan should be. What did they find out in the end? It's two years down the line now. They found out that the majority of their people, of their community, was engaging with the social media aspects of the campaign that they had created. was not engaged with the newsletters they were sending home or the messages they were putting on their website, that they were really engaged with their Instagram feed and all the great photos they were showing of student successes, and that that was really increasing their in the community. And so they took a look at it, the board member chimed in, added to the strength of that program. Now they're assessing it, and they're spending more time and energy on the social media part, less on the other part, because they were able to assess that that's what engaged the community. So that's an example of how the board influences the how.

[6015] Elisa Martinez: if I may. Yeah, I just wanted to say I mentioned to Terrence, you know, this is one of the things that we started to work on with with Mark as as he's joined, but absolutely, that's that's the forum at depth to your point where, you know, we give that initial direction. What Superintendent Triplett did was he brought back here's how here's my what I'm thinking my team and I are thinking and then we weigh in. And so that's really the time for us to start to help shape if you're you know, you see a gaping hole in your perspective, or as an individual board member, we have discussion and then we kind of get to some agreement. But I think that's the mechanism that frankly hasn't, we just haven't had it. So we've just started that process, but a lot more work that we have as a board to kind of enrich that goal setting process moving forward. But absolutely, that's a place where we have a voice.

[6072] SPEAKER_14: The other methodology, Terrence, would be some districts, like, for instance, the communication plan is a good one, often form a subcommittee that's made up of both staff and a couple of board members who might have an expertise in that particular area who form a subcommittee. And then the subcommittee comes back to the board with recommendations. And that report is usually reported by the board member who sits on that subcommittee. And they are sort of the liaison between the committee of staff and the board. And they come back to the board and say, hey guys, I've been sitting on the subcommittee for four months. Here's the plan the subcommittees come up with. And that works really well too, because a board member has some buy-in. If you have a good relationship amongst your board and you trust each other, you know that that board member has the best interests of the board and the community at heart. And it lends a lot of credibility to the suggestions from staff and the subcommittee because a board member's already participated. So sometimes that's how you divide up the, you know, there's a lot of work to be done in a district, obviously, but that's how you divide up the load by having board members, one or two board members sit on a subcommittee and actually help with developing the house. Did I answer your question?

[6145] Terrence Grindall: That's sort of the, just not to dig deep into this but one of the things Bowen said early in an earlier meeting, he was just talking about another issue but we often spend a lot of time. When you go to the doctor, you spend a lot of time diagnosing the issue and then the prescription is pretty simple. We do the opposite. We diagnose from the hip and then we spend a lot of time working out the solution. I think that's where marketing efforts usually go wrong, is you don't set the strategy and what the message is effectively. You assume you know the message and then you spend all your time on the details of that. That's where I'd like to have influence in the structure rather than whether or not it's social media, whether it's Instagram or Facebook. Does it make any sense?

[6208] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, a little bit. But again, I want you to start thinking about the what and the how, okay? What is it that you want to accomplish? What is it? What is that thing? Can I articulate that in a way everyone can understand? And then if you give a clear direction of the what to the staff, So in the case that I just gave you with Parlier, their what was, we want to stop losing students. We want a better reputation. It was that simple. That's what we want to do. Now, did the board participate in that messaging? Yeah. Eventually, they participated in the messaging. But they let the superintendent and the communications specialist that they hired determine the mechanics, fill them in on the messaging, and the boards always waited that board always weighed in on the messaging and enhanced it in many ways because they knew what would resonate with their community. They knew they were in touch with the community. They're the voice of the community. They knew what they were hearing in their ear from the community. And so they made sure that the messages that were going out from the district were simple, easy to understand and would resonate with the heart of their community because they're the people who are in touch with that. So I think that helps to maybe clarify that you do have influence.

[6285] Terrence Grindall: Well, let me just say that. So what if the what was develop the brand for the district and a marketing strategy rather than a broad what of improve our perception of the community? Can the board get more involved in making a more detailed what?

[6313] SPEAKER_14: I think if you have an expertise in that field, right, if I were on your board, I'd have an expertise in that field. I developed a variety of brands for a lot of corporations, just like maybe you and Aiden have. Sit on the subcommittee, be part of the subcommittee and assess, you know, when you're assessing a brand, when you're developing a brand, you first assess the competition. And then you think about authentically, what are we? You can't be a brand and be inauthentic, right? You can't be something you're not. So what are our strengths and what are we? And what do we want our brand to look like? How do we want people to think about us? And so you could help staff, certainly with your business backgrounds, you could certainly help staff with the process for developing a brand, most likely. But you're going to hear from them authentically what strengths they have and what you are right now. And maybe you're not quite where you want to be yet with the brand. And then you ask the question, how do we get there? How do we have more offerings than anybody else? How do we have the highest achievement in our area? How do we do that? And start to put out messages that get you there. So I would say it sounds to me if both of you or one of you have expertise in that subject and that's an area that you want to tackle, form a subcommittee made up of staff and staff and a couple board members that can work on that together and develop the processes. Does that make sense?

[6402] Terrence Grindall: Certainly does. I also want to apologize to the rest of the board for taking up so much time on this.

[6407] SPEAKER_14: It's okay. It's important. That's why we're here.

[6410] Mark Triplett: So I'm dead before we transition, could I just want, I just wanted to highlight one thing. Because you've made references to superintendent goals and evaluation. So just for the sake of the board, particularly that because we're a new board now. We did go through a special session where the board helped me to define goals for the year, measurable goals for the year, and keep them very concrete. Not too broad because then it's very hard to achieve. And then also identify metrics around those goals. So that's something that has been done. And we are at about the time in February to revisit those and do like a mid-year sort of review of those goals and how it's going and really get feedback from the board around. I'd love to get board input on how we're doing in terms of reaching those goals.

[6479] SPEAKER_14: Mark, when did that happen? When did the board meet and establish this for you?

[6483] Mark Triplett: That was in November, I believe. Before the election. Before the election, yeah, exactly.

[6488] SPEAKER_14: So here's what I would say to Aiden and to Terrence. So this is an example of the train on the tracks, right? Rolling along at 100 miles an hour. The board gave the superintendent direction in November of what they wanted him to accomplish. You're going to touch base on that in February. So that's time to sort of assess those goals. When's your evaluation scheduled for March, June?

[6510] Bowen Zhang: Yeah, so I want to chime in this a little bit. So I'm actually glad that we're moving toward sort of a mid-year evaluation at around February or March and push our full year evaluation at around September. The reason for that is when I first got onto the board two years ago, we have this full year evaluation of superintendent in March or April. at a time when our book is not closed for the year, so you don't know the deficit number, at a time when the dashboard test has not, the standard test has not been taken, so you don't know the result of the dashboard until probably August and September. So when I first got on the board, we're evaluating the superintendent for the whole year at a time when we don't have data on fiscal stuff, and we don't have data on academic performance. So the good thing I realized, that's why in the past we've been trying to move toward, at least I hope we can move toward evaluating the superintendent around the whole year review at around September. Because we do close our board and having the audited result for our budget for the prior year in September. and then we'll have preliminary release of the dashboard test score around September as well. So that just makes a more perfect time to give a full year review on the superintendent.

[6594] Elisa Martinez: And so if I may go, if superintendent, if you may answer the original question, which was when is your evaluation, because we could have that discussion, but in the contract that we did all approve, there is a specific timeline for evaluation.

[6608] Mark Triplett: Yes, so thank you, Lisa. Yeah, so it's all contractual that was agreed on between myself and the board. I'd have to go back around the exact date, but the year in the contract, the year ends at the end of June. Again, I can't remember the exact date of the evaluation.

[6630] SPEAKER_14: So that's typically when it is, Mark. It's June or early July. And so the message I want to give to new board members, and this is really important to understand, it's really important that when you participate in the evaluation, that you understand you're evaluating the superintendent on goals that you inherited. And unfortunately, you did. You inherited them, guys. That's how it is. So it wouldn't be fair to give the superintendent a goal that you wanted him to achieve between now and June. kind of hard for him to make any progress toward anything like that. But also the good news is, is once that evaluation takes place, immediately after that evaluation, or even during the end of that evaluation, it's what do we want him to focus on from here forward, from June forward? And that's the time when new board members can say, that's great that you still have to work on these schools, because most schools that a superintendent gets are not one year goals. They're just showing you the progress in that year toward a long-term goal. It's time for you guys to make what goals you think are important known so that the rest of your board can weigh in on whether they're important to the whole board, and they want to give the superintendent direction to pivot and maybe have something else be priority number one. And then you have the opportunity to, through that year, from June to June, to evaluate whether they're making progress on those goals as you move forward. Okay, so that gives you just a little sense of the timing of when you can start moving some of your agenda items to the top of the goal.

[6724] Bowen Zhang: So Deb, I want to circle back on an issue that we discussed 20 minutes ago about the number of goals. So I guess my question for you is, have you ever seen a district that give just one goal to the superintendent? Yes, yeah. So the reason I'm asking this is, My professional background working tag. So fresh out of college when I first entered a workforce, I look at all the other company and organizations, I envy the organization that have five goals six goals 10 priority for the organization because I thought, at that point I thought, that's a sign being able to multitask and doing a lot of things great at the same time. But as I mature and grow and grow more and more into the industry, I start entering the organization, particularly a giant corporation that actually just have one goal for the year, because I think it's much easier to give your CEO five goals, 10 goals. and much harder to say this organization this year is just one goal. Particularly think about, for example, in 2005, Apple, a company of scale like that, completely halted production of iPad. Say, we're going to do the iPhone first before we do the iPad. And then there are other giant corporations just have one goal, like Tesla, one goal, increase production, that's it. So for me, as I'm thinking about the goal setting, Like there's this one thing that we've been, I mean, obviously we spend 90% of our time dealing with this budget. And then the core issue of our budget is the enrollment. So have you ever seen district that said for the superintendent in the next one or two years, you only have just one major goal, which is to improve our enrollment, improve our ADA. Because with that one, we saw a ton of our problems.

[6823] SPEAKER_14: Probably three. There are probably three districts that have that as a singular goal, Bowen, in the state. There are probably three I can think of that I've worked with. 3,000 in the state, but three that I've worked with, that's their singular goal, because they're losing kids to charter schools, they're losing kids to private schools, they're losing kids to online schools. And if they continue to lose the faith of the community, because when you lose kids, that's what you're losing. You're losing the faith of the community in the public education system and in your district in particular. So yeah, there's probably three districts I know of that have that as a singular goal, but keep in mind, that's a huge goal.

[6860] Bowen Zhang: I mean, that means that you have- Yeah, that's actually what I want to, because one member of Grindell or Karen just said, you probably need a marketing, a reasonable marketing campaign to change your perception. You got to improve your customer experience. You got to somewhat improve your academic performance. You got to do a ton of things just to improve on that one metric. And obviously, with that one metric improving, you solve many of your fiscal deficit problems.

[6886] SPEAKER_14: That's true. But yeah, like you said, there are so many moving parts to that. And it can't just be a marketing campaign, because you can't market stuff that isn't true. So if what's important to your community to keep students in your district is a variety of offerings, or a plethora of high-level offerings like robotics and like coding and like offerings that you don't have in your district, that's going to take a long term to implement before you even have it in place and can market it and talk about it. So it's that's a big talent to eat and I'm right. So yeah a lot of goals. You know the example I like to give is a district in Silicon Valley, that their number one goal was increased math and science scores for students. That was their number one goal for four years, and increase the level of, or the amount of children involved in AP classes. And then their high school had seven suicides in one year, seven. And so I could tell you what their number one goal is this year, it's students' social and emotional health. That's their number one goal. because they found out when they studied, why do we have this kind of stress on our population? They found out that their average AP student was getting six to eight hours of homework a night between all of their AP classes. And they found out that when they interviewed students and when they went to mental health professionals, that their students felt such pressure from their parents to get into Stanford and to get into higher level schools and to take all these AP classes and that they had no social life, that they had no physical life, they had no physical activity. Most of their time was spent with their face in the computer and they didn't have any balance in their life. And so, boards, goals change based on conditions in a community. So yeah, you have to assess What and you know what your number one goal shouldn't come from any one of you, your number one goal should be what you feel collectively is being poured out from the community as their number one concern. So all of you should articulate regularly at your board meetings, this is what we're hearing in our community is of utmost importance to our community. And right now I can tell you that if social emotional health of children going back to school isn't on your radar, it should be. Because there are so many issues that are bubbling up in communities all over the state, and I doubt you're any different. That just children are and families in general are traumatized from this experience and that trauma is going to affect every aspect of what we do as educators. And so be thinking about that as part of your mix is a healthy mentally, physically healthy children should be, you know, On the hierarchy of your goal priorities right now.

[7063] Mark Triplett: Absolutely. And I can reshare the superintendent goal document that was approved by the board. Currently, there's four goals for me and the district this year. And one of them is positive certification and ensuring a positive certification at the county by maintaining a balanced budget through 2022-23. The second is develop an interactive website to inform and engage the community. The third is create a graduate profile to identify the skills, knowledge, and proclivities that a Newark Unified School District student will demonstrate. And then create safe and attractive and inviting learning environments and appearance of schools.

[7109] SPEAKER_14: Okay, so I don't want to visit those right now, Mark, but thank you for sharing them. And we'll talk about, and you guys should have ongoing conversations about you know, if you're making progress toward those things, if they're still on the list, if they're not on the list, and you'll assess that, I guess, in February and then again in June. So Aiden, I want to give the floor to you for a moment. Aiden shared a document with me that I think really exemplified a lot of what we're talking about. So I encouraged him because of his his business background and that he teaches this to take, you know, just a few minutes, maybe 10 minutes, Aiden, and talk to us about this, this team development process, if you would. And I'll tell me when to advance the slide.

