Special Meeting

Combined Summary: Special Meeting of the Newark Unified School District Board of Education

Introduction

The Newark Unified School District (NUSD) Board of Education held a special meeting on Saturday, March 25, 2025, at the district office. The meeting focused on governance, roles and responsibilities, and team-building exercises to improve collaboration and decision-making among board members and the superintendent. Key themes included transparency, accountability, student achievement, fiscal responsibility, and community engagement.

Agenda Items

1. Governance and Roles Workshop

• Description: Facilitator Darrell Camp led a workshop on governance, emphasizing the importance of understanding board roles and responsibilities. The board reviewed key policies, including Board Bylaws 9000 (Board Roles and Responsibilities) and Board Policies 2000 (Superintendent Responsibilities). Discussions centered on the importance of transparency, honest communication, and respecting differing perspectives while working collaboratively. The board also explored the concept of legacy and how their decisions impact the district's long-term success.
• Decisions made or actions taken: No formal action was taken. The workshop was informational and aimed at strengthening board governance and teamwork.

2. Board Self-Evaluation and Strategic Focus

• Description: The board reviewed results from a previous self-evaluation conducted in July 2024, identifying areas for improvement in governance practices. Emphasis was placed on setting realistic, measurable goals for student achievement and fiscal stability. The board discussed the importance of balancing high expectations with support for staff and students, particularly in addressing achievement gaps and declining enrollment.
• Decisions made or actions taken: No formal action was taken. The board committed to revisiting goals and ensuring alignment with district priorities.

3. Board Culture and Meeting Efficiency

• Description: The board reflected on its culture and the need for efficient meetings. Concerns were raised about the length of meetings, particularly public comment periods, and the need to balance community input with effective governance.
• Decisions made or actions taken: The board agreed to explore ways to streamline meetings, including setting time limits for public comments and prioritizing agenda items.

4. Hiring Processes and Superintendent Collaboration

• Description: The board discussed the hiring process for key positions, emphasizing the importance of transparency and collaboration with the superintendent. The board acknowledged its oversight role but recognized the superintendent's authority in hiring decisions.
• Decisions made or actions taken: No formal action was taken, but the board agreed to document and refine hiring processes to ensure clarity and fairness.

Public Comments

• Key themes:
  • Transparency and Accountability: Community members expressed concerns about budget transparency, procurement procedures, and the over-reliance on consultants. They urged the board to prioritize clear communication and fiscal oversight.
  • Student Achievement: Concerns were raised about declining enrollment and the need to address achievement gaps. Speakers emphasized the importance of focusing on academic success for all students.
  • Human Resources: Issues such as staff retention, recruitment challenges, and the need for experienced HR professionals were highlighted.
  • Community Engagement: Speakers encouraged the board to strengthen relationships with the community and ensure that public input is valued and incorporated into decision-making.
  • Meeting Efficiency: Some community members expressed concerns about meeting length and public comment limitations, advocating for greater transparency in decision-making.

Follow-Up and Commitments

• The board committed to:
  • Reviewing business operations to improve transparency and accountability.
  • Addressing declining enrollment through strategic planning and community outreach.
  • Prioritizing student achievement by setting measurable goals and monitoring progress.
  • Strengthening human resources capacity to support staff recruitment and retention.
  • Scheduling future study sessions to delve deeper into complex issues and ensure thorough understanding before making decisions.
  • Reviewing and refining its governance calendar, including setting aside time for study sessions on key issues.
  • Exploring ways to improve meeting efficiency, including potential changes to public comment procedures.

Conclusion

The meeting concluded with a focus on the importance of collaboration, transparency, and strategic planning to address the district's challenges. The board acknowledged the need to balance high expectations with support for staff and students, while also fostering a culture of accountability and continuous improvement. Next steps include revisiting district goals, improving communication with the community, and ensuring that governance practices align with the district's mission and vision. The board will also implement changes to improve meeting efficiency and ensure alignment between board priorities and district operations.

1. CALL TO ORDER

[0] Kat Jones: I call the meeting to order at 9-12.

[2] Kat Jones: 9-12? Yes. The clock says over there. I'm going to go with that. My watch says the same. All right. So let's stand for the pledge. They bring the flag in.

1.2 Pledge of Allegiance

[22] I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God,

[29] on the board, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

1.1 Roll Call

[36] Kat Jones: All right. Roll call. I'll just do it. Member Hill?

[43] Here.

[43] Kat Jones: Sorry. I just like my last. Member Block? Here. Member Thomas? Here. Member Jones? Here. All right. We are all here. Great. So I think we can skip the meeting practices and information and reading. at, but that is what comes next. Approval of the agenda. Do I have a motion?

2. APPROVAL OF THE AGENDA

2.1 Approval of the Agenda

[67] SPEAKER_08: Approval of the agenda.

[68] Kat Jones: Okay. And do I have a second?

[70] SPEAKER_08: I have a second.

[71] Kat Jones: The agenda was amended. Oh, okay. So we'll back that up. We did amend the agenda yesterday morning at 1130. We took off 4.5 for other feeling that we probably didn't and we don't have time for it. It was on the last agenda from the summer and we just literally rolled the agenda from CSBA over from the summer to this and then realized that we probably weren't going to have time to do that. So we did take that off. All right.

[109] Austin Block: So I'll take another motion. I'll make a motion to approve the agenda without item 4.5. Great. Thank you. I second that.

3. PUBLIC COMMENT

3.1 Public Comment on Agenda Items

[118] Kat Jones: Okay. Thank you so much. All in favor? Aye. Okay, five ayes. Thank you. Okay, public comment on the agenda.

[150] Cindy Parks: good morning your willingness to hold this type of meeting shows you value teamwork collaboration teamwork and collaboration just as students succeed with communication teamwork are prioritized so must our school board by coming together you can strengthen relationships align goals and tackle challenges while also addressing critical issues that affect the district's success some of the critical issues are in the business operations transparency and accountability are at the core of any successful organization unfortunately there have been issues within the district that raised red flags. Number one, the budget disclosure. The staff and community deserves clear and open communication about how funds are being allocated. Without this transparency, trust eroded. Number two, procurement procedures. Proper protocols must be followed to ensure compliance and efficiency. Number three, reducing consultant usage. Overall alliance on outside consultants drains resources that could be better invested in internal expertise, long-term sustainability, and, of course, ensuring competitive ways number four asset oversight improved management of district assets is critical to prevent inefficiencies and waste in educational services the heart of any school district is its students however the district faces significant challenges to ensure the students have the resources and opportunities to thrive declining enrollment this trend not only impacts funding but also reflects the need to rebuild trust in the quality of education our district provides along that same line a campaign to increase age not only provides much-needed funding it ensures learning continuity and overall higher success achievement number two student achievement the district must focus on every student's academic success achievement gaps need urgent attention in human resources a district is only as strong as the people who work within it and there are notable concerns in this area of human resources number one the lack of experienced staff without experienced professionals the HR department struggles to to efficiently address employee needs, concerns, and manage key processes like your approval of the seniority list. Number two, costly negotiations. The district's reliance on attorneys during employee negotiations not only increases cost, but also reflects on an urgent need to rebuild HR capacity internally. Number three, recruitment and retention. The challenges in hiring and keeping talented staff are detrimental to the quality of education and support to our students I respectfully urge the school board to give serious thoughtful consideration to these critical issues transparency accountability and strategic planning are essential to restoring trust and ensuring the success of our district specifically I ask the board to number one review business operations number two address declining enrollment number three reprioritize student achievement and number four strengthen human resources these issues require your attention and deliberate and careful deliberation as they have far-reaching implications for the the success of the district and its students your constituents the community are counting on your leadership to guide us through these challenges and create lasting solutions and normally I'm the one asking for documents from you I'm going to share with all of you so I understand that there was some you guys were kind of looking for the plans for the district office to move to Whiteford and so I have those plans for you

[360] Cary Knoop: I just want to say a couple of few words you know great you folks are doing a teamwork thing personally I think it's more important that the board should first deal with how to improve transparency transparency is very important if the difference The district is not transparent about certain things. Let's say, you know, accurate representation of financial information, you know, $14 million, structural budget deficits, Area 3 situations, things like that. The board can say, well, we didn't know about it. We, you know, we just heard just the same time as you did. But you have the responsibility to make sure this district stays transparent. That's your job. So I think a class on transparency and with it the Brown Act, which again is a remedial law. It's the floor. It basically tells people like, you ought to be transparent, but if you're not, we make a Brown Act for you. I'm rather disappointed to hear the comment from the president saying that the item that was scratched was scratched in the interest of time. In my opinion, this is a blatant violation of the Brown Act. agenda item that says other issues whatever comes up you can just bring it out that is not transparent and that is not confirmed the brand like in my opinion so that sounds me that the reasoning here given is that we just don't have time to do that just a few words on the team building I am very much in for a favor of timber building but the way the the agenda reads it the way I read it it says here is the board as a block he has to sue superintendent this is the team that needs to be improved rather than the board itself as a collective needs to work better together because I I do I guess I'm old-fashioned I do believe that the board and the leadership in the district are two separate things the board is a supervising and you gotta if you supervise something you can't be deep into the waters you can't be into the problems itself you got to stand above it as a board but team building for the board is great we've seen in the past lots of problems where board members publicly are bickering and so on and that obviously is bad for the district and bad for the board and bad for politics you know team building in my mind is understanding the other person's perspective respecting the other person's perspective not necessarily agreeing with it but respecting it so I hope that is going to happen that the board members among themselves will realize they have strong political disagreements they also have things that they have together but you have to work together and the bottom line is you've got to get something done so have a good day and by the way there's a recording here so anybody knows and this is the result of the recording is public domain so I can give a copy to the district if they wanted to it's free to use okay thank you very much and have fun with that I will hand it off to you thank you

4. BOARD WORKSHOP SESSION

[570] SPEAKER_14: Thank you, Board President. So, yes.

4.1 Team Building (Estimating)

[574] Tracey Vackar: Actually, if I could just take a moment, I just want to introduce Darryl Camp. He actually is our facilitator today and is local, but has had many, many different roles, and so I know he's probably going to have a little bit kind to introduce himself a little bit about his background and how he got into education and also the importance of just, like, good quality leadership and some of the things that he's doing within leadership, not only here in our county, but within our region and throughout the state.

[599] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, thank you. I think about this journey that I've been on and I'll start by saying I don't think I'm special, the facilitation, it's not going to be earth shattering, but I think over the years, I guess some things have happened that sort of even surprised me. Like I was sharing earlier, I grew up right down the street in Oakland and went to Oakland Public Schools and then I went off to this fabulous place called Morehouse College where It's a fabulous place for African-American men, particularly in Georgia. Then I came on back here and started teaching. So my teaching career actually started. I was your rival. I taught and I coached. I taught math and I coached girls basketball over at James Logan.

[646] And just had a fabulous time. You know, the gym was first world at that time. You feel like a real professional coach of me. It's just so good. But Newark used to be in our butt. So it wasn't a real rival because it's the only rival when the other team wins, right? and some of the fabulous student athletes that were there. So that was my beginnings in education.

[671] SPEAKER_14: And then I embarked on this journey, this journey when I got into administration that took me eventually the combination of administration and a family that was growing, it took me to the Health Grove area in Sacramento. I wanted a bigger house, probably the reason that we're declining enrollment across the Bay Area. That was one of those, about 20-something years. I moved to Elk Grove just to get a bigger house 28,000 square feet or 22,800 square feet houses and that's where I spent like nine years but that's when my administrative journey kind of picked up and then I ended up in Stanislaus County too and got my first superintendency so actually end of the day this is my 13th year serving as superintendent in two districts right down the road now but I was in a small town called Riverbank in Stanislaus County I spent seven years as a superintendent there and then I've come here and spent the last six years normally I don't do this governance work in the county just a little awkward but you know man is that absolute but I think this is the first workshop in Alameda County that I facilitated I've been up and down the state facilitating workshops but this is the first one in Alameda County so I said okay well normally I try to stay away from Alameda County because it's closed but I kind of separate these roles you know I'm a superintendent that's my day job that takes you know 60 hours a week in the other hours a week I spend time during this work I facilitate in the Masters of Governance program so I'll see I think I'll see Austin and Gabe Gabriel right on March the third and I think facilitating it no it's in I've made I've been made when I'm sorry made the main workshop yeah and I saw Dave just last weekend as he was and I was going through the student achievement one, and I just hang around. But I've been working with CSBA for the last, say, seven years during the work, Masters of Governance, and then during workshops like this across the state. So that's actually become a part of my expertise. But the other part is I'm highly active in the Association of California School Administrators, highly active. In fact, to the point that next year, during the 25, 26 school year, I'm going to be the president of AXA. Texas, a group that represents administrators throughout the state, and 18,000 members. And a couple years ago, they elected me to be president. It was a pretty competitive race, also, with a highly qualified candidate from the Southern California area. So I was humbled. I was just humbled that the state delegates decided to elect me in a competitive process. But I feel really ready for the job, though. I'll tell you that one, too. But it does give me a different exposure than what a lot of superintendents might get in some ways or I just give you an example I don't know if any of you ever participated coast to coast the advocacy efforts and and that's happening maybe the end of this month no end of April getting stuff confused but in that experience it's a great experience that you get exposed to the you know the federal congressional representatives and you know not only I found myself last year it was awkward in a room like and I was like this, you know, we're standing here in a small room and over there you have Nancy Pelosi and then Adam Schiff is here and then Aguilar, third-ranking Democrat, I think. I learned that the Democratic caucus in California, they have lunch every Wednesday and I was with this small group of people that got to, you know, come and share an advocacy perspective with them and then I found myself and then we had a meeting with Padilla as well. It was just a fabulous experience. I get exposed to that type of stuff now and it's just really helped my skills.

[915] The other part, I don't know if I shared, FICMAT. You're very familiar with FICMAT. I heard it earlier.

[921] SPEAKER_14: I had this fabulous five-year run when I got to sit on the board with FICMAT. So all this means is, oh boy, I think I picked up some stuff along the way. but I'm going to separate that from the workshop because sometimes I might insert and say hey just an opinion with somebody with experience take it or leave and these are our absolutes I'll separate that from this is a CSBA thing right and just I just feel like if I get knowledge that might be valuable it's hard for me not to share and I feel like I'm not giving you my best I'm not trying to over insert but but I want to share right that's part of what we do in education we try to share with each other and

[959] to make things go better, right?

4.2 Roles and Responsibilities

[963] SPEAKER_14: By no means do I have all the answers, though. I have to say that, right? And you're already, I give you a lot of credit because you're spending time this Saturday. I have talked to my colleague, Dr. Yao, who's in Singapore right now, my understanding is. Yeah, she wanted to do a workshop and she asked me, she said, well, I'm going to be in Singapore. The board really wants to have this workshop, you know, pretty quickly, and can you do it? And I said, well, I'm available, but I but bottom line we're here so we're gonna make use of today I really appreciate to Toya she's not in the room but whenever you see Toya say thank you to her what she did in such when normally we take a long time to schedule these workshops and then the interviews with the trustees that's sometimes one of the it's a challenge so I give your credit I give Toya credit so say thank you to Toya when you see it because when she came up with this interview schedule it was like great very and I give you, I think I've only worked with two boards where all the interviews happen as schedule. So kudos to you. Thank you. That's really helpful for me because I don't have all this time to be going back and forth. I hate scheduling, right? And for that to happen like clockwork really, really did help me out. Thanks to the superintendent Vacher also. How do you pronounce your name? Vacher. Vacher, okay. Yeah, and Catherine too for reaching out and the conversations we've had and every conversation that I have with the different trustees. So we're going to get going. We got a pretty ambitious roadmap for today because we're definitely going to spend some time, as many people expressed, talking about the roles and responsibilities. We're going to have some fun, too, with some scenarios with the roles and responsibilities. The afternoon might get a little wonky. You can see in the afternoon might get into... I'm undecided because in your package, you have your board self-evaluation results from July. but I know we have two new members of the team since then right so what we might spend some time just unpacking that and having the board members that participate in that kind of share what the next steps were after having that workshop or it might be an indoor time work might go over the aspects of the governance handbook looking at that it's a fairly recent handbook however once again get two members that they really weren't a and you're part of that experience. And when you talk about roles and responsibilities, that handbook will be a critical document. So we'll see how we go. We'll see how we go. But we're going to definitely spend time here. Another request I had was, hey, we got to get to know each other. Now, that sounds soft and touchy-feely. I realize that. And I'm not a touchy-feely person. I taught math. I coached. I was like, just win, baby. I don't care if you get along, right? That was the thing, right? Having grown up in Oakland, the A's in the 70's were kind of known for that. They used to fight and Charlie O and Rudy and all that group, they used to be known for fighting but winning and that's kind of my mindset. I've switched over the last few years and this is why. Doing this work with other governance teams across the state and when we look at governance teams that are moving along kind of, functional is probably the bad word, but they seem to to be effective and efficient and seem to stay away from drama. There are governing teams like that, and then there's some that are really involved in a lot of controversy, and that controversy kind of spills out into the superintendent world and the administrative thing. When I start talking to those teams, you can almost sometimes trigger, you can almost identify when you peel back the onion, how the board contributes to those cultures. And when you peel back that onion even further, where it gets into how the board agrees to do business. And it sets the tone for the organization. I was working with one board, I think it was about three years ago, and I saw something happening in a room just like this. And I was like, ugh, I don't feel good about this. I think we need another workshop for about four or five hours. I really did, because I was picking up on some cues. And I tried to call the superintendent after I left and say, hey, I really think he, and the superintendent didn't want to engage and all that. I was like, I think it's a bad move. Three years later, I think they're on their third superintendent's end. Yeah, because that person was gone, another person came in. I'm reading about some lawsuits that are in the case. I was like, oh, okay, yeah, gotta see what was happening. Yeah, I didn't know at the end, but it turned out I think I was right. I was just predicting. So this is actually a critical step for you to get to know each other and how you're going to work together. So I'll connect the dots along the way okay any questions before we get going about it okay I might toggle in and out of this PowerPoint we'll use this some of the time and I might go into some other documents as we as we keep going along all right so here's what we're gonna do first and you don't mind me too I might be a timekeeper too so I'm not trying to be evil I just want to make sure that voices are heard okay so I'll start like a three minute timer when people are talking sometimes I try to give you a that's up three minutes doesn't that mean you have to stop but just you know think about when you hear that sound wind it down right I tell people finish your paragraph but don't start a new one okay that's a thought pattern like that alright so let's do this the first thing I'm going to ask you to do is this just so we get grounded about how we're going to work through the day I'm going to ask you to pick up your handbook which is you know this document here and it was oh okay I'm looking at this there's a line looks like it was a minute from when I looked at it like I mentioned 2022 and I knew yet Dr. DeLeon right that was superintendent then and I guess there's going to be an attempt to readopt it in 2025 which is good so this is the first step there but I'm going to ask you to turn to page six page six and read over the top of the those top six bullets where it says the Board of Education will and go ahead and place a star next to the bullet that seems most important for today for this team for this team and then you can pick a secondary one to start the most important one and then indicate what's your second most important

4.3 Establish Structure

4.4 Governance Handbook (update for 2025-26)

[1379] Kat Jones: So, Daryl, I wanted to let you know that the bullets, and everybody can kind of see that, the bullets are not all lined up on the left side.

[1386] SPEAKER_14: Oh, I see what you mean, right. There are other bullets that kind of catch you. Okay, so, thank you, thank you. I didn't pick that up earlier.

[1394] Thank you.

[1399] Kat Jones: It's a formatted thing because Toya and I started to, like, on the governance team on page three, we, like, the name So there's just some formatting issues that started to occur with adding in the readopted and you're going to find it on all pages.

[1424] SPEAKER_14: The bullets are just... So we actually have nine bullets on that section of the board of education.

[1439] K-12 school board meeting

Pause: 1m 29s

[1559] SPEAKER_14: Well, another minute and a half work for a minute. okay let's do this thing so okay so we're just gonna just take a straw poll to see where we are with this and I see what you need now Kat so the information I had looks like more like this so I apologize when I did not realize that toy was gonna print this one she was supposed to print

[1619] SPEAKER_14: Okay, so let's see what we got. Nancy, you want to kick us off? Which one was most important to you? Which bullet?

[1629] Nancy Thomas: They're all good.

[1630] SPEAKER_14: Which one's most important for today?

[1632] Nancy Thomas: The last one.

[1634] SPEAKER_14: The last one? I'll say number nine is most important. Okay. Number one.

[1641] SPEAKER_14: Number one. So nine, okay, is, okay, gotcha. Awesome.

[1649] SPEAKER_06: What you got?

[1650] SPEAKER_06: Four. Okay.

[1656] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: April? Four as well. Four as well.

[1662] SPEAKER_11: Okay. I guess it's seven. Seven. And to present it?

[1671] Tracey Vackar: Yeah. I like number eight.

[1673] SPEAKER_14: Number eight. Okay. So that's your first one that's most important today. And then the

[1679] The second choice, we have to pick number two. What's number two? Let's go reverse order.

[1685] SPEAKER_14: What do you get, Susan?

[1688] Kat Jones: I have number nine.

[1699] Eight.

[1699] SPEAKER_06: Eight. Seven. Seven. Yeah, I said seven.

[1705] Seven. On the same page. Yeah. Eight. and one.

[1711] SPEAKER_14: Let's kind of step back and see what we get here. Just to give voice to some of these, nine popped up a couple times, seven came up three times, eight came up a couple times, right. Can somebody give voice to number seven? Go ahead and read that.

[1735] Kat Jones: Communicate honestly and respectfully even when they don't agree.

[1739] SPEAKER_14: Okay, so that's that one.

[1745] SPEAKER_14: Does anybody want to, in terms of number seven, why is that important today?

[1754] Kat Jones: Because we are five different people, six different people, and we, but we still need to be honest with our feelings. We need to respect, and saying that respectfully means, you know, that kind of goes it goes back to tone voice the words you choose but it's okay not to agree because we are all coming from different perspectives and that's part of the beauty of this process is that we do we do bring in a different perspective and that's an opportunity for us to learn from each other and a different perspective trying to be heard to it's okay to disagree but how do you disagree

[1800] SPEAKER_14: is part of the story too, right? Anybody else want to give voice to number seven? Or are your thoughts behind number seven?

[1806] Nancy Thomas: I think the opposite. When you don't agree respectfully and there's bickering on board, it's a really bad look in the community.

[1820] SPEAKER_14: Yeah. In Davis Campbell and Michael Fullen's book, The Governance Corps, I know we utilize that in a lot of our CSBA trainings, he talks about that being one of the four I think what I also like about that one is that I think sometimes honesty and respect can be put into tension with one another but they don't have to be like they're not contradictory in any way and sometimes I think some people can make the argument that in order to be honest maybe

[1860] Austin Block: you know we need to be more harsh or in order to be respectful we need to not be as honest but I think those two can can harmonize and I don't think there is any contradiction between sometimes Matt being honest can be almost disrespectful in some ways alright so seven is something we want to keep in mind today what about number one thing that I think we've got to consider in this is that in critical times

[1890] Aiden Hill: in our history where there were really big issues, sometimes being respectful is not possible. So look at the Civil War. Sometimes there's issues that are so grave, slavery, that you can't just sort of give a living. So I think that what's important, I think maybe it's important and I think it's important to strive to be respectful, but I think that it's also important to understand that we need to try to hear where other people are coming from, that there's different ways of delivering, right? And there's different definitions of what respectful is, right? And so I think that, and it kind of gets back to, I think, when Austin and Gabe were talking about is listening, right? And so, and not necessarily personalizing but trying to take a step back and say, okay, there's the delivery, but then there's the message. Let's try to make sure that we understand what the message is.

[1959] SPEAKER_14: Yeah. Even though the delivery, I mean, sometimes the more passionate you're about something, sometimes that comes out and people can take that passion as being disrespectful, but try to hear the message, right? Right. The other part I just want to mention, too, sometimes this word is kind of taken for granted, the honestly.

[1979] Right.

[1980] SPEAKER_14: The reality is your honesty sometimes might be different than my honesty because your experiences, the way you get to know about a particular issue or situation may vary based on just your experiences and your background and candidly your beliefs, right? So sometimes people are questioning these out of honesty and the reality is you're just seeing different sides. Like if I were to say, what color is this? What would you say?

[2010] Kat Jones: Yeah, exactly.

[2013] SPEAKER_13: What's that?

[2013] Kat Jones: Turquoise teal.

[2015] SPEAKER_13: What color is this now? Black.

[2019] SPEAKER_13: No, it's kind of white.

[2025] Kat Jones: You're talking about the phone itself. We're talking about the screen.

[2028] SPEAKER_14: Different perspectives. Your odyssey is different than my odyssey. We just have different perspectives on that particular topic.

[2038] Aiden Hill: One of the, I can't remember

[2040] with a guy's name now. He wrote a book about the seven habits. Stephen Cuddy.

[2048] Aiden Hill: What he said is, seek first to understand before being understood. I think that's the important thing is to try to listen to no matter what the delivery is or the person or whoever, try to understand the message before trying to articulate your own response.

[2067] Kat Jones: And that takes high I'm going to add just one little caveat too. It is hard and here's where it's even harder.

[2100] SPEAKER_14: when you're sitting up there at the dais, you tend to want to be understood more than to understand at a certain point in the meeting on a quick topic, right? Sometimes that's the value of kind of stepping back as a board and saying, look, this topic is really deep. Let's have a study session so we can set aside a sufficient time to really go deeper so we can focus on understanding and then to be understood earlier. or maybe in and out of that. But sometimes when you're in that 20-minute, 30-minute timeline and you're trying to get through an agenda item, it's hard to do both during that time period. So sometimes I just take a step back saying, look, we're not here to decide tonight. We're just here to study an issue.