[7152] Aiden Hill: Sure. Yeah, thanks. And I'll keep it quick, because I know, you know, you got a lot of stuff on your agenda. So yeah, I mean, when I spoke with Deb earlier this week and we were just chatting about topics that would be good, I made the comment that since I've been in business and my role has really been project management and helping companies rescue projects that were in trouble. And I've probably worked at this point, I've lost count, but probably over 60 different projects that I've worked on. I'm very used to coming in to a new team environment and having to actually pull the team together and start to have them be able to achieve the goal, whatever the goal is that the executives have set. And what I found is that there are certain models out there. And one of the really famous ones was a model. It's called the Tuckman model. It was named after the author, Bruce Tuckman. And it's pretty well known. A lot of people informally know it as forming, storming, norming, performing. And what he basically talks about, and there's other models, but this is a pretty widely accepted model. And I've used it a lot in my business career. And then also we in the Fremont Union School District and the business department across all the different schools actually teach the Tuckman model. It's a pretty good model for understanding how teams come together and kind of the steps that they go through. And I've found just in my personal experience that it's pretty uniform. And literally every single team that I've worked with, we've gone through the same process. And so this is actually a part of the presentation that I give my students, I gave this past fall. So the overall concept is that, you know, effective teamwork is essential, but that a newly formed team cannot be expected to perform exceptionally well from the outset. And so that's one thing that I think that we should really appreciate too, is that even though we have a long history as a district and that there's some members that have been serving longer than others, but right now we're actually a new team. And so, and I think that Deb had mentioned earlier, we have to figure out how to work together. And I think that we need to be patient with the fact that Become an effective team and working together, it takes time and and recognizes that as we do this we're going to go through steps and I and what I found is that if we can actually start to articulate what's going on and understand some of the challenges, it's going to create some. you know, more calm viewpoint of what's going on and more acceptance and patience. And so really, this is what the, I'll talk about it very quickly. And I included a link here in the presentation. And so, Deb, if you distribute this out later, everybody should be able to go and actually read more if they're interested. So you can go to the next slide. Okay, so essentially what Tuckman states is that every team goes through certain steps. They don't necessarily go through all of them, but they definitely go through the first two, which are forming and storming. And then if they're able to start to come together, they can go to the next steps and become even more effective. But if you look at what Tuckman talked about in terms of the first step forming, the hallmarks of that is team comes together, a task is determined, maybe externally, I mean in our situation, it could be coming from the community, it could be coming from internally, or it He gets assigned by somebody on usually as team members are coming together. They're really in this, you know, in this new state where, you know, people are positive, polite, they're excited and but they're still not really identifying as a group. They're working independently. And although there's, you know, there's some level of friendliness on there's not a lot of trust and I think that Deb talked earlier about the, the fact that you know trust is essential. And one of the things that I want to communicate is just in my experience that that it's always the case when you have a new team where there's trust issues. And so we shouldn't feel that this is unique or somehow that we're dysfunctional. This is a normal part of the process. As teams are coming in and forming, some people are anxious about what's going on. Some people are exciting, but essentially we're in the honeymoon period where everybody's gotten together and we're now seeing that we're on a team. Next slide, please. But very quickly, and you know it happens sometimes more quickly than others groups go into what's called the storming phase and what then really happens is that People start to look at the task. Now what they thought was the goal and there may they discover that maybe there's different viewpoints about what the goal is. And so there's competition around, you know, you know, is this the goal? What should it be? And there's, you know, disagreements and misunderstanding. Also, the team starts to try to figure out how they're going to work together. And oftentimes, there's not agreement around how that's going to happen. And so that creates a lot of discomfort. Sometimes when, as this is happening, you know, members will get frustrated. And then maybe they will question a lot of things. They'll question the goal. They'll question the process. And what can happen too, and this is, you know, I've seen this happening, storming before. Sometimes there's some people that have, go ahead. There's some people that have a greater tolerance for conflict than others. And that's why I was thinking that it would be good for us to actually do a personality assessment and maybe, you know, in closed session, you know, discuss share a little bit about that. But for some people conflict is very, very frustrating. And that may really drive them to try to help the team get to a consensus as quickly as possible. But if that happens too quickly, sometimes the plan may not be as effective and sometimes the team may have not fully bought in and they'll end up going back into storming. And some people will describe this stage as being on an emotional roller coaster. And sadly, and I've seen this, you know, in certain situations where a team can just not get it together and they're stuck in storming and it's a miserable experience. And so I don't think any of us want to be in this. And so I think we definitely want to figure out As we go through this stage, which we, you know, our will, whatever that you know that we got to figure out how do we transcend. How do we move beyond that and the and the key really the hallmark for What what Tuckman and others say about this is in order to get through storming, you got to reach a working agreement. It doesn't mean that everybody is unified 100% unified and there's consensus over the goals or the responsibilities, but at least there's a working agreement around, okay, yep, these are our goals, these are the rough roles and responsibilities, what we're gonna do, and there's some level of acceptance. Next slide, Dan. Okay, so norming.

[7583] SPEAKER_14: So this is- Before you run, Aiden, I will tell you that I've worked with four for 12 years who are still in storm. No, it shouldn't be, sorry.

[7593] Aiden Hill: Can you say it one more time?

[7597] SPEAKER_14: Unmute. I said I've worked with, let me try again. Unmute.

[7603] Mark Triplett: No, we could hear you before, Deb, but now we can't. You're on mute, Deb. Deb, you're on mute. Deb, you're on mute. You put yourself on mute when you started talking.

[7630] SPEAKER_14: Okay, can you hear me now?

[7631] Mark Triplett: Yes, yes.

[7632] SPEAKER_14: I said I've been working with some boards for the entire time I've been with CSBA who are stuck in storming. Lots of them.

[7640] Bowen Zhang: Yeah. Do you have team that move on to norming and then... Okay, go ahead. Go ahead, Aiden. And then sort of come back to storming.

[7649] Aiden Hill: Yeah, it happens. It happens. And one common reason for that, actually, is if there are new team members that come into the group. And so you may have a group that is in norming or performing, but when you have new team members, you literally start the whole process again, and you go into forming and then storming again. The only kind of exception is if you have reached a performing stage and there's a long, long history of that. And so you look at like, for example, some of the championship, you know, like football teams like Alabama, where like they have such a strong program and such a long history that usually that won't happen. But for most other teams, it's pretty common that if new members come in, that you have to go through this process again. Okay, so just keeping going. So norming, this is where, you know, I think all of us, you know, ultimately want to get to. And it's, you know, because by the way, storming is there's conflict and there's little progress. It's just people are arguing with each other. And so there's gridlock. Once you get into storming, once you've established, you know, you've agreed on the working agreement around common goals and roles and responsibilities. Whoa, did she drop out?

[7734] Bowen Zhang: Yeah, I think it probably has to do with internet connection. OK.

[7738] Aiden Hill: Well, I can just make it really quick. So the common things that happen, and you know what, actually, can I share my screen?

[7748] Bowen Zhang: I think the Zoom host, the IT person. I think you can. At least I can.

[7754] SPEAKER_24: I can do that. You should be able to share your screen.

[7756] Aiden Hill: OK, let me just pull up that presentation. Hold on a second. One second. OK, share screen. OK, so norming, basically, this is where we start to get agreement around how we do things. We agree on the rules, responsibilities, the rules. And then we can really start to make progress. And that's where also we start to all really buy into the goal or goals. Deb, are you back?

[7805] SPEAKER_14: I'm back. I got kicked off, but I'm back.

[7808] Aiden Hill: No worries. Okay. So, um, and we, and I actually pulled up my presentation. So we were just going through it, you know, offline, but, but I'll just continue with yours. So, you know, once we're into norming, um, not only do we agree kind of on the rules of the road, but then we all really start to get commitment towards the team goal. Um, and then we, and as we see progress, we start to get excited about it and, you know, and, and get motivated. And this is where really the trust really starts to develop. And that's, you know, that's what makes it, you know, start to be fun. And, you know, like there's nothing better than being on a winning team. So that's really, that's where it starts is at Norman. And if you can go to the next slide, Deb. The final slide. Performing. So in my experience, you know that not many teams haven't fully gotten to this level, but but some, you know, have that I've that I've worked with and But it's this is just the ultimate right i mean and so and this is what I'm really hoping and I talked about my own personal goals earlier. is for us as a board and as a governing structure and as a whole district and as a community to really, really reach high performance. But the hallmark of that is really understanding roles and responsibilities, goals, and then having a high degree of trust so that then we trust each other to do different things. And we don't second guess. we're in alignment and you know if you've ever seen great sports teams where literally you know they can that everybody out on the field knows exactly what's going on and they can all make adjustments in real time because they're they're operating like you know one group one mind it's like the hive mind. Decision making at this stage is collaborative and dissent is expected and encouraged. And this is, I think, another hallmark of trust is that, you know, sometimes we view disagreement as a bad thing, but high performing teams don't necessarily view disagreement as a bad thing. they view it as a mechanism for really kind of vetting what are the best ways to get to the goal and understanding maybe there's different viewpoints. But at the same time, you know, the group may respectfully agree to disagree on certain things, and the person who maybe has a certain viewpoint, they're not going to take it personally if the group isn't supporting their their viewpoint. At the end of the day, they stand up and they salute and they say, okay, I'm gonna go with the group. And then the other key thing is that, if teams that get to this level, they are literally the train that is running and it's on a track and it's heading towards success. And even if one team member temporarily leaves or somebody new comes on board, that the train has such momentum and is so effective that it just keeps going. So that's it, Deb, and I hand it back to you.

[7992] SPEAKER_14: Thank you so much, Aiden, for sharing that with us, because I think it really ties into everything that we're talking about. I trained corporations for years and did branding for corporations for years, and a school board is really the largest corporation. Being part of a school board was definitely the largest corporation I ever had a hand in running, right? I never had a hand in running anything that had the budget the size of our school district. So really, really important that we think about these principles. And what you just said in the performing stages, it really exemplifies what high-performing boards look like, right? They agree to disagree. It's part of the democratic process. But in the end, even if they disagree with the vote of the board, individual board members aren't an impediment to that. that item moving forward, right? That we've all listened to what each other have to say. I might not agree with what you guys voted on, but I'm not going to stand in the way of it happening because next time when we vote for something I want to have happen, I don't want any of you to stand in the way of it happening. So it's that collaboration and that back and forth. It also, I think is really important that the community, you know, I work with some boards who they say, God, the community just thinks we rubber stamp everything because we're always five zero, right? because they're not having that robust deliberation. They're not asking those questions in public so that the community knows how much thought and energy they put into a decision. And so really, really important, too, that you display that you're putting thought and energy into the decisions that you make so that the community understands. So before I move forward, Mark, I want to ask a point of housekeeping. Are people, are they having lunch delivered? When is that happening? And when do you want to take a break? Otherwise, We could take a 10-minute break now and reconvene. And then I was hoping I could just work through lunch so I can get you guys on to your Saturday and we can end ASA, you know, as soon as we're done here today or at a reasonable hour. You let me know what you want to do.

[8109] Mark Triplett: Thanks. Thanks, Deb. Yeah, I believe that lunch is being delivered at 1130. Okay. And I don't know about others, but I think a bio break pretty soon probably be good.

[8121] SPEAKER_14: Why don't we take 10 now. And then when lunch is delivered, just go get lunch, bring it in front of you, you know, turn off your camera, bring it in front of you. I'll keep working. And we'll just go to the end. Okay.

[8132] Mark Triplett: Well, does that work for everyone to have a little bio break right now?

[8135] SPEAKER_14: Okay. OK, let's take 10 minutes and come back when you see my lovely face on the screen. How's that? Thank you.

[8146] Mark Triplett: Thank you. And thank you, Aiden, for that presentation. It was really, really helpful. Good stuff.

[8780] SPEAKER_14: Hi, all. Let's come back together. I don't know if your lunch arrived yet or not.

[8789] Mark Triplett: Mine's not here yet, but I think we could go ahead and start and then.

[8793] SPEAKER_14: OK. You could take a break when it comes and just go get it. Come back to the room. We're good. So what I'm going to be sharing next with you all is in your governance handbook, the items that you have. We don't have time today. We only have an hour and a half left, actually. We don't have time today to go through and rewrite your mission and your vision. Again, guys, these are things you inherited. It may be something you want to look at later. They're pretty broad. They're pretty general. But if you had any comments, if you guys can read your vision and your mission, and if you have any comments, you may want to note, annotate them, and see if this is something you want to have a meeting at some point in time in the future. A lot of boards revisit their mission and their vision once they're in a stable place. And maybe after superintendent evaluation, or maybe once your kids are back at school, and you're moving forward to sort of see if this still resonates with all of you. But I would give it a little time because this is a, you know, that's a process in itself. But this is currently the mission and vision of the district. Like I said, they're pretty broad based. have a little trouble with that one today. And they may be something you wanna revisit in the future. This speaks to, again, in your governance handbook, your core values, which directly relate to your mission and vision. Again, this was determined by the previous board and kind of articulated in this governance handbook. Let me start by talking about the purpose of a governance handbook. A couple of reasons we have a governance handbook. We have a governance handbook because when new board members come on board, it gives them a good reference for where the district's been and where they're going and sort of the mindset of the group that they're joining or the group that preceded them. It also gives you an idea of how you agree to work together in your norms and how you agree to do things like your protocols. Like I said, how things get on the agenda, board member requests for information, what's appropriate, what's not appropriate. as deemed by the group that you are joining. And so it's a great tool to give to new board members to give them a just sort of, and even I do it often in the candidates forum. I do a lot of candidates forums for districts when people are running for office so that candidates who are running for office understand sort of what the requirements are, what kind of, what is the makeup of the group that they're joining and what are the fiscal requirements of the job. And so I use the governance handbook a lot just to sort of orientate people to the group and what their goals are, what their mission vision is, what their protocols look like. It's also a good tool for the board president to refer to because it's really hard to tell your fellow board member you're doing something that we are not comfortable with or that we don't agree with. And so going to your protocols gives you a tool where you can remind your board members or your fellow board members or an individual board member that this goes against our protocols. And we agreed to these rules and we all agreed to follow them once you've adopted your governance handbook. And so please stay within the rules that we created for ourselves. So it's a tool just to remind you of how you agreed to move forward. So this speaks to your core values. I think all this work that you guys put into this was very good work and very meaningful work and really speaks to what you want as a platform for the foundation of the work that you're doing moving forward. This articulates your shared purpose, the purpose of the board and the purpose of the superintendent, the purpose of the governance team as a whole for what you want to have happen in your district. And all of these things I would read you guys in your governance handbook and make your notes for the future and bring these up at some point in time of things that you think should be added to this subtracted for this, but the time to do this is really when you're in a good stable place. I want to speak to Board Bylaw 9200. Board Bylaw 9200, as a new board member, you get this book of bylaws and board administrative regulations and things like that. The ones that you really need to pay attention to, those are great sources to have and your executive assistants can direct you to the source that will lead you to the legalities about a decision. Like, let's say for instance, a parent comes to you and says, how do you guys decide if a student is expelled? What are the rules on expulsion? You could go to your superintendent or he can direct you to the executive assistant who can give you the administrative regulation or the related ed code on what the expulsion procedure looks like and what are the legalities around how and when you can do that. And so that's a good thing to, those are good resources to have. That's why they're in place to guide you and to guide the work that you do. But what the only bylaws that are specific to board members are in the 9,000 series from 9,000 on. And they talk about the role of the board. This one's really important. The limits of board member authority, recognizing that the board is the unit of authority at the district. And then no individual board member has the authority to direct staff. And so let's talk a little bit about what directing staff means. Because this bylaw goes on, this is only the beginning of it. Directing staff means asking staff to do anything as an individual board member. So staff is directed, the superintendent and other staff by the vote of the board. So the only employee that your board has is your superintendent. He is the only person under your purview. He is the only person that the board as a whole can direct. Now, does that mean that Terrence couldn't ask Mark for attendance records at the high school? Terrence could ask Mark for attendance records at the high school because he's curious and he wants to see the attendance records. Mark might say to him, you know what, Terrence, that's going to take like nine hours of my time to pull all that up and figure out where to get that and provide that to you. And Mark might ask Terrence the question, what are you trying to accomplish by seeing the attendance records at the high school, Terrence? Maybe I can just answer your question. And so there should be a dialogue like that and mark should you guys should give mark the authority. to be able to tell Terrence, no, I'm not gonna go get you the attendance records at the high school, Terrence, because that's gonna take 11 hours of my time. And if you want that though, Terrence, and the rest of the board feels it's important, we'll agendize that request. And if three board members think it's important for Mark to provide that piece of information, then he is directed by the board to provide that piece of information to you. But you as an individual board member do not have the authority to ask him for that piece of information that's going to take up significant staff time. The reason for that is the same reason why you, none of you can sign a check on behalf of the district, right? Because you are the keepers of the budget and the money and the taxpayer dollars and staff time, spending staff time is the same as spending dollars. And so as individuals, you don't have the authority to spend dollars and you don't have the authority to spend staff time that equates into dollars. it takes a vote of the board in order to spend significant amounts of staff time. So most boards have a protocol that says something like, if we're going to make a, individual board members are gonna make a request to the superintendent that takes more than a half hour of the time, 20 minutes of their time, it's up to you to determine what that timeframe is. Some just say a reasonable, I think yours says a reasonable amount of time, it requires a vote of the board, okay? So limits of board member authority. The lawsuit that I showed you earlier that cost a district $4 million was all based on a board member stepping outside of the limits of board member authority as detailed in board bylaw 9200. The particular board member directly was giving staff orders, went into high schools and told the principal how to do their job, went into classrooms and told teachers how to teach, went to the facilities manager and told them how to run a facility to make a change in a facility and would not take no for an answer. And all of those resulted in hostile workplace cases or board micromanaging cases that ended up in lawsuits for the district. The union backed those employees and it ended up into significant lawsuits for the district. So that's why really important to understand that you don't wanna be making requests of any individual employees or directing or asking for reports from any individual employees all requests for information should go through your superintendent and all direction for anything should be directed towards your superintendent who has the ability and the authority to tell you that needs to go to a vote of the board per board bylaw 9200 in our protocols.

[9357] Aiden Hill: Yeah quick question, quick question.

[9359] SPEAKER_14: Might have a lot of questions so go ahead Aiden.

[9362] Aiden Hill: We have like you know a few different committees that we serve on and sometimes like the superintendent's not serving on those but some of the staff maybe. And so then there may be requests or some type of action that comes out of that. How is that handled?

[9378] SPEAKER_14: I would suggest to you, I can't tell you how it is handled now, but I can tell you how it should be handled. Even if you're in committee, just say to the committee member, if you're asking for a piece of information, I want this piece of information to be able to contribute to this committee, how long do you think that would take you to get? Or is that something that exists or something that you have to compile? And if it's gonna be significant, if they're like, wow, we don't have that, that'll take a while, say, well, just so you know, I'm gonna request that of the superintendent and he'll decide whether that's appropriate for you to do or not to do. I can't, as an individual board member, I can't ask you to do that if it's gonna take a day of your time. So I'm gonna make that request to the superintendent. And then the superintendent, again, will tell you whether he thinks that's important for you to have that piece of information and to spend staff time on it. And he may, and then he could direct staff to do that. Or if he doesn't, if he thinks he can answer the question in a more expedient way, he'll do that. Or he may say, you know what, Aiden, that needs to go to a vote of the board that's gonna take significant staff time. So it'll go one of three ways. So I would say, ask the person first, ask them if it's easy. If it's not easy, then ask the superintendent. Okay, thank you. That's your question? Any other questions on limits of board member authority? Okay, that's what your protocols are all based on guys is keeping you within the limits of board member authority. That's why we have them all. So again, we talked about this ad nauseum. I don't have to really go into this any further. I think we talked about the board determines the what they want to accomplish. The superintendent determines the how. So, and this is a tool that board president, where are you? I'm not seeing you on the screen. Bowen may have been taking a break,

[9482] SPEAKER_24: I'm going to say this about sorry, Deb, his food just arrived. So I probably want to go pick it up.

[9486] SPEAKER_14: Oh, okay, good. All right. Well, this is a tool I always tell board presidents, but any of you could use it if you're having conversations at the board level at your during your meeting and one of you is telling the superintendent how to do his job or how to do anybody's job in the district. And that's what I think is a good rule of thumb you could use. If what you're suggesting falls under the job description of anybody that you're paying, you're probably stepping outside of your role. So think about that. If what you're suggesting, someone's being paid to do that job, you're probably stepping outside of your role. So something to think about. But if you are having conversations at the board level about the how, that's when the president or any one of you can redirect the conversation and say, fellow board members, I think we're diving into the how now, and that's not our job. This is not in the realm of what, okay? We're diving into the how. And maybe we need to check ourselves and say, is this worthwhile? Or should we give the staff the first attempt at solving our what, right? Before we dive in. Let's give them attempt to doing this. doing coming up with the how first and then we can weigh in on it, but let's not tell them how to do what we're asking them to do. I think this illustrates it really well. Some of us are very visual learners and for me this really sent the message home when I realized that the board lives in this yellow bubble here. And the things that they're asking the superintendent to do, the what, are driven by their beliefs, vision, mission, the beliefs and vision of their community, their policies and their priority, right? That's what's driving their what we want to accomplish. So once that's determined by the board, the superintendent has to then let the staff know this is what's important to the board. And the board has a skill-driven set of skills, obviously skill-driven set, that develops the action plans, the implementation plans, the evaluation metrics, and the progress reports for those things. And your superintendent really lives in this world in the middle, in the green oval here, where he has to really get the staff on board with the what you want to accomplish and really inspire them as a leader to accomplish the what's important to you. And then go back to you and let you know how it's going by showing you how, what the goals are and understanding what the goals are and how they're going to implement them and showing you the success indicators or failure indicators of what you want to accomplish. So again, superintendent or you determine the what, superintendent determines the how and runs between these two worlds. And sometimes it's a, it's not an easy balancing act to make sure that, you know, to tell you, gosh, this is just, isn't resonating with the staff or I can't get staff behind this, or I can't get this negotiated. Contractually, even though it's something you want to accomplish, I need your help to lobby teachers, to lobby other administrators, to make them understand why this is important for the board to accomplish. Because as a superintendent, as one voice, I'm having a hard time doing it on my own. So again, letting you know, running interference between both circles, and letting you know what they're hearing out there. So any questions or comments about this model? Okay, what do you guys think causes the most- I'm sorry, Deb? Yes, go ahead.

[9703] Mark Triplett: Sorry, I was eating. Just a question, go back. Yeah. Can you speak a little bit about, given that the superintendent and staff are sort of the experts, so to speak, in the profession, or should be expected to be, what is their role in the what? given that, of course, the board is really responsible for the what, but also, yeah. So where is that sort of like crossover?

[9739] SPEAKER_14: Good question, Mark. So the what and the goals are not determined just by the board, Mark. That's a really good question. The goal should be determined by the board and the superintendent collectively. So the board brings to the superintendent what they're hearing in the community is important to the community, but then there might be things in the community that they're not aware of because they're not in the classroom on a day-to-day basis. maybe the community's not even aware that there's a lot of bullying and a lot of violence on campus. Maybe they're not aware of that. I can't imagine they wouldn't be, but sometimes they're not. And the superintendent might say, well, it's great that the community wants to increase math scores, but we've got chaos going on in campus. We really need to make our campuses safer. That needs to be a priority as well. And you as the board need to really take that seriously because again, this is their full-time job. It's the staff is there full-time with the students much more than any board member or community member is. And so what they tell you needs to be accomplished or needs to be your hierarchy of goals really needs to be taken very, very seriously and have a heavy weight in the decisions that you make. So the what is not just determined. I was talking about the what as it relates to the board's goals and what the board wants to accomplish, but part of the what and part of the overall goals are certainly determined by the board and superintendent together, and with great input from staff, from the superintendent and staff.

[9830] Aiden Hill: Thanks. Just a quick question, but ultimately, right, it's the board that votes on what the decision is, right? So you've got very educated and qualified staff and experts that are providing input and guidance and possibly very strong opinions. But at the end of the day, it's the elected body that makes the decision, correct?

[9854] SPEAKER_14: It is the elected body that makes the decision. But again, I'm gonna reiterate this again. It's really important that their opinions And the data that they provide carry a very, very heavy weight. Because I'll use that example of that district in the Bay Area that I talked about in Silicon Valley, where the board or the staff told them year after year after year, our students are under too much stress. At home and in school, we are putting too much emphasis on grades and getting into Stanford. We are putting too much emphasis on their academic lives and not enough emphasis on their physical health and their emotional health and their social well-being. And that board did not listen to the staff until it was too late. And so, again, we have to really trust the people who are in the classroom interacting with these students day to day. There may be things that your community and even as parents were blind to. So it's really, really important that what they tell you they're seeing and what they tell you is needed for the children of the district have a very strong effect on the weighting of your decisions. So yes, ultimately, only the board can make that decision. That's why you're elected to be community leaders. But in that instance that I talked about, who do you think took the blame for those kids' suicides? That board. took the blame from the community for that. Why didn't you see this coming? Why didn't you do something about this? Why didn't you look at this earlier that they were getting eight hours of homework? Why didn't you tell us that our kids were under that kind of stress? And all the staff could do was throw up their hands and say, we told the board over and over and over again, they chose to make the decisions, guys, we told them. And, you know, it was not a, Comfortable. It was a very painful situation for that community. And that's an extreme instance, but even in smaller situations where I've seen boards, you know, not take the recommendations of staff, or at least not take it into consideration and do things that were not collaborative. It's never, I've never seen a success come out of it. Aiden, I've never, I have yet to see a success come out of just a board driven initiative that did not have staff buy-in and staff input. So, important. Okay, I'm going to ask the question again. What do you think causes the most conflict among board members? What do you think? Any ideas?

[10019] Bowen Zhang: Well, I would say probably number one source is probably you don't like the other board member personally. That's probably the most.

[10026] SPEAKER_14: That you don't like what? I didn't miss that.

[10029] Bowen Zhang: I think the number one cause of board conflict is probably you don't like the other person personally. You don't like the other board member personally.

[10037] SPEAKER_14: Sometimes. No, you're wrong. The number one cause for conflict is boards. disagreeing on the how. And so sometimes that's personally driven, but usually it's mechanically driven. It's like, I think we should do it this way. No, I think we should do it this way. Staff thinks we should do it this way. Everybody not agreeing on how we're going to get this done. Everybody having a different opinion about that.

[10061] Phuong Nguyen: I definitely agree with that because we've seen it in our own meetings.

[10067] SPEAKER_14: So that's where the how is really important. And I provided you guys with a sheet, you might want to just keep in your files. It's called when you got the electronic documents from us. It's called 30 protocols to consider and 30 protocols to consider it just lists all the common protocols that different boards have and We're going to go through your norms and protocols now. And I'm just going to, like I said, I'm going to go through these relatively quickly. If you have comments on them, I'd like to hear them. But here are some of the norms that we adopted or that I suggested for you earlier when I worked with you in 2019. And these are just basically how we agree to work together as individuals. Does anybody have any issues or problems with norms number one and two? Nope? Thumbs up? Everybody good with them? One and two? Okay, good. Move on. How about norm number three? If you read it, you're good with it, just give me this.

[10152] Phuong Nguyen: I personally still have to work on this one. I get a little bit emotional. So sometimes I have to be more mindful of this, for sure.

[10161] SPEAKER_14: I think it's OK to be emotional, Phuong, but it's important that the community doesn't have the perception that your decision making is based on emotions and not on facts, right? Not on data.

[10172] Phuong Nguyen: Of course. I do do the homework and, but I think what I mean when I'm emotional about something is like, I, I know that I maybe what I'm saying is going to be conflicting or, or or starting some sort of confrontation, for me, that's really hard. So I'm not a confrontational person. So I have to be mindful of when I bring those kinds of things up that, you know, that I, I'm not raising my voice or in a way that is disrespectful or unkind. Because generally, that's just not how I am as a person. But so just being mindful of that.