[2147] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: And just going back to that same bullet point there, respectively, I mean, growing up, it's a cultural thing, right? You don't... When they, especially your elders, right, you do not... even though if they're wrong or right you do not question that so it's the approach in the manner that you take and explain but not to you know not to be controversial and that's really something growing up you totally just see that yeah so you want to go ahead and make sure that that you have not to offend but to actually clarify and he said growing up in cultural reality is y'all I'm assuming y'all grew up

[2190] SPEAKER_14: with different norms and all that. And the beauty of this process is, well, this is your governance family. And you have to actually work to understand what are going to be your cultural norms. My colleague Lou Ann, she tells a story of, she was working with the board, and the board members, the newest member of the board had like 14, 16 years on the board. So it was a highly stable board and all that. And then the board changed. and they said, hey, I really hate it when you interrupt each other. And they're like, we interrupt each other. And there's a board that one person can start a sentence, the other person can finish a sentence because they've been working together for so long and all that. They didn't realize that they had a cultural norm of interrupting each other. It's like the fish doesn't know it's in water. It's just swimming, right? Sounds like marriage. Well, let's pick up. What's another one? Number seven definitely came up. Nine was a popular one, too. Go ahead and give boys to nine.

[2281] Nancy Thomas: I just think this is kind of the mode in which we should be. We should ask questions that we don't understand. And it kind of collects the things that have already been said.

[2295] SPEAKER_12: Yeah.

[2296] Nancy Thomas: To get to a place where we can make a decision that we can all buy into.

[2306] SPEAKER_14: To kind of piggyback on what Aiden was saying about you're the Sikh person, and if you're in a stand mode, then that's one of those principles, right? Ask the question and act with the intent of influencing but try to understand and respect.

[2322] Kat Jones: As I think about number nine, it kind of, in a way, it's just further explaining number seven and number one. Because if we go to one, it's communicate openly and honestly, which was on our chart. And then we go to seven, communicate honestly and respectfully, even when you don't agree. and then you get to ask questions when you don't understand, be respectful when you disagree, and strive to build on each other's comments and ideas. They really build on each other, but they're kind of saying the same kind of thing in a different way, which the fact that we have all of those on our chart shows that those are really critical to the team.

[2367] Tracey Vackar: I think the piece also about where it says, build upon each other's comments. I think when you're together as a team, you're going to get different perspectives. And although maybe one thing is actually presented either by staff or by whatever the initiative might be, even if it's not staff, or whatever the problem might be, the solutions might be many from a different perspective. And the communities that you represent, people that you've talked to, how it impacts children, how it impacts the teaching side of it, each of you are going to bring some different viewpoints. And so I think to be able to build upon that, will help us get to even a better answer maybe than the one that was recommended at the time right so I think like I'm not afraid to have things built upon if we bring something forward to you with an idea to say hey let's ask some more questions about it let's seek more understanding but I think in that general conversation if you're really open-minded about where you're trying to get to to be able to help and support our system to grow especially their goals you know earlier was mentioned you know we need to really focus on academic achievement and I agree we're starting to do some of that we saw some early signs of that most recently we were looking at you know how is testing going we're taking a deep dive at those things we're even trying to say okay can we really like look at will our end results be later on in the year are we really going to get there the other piece of it was are kids really going to stay engaged are they going to check out and we heard that too right the comment that was made by the community so in thinking about those things those are all the things I think the idea of being able to build upon something even if the idea might have merit there might be more that needs to be added to it.

[2474] SPEAKER_14: The school districts are highly complex and I would say that too and sometimes it's helpful to combine thinking and just to paraphrase is sometimes the goal I love this a CEO once said his perspective this particular CEO said his perspective was the goal and the goal is to be right at the end of the meeting, not the start of the meeting. So he was open to saying, just because you have an idea is the best idea. Engage with others and see what you come up with. So I'm looking at numbers four and seven, four and eight as well. Are those, I think we already have some concepts in the room, though. But four, openly, respectfully, to what other team members have to say. I see some crossover. And then this one eight as recognized and respecting attempting to understand other points It's kind of the the theme is there right as questions paraphrase does anybody else want to add any other When you look at this any verbiage in the room because I'm we want to keep this in mind as we go through the workshop today honesty points of view sharing And call each other when we feel like this is bad happening. That's okay, too, right? Someone has to something say well who polices the board and

[2550] Kat Jones: We do.

[2552] SPEAKER_14: It's kind of boring. And some might argue the community because they get a vote.

[2556] They get a vote ultimately, right?

[2559] Aiden Hill: But one thing that I think that we should keep at the forefront of our minds is with number one, and it does flow through a little bit, but if we're not honest about the situation, we're never going to solve the problem. And granted that there may be different interventions and I think there's a lot of different interpretations of what's going on, but when you're confronted with facts around something, you can't sweep it under the rug, right? So you're not going to be able to accomplish the goals.

[2597] SPEAKER_14: The honesty. Are you ready for the truth? Can you handle the truth? I feel that movie. Okay, but these are some things we definitely want to keep in mind. is I'm making an assumption, I bet it's going to come out, that when you decided to get on the board, y'all have different reasons, but I was sensing in the pre-workshop interviews, all of your reasons are connecting to you want to contribute to Newark's educational system, and why? Because you wanted to be better for students. That's the big picture that I was clearly gathering from all the comments. It's just, I think some of the and you have different thoughts about how to do that. That's okay. That's okay. Okay, so those are our cultural norms that we want to keep in mind throughout the meeting today. And if I step away from this, call me on it, please. And I'll try to do the same gift to you. I tell teams I work with, when you get feedback, and especially if it's critical feedback, say thank you. That's the right response. to justify and defend and all that just say thank you for giving me the feedback and then yeah I don't have to take it still but the worst thing I could do especially as organizational leaders is to dismiss it or to go into defense mode because then people won't give you feedback anymore and which may not lead to improvement even if it's feedback you don't believe in you can just say thank you and do not believe it right or take it in but your better part is you want to create a culture and you can shut it down real easy if you're defensive about anything. Somebody told me, we did a state of the district a couple weeks ago and somebody said, there was too much Dr. Kent voice.

[2713] Aiden Hill: I just said, thank you. Yes. That's it. One thing that I think that we should also think about here, and we don't necessarily need to be focusing on it right now, but so these are a set of norms. But norms can change, right? And you to identify an example with that other board. And we have two new members, right, who we're getting to know and that have, you know, viewpoints on things. And you kind of mentioned, and we talked, and we had our one-on-one, and I was talking about the Tuchman model of team formation that, well, yeah, forming, storming, norming, right, so you're going to, once you're going to start to get productive when you have norms that you agree upon, but the minute that you have team members and I really give the board credit because, like I said, we might get into this in the afternoon.

[2775] SPEAKER_14: I see some good things. One, you've got a handbook. I think the boards that are best equipped to do the work they do this on a regular basis probably every year max every other year in terms of the minimum amount of times there the fact that you had one great but there were some signals in that board self-evaluation said hey we're we're uncomfortable as a board about the way we're doing business right and when you talk about new members of the team you absolutely you always have to constantly revisit these these things these ideas and they're never stagnant that's the thing I'm not gonna make any comments because we're being recorded but I will say for those that are in partner relationships do you ever stop working on your relationship with your And how many people is that normal? Usually it's two people, right?

[2863] SPEAKER_14: So how many relationships have you got going on here? Five. Wow, but the interactions.

[2872] Kat Jones: But then there's the interactions, yeah.

[2874] SPEAKER_14: I think it's far more complicated. Yeah, it's far more complicated. I think we've got 27 different relationships between the six people.

[2880] SPEAKER_14: and I don't know the math behind it, but it's a lot. I was. I got lines that draw here to here. I have a visual that kind of explains all the different relationships you have and they all take work. And then as a group, it kind of takes work too. So that's what we're doing today. We're doing some work on the relationship. Make no mistake about it. This is governance. Some people have a different idea about governance and then than what it actually is. Like, what's the superintendent's role on a governance team? Is the superintendent a part of the governance team? Yeah, the superintendent's a member of the governance team. Does the superintendent have an executive administrative role? They are. They are. They definitely do. The visual, well, I'll show you visual. Yeah, they serve on multiple teams, right? They definitely, definitely do.

[2940] Tracey Vackar: The only other part I'll say And we also try to really convey the goals of what we're trying to get to. I mean, that's a big piece of trying to get others to understand the importance of those goals as we work through challenges in the district, as we try to move the district forward. Those are really important elements to be able to be that liaison to help really push that.

[2968] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, the only other thing I'll say about this is in terms of the roles, because I know we're going to get any roles. The teachers, they have a role in the education system, right? Do they go to school for this? Can you just wake up and be a teacher? No. We've got a lot of teachers in here, former teachers in here. One, two, three. Yeah, that's right. So teachers, they're the training program for this. There's a professional learning education. For admin, principals, superintendent, assistants, superintendents? Do they go to school for this?

[3003] SPEAKER_14: Yes. Governance, clearly, do they go to school for this? No. They should. You get elected. There's some requirements, but you don't go to school and all that. You run for an office, or you get appointed, and you're on there. The part that a a lot of school districts leave out they regularly invest in professional learning for this group and this group regularly right even if they go to school they're still investing in it this is the group that oftentimes gets left out in the professional learning so even though now this is a Daryl editorial okay it's also consistent with CSBA but I'm going to editorialize it just for you so don't don't take this away I say when budgets get people start scrutinizing every one of your expenditures if you can prioritize this one too don't just don't just take it for granted if you're not investing in this part the whole system can start to spiral right and when you're dealing with a multi-million dollar budget which you have I know people don't see it like that but it's a multi-million dollar annually budget and you're have a fiduciary responsibility within that so I would encourage and encourage people to invest in that. People would nitpick it, because they'll say... Oh, yeah, they do. Yeah, and I don't mean, it sounds, how do you put it? It's an easy sound bite. Oh, gosh, you're going to see SBA's annual conference and it's $2,000 a person. Very well could be, right? Hotels, registration, and all that. And the county superintendent, you two broadly remembered, I remember during that new board member thing that they hosted, her phrase that she said was, who's supposed to be concerned with. Men of zeros. In the big scheme of things, when you're talking about a multi-million dollar budget, that experience and interaction that you have with other board members and the content that's really directly related to governance, it's invaluable.

[3138] Kat Jones: Well, it becomes the education part, just like the admin and the teachers. Going to the mid-classes, going to CSBA, holding retreats like this, it's what helps to educate elected officials for their position. If you come from education, you've got a little bit of an edge up because you have an understanding of what goes on in those others, or if you've worked in education. Really, we've all done things in education individually, different aspects, but education for governance is just as important, and it is. It's small zeros compared to those. for the big scheme of things of what we're responsible for.

[3182] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, and especially in proportion to what you're responsible for. That's the part that I want to emphasize. It's multi-million dollar here.

[3190] Nancy Thomas: I think one of the important things is that in my memory, the board's never sat down and looked at and discussed its own budget. So, you know, we don't... staff does that. We don't see it. We don't discuss that budget should be there for us to see. We have every right to establish what that is.

[3218] Tracey Vackar: Quite frankly, this district hasn't established it. They have not set aside capital for the board or for the district.

[3230] SPEAKER_14: It's not unusual. I mean, it's not unusual just to do it, right, and throw it in with all the other professional learning that happens. I was working with one district that had that They actually had in their board governance handbook a dollar amount that was indicated, but it wasn't updated, and things have been, cost of living, cost of doing anything has increased the last 10 years, right? I think it says, like, each board member shall be allocated $2,000 a year for professional learning. That's CSBA. That's the annual conference. Yeah, really. But does this fit in that, right? If a board member says, hey, I want to and engage in MIG or the board president workshop or all these other things that are out there too. Now here's the other part though.

[3280] One thing that I think we ought to consider about that particular circle is that respectfully that's not just CSBA.

[3291] Aiden Hill: So CSBA has some perspectives and some experience but we ought to be looking at this from a broad perspective because with the Golden State Warriors management team.

[3310] They're a championship team.

[3312] Aiden Hill: Maybe they have some ideas around what we can do.

[3317] SPEAKER_14: I wholeheartedly agree that CSBA doesn't corner the market on leadership or even governance. There are a lot of teams out there that might partner with, like your attorney firms, normally they have an educational, I can't find the word, they have an educational kind of part of their business. They have an arm. Right, yeah, arm, that's an arm of their business, and that's okay too. And I've engaged with those too, especially in my current district. I can't contract with CSBA, it's kind of a conflict of interest in some ways, so I go outside and use other partners in order to help us out. but but I will say this is a it is solid the key part I want to just you said is then that don't be scared to invest in yourself don't be it's actually can be beneficial to the whole district if you're investing in that okay so we got some ideas going in let's do this and then we're going to take a break though I let's get acquainted because one thing we we haven't done yet is to kind of get to know each other a little bit better. In your folder, I think it's on the, what side is it? You have a sheet like this that says, get acquainted. It should be in the folder. I don't know which folder. Oh yeah, that folder, the CSPA folder. It should be in this folder, I think, the CSPA folder. There we go. what I like you to do is just to spend no more than five minutes answering two questions and you can see the first question is what's something that happened earlier in your life that has impacted the person you are today this could be a single moment or a period of time in your life okay I would say this too if you're not comfortable sharing it please don't bring that into this space today okay I'm gonna get where are we going with this I'm gonna give you some chance to talk to each other individually and then we'll decide what we want to bring into the whole group space okay so the first question is here takes and I want to take some time to write that down, something that happened earlier in your life that impacted the person you are today, and then how has life changed for you on the back side, how has life changed for you since March of 2020? If I want to role model this, what I would write about on the first one would be, I think I'm, I don't need to see the therapist about this, but when I was playing baseball up at Skyline, and we were really, we were pretty good. One year we were ranked number nine in the state, another year number 10 in the state. Brian Johnson was our stud athlete. He ended up, you know, starring as a quarterback and baseball player at Stanford, two-sport athlete, Division I. He was on our team. But the year after, we weren't as good. And I remember, we were good, but that is good. I remember somebody quit on our team. And then the guy asked if he could come back. and we did this. The coach put, the coach stood out there in center field. He lined us up on the right, the foul line on the right side, the right field. And he had us all run to him, say whether or not we wanted the guy back on the team. The guy that was asking to come back on the team. And I think this is one of my cores. I remember running by the coach and I just said, hell no. It was, I was like, once you quit on me, I'm like, I'm done. and I'm done with you. And I think that's still my overall mindset today. I want people to quit on me. If you're part of the team, you're part of the team, right? And you're going to go through the ups and downs. So that's a single moment that's impacted me today and I will see a therapist about it eventually. How has life changed for me in March 2020? My mom died in 2022. That's it. Alzheimer's, a long battle of Alzheimer's and she died in 2022. And I say this, God bless

[3599] SPEAKER_14: in the CSBA folder on the left side on this one yeah and remember it doesn't have to be a long thought out essay and all that type of stuff kind of because you're going to share it with a partner in a minute and don't forget the back the back side too so the 2020 house library in about three or three minutes yeah and a lot of other things

[3744] K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting

Pause: 56.8s

[3831] SPEAKER_12: K-12 school board meeting

[3866] SPEAKER_14: about 30 seconds. Okay, that was the 20 second one.

[3894] Now my numbers don't work out.

[3896] SPEAKER_14: All right, okay, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna get up out of the chair and go talk and talk to people, but we're just gonna do some pair sharing first. So here's what I like. Yeah, could YouTube, Tracy, Nancy, can you talk? Aiden and Austin, Gabe and Kat, just share. Spend like a minute, no more than a minute and a half each, and then switch over, okay? So a minute and a half each before you switch over, I'll give you the timetable, and you're sharing your stories. hopefully uninterrupted, and then we'll switch around a little bit. Okay, ready, go.

[3964] All right, so a lot of things that happened.

[3970] Aiden Hill: When I was in high school, when I was like a sophomore, I remember in the summer of my sophomore year, I went to go to the movies, which had been a few weeks before, and I remember watching Star Trek II, The Wrath of Comics.

[3989] One of the parts that really includes my life, but I don't know if you're going to track it at all. OK, so it basically takes place later in Captain Winter's life.

[4004] Aiden Hill: And the opening scene is, you don't know when you're watching a movie until it gets into it, but it is a simulation that they take all of their Star Trek cadets through. and what happens is that they're trying to evaluate you and see how you react. But Captain Kirk, what you learned through the story is at this point he's like an actor, but what you learned is that the first time he went through this simulation, okay, it was like about 30 more seconds before we switch up. You know, don't accept your constraints. You know, can you think outside the box? and have to think of different ways to tackle a situation and achieve your role.

[4086] Austin Block: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[4087] SPEAKER_14: I was, I wrote about the... Make sure you switch if you haven't done this already.

[4095] Austin Block: ...that the reason I'm in education right now is because I happened to be a summer job after my freshman year in college. You were in high school? No, I was after my freshman year. I was 19. I took the summer job doing SAT programs with four kids at a time. And I'd never felt so and I just kept going down that pathway. I feel like I'm a very different person as a result of . Yeah, I mean, I still felt like I did when I was starting my program, but at least it was something. I think that the great educators have passion for it, right?

[4179] Aiden Hill: I mean, they love teaching. And when I was an undergraduate, I studied history, basically the antiquities in medieval history. And one of the figures in medieval history that's important is St.

[4195] SPEAKER_14: and he said in order to be a great teacher you have to love your subject you have to love your students I think that's really true I'll be winding down right now we're about to do a switch around in just a minute

[4225] Austin Block: Sometimes it can help you put yourself in your shoes if someone doesn't feel as strongly about it as you do. So I don't know how to listen to it. All right, lining down.

[4267] SPEAKER_11: Finish the paragraph, but don't start a new one.

[4285] SPEAKER_14: just winding down then we're gonna do a rotate okay all right all right yeah so thank your partner thank you and then here's how we're gonna do we're gonna have three of you are gonna stay put in three of you are gonna rotate so I'm gonna ask Catherine to rotate this way oh counterclockwise and then Aiden, can you rotate that way? Okay. And then Nancy, can you rotate that way?

[4325] Okay.

[4326] SPEAKER_14: Okay. And then a minute and a half to two minutes, we're going to share both prompts. Both prompts. Okay.

[4336] SPEAKER_14: Ready? And go.

[4341] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: It's good to see you always.

[4345] Okay, so I was just sharing both of them, right? So the first one, I just heard about the fact that I am in education today, because I think it seems like a tutoring job, basically, during college three months.

[4365] SPEAKER_11: I never thought I would be in a classroom, so I was interested in education policy and these kinds of conversations, but I never thought I'd be in a classroom.

[4374] Aiden Hill: Okay, so and opening the scene. You don't know when you're first watching this, but the cadets are going through a simulation where it's essentially a simulation of an unwinnable outcome.

[4388] SPEAKER_11: And the purpose that they take the cadets to that is they want to see you have a reaction to measure and failure. And so you learn that. But then you learn shortly after that. So Patrick Kirk has become a tech blog. But then you learn that he was one of And I thought, wow, that's a pretty, you know, intelligent way to look at life. And then I really employed that. It's like, I never accept that you cannot figure out a way I appreciate you sharing I've never looked at it that way and he was an early hacker I appreciate you sharing I never put that together

[4465] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: I appreciate you sharing that because I've never seen it from that last year.

[4475] SPEAKER_11: About 30 seconds, make sure you switch.

[4482] SPEAKER_14: In about 30 seconds, Will, switch.

[4487] Who's sharing?

[4488] Aiden Hill: They're ultimately successful in their profession.

[4495] SPEAKER_11: I'm going to go ahead and go back and look at it I'm going back to high school my high school years

[4525] Austin Block: K-12 school board meeting

[4555] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: I was a junior.

[4560] SPEAKER_11: My sister had to drop out in high school to work and help my dad pay the mortgage

[4585] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: Okay, want to wrap up your conversation in about 30 seconds? By the time you keep I'm not going to be that's the time I'm not going to be that's the time I'm not going to be that's the time And when you're ready to do so, thank your partner and then return to your other team.

[4674] Aiden Hill: and that's what I try to tell the kids in my class.

[4682] SPEAKER_14: All right. Time to return to your seat. Thank you, partner. Appreciate it. Thanks for sharing.

[4692] SPEAKER_12: Yeah.

[4694] SPEAKER_14: Wow. I'm kind of curious. Well, no one, I guess, has permission to share whoever you had a chance to share what story. So if you're going to share their story about something that was intriguing enlightening to you didn't know about that other person after permission but then if they granted you know share or share something that you shared with your partner during that discussion also I think I I've seen like a trend speaking to my double trustees and you see that a lot of things happen during high school you know your biggest changes in your life you know culture

[4734] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: really something new scary you know it's a big step right and but those are I would say some of the best times in your life as well because you get to meet others you get to meet individuals that really impact your life a trend being that things happen during high school right and you keep these things because it when you're young you really don't think about things right but when you're older you don't understand it impacts the way you think and the way you carry yourself so I think it's really really key to keep these things but really take them in the journey with you take them and share them it's a short you know just sharing the experiences makes up makes who you are and that's what builds you so others hearing me say that like just it it's motivating to me because it you know it

[4794] Austin Block: makes me think about how a large part of our work is making sure that the kids at Memorial are having those ah-ha moments when they get to the end of their journey in Newark schools. And yeah, definitely the thing that I wrote about was the summer after my first year of college, so basically that age. I was talking to other people who were also talking about things connected to that high school-ish time of life. And we have the opportunity and responsibility to try to make that experience for the 4,500 kids in our district. So I find it motivating to hear you say that. Appreciate it. Thanks for sharing. That's awesome.

[4835] SPEAKER_14: That's a weighty statement. We have a responsibility to create experiences that kids are going to remember and benefit from. Others?

[4845] Kat Jones: It's really true. I mean, you know, I think stories that I heard, it's about how we were supported as high schoolers and that that's what we want to turn around and give to you know all of our students but realizing that that age group is so critical.

[4871] SPEAKER_14: Do you mind me asking what was your experience? Something that happened early in life?

[4876] Kat Jones: Mine was that I changed high schools after my junior summer or during my junior summer. I've seen your pictures and I'm in two different yearbooks from both schools and when I went to the new school the counselor said well it doesn't look like you're going to college and I said oh yes I am and my mom said yes she is because it was instilled in me from a very young age and so I worked harder my senior year than I worked in my first three years to make that happen took extra you know more classes than I had more I graduated with more units than I I needed to to graduate with, but I took the classes that were going to make a difference and got into the school I wanted to go to.

[4924] SPEAKER_14: Interesting. I remember these comments that adults make on campus about the future, our future, right? Kids talk about that a lot, that adults trying to predict steer, guide, sort of different paths in life and realities.

[4941] SPEAKER_11: Judge?

[4942] SPEAKER_14: Judge, yeah, judge. We're all a work in progress. with us, and we take multiple paths that lead in different directions, too. But the key determinant won't be the counselor, the teacher, and all that. It's going to be from you.

[4953] Aiden Hill: One of my first mentors, this wasn't really my story, but he said, he would quote a famous Zen saying, which is, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. And so, again, until the student is interested, ready, wants to learn. No amount of brow beating or whatever is important.

[4980] Kat Jones: And the other piece that I will add on to that from my experience was I had a counselor who listened, who really listened and then helped me to accomplish my goal. So, you know, having that opportunity for students to be able to sit down and really talk about what is their goal coming out of high school and really being heard and then how do we help? How do we help?

[5004] Nancy Thomas: I grew up in the post-Sputnik era and I love math and my math teachers encouraged me to apply for and take these summer science institutes and so I was interested in science and love math and when I was in junior college at Norm's sweet shop I was going to math teacher, but when I looked at my, when we were looking at our schedules for the next semester, my fellow, they were on the ski patrol with me, fellow guys, they said, Nancy, if you took graphic arts, you could be in engineering just like us. So it was that one moment in time that really switched me from being a math teacher to being, going to engineering, and I met an engineer, got married.

[5060] SPEAKER_14: Changed your life. Changed my life. Changed your life. That's powerful, though. The power of a statement that creates a vision, if you will, and then that's when the student meets the teacher, right? That student has a vision then. And you have to piggyback on what Kat was saying. Do we have a role in visioning for kids, for students? I see that. I use this analogy often. I do a lot of equity work, too, and diversity equity work. and I ask people to say if you go and talk to an African-American male student and say 11 or 12 years old and you ask them what they want to be in life and I would say probably 75 no less than 60% are going to identify a professional athlete or an entertainer and it makes sense because the teacher goes into you realize your odds aren't great of being a professional and I'm a professional athlete. It's true, but if you look at the TV or whatever YouTube, that's what they see, right? That's what they see as a teacher. Yes, you would think that it's a better chance of becoming a professional athlete or entertainer than a teacher. But they don't see African-American teachers, right? So it's a perfectly rational argument that their brain is making. And one of the things that I take criticism for, We made a point this year to try to expand the visioning. So we had 30 kids, not all African Americans, but we had 30 kids that went and visited some of the HBCUs, particularly Mauro Moana, Morehouse, and Clark, and they had homecoming in Tuskegee in Alabama. You should have seen some kids come back. And these kids, some kids, they might not have had a high GPA going out, but you could see the motivation kicking in, like, oh, I see myself now. I was like, wow, look at that. I was so shocked.

[5182] But that's an investment in vision, right, of creating a vision for kids, but you don't have to do that. You can create visions right here locally for kids.

[5190] SPEAKER_14: It's amazing how many kids to gravitate toward the same career as their parents. Why? Or families. Yeah, the vision and the playbook is all kind of rolled out, right? Yeah, those are probable. Anybody else want to share? I have one more kind of activity. I'm kind of curious how this is going to turn out, though.

[5211] Tracey Vackar: Just a little bit since 2020, maybe. Yeah, about 2020. so I think you know I think that was a chance right at least for me to kind of reflect on you know where did I want to take my last piece of time in education and I was loving my instructional leadership time that I was in at that point very involved with creating CTE pathways at the school district I was in and seeing results but also recognizing that as we were coming out of this pandemic that things are going to dramatically change in public education. I wanted to be in a different role in policy to be able to help with that. So I went back to school myself to work on becoming a CBO because I really wanted to be able to help with what that next thing would look like as we shift. And I felt like public education was going to take a huge shift for the future and not be like how it was. I don't think our classrooms in the future are going to look like our traditional classrooms anymore. I think there's just going to be a lot of different changes that are going to come with it. And I guess I wanted to be part that movement which was one of the reasons why I made that shift personally from going from instruction into back into the business role that I kind of knew earlier on in my career in life and wanted to be able to do something different.

[5286] SPEAKER_14: Because at that point you were teaching in CTE.

[5288] Tracey Vackar: At that point I was an executive director of college careers and economic development and my challenge in the district I was in so LCFF had just come into play when I went to this district to be a CTE director and it helped the program and LCFF was just coming in and listening to the community. The community said that they didn't want their children living on their couches anymore and having to work multiple jobs in order to have any kind of life. And what they wanted was a better quality is what I heard. So my title changed to being an economic director and thinking about how do we help kids steer towards careers that would be introduced that would be at least six figures. But that's what it's going to cost to be able to live in that community with six figures. And so how can we get kids there in a four-year period and do it through both the college pathway as well as through stackable certifications in life that would keep them moving. And so kind of a different perspective, right? It was really fun. The results in the school district are great. I love following them and seeing what they're doing. And then I think also the way how they can connect kids into seeing things that maybe they didn't even know even existed out there. because their families weren't connected to it. Again, the big piece around kids only know what their families kind of know, right? And so to be able to give them some of those additional resources to learn about those other parts of life that are out there that they might be very talented with, really kind of a really great fun time for you.

[5382] SPEAKER_14: Yeah. Well, I'm kind of curious, and thanks for sharing all of the stories too and sharing with each other. I'm kind of curious, and just from Austin,

[5393] and gave standpoint.

[5395] SPEAKER_14: So you got on the board in November.

[5400] SPEAKER_14: How often have you had an opportunity to just kind of talk about, talk with each other just about who each other are?

[5413] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: It's funny you mention that, Dr. Kemp, because when, before the campaign, I was really looking into being a part of the community getting a little more involved and I was encouraged I was encouraged by my family by my children and it took a while took about four to five years for me to figure out that it was my time and I share this because it's really it was my aha moment when I've seen the opportunity present itself I took the initiative I'm like okay let me just peek and see what it's all about I had been following a couple of the school board meetings and I could see myself there I could see myself there and when I was running and campaigning and knocking on doors I did it with my family and it was family effort it was and I share this because it's really something that I hold near and dear because now the sacrifice is not only me, right, it's my family's as well. But it's also for them.

[5498] SPEAKER_14: I mean, since you get on the board, I mean, how many times have you had a chance to kind of talk to this family, your new family? You have to get rid of the old family, but to talk to these people right here, how often has that been presented against you?

[5513] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: not as much as I would want to and I know because of our schedules I know that many of us are we're teachers and it's tough but we do have texts at least three or four times a week and you can tell people are I mean we're busy we're humans right and we all have lives but we make the time to respond and we make the time to acknowledge so that that there is like I'd like to sit down a little a little bit more often. It's hard. Yes, it's a little difficult.

[5547] Austin Block: Austin, similar experience? Yeah, I feel like I've had, you know, short individual conversations with each of you all. I mean, Gabriel and I, like, collaborated, you know, during the campaign and stuff, so we got to know each other more, and, like, through the Masters of Governance trainings, we've been, like, carpooling to the County District Office, and we've been getting some chance to chat more.

[5566] SPEAKER_14: That's the benefit of going together, or have a team go to that Masters of Governance, right?

[5570] Austin Block: Yeah, it's been nice, yeah. So, yeah, I feel like I feel like I'm starting to get to know everybody but of course I think there's a lot more relationship building to continue as well.

[5580] SPEAKER_14: If you don't proactively think about it and schedule time to do it, it really doesn't happen. Then all of a sudden you're sitting up there on the dais having to make some critical decisions that only affect maybe 4,000 students. It's not the best time to form a relationship when you're talking about something that deep where you all have different perspectives. So just by taking the time to do to do this, this actually connected to governance. It might seem touchy-feely, once again. But if you understand something about each other, it actually is consistent with some of the things we're talking about here. And that Franklin Covey principle, see first to understand. If you understand the person's background, what changed them, what drives them, then you're more likely to understand their vote. in such a way that's different than you. It's not because they're evil or ignorant or incompetent.

[5640] It's just because they have a different perspective. And that's okay, right?

[5643] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, that's okay. And I think the gold standard is, I always ask people this question. You don't have to answer this, but it's something that gets you to reflect. Has there ever been a time, or will there be a time, where you go into a meeting thinking that you know how you're gonna vote, and I think that because somebody said something or because of some new information that was presented to you, you changed. Some would call that wishy-washy. Some would call that just a level of maturity that says I'm willing to change based on the information, based on my learning. So that's just something to consider.

[5685] Tracey Vackar: I think there was something in our handbook when we were talking about a trailer that stuck out for me with what you just said. the idea that another person's comments might change your perspective, right? Or maybe add to the conversation. Like, can you add more to it and make the idea and improve upon the idea or the concept in a different kind of way? And I think that's kind of the beauty of it when you get more perspectives together in the room is to say, yeah, that's good, but could it be even better?

[5720] SPEAKER_14: You'll know that moment when it comes, okay? I don't know what it would be but I guarantee you you're gonna have moments oh by the way who joined the board Kat you came in 2022 22 22 you left and came back Nancy right in 2019 22 I left in 2019 and came back in 22 and 2020 I'll say this is a caveat y'all the almost everybody experienced that for Nancy you didn't have a traditional way of coming onto a board. Pandemic messed things up. It really did. It really screwed us more so than we probably could fully acknowledge and fully recognize at this stage. But the old school of thinking with boards were, hey, when you get a board that you set time aside, you have one-on-one meetings with each other, coffee, dinner, go sit down and collaborate. But in 2020, clearly in 22, I think we were and we were starting to become, it was okay to sit down and meet with people again. But clearly we went from about, we went about a year or two where it was like discouraged, right? You're encouraged not to have these meetings with people and kind of not to be in these group settings and then we got used to our patterns for a year or two and some of us never really established a collaborative pattern again. So just recognize too, if you came on during that time, it wasn't, you didn't have the, and you didn't have the luxury of what some of the conventional norms were. Just recognize that. So thanks for deciding to serve. I'm going to have you do one more thing on a level. This is curious. You ever read, it used to be newspapers. Some of us are more used. I used to get a newspaper. Some of us used to get a newspaper. Anybody still get a newspaper?

[5834] Okay.

[5834] SPEAKER_14: I'm with you. I like the feel.

[5839] Tracey Vackar: I still like the moneys.

[5843] SPEAKER_14: but you know, you ever read these when somebody retires or they, fortunately when they pass and you read these little snippets about them, right? The obituary? Yeah, obituary. There's not an obituary. But let's picture that you're leaving the board and a newspaper article is going to, a reporter is going to write something or blog or put something out on social media, something about you. What I want you to do is, I kept up my slide, I want you to write yours. I want you to write yours. Now it can't be long because you know you're not going to get a lot of words in print. So I just wanted to see. I probably will ask you to share this out because it's going to be public information. You're just doing the newspaper reporter a favor and writing. So it's a headline. It's a headline and maybe no

[5903] SPEAKER_14: What will they write about you when you leave the board?

[5918] Austin Block: It's hard because I feel like sometimes newspapers give credit to people at the top when it's really all the people in the classrooms that are doing the work. It's like how do you summarize the contributions of a board member without taking credit for other people I don't know if it's talking about test scores improving or stability in the district but it's not us necessarily doing that it's all the people who are actually doing the things they might say that

[5964] K-12 school board meeting

Pause: 25.8s

[6020] K-12 school board meeting

Pause: 24.1s

[6074] SPEAKER_14: after you finish your 300 character comments, we'll morph into a break, and let's say we'll come back at 11.05, so it's about 10 minutes. 11.05, yeah, that's true. It's about 10 minutes. So feel free to refresh, get set.

[6104] Okay.

Pause: 43.2s

[6147] K-12 school board meeting

Pause: 30.9s

[6208] SPEAKER_14: on the board meeting. As you're in the break, remember to please eat. Kat took the time to get all this stuff for us. Yes, please.

[6217] Kat Jones: I do have lunch that's going to be here between 1.15 and 1.30, so I'll just scoot out real quick when I get this. That's what we're doing. And then we get out. You know, people, you know, if you want a break or you want a break or you want a break or you want a break or you want a break or you want a break or you want a break or you want a break or you want a break or you want a break or you want a break or you want a break or you want a break or you want a break or you want a break or you want a break or you want a break or you want a break? meetings interviews that we do in the district team building things that we work on We can just set up dinner and then Yeah, kind of relaxing, eat and talk and see if you have to Zoom people in or teams or Zoom people in to use this set up for it.

[6285] Yeah, so if we have a Zoom for, you know, some of the people coming in by Zoom, they can see us. I just want to grab the answer. It's a good space. Oh. So, yeah.

[6298] SPEAKER_14: that's on the other side of the building. Yeah, yeah. I'd like to snoop. Never know what idea I might pick up.

[6307] Kat Jones: Well, it's really old. We're actually, um, Tuesday is our last year.

[6326] Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[6329] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: What's going on? What's going on? It's been busy. Busy, yeah. But it's a good busy, I feel. You know, with the ELPAC testing CASPP, all I have We've had a lot of people out due to sickness and illness. We focus on the tendons, but we can't really focus on the tendons when we're not there to be a Kat. It's just been a rough year, especially during all these. It feels that this year it's been more than ever just illness back to back just taking people out.

[6397] Illness? Yes. Okay at your school? Yeah. Yeah. Same as the old school and my school as well. Yeah. The flu season is like worse than it's been like a long time. Yeah. Because I think you know we were all messed up right for a while and maybe I don't know maybe the natural

[6419] Austin Block: Yeah, I think so. I was talking to Alex Lee yesterday, our assembly member, and he said he's trying to convince people in the state legislature to eventually, and it's probably a long-term project, but to make school funding connected to enrollment rather than ADA, which would help alleviate a lot of that stuff. I mean, if we're getting punished because it's a bad flu season, who does that help?

[6449] Aiden Hill: because ABA basically operates on the assumption that we have control over whether kids come to school and quite frankly we have very little control even if you separate out the illness there's family issues going on and a variety of other things so we have zero control over

[6479] Austin Block: because the kid's not there 95% of the time. Also, I've had kids that are chronically absent that excel academically, and I've had kids that are there all the time that struggle. So attendance does not always correlate to academic achievement. Often it does, no doubt, but it's not a one-to-one. so nice to have that certainty, just like, all right, it's August. We have 4,500 kids enrolled. This is what the state will be granting us for the year for the purposes of education. And I'm like, how much are we going to get? I don't know. It depends on how many kids show up in February.

[6528] Aiden Hill: Well, my district is one of the few fortunate ones. One of the few what? One of the few fortunate ones that we are what's called a basic aid district. Oh, really? And so it's all based on property. So there's some very basic level of money that comes from the state, but the bulk of it is connected to property taxes. And because it's in the Cupertino area, property values keep going up, so we don't have any financial problems.

[6569] SPEAKER_14: Did you see that news article this week? I think about, it said in 2014, what was the date? It said 71% of the house, no, in 2014, 71% of the houses sold were under normal, and now it's like 26%. That was, there's a region, right? It was a big area thing. I forget the area, but it was a big area of all concern. I mean, it's crazy, right?

[6607] Aiden Hill: And I was telling my kids, because I teach business, and we've been going through our personal finance unit, and I've been talking about how when my wife and I bought our house here in Newark, so we bought it for a little bit under $500,000, and this was like 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago. And we both were professionals, and we both had jobs, with good jobs. But 500,000, so the standard, if you want to get a standard kind of performing loan, you need to put 20% down. So that was $100,000. And even for us, both with good jobs, that was a little bit of a struggle. And we actually had to borrow a little bit of money from her parents, which we ultimately paid back. But again, we were both working professionals with good jobs.

[6656] But now, you look at the situation now,

[6660] SPEAKER_10: where if houses were 1.5 million, so that's a $300,000 down payment.

[6672] I would agree.

[6674] SPEAKER_14: You're making me reflect on that time because I remember that was when I had a condo over in Hayward and we were looking to move into a house and we saw what we could get in Elk Grove for $300,000 compared to, it was a little, it was a 1940 home, I grew up in the Bay Area but my sister and her husband

[6720] Aiden Hill: and they could not afford to live here, so they moved up to Sacramento. And I was initially very critical of it.

[6733] But they moved to Royceville and they got, yeah, it was probably a 23-year-old.

[6743] SPEAKER_11: They put coal on their life, 15,000 but you get a lot more house up there.

[6758] Aiden Hill: But in retrospect that kind of would take a lot up there at that time.

[6770] Well, this area has appreciated the greater work.

[6775] SPEAKER_13: Yeah, I was bad.

[6778] SPEAKER_14: I saw that yesterday. In the weather, you're right, I like the very weather.

[6786] But what I did know that I would like, I like better there. I really like hanging out in the backyard. Here, you always have a coat, right? You better have a coat, right? I had to end up getting your arms.

[6810] Aiden Hill: I would have liked to have gone and it's much closer

[6840] SPEAKER_14: It's always fun to see if many of my past students are in any of these groups. It's only 20-30 minutes from downtown Sacramento.

[6858] Aiden Hill: It's really a fabulous event. One, the roads are wider and so traffic moves.

[6870] Austin Block: I saw my old girl home I did make a good move the condo that I bought when I first started teaching we're basically the same age so she was high school class of 2011 I rented it out for over 20 years but then in my recent move when I took a job in San Lorenzo Kendall Smith

[6900] SPEAKER_14: so we got a house in Tracy I went from Smith to Jones but my main name was much more interesting I hate commuting and being in the traffic both ways but if I stay at my condo the condo is about 8 minutes from the district office that gives me a place if I want to stay overnight or if I want to take a break in the middle of the day and go yeah and the good thing about it is I don't have much in it at all it's not like so attractive that I want to stay the whole time I got no TV K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 I mentioned I grew up in Oakland, so my parents bought that in early 70s. And my sister and I, we're business partners now, sis. When my mom died, we had a choice, sell it or rent it out.

[7006] Yeah, we're renting that out.

[7008] SPEAKER_14: And it's in, you know, the Oakland Zoo area, Keller Golf Link, right above there, above the Old Naval Base. Yeah, that's probably a desirable place. Old Highway, yes. Right now it's faking. Maybe we're asking too much for it. Yeah, but it's definitely a positive cash flow situation. But if I wanted to, I could probably buy out my sister and this move right in there.

[7047] Yeah, choices.

[7049] SPEAKER_14: I feel sorry for the young So like you said, you look at this Bay Area real estate and you're like, how are you gonna do this? Who makes enough to save up 200, 300,000? Yeah, because even like you said, it's 1.5 and you can put down... Even if you put down 300, you got a hell of a payment cover, right? Yeah, 1.2 balance is still getting paid off.

[7086] Aiden Hill: Yeah.

[7088] That's painful. What do you like?

[7089] Aiden Hill: And we're just talking about how prices have appreciated for the Bay Area and how for young people it's almost like they're priced out of the market, right? Sort of. Totally. Hence, I'm declining.

[7104] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, declining aerobics. I was at some meeting that was hosted by the the California Department of Education, and they were talking about steps district can take to stop the declining enrollment and all of this. I got so frustrated. I said, you don't get it. All this stuff about creating dual immersion programs or expanding your CTE, I said, no, it's a math problem. And the way you're approaching it with that approach is you're just moving kids from one area to another, and so someone's winning and all that. That's not going to solve the overall problem, right?

[7147] Aiden Hill: Well, again, I was mentioning to Austin that so I'm fortunate that I'm in one of the few basic aid districts, so most of the funding comes from... Fewer kids, it's a good thing for fewer people spending, right?

[7163] But still, there's a part of the formula that... The revenue fund? Correct, that because we can get some money in the state. But most of it's coming from property tax.

[7173] Aiden Hill: But nevertheless, we have declined enrollment like everybody else. And like you say, the fact is that you're not going to have families that have free-afforded kids anymore. So now all of the construction and stuff are condos or smaller houses where they have one kid because that's all they can afford. So you're not going to solve that math problem. Do you have a lot of generational houses in your community? Yeah, some, but a lot of it has been bought by immigrants, but basically immigrants that have gone into high tech. Oh yeah, they're making good money, but again, that's when the next generation hits, okay, are they going to be able to buy into that?

5. BOARD OF EDUCATION COMMENTS

5.1 Board of Education Comments

[7229] SPEAKER_14: all right y'all ready to pick up yeah okay so here's our game plan to get into the lunchtime we're gonna share our legacy share what you're gonna write about you when you you're moving on from this governance team yeah that's that's it and then we're gonna morph and look into our roads of responsibilities we'll get started with that before we take our that's our game plan before lunch so I'm gonna ask you just to read what's on the card and don't deviate don't K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting All right, Aiden, what will the paper write about you?

[7295] Aiden Hill: Aiden Hill helped turn around the struggling Newark Unified School District and build a self-propelled educational dynasty in the state of California and possibly the world.

[7311] Educational dynasty. I like the sound of that. Dynasty, man. All right, thanks for sharing and sticking to the script. You got it pretty big.

[7318] SPEAKER_14: Yeah. in the world. All right. Nancy, you want to go?

[7327] Nancy Thomas: Nancy Collins is retiring after 20 plus years of service on the Newark Unified School District Board of Education. She is best known for promoting the district's STEAM focus by bringing Newark Unified School District's participation as PI in the Regional National Science Foundation Hands-On Science program. During the latter part of her she became a strong advocate for, oops, too many strongs, strong advocate for strong fiscal policies that brought the district back from the brink of bankruptcy.

[7381] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: Thank you for your time and dedication for making a difference in our students' education within our Newark public schools by inspiring and supporting all students to be able to achieve their full potential in being responsible, respectful, and productive citizens in community.

[7410] Thank you.

[7411] Kat Jones: Okay, I think I stuck to 300 characters. Okay. So I didn't say much. Kat Jones continued to work passionately for students while serving on the school board. Her focus was to work collaboratively with board members to create academic success for all students.

[7432] SPEAKER_14: That's all we've got to get. All those years.

[7435] Kat Jones: I tried not to write something that they could like turn around and mess up. so they always do that.

[7444] Austin Block: Mine's pretty short, too. I just said, block wraps up final term on NUSD board. Trends of rising enrollment and increasing student achievement suggest the district has found its footing.

[7455] SPEAKER_14: Rising enrollment and student achievement, yeah. Love it. And the superintendent, when you decide to call it quits.

[7466] SPEAKER_18: Rest in peace. No.

[7471] Tracey Vackar: She helped the district improve financial stability that assisted in the results for student achievement to provide stability for the U.S.D. for the future.

[7488] SPEAKER_14: Financial and then stability, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. It's interesting. Like I said, it is true. Once you step away, you ain't gonna get along. You might get something if You gotta report that's really nice about it or maybe it's a slow newsy or something like that. Other than that, it's not gonna be much. It'll be interesting to see what they say about you. Somebody asked me to do that once. I was getting, oh, I'm being sworn in. The guy asked me that's gonna say a few words before I get sworn in as president. He said, send me a list of your accomplishments in the last blank years. I said, oh gosh. Then I had to go through this reflection period. I'm like, oh my goodness. What are people gonna say, right? and then you start thinking what are the most important one and then if I just focus on the superintendency what what do they say about what's the big takeaway of my prior history where I spent seven years as a superintendent eight years overall what are they going to say and I drill down and say oh these are things I'm probably most proud of probably that's still going even beyond my time there I started off with saying I like the word legacy and I think that is an important place for us maybe to even think about launching

[7561] Tracey Vackar: like what is that legacy we went for Newark Unified School District and I think when I was out there with campaigning for the bond and listening to the community and hearing about the past and how people perceive the district of the past and how they perceive us now that legacy is huge and so I love that word and I think it's a great place for us to talk about vision and the legacy that we want to have so I hope somehow in the next few months as we start looking at our goals again that we think about what are those legacy things that we want to leave behind and then also how do we celebrate those I don't even do a lot of celebration here education doesn't tend to do a lot of celebration but I think this community it's interesting public perception and also you mentioned this idea wait a minute I'm a part of a team I might get

[7620] SPEAKER_14: and the board is working well, is it Gabe's working well, or Aiden's working well, or is it the board's working well? What's the outcomes? Well, they'll clearly you know like this little caveat this is campism it's kind of like you bring out when you're coaching when when the team wins you know what all the parents say we won we won we won my kids great when you lose whatever say damn coach so sometimes it is you may not get due credit or you might need to uplift the team wins right yeah you have to

[7680] Tracey Vackar: Even though embrace the problems to be able to solve where you want to go. I mean, that's going to be a big piece. I know we've done some of that work here this past year. Some of it has scared the heck out of me. Probably scared the heck out of a lot of you too. And I think we've just scratched it. I mean, we haven't fixed it. We've just started shifting it. And that's hard.

[7710] Austin Block: I'm just going to say I think it's like a tricky balance in that we of course need to be extremely honest about the problems the district faces and always be upfront with the public about it and make sure that we're clear-eyed about it and at the same time like if we create a narrative of dysfunction that can be self-fulfilling as well and like you know I think that sometimes it like that's like a really tricky part that I think a lot about is like how do we be extremely clear that this is not going well, this is not going well, this is not going well, without leading people to then go around the community and say, oh, Newark's a building district, oh, Newark's a place that we don't want to send our kids. So I think that it's easy when discussing the problems openly and clearly for then people to just walk away with a negative narrative that makes it harder for us to rebuild trust and rebuild enrollment and get the buy-in that we're going to.

[7764] Kat Jones: It's almost like talking about this is what we're doing because. So you talk about what we're doing, how how we change things and we're doing that because this happened. But you state that positive first. So that's what's put out there first. And then, of course, sending it back up with where you're moving.

[7785] Aiden Hill: Yeah. One of the things that we've talked about in the past, right, we've talked about Good to Great and Jim Collins, right, is that he basically says, you know, that the great teams and organizations, they have an inspiring

[7800] in the future, but they don't dismiss the immediate challenges that they're facing.

[7810] Aiden Hill: And to hold those two things together at the same time is difficult, but it's absolutely necessary. Because if all you say is negative, then people are going to walk away. They're not interested. Nobody wants to feel like they're a part of a losing organization.

[7828] On the other hand, if all you talk

[7830] Aiden Hill: and what you talk about is positives and you don't acknowledge any of the issues that you're facing, people don't believe.

[7837] SPEAKER_14: So you have to do both. So the concept is balance, right? Balance may not be 50-50, too. So balance could be a different proportion of the good compared to the things we need to work on. In another situation. Yeah. And I'll say maybe the strategy. But it's a question, what do you do to further for inventing the culture of this celebrations, right? Because if you don't proactively do it, it may not happen. I'm pretty sure school sites do it. School sites do that all the time, right? They're always celebrating students. That's what people feel good at. But at the board level, any like regular celebratory events? School spotlight. School spotlight. So during board meetings, tell me more about that.

[7890] Tracey Vackar: one of these we've been doing is this year we've I think they've done it before in the past but we've brought the schools in to talk about what's happening at school sites some of the new work that they're doing but we also have added a piece in there to talk about student achievement and so if they're going to come they need to really talk about it they need to show their prior data and they need to show kind of where they're at now and where they think they're on the trends for improvements and some of the strategies that they're using at their school site to be able to help and support students with that. So those are some new elements that we've brought back in. I know we've seen some pretty great data that it's not that we're perfect, but that we're now actually trending in the right direction. And seeing with the LCAP meeting, the LCAP meeting, we shared the data of all of our school sites and what that looks like as a district. And we highlighted, I can't remember who our last school was that we brought in, but we were looking at that data it was Kennedy so we were looking at Kennedy well I want to see my student data like they were like really excited about like like that's the first time we've seen this and they've been on this committee for a long time and they finally said they're seeing some great results in the i-Ready right and what does that mean and how can we help and support our kids as parents and they wanted to have those conversations which was really great so it's nice to be able to see even though small steps moving in the in the right direction. It's moving in the right direction, right? We can actually kind of watch that piece happen.

[7987] Aiden Hill: And what Tracy's talking about, and I think that this is really important. So when we had our last meeting, we were looking at test scores, and we were seeing improvements. Now, there's still a long way to go, but we were seeing measurable improvements, and that came from focus. And in my mind, that's that's something that's an opportunity to celebrate.

[8014] And it's okay, you don't have to necessarily reach the end goal yet. You can set milestones and you can say, okay, here's our short-term goal. And if we hit it, we're gonna pat ourselves on the back, right? But I think that also that we need to be honest because the challenge is that, I mean, I think that some people who've been exposed to, you know, kids' sports, you know, if you have a situation where you have a participation trophy, like, you know, Yeah, so it can't be celebration for celebration's sake. It needs to be that we've set a goal for something, and that we've worked really hard, and if we achieve it, then we celebrate it.

[8051] Aiden Hill: And it can be a sure goal, but I think that if we just have celebrations for celebration's sake, that people don't believe it.

[8060] Nancy Thomas: We've also celebrated students, individual students who have excelled, and we have a mayor that is highly he speaks highly of the district and he during city council meetings will acknowledge individual student achievements as well so I think you know that partnership with the mayor and having him highlight these things it's a good idea if we can find more areas where he can do it.

[8092] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: That's one of the key components that I really enjoyed when we were to select two schools or three schools to go visit and I think just visiting the schools you being in person seeing what they're doing and the showcase that's happening that's really key I really appreciate when I go into the classrooms and see the children just I love being around children but the teachers interacting our parents our aides really really engaged in their So it's something that you wouldn't see that that's what leads to their success, their attendance, the data. But another component that you mentioned was that the involvement of the city, the community, the partners, the organizations. I had the privilege to attend the Newark's volunteer session along with and it was really nice to see our children being, you know, presented and showcased for being volunteers, a civic engagement and giving back to the community. So all around the community has a lot to do with that, along with what we're doing, but for us to be present.

[8184] SPEAKER_14: Liam, I have a question, Sue. So if trying to figure out that balance, if someone, you know, if you're monitoring progress along the way and you don't see achievement, how would the board approach that? If somebody presented and said, hey, okay, here's our data, we're not seeing the type of improvement we want to see right now, then from a board perspective, what do you think? From a governance perspective, is it?