[10222] SPEAKER_14: So one of the sentences that you guys put in here that I was very careful to include is this sentence. We will let each other know of the impact of their communication on us personally so that we are able to clarify their intent. They're able to clarify their intent with us firsthand. We had had a lot of instances where people left your board meetings with bad feelings because of they felt personally attacked or they felt like it was an attack on their value system. And so I thought it was important to articulate that we agreed that if say Fong left the meeting feeling a little bruised because of something Bowen said to her during the meeting or a comment that Bowen made, that they would agree that the two of them, that Fong would agree that she would reach out to Bowen and let him know that what you said hurt me. What you said made me feel bruised. What you said made me feel like I wasn't worthy of a comment, and that you guys would resolve that, the two board members, if that happened, will resolve that between one another, and they would come back to the board table the next month with a clean slate, having resolved that issue and made it known amongst themselves that they didn't want to be talked to in a certain way or spoken about in a certain way. And so we'd hoped to use that tool in this norm to resolve those conflicts and put them behind us and move on to the next issue with a fresh slate. So that's why that, so you guys have some idea of why that garbage was in there. And I think it's still important to continue to have.

[10325] Phuong Nguyen: No, and it really is. I would say that we have practiced that. And just to clarify and have understanding, because a lot of times in the moment, sometimes your words are not clarified or misinterpreted in the way that it is presented. Because a lot of thoughts are going through your heads and sometimes the way that you articulate it doesn't come out how your thought process is. So I think that's really important for all of us too. If we do say something that is misrepresentative and towards another board member or towards staff that it does get clarified. as soon as possible. And I could honestly say that, you know, that has, we have been trying to practice that. So.

[10380] Maria Huffer: Great.

[10381] Phuong Nguyen: Has it helped? It's always uncomfortable at first, but yes, it definitely, you know, it definitely does help because in the end, I think there's more respect that comes out of it. And the level of understanding is definitely there. Great.

[10403] SPEAKER_14: Any other questions about.

[10405] Mark Triplett: Go ahead. I definitely echo what phone was saying that sentence stood out to me as well. And one thing I was wondering. about that sentence is just for clarity sake, it seems like that is really important to do one-on-one in private versus to do in the public space in front of everybody. It seems like it would be less productive, but I'd love to hear if the rest of the board has that same thought.

[10437] Phuong Nguyen: I would agree with that, definitely. I think a one-on-one off to the side, especially if it affects the individual, you know, more so than others or whoever felt strongly that the statement was inappropriate or whatever.

[10453] Elisa Martinez: That was the intent. That was the intent. I was going to say I agree and that was the intent, yeah.

[10460] Aiden Hill: And I just wanted to add something, you know, and this is, you know, something that I'm struggling with a little bit in our current environment is, you know, kind of the the potential restrictions around the Brown Act. You know, make it, you know, difficult. I think, I mean, because, you know, oftentimes in business or in a private setting. It's much easier to have these kind of conversations. I think it's harder in this sort of public forum. And so sometimes You know, the only opportunity for this to come up is sometimes publicly. But, you know, I, one of the things I was suggesting earlier about taking, you know, having us do some kind of personality assessments is one of the things I found In doing that in the past is that there are kind of different people and they have different styles. And you just need to understand that. And there's some people that are very consensus oriented. There's some people that are very kind of, you know, passionate I, you know, I tend to be a little bit more on the passionate side of people haven't figured that out and And so, but sometimes my, my passion gets maybe misinterpreted. And so I think that we, we just have to, we have to figure out how to do this in a respectful, you know, way. But I think the important thing, and I think we, we talked about is I don't think that we should that as we talk with each other, we still make sure that we can have an open and honest and detailed conversation about things using facts and that it's not interpreted as an attack and that we figure out how we can talk about the facts and how we can drain the emotion out of it so that we can get to the best solution and what's the best way to do that.

[10567] SPEAKER_14: And though I will tell you that it's never a violation of the Brown Act for one board member to talk to another board member. That's perfectly fine. It's just when you try to get a consensus of three or more, or two or more board members together to vote the way you want them to vote on a particular subject, that it's a violation of the Brown Act. For you to meet with Fong and say, I didn't like what you said in the meeting, Fong. I wasn't comfortable with it. That's never a violation of the Brown Act. It's only two of you. And you're not trying to influence or vote on anything. whenever there are, you feel, and this was an attempt to give board members a tool so that whenever they felt like they were disparaged or felt had walked away from a meeting with bad feelings, we had a methodology for how to stop that because what was happening with this board and it's happened with many boards is those feelings stay and then you come to the next meeting and you're gonna get that person back for what they did to you and it wasn't productive. And so the best use of people's time and energy was really work these things out one-on-one, let them go and then let them go. You know, that's great.

[10631] Aiden Hill: That's great to know.

[10632] Bowen Zhang: Yeah. So I will want to chime in. Yes, because before the pandemic, we do have instances that I think we really utilize the one-on-one offline conversation, whether it's at a Starbucks coffee shop or some other location to sort out our differences. You don't, I mean, whenever you have whatever conflict or there are some misinterpretation of intent, I think that kind of one-on-one setting is a good way for you to not really start liking each other, but at least accept and live with each other on the differences. Like I said, you don't need to really like each other personally, but you can coexist peacefully after a one-on-one conversation.

[10674] SPEAKER_14: And remember I said at the beginning, the best leaders I've seen come at problems from the affirmative, not from the negative. you know, it just, the way you frame a question or the way you frame a comment can make all the difference. And, you know, even if you start out, if you disagree with what's in a report, say staff gives you a report and you disagree with it, you could start out by saying, I want to thank staff for the time and energy they put into putting together this really detailed report. However, I have some issues with their conclusions, and here's why, right? But start out from the affirmative. Come at it from the affirmative. Make your concerns known, but in a way that's respectful and respects the time and energy that staff or fellow board member put into a report or a piece of information that you're given. And again, really, really important, and I don't see this happening right now, but it has happened with this board in the past. You were talking, or there were some attacks that were verbally personal about a person's actions and never make it personal. You're there to do the business of the board in public. This isn't a public meeting. It's a meeting of the board done in public. And so really, really important to keep that decorum very, very professional and not get into any sort of personal personal attacks or personal disparagement.

[10763] Bowen Zhang: That's the thing I said 10-15 minutes ago. I said all the conflict ultimately comes down to personal feelings.

[10770] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, you're right, Bo. In a lot of cases on your formal board, it did. It came down to a lot of personal feelings. Maintain confidentiality. Read through this, guys, and see if you understand it and if you're comfortable with the confidentiality norm. Do I have a thumbs up? Okay, good. The reason this one came into being is we gave the board president the power to personally confront, sit down, clarify with anybody when they felt that there were leaks of confidentiality coming out of closed session. Closed session is usually about, you're usually in closed session because of a personnel issue, a strong budgetary issue, a legal issue, or a student individual student issue, really, really, really important. This is the second biggest reason why boards end up in lawsuits is leaks of confidentiality from closed session. Sometimes well-meaning, you know, the example I always give is when I was a board member, we were closed session talking about elevating, it was a personnel issue, talking about some candidates to become a principal of our middle school. And one person's name was brought up and one of our board members just inadvertently, I think, said, I don't know if we should consider that person for the principalship right now because she's battling cancer. And you can't unsay that, right? Once you say that, we can't unhear it. So did that influence our decision to not give her the principalship? I can't say whether it did or it didn't, but it could have. And years later, this teacher who did not become the principal heard that that conversation happened in closed session. It was leaked by someone. I don't know who. But we were sued for a lot of money because there was a perception. And it was true. When the grand jury called me and said, did you have this conversation in closed session? I said, yeah, we did. Another board member brought it up. It was, I couldn't unhear it. Did it influence your decision? I said, I really don't know, but it may have. So I had to tell the truth and testify that, you know, this actually happened and it cost our district a lot of money. And I don't think it was ill-intended. I think it was out of concern for this teacher, but that kind of breach of confidentiality from our closed session can get back to that teacher whose life it affected, right? So very, very important that your conversations in closed session Do not get shared with anyone, even your spouse or your closest friend. Really important to keep confidential matters confidential. Take collective responsibility for board members standing behind the decisions of the majority of the board. So we talked about this one. Here's what I want to say. This one's a hard one to follow all the time because sometimes there are going to be issues that personally and because of your affiliations in the community, you might not be able to get behind, right? So what I say to this norm is if you can't get behind the vote of your board, if you can't, for whatever reason, stand behind the vote of the majority of the board, at the very least, you need to not be an impediment to the implementation of the vote of the majority. That means you don't go out on Facebook and say, I don't disagree with what the board has voted on. I think they're crazy in doing this, and I don't think it should happen. That's being an impediment to the vote of the majority. So if you can't get behind it, it's OK. You just take the responsibility, the collective responsibility, and don't be an impediment for moving forward. Reporters would call me and say, hey, Deb, and this happened often. Remember, I was a 27-year-old woman on a school board for almost 10 years with four other people who were all 60-year-old males. I had a very difference of opinion on a lot of subjects from them. And so when the reporters would call me and say, hey, Deb, that thing that you really wanted to get passed, how do you feel that it was four to one? And I would say, well, you heard what I had to say during board deliberation. And out of respect for my fellow board members, I won't be an impediment to it moving forward. It's going to go, it's going to go, it's going to happen. And I'm not going to stand in its way. Right? I didn't say I'm behind it. Sometimes I would, you know, if I felt like I could get behind it, I would say I'm behind the vote of the board. But if I didn't, I would just say, I'm not going to be an impediment to it moving forward. You heard what I had to say during board deliberation. That's the only time that we agree to disagree. Once the vote's taken, I don't want to make a comment about it. Does anybody have a question about these two norms? Or are they pretty clear? Are we good? Aiden, did you have something?

[11087] Aiden Hill: So it sounds like what you're saying is that we might consider modifying this language slightly, you know, just to say that, you know, we may respectfully disagree. However, we're going to ultimately support the, you know, the majority of the board in their decision.

[11102] SPEAKER_14: I believe we have it in an upcoming protocol. I believe it was important enough to put in a norm as well as an upcoming protocol. So yeah. Okay. Okay. Number six, everybody's okay with that?

[11121] Elisa Martinez: Doesn't mean that we always follow it. I always follow it. But absolutely, it's something to strive for. Absolutely.

[11132] SPEAKER_14: Okay. Number seven. This was a good one that you guys started implementing. So instead of having a lot of battling dialogue, the board president before you, Bowen, and I think you do this too, say, what I think I hear you saying is, trying to clarify what people were saying so that there was a common understanding. In marriage counseling, I've been to marriage counseling. How many of you have been to marriage counseling? In marriage counseling, they call it mirroring, where you say to your partner, what I think I hear you saying is, you don't like it when I leave wet towels on the floor, right? And so you mirror what you think you hear them saying so that you can have a common understanding of what the other person is trying to accomplish. So I think this is a very good practice. Number eight and nine, I think no one could disagree with. You want to talk straight. And you want to don't take disagreements personally. They're just, it's business is business, right? We all have our opinions. Number 10. I love this one, because this was not happening sometimes, guys. And what I saw, even in your board meeting from this week, is that you give specific and constructive direction. You know, this is what we want to have happen. Can you come back to us with this information? Instead of going round and round about philosophical things, you're giving specific and constructive direction. Everybody good with 10 and 11?

[11248] Penny DeLeon: Any questions? OK.

[11256] Aiden Hill: Hold on.

[11258] SPEAKER_14: Want to go back? Go ahead.

[11260] Aiden Hill: Go ahead, Alicia.

[11261] Elisa Martinez: Oh, I was just gonna say, I think, emphasize this, you know, us taking the time to ask cabinet some questions before, before the meeting. I think that's, we've come a long way from where when we first got on the board, I think, right, Bowen? I mean, I think we're doing trying to do a lot of that. I think something you mentioned earlier that we don't always do is we don't repeat some of those questions sometimes for the sake of time efficiency. So our community isn't seeing that we are asking those questions. So right, I mean, I know that I'll quote an anonymous source that says, we just like to play nicey nice with our cabinet. It appears that way because we've already gotten some questions answered. So I think maybe that's something we all need to try to do a little bit more of. or somehow allude to the fact that these are some issues or questions that have already been answered, just so that folks know that that's happening.

[11324] SPEAKER_14: So let me give you a strategy that I just, the board I worked with two nights ago has implemented that might work for you. So I know you guys have, and I think, at least I think you do, that when you ask, when board members ask questions offline, like so when you email, the superintendent, your questions regarding the agenda, things that are on the agenda. Mark, do you or your executive assistant copy all board members on those questions asked and the answers?

[11353] Mark Triplett: Not identifying who asked that, but you do. That's correct. So we collect up all the questions, and then we send out a response to all the questions to the board members collectively. So we don't answer the questions to an individual. We answer the questions to the whole board.

[11373] SPEAKER_14: Which is a perfect practice. The board that I worked with a couple of nights ago has gone a step beyond that and has provided that document as part of the board packet. right before the board meeting. So as an addendum, an attachment to the board packet. So that might be worth doing to show the community the kinds of questions that are being asked by board members and the answers that are being shared with all board members so that they can see the due diligence that you're doing and the questions that are being asked and answered ahead of the board meeting so they don't think it's just a rubber stamp. And also that board has, the board president especially has said, If the community is interested in the kinds of questions we had, please refer to the addendum that's in our current board packet or that was attached to the agenda so that they can see the thoughtful process that took place prior to this vote.

[11427] Mark Triplett: Yeah, I think that's a great idea, which we don't do, but I think we could. The only caveat I would say is just making sure the public understands that we're getting these questions and we're trying to field answers. And so sometimes the response doesn't come out until the day of the board meeting.

[11446] SPEAKER_14: Well, that's when they're attaching it. It would be like if you were in person, they have it at the door for all those people attending the meeting, right? The question and answer packet. So you don't have to put that out. It's an addendum to the agenda. You don't have to put it out until you call the meeting to order basically.