[8211] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: What does achievement look to you, right? What does it look like? That's identifying achievement that could be in the form of of data, it could be in the form of what's happening in the schools.

[8225] SPEAKER_14: Let's say if you set an achievement goal of, I'm gonna make something up, 45% of the students will meet or exceed standards as measured by the annual state test in English language arts. And 45 will, and let's say you're at 37, and then all of a sudden you have, you look at it and say, okay, we're at two or three straight years 37 or 38. You're trying to get to 45 with a short-term goal. You might have a moving goal of 90% or something like that. So somebody shared with you, David, that's not meeting your expectation.

[8267] Aiden Hill: Well, one of the things that we did when we set our goals a couple of years ago is we used the SMART goal framework. And one of the things that is important is that you need to make them attainable. So if we're going to say that we're moving from 30% to 99% in one year, two years, or even five years, it's completely unattainable and it is depressing. And so we have to set realistic attainable goals. And so therefore what we did was we said we want to see 2% improvement in test scores across basically all schools and 5% for subgroups and I think even that I think the subgroups is a little aggressive but if you can set I think a realistic goal and that's the thing right is that we should be looking at you have your overarching goal but then you have your steps that you're going to go to and if you set that out right, then you're not going to have this situation where you don't need it. But if you don't, I think you have to be honest about it and I think you have to come back and say, okay, we need to revisit this. So what happens then? Saying, hey, we didn't need our bill.

[8357] Nancy Thomas: I think what the board needs is they need the data but they need it in the perspective of or with the plan to bring it to where we've said we want it to be. So if we want a 2% growth and we only have a 1%, what is the district going to do different that's going to change that metric next year?

[8382] Kat Jones: And also, how can we support that? I mean, we can demand, but our job is also to figure out how to help support.

[8392] Nancy Thomas: And maybe understand why a certain goal hasn't been met. What are the mitigating factors so that we can then ask

[8399] Tracey Vackar: ask the questions and provide more support I wrote a word on my board the other day it was a conversation with one of you my apologies I don't remember which school it was but after I got done with the conversation I wrote it up there it said being a champion like I from my perspective I need you to be our champions you care about our community I know that but sometimes I don't know that it's always articulated out there so being a and champion of helping us push what needs to be done can be such a great motivator for everybody else. And I really started thinking about that. I served on a very high functioning board at the community college. And not that the colleges did everything great, but they have lots of challenges. But one thing that I think is the board that we try to do is we try to really champion areas that were really important that we focused on and each of us like had like a very defined thing almost like where you guys like if somebody took on fiscal somebody took on facilities and leaders like they really focused in on and they they really looked at those reports and then tried to also bring that back into the conversation and so I would say that's something that would be really helpful I think for the district to hear that you're championing ideas versus always making sound like just being critical right because I think people trying it's been difficult it's been hard since the pandemic all of you know this in your own professions you all you all know this but I think there's a different messaging that happens with that I just don't know something I wrote on my board something I wanted to think about like how do we also do that as a team to be able to push it out so it's not just all of you it's also us as a leadership team here in the district every district member and I see my entire team over here being on that leadership team to help and support our school sites so whether you is a technical person or they're not here in the scene. We're all on that same team to help you do that.

[8525] SPEAKER_14: It's kind of, to kind of extend on that thinking too, from a board standpoint, you have a role in accountability. But part of that role is obviously the outcomes, but part of accountability is the process too, right? So, so you want to see the data to see if you're moving towards your goals but then how do you also celebrate the process that people are taking it's almost like if somebody doesn't meet their goal and they share with you this is what we try this is the results based on the results now we got to try this this and this you know I support you good keep trying right more of a coaching approach yeah because the reverse is I'm going to provide a counterpoint to that yeah please do all right

[8579] Aiden Hill: so the great champions set incredibly high expectations if you have low expectations you get low results and that doesn't mean that you don't try to give an attaboy if people are trying and they don't succeed but at the same time you communicate that you need to figure it out this is paramount because it gets very easy to get into this sort of mediocre mindset, right? And it's like, oh, well, yeah, I tried, but I didn't really make it. And so what I've seen with the championships teams, the coaches, that they hold themselves to the highest standards, right? And you have that sense of urgency and that sense of pushing. And so if we want to be great, we've got to set high goals, and we've got to push people, and we've got to be honest if we're not meeting them. And I mean, I've heard the comment, too.

[8639] SPEAKER_14: And as what can we do to support? What do we need to do to support that work? Correct. And I'm going to say this, because there might be a relationship, well, this is just the other practical part, too, is saying, look, we have people on the bus, right? You're always kind of... The people on the bus, it's always a constant conversation, right? Do you have the right people on the bus to accomplish the goals that you want to? And in education, you get all the, you know, our systems in place,

[8669] SPEAKER_14: in terms of people on the bus, on and off the bus. Because you're in a competitive market, that the stability question and how the board approaches it is one of those critical concepts, right? If you have, probably the higher up you go in the organization, the more likely people are to kind of shop and go to different places, right? It's just natural. The teachers less so, classified probably less so to be morphing, especially the non-management classified. But part of this challenge is how do you get the people on the bus, support them in such a way that creates greater chances of stability. Or you can take another approach to your point. Some teams, like the Warriors just went through it, right? They said, okay, we're not getting the results we expect to. We need a major shakeup. So they got rid of four players, they brought in a player, right? and that somewhat happens in schools too. The only challenge is, in the sports world, they identified this candidate, they said, for you basketball fans, Jimmy Butler. They're paying him 50 million a year, now they're doing it. So even if there were a major shakeup, you're still in a competitive market. And that's part of it. And the message you're sending about stability, those reverberate. Those messages too. I mean, people talk in Alameda County and Alameda County and beyond about districts and stability. Like, people ask, hey, is that a district that I feel like I can grow in? Is that a district that, you know, I feel like I can get a good shot in in terms of stability, right?

[8774] Aiden Hill: That's it, but the thing is, and this is, you know, maybe some people might view it as a harsh statement, but right, so you heard my preferred obituary, whatever you want to call it.

[8787] If you want to be a champion, right?

[8789] Aiden Hill: so Nick Saban winningest football coach in history across college, across professional interviewed on 60 Minutes and you could see the culture that he had built and this is the thing is that great organizations have great winning cultures and they asked him about it and here's what he said he said winners? do not tolerate losers. And losers do not tolerate winners. And that's a harsh statement. But what it's saying is that we are all coming here to play. And we are all coming here to hold each other accountable. And that doesn't mean that you've got to create an environment where you don't give people a chance to succeed. So constantly having unrealistic expectations and firing them and that kind of stuff, you're going to get the reputation of being an unstable person.

[8848] in a stable environment.

[8850] Aiden Hill: But what we have to do is we have to create a culture that says we are trying to build something great and we're going to accept nothing less. And if you don't make it as you're trying, we're going to figure out how to give you a second chance. And as you're saying, the thing that we, at my viewpoint about the board, is that we need to provide the strategic direction and we need to articulate the goals. But we need to let schools and I'm talking really primarily from an academic outcome, because that's where it happens, that they need to then come and say, okay, we're gonna now figure out how to operationalize your goals. And I think that Tracy's already been working with our superintendent of ed services in doing this and we're seeing results as related to that. And then literally what we saw in the last meeting was that we were holding up metrics and you were seeing people that I know in the audience sometimes have not always been on the bus and have been supportive, but when they actually are seeing, wow, we're making improvements there, I saw pride in their faces. So that's like the thing. It's this tension where we need to push people to high performance, but at the same time, it needs to be, we need to give them the tools to do it, and sometimes a little bit of patience, but we never let down on the goals.

[8944] Nancy Thomas: I agree with you.

[8945] Austin Block: I don't think this is disagreeing with that at all, but I think that we want to create a culture at board meetings where people feel like they can be honest and reflective about areas of growth. And sometimes I think the putting pressure, the accountability pressure, is better on one-on-one settings. You have the superintendent meeting with principal, the principal meeting with teachers. then publicly creating a place where people can feel comfortable enough to say like we're not doing a great job here and this is the help that we need to get or this is what I'd like to change next time so like I'm all for holding people to a high standard and ensuring accountability but it's hard to in front of the public like live streamed on YouTube admit that you've made a mistake and that something's not going well and so I think like that's just something that I think about like how can we create a space in the board meetings where a principal can get up there and say, this year things didn't go well, and these are my reflections on where we went wrong, and this is what I'm thinking about doing for next year. And then in private, if that continues to be a pattern, then Tracy has that meeting with the principal, like, hey, this is the second year in a row that we're not seeing progress, like what's going on, and kind of holding people's feet to the fire.

[9021] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: I totally respect that. I think that admitting to that we need work, that we're kind of down the right direction, or whatever they need support. And it's okay to ask. And vice versa, I mean, having that open channel, that channel of communication is really key. But I think it starts with us, right? And it really, us honoring the time for our audience, our public comments to have the time. I think it starts there to have that platform to be able to speak and really communicate that to us as well as us communicate back and acknowledge.

[9065] Aiden Hill: And one of the things that I think that we can do to help that is one of the things I learned early on in my career from some of my bosses is they said, you know, don't come and bring me problems, bring me solutions, right? And so it's, okay, something didn't work out well and so I think that we can have, you know, somebody is presenting there saying, you know, we were shooting for this, we didn't achieve it, but if we can create a culture that says, okay, understand that that didn't work out, so what's, you know, what's the next step, right? What's the solution? You know, and I think if, you know, and then that becomes maybe a less confrontational and, you know, stressful interaction.

[9109] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, I mean, all practical points, really good points, and just to highlight that too, the more, it's dealing with people, right, and people

[9118] that are trying to, I'm going to say the majority are trying to do the best they can.

[9124] SPEAKER_14: And the worst thing is, one of the worst things is if you're putting your stuff out there in public, yeah, they don't want to, no one wants a public embarrassing.

[9136] Aiden Hill: One of the challenges too, Darrell, and this is something that I think I expressed to you when we were chatting before, and I shared this with the other board members, is one of the challenges that we face in public education is the Brown Act. And it doesn't matter whether we agree with it or not. It's the law, right? But this prevents having real, honest, tough conversations and communications that you can then transcend because then, you know, because we're forces aboard to have these things out in the open, we can't always be completely honest or completely like, you know, and there ends up being consequences and people feel or shamed or whatever. So it's a challenge that we have and it's difficult to overcome.

[9187] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, it clearly is. Now this is a, it's probably will come out, it's going to come out in a little bit in our next section on the roles of responsibilities and you'll probably see it in your HR Masters in Governance course and then I'm going to, okay this is a campism. I know when I'm working with my board I tell them, look we have a process we have a process for evaluating every employee in the district this thing is always wrong but but we have a clearly defined process right they should be followed and if they're concerned about somebody in their performance it really needs to come from their supervisor but you're not their supervisor it's only one person you supervise a superintendent he gets It gets messy if we deviate from that process. You know why? You got a thought, you got a thought, you got a thought, you got a thought, and their supervisor has a thought. So it gets messy when the person is wondering who is the thought going to come from and which one's most important.

[9254] SPEAKER_14: Especially because who has the most power out of all those people? The supervisors, five trustees, you got the superintendent who may or may not be the supervisor. Who has the most power out of all those people?

[9268] Tracey Vackar: I think the public in some ways, you know, especially in this district, not all districts, but in this district, I think the public has a lot of power in having an influence. What's that? I think they really care. How do they exercise their power? They voice it, of course, I think at board meetings. I think they talk about it. They get themselves on committees. They know history, what's happened, and they don't want to see repeats of the history. They're really concerned about it. And I think they also remember the district when it was larger and when it ran operation was larger, you had more people to really help, do you think?

[9338] Tracey Vackar: As you start to shrink, it gets harder.

[9344] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: For me, it would be our student member. Do you think they have the most power? Not the most power, but it has an influence because a student being there in the seat, experiencing and all of this from the teacher, you know, going through that. I think it's really key and having a voice, that voice to be able to transmit that information to us because they're the ones living that directly. So the power of just pouring that into a student so young of an age and being able to present their school, their fellow colleagues.

[9386] SPEAKER_14: Those are important, and don't get me wrong, influence is a form of power as a huge but in terms of the decision-makers all these people can influence like they can talk to they can talk to individual boards they can yell and scream at a board meeting they can go to the media and yell those are all influence the board collected but the board there you go collective it's really not about the individual individually you don't have power right but collectively you do but let's say if you start exercising that power in such a way that that's inconsistent with their supervisor.

[9422] Nancy Thomas: One of the biggest obstacles, and I think you kind of, someone brought it up, is that the Brown Act gets in the way. We have to be able to spend the time to have, you know, difficult conversations. Maybe it's, maybe the answer is we have more study sessions and maybe we let down our guard in study sessions and show that, you know, have that back and forth and the disagreements that

[9448] SPEAKER_14: kind of flow into a consensus in the end that provide clear direction for the superintendent you can definitely study things more I mentioned the book there public manner was really important the other part was deep learning so if the board ever really want to go deeper into a particular category in the business of education you can always set aside time where you can be a little bit more authentic with your comments another thing that well I'll just say this other two principles were systemic thinking and strategic focus sometimes you got to want to be engaged at that level because your role you have to be thinking strategically and systemically and sometimes the more you get into the boots on the ground it gets a little bit messy because you've hired people to do that work because we're going to keep going and explore some that I guarantee you some of this is going to come out in our roles and responsibilities because I see we're doing it by the way before we move on to that though just go to page four in your handbook page four and just a little bit. You should have asked this earlier.

[9518] Tracey Vackar: Your pages are a little bit kind of messed up.

[9520] SPEAKER_14: But that section that says our shared purpose. There you go, in the middle of the page. Our shared purpose. Think about your legacy statements and our shared purpose. And look at how they might overlap, words that might overlap with

[9538] SPEAKER_14: some of the concepts you heard with our shared purpose. What are some of the words that you saw some overlap? I think one, I heard somebody something about financial. The fourth we're looking at.

[9574] Kat Jones: Improving achievement. Positive community involvement.

[9584] SPEAKER_14: Positive community involvement.

[9587] Tracey Vackar: That word legacy is back in here again.

[9589] SPEAKER_14: Oh, okay. Believe a legacy, right? A positive community involvement.

[9595] Tracey Vackar: I think also legacy is like your signature DNA is as a district. Different districts throughout California, we can name them, Dr. Camp. Throughout California, we can name districts that are known for high academics, high stability, and we can also name districts that have had continuous problems. We can all do that. We can name it here locally. We can name it across the state. We can talk about certain states that are known for achievement and not having achievement. But I think that legacy, I think it kind of goes back again. what is it that we want to really produce here for our children?

[9633] SPEAKER_14: Yeah. I didn't think about it. I was thinking in terms of Alameda County. You just triggered a thought. I was like, I came in 2019. And I'm probably already, in the matter of six years, the one that the district that has the most stable superintendent during that period would be Emry's had Dr. Scott for a while Castro Valleys is now retiring with Parveen Amadi. Oh, Thompson is in New Haven. He's been there for six years. He came at the same time, as did Skidari and Alameda. Haber will be on there third soon, since I'm coming in. Albany will be on there second. Dr. Wells died, though. The Connecticut County and the messages, you know, people were sending. You're on number I don't think that stability is the measure.

[9705] Aiden Hill: Stability is the means, right? And so the measure is outcomes, right? So there's lots of teams that have the same coach and they continue to be mediocre, right? when we look at the 49ers, right, and we were talking about that. The 49ers went through all sorts of turmoil in the late 70s, and then everybody would say, oh my God, these guys were horrible, but you know what, it took that turmoil to finally get Bill Walsh. And then that stability helped Bill Walsh, right? Correct, but the reason it was stable, ultimately, is because he was producing great outcomes.

[9741] SPEAKER_14: You know, you could say the same thing about the current 49ers. They went through a series of, and then all of a sudden, Nolan, stable, right? Warriors. Turnover, turnover, turnover. Nice recovery. Musclemen. I don't remember all these people who were there, right? And then all of a sudden, they were critical because Mark Jackson sounded like he was getting good results. They got rid of him, and that occurs in a nice, stable run, and that definitely contributes to some organizational stability. Some would say it's helping up with success, right? Right. Interesting. But interesting concept. You have to decide when to make a move. Well, candidly, that is kind of similar with the board. I'm not saying this just because of the superintendent here, but that's a board important decision. The question that, you know, we always ask CSBA is if the board is constantly changing the superintendent, then we ask the board to consider, hey, is it more the superintendent or the board that's causing this, right? If you keep going through, because if you, you know, that's the conversation that comes up. A little bit of inside baseball is superintendents behind the scene are having this conversation, right? They're evaluating based on the facts. They may not even know the back story. They just say, how stable is this district? They're going to look at money. They're going to look at stability of the district. In other words, what are my chances of success in a place where I feel like I can really contribute, right? Especially experienced superintendents. Once you get the experience in, you get And if you're stable in your current situation, you're not going to move for an unstable situation. You know what I mean? It's just impractical. Maybe if it pays a hell of a lot more. Maybe. You might take out a chance.

[9851] But if you're stable, why would you go to an unstable?

[9853] Aiden Hill: Well, what I would argue, though, is that the great leaders will make all sorts of compromises to be on a great team financially. And so they might be on a stable team, but they haven't won the Super Bowl, they haven't won the World Series, whatever it is, but if they see an organization that's committed to great outcomes, because there aren't many that are, and that's what makes them great.

[9885] SPEAKER_14: But the same concept, it's not really a but, but and. When you think about district-level leadership in schools, they're evaluating all of that, but their criteria of a great team might they're gonna look at it from their perspective well sure and the first thing they're gonna they're gonna ask okay I would say what their salary range they're gonna ask house you know the next question you're gonna ask what's the next question we're gonna ask anything about the salary of the district what are you paying your superintendent health benefits they're gonna ask that what else are going to ask how stable is the board that's probably the number two question they're gonna ask tell me about the board right and not only are you going to ask colleagues who they trust you know what else they might do finding out about the board watch our board meeting oh clearly especially this is great with this everything's recorded right now yeah that's a great resource they also before they could watch them they would study your votes and they want to see how many the 3-2s you have and 4-1 votes and 5-0 votes on critical issues. They're gonna try to figure out, is the board together with critical decisions or that? And it's not saying that you always gotta vote the same way. But don't be real, they're looking at you. They're studying everything they wanna know. Why? Because think about it. If they're in a stable situation, things appear to be going good, but they might have an interest in living in the Bay Area, let's say. Well, they're gonna say, is it worth leaving wherever I am to come here, right? that's the question that is so something to consider okay here's what we're going to do we're going to before lunch we're going to do one thing you're going to be a teacher but first you're going to be an expert so your goal is to be the expert so you can be the teacher along with you teaching you're going to have two other partners so I'm going to separate you into three and three some of you will be responsible for some board bylaws related to the board and some of you you're going to be responsible for the board policies related to the administration and the superintendent okay that's it so you're going to be in teams of three the teams are trying to break you up nice Kat Austin and Nancy and then Aiden Gabe you prefer Gabe or Gabriel okay Aiden Gabriel and Tracy are going to be on one team okay the team that has Tracy you're going to take you're going to take the board bylaws the nine thousands that are here so in your packet there you got some board bylaws and and board policies so go ahead pick those out there there's the CSBA they're your policies oh yeah yeah they might be in the one that Toyota put together yeah yeah they're in the one that Toyota So you're going to pull out these policies first. Oh, you can't pull them out, huh? No. Oh, good. Okay, good. You just have them. Identify where your policies are. And... Good. So the team that has Tracy, Gabe, and Aiden, you're going to have the 9,000s. So, what's it? 9,092. So your goal once again is in Probably about 12 minutes 15 max you got to become an expert in such a way that you're going to When we come back together as a team you're going to explain your two board policies or bylaws to the other group okay so get the critical parts so what I would recommend doing is for the next we'll do this soundly before you get together it's been sitting it's been individually right now like five minutes we're trying to read over your your two ones that you were assigned just read over the two that you're assigned okay then I'm gonna have you separated about five minutes ago the group read over that

[10167] SPEAKER_10: and I'm going to take that part first.

Pause: 2m 1s

[10318] K-12 school board meeting

Pause: 36.7s

[10385] SPEAKER_08: K-12 school board meeting

Pause: 1m 36s

[10511] SPEAKER_14: when you're let me ask you this a kind of a group question we could just set a time that we're going to reconvene in a group where one group is going to teach the other group and I could just say okay we're going to reconvene at 12 40 or 45 if we do that we say okay you're expected to get your food talk to your group during that time period you know so you have time to eat and work together as a group or would you prefer to just stay work together as a group and take a clean break to get over for lunch be a clean lunch break clean lunch break do this take a mental break yeah okay so let's let's do that let's work together for probably let's work together see how long that you tell me when you're ready to take the clean lunch break okay so we have Tracy, Gabe and Aiden you're discussing 9,000 9,000 9,200 and the other group you're discussing the 2,000 let's go ahead and just regroup where are we going to regroup and get to the central points then we can take a break after you get and tell me your group is ready

[10603] . My hope is that you'll be ready in about 10 to 15 minutes. That's my hope.

[10612] Kat Jones: But you're going to have to make sense of it with your group first before you decide on how you're going to present to that group. We'll sit up there, I guess.

[10634] SPEAKER_14: K-12 school board meeting

[10664] Tracey Vackar: I was checking in about Crabby tonight, sorry. K-12 school athletics.

[10677] That's not it. That's what I'm talking about.

[10683] Tracey Vackar: All right. Any thoughts?

[10694] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: Since we're educating our fellow trustees, we can definitely start off with just bringing a description.

[10714] Kat Jones: Yeah, sorry, they're all like weird bangs.

[10716] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: Or the green board or the white laws. What do we want to present? That's the thing.

[10729] Aiden Hill: So I think, Gerald, one of the things that would be helpful is what are you hoping the outcome of these presentations is going to do?

[10744] SPEAKER_14: A clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities.

[10749] For you, you're the board. Yeah, the board.

[10754] Aiden Hill: with the board members of the board members of the board members of the board members of the board members of the board members of the board members of the board members of the board members of the board members of the board members

[10784] and so are we looking for like, you know, a sentence? Are we going to go through every single one of these? I'm looking.

[10794] SPEAKER_14: Well, maybe they haven't read it, so, well, assuming they haven't read it, right? So just to make sure these are the key parts.

[10801] SPEAKER_14: If you had to pick the four or five key sentences, what would they be?

[10814] Okay.

[10815] Aiden Hill: Well, I mean, as I read this, I think that the key things are that we are the elected officials, the board is the elected officials, and we're supposed to provide leadership and oversight. So that's our overarching responsibility. And obviously, we work in conjunction with the superintendent to do that. But I think one of the things that comes out of this that I think is important for us to remind ourselves of is that we are the voice of the community, right? So we are the representatives of the community. And so we need to make sure that we're taking those thoughts and issues, et cetera, into consideration as we exercise our job. But ultimately, we delegate. I mean, the way that I view it is that the board establishes the strategic direction and it provides oversight, but we hire the superintendent to execute that strategic direction. So it's the superintendent's job to implement basically the direction that the governance team has come up with. But at the same time, we are overseeing the execution of that. And so that's board policy 9,000. And there's different areas we can talk about. So it's policies in general, it's academic outcomes, it's budget, it's facilities. So that's 9,000.

[10919] But then from a 9,200, at the end of the day, the board, the only authority that flows from the board is from the collective all of the board. And so no one individual that individual can go out and, I mean, number one, start to jump chain of command and go out and start directing different districts to go do stuff because that's not our job, right? That flows through the superintendent.

[10953] Aiden Hill: But then also, even with the superintendent, we can't individually come to the superintendent and say, well, you need to do this, you need to do that. I mean, that needs to be a discussion and the board as a collective whole has to say this is the direction that we would like to provide the superintendent. So that's my interpretation at a high level. Marie, your thoughts?

[10978] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: No, I mean, I actually underlined what you just mentioned. Boards should not exercise any administrative responsibility with respect to the schools or command the service of any school employee. Individual board members do not have the authority

[10995] Aiden Hill: I think the key thing that we need to understand is although we don't exercise the authority but we oversee and we can provide input on that and so if there is a particular direct and when I say that I'm talking about to the superintendent it's not to the individual people within the the organizational structure.

[11028] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: So the board member has no individual authority.

[11031] Correct. Correct.

[11033] Aiden Hill: So it's ultimately it is the board that has discussions about these things and the board that provides direction to the superintendent.

[11046] Tracey Vackar: Yes. But on the same note, you guys are all very active in various committees, right? And so then making sure those committees that are being worked on come back into the whole. I agree. I agree. That to me is like a piece that needs to happen with it. So sometimes there's work that gets done while it's still in committee before it goes before the board. So I think that's something you still have to be mindful that I recognize that's an important element is we sit there and we really try to develop a quality program for my team to be able to get behind like what we're hearing in those committees for us to come back and do some of the staff work that needs to happen.

[11090] Tracey Vackar: That's an element that comes with it. That synergy, I think, is important. And then to be able to make sure that influence comes back in the boardroom that, hey, we're working on these things. We're not there yet. We're going to have to come back at a later time, or we're going to come back immediately because there's an urgency, whatever it might be. I mean, many times there is an urgency that ends up being the presidents versus some longer-range things that we're working on.

[11122] Aiden Hill: Right. Well, and this is kind of before you came on board, just sort of as you were coming on board. So I was the vice president on the board at that point, but then I was also the chairman of the audit committee, and that year we were doing a lot of work in the audit committee because, quite frankly, number one, we had lots of audit exceptions and issues, but also there were kind of some

[11145] Aiden Hill: and we went back and we did a whole exercise to revamp the charter and it was a lot of work but at the end of the day that needed to be brought before the board for a quick summary and a quick you know essentially approval or you know with modifications whatever because the audit committee by itself doesn't have the authority to just go forward and just do whatever it wants to do

[11183] SPEAKER_14: I'm kind of curious too, as you're explaining it, and then thinking about it from a practical standpoint, what might be a couple of other examples where, boy, okay, it's hard to kind of figure this out. I would say kind of sometimes and it's hard to navigate. Knowing these, what are some practical issues that come up where it gets a little bit, and that's clear, I guess. Can you consider an example?