[11464] Mark Triplett: Yeah, I will say it's super helpful from a staff perspective to get for board members to have really looked through the materials and then ask the questions in advance. It's really helpful to us because then we can better understand what we might not have made clear and really helps us with presentations. I do think it's worthwhile talking about the type of questions that we're talking about, because if it's a factual, like, need to better understand, clarify question, that makes sense. If it's more like a discussion question, like, almost like a question that would start an open discussion. That's really, really challenging to address in an email. And none of the board members, I haven't experienced that from any board members, so it's been great. But I just wanna get clear on the types of questions that are possible to respond to.

[11533] SPEAKER_14: Sometimes you're right. I have superintendents. I've seen these questions and answer forms. And superintendents will say, board member asks, shouldn't we be thinking about X, Y, and Z? And the superintendent's response is, please bring this up at the board meeting for open discussion.

[11549] Elisa Martinez: I don't know if we should be thinking about that. I may be guilty of that once or twice.

[11556] SPEAKER_14: I don't know. You tell me. Let's have a discussion at the board level and see if we should be.

[11563] Elisa Martinez: We're all learning.

[11564] Phuong Nguyen: Absolutely. And then there's always questions that provoke additional questions, you know, during discussions.

[11575] SPEAKER_14: That's going to happen, Fong. And so I like to say, you know, what I would ask the staff, like, oh, my gosh, I would say to the staff, I'm really sorry, this just occurred to me, I probably should have asked this before the meeting. But Aiden asked a question. And it made me think of a question. Because his question got my mind going. What about this? I know you might not be prepared to answer this. But could you get back to me about this right so but you know let staff know that you wish you would have asked that one beforehand but you just happen to think about it so they don't get the feeling like you're trying to catch them without an answer ready but they know that it's just it just came up and by all means ask it and and if they don't have the answer you're you're open to waiting 24 hours till they can get it or However long a time it takes them to get it.

[11620] Phuong Nguyen: So yeah. So I said, right when I first started being on the board, one of our council members, member Hannon, he from the city, he always said to us, and I think it was really great advice, was like, always be prepared. And he said, yes, you should. Remember to have questions, ask staff questions before the meeting. And then, like you said, reiterate those questions in public so that the public knows. That you guys had discussion and questions and that staff had answered them and then allow staff to answer them. And he also. and feel unprepared. So I think that's really important.

[11671] SPEAKER_14: Well yes Feng you're right because all of that builds community confidence. You know if the community sees you ask a question and staff is prepared with the answer they go wow that the board's really thinking about stuff. They're really looking at you know they're looking at making sure that all of our I's are dotted and T's are crossed and staff was ready and they were prepared to answer that question. So obviously they thought about it too and and all of that really instills confidence in your community that you're working together as a team, that you're a high-functioning group of individuals, and that you're thoughtful in the decisions you're making. Elisa, did I see your hand up? No, you're good.

[11709] Aiden Hill: Okay. I have my hand up.

[11711] SPEAKER_14: Okay.

[11712] Aiden Hill: So yeah, two questions and then possibly a suggestion. So the first question is, I don't know what the cabinet is. And then the second question is, do we have a timeline for when we should be publishing the agenda, kind of a standard timeline? And from your experience, Deb, is there kind of a best practice around how far in advance the agenda should be published?

[11738] SPEAKER_14: I will let Mark and Maria address that because that is in state statute, in law. So Mark, do you want to talk about that or Maria?

[11748] Mark Triplett: Yes, thank you. Yes, so we publish, by law, we publish the board agenda on Mondays for the Thursday meeting. And then in terms of, sorry, what was the second part of the question, Aiden?

[11764] SPEAKER_14: Is there a state statute or is it a best practice? It's not a best practice. It's a state statute. It has to be published 72 hours prior to the meeting. Unless it's a special meeting like this, it's a workshop that has no action. If it's a workshop with no action, you can publish it as late as 24 hours before the meeting. So regular board meetings that are actionable, 72 hours. Special meetings, you could publish it as late as 24 hours, but I always suggest Just publish all your agendas 72 hours ahead of time. It gets the community used to seeing them three days ahead. Phuong, did you have a question?

[11800] Phuong Nguyen: Yeah, so for instance, we just had a holiday before our last meeting. So should the agenda be posted the Friday before? Or does that not apply?

[11813] SPEAKER_14: It doesn't apply. 72 hours is the law. I don't think it applies if it's a holiday or non-holiday.

[11819] Aiden Hill: What's the cabinet?

[11821] Mark Triplett: Oh, and that was the other question that I knew there was another one. The cabinet is executive cabinet is my my executive team. And people on that as chief business officer, the HR executive director, and then the assistant superintendent of education services. Okay, great.

[11842] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, that's typical. Okay. The only other exception, aiding to not publishing an agenda, is if you have an emergency meeting. Let's say you have a, you know, with COVID you probably had a few emergency meetings or a school caught fire and you had to close school for a while or something. You had an emergency meeting, you don't have to publish that 24 hours ahead of time. You can call an emergency meeting for an hour from now and it's okay because it's an emergency. So that's the only exception to that rule. Great, thank you. But I do want you to talk about, Mark, what is your practice with, OK, the agenda is published on Monday. Your meeting's on Thursday. Do you have a timeline for when you want all board member questions so you can answer them prior to the meeting? What's the agreed upon timeline between publishing? And is there an agenda review process prior to publishing? And who does that?

[11898] Mark Triplett: Prior to publishing the agenda?

[11900] Nicole Izant: Yeah.

[11901] Mark Triplett: Yes. So we have all our agenda review meetings. And that is with executive cabinet, myself, and board president, and one other member that is on a rotating basis. And those happen on Fridays. And then that's the final review of the agenda. And then we post it on Mondays. So everything needs to be prepared and up on board docs by Friday so that the board president and the additional rotating board member can see those when we go through the review of the agenda. And then we post it on Monday. And then we don't actually have an official deadline for questions. In general, board members are looking at the agenda. My sense is that people look at it almost right after it was posted, and then start asking questions. And so we normally receive questions Tuesday and Wednesday. And then we try to put out a response by Wednesday evening, if possible.

[11970] SPEAKER_14: Okay. Does the whole board have access to agenda online or board docs on Friday when the sample is published?

[11979] Mark Triplett: No, no, that's the board president reviews those with us as a team and with the rotating board member.

[11987] SPEAKER_14: OK, just curious. All right. I would say that you probably should have I would just advise you that you probably should have a goal that all board members have their questions in no later than Wednesday morning, like Wednesday before 11. So it gives you the time to be able to work for a couple of reasons. You want to at least make sure that it's in the hands of, or the questions are answered hopefully by Wednesday night and in the hands of all the board members a day prior to them coming to the board meeting so that they can look at everybody else's questions and make, and also so that you have some idea of, you know, when you're going to get them all or when to, your executive assistant has an idea when they compile the final questions answer document kind of thing. If you have a late one coming in, I know you're scrambling right before the board meeting. sometimes to provide that information to the rest of the board. So whatever the timeline is that works for you, I would just suggest you kind of put that out there.

[12046] Mark Triplett: Yeah, I think that's a good timeline. And actually, that's really what everyone follows. But it's good to institutionalize it.

[12055] Aiden Hill: And then one other question. The rotating board member, is that something that we voted on when we seated the new board? And if so, because I can't recall that. And if so, who is that?

[12067] Bowen Zhang: It is, it is not. So let me chime in on that. So that part of the thing is not voted on. It's not, you know, it's not part of our governance handbook. So there used to be a time, maybe five, 10 years ago, where the agenda setting is always the president and the clerk. So the president, the vice president. However, four or five years ago, there was somehow a break. Also not being approved by the board. It's just somehow a break, an arbitrary break from that protocol. So it started becoming board president plus a rotating member every two weeks. So it's a round robin rotation for the other four board members. And that tradition just, I guess, just continued until today.

[12115] SPEAKER_14: So I can tell you where it came from. It was your former board president attended my board president's training, and it's a suggested best practice. that it be not the board president and the vice president, but that each board member on the board be allowed to rotate into agenda setting on a rotating basis. So this month it might be Elisa, next month is Fong, next month it's Aiden, the next month it's Terrence. So that you rotate in because our goal is that at any point in time, any board member is prepared to be board president. Say you were to step down tomorrow, Bowen, the rest of your board has all sat in on agenda setting at some point in time, and they all are prepared to be board presidents. It was the best practice I suggested to your former president, and that's when they started implementing it.

[12164] Bowen Zhang: Yeah, I think that's been the practice in the past probably three, four years.

[12168] Maria Huffer: Yeah, yeah.

[12169] Bowen Zhang: And speaking of rotation, I believe next Friday it will be you, Aiden, with me setting up the agenda. OK, for the next month? No, just for the meeting on February the 4th.

[12182] Aiden Hill: So what, so is this something that maybe we can, I mean, I don't know if we have to do this in regular open session, but can we maybe revisit this policy kind of per what Deb is saying? And, you know, cause it sounds like what Deb, what you're saying is kind of the best practice is to do it, not just once a Tuesday, but you know, like on a monthly basis.

[12202] SPEAKER_14: Oh, I, it is, that's exactly what I'm saying. And that's exactly what he's doing currently. So we could put.

[12207] Bowen Zhang: No, what current is happening in the rotation doesn't happen per month. It happens per meeting. Per meeting.

[12214] SPEAKER_14: I'm sorry, per meeting. Not per month. Some boards only have one meeting a month. As I was saying, rotated in every month. Every board member is rotated in per meeting. So you might be this agenda. Elisa might be the next agenda. Fong might be the next agenda.

[12229] Aiden Hill: Yes. OK. I understand.

[12231] SPEAKER_14: OK. So we already kind of covered this request for information and when it's appropriate.

[12242] Aiden Hill: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Sorry. Just one last. If we do have items that we want to have added to the agenda as board members, do we then rotate? I mean, we then send that message email to the board president and the rotating member?

[12260] SPEAKER_14: Just the board president. Okay. Let's talk about that. Go ahead, Bowen.

[12266] Bowen Zhang: Another powerful tool is what happened two days ago when you, during the board request, you asked for a request we put into a future agenda, and then the majority of the board agreed on that. Then after that, that will be put into a future, it will be part of the future agenda at a board meeting. I think that's like a more common tool to use for board members.

[12287] SPEAKER_14: So what's been happening, Aiden, when you and I talked on the phone, it was before I talked to Bowen, so I didn't realize that what was sort of happening that I didn't know, isn't in your protocols, is that there are two ways you can get something on the agenda. You can make a formal request to the board president. That's the best practice way, right? Formal email request to the board president to have something agendized. But also you guys agreed that if a board member requests something be on the agenda and it has consensus of the board, it would be agendized. So there are two ways. that something can get on the agenda by formal request and by board consensus.

[12327] Mark Triplett: And it would be a request to the board president and the superintendent, is that correct?

[12331] SPEAKER_14: Yes, correct. Board president and superintendent, yeah. Or if it just goes to the board president, he should copy you, Mark, but should. Formally, yes. Board president and superintendent.

[12339] Terrence Grindall: Okay. Shouldn't the process of having a rotating member be documented somewhere? Or is this just up to the whim of the board president?

[12354] SPEAKER_14: Terrence, it's usually up to the purview of the board president how they want the agenda set.

[12360] Bowen Zhang: So actually, I can make how the rotation works. At least, I don't know the rotation algorithm for last year. But for this year, the rotation was the reverse order when I called for the vote. Remember, like, when I call for the vote in a meeting, I use the seniority to the present, the least senior person got called first. So that will be, after a student member will be member Martinez, then it's member Grindell, member Hill, and member Nguyen. The rotation is the opposite order. So after member Nguyen will be member Hill. After member Hill will be member Grindell, then member Martinez, then back to member Nguyen. So you're gonna get called every four meetings.

[12405] Elisa Martinez: But I think, I'm sorry, I think, Number Grendel, I think you have a good point. So we haven't formally changed our governance handbook. We've got and I think this is what, Deb, you're referencing the materials we agreed upon the last time we were together as a board with regards to protocols and norms in 2019. That's when we talked about this rotation. The formal In the last governance handbook that was formalized without I mean we're really a two years in 100% turnover in the board. Right. So, but the last time that this was formalized, if you will, in the in the governance handbook. was, I think, was the president and vice president. When we last met and we've got this draft protocols, that's when we determined. And then there's the next level of detail, which is what President Jiang is talking about, which is, and by the way, this is how I'm going to follow that sequence, right? But I think that's part of what we're wanting to do today is do we, in essence, agree that that's what we want to continue to do, and then that becomes formalized, right? And then, of course, the president will execute on that sequence.

[12475] SPEAKER_14: Incorrectly, so if you guys decided today that you you're comfortable with that and we haven't gotten to protocols yet. I'm sorry. We're having good conversations. We're running a little behind, but that's all right. If you decide that that's what you want to do in these conversations, I will give you the sample protocol for that rotation. Okay, and we'll make it part of the draft governance handbook that eventually you adopt. So you're absolutely right. Bowen, I will say this to you. You're really lucky that you have a lot of board members who want to participate in the agenda setting because most board presidents are just who's available on Friday. you know like that's how they rotate in who's ever available on Friday and can make it this shows up so if you if it's your turn like Aidan if it's your turn and you have a conflict then pass it off to whoever else is available and then make say but I'm going to take my turn the following Friday right so it doesn't have to be as formal as Bowen said where it's by you know yeah yeah minority because sometimes you're just not going to be available to be able to sit in on it you can pass on your turn and take it up next time

[12539] Mark Triplett: Yeah, and there is a standard time, 10 a.m. on Friday, just so that we have a regular, we can all schedule it accordingly.

[12550] Aiden Hill: And just one clarification, when the agenda is being, that meeting, that we're specifically talking about the agenda for the following week. Yes. It's not, and so we're determining what items will be discussed in the following week, but not out in the future, correct? That's right. And then what happens if there's an item that comes up that maybe is going to take, you know, staff, a longer time to kind of address. How is that handled?