[11228] Tracey Vackar: I can think of one. You know, we had the DLI program that I had to go out and make a decision on because I didn't have the staffing with the right credentials, right? I knew it was going to be in compliance with a lot of our policies, right? But I knew that the impact to students was going to have a negative consequence and just felt like something needed to really happen there, right? So I made some decisions based on the organization in helping to support the children to make sure that they had a structure to ensure that classrooms were coming in, right? That was a really difficult decision because it had been kind of a piece and it had so many problems and it was riddled with ineffective results. It was a little scary for me to go out there and take a step out there. I couldn't make it work. There was no way it was meeting the legal requirements and what we had to do. To make sure I got that out there and got that communicated as fast as possible. I think that's a piece where our policies helped me in the decision making to be able to do that but then I had to make sure I picked up with the communication that that communication piece out there as quickly as possible both to the community as well as to the board and to the teaching staff there's going to be a change here right but I think that one of the important things that happened throughout all of that process is that there were different

[11333] Aiden Hill: viewpoints in the community about DLI, some for, some against. There were maybe some differences of opinion on the board. In fact, I mean, I know that there were some differences on the board. But at the end, DLI was, at that point, the policy.

[11354] It was a program that we had in implementation.

[11357] Aiden Hill: But you came and looked at it and said, OK, we right now don't have the resources with the resources to actually continue to execute. So we've given you a policy that you're not coming back and telling us, I can't fulfill that. And so you came back essentially with a proposal. And my recollection is that we then as a board ultimately needed to ratify that. So you're coming back with data on the ground that says, this is a problem. I don't think we can execute it. My recommendation is that we that we terminate it. But again, we need to get board approval on that.

[11405] Tracey Vackar: It was a little bit more of a ratification on that standpoint because I really didn't have the qualified teachers, right? And so I come back and tell you, here's what happened, here's why. I couldn't try to triage it in the meantime, but that triage wasn't really even going to meet all that. So then I looked at your other policies, education, wouldn't you required the right teaching credentials. Like I had to look at all the elements that came back to be able to verify what was going on, right? And then how within like the CIPSA plans and our Title I and stuff, could we go off and still ensure that the students are receiving it if they have the extra support, have the support systems? And those were the pieces of the way to come back and talk about.

[11444] Aiden Hill: But that was a decision. Yeah. And I mean, theoretically, the board could have come back back as a unit of authority and said, okay, we understand the challenges, but we're willing to authorize additional resources. We're going to carve out money. We're going to do whatever because we care so strongly about it. I mean, the board could have done that, but the feasibility of that really happening would be pretty low because you're not going to go and all of a sudden find people with a B plaid in like two weeks or whatever.

[11485] Tracey Vackar: No, there's a problem with finding eClouds across the state of California. It wasn't just two. Right. It's happening statewide, right? So it was a bigger problem. And those that were able to get people with eCloud were paying substantially more money or we offered bonuses to come in and kind of do that. Those that were able to keep a sustainable program.

[11507] Aiden Hill: Right. I mean, you know, we had that part which we were fully under, we didn't have full control over.

[11512] And then also so we didn't have control of the enrollment, right?

[11515] Aiden Hill: And we did not have sufficient enrollment to support that at that point, with which we had even less control, right? We couldn't just... So it would have been problematic, right?

[11526] Aiden Hill: And especially given our class size mandates, et cetera.

[11534] Tracey Vackar: I was just trying to think of like a situation like where this had to be used, like, you know, we had like policies that like aligned with it. Right. All the things the board helps to oversee and support the academic success of the district. But also looking at the development here, are we including the goals and achievements? Do we need to back and retool it?

[11559] Aiden Hill: What does that look like? Because the board can provide direction.

[11563] At the end of the day, if you as the superintendent and the administration execute on that, then you have to come back to the board and say, in that this is not going to work.

[11576] Tracey Vackar: Right. And I think also listening to the board talk about the challenges that have been over the years, you know, hoping is that they really do a deeper dive looking at that and make sure these things are being met. Right. But that was a communication, right? That's about communication, making sure communication was happening both ways.

[11594] Aiden Hill: Yeah, we had a fair amount of discussion about that.

[11598] Go for it. Yeah, please go in. Sorry.

[11602] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, that's okay. Once your group is finished, then life starts. We'll reconvene at about 12... 12.50? Is that good? 12.50? It gives us 25 minutes. Okay. 12.50 it is. Thanks for hanging in there. You're not feeling well. Okay. There's cocoa right there. I know. Thank you. So you said you're more of a Raiders or Niners?

[11640] Both. I like both.

[11641] Austin Block: I feel like that's unusual to have someone who's a fan of both.

[11644] SPEAKER_14: I'm a fan of, I'm more of a Niner just because I think I explained that the Raiders broke my heart when I was growing up when they left the first time.

[11654] Yeah, I never really fully recovered from that heartbreaking. The A's, I'm making it easier.

[11660] SPEAKER_14: I'm like, I'm done.

[11662] I'm done.

[11662] SPEAKER_14: Go do what you gotta do. You never win again.

[11666] SPEAKER_18: Giants? Are you Giants then?

[11668] SPEAKER_14: No, but I'm going to San Francisco, so I don't hate anybody, right? I like the Bay Area. The Bay Area comes alive when the sports teams are doing good, right? So I just kind of like to be in that atmosphere. I did play in Candlestick when I was younger. You did? Yep, Candlestick. It was the Oakland champion play at the San Francisco champion, and I mentioned we were pretty good, so we got to play in Candlestick. for a couple years. I got a base hit, a candlestick, and a solar base. I do a strikeout soon, let's tell the other side of the story. My knees were knocking my first event. I was looking out there, you saw maize, the cubby, you're like, what the hell am I doing here? Looks good. Yep, we won the Trans Bay Championship at the Candlestick Park. You must be a giant.

[11724] Tracey Vackar: You bet.

[11725] SPEAKER_18: But I grew up an A's fan. Why did you stop rooting for the A's?

[11734] SPEAKER_02: I don't know. It was definitely the mid-70s going to the World Series and all of that. Then they just kind of fizzled, I think. They kind of shifted.

[11746] SPEAKER_14: In the 80s, when they went to three consecutive World Series, they lost two of them. To the Reds and to the Dodgers, right? the Kirk Gibson famous home run. But then in between they beat the Giants, right?

[11759] SPEAKER_13: That was the earthquake year.

[11762] Kat Jones: My son was born the night before that earthquake.

[11767] SPEAKER_13: The night before?

[11768] Kat Jones: Eight weeks early, the night before. Yeah.

[11771] Kat Jones: Needless to say it was a little scary to be in the hospital because the hospital broke into three pieces.

[11782] Wow.

[11782] SPEAKER_14: Those were the fun days. Now it's hard to believe that Olsen is not having a professional team.

[11793] It's hard to believe.

[11798] SPEAKER_14: I did have a moment where I got to go back in good old what was Oracle Arena about a month ago. We're doing the All-Star break for the All-Star Classic. They hosted a couple of events right here at the arena, so I went to one of them. They had the practice in the morning at Oracle and they had the HBCU class in the afternoon and early evening.

[11831] Cindy Parks: In the early 2000s the high school baseball team played it at Oakland.

[11838] SPEAKER_14: At the Coliseum?

[11840] Cindy Parks: Was it the NCS championship? and I don't know what it was, but I remember going.

[11847] Kat Jones: We got that opportunity.

[11849] SPEAKER_12: I think Oakland Athletic League, didn't they eventually move that game?

[11853] SPEAKER_14: When Oakland Champs played for San Francisco Champs, Oakland had its own sports section and so did San Francisco, so we weren't part of NCS, but we played each other. So when we went to San Francisco, we played a candlestick and we played across, in this part of the Bay, we played a lane candlestick. Well, I was seven years old and

[11902] Aiden Hill: when the A's were in the World Series and my dad and our neighbors, we went to one of the games.

[11913] You went to a World Series?

[11914] Aiden Hill: Yeah, but I was so little I didn't even really fully process it. You now appreciate it, right?

[11920] Yeah.

[11922] Aiden Hill: So I think Randy Jackson was on the roster at that point and Raleigh Fingers and all those guys.

[11928] Yeah, that group.

[11931] SPEAKER_14: Because now when you really the A's were the Yankees Farm Club. Because all these people ended up playing for the Yankees, John B. Henderson. Martin and the coach, right? Forget the coach's name. That went over there? Oh, Martin. Yeah, Billy Martin. That used to be fun, too. I remember Billy Martin kicking dirt on people. He used to get fired up.

[11961] SPEAKER_10: Oh, man.

[11962] SPEAKER_14: K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting That's where I grew up. There were two football players that lived up there. Mike Davis from the Raiders and Sherman White from the Buffalo Bills. Now I remember once I was walking home or something like that and I came across this paper. It turned out it was a check. Check stuff. Or no, it wasn't even a check. It was a check that was uncashed. Sherman White. I guess he dropped the check. I'm seeing a Jan Cracker. For some reason that name looks familiar. Former board member.

[12048] Cindy Parks: Was she a teacher too? In New Haven.

[12051] SPEAKER_14: That's why I know her. Yep, that's it. K-12 school school school school school school school school school school school school school school school school school school school school school school school school

[12083] SPEAKER_12: I can't even remember the name of the person I was coaching when I was coaching.

[12103] SPEAKER_14: Was there a Frise? Girls basketball though, Dan Frise, does that sound familiar? That name does sound familiar.

[12111] SPEAKER_06: Frise. From way back, right?

[12113] SPEAKER_14: I was well we got a guy I came in under guy right and make the administrative move with guy there and then Delane came in and I think I left I left during the lanes time Delaney I first was accreditation was with

[12143] SPEAKER_14: You're talking about somebody that impacted the community. They still talk about her in New Haven, her tenure. I mean, if she came in in the summer, and as a new superintendent came in in the summer, by the time school opened up, the Continuation High School was flattened.

[12183] SPEAKER_12: I thought, wow.

[12185] SPEAKER_14: So then Logan, the biggest Logan was, 4,000 at that point, we didn't have like an outlet for kids that needed a small neighborhood. Kids got really low, Continuation High School.

[12203] SPEAKER_06: K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12

[12233] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: she has no care did they not move it to like she's artistic community based I don't know I don't know

[12263] SPEAKER_14: I know after I left, they closed down a middle school. They closed down some elementary at least one.

[12275] Tracey Vackar: I remember following their story for a while. Following what? Following their story for a long time.

[12282] Tracey Vackar: It was so interesting what was happening. I wasn't going to guess that it was building schools. She was closing it down.

[12293] SPEAKER_14: My whole concept of governance though was kind of war played from that experience. I was ignorant. My concept was Kai Manuel was such an imposing figure. In my mind it was like the superintendent and the board because the guy obviously was a woman.

[12318] Everything was gone, right? You're not sick, really.

[12323] SPEAKER_14: When he got sick, he got really sick because of being pregnant. Those immune systems. He used to go to a football game and everybody knew guy's seat. He had a specific seat. Oh, yeah. I know. You don't sit in guy's seat at football. He would go to all the games. But you feel really special coaching here. That's one of our issues in San Lorenzo. We got two big high schools.

[12369] SPEAKER_14: Trying to support them. Numerically, they can all fit in one high school. That's another story. The high school is more attractive now than a lot of the families. It's probably going to be a preference, right? It's hard for you. It's not equal footing. And the one that's more popular right now is not the one that has a history. San Lorenzo High School has more history. But it's less attractive right now.

[12427] Nancy Thomas: My daughter taught at San Lorenzo High School for quite a few years. She did? Yeah.

[12431] SPEAKER_14: There's so many copies.

[12437] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: What did you think over there, Mr. Block?

[12440] SPEAKER_14: Just listen. Yeah, I went through the closure a couple years ago.

[12446] from a general standpoint.

[12454] SPEAKER_14: There's so many communities across the state. You went across the bay. You went to school across the bay.

[12476] Austin Block: That's why I didn't come to the Bay Area. That's what got you up to? Yeah, that's what I grew up in like the LA suburb, San Fernando Valley. Came up here for college and then left the Bay Area much better. So never went back.

[12489] SPEAKER_13: Oh, look, you nailed it. Good, good. Much better, no talent.

[12493] Tracey Vackar: Way better. I mean, the air quality up here, just the way of life is different.

[12499] Austin Block: Yeah, the traffic is so much better.

[12501] Tracey Vackar: Really?

[12503] SPEAKER_18: You lived here all you were alive in Nalanita County. You go, no, no.

[12509] Austin Block: You get stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic not moving on the freeway at 1 a.m.

[12520] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: You say traffic and I see 880 right off the bat. It's like, no.

[12528] Tracey Vackar: It's nothing. I mean, there's traffic, but it moves slowly. It moves. Yeah, it moves.

[12536] SPEAKER_14: But we're spoiled. Yeah, it really gets to the bumper to bumper, right? You move it. It's a little. It might be 20, 30 miles apart, but it's moving, huh?

[12548] Mm-hmm.

[12548] SPEAKER_14: Mm-hmm. Yeah. All of our colleagues in L.A., hopefully they're saying, how far you live from work? They always talk in terms of minutes, haven't I?

[12558] Yeah.

[12559] SPEAKER_14: I mean, my parents, like, driving 30 to 45 minutes to dinner is, like, totally normal if you've got any time.

[12566] Mm-hmm.

[12566] SPEAKER_06: Well, it's only 30 minutes away. Not a chance.

[12571] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: But in L.A., there's a lot of traffic, but you guys have so many outlets. There's so many, you know.

[12577] SPEAKER_18: And lanes.

[12579] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: Yes. Lanes.

[12581] SPEAKER_18: We have two. You just go, wait a minute. Remember when 880 was like three and, you know, it's like, it's like you go to L.A. and you go, wow, this is where all the money is because they got six.

[12592] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: Actually rolled down your window and just stick your head out and just drive it out.

[12595] SPEAKER_08: It's like, yay.

[12596] SPEAKER_14: That's good. So stayed up in the bay because the quality of life is different.

[12607] Austin Block: I think so. Whenever I'm back in L.A., I feel the superficial Hollywood vibe. It really proliferates everywhere. I don't know. It's like in L.A. proper that I'm talking about. L.A. City. I don't know. There's just, it seems like more of an emphasis on like flashy displays of like status and wealth. It's a little bit more subdued here. I feel like obviously there's still the same thing in a lot of parts of the Bay Area, but I don't know. Something about the Bay Area, I just like a lot better.

[12650] SPEAKER_14: Your sports alliances stay the same?

[12652] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, let's just really talk about that.

[12655] Austin Block: Did you celebrate the daughters I'm a soccer guy. I know very little about baseball. I'm a neutral bystander for baseball and football. Soccer is my thing. Don't we have a World Cup company? Yeah. I'm on the wait list. That's exciting. That's why I've been quiet in these baseball and football conversations. I don't have much to contribute. I really don't have much knowledge on it. I enjoy all the sports, I just don't know any of the players or any of the history.

[12695] I'm not very knowledgeable at all.

[12698] Kat Jones: Our house was interesting, especially before the Raiders moved. It was Raiders, Giants, and Lakers.

[12716] Austin Block: I was like one of those kids that loved to be a contrarian and so everybody in LA was a Lakers fan and I just decided to hate the Lakers because I was the one antagonizing all my friends whenever they lost just probably really obnoxious in hindsight. I became a San Antonio Spurs fan when they were rivals at the Lakers just to kind of make people mad.

[12759] SPEAKER_14: So I grew up back east. It's a good time to be a Spurs fan now. You grew up back east.

[12767] I did. I grew up back in Ohio.

[12770] Tracey Vackar: So I'm a Cincinnati fan of, you know, Bengals and Reds and and Pete Rose used to drive me to cheerleading practice. What? He was our neighbor. No way. And he had to drive his nephew. Does he make any bets? Teach me that. It's on the phone. They didn't have phones like that back then, just so you know.

[12797] Aiden Hill: Was he stopping to pay for us?

[12801] Kat Jones: Yeah, that would be a... Well, think about betting.

[12817] SPEAKER_14: Well, people used to think about betting and sports. Now look at it.

[12820] Tracey Vackar: You can actually go and call your bookie.

[12826] SPEAKER_14: Now it's highly encouraged. Advertised. Talk about it.

[12832] Aiden Hill: Although they are clear that news reports are coming out about how this is creating serious gambling addictions that are destroying people.

[12842] Cindy Parks: Well, you can tell that whenever there's that ad for, what is it, Fanville Fanville. Yeah, there's always that disclaimer saying, did you have a gambling problem?

[12853] Austin Block: It terrified me. I see my high school seniors already talking about it, and they talk about it in addictive ways. Really? Oh, yeah. That's crazy. They are already, anytime I catch them off-task conversations, it's about You've seen yours have discretionary income, huh? Yeah, they do, evidently. And yeah, it worries me.

[12885] Austin Block: Starting young, we're getting hooked.

[12892] Cindy Parks: Trying to make a fast buck. What was that? Trying to make a fast buck.

[12895] Austin Block: I am. and usually not succeeding.

[12898] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: And if you do, that's the way you get it, the way it's gone.

[12908] SPEAKER_14: Are they doing Bitcoin and stuff like that? Yeah, some of them. My youngest son bought some Bitcoins and they don't know what you're doing.

[12918] Tracey Vackar: Did he buy them or did he mine them?

[12921] SPEAKER_14: I don't know the difference.

[12924] What's the difference?

[12925] Austin Block: Do they mine them? is like you have a bunch of computers that like doing the calculations and calculations and you get rewarded for it.

[12931] SPEAKER_06: Versus buying them is like you just purchase and invest. He did that one.

[12936] SPEAKER_14: Being a teenager right now is so much different. That's the social media thing.

[12956] SPEAKER_14: It's hard. I would have hated it. It used to be a mistake was a mistake. Now a mistake is replayed over and over again. Or even a fight. It used to be a fight and you lose. So be it. That's it. Heal up. And it could be replayed over and over again.

[12986] SPEAKER_06: K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12

[13016] Aiden Hill: for those of you that haven't already read the great book of Anxious Generation talking about how cell phones have really contributed to mental about mental health and wellness issues. And this guy brings in research that really indicates that that's part of the largest driver of all of this. And literally what I've seen is, experimenting in my own class, is when I first came out, I started teaching during the pandemic, so you had zero control over kids' screen time at that point. was physically present. But then when we were finally in class, I was first trying to operate on the honor system. That didn't work. I then tried the educational route and had them watch videos basically talking about how it's an addiction. That didn't work. So now I just have a pretty hard and fast policy that they have to put their phones in the phone cubby. And the change in the tenor of the classroom is just amazing. because now they actually talk to each other. And I'm fine with them talking about other stuff. You know, that's a part of learning how to be a human being. And so, and quite frankly, I think that they're relieved that I have put this rule down because now they don't have, because literally they're addicted to their phones. And so, you know, it's an automatic response, right, where like they're not even thinking. It's like it's in their in their pocket and they're pulling it out, or it's in their backpack and they're pulling it out. But now that they know that they don't have permission to do that, it's liberating for them.

[13144] Tracey Vackar: How many of them use their watch?

[13146] Aiden Hill: I tell them to put that. If I see it, I tell them to put it in the backpack.

[13151] Aiden Hill: Because that happens too.

[13154] Tracey Vackar: Multiple devices. So you have a cell phone cubby. So maybe you actually shut it and lock it somehow? I don't know.

[13163] Aiden Hill: It's just a pouch. And they have an assigned number.

[13166] Austin Block: I used to have a basket on my desk and the kids had to put their cell phones

[13196] Kat Jones: and I would have between and that was a number of years ago since I stopped teaching sixth grade in 17 and I was still on the Bunker campus and I probably had in the beginning I probably had five or six and I had this little heart-shaped flower, it was a heart-shaped, but it was a flowered basket or box that was kind of, eh, this big, you know, six, seven inches if I was to turn it into a circle in diameter. But I got to the point by my last year of doing it and I collected, I think I started, I did it for four years and by the final year, which would have been 16, 17,

[13256] Aiden Hill: I had I had to get another basket you know I was collecting 15 to 20 every day and they didn't have a problem they just walked in put it on my desk and walked to their seat but I learned the tip from my veteran teacher Frank Kat I was complaining about this earlier and then she said oh well like what I do is if I do catch him with it I have him come over and I say okay call your mom they're like what and then it's like call your and it's like, okay, hand me the phone. Oh, hello, Mrs. Smith. You know, your son Johnny is addicted to a cell phone and I want to talk to you about it. Get your help in making sure that he understands he's not supposed to use his cell phone. So she passed along that tip. It works wonders. It only takes once. Oh, yeah. And the whole class is like, okay, now go there. And the minute that I, you know, that I, because I tell him this, but it doesn't always sink in. But, yeah, like you say, the first, the first

[13316] Kat Jones: I think the first time I had to have a kid call well the first the reason I started collecting is I had a student whose phone rang through two or three times in within a week okay that's it and so that was it was disruptive it was really And so then it was, if you don't turn your phone off, then you'll have to put it on my desk. But hers went on my desk. And then the third time it happened, she had to call home. And then I started just collecting anybody who came in. Now, did I get them all? No. but I got a large number of them and we didn't have any more phones getting, you know, going back with.

[13383] Kat Jones: At that point it was more phone calls and then her, you know, there was a special circumstance for her but I wouldn't have known that had I not, you know, done that and then we had a conversation about it and how to deal with it.

[13400] SPEAKER_14: Things that we do now. All right, you ready? I'll give you the original.

[13405] You ready? Crank up?

[13405] SPEAKER_14: Okay. so where we have become experts in the board policy 2000 to the board bylaws 9000 at least those two particular ones let's talk about it let's thought let's have the truth that let's have the 2000 group go first what are the most important information what's the most important information related to the board bylaws I'm sorry the board policies the concepts and roles on the board and

[13436] SPEAKER_14: and then the superintendent responsibility.

[13443] Nancy Thomas: So we kind of split this up into three of us regarding policy 2000. The board recognizes the administrator's role in managing the district and providing support services and managing the operations all within laws and the board policies. And the superintendent provides leadership

[13466] Nancy Thomas: leadership structures, regulations, staff action plans, shapes the culture, delegates the staff regarding operation, and instills confidence in the community.

[13480] Austin Block: A couple of other things that we added on board policy 2000 is the fact that the board and superintendent work together in order to set up protocols for the governance team, including board meetings and communications between and the board, and that it is the board and the superintendent's responsibility to together agree on a system for superintendent evaluation, so what method, what criteria, the timeline, et cetera, and that's something that's done in collaboration between the board and the superintendent to ensure a smooth evaluation process.

[13517] Kat Jones: Okay, and then looking at 2110, which is superintendent responsibilities and duties, the highlights, the governing board desires to establish a productive with the superintendent. The board also desires to provide a fair basis for holding the superintendent accountable. The board shall clarify expectations and goals for the superintendent at the beginning of every evaluation year. And the superintendent may designate any of his or her responsibilities and duties to other staff, but still remains accountable to the board for all areas of operation.

[13555] SPEAKER_14: and we can delegate but still is responsible. So that's the 2000s and the 2000 and the 2110. Did that group happen to get into any nuances where it's less clear?

[13572] Kat Jones: No, we didn't get that part of our discussion, I believe. No, that's okay.

[13579] Nancy Thomas: At least that's my... I don't think it was absolutely clear.

[13585] SPEAKER_14: Absolutely. on the board. In your experience, have there been times where you felt like the actions aren't consistent with these particular board policies?

[13602] Nancy Thomas: Yes.

[13603] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, okay. This is your second stint on the board, too.

[13610] Nancy Thomas: Just talk a little bit about that. were investigated by the grand jury because we had school board members that were digging into operations that belonged to the superintendent.

[13627] SPEAKER_14: And then it comes really back to this, right? The superintendent's responsibility. They say, a big takeaway, hire wisely. That's their responsibility.

[13640] But I think that there's a nuance there. And this is where I've seen also in other governance situations.

[13648] Aiden Hill: So certainly, you know, you have a board that delegates to the superintendent and the superintendent is the CEO and is responsible for execution. And we're going to get into this when we talk about the board's responsibility. But just as Kat read this, so the superintendent may delegate to other district staff any duties imposed upon him or her by the board. This delegation does not relieve the superintendent of responsibility for action is taken by his or her designees. So this is what it says for the superintendent. But the same goes for the board. And it's actually codified in the ed code as well. That although we can delegate to the superintendent, at any time, if we have some concerns, we're empowered to basically raise those. And it doesn't mean that we're going to go jump chain of command and go down and start to direct staff. But if there's a concern about any part of the operations,

[13705] Aiden Hill: not only do we have the right, but we have the obligation because we're ultimately accountable.

[13712] SPEAKER_14: That's an interesting concept. So if there's a concern of the board, I'm going to say as a collective, about different operational things that are happening, what might be the board's role in that? That's a good thing to just kind of raise.

[13728] Aiden Hill: I think it should be talked about in either a study session or as an agenda item.

[13736] SPEAKER_14: How do you determine which areas that, I mean, because there's so many operations that happen over the course of a day, a week, a month, and so many different areas in a school or a district that are happening. So how do you pick and choose which ones to want more information in, I'm just saying?

[13761] Tracey Vackar: I think they can be raised both ways, right? I think they can be raised by the superintendent as well as by the board, right? I think I have a responsibility to be able to come back and tell the board there's a deficiency in some place or this isn't working well or we tried this and it's not working I need to come back and either I need to come back with an idea or some action plan with additional input this is where that sometimes it's better to have other people weigh in on it besides just our lens from the educational standpoint so I think it works two ways I think it's a two-way street and I thought about what you said a little bit ago about didn't always work well like we want to make sure that it is working well and that we have a communication people that's set up so that we are leading our district with the best possible in all the integrity but care making sure that we're meeting those goals that were set by board right like those are really clear to me like the goals that you've all set last year and actually the year before that you kept you maintained the the same goals for the most part. They were very, very clear to miss what they were. They weren't being, in my opinion, administered as well as they should have been. Lots of different reasons why. Some of those things are still sitting out there, and we're still working through them. But I think I need to come and tell you when there's a problem, whether it's in HR and the fact that we didn't hold our county billing system well when we were doing our evaluations, or if there was a problem. And I'll give you another example which relates to President Jones, right, where sometimes there's things that are happening in the district that even the superintendent is not aware of.

[13885] Aiden Hill: and how it gets surfaced is that a community member comes to a board member and says, hey, there's an issue. And there was a situation at the junior high school, and this is just that you were kind of starting to make the transition in, where there was some bullying going on.

[13902] And quite frankly, some of our staff was involved in it.

[13907] Aiden Hill: And that information was actually being hidden from the former superintendent. and it was only the fact that somebody was able to come to Kat with legitimate information and the fact that she had street cred as a board member to be able to come and talk to Penny and say, hey, you're not getting a straight story here and this is really serious. And then Penny, when she investigated, she was shocked. We found out that there was a lot of stuff that was being hidden. So I think to your point, at the point, Tracy, that there needs to be free-flowing information and that you never know where it's going to come from.

[13955] Kat Jones: For sure. And to be willing to be a thought partner or to ask for a thought partner. Like, I'm not sure, this is what's happened, I'm not sure where to go and getting, you know, speaking, talking amongst, you know, as we can to the Brown Act, but staying within the Brown Act, discussing options and being a thought partner like, well, have you thought about this? Have you thought about that?

[13979] Kat Jones: You know, and kind of playing out different scenarios that then we can look at and say, oh, actually, that one seems like a direction we can really go with this. You know, it's not a bad thing for the board to come to the superintendent or the superintendent to come to, you know, the board and say, I need help with this. What are your thoughts? We are a we all basically come from education in one way or another being an engineer Nancy was also very involved in the education of working through education as her job working as an engineer but we're all connected to education which honestly I think is probably pretty rare for a board that we all have as strong of a relationship with education as we do. So we come at the same topic from a lot of different perspectives, which allows us to be able to do that thought partner thing.

[14047] Tracey Vackar: I think it's actually a strength. What's that? I think it's a strength of the board. I think it's a real strength for our community and for the board.

[14056] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, I like some of the concepts that came out. Yeah, there's no way the superintendent is going to know everything that's going on. Yeah, you know, trustee, they aren't either but you all have to be in a position where you're you kind of feel good that if the constituent group comes to you and says he's a concern and then but I heard what you say it was there was a sharing of concern I shared it with the superintendent but then there's up the superintendent to determine like what to do with it or an investigator right because one of those principles is the board really doesn't get into the investigating role but it's kind of a blurry line between getting information and investigating right you're you're getting information but you recognize that you're not the one that's going to be like following up on the leads and all of that and seeing where the investigation might lead.

[14107] Aiden Hill: However, the board is certainly authorized to ask for an investigation if there's an area that is problematic and to expect some type of finding or some type of

[14125] SPEAKER_14: I think there's I think there's no area there's no say you always need to know there is an area for 20 which one there are some it's an employee issue

[14155] Nancy Thomas: where we might be called on to be a judge. If the employee issue comes to us for a judgment, we should not have been involved in discussing it with staff because we could have formed a prejudgment about it.

[14175] SPEAKER_14: Nancy sounds like a person that has attended the policy and judicial review part of the Masters of Governance. Did that come up, by the way, last Saturday? Yeah, the board's role, and you basically and they talk about in our democracy the three branches of government normally and you know what the executive the judicial and the legislative part those three branches and I know in Masters of Governance they talk about your role in that so the legislators create the policies right through the bills who creates the policies in the school district on the executive on the executive side of things. But we don't have three branches in the school district. You don't. That's what I'm saying. Because the board is the legislative. Who's the executive in the school district? Who hires the executive? The board. And then on the judicial side of things, who will make the decision like Nancy was saying? If an issue comes up to you related to personnel, who makes the decision? Who's the arbiter?

[14245] Aiden Hill: But I don't agree with that. I mean, I agree that we don't have three branches. But I don't agree that the board is incapable of executing its duties, quite frankly, in any situation. And so just because somebody talks to me about something or gives me information, I have a responsibility to weigh it fairly. and so again, and the concern that I have, and this is the information, this is the position that I share with you on the phone, is that I think that oftentimes we've created a dysfunctional situation in education which has tried to erode board power and oversight. And I don't think under any circumstances should that be eroded. on the board. We are the ultimate authority, and we are elected by the people to provide that oversight. And even according to Ed Code, Ed Code says there's no information that can be kept from the board. That's what Ed Code says.

[14319] SPEAKER_14: I guess the principle, though, is when an issue comes to you, how much do you want to have yourself predisposed to information? Even though you've got to make a decision, right? The idea of a judge, usually, and the reason that they go through a process in juries, right, in jury selection, it's the idea you want people, not without history and experience and all that, but you don't want them to be, they have preconceived notions about a particular case, right, so they try, they go, we go through great pains in our system to have a jury that's impartial, and it's kind of on that same principle as a board, when an issue rises to your attention where you're going to be asked to make a decision, it's that idea of impartiality, because you are the judge and jury in this So that's the idea the more information you have prior the more you're forming your thoughts and Granted yeah, that doesn't preclude you from making good decisions still but the idea the principle is a I'm open to information that I'm going to make a judgment and write personnel decisions student expulsion decisions another one where you know it could be the media the public teach everybody could be complaining about a situation that's happening and Yet you might be wise to kind of stay out of that because it could bubble up to you anyway for an expulsion.

[14398] Nancy Thomas: Our attorney put it this way to me once and said, you know, yeah, sure, you can hire someone and overrule the superintendent and hire someone that you want. You're the board. You have that power. But be careful.

[14412] SPEAKER_14: That's what the attorney was saying. Well, you know why the attorney's saying that. Yeah. Because they have to deal with situations where you end up spending thousands of dollars on litigation in a particular area.

[14428] Aiden Hill: But what I would argue, though, is that ultimately, if this is a legal issue, it's going to be adjudicated in a real court. And we are not a real court. And quite frankly, if a personal matter comes to us, we can, quote, unquote, make a decision. But that doesn't necessarily mean that that's going to be upheld in a court of law. And quite frankly, you know, it cuts both ways where let's say that we don't, we aren't apprised of a situation and we only find information at the last minute and partially, we could make an incorrect ruling, right, because we don't have complete information. And so again, I don't see a situation where the board is not engaged in anything.

[14482] SPEAKER_14: I did bring you one other example too, but I saw Gabe, Dave,

[14484] Kat Jones: we need enough information as a board we need enough information to be able to make a decision but maybe not all the information so that we can be that judge later yeah yeah I hear today that's my approach to this is the camp isn't like I'm trying to get the board but I don't

[14514] SPEAKER_14: information so I'm still consistent with this principle of no surprises I don't want to be surprised you read about some yeah I want you at least have a heads up yet I don't want to get provide certain amount of information because I know that you're might be the arbiter of this but there's another situation where you may not want to know information and I offer this just a just a thought suggestion there's not an absolute you mentioned the personnel decision that's something you know the way in and that also includes student information type of situation discipline mainly that are bubbling up but there's another one that people don't know about often think about something happens or allegedly happens law enforcement gets involved law enforcement tells the superintendent of staff were involved don't you open your mouth about this situation what they say you're screwed of the investigation if you open your mouth. So sometimes the superintendent's like, well, wait a minute. My board wants information. Law enforcement's telling me, don't mess up the investigation. And if I go south on law enforcement, the law enforcement says, hey, I'm impeding. They could probably come down pretty hard on you for messing with the investigation. You're interfering with the investigation.

[14602] Tracey Vackar: Sometimes there's two investigations, right? law enforcement investigation, and then sometimes there's a consequence based on that that we have to do an investigation to.

[14613] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, sometimes there are concurrent investigations going on. But in that case, the superintendent's got to get their hands tied, really. They can't disclose information. So just recognize that these are situations that come up. When they come up, just recognize them.

[14628] Nancy Thomas: Why can't they disclose information? I mean, we're held to secrecy in closed session.

[14634] SPEAKER_14: because if the superintendent knows, that's one person who has that information, then if five other people know, it just increases the likelihood that the investigation can be messed up. But you see, from the law enforcement standpoint, sometimes it's better to keep the circle of knowledge really small.

[14658] Aiden Hill: I think that that's a different situation because you could argue that for any person

[14664] that's in the district, right?

[14670] Aiden Hill: So we could have law enforcement come to a principal and say, you know, we're investigating this, that this is confidential, and we don't want anything to be screwed up, and so therefore you are not allowed to speak with anybody about it, right? So that means even the superintendent doesn't know. I mean, so my sense is once it's law enforcement that's coming into play, it's a whole different ball of lies.

[14693] SPEAKER_14: Right, and and sometimes it's not a clear cut, right? That's the other part. Like sometimes like child abuse allegations and things like that.

[14705] Aiden Hill: Right, it's a mandated reporter type of situation. And quite frankly, you know, I mean the protocol is if we as teachers or anybody that's a mandated reporter see something, our protocol is that we need to either go to whatever that agency is or we got a child protective services

[14724] SPEAKER_14: So we kind of identify once again the big concept here is Yeah, the the superintendent has this role of the staff as the superintendent says it doesn't say a lot of the staff a lot of times it says doesn't mean but this idea of developing action plans that's that's all kind of on the staff side of things right and the superintendent frequently will delegate but that doesn't relieve those responsibilities those are the big principles right let's flip and go to the nine thousand what are the key principles in the nine thousands talk about the board that's been elected by the community provides leadership so it's an oversight

[14784] Tracey Vackar: that they establish effective organizational structure. I'll let my colleagues speak on some of the rest.

[14805] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: Also on the same lines, rules adopted by an organization primarily for the purpose of governing its members and the regulation of its affairs.

[14814] SPEAKER_14: That's in the 9,000? Can you say that again?

[14824] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: Rules adopted by an organization primarily for the purpose of governing its members and regulation of its affairs.

[14832] SPEAKER_14: So the rule of policy in the regs.

[14836] Aiden Hill: It's the responsibility of the board. But I think that the important thing, you know, when they start out with this, is they say the board's been allowed by the community to provide leadership and citizen oversight. So that's really our mandate. And as Tracy's indicated, we need to work with the board and with the superintendent on that. And so we're working together as a governance team to discuss these things. We're working with the superintendent ultimately to understand what are going to be the actions that are taken. And then we engage in oversight, and one of the things that I think is really important to understand, and it kind of flows back into the 2000s discussions, in my opinion, is the board's role is not to direct staff. Okay, so the board's role is not to go out and provide instructions to anybody that works in the district or micromanager or do anything like that. However, the board's role is to do oversight, and if the board is who's concerned about a particular area, they have an obligation to actually dig into that. And kind of my experience working with leaders from the past, where sometimes I've had to go, at one point I was working at KLA Tencor, which is one of the best companies in my opinion in the world and tough as hell. And my experience in seeing how the executives work is that here I might be somebody working down in the low levels, working on something, and it has some major impact, and I go and I bring it before the big dogs, and there's levels of chain of command, et cetera, but basically, if it looks like I'm in my lane and I'm doing things correctly, they're gonna stay at 30,000 feet, right? And they're gonna just say, okay, everything looks good, or think about this, think about that, but they're not gonna get down in and into the details. But I've literally seen executive vice presidents and CFOs I think the key thing is that we're not micromanaging but we're providing oversight and if there's issues we need to bring those complaints ultimately back to the superintendent but it's not kind of this black box situation where we have no idea what's going on.

[14994] SPEAKER_14: yeah it's an interesting concept and but I will say that could be further explored with multiple things that happen in the school district I tell yeah I'm thinking think about the number of interactions that happen over the course of a school day in a school district they're literally thousands and the board doesn't want to get involved in all of those let's say you get a teacher that you don't think is doing their job it's not the board members job to come in you know figure out what's happening with the teacher or friends right he it because one it gets to that second part right the board doesn't have any authority anyway in that those type of situations so you can't really what do you do even if you get more involved now the superintendent who has a different role may get more involved like you said in those situations that you said CEO and I'm just making the distinction between CEO and the board right the superintendent might say hello and say, oh, we got an issue with this. I need to get more hands-on involvement with this issue, right? I really need to get any boots on the ground for a period of time.

[15063] Aiden Hill: Yeah, and so if you take your example, I mean, let's say that there's a teacher that there's some sort of issue going on in the classroom and it's impacting, you know, and parents are concerned. Parents oftentimes will reach out to the board, right? And so our responsibility- That never happens. No, just kidding. So it's our responsibility at that point to forward that complaint to Tracy and say, hey, heads up, this is going on, need your help in addressing it, and can you provide some type of follow-up or whatever, right? And so at the most part, it's kind of left at that for the most part. But if it becomes sort of a lingering issue or it starts to get bigger, right, and we again have community members coming to us, we may need to get more detail and we may and we need to have more discussions and we may need to collaborate as a group on what the appropriate response is.

[15123] Nancy Thomas: I think we're looking at our handbook. There is a whole process you go through when you get a complaint from a community member or staff member.

[15134] SPEAKER_14: Nancy, you know exactly what I'm doing, huh? Yeah, because you do have it. You have the R's, right? The six R's? Yeah, the six R's. And I saw it earlier. Let's see if the first one can figure it out. Let's see. I think it's on page. You're on the right page? I saw it earlier. Oh, there it is. I found it. Go to page 8.

[15156] SPEAKER_14: It actually starts on page 7. So at the bottom there, this is a real good one. Especially new trustees or even refresher. I said this is... This is kind of like a really excellent template. It's tried and true. It's consistent with the principles. When a board member receives a response from our two community complaints, this is the idea. What's the number one? Somebody give voice to that? Listen. Receive. Listen. And listen. Right? Number two, which is kind of indented way over there. What's number two? Repeat and paraphrase. Yeah, so what does repeating and paraphrasing do to the person now well three let's keep going request number three right at the person what would they like so sometimes just by saying what do you want me to do with this information if they say something that is not consistent with what's it the 9000 particularly 9200 you can say look at an individual board member I don't have any authority And even if it doesn't if it's something that's more on the administrative side from the board side You can just run with those as an individual you don't right, but it's a collective body you get right, so if a person says look This teacher well, I don't know you might have a homework policy, but let's assume you don't They say this teacher is way out of line. They get too much homework And then somebody comes to you and says look my kid they can't do the school work participate on the soccer team and participate in the church choir. There's too much homework from this one class and they got five other classes. Stuff like that.

[15274] Aiden Hill: I want a board policy. At that point you just cited code which is that nobody including the board has any input into how a teacher runs their class.

[15285] SPEAKER_14: So in other words you kind of you tell them this. But here's the catch though. And I feel because I haven't and you have to sort of re-educate them about the role of the board. So it's actually a great opportunity to be a community leader because you're saying, look, in our form of democracy and education, this is the way it works. And then you redirect. Well, that's... What's that? Go ahead. Oh. Well, number five, right that part was key I would there and say they're the opportunity to redirect have you talked to the teacher you're ready that's the first thing right and then if he they say yeah I talked to the teacher before okay so you have to read you know what's next after the teacher is it the board well it's a superintendent I mean or the principal yep yeah so that's part you're helping to educate that particular constituent about the and I think that's a good chart that outlines this.

[15356] Tracey Vackar: That's perfect. I might steal it from you. We use it too as administration. We do the same thing. Parents come in and have a concern. We also want to be able to redirect back to the lowest level possible, try to resolve the problem if you can. Sometimes if it's one of those big hairy things that they tell you about, it's like, okay, then now you have to investigate if it's been shifted or moved, right?

[15377] SPEAKER_14: But these are all good. To review it, to redirect, then to report that's kind of good because like you said the superintendent doesn't know everything that's going on and it's actually might be helpful the piece of information that you share might actually connect to some information that the superintendent has that actually you know brings value to what it might you never know right what pieces might be most important to connect some dots that's why I've encouraged to report it to the superintendent so they can kind of figure out oh is this a one-off or is this a consistent issue So it's really important to do that, right?

[15415] Nancy Thomas: I think there's a seven, number seven there, and that is that the superintendent should report back to the board. Everything? No, the results. Every time? I think the superintendent, if the board member has brought something to the superintendent's attention, if the superintendent can give back to that board member and say, we've dealt with it, that's what I'm talking about. or too many things fall in the black hole. We never hear again. We don't know if it's ever been dealt with. It's only common courtesy to get that. You've seen it. You acknowledge it. You don't necessarily have to tell the outcome unless the whole board should hear the outcome, but you should acknowledge it, I think.

[15463] I think to your point, Carol, that we're not in the business of solving a problem with a

[15473] Aiden Hill: you know that is happening inside the district but we are responsible for making sure that problems are addressed right and so and that and as you're describing as Nancy's process here describes that you know initially our role is to provide guidance to the community member to say here's the escalation path right so here's you know kind of what you need to do first next by the way I as a board member I'm not involved in you know in in solving your problem directly, right? But here's kind of the steps you need to go through. And no matter how low a level, theoretically also copy the superintendent on this so that they're aware this is on their radar screen. But then I think that it ultimately becomes an issue of judgment. And you said, well, okay, I've never been a political figure before. And so... I'm a politician, although I operate in politics. Well, right, right. But you're not elected. Right, I'm not elected, right. Okay. and so the issue that we have, the real issue that we face is that if this is just some small issue that comes up once and randomly, it's a one and done, right? It's okay, you know, hey, this issue came up, you know, hey, here's how you handle it, superintendent FYI, right? And then as you're saying, the superintendent has a million things on their plate and so if it's something that is minor, I'm not necessarily expecting to hear a follow-up, right? It's like no news is good news. but if it's something that's big and also if it's something that's festering where it keeps going that's when the board as a whole kind of needs to get more involved and have a discussion and I think the other thing too is that it is a political situation and sometimes different people have different constituencies or they have their own little personal things that they care about and the superintendent is going to have to make a call about okay and say, you know, I understand that this issue is really important to this particular board member and so maybe I'm going to spend a little bit more time on it than I might normally do because I know that they care about it or their constituency is very strong about this and that could affect their future electability, you know, blah, blah, blah. But I think it's a judgment call. I don't think that we can put a hard and fast rule in place.

[15613] SPEAKER_14: Well, what I like about you said was you're giving room for some nuance, right? Right. And I do think it's important that if a situation or situations arising where there appears to be some frustration bubbling and I'm not saying that's the case but if there is what I'm suggesting is maybe that's the time to sit down to talk about maybe we need a protocol on this right the superintendent may not say the individual board member hey look it's really a lot of time to be following back and all this I feel like I'm just keeping track of stuff and that's the whole job in itself but the board member may not realize that and especially if you get two or three board members that are all operating on that it starts to add up the to-do list and the to-do list is already full so actually when you when you start filling up that bucket if you will if the superintendent only has this much bandwidth to do the job and then start taking about this amount to respond to board members about all these investigations actually what you're doing is you're taking away from their strategic focus focus has been an important element that we talked about time and time again

[15683] Tracey Vackar: but I think it's important that if the board member comes to me if it's something I think I can solve or at least look into I need to let them know that if it's something that I think that is something that's going to take a whole lot of time or even after checking into something like there's been a couple things that have come my way I thought it would take no time at all to go off and solve it boy was I ever wrong you know there was this thing about trying to figure out like how to capture rates of our kids I can't and I'll tell you how difficult that is to solve and look at the kids that aren't coming into our school districts and even looking at it by a small zip code, how difficult it is for us to even aggregate the information to be able to share that.

[15726] SPEAKER_04: It didn't seem like it was going to be a big deal.

[15729] Tracey Vackar: It became a really big deal when I was asked to sit there and kind of look at it. I thought it would be something on ITV, oh, we'll put it into our student information system, compare it with something. I thought something magically would be poured back out.

[15740] SPEAKER_13: Well, it wasn't that easy.

[15743] SPEAKER_14: I don't want to get stuck on that particular issue as an example but I already think you have some things that have that tone in it I mean turn to page 10 in the handbook and at the

[15772] SPEAKER_14: at the bottom of page 10. And somebody read the second bullet under bringing new ideas forward. Just read it out loud to the group.

[15789] Kat Jones: When initially agendized, the preliminary discussion of a new idea will not require staff research time. Initially, staff would be expected to respond to new ideas based on current knowledge.

[15801] SPEAKER_14: Can somebody read the third bullet?

[15802] Austin Block: 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 district staff.

[15815] SPEAKER_14: So think about this. So this is not directly related to what we are, but it is indirectly. It's this idea of time and what you're going to spend time on.

[15825] Aiden Hill: But let me throw this out to Darrell. So we already kind of follow this, although there might be times when it lapses. but I think that the expectation is that no individual board member has the right to go to the superintendent and say, you know, you must look into this, you must do that, right? So we, as it were, a unit of authority, so we have to make that decision because as you're describing, the superintendent's time is precious and we need to make sure that they're working on their highest and best tasks, right? But I think that what's important is that if we as a board member, as an individual have issues that we feel strongly about and that we're not feeling are getting the appropriate attention, but I think that the path is, and we do try to follow this in our board meetings during our board comments and requests, is we say, you know, this is an area that I really care about and that I think is important, and I would like to get our fellow board members to agree that we ask the superintendent to investigate this further and come back to us with some deliverable.

[15892] SPEAKER_14: I think that's a way of approaching it right now it is kind of tricky because obviously there's only you know when do you even have that discussion that's like another question right but it's almost like at the very end right so we have we have a you know board comments you know requests okay we can make those requests at that point okay and what we've done is we've done it with a nod it's not because it's not agendized it's not an official right right I

[15922] Tracey Vackar: Yeah, and the other part, just a practical, well, I don't know, but you've got to figure it out.

[15951] SPEAKER_14: This idea of there's some boards that they get along so well they don't like to upset the other board members just out of being respectful if you go to other board members so the same okay good but it could be a problem you can see what I'm saying if like Aiden has an idea that he wants further research about or follow up on and the others of you is really not passionate or something like that but you want to be respectful and everybody just says hey okay I'll go along with it well if that I was with the board I remember this they had a portion of their agenda where ideas were addressed at the end of the meeting and the superintendent she shared in this case she said I got a workshop like this she said I you know I don't like this because of my and my staff always they're they're they hate that part of the agenda because what ends up happening is that you're forming a to-do list in between meetings when they already got a full plate right and they have a project list and they said they just hate it so at that meeting they decide to get rid of that portion of the agenda they just said no because they didn't see it though until the staff nobody wants to piss you off right so they're not going to tell you that but you have to have that relationship with loose the superintendent to say the same the same idea I I said about feedback or your feedback is a gift. But you have to create the climate where the superintendent can say, look, this is really starting to become disruptive.

[16052] Right.

[16052] SPEAKER_14: So just be aware of it. We don't have to solve that right now.

[16055] Kat Jones: Or I have so many things on my plate right now. We've made all of these suggestions. Please prioritize. Because that's a legitimate thing, too. I know there's probably a three-page running list. There is.

[16069] Tracey Vackar: There is a three-page right now. Honestly, there is.

[16071] Kat Jones: Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

[16072] Nancy Thomas: So, you know, then then we'll do need to bring that back Discuss it and the more that I discuss what what you're all prior to developing a calendar and putting the things that are Collectively care about on the calendar and the things we don't we drop off But we don't let the list to stay there and grow and grow and grow So what I'm hearing is maybe the the part of the main presentation is key because you've already communicated I don't know if these are still true, but

[16102] SPEAKER_14: but the district goals on page four, fiscal vitality, community engagement, two-way communication, but you can fit a lot of that within that second bullet on two-way communication.

[16113] Aiden Hill: That's the point, right, is that we have to have very strong goals because the goals are what prioritize the actions and I think that we need to make a conscious decision that is anything that we're asking the superintendent to do, which goal is it aligned to and what type and what kind of bang for the buck are we going to get? And we may decide that there might be something that is unanticipated that doesn't fit in with those goals and we maybe need to make an adjustment. But I think that the superintendent needs to be able to have a discussion with us to say, here's the trade-offs, right? So you're now wanting me to go work on this, so that means I'm potentially going to have to take something else off the plate, so what do you want me to take off the plate?

[16159] SPEAKER_14: I think that, to me, that's a fair conversation. And it days it does put the onus on the governance team to really prioritize your goals Right it really does and then they have a I call it the term I'm you like this governance discipline to say okay I realize that there was something that happened in Newark. You can still call it Newt Memorial Okay, Newt Memorial High School and the media is here and the constituents are there and you realize that oh if we really Divert a lot of attention to this area that is taking away from what you've said or your priority goals So that takes a lot of discipline, a lot of discipline, especially when people are yelling at you.

[16198] Tracey Vackar: And I'm super sensitive to your needs. I've been a board member. I know what it's like. And it's hard when you're out there and I know people are saying things to you. And I know right now in this district, there's just like a lot of needs, right? And so to be able to really give the priority things and make sure that we're all on the same page can be a really important thing to make sure that we're going to sync together. And so I appreciate knowing that that's something I can bring back. I think it's okay to come back and say community members come to us they share some issues we show our due diligence and escalating those to you

[16252] Aiden Hill: and we, but I think it's important for us to be able to say, okay, this came in, we've acknowledged it, we now have to decide what, if any, action we're gonna take on it. And it's okay to say, you know what, I'm sorry, but we just don't have the bandwidth to take action on this right now. And I think that most people in the community can, you know, that they're okay with that honesty of saying, you know, you've heard my complaint or my issue, you validated it, but you're saying that we don't have the bandwidth to work on it. And I think most people accept that if it comes back that there's a whole crowd of people that say, no, this is a priority, well, then that is gonna force us to reevaluate. But I think if we can close that loop so that everybody understands the expectations to say, this is what we're focused on, this is good, but this is gonna be in the queue.