[12579] SPEAKER_14: You usually request that it be agendized and staff can come back to you and tell you when they could have the information necessary to put it on the agenda and give you a timeline idea.

[12588] Mark Triplett: Okay. Yeah. And can I say, I appreciated what President Jun said about the way that we do it at the board meeting, at the end of the board meeting where board members are able to make requests and then get consensus from the board. I think that is really nice because it also then allows the public to hear what's being articulated and requested. And so then it doesn't feel like agendas are being made somehow in secret or whatever. So I would recommend, and I don't know, Deb, if this would be something that we need to just get a vote on or a consensus on, but that we continue with that policy that President Jun was just articulating. I feel like it's what's best for both the public and the board members, because then everybody can hear it. Everyone's clear on it.

[12645] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, I'll put it in the form of a simple protocol in the handbook. They annotated handbook I give back to your to you, Mark and your executive assistant. And so they can you can wordsmith it, and then bring it up to the board for adoption. Okay. Okay, from our last time we were together, the board articulated what they need from the superintendent. And so I would like any of you to chime in on anything you want to add to this, if anything at all. Go ahead, just speak up. I'm writing. Anything else you want to put on this list of things that you need from the superintendent so that Mark understands very clearly what you as a board need from him?

[12704] Aiden Hill: I think from my perspective, Deb, I think it looks good. But I think that this should be, you know, be an ongoing conversation. I mean, not like every week or something like that. But maybe when we get into summer, you know, maybe we look and say, okay, you know, is this everything we need? Or is there something additional? And then also for the superintendent to be able to come back to the board and say, this is what I need from you guys.

[12725] SPEAKER_14: Aha, that's the next slide, Aiden. You're one step ahead. I'm one step ahead of you. So here's what the superintendent said, and it wasn't Mark. So that's why I wanted Mark to take a look and say, Mark, what else do you think you need from the board besides these things?

[12741] Mark Triplett: Yeah, thank you. I would say, and I think that I would expect that board members probably want this from me too, is no surprises, or at least as much as possible. No sort of hijacking or anything like that. We're a team, and we all want the same thing. And so the more that we can support each other, the better.

[12770] SPEAKER_14: The thing I always tell you to add to both lists, if not physically on the list, but mentally, presumption of best intentions. I'd like for you all to presume that if Mark comes to you with a request or a piece of information, he has the best intentions of our students and our district at heart. And I'd like for Mark to think about when an individual board member comes to you with an idea or concern or question, that it's presumed that they have the best intentions in mind. that they just want to clarify it because they're being asked this in the community, or they really care about the kids of the district, and that's why they're asking the question. So presumption of best intentions, I think I'd like to put on both lists, because I think it's a mindset, right?

[12815] Mark Triplett: It's a mindset. Could I add one other one? Sure. I think, and maybe this, I don't know if this is the right spot to put it, but it's really helpful to come to get from the board the voices of as much of the community as possible. So, you know, we all know that we have certain small group of voices that are particularly vociferous and that's, those are important, but a handful of people does not represent the full community. And so the more that the board can seek the voices of all of the community, and particularly, I always think about whose voice is not in the room, and how do I go out and seek that voice? Because those tend to be the people that are most underrepresented, the people that are usually farthest from opportunity. And so I really appreciate the board seeking those voices and communicating those to me. And that's what I try to do too, is I try to really seek out those voices.

[12892] Bowen Zhang: One small advice that I want to give to the superintendent or even other board members. I think when it comes to seeking out other voices, I think the meet Dr. Mark in the park is a great event, a great activity. I think when the pandemic's over, it may very well serve you well to do the most basic thing, which is try to start knocking on doors if you have time. You have to address, I mean, I'm pretty sure the district have to de-address and the contact information of certain parents that you think were never visible in our boardroom or never heard in our community. So sometimes doing this, doing the basic, the most rudimentary things sometimes can give you the best outcome.

[12940] SPEAKER_14: Well, like I talked about earlier, Bob, when I said that board showed up at the soccer field, right? Because soccer was the main social activity for that small community and really sought out those other voices. And yes, it's so important and so hard to put yourself in the mindset that these five people or 10 people who showed up at our board meeting are just a very small microcosm of our community. And yes, their voices are loud, but they don't speak for everyone. And really, really to seek out other people in your community who may have contrary opinions. And again, distill all that down into your decision-making process. Elisa, did you have something you wanted to add?

[12984] Elisa Martinez: I did. First of all, I did write down your bottle idea, water bottle idea. I mean, it's one idea, and we all have the best intentions, and then we get busy and we work, and then we don't get those other voices. So it's really easy to get swayed to Superintendent Triplett by the loud minority, right? But where I originally wanted to, where I raised my hand was, I'm watching the clock, and one thing we haven't done is we haven't heard from student member Salemi. And as we're hearing each other, what we expect of each other, I don't know how much more time we have, but I would love to just kind of get his take on, you know, hey, are we missing some, some just obvious things that we should be expecting of each other? Or hey, what do you expect of us student members? So let me to make sure that we don't forget that who we're serving. And I say that because the last time we met Deb, I think it was a longer timeframe and we spent quite a bit of time with hearing from our student member. student board member. So I just want to make sure we carve out a little bit of time.

[13053] SPEAKER_14: You're right. We had six hours, but a six hour zoom meeting is like zoom meeting from hell. So we just can't do it. We can't do four hours. So yes, I condensed a lot of stuff, but I would love to hear from student board members. So let me go ahead.

[13077] SPEAKER_36: My mic wasn't working. Well, I think that all of the things that we are seeing, I agree that those are really important things in terms of practices that we keep between us. But maybe something that I would expect more than anything is information, a good amount of information. Because I know that, and I realize this, I don't have a weighted vote. but I do have an important, I guess, voice. And that is something that I do feel is recognized, but maybe in getting that information, so when I'm deliberating something or I'm trying to bring up something or whatever it is that I'm making an informed decision or I'm not kind of left in the dark, so to say, that's really important. And I was thinking of bringing this up you know, if I, if I say I leave this role for whoever comes next, because they, I think I know a lot of information, right? Like a lot of the rules, a lot of the way that things work, but there might be a student that doesn't. And I see that I, sometimes I know more than even some of the adults in the room in terms of like the rules and stuff. And that just tells me that, Hey, I knew coming into this, right? So a lot of the things, because I was that type of person to pay attention, to learn. But there are things that I don't know. and maybe like the questions that other board, the board asks, if I get those questions too, even if I don't ask the question that week or whatever it is. And then the second thing would be just, and I think Dr. Triplett does a good job of establishing communication, but not just for me, but in terms of the student body in general, just having that communication with the community and with myself, that's very important. And that's it for me.

[13194] SPEAKER_14: That's great. Thank you for sharing. So guys, out of respect for all of you and the time we have left, which is not much, believe it or not already, we're only supposed to go to one, is I'd like to, with your permission, go back to the first slide of what you hope to accomplish, because I know we're not going to make it through the protocols. So I want to make sure that we go back to the first slide and see if we've accomplished all those things. And if not, let's address them real quick before we leave. So let me go to this also a point of order the special meeting actually can be extended for for like 30 minutes when we kind of have a vote to extend the meeting a little bit right well let's see where we get to unfortunately you guys i have another workshop tonight that um starts right after yours ends so i don't have i don't have the ability to do that i only have a 15 minute window in between Okay. They're working me to death, Bowen, I'm telling you. And it's not as easy as this group. It's a much more difficult group. So I need that 15 minute break to eat a sandwich. Anyway, so your objectives, we talked about governance team. So I think we covered number one. What do we do when individual board members don't trust a decision? I think this is an important one to talk about or trust a trust information. What do we do? What do we do currently?

[13286] Elisa Martinez: Well, we challenge it. I mean, sorry, President.

[13296] Phuong Nguyen: Go ahead. No, we're supposed to trust it and move forward and support the implementation of the majority of the board.

[13306] Elisa Martinez: Sorry, I was responding to your question. What if we don't trust the information? I thought I heard you say that. The decision is we got to support it.

[13317] SPEAKER_14: So if you don't trust the information or like, again, I'm going to say this, I've said it a hundred times. New board members have inherited a lot of stuff. They may not have been privy to all the decisions that you made and all the discussion you had in an area before they came on board. So what I encourage them to do is if you don't trust a decision the board made or you don't trust in information that you're getting, sit down with your superintendent and your board president or one or both of them together and ask the questions that you need to ask in order to be comfortable with making a decision on anything that you have to vote on. That's your job. They can't know what questions are in your mind. So it's really important that individual board members sit down with their superintendent or their board president or both and get their questions answered about how did we come to this conclusion? Why did we make this decision? What is this information credible? Did we look at all of these things? So really, really important that you each take personal responsibility to get your questions answered and get the information that you feel that you need by making a one-on-one outreach to your superintendent.

[13390] Aiden Hill: One of the things, Deb, and I think that this is connected to the next point right there, is there's always a situation where new information can appear. And so how do we respond to that? And I think that there was some frustration that was expressed at the last meeting about making rush decisions. And so what's the process if we feel that we don't have enough information yet to make a decision, how do we respond and address that?

[13420] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, so Aiden, what I would do as a board member is I would ask if it was something we had to make a decision on that night, Okay, so this arose certainly in my 14 years of being a board member. Superintendent Triplett, do we have to make a decision on this tonight? Is this imperative or we don't get the funding or it's against state statute if we don't make a decision on it? If it's not something you have to make a decision on that night, you can make a motion to pull that item from the agenda. And until you feel comfortable voting on it or until your questions are answered and put it on the next board meeting agenda. Now that takes board consensus, but you can make a motion. Because if other if you feel that way, chances are, maybe some of your other board members feel that way too. and they would like to have that item moved from the agenda. So that's the thing I'll say to you guys about an agenda. Just because an agenda is presented to you, it does not mean that you have to take action on the action items on that agenda or discuss the items on the agenda if you don't have consensus of the board. You notice at the beginning of the meeting, Bowen said, do I have a motion to accept the agenda as given to us? and there was a motion and a second and you all voted to accept it. This could be the case if you see something on the agenda that you don't have enough information on, you can say that exact thing. And there were many times that I felt that way. I felt like we have not had enough. I'm hearing from the community. They are not comfortable with us voting on this right now. We need to have a community workshop on this issue or I need more information and we need to determine what our next steps are. But I in good conscience, cannot vote on this right now because I'm not informed well enough.

[13523] Aiden Hill: And also what can happen is that not only may you get community feedback prior to the meeting, and obviously if you get that, you can make a decision at the beginning to say, I don't think that we should agendize this one particular thing. But during the public comment period, there may be new information that gets presented where it's maybe important to listen to it and to reflect on it before making a decision.

[13548] SPEAKER_14: Yeah. So you have that ability, but you don't have the authority as an individual board member to ask something to be pulled, but you do have the authority to make a motion and seeing if you can get some acceptance from your fellow board to pull it from the agenda. So you do have that ability to do that. Sure.

[13562] Mark Triplett: And Deb, can I add, in addition to that, which I think is really important to note, is that proactively, like really diving deep into all the items after they're posted on Monday and really seeing like, OK, does this make sense to me? Do I have any questions? Do I have any doubts? please, board members, that's the place to then reach out to me, ask me questions, because not only could I try to answer and have my staff answer the questions in advance, but then also that could help shape how we present something when it gets to, on Thursday, to answer those questions, so then board members don't have to feel like I don't have enough information yet.

[13607] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, good. I really want to dive into the second one, guys. Bowen, I don't know how this started, but I've never worked with a board that makes a motion before there's deliberation. I don't know where that came from.

[13619] Bowen Zhang: So I'll give you a little bit of history. I think when I first got on the board, what we were doing is the items come on, and then the staff presentation first, public comment second, board deliberation third, and then at the end, somebody make a motion, and then we go to a up or down vote. roughly in the October or November of 2019, that was changed by, oh, maybe, yeah, maybe December.

[13644] Elisa Martinez: I think, Member Martinez, maybe you can chime in on how this... Yeah, let me speak to it, Member Zhang, because I know I did it. I made this change after the training we had with you, Deb, and it's on page nine of deliberation at board meetings, and What we, the problem that we were addressing right was that there was just, we were coming in and, and there was just a ton of discussion like the item we get to item 1.2 or whatever what 3.2. And then it would just be all sorts of discussion. And the meetings were going crazy long, right? And then eventually, it's like, OK, so what are we talking about? So, oh, superintendent, can you talk to us about what's going on? So there was no structure. That was kind of the problem we brought to you. And so I was speaking to the no experience under my belt in terms of parliamentary procedures and running the meetings. We talked about this. And the idea was that we would, you know, that the president calls for the motion in a second, with the intent that there was no second, right, the motion dies. Right. So then, and then so we got the motion in a second. And then we have, then we have public comment and conversation, questions answered, and then we call the question, right? That's basically the guidance that we got from you. And then, of course, you see it online everywhere as well and in governance training as well. So it's not like we pulled it out from the left field. It caused quite the stir in Newark, I will tell you, because, oh my God, we've always done it a certain way, right? So that's you know, not making it up. That's where it happened.

[13751] Bowen Zhang: I'm the first one to start this process.

[13761] SPEAKER_14: That guidance was specific to the consent agenda. That was not specific to other agenda items. That guidance was specific to the consent agenda, that there should be a motion in the second on the floor And it was because, Elisa, a lot of people were pulling things from the consent agenda. I want to discuss this item from consent. I want to discuss this item from consent. And so my guidance was, do that for the consent agenda. Have the consent agenda, have someone make a motion and a second to accept the consent agenda. And then if there's any public comment or discussion, kind of keep things a little closed down. pull one item or some items. Before that, you guys were discussing the entire consent agenda, every item on the consent agenda. So that was specific to the consent agenda. And if you wanna keep doing it that way, I'm not gonna tell you no, it's acceptable and it's within the guidelines of the law to do it that way. But I would suggest for items that are going to take board deliberation, that again, you don't make a motion up front, it's a staff report, it's public comment, it's board deliberation. And then the board president sort of directs this, once they hear everything that's happening in deliberation, they say, I think we've had a lot of deliberation. What I think I hear you saying is we're going in this direction. Would anybody like to make a motion? And then there's a second. But so many people told me they were uncomfortable with it on every item. But I still do suggest that if you're having issues with the consent agenda, you handle it that way. But it's up to you.

[13854] Bowen Zhang: So I got to mention one extreme example of that. That was the moment where I really well, that really just hit home. I say this is really awkward is when we decide to vote on closing schools. So on that item, before we open up, even though obviously we did a lot of study already, we have a committee that went through several months, but on the item about closing school, just to start that discussion, the one board member I need to make a motion, I move to close these two schools. And then we started, so you need to express that, I move to close these two schools. And then we started a discussion, the presentation of public comment, blah, blah, blah. And then at the end, I mean, at the end, we indeed closed the two-school minimum. But that was the moment where I really, hey, I don't even know how to make a motion to start this discussion. Because I really don't want to start out and say, I'm closing these two schools, get a second, and let's start discussing this.

[13901] Elisa Martinez: Right. And so that's why the action, how the action is written, is so important. Look, at the end of the day, and there's been this sense that Elisa wants it this way, and then she's a control freak. Absolutely not. The intent was to bring order, and I, you know, and Deb, you know, completely, and I, you know, Lucia was a board member, so I don't want to bring her into this discussion, but I think clearly we've miscrossed. However, Like I said, you're not the only source, right? We've gone through a master's in governance for this. This is something and a member. Yeah. Member Wynn was there. Lucia, when she was a board member as well. And then there's videos, and I think I may have sent you one, Bowen. So my only point is we're not married to this. The whole value of asking for the motion up front from what we heard in governance training is that if there is no support for that, that the motion dies and we don't spend discussion on it. So that's the whole reason why If we, as a group, want to change that and we're saying, hey, we are committed that we're going to talk about it, whether it's going to go or not, then I'm OK with that. But I want to make sure that everybody understands that this is something that's a practice that Newark didn't make up out on their own. And so that if we want to modify it, absolutely. But I think that we've got really good order and structure, but President Jean, you as president, you know, if there's more efficient ways to do this and effective, then I think absolutely, you know, let's have that discussion and let's make the modifications.

[14011] SPEAKER_14: And I wouldn't say, I wouldn't even modify it. I wouldn't have a hard and fast rule. Sometimes something's going to be on the agenda that you all have discussed a lot in a prior meeting or whatever. And it's just rudimentary. You're going to feel comfortable that, you know, I'm going to, Terrence is just going to make a motion to accept, you know, this reward that we're getting. Like when you're going to say, we accept this grant that we've been given from an organization. There doesn't need to be robust discussion around that. It's just like Terrence, yes, I make a motion to accept the grant money. Ms. Martinez, you second the motion. I second it. We all, all those in favor. I mean, there's some things where you don't need to follow a hard and fast rule. You're just going to make a motion and accept it because it's rudimentary. So I'd say don't change anything. Just a board president know that you have the flexibility to allow a motion to happen right at the beginning of a, of a, discussion item or action item or after for deliberation?

[14070] Bowen Zhang: Yeah, I want to comment on our surrounding district. I've looked at our surrounding district to try to see the Fremont and Alameda. I see two patterns. One pattern is presentation first, public comments or discussion, question, discussion and motion. That's one pattern. The second pattern I see, I think that one is even more elegant, is presentation first. Board questioning second. Only questioning, no comments. Then public comment. Then back to board discussion comment. Discussion comment, no question anymore. And then final motion. So I see like four stages and five stages. But I guess Fremont is using the first one. I think there's another district that's using the second one where they have five stages. They separate questioning from comments. But I was in Alameda County at least. I think other districts are probably doing the motion last.

[14120] Terrence Grindall: Bowen, the challenge with the four-step process is that the chair needs to make sure that the questions are just questions.

[14132] Bowen Zhang: You mean the four-step or the five-step?

[14135] Terrence Grindall: Well, whatever. If you do report, then board questions, and then public comment, and then deliberation, that it's a it's a bit of a it's a good it's a good process but the chair needs to make sure that the questions are really questions sometimes people start yeah yeah i think i think i think i'm fine with keeping questions comments and discussion the same stage because we will have a mix of them

[14163] Bowen Zhang: Watching the time, I think we probably need to, I mean, even we have two more little items before the training. So we need to move to extend the meeting. We probably don't need 30 minutes, but I will move to extend the meeting to 1.30 PM.

[14175] Phuong Nguyen: Can I get a motion? Deb can't stay.

[14177] Bowen Zhang: I can't stay, but I would if I could. We have four requests and four acknowledgments after this. So this is not the last item on our board meeting. So I'm calling the motion to extend the meeting to 1.30. Can I get a second?

[14191] Chery Villa: A second.

[14193] Bowen Zhang: Member, student member Salami, how do you vote?

[14196] SPEAKER_36: Yes.

[14197] Bowen Zhang: Member Martinez? Yes. Member Grindel? Yes. Member Hill? Yes. Member Nguyen? Yes. My vote is yes as well. Motion carries unanimously. Meeting will be extended to 1.30. Okay, one more minute.

[14210] SPEAKER_14: I'm going to take five more minutes and that's all. Sorry, I wish I could stay with you but I can't. But I think it was important to talk about one of the questions. The only one I looked through this list that we haven't addressed is the minutes. A couple of you had questions about the minutes. And so I expressed to you that the only legal, I saw you, I went through your requirements for minutes, they're in order. So maybe superintendent, you want to provide those to the rest of the group for further discussion. And then you guys can discuss what you want included in the minutes, but what is detailed in what you're, currently reporting in the minutes and your guidelines for minutes are perfectly within regular guidelines. And so usually it's just recording, you know, action items and who voted which way, how people voted. And I would encourage your community to be aware that they can, again, watch these live on YouTube or watch the recorded versions of them if they want additional detail about discussion, but most boards, in fact, many boards who Who do like court reporting and record every word of the minutes.

[14278] Aiden Hill: Yeah. And one thing. And obviously, Deb, you don't have time, but maybe you could pass along to us. But is, you know, so there's there's kind of, you know, maybe what a statute says or what kind of the minimum level of acceptability is. But then what but what's the best practice. Right. So we've all talked about how we want to be the best. We want to be the greatest. So what's the best practice and and obviously you know you'd like you say we're not looking for court reporter level, you know, discussion. But one thing, though, to keep in mind from my understanding is although there are statutes in place for how long printed minutes need to be kept there are they do not apply to video recordings. And so at some point those video recordings can, you know, disappear. And so obviously we want to have as robust a set of minutes that are meaningful so that they're a historical record and it can always be referred back to.

[14327] SPEAKER_14: Yeah. So take a look, Aiden. I would suggest that if the superintendent will provide you all with what I was provided with this morning, which is what your guidelines are for minutes, I think you might all be a little more comfortable with them because they're much more than just the minimum guidelines. So take a look at them.

[14343] Mark Triplett: The board did approve recently this idea of video recordings in perpetuity. And so that is something that is part of our board policy, if you will.

[14357] SPEAKER_14: Well, thank you all for having me. I wish we did have two more hours, but I know it would kill you. So next time when we can get together in person, we'll have plenty of time and I look forward to working with you again. And I hope you found today to be helpful. Thank you.

[14374] Phuong Nguyen: Thank you, Deb.

[14375] SPEAKER_14: Always a pleasure. Thank you, Deb. Appreciate it. I will close off by saying you all have my personal number because I called you. It's the only free thing you get from CSBA is a phone call to me anytime you want. You don't get charged for that, and I always return your calls. I'm here for you if you need anything or you need any guidance or even just need to vent. Just give a call, OK? OK.

[14395] Phuong Nguyen: Thank you. That's good.

[14396] SPEAKER_14: Thank you. Thanks, Deb. OK. Bye, guys. Bye.

[14405] Bowen Zhang: I guess that's it for our training session. Any other follow-up discussion that any board member want to make a comment on the training session we just did? Member Martinez?

[14416] Elisa Martinez: Yeah, you know, we just ran out of time, and I just wanted to touch on a point. I think it was Member Hill that mentioned, you know, the whole questions, and I think, Member Hill, you mentioned, you know, when we hear public comment from folks and we want that, that may change how we think. Absolutely, that it may, but I think we just want to be careful, and this is part of the guidance that is in our governance handbook, is we can't address, the only person that can address a comment is the board president. So, you know, member Jones has made a comment or makes a question, we can't say, hey, let's answer member Jones or per member Jones, we got to be very, very careful that Yes, we internalize it and maybe changes how we formulate our own questions, but really the only one that can speak for us with regards, if they choose to, is the board president. So that's just making sure we don't set a precedence of engaging directly with a community. I think that can, you know, is a slippery slope.

[14482] Aiden Hill: Yeah, and I'm not advocating for that, but what I am kind of advocating for is if there is new information that appears, that maybe we decide that we need to reflect on it before we take an action.

[14494] Phuong Nguyen: And is there a difference between a public comment in public comment section or public comment on agendized items?

[14503] Bowen Zhang: With regard to public comment on a non-agenda item, normally the superintendent and the board do not respond to that.

[14513] Phuong Nguyen: That's correct, yes.

[14514] Bowen Zhang: But the public come on agenda and oftentimes the board member during the discussion will ask the superintendent, can you, I echo the concern of this public speaker, can you answer that question which is just exactly what member Grindel did two days ago, echoing a public speaker's comment. So I guess that's the difference.

[14533] Phuong Nguyen: Okay, just want to make sure that we clarify that for our new members.

[14538] Elisa Martinez: I don't know if I agree with that with regard to, I think it's, the point is we've got to be careful, right? You could always, so again, the president is the only one that can set direction, right? We as individual board members, we cannot, maybe we could appeal to you as the president to give direction, but we can't. We can't say, hey, as an individual, a board member, I can't ask, the superintendent to address. I think that's why maybe this is something we do need to review with each other, but no, we can't.

[14576] Bowen Zhang: I guess what member Grindel was asking superintendent that he shared the same question as the speaker. He's asking a question himself. So obviously that's permissible during the discussion and deliberation. But obviously we don't do that during the non-agenda item. After the public speaker on the non-agenda, you don't tell the superintendent, hey, I share the same thing, can you address it? We just don't address item that's not on the agenda.

[14603] Elisa Martinez: So remember that this is a meeting, our meeting in public.

[14607] Bowen Zhang: Yes, yes.

[14607] Elisa Martinez: Thank you. So technically, we're not hearing all this. So we can't allow the impression that we're, because what we're coming with is the information that the agenda items that come to us. That's my only point is, again, it's also perception of how, you know, everybody's getting the agenda items in advance, just like we are. So if there are questions from the community, and many of them do reach out to us in advance, right? So I think it's just, we just want to be very careful of that, is that, Let's just really think about that. It's our meeting in public. Imagine that we aren't having any communication, right? We can't engage in that way. So maybe it is, you know, you formulate your question and your thought. We just, I think we just want to be careful not to reference that. Anyway, that's just, I think that's maybe where we need maybe more guidance.

[14662] Mark Triplett: Thank you, Lisa. I think it's very important because if not, we do get into a problem where we're actually having public comment is is becoming almost like a de facto board member and The public was not elected to represent the community. And so I think it's really important that it doesn't become a

[14685] Terrence Grindall: answer public comment then you know back and forth because then it's a discussion not with the board it's a discussion with the public it's a then it becomes the meeting with the public versus yes yes with the board right but i i do i do distinguish between a a member can ask the same question that the that the member of the public asked um that's not back and forth that's that's the member asking a question Yes.

[14717] Mark Triplett: I think that's true, Terrence. And I wasn't thinking about the example from, I didn't remember an example from the other night, but in general, I just, I do think we need to be very careful of that. Cause like Elisa was saying, it's a, it's a, the meeting in public, it's not a public meeting.

[14735] Bowen Zhang: Another thing I want to ask follow up to, you know, training regarding the protocol is right now we're, we're doing public comments for some presentation seconds. I don't remember, two years ago, do we do public comment first, presentation second, or is the other way around? Because I always thought during the staff presentation, they might answer some of the questions the public might have or concerns the public shared. Should we do presentation first, comment second, or comment first, presentation second?

[14771] Elisa Martinez: To me, it kind of makes more sense to hear from the public what their questions are, so that if staff wasn't intending to, you know, maybe it wasn't part of the original presentation, but because they hear these questions surface, that now they're going to have the opportunity to say, you know, here's my basic presentation, and then kind of answer, knowing that those questions are out there, answer the potential questions from the community. So that kind of has made sense. I can't remember to your point. I think it's been like that for a while, but I don't remember.

[14806] Terrence Grindall: Yeah, I do disagree. Respectfully, I think the staff report should come first. That shapes the conversation. It lays the information of what's actually out there. And ideally, that keeps support. public comments down because staff's already had a chance to address it. So I do think we should have the staff shape the discussion of what's actually being put forward then allow public comment to comment on that and of course board members as well.

[14836] Bowen Zhang: Any other board member want to chime in on this topic? How about you superintendent?

[14849] Mark Triplett: I, I tend to think it's it's helpful to hear public comment, because then if it's something that we can address without again that back and forth, then, then we attempt to do that. But that's, that's my impression.

[14866] Bowen Zhang: Okay, I guess these things will just need to finance separate time to Yes, I'm okay with either. reach a consensus. Okay, any other comments on the training session we just did?

[14882] SPEAKER_24: If I may, there's still the next task for the board is to work on the governance handbook. So some edits do need to be made and then finalized and some edits to incorporate what was discussed today, but that'll be coming from Deb. and then re-vote on it, so re-approve with all the amendments. So these kind of changes, that discussion that you were just previously having, could be a change that could be suggested within the governance handbook and then finally agreed by the entire board.