[16309] Nancy Thomas: When I have the problem is where there's there's no x by y there's we ask for something and and we don't have time but there's no by y there's no I don't think we should do it or I think we can do it but we can do it by date x so that it just it leaves it up in the air it leaves it in another land and that big long list that we haven't seen we should we should see that long list I'll read to you

[16342] Tracey Vackar: Good, I mean it's a body and we should talk about It's a long list and some of it you put on there and some of it I've also put on there or I've listened maybe even directed but I listened and like you know when I was hearing things I've also added to it and I do prioritize that list on a regular basis I know like this coming week you guys are going to see a lot of the concerns that you've got with programs that have been discussed either by you or the community and we're going to bring those forward I'm looking forward to the discussion you know we've got recommendations but there may be something else that comes out as an outcome of that just as we discussed and what will happen with this I have no idea exactly what will come out of it I'm very open-minded and I'm not stuck on it has to be done this way with our based on recommendations we're going to be the best that we can by what we know but we know there's also another element that's out there with it I think it's important to have those looking forward to that kind of discussion just a

[16402] SPEAKER_14: possibility now give the impression this might be a running list but if it's even if it's a running list can it be themed and if the board wants more information goals well yeah I think that's a great crosswalk to say and what to what extent is the list correlated with the goals set by the district everything's correlated yeah you can always because you're smart people you can always make this connection but I was gonna say if you see themes maybe you set aside time during the year to have study sessions on that particular issue now here's what you're gonna find though if you do that you're gonna have to ask yourself how much time do we want to spend as a governance team realizing that that impacts the staff too because they're usually preparing for the meetings for your meeting and then so how much time are you gonna spend on those issues because you don't have unlimited time either I've seen boards get frustrated you know like do we really want to have that much information spend this much time on that item. It's similar to staff. They're saying like, look, we don't have an unlimited amount of time. But there's some boards that will set aside four study sessions a year. They'll take four big items. My current board, they've decided that, I don't like it either. Sorry, they're hearing. Oh, they're not hearing. But they've decided from 4.30 to 6 before every meeting, we have a study session. And then we go into closed session. Every meeting. Every meeting. I'm like, do you really? But they like information, so. but what we do is we have a study session schedule that we develop for the year that way it allows my staff to prepare well that allows feedback to people that have asked for it exactly I hate it I'm fine with it six months out as long as I know it's going to be discussed so but what it does to the community it communicates that okay we have a schedule and It gives a placeholder, too, saying, oh, you have an issue about this? Oh, we discussed student discipline handbook on this meeting. You know, it's a placeholder.

[16531] Aiden Hill: I think the key, though, is that we as a board agree on what is kind of what we need to discuss. Absolutely. So that I don't have the right to go tell Tracy, you know, okay, this is something that I think is really, really important. I have to make the case to the board to say, okay, you know, I think that this is important that we all agree. and that's our common list that we're working on.

[16555] Tracey Vackar: I think I've tried really hard to hear what the goals are and make sure that in my reports that we're tying those goal pieces in there. I know Karen, she can recite it. We've gone back, we've watched prior board meetings from prior years.

[16571] Tracey Vackar: We want to know where were the problems when they get mentioned and how can we help craft and change that. We're working on those kinds and we're trying to get through those elements and share that information. So we're trying to integrate a lot of what you're asking us to do, and I hope you're starting to see that.

[16593] Nancy Thomas: I think this next study session is good. We'll see other things that have been on the list for a long time.

[16601] SPEAKER_14: I mean, just to draw your attention to a couple of docs, you don't have to look at this now, but in your packet on the right-hand side, there's that governance calendar, but that's the idea that we're going to plan our meetings and think about it it may not be every meeting before it could be you know four times a year three times a year you have to just the important part like Aiden was saying was to have a conversation about it decide on how much time and then how you're going to prioritize that time and this is the document I was sharing so I meet with my board I'll be with them probably the next couple months here and we'll start laying out what do they want to see again what do they want to take off what do they want to replace so that these are items they want more information you know and the right-hand side so we normally pick a couple of these every meeting in an hour and a half period we do some student celebrations and then we'll pick two of these items about 30 minutes each and they'll go deeper into the book will call this the deep learning category where they get to know a little bit more about the implementation and here's the here's the catch though before I do it though this is it but you notice what we're on here these are issues that come up during the year where they want more information so the conversation with myself and the board presidents sometimes the board clerk is okay we have other items that you've identified that you wanted it to be before the year starts staff have been preparing all this right so now if you want more information the question is what are you going to take out in order to get some of these future possible items if you do this for an hour and a half from when you say five to six thirty four thirty six four thirty to six and you have closed session then we have closed session then we come at a seven hour okay and then

[16701] Kat Jones: and what time do your meetings typically in?

[16704] SPEAKER_14: 2. Really? Too late. No, no, I'm kidding. Actually, no. It's halfway reasonable. I would say normally about 9.30. Oh, really? 9.30. Wow. Sometimes we've had to utilize that board policy 92-23. I think the board votes if it's going to go beyond 10.30 a lot of times. We've had to use that a lot recently, but I know what's going on. I tell the board, look, the amount of conversations you want for a particular item right now is more than what we've allocated and you want more so it's the same thing that any board would have to deal with you're gonna have to decide how much time is it worth it and then the same conversation and to what degree is this moving the needle aligned with our priorities and goals that are intended to move the needle that's that's the key part let me throw out something and this is something that maybe we can think about and talk about in the future is so my

[16761] Aiden Hill: prior to life before becoming a teacher, right? I was a consultant and I got involved in a lot of system implementations, right? So implementing big, huge software packages. And then what happens is after you go live, there are all sorts of issues, okay? And so what you have to do is you usually create a database where you log those issues. And then there is, and essentially, so this is our list, right? Just like you have your list there. And then your goal for a certain period of time is to work through those lists. that list. But the key thing to make this work is you actually establish a prioritization status. And so when there's mistakes in systems, they call them defects. So you say, is this a level one defect, a level two, a level three, a level four? So the level ones and the level twos definitely get worked and get done. The level threes, if you have time, level four, it's just sort of what we get around to. So maybe we should use some type of

[16821] SPEAKER_14: I'm going to call it project management so you have to even prioritize which projects and then how are you going to manage that too I mean I have some tools I use with my I'm starting to use it with my board because they're starting to get more but you have to decide on how much but I think what what you're gonna end up coming back to is time. Your most precious resource will be time. And that also symbolically, the Berkeley School Board used to do this, and I'm not advocating for this too. I like the idea, but it was probably time intensive. They had a board president a few years ago that really wanted to have the board look at, put a mirror to itself to see how the board was spending time. So this board president, in this very concrete sequential way, started recording the time that the board was spending on different issues. And then the issue was aligned with the priority. And then at the end of the year, had a running list that shows exactly how many minutes the board spent on blank, blank priorities. Wow, you talk about a level of accountability that's like, and what does it say? That's the other part. What does it say when you really look at your time allocation? You might say something's important. Show me. Show me the time.

[16910] Austin Block: I was reading a book on that who I guess when he consults with other boards will basically do that process for them and will tabulate how many minutes are spent on each topic and his argument is that 50% of board meeting time should be focused on student achievement and if you're spending less than 50 minutes on student achievement then you're not sufficiently focused on student achievement so they go through and then code all the meetings.

[16937] SPEAKER_14: It's powerful if you do that. I hate it because of the amount of That takes a lot of organization to do it, but it's clearly within the message, right?

[16947] Tracey Vackar: Yeah, but you can break it up. I mean, I'm looking at ways that we can break it up and share that information so that we can get that messaging out there and then recapture that same information or even set some other goals within some of the other organizational meeting things that we do with our parents and community to parlay that. I mean, I think there's ways that you can do that. I mean, it's a difficult time to establish practice but again I think about like our conversation that we have student achievement again just a bird's-eye view is kind of what's happening with i-Ready how that parlayed into what we were doing with LCAP on this past you know last 10 days really important information I think it's also to help that information we go back to their school site councils when they're looking at their systems so to me it has like this progressive thing that kind of goes along with it but I think it will be very

[17001] SPEAKER_14: this door the beginning stages of doing something this is my thing is similar concept but it's not exactly lines of burns I just track our board meetings in our flow so time on public comment our public comments frequently go on for an hour and a half begin public comment imperfect here's your 20 to 30 minutes yeah this allows me to have a conversation with the board president to say okay let's look at it you know you always want to know some meetings might be an anomaly and all that but then you just want to say, okay, well, what are our trends? This could be a whole data analysis conversation that you could have about trends, right? So yes, when we adjourn, well, that's our adjournment history. How long have I been doing this?

[17045] Kat Jones: I was just going to ask you, like, how long is public comment? And I'm seeing it's really short compared to ours. That's, I think, a lot of where our length comes in.

[17053] SPEAKER_14: During that time period? Beginning and ending public comment? So you have something in your board I can't remember about that, right? About 30 minutes allocated for any... Oh, you do it. You say 30 minutes for any item on the agenda or an item not on the agenda, so that public comment period should be 30 minutes.

[17073] Aiden Hill: Right, so you have public comment on non-agenda and public comment on agenda, right? But each of those is an agenda item, right?

[17082] SPEAKER_14: It's not the topics underneath, right? But if public comment is, you say 30 minutes, then the question and we have a lot of questions. How do you manage that 30 minutes? Like, there's some discretion to the board president. Well, you say something about, it's not unusual, three minutes for public comment, but the president has the discretion. It's a maximum three minutes you have in there.

[17104] Cary Knoop: That's right.

[17104] SPEAKER_14: But the board president has the discretion to be able to limit that more, right? So I know, like, our board president, sometimes they're like, okay, sorry, one minute.

[17113] Kat Jones: Yeah, so we don't do that because we want the community, you know, to know that we are here to listen.

[17120] Tracey Vackar: when we move over to City Hall it's going to be different because we have to be out of there at a certain time so we will start I will start limiting I may not I won't be their favorite person but I will start limiting because of that yeah because other than that you just I mean it is we can explain it to the community too if you're going to have a change in practice I think they can also like they want to come and say things to us I think they can also help organize when they have a bigger group they can help organize to you a little bit.

[17151] Aiden Hill: I think that's something... One of the things that we've asked that sometimes people have balked at is if you're coming to speak on a particular agenda item and you have similar viewpoints potentially to other speakers that, you know, why don't you get together and appoint one person to speak on behalf of that particular topic. We've had pushback around that, but that's one way that you can... I'm trying to

[17180] SPEAKER_14: help people to organize, right?

[17182] SPEAKER_14: Correct. But this, it sounds like there's some interest in kind of reassessing like the flow of the meetings. We have to know that.

[17194] Kat Jones: We have to, yeah, we really do. We commonly are going until between 11, 11 and 12, very commonly.

[17203] SPEAKER_14: That's the norm?

[17205] Kat Jones: That, I would say, is the norm. And sometimes we're starting at 5.30 when

[17210] SPEAKER_14: They know a study session or you know, we've got a long Closed session and so we bump We bump it and we started happening earlier, you know, and some will interpret that you realize I see articles Four or five times a year and hit the paper for me board the boards trying to do XYZ with all that and actually there's a lot of times the media gets it wrong It's not about limiting public comments. It's actually encouraging a good governance the idea that you can make good decisions after 12.30 or midnight.

[17245] Kat Jones: I'm wasted by all of it.

[17246] SPEAKER_14: Right, right. Most people are, right?

[17249] Kat Jones: And I don't have to go to work in the morning.

[17250] SPEAKER_14: But this other idea, too, if somebody's planning to comment on an agenda item and they're expecting it to be heard maybe around 7.30 and yet it doesn't come up until 8.30 or 9, that's actually hard on the community also, right? So you want some degree of predictability about when certain items are going to come up. That's fair to the community.

[17269] Aiden Hill: One of the things that the boards the president's workshop talks about is reminding the public that this is a meeting of the board in public. It is not a public meeting, right? And so therefore, and we are here to get the work of the board done, and certainly we want to get some level of input, but you can't totally hijack the meetings.

[17290] Austin Block: I just think we have to be careful in all of this, though, in that, like, you know, after a lot of years of stuff happening, right, the level of community trust in the district is not at a particularly high point right now right and so making reforms to public comment processes are dicey because we don't want to convey the impression that we are trying to limit public input or that we are trying to avoid transparency so I'm very hesitant about changing practice because I think it is in a lot of ways cathartic for community members to be able to come up and say their piece in a board meeting and obviously I don't love late meetings and certainly you know it would be I think helpful if people could organize together and

[17330] Kat Jones: and have one representative speak on behalf of many different people but we're trying to build trust and I think that's been why we haven't done anything to limit it and it will be more difficult to have that to honor that what we've done in the past when we're moving into a facility that we do have a lights out time for so it'll be different

[17360] SPEAKER_14: might be a great opportunity to try it.

[17363] Kat Jones: We have to be out by 11 o'clock so because we have that deadline that means that we do have to tighten up things and you know we're only going to be able to really you know have public comment probably at the most for what 40 minutes at the most 39 minutes we get 13. I mean it's just going to kind of depend but but that could be something that we have to really look at in terms of how do we move forward honoring the community and honoring the fact that we have to be out of here by 11 o'clock.

[17403] Austin Block: And that's by 11 o'clock. To that point, I think part of the idea of moving to the city council chambers is that the sound and video quality is added.

[17414] Kat Jones: Yes, and that will facilitate a lot of, that'll give us time to talk.

[17420] SPEAKER_14: and then you kind of you just you do an implementation timeline right and then say yeah and then you give people grace as you're implementing the new process right yeah while you're doing it that's okay that's okay I'm glad we're having this this conversation

[17450] SPEAKER_14: I really heard loud and clear roles of responsibility was a big one, so I want to make sure we kind of talk about this. Someone's going to have to explain to Aiden, so make sure you pay attention. This is something that CSBA always utilizes because, yeah, you've seen it. If you go through management gutters, you've seen it. The new board member workshop, you've seen it. Actually, since you've seen it, explain it to me.

[17479] Austin Block: What are the keys? is to set the values and the vision. It's up to the staff to do the execution. We are the why, not the how. Governance team, this area, the value.

[17493] SPEAKER_14: Staff, this area.

[17496] Kat Jones: So we do need to leave this up because Aiden has not done the Masters in Government.

[17504] SPEAKER_14: Someone's going to explain it to you when he comes in. Now, what's the area

[17510] Nancy Thomas: What's the area that both are responsible for Donna what's it setting the golden?

[17519] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, that's just strategic goals. That's big because you're you have interest in monitoring progress Right, so that's where that comes in where the staff actually is job is to give you the data It's like a modern progress and your job is to monitor progress And to set the goals better you can be smart goals or you know you set the goals also in collaboration with staff. So this is where it takes really an authentic, honest, open relationship with the superintendent saying, are these obtainable goals, right? Or the resources needed in order to obtain those goals. Aiden, okay, they're ready. Go ahead, explain to Aiden.

[17558] Kat Jones: Go ahead.

[17561] SPEAKER_14: Aiden, we took advantage of this opportunity. You were like, it was only three minutes. The roles and responsibilities of... Oh yeah, so Aiden, this is what we're talking about. Go ahead, Austin.

[17571] Austin Block: Yeah, fundamentally this chart is creating a venn diagram of the responsibilities of staff versus the board or governance team. The governance team having the responsibility of setting the what, the vision, the goals, the beliefs, and the staff having the responsibility of tackling the how. So the vision versus the execution. Our job is the vision. Staff's job is the execution. And there's crossover when it comes and we're going to talk about what's going on when it comes to what the specific goals will be and how we will measure our progress towards those goals.

[17604] SPEAKER_14: Anybody want to further extend on what Austin was explaining? Thanks. I was trying to be your man of life. Thank you.

[17612] Aiden Hill: So I'm going to provide a counterpoint to that.

[17614] SPEAKER_14: Well, wait. We're explaining first before we go to cameras. Okay.

[17617] Kat Jones: Anybody else want to extend? the crossover of the two is really important to make sure that that is really clear. That we're clear in terms of what were the value driven items of the beliefs, vision, mission, making sure our policies are in good shape, setting up priorities, and all of that impacts our goals. And using smart goals I think has been something that's been really powerful. but then the how to's, the how does it get done, those are honestly, those are like the ARs, those are the administrative regulations and that is up to admin teachers and staff to put together those action plans, implement them, how are they doing and then going back to the green and feeding us the information through privacy reports and letting us know in a timely fashion.

[17690] SPEAKER_14: right back into this area in a timely fashion.

[17694] Austin Block: I've had a thought too about like our board goals that I just I don't know what people's thoughts are so I feel like normally smart goals are goals that you set for yourself right I'm making these smart goals for myself in terms of what I am going to do in order to achieve this objective but we're in a weird position as the board where we're really setting goals for other people to accomplish right the student achievement goals it's not we are going to do better on the standardized tests that that they are gonna do better on the standardized test. And so sometimes I wonder if we might wanna have a SMART goal that applies to our own behavior about like how, like what we're gonna hold ourselves accountable to and that's formulated and it's a SMART goal as part of our board goals because really what we're doing otherwise is our existing board goals, which I agree with, I don't disagree at all of our current board goals, I think they're important, but our current board goals are we're making goals for other people. We're saying we want you to do this thing, which is a little bit contrary to the fundamental idea of SMART goal.

[17750] SPEAKER_14: then we're going to go to the counterpoint just to emphasize a little bit this part when it comes to the district-wide strategic goals you can because you can use a goal for everything you do in education right now but you got to establish the party to say which ones are going to be the most important goals that we're going to monitor on an annual basis right which was the most important and that's where the parties are really important to piggyback on what I was saying and I don't know if we get there today I didn't you know how we would end it if we go to the handbook or the board self-evaluation but in your packet maybe at the last it was been like 15 minutes or so just looking over that board self-evaluation which is intended to create some board goals based on your data to so using the results you've heard this term CSP TP California Central Teacher Profession it's in that area 5 the one that I like about using the results of assessment to improve X yeah and that that's what that board self-evaluation is intended but what's wrong with this Yeah, give us a counterpoint.

[17813] Aiden Hill: So I mentioned to you when we spoke before about forming, storming, normally performing, right? So this is the cycle that teams may make at least start, but they may not always get to the performing level, right? So forming is just a bunch of random people get thrown together and theoretically they're going to work on that. That phase disappears pretty quickly. and you get into storming. And the hallmark of storming is that you have disagreements over goals and roles. And that's what creates the conflict. And the only way that you're going to get out of storming is that you're going to have an agreement. You may not have 100% consensus, but you're going to have a basic agreement around these are the goals and here's who does what. Then you get into norming, which is now and we know what the goals are, we know what the goals are, who does what, and now we're going to set up a process to actually execute. And most successful efforts make it into norming. The efforts that fail never get past storming. So they never get clarity around goals and goals. Where do you think the board is? Oh, okay, I'm sorry. Okay, but if you want to get to the highest level, to the performing, these are the championship teams, there are nuances and there are nuances that occur that make them championship teams. And one of the nuances is that all of a sudden there's so much trust in the team and an understanding of different people's strengths and weaknesses that there are dynamic things that occur that can force temporary adjustments to roles. And I gave you the example, you know, the football example of you've got this high-performing the plan is that they're going to throw the ball to the wide receiver the problem is that he's not open pass rush is coming in and the running back is not available to take the ball so the quarterback even though his normal role is to either throw the ball or hand it off to somebody else he realizes in a moment in this situation I've got to go and run the ball and there is such a high degree of trust in the organization that enables that kind of thinking. And so what I would say is that this as a basic framework is fine. But when might deviations occur? But what I think is really important to understand is that this idea that everybody's just in one lane and it's like, I know, there's a Chinese wall that is separating and nobody can see over the... it is not the hallmark of championship teams. You have 360 degree visibility. And the hallmark of championship teams is to say, okay, we do have this basic plan, people are doing this, but if somebody sees, hey, quarterback's about to get sacked, hand off the ball, that's the hallmark of a great team. And so what I would say is that in general, the board in my mind is responsible for, they're the voice of the community, and they're responsible for setting the strategic direction of the district.

[18023] SPEAKER_14: I'm going to add to that, though. Yeah. I think, and Nancy would probably chime in and say, look, she was part of a board that led to a grand jury investigation because those roles and responsibilities, there wasn't an adherence to this kind of philosophy. That's horrible. The other part that could happen is this, especially, I think about this board. Many of you have teaching backgrounds. and so for example if this board wanted to get involved in how the English teachers at the high school are supporting English language arts and and the staff is working on how to do that better but you have an idea about how to do it that you start to get involved in the action planning staff it creates a culture of the board doesn't trust me as a professional to do it and that's it has that potential I've seen it where like the the board is saying look is I want to get more involved in the instructional expectations and should everybody have standards essential standards posted in their classroom everyday basis what needs to be included in lesson plannings what do you do to engage our students do we have if the board starts to get involved in that level it could have an impact of creating kind of a toxic culture for the whole district because now you've hired people to be the experts in their particular area but you're trying and insert yourself in that. So let me ask you this, Daryl.

[18114] Aiden Hill: So, you're a superintendent, correct? Okay.

[18119] You have a chain of command in your organization, right?

[18123] Aiden Hill: From down to your cabinet, you know, your principals, your assistant principals, teachers, classified, et cetera, et cetera, okay? If you, and I think we talked about this in in the role of the superintendent, you may delegate certain things to your staff. You may delegate to a principal that they need to do this, this, and this. They need to create this environment. Maybe they need to go create this action plan, et cetera. But all of a sudden, there's issues. So can they push back on you and say, get out of my way? They do. Right. They do. But here's the thing. And I know what you say back to them. What did I say? It is my life. But here's the difference. I'm ultimately accountable.

[18180] SPEAKER_14: But here's the difference, too, though.

[18182] SPEAKER_14: Where does the superintendent lie in these? Both. The superintendents in the governance team, right, they work that school team, and the superintendents for the year. That's the difference. That I'm... I'm in both planes, if you will.

[18201] SPEAKER_14: And I happen to have, I'm saying, part of it is in my case.

[18211] SPEAKER_11: You have to go, Nancy?

[18212] I've got a gut ache.

[18214] SPEAKER_14: Oh, sorry, Nancy. I've got to go home. Okay, take care of Nancy.

[18217] Cary Knoop: Yeah, feel better.

[18218] Yeah, feel better.

[18219] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, the other part that kind of contributes to that is, you know, I've got the admin credential, I've got the teaching background, you know, so I can kind of dabble, but in in principle that if the governance team stays there and the admin stays there it the system system function right right so that's the point though right but I'm saying if trustees get involved in this area it can be highly disruptive okay so the question is what what does involved mean right the question is what does involved me well I've got even a bigger question when if you get the governance team feels like you're getting too much into this area who's going to speak up in this conversation superintendent might, but it's up to the trustees to kind of say, hey, I think, I see it happening. Some trustees say, I think we're getting into the how. That's usually what happens, and Boris, you know, I work with them. They'll say, I think we're getting into the how, and then they kind of raise it. Now, that, so it's really up to the trustees to figure out how that's going to work, but it's usually the trustees or the superintendent are saying, I think we're kind of crossing over these roles. Well, in the, you know, I think, again,

[18289] Aiden Hill: what I'm trying to drive at is I don't think that there's a hard and fast here because for example if the topic is what type of cleaner should we use in the bathrooms if the board is spending time on that the board is in serious trouble okay I would say you know even if you get into you know specific teaching styles or whatever you know unless it's like a larger program that you're trying to implement again like but the board shouldn't be getting involved in that so I'm agreeing with you that there needs to be a chain of command but in my experience is that when certain things are not working correctly that sometimes you need to have group collaboration around problem solving and in my experience everybody has blind spots and often times if you have a good team your good team helps you with blind spots. But if you create these sort of hard and fast lanes to say, oh, , you're not supposed to do that. So for example, let's take Tracy as an example to say, maybe she's out in the community and she hears certain things and she says, you know, I think you guys really ought to think about adding an additional strategic goal. And we could theoretically push back and say, well, you know what? Thank you very much, Tracy, but we're the elected body. We're the representative of the community.

[18387] Stay in your lane, right?

[18389] Aiden Hill: Because, again, right, she's theoretically talking to community members. Theoretically, that's our constituency. So we could say, hey, stay out of our lane, right? But that's stupid, right? It's stupid. Well, the part is the superintendent is part of the governance team. No, no, no, but the superintendent is not elected officials.

[18404] SPEAKER_14: Right, but they are part of the governance team. Right, okay. But either girl is, because I like the I think the bottom line is that is that for us to decide it's the governing board as a whole to decide you know when are you going to intervene at different levels and all I'm asking you to do is to be conscious about it I'm saying this is the probably the most promising practice and be conscious and then someone's got a way in and say look I think we're going off here right and all that and you can still decided to do what you're going to do right as a board you get especially if you get three votes but just be conscious about it you're doing something realize what you're doing and why you're doing it that's my biggest thing yeah I know we I'm gonna look at a couple more items but it's there's a good point here's another ones to that that shows to kind of validate what Aiden was saying it's a reason when you look at this same chart that it's a different chart but it illustrates the same point the governance team here and obviously the district staff here and this fine this line that's kind of blurred between between the staff gives the progress report and once again progress report and the board is monitoring progress because you want to monitor that but the reason that this line is somewhat blurry is sometimes there is some blurriness between the taking action and the action plan it's acknowledging what you're saying that is kind of blurry it some way these aren't always absolutes but this gives you a frame to think about right and just realize when you get into the blurry It was already validated in the chart Let's look at one more thing then I'm going to transition there in the last part I want to take a look at the that board self-evaluation, but let's do this I don't know if we have time for scenarios. Let's get that I Want to illustrate one point that was I talked about earlier if You got five trustees themselves you have an Orchard if you have and then you have all these people your principal principal principal there's an assistant superintendent HR and all that and if the trustees are trying to directly direct the work of all these people you're creating out you're creating all these different forms of potential communication that could happen yeah and then for the CFO here the chief financial official if you have five trustees and the superintendent given direction, you've actually created, this represents organizational chaos, right? Because it's a system, don't get me wrong, it's just a system that creates chaos because you don't know who to listen to. If this trustee direction is different than this trustee, which might be different than the superintendent, this person is left confused about who do I listen to. But I don't think, Carol, that anybody here is

[18588] Aiden Hill: is advocating for that kind of structure. I don't think that anybody here is saying that we as board members should be directing or especially micromanaging any of those individuals. But what I am saying is that as a governance team, if we see that there's an issue in a particular functional area and we say, hey, there's a problem here, we should be talking about it as a governance team.