[14916] Bowen Zhang: Yeah, you know, I really appreciate that follow-up because, you know, we've heard, oftentimes we've heard the term presidential discretion, Oftentimes, I'm not a, I'm not really a believer in personal discretion, because the limit and the scope is actually sort of undefined. I really hope, whether we do public comment first, presentation second, or we do motion first and motion last, that we can bring the board together and reach a consensus and vote this one into our protocol, so we don't have confusion going forward for the, for whoever will come after us. And And things that are as fundamental as the way we do business, things as fundamental as to our tradition, protocol, and precedence, I hope that we can mold that into the governance handbook, not just by a simple majority. I really hope this can be a super majority vote, because a three-two vote will be quite divisive on something as critical to how we function as a board. So obviously we'll have a chance to deliver more on these items and hopefully we can reach a broad consensus when it comes to our protocol and presence. Member Hou, I see you raise your hand.

[14989] Aiden Hill: Yeah, so I agree with you, President Jung, that I think that the policies and protocols, that it's really important for us to achieve consensus on it. And it may not be possible in every single case, but as we talked about before, we'll still kind of get behind you know, the decision, but I think that we should operate in the intent of creating consensus. And with that, you know, I'd like to make a request. And, you know, again, this is, you know, kind of like what Deb was described me as a new board member, you know, kind of being hit with a flood of information and not being able to distinguish everything. But like, I don't even know if I've been sent a copy of the governance handbook or not. Maybe I have. missed it. And, you know, and I'd like to kind of go through and, you know, read it and really understand and that maybe we have an additional study session where we talk about it, because I think for something this important that we really want to talk about it and have, you know, a good healthy discussion and make sure that we've achieved a common understanding and agreement before we vote on it. And I mean, and I'm happy to, as a member say, let's use what we have right now until we kind of have looked at everything and then we can come back with any modifications.

[15066] Phuong Nguyen: Yes, Ms. Gutierrez has sent it out to us multiple times. So she just recently sent it out to us this morning also with a draft form. So yeah.

[15079] Mark Triplett: And it was sent in the orientation packet for new board members.

[15083] Aiden Hill: Yeah, I mean, I just got a lot of, I got like, I don't know, 20 different emails.

[15088] Elisa Martinez: So if I may, President Zhang, I actually have, yes, I just have a question, and I'm not sure if you and Deb discussed or Ms. Gutierrez, but one of the things, so we've got the last adopted one, which is for the most part, we are still following it, plus some of these protocols from 2019, just from a process so we don't get lost where we don't get it finished and adopted. Well, is Deb going to send us a revised, like what's the next step so that President Zhang, I'm not sure if you're wanting to get us all together, have a subcommittee to get all the edits in. I'm not sure kind of what.

[15124] Bowen Zhang: Here's what I hope, because like I said, something as fundamental as how we do business should not be passed with a 3-2 vote. That's my philosophy. something as fundamental as protocol shouldn't be passed by a three, two, single majority vote. So what I hope, what I want to be, maybe we'll have a subsequent meeting where we just discuss that, no vote, just discuss that. And then we fully deliberate on how we do business. And then maybe on the following meeting after that, then we just vote on the governance handbook. And by that time, there probably won't be that much discussion since we already spent a prior board meeting doing that. Speaking of the procedure, I'm not sure, Superintendent, whether Deb contact you on whether she's going to send a completely revised one or just some simple additions onto the... Yeah, we're in conversation with her.

[15174] Mark Triplett: So what we have currently is we have the version that Deb worked with the board on, I believe, in 2019. Correct me if I'm wrong, Ms. Guttiere. And then we also have the version, the pre-Deb version from 2017 that was approved by the board. And so what we've been doing is merging those two together to then be able to bring to the board as as the draft that then The board can basically go through item by item, make changes, vote on it, get consensus, all that kind of stuff. So we could have that ready for upcoming, if it's a special session or whatever you all would like.

[15219] Elisa Martinez: Yes. Yeah, I think that makes sense. Okay.

[15223] Terrence Grindall: Terrence has a question. What's the best venue if we see we have some technical changes should we send that to you?

[15237] Mark Triplett: I would recommend that that happens in the board discussion, that we merge the documents. We then share it with you all in advance with just an understanding that it's just a draft based on what's already been approved. And then in the board meeting, we have a discussion, and you all make suggestions of changes, agree on them together. Does that sound OK? That is fine.

[15269] Bowen Zhang: And I just want a small comment on the whatever the motion first or motion last we discussed that the president sort of have the discretion to change this but like what I just said about something as fundamental as how we do business. Personally, although I disagree with this motion first procedure, I think member Martinez well aware of my disagreement. But I think for the spirit of building consensus and really reaching a broad consensus on these things, I am willing to stay the course until we have a broad vote on overhauling these protocols. So I am willing to limit my own presidential discretion when it comes to how we do business as a protocol. So that's just my last comment on this one. Any other comments on the training sessions? I thought it was great. Okay, next item, Board of Education request. Student member Salami?

[15333] SPEAKER_36: No request.

[15335] Bowen Zhang: Member Martinez?

[15337] Elisa Martinez: I have no request, thanks.

[15339] Bowen Zhang: Member Grindel?

[15341] Terrence Grindall: Nothing at this time.

[15343] Bowen Zhang: Member Hill? No request. Member Nguyen?

[15347] Phuong Nguyen: I just request that everybody have a great weekend.

[15351] Bowen Zhang: Okay, thank you. I don't have a special request either so moving on to acknowledgement, recognition, and announcements. Student member Salami, any announcements?

[15362] SPEAKER_36: No announcements, just thank you all for being here and being supportive.

[15367] Bowen Zhang: Thank you. Member Martinez?

[15372] Elisa Martinez: No, just thanks and look forward to it and continue to improve upon what we've already have. So thank you for being here.

[15382] Terrence Grindall: Member Guendel. Likewise, thank you. Thanks, everybody, and have a wonderful weekend.

[15392] Bowen Zhang: Member Hill.

[15395] Aiden Hill: Yeah, again, thank you, everybody. And I think we have the seeds of greatness in us.

[15402] Bowen Zhang: Member Nguyen.

[15404] Phuong Nguyen: I just wanted to say thank you to Ms. Gutierrez and Dr. Triplett for being thoughtful and door-dashing food to everyone. And then also I hope that our new board members found this training, found this training, I can't even talk today, found this training Informative, helpful.

[15431] Elisa Martinez: Informative, yes.

[15431] Phuong Nguyen: Thank you, helpful. I think I'm losing some brain cells or something, this mom brain of mine. But I hope that you guys found it informative and that it's helpful to you moving forward. And we're happy that you guys are part of our board. And I will be reaching out to our new board members to build relationships with you both. So thank you so much. And have a great weekend.

[15459] Bowen Zhang: Thank you. So for me, this is definitely a very informative training session. And obviously, the lunch is great food is delicious. So that's, that's, I really like this train. So I think we should do more than about six months or next year. And another thing is next weekend, next Sunday will be a member Martinez birthday. That's wish her a happy birthday.

[15484] Elisa Martinez: Thank you for President Zhang. Happy birthday.

[15488] Bowen Zhang: With that, I will move to superintendent's conclusion remarks. Dr. Triplett.

[15493] Mark Triplett: Thank you. Well, I want to really appreciate all of you all. I think the discussion was really rich and helpful, and I think it achieved its purpose of really helping us to each understand each other a little bit better and to start getting really clear on our on our norms and protocols. In particular, I want to appreciate you, Member Hill, for bringing to us some of your expertise around teams and the team process. I think it was really helpful. And then also really appreciate you, member Salemi, both for being here. It's so great to have you in this conversation. But then also I want to appreciate you for this week. I know you started asking questions in advance and being a part of that dialogue. I'm sorry that I hadn't thought to to suggest it to you earlier, but I really appreciate that you are a part of that. So just so you all, board members, you all know, member Salemi's chiming in with questions, and he's part of the BCC when I'm responding to all the board members.

[15562] SPEAKER_26: Great.

[15563] Mark Triplett: OK. Thank you, Ms. Gutierrez. The lunch was not me. It was all Ms. Gutierrez. Thank you.

[15569] Bowen Zhang: Thank you. OK. Moving on to adjournment. Can I get a motion to adjourn the meeting? Motion made by Student Member Salami, seconded by Member Nguyen. Student Member Salami, how do you vote? Yes. Member Martinez? Yes. Member Grundahl? Yes. Member Hill? Yes. Member Nguyen?

[15595] Phuong Nguyen: Yes.

[15596] Bowen Zhang: My vote is yes as well. Motion carries unanimously. Meeting is adjourned at 1 23 p.m. Thank you everyone and have a great rest of the weekend.

[15605] Carina Plancarte: Thanks, everyone.

[15606] Bowen Zhang: Thanks, everybody.

1. Live Comments: Join with an Internet-connected device (tablet, computer, phone, etc.)

Virtual Meeting Practices & Connection Information

Type Information, Procedural In accordance with the Governor's Executive Order N-29-20, Board meetings will be held "virtually" until further notice. These meetings will be accessible to the public by internet or telephone. No physical meeting place will be provided.

Meetings will live-streamed on the NUSD YouTube on the internet. Public comment opportunities will be available through the virtual meeting. Meeting access instructions are provided below here.

As always, we encourage you to contact the entire Board by email at "board@newarkunified.org." This address goes directly to the Board members, who check their emails frequently.

Pledge of Allegiance

Type Procedural

Roll Call

Type Procedural Board Members:

President Bowen Zhang Member Phuong Nguyen Member Elisa Martinez Member Terrence Grindall Member Aiden Hill

Student Board Member: Member Wahhab Salemi

2. APPROVAL OF AGENDA

2. Live Comments: Join with an Internet-connected device (tablet, computer, phone, etc.)

Approval of Agenda

Type Action

Recommended Recommendation is that the Board of Education approve the agenda for this meeting. Action Purpose:

Members of the Board may request that the agenda be approved as presented or amended.

Motion & Voting Recommendation is that the Board of Education approve the agenda for this meeting.

Motion by Elisa Martinez, second by Terrence Grindall.
Final Resolution: Motion Carries
Yea: Elisa Martinez, Bowen Zhang, Phuong Nguyen, Terrence Grindall, Aiden Hill, Wahhab Salemi

3. NEW BUSINESS

Governance Team Training Session

Type Action, Discussion, Information, Procedural

Recommended Recommendations are available at the Board's discretion based on the discussion during the Action training session. Purpose:

To provide new board member training and Governance Team cohesion, by understanding the roles, norms, protocols, agreements, duties, and requirements of a Board Member and a Governance Team.

Background:

In accordance with the approved Governance Handbook, the board member's roles and responsibilities include "regularly reviewing or revising District direction documents (Governance Handbook, beliefs, vision, priorities, strategic goals, success indicators)." In addition, "As soon as possible the Governance team will schedule an orientation session with the newly constituted Board," and "the NUSD Board is committed to continuing education opportunities for all staff and Board Members."

As such, the Board will participate in training facilitated by Debra Dudley of the California School Board Association (CSBA).

4. BOARD OF EDUCATION - COMMITTEE REPORTS, ANNOUNCEMENTS, REQUESTS, DEBRIEF AND DISCUSSION

Board of Education Requests

                       DEBRIEF AND DISCUSSION

Type Information Purpose:

This is an opportunity for Board members to suggest items for placement on future agendas, and to review requests.

Background:

Governance Team Handbook

Authority is collective, not individual: The only authority to direct action rests with the Board when seated at a regular or special Board meeting. Outside this meeting, there is no authority. A majority vote of the Board provides direction to the Superintendent. Board members will not undermine the ability of staff to carry out Board direction.

Bring up new ideas/decide to move new ideas forward:

The Board will be open to having "brainstorming" discussions about any idea that a Board member may feel merits exploratory consideration. "New Ideas" are defined as any proposal brought forward by a Board member, at his or her own initiative or at the request of a constituent, which has not previously been discussed during a Board meeting. Board members will first notify the Board President and/or the Superintendent of their interest in bringing forward a new idea. The preliminary discussion of a new idea will not require staff research time. Initially, staff will be expected to respond to new ideas based on current knowledge. Only a majority of the Board may direct the Superintendent to conduct research regarding the exploration of a new idea. The Superintendent will decide on the delegation of assignments to other District staff. The new idea will be agendized for discussion only. The Board will decide if the new idea should be further developed and studied by staff. A Board majority will decide if staff time should be invested in the "fleshing out" of new ideas. Individual Board members, in the course of interactions with constituents, will be careful not to make or imply a commitment of the full Board to explore or proceed with implementing new ideas.

Board of Education Recognitions and Announcements

                       DEBRIEF AND DISCUSSION

Type Information Purpose:

This is an opportunity for Board members to acknowledge or recognize specific programs, activities, or personnel.

5. SUPERINTENDENT'S CONCLUDING COMMENTS, UPDATES FOR THE BOARD AND FUTURE AGENDA REQUESTS

Superintendent's Concluding Comments, Updates for the Board, and Future Agenda Requests

                       AGENDA REQUESTS

Type Information Purpose:

This is an opportunity for the Superintendent to make any concluding comments, updates, agenda requests, or provide information of future meetings.

6. ADJOURNMENT

Adjournment

Type Action, Procedural

Recommended The recommendation is that this meeting be adjourned. Action Purpose:

No items will be considered after 10:00 p.m., unless it is determined by a majority of the Board to extend to a specific time.

This action will conclude the meeting.

Motion & Voting The recommendation is that this meeting be adjourned at 1:23 pm.

Motion by Wahhab Salemi, second by Phuong Nguyen. Final Resolution: Motion Carries Yea: Elisa Martinez, Bowen Zhang, Phuong Nguyen, Terrence Grindall, Aiden Hill, Wahhab Salemi

The recommendation is to extend the meeting to 1:30 pm.

Motion by Bowen Zhang, second by Elisa Martinez. Final Resolution: Motion Carries Yea: Elisa Martinez, Bowen Zhang, Phuong Nguyen, Terrence Grindall, Aiden Hill, Wahhab Salemi

No minutes available.