[18617] SPEAKER_14: So let me try it. Let's try one of these scenarios out there. Let's try this. By the way, so this is the ideal way, right? The trustees, superintendent, and then the superintendent give directions to their assistants and all that, and then it just kind of flows in there. It's a lot calmer, I know that. You can see it from the aerials. But I'm gonna try a scenario to get to the point. Let's try this one. No, let's try, let's see. Let's try this one, okay. someone to give away through this scenario.

[18652] Kat Jones: A parent of an 11th grade student approaches you and suggests that each high school student have eight Saturday sessions in the spring to help prepare students for their AP exams.

[18664] Kat Jones: You think it's a good idea, now what?

[18670] SPEAKER_12: What are we going to do?

[18672] SPEAKER_14: So you've got AP students, someone approaches you as a trustee and suggests that each school should have these Saturday sessions in order to help prepare kids for the AP exam.

[18683] Austin Block: Hey, thank you so much for your idea. That's really interesting, and I can see how that could help students prepare for the AP exam. Have you brought it up with the AP teachers at the school or with the principal?

[18694] SPEAKER_14: Any addition or different?

[18696] Kat Jones: I don't know that I'd say quite that much.

[18698] SPEAKER_14: What would you say?

[18699] Kat Jones: I think I would say I appreciate your comment, and I will speak to the superintendent about that.

[18708] SPEAKER_14: Does that go on that list where you got to get feedback?

[18714] Aiden Hill: What I would say, Darrell, is that as Austin and Kat have indicated, your public facing comment to the person that brings that up is that you're listening and you're redirecting.

[18728] However, let's say, for example, that we as a board and as a governance team have a goal around advanced placement tests. both in terms of the people who participate and also the outcomes.

[18743] Aiden Hill: And let's say that we're not hitting the mark. There's an issue. And so now this is an early warning sign or one warning sign that says, hey, there's something going on. Here's an idea. I think that it's our responsibility as a governance team to say, OK, we've talked about academic outcomes as an overarching goal. And within that, one of the components is advanced placement tests. This is an idea that came up.

[18768] SPEAKER_14: there's other ideas let's talk about it could be oh well the thing is there's this is just somebody approaches you with an idea it may be like I said if it's attached to your strategic goals maybe you might want to see is this an action plan or is this a what about a what or a how it's about how I would I would steer clear of bringing that up like I wouldn't even take this

[18798] Austin Block: to Tracy probably I would go to this to direct them to the school site level because I mean this is just one parent's opinion about how to help kids do better on AP and that parent doesn't necessarily have any expertise in this and they're absolutely welcome to bring up ideas to school staff but I think to take one parent's personal opinion and then spend more time on that I think that would be us getting in the weeds way too much too much in the house certainly even if our board was around AP I still wouldn't elevate this to a board discussion and we could have a board discussion about what support do the principal AP teachers need in order to be more successful, but that doesn't necessarily mean, hey, this parent brought up this idea, let's make that the basis for our discussion about how to increase AP scores.

[18840] Tracey Vackar: And more importantly, maybe there's something already happening in the school that people don't even know about, that they go directly and back down to the site level. We'll let you learn that, right? Now, you might mention it to me when we had our one-on-one later on in the week, or we were having a conversation with, hey, I had this parent's concern. you might hear about this at the high school level, or maybe it comes up, I'm not even sure what we do, but you know, my high school, we do this, or they go over for more than one, and you might just want to know.

[18867] SPEAKER_14: And fortunately, you only have one comprehensive high school, so this is not a high school A versus a high school B type of input type of thing, because sometimes, like, we discovered just recently that one high school was paying for AP tests, another one wasn't, and it's like, oh, okay.

[18883] Aiden Hill: I agree with Austin. I mean, so we have 50,000 residencies, in our community. Okay, there's no way that we can be responding to every single resident with any particular concern that they have. It's not feasible, right? And sometimes there may be issues that really are not a priority for us, et cetera. And that's why I classify this to say, okay, this suggestion by itself, we shouldn't necessarily be taking action on. But if this is an early warning that something's broken, and that maybe we need to have a discussion about that. It's a bigger discussion.

[18925] Tracey Vackar: Are there any preps that are happening?

[18926] Aiden Hill: That's a bigger question.

[18927] Tracey Vackar: If kids aren't doing well AP exams, what do we need to help prepare them?

[18933] SPEAKER_14: If this is a conversation where the board wants more information, you have to strategically decide where does that go in your governance calendar and how much time you're going to spend to it so the staff can prepare a more comprehensive presentation. The staff can be honest about some of the challenges within that presentation. One of the challenges might be, hey, we tried that. We don't have teachers that are gonna volunteer their time on the Saturday, right? That could be a reality of a challenge, right? Yeah, so that's good, okay. Oh, let's try this one. Somebody get boosted this, or are they the right fit?

[18970] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: There's an opening for an upper-level management position, and a popular principle applies for that position. During the interview process, outside candidate rises to the top of the field. The superintendent is prepared to recommend hiring the outside candidate prior to the board meeting to approve the hiring. Trustees are lobbied by their constituents to hire the popular principal. How will the board handle this situation?

[19006] Kat Jones: Uh-oh.

[19008] SPEAKER_14: We don't hire principals.

[19009] Kat Jones: Yeah, it's not hard.

[19012] SPEAKER_14: Well, you're hiring an upper-level district office position at which a principal applied, huh?

[19018] Kat Jones: But we still don't do that hiring.

[19020] SPEAKER_14: You got my trick question.

[19022] Aiden Hill: But you do hire. But this is where I fundamentally disagree. I mean, and we've had discussions about this, and this is not the way that it works in corporate America, right? And so at the end of the day, the CEO is responsible for making hires, okay, at the end of the day. But the the CEO oftentimes collaborates with the board on key hires. They're not going to be going down and getting involved in some teacher at some school or some assistant principal. But when you're talking about the chief financial officer, the chief financial officer has responsibility for reporting earnings out to the street, which influence the stock price and whether the CEO keeps his job. And so whether the board actually gets kicked out and so the board is oftentimes involved in certain key hiring processes that doesn't mean that they're making the final call, but they are involved in the discussions and providing input. And what I would say is that, and one of the challenges I think that we have in our district, if you look at what CSBA says and what other people say, this is a religious war about whether the board or should be involved in certain hiring or not. And there's different viewpoints. But what is a consistent agreement is that the board, in its oversight responsibility, has every right and every expectation to have a clear process outlined and to have progress reporting on how it's going. And so it's not a black box. It is a very well-defined process where you can actually see exactly and what went in and what came out. And the board has every right, if it feels that that process is not working, to come back and work with the superintendent to fix it. About the process. About the process. So at a minimum, that's what CSBA says.

[19142] SPEAKER_14: Well, I agree with you. In a lot of ways, the process is where the board's input comes in on these type of situations. And you are, make no mistake about it, and some superintendents get bent out of shape for this, and I see why. you actually are you're the hiring the superintendent doesn't have the authority to hire they're making recommendations on ratified you don't have to I've seen it happen out of April but there there are some implications if you don't and the implications are you let's say the assumption is you've already outlined the process the staff has gone through this process and then it comes to you and if you don't ratify it if you will it has implications for the rest of the system

[19187] Aiden Hill: because who you know people have contributed to this process and if you invalidate all of those opinions all of those opinions they insert yourself you have to consider the implications of that right but the important thing to be thinking about here is that number one you have to have a process that's well-defined and the board really needs to you know have you know be providing some input in my opinion for key hires right we're not talking about everything and and and ultimately the important thing to understand is that processes sometimes work and sometimes they produce defects. You have quality problems. And so let's say in this situation, the process was defined, the board really doesn't have any input into it, but the board is getting lobbied and ultimately the board stays out of it. if ultimately that decision to hire this guy, this guy ends up doing a great job, the process worked, right? But if it didn't work out, so we need to go back and look at the process, right? And that's what you do in manufacturing, that's what you do in anything where you have a process that is supposed to produce quality outputs. If you don't have quality outputs, you need to go back and look and say, well, okay, what went wrong? How do we fix it so that we have quality

[19277] SPEAKER_14: I think you can always go back and look at process, always. And sometimes I just say in education, not getting anything, sometimes you go through a process, you're good about the process, and sometimes a person moves or moves into the area, and sometimes it's just like, uh-oh, okay, the process was solid, they just turned down that to be the good fit. I mean, that does happen sometimes.

[19299] Tracey Vackar: I think you need to look at other things. Like, this is an interesting question because we've talked a lot about growing our own, right? when you're growing your own, you're going to take a little bit of a risk and a chance and have to be able to do some things along with it. You have to think about what are the other implications of doing something like this when you're looking at this. Even if you have the shiny story that comes from the outside, if you were trying to create a pipeline to be able to keep staff here, there might be reasons to come back and have a discussion or even prior to this even happening, we're in the metrics of what that looks like. It's an interesting scenario.

[19349] SPEAKER_14: But to your point, too, I think considering, I mean, let's look at the alternative. Let's say the superintendent, different from what you're saying, was the superintendent here is making the recommendation, right? So superintendent, board's comfortable with the process. Here's the recommendation. Did you get lobbied? So if the board did decide to choose with a very popular principal. Yeah, it's not appropriate. But what would be the implications for the very popular principal that's now get this job? That they're more powerful than the superintendent. Oh, that's a message. Yeah, what else? Well, I was going to say that they also now leave behind the job where they are popular, and they're going to leave a gaping hole at the school that they... But do you think... You hold them back. Do you think... Well, do you think the other part... That's the implication, too. But are you putting that that person in a position to succeed? Like you said, already they know that they have more power somewhat than the superintendent. That's part of that process.

[19407] Cary Knoop: What else?

[19408] SPEAKER_14: Are they overseeing other people? Of course. Do other people think that they got an advantage somehow that was unfair? Possibly. Well, if those people are on the interview committee that have contributed to this conversation and they're looking at you, right? They're looking at you.

[19426] SPEAKER_18: I'm telling you, I hear it from with the people that are on the interview panels.

[19429] SPEAKER_14: It happens all the time. So now, all of a sudden, you might have a bunch of disgruntled people that are working under their direction that think that they're favored, and that's a hard position to lead in, because the people you're leading don't respect you. Let me ask you this.

[19445] Aiden Hill: Let's say that you have an interview panel. It could be the superintendent. It could be some other position. Let's say that the panel recommends one but the leader says, I don't agree. That happens. I'm the butthole sometimes.

[19463] Kat Jones: That's presidential veto.

[19466] Aiden Hill: So, if that applies for the leader, why doesn't that apply for the board?

[19476] SPEAKER_14: It does. I mean, the reality is, and our caveat, I think, is, and what we caveat every interview panel, we tell them, you are a part of the process, but you're not the outcome. you're making a recommendation but you're in that the final decision maker so we're very upfront about it and then we tell them the why the why is what you don't know you don't have the same perspective of how this fits within the organization maybe the superintendent is looking for something that vastly different than what the panel is looking for and then the most critical factor out of all of that is the panel oftentimes does not have access to reference and we have to make a decision based on all the information we have.

[19547] Aiden Hill: I think one of the challenges that we live through in real life is we had a prior superintendent that hired a number of cabinet members that had serious issues. And as you stated, right, so, and according to CSBA statistics, the average tenure of a superintendent in California is two years.

[19576] SPEAKER_14: Okay.

[19577] Aiden Hill: So would you put sole responsibility for hiring key cabinet members in a position or in a person that may be there only two years but that you have longer term you know essentially responsibilities and so and I think, you know, I'm sure that the answer, right, because it's pretty obvious is you wouldn't have people that have a shorter duration, time making long-term commitments that the district ultimately has to uphold on a sole basis, right? So I'm not saying that the superintendent wouldn't have, you know, the largest or the loudest voice in this, but ultimately the board has to make and making sure that the leadership team is going to be the right leadership team for the long term.

[19644] SPEAKER_14: My answer is this. I think it goes back to the most important decision for the board is who you hire as a superintendent. And within that decision, you're saying, I trust the superintendent's character, competence, judgment. Because if you're inserting the hiring of an upper level member of the superintendent staff, and the superintendent doesn't feel the same as the board on that decision, and then you're trying to hold the superintendent accountable to outcomes, then the superintendent's almost giving it out saying, look, you don't even allow me to hire my staff, and then you're trying to hold me accountable for the outcomes.

[19687] Kat Jones: And we actually couldn't. I mean, in the board, in that case, really couldn't because if the board was that involved and made that decision and then it becomes a failure, you can't blame so up versus so we okay superintendent we trust you going with you you decided and then if it goes wrong you blame the superintendent I mean let me just ask my question as part of this if the board felt that they needed a little more input could the board then say we'd like you know some someone from this organization to be part of the panel, the hiring panel, to, you know, just to, maybe that's the quote, unquote, not necessarily, I don't even know if this is right, but the board's person that they put on there, this is our pick of who we put on the panel, and then we have to trust, because not only do we trust our superintendent because we hired them, but we've also, you know, said, okay, in your panel of five,

[19757] SPEAKER_14: here's here's one person that we would like to have that kind of sort of I don't know represents the board I don't know if that's really PC or not but well I will say this that there's deviation about the process this whole line because you got into board policy for 4111 you have this line so best candidate appropriate interview committee may be established by the current candidate to recommend finalists so you have some language in there that gives I just ask you to do it have an eyes wide open to what it means the general rule and those is a campism you don't have to follow it not to follow any of this but but my recommendation is if you do have board members and at the just build that into your process and but just recognize what you're doing if you have everybody in the world at this committee meeting or a committee interview and you have a board member with that group recognize that people are looking at everything you do they're looking at your mannerism definitely what you say the way you're acting and my general rule of that and I utilize with me if I'm in the room I'm the last one to react or say anything the general rule is the people with the most power speak last if at all if at all right especially you know you're the final decision maker so you have to say what's my purpose of being in the room I just want to hear maybe sometimes my purpose is I just want to hear what everybody else is saying firsthand right but I don't I already got a stronger I'm in the room with the recommendation to the board so why do I need to share with the whole committee right that's the purpose so just just recognize that and you decide to, or candidly, the upper level administrator, sometimes that's a superintendent, sometimes that's an assistant superintendent. Just recognize that sometimes a wise move is just to be there but don't say anything because the minute you insert, you're influencing the whole conversation and you're actually limiting comments and thoughts.

[19897] Tracey Vackar: I think your relationship that you have with your board in a case like this, I think it's really super important, right? If I thought there was something that would be controversial to come out of a hiring process, I would probably slow it down. And I think you guys have seen me slow something down and come back and want to do some more vetting on things. I think it's about conversations, right? So I mean, especially if you've got somebody on the inside that everybody's out there talking about and this is the best thing that's going to happen. If I really had a different opinion on something, for whatever reason it was, I'd probably want to come back and just make sure we have the conversation, that we really talk through it. And I don't know that my opinion would change necessarily, but it might be important to come back and come do that. So I think it comes down to something like that. I do think that synergy is important moving forward. And again, I don't want I also want to think about some of the goals that we've talked about because it's difficult to track people to come to Newark and I'm just going to use Newark maybe this works well in some other places in different ways but we've had a hard time attracting people to come to Newark we've had a really hard time and then to be able to keep and retain them for those that are staying we really just need to think about how do we cultivate that system of support and opportunity so that they still want to to continue and grow. I mean, I just, I don't know, I think it's going to be a valuable thing. There's probably more discussion to have probably on this particular topic. But I think as a governance team, if there's a position that you think is critical to all of this, then we should be having a discussion probably at the time that we are opening up the position. And by the way, I also trust that when you all make a decision, and I can think of one that was made recently when I and brought it to you. I really appreciate the feedback that I received. But I also thought it was important just to say, here's a little bit of an elephant in the room, right? And I'm not going to go into details of what it was, but you all probably remember the situation. But I thought it was important to bring it forward and just make sure that we're all moving forward together in the right way. If there's something I missed, I need to know. And so I think that's a healthy conversation to be able to have. It's a good place to be as a governance team. And it's good for me to know that I can come back and weigh in on that with the five of you if I need to, and vice versa. I think it happens both ways.

[20070] SPEAKER_14: I love the idea of the open conversation and candid conversation. It's critical. And sometimes, you're right, the brownneck does get in the way, because there's only a certain amount of things that you take to closed sessions. Correct. And I would say this, too. the superintendent evaluation is a closed session item. And sometimes things are in the superintendent's evaluation that, you know, once it's in the superintendent's evaluation, you can discuss in closed session. So if you have things that are elements, sometimes there's something in the superintendent's evaluation that's directly linked to that element. Not to ask you to hide anything, but that's a spot. The other part is when you're talking about a particular position, you can close session item that, right? You can just say it's about the appointment hiring of a particular position, and then that's the opportunity to have a conversation about that position. It happens most frequently by the superintendents, right? We're talking about the superintendent hiring appointment and all that type of stuff, right? That's good, that's good. Hey, I'm glad we have. I didn't realize, I thought that scenario, I knew

[20146] Aiden Hill: and one of the challenges that we have in our district is we have practically zero documentation around any process, right? And so therefore you cannot improve a process until you've actually documented it. And in my opinion, you know, Hiring is the most important thing in terms of actually producing results and I really think that we should be spending time putting together a very robust process around hiring and really discussing that and having a back and forth because I think that if we've done that it's going to be a great process and ultimately everybody will feel that there's transparency around it and they will buy into the results but if it's a black box, it just creates, you know, confusion and suspicion and that kind of stuff. Yeah, that's good.

[20216] SPEAKER_14: So you can always do that and what I heard was then maybe that, especially with upper level positions, maybe just to have some conversation on the front end about the process we're going to use to get to the outcome where it might be beneficial, right? Just kind of lay that out. It doesn't necessarily need to be in AR. It probably could be in AR but I think you just need to be able to share and have an agreement.

[20238] Aiden Hill: What I would say is it doesn't need to be an AR, but it needs to be documented.

[20246] Tracey Vackar: Right? There's a lot of processes that you're missing. I don't want to tell you that.

[20253] Kat Jones: I know that.

[20253] Tracey Vackar: I know that there's tons. There's so many systems that we have to still put together.

[20258] Kat Jones: Well, one of the things that Burrell did when he was here is he did put together a hiring document that

[20266] Kat Jones: might be a good starting place for us to go back to.

[20274] SPEAKER_14: Do you remember? I wasn't very impressed. Be there. Sounds like room for conversation. But maybe it's something to evaluate. Hey, can I ask you to do this, too? I know we're running out of time. I just want to take at least a quick look at this, though. Pull out on the left side of your folder this board self-evaluation. And I'm I'm really doing this for Gabriel and Austin here, because they weren't a part of this. Oh, I'm sorry, the CSBA folder, that's right, the left-hand side. Pick the CSBA folder. I think that was the list we worked off with.

[20315] Kat Jones: Not that, oh, that was the sample meeting guy.

[20321] SPEAKER_14: Yeah, but this is the one we worked off with. In order to create that, yeah, yeah. I think it's great because if you look at it just in turn well just to orient everybody on that first page under the big heading these are the conditions of effective governance on the first heading and you see the big bold you get feedback on board unity roles and responsibilities when we talked about board culture culture and then board operations and then starting on page three it gets into the conditions of effective you know how you running the board meetings the board development and then it gets into those those same five responsibilities that are it that are indicated in the board bylaw right setting direction support structure accountability and community leadership so that's the structure of this and I don't have the results here but you probably discussed and you probably prioritize based on these evaluation results what were items that you wanted to focus on a governance team right okay does anybody want to share just for Austin and Gabriel when you looked at this were there any particular outcomes that you definitely think that they should be aware of and the reason I'm asking is if you decide to do this in a few months or so you want to you want to make sure that they're aware of saying hey this train that you're jumping on that's already moving these were some items in terms of boards governance how you or you're gonna evaluate yourself, right?

[20418] Kat Jones: Well, I think the thing that's interesting is, you know, for me, looking at what we did with a different group of five, you know, with Phoung and Carina versus Austin and Gabriel, it'd be fascinating for me. I mean, I kinda wish I could see my other one, but this would be helpful to go back and say, yeah, do I still feel like that's where we are? Or have we moved? And have we moved in the best direction? you know thinking about the five of us so it'll be it'll be very interesting to compare this with how you know if we were to do this in the summer what the result would be from from a year later well that's what even though it's two different you know but that's okay that's what I've seen it done in fact there's a school district across the Bay that they do it annually and being when they look at their results annually they look at it longitudinally so they might have three to five years worth of data if they

[20476] SPEAKER_14: and then they have a conversation around, well, this is what we said then, this is what we have now. What do we do to create this improvement? Oh, boy, do we need to focus some more on that area? That's their conversation. And the reason I wanted to at least bring this into the room, I was hesitant, but I said, no, it's your data. But based on things that I'm going to hurt, look at number 29. 29 under board meetings. You see the connection? I'm looking at the raw thing. Well, look at just... number 29 right here on the side yeah question number 29 in other words the board can find its meetings to a reasonable length of time so this was the thought back in July what this tells me is okay maybe if I see normally what we do is we look at these areas and you have to kind of prioritize which area you're gonna work on what I heard today was this might be an area that you want to work on but I don't Ivan I'm not giving probably sufficient value to those other areas that were listed in red or yellow. But red, let's just say red right now, right? Does anybody recall another item that might have... So that little battery is what we... Yeah, yeah. Well, just to orient you, on the bottom is kind of the key. Green and blue means you felt pretty good about it as a team. Yellow and red mean not so good. And you can see the rankings of trust across each item right so in 29 one person says that's often the board confines its meetings to a reasonable a lot of time but a lot of people say or two people say it less often two people say it rarely so that's you know on the color-coded system here that triggers a rate you think there were other items that really rose I mean if I look at it broadly that area of board meetings had three blues but also in the board cultural page to that for four reds. I'm sorry, three reds, but there were four reds under board culture.

[20602] Kat Jones: And I would venture to guess that that would be better now.

[20608] SPEAKER_14: Those were the two most obvious items, I guess, areas, right? The board culture and the board meetings.

[20615] Kat Jones: The structure.

[20616] SPEAKER_14: Which one?

[20617] Kat Jones: The structure was looking pretty bad under board responsibilities.

[20621] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: I would say also community leadership.

[20625] SPEAKER_14: The last one? Oh, yeah, that was looking shaky, yeah.

[20628] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: Yeah.

[20629] SPEAKER_14: This is bad practice. Normally we always start with the strengths, but we're in time, so.

[20635] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: Yeah, there's no green, and I think that's something we could definitely strive for.

[20642] SPEAKER_14: Maybe just pick a couple of them that you really want to work on. Can you give me a, you want to give an attempt at least to focus on one or two of these items?

[20653] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: I would say the board culture.

[20655] Gabriel Anguiano Jr: with you one. We can definitely say that we're connecting, that we're communicating, that we're creating that communication channel.

[20675] SPEAKER_14: How will you react toward each other? How will you treat each other with respect? Managing conflict and understanding a perspective Oh, that's tied into our first comments over the day, right? About hearing perspectives, seek first to understand. Does anybody else have another proposal or are you good with board culture?

[20701] Kat Jones: Normally I would do a sticky dot activity with this, but... Well, and I mean, you know, we spent a lot of time today talking about roles and responsibilities, so I would hope that that session would go up because it is something is something that we've spent some time, you know, discussing.

[20719] Tracey Vackar: I think we had also some discussion about board meetings, right? When you look at the areas that have so many reds in it, that's when it has a lot of reds. It also has some other strengths in it, which is also kind of nice. It kind of has like a hot and cold, right, to it.

[20737] SPEAKER_14: People are prepared.

[20738] Tracey Vackar: I think as we look at shifting into our new location, thinking about board meetings, for us to pay attention between now and July. And how do we have to adjust something?

[20752] SPEAKER_14: Oh, but you feel good. The board at this time felt pretty good about the relationship between how long the board spends on an agenda item and the importance of the item, number 30. People felt pretty good about that back then in July. But somehow that equate to a reasonable length of time. Maybe you're comfortable spending a lot of time on certain items. but it just you're comfortable with it but not comfortable with the time that it ends. That maybe those two are just not in congruence with each other but there might be a relationship between the two.

6. Superintendent Comments

6.1 Superintendent's Concluding Comments, Updates, and Future Agenda Items

[20788] Tracey Vackar: Well I do think the board was very focused on certain areas that they were concerned about and they did spend time and that was brought forward. They did a lot of work in the spring and you continue to do a lot of work. I mean honestly that did happen. I can sit back and tell you board members came prepared.

[20805] SPEAKER_14: Yeah.

[20806] Tracey Vackar: or meetings. You guys still are very good about coming.

[20809] SPEAKER_14: It feels good about it.

[20810] Tracey Vackar: Pretty prepared. There are some things that haven't changed, but there are some things that I think as we move forward, especially around just board meetings in general, I think we just need to be mindful that we're about ready to put a big shift in it. We're going to change locations. It's going to be hard for staff. Like, we've got to be ready to go on the road. It's going to be a challenge, right? So I know it's going to be a challenge. So I think it's one that, you know, if we look at board culture and board meetings, it's just something that goes up between now and July. We are communicating on all kinds of vehicles to put that out there in the community. We're doing an announcement every week on parent square. We're trying to make sure that people know.

[20864] SPEAKER_14: So I'm going to just indicate the board culture and then but I do think at some point I think you pick it up on the relationship between 29 and 30 are connected this idea of reasonable amount of length of time in meetings and the board effectively manages community input that's what you picked up on the community input on certain agenda items or items then on the agenda something that needs to be kind of paid attention to right we're going to move the needle on that part so okay this is good but this might be a starting point for a point to consider as we're moving forward. I didn't know how our time would work out, but I knew we needed to spend some time on roles and responsibilities. It may not solve everything, but you have the frame of the roles and responsibilities and just probably the desire to talk about it when you realize that you're deviating off the frame to Aiden's point, make it at a consciousness level. But I want to be respectful of time. I'm already over, so I'm sorry. I'm sorry. one minute one minute can you do this before you before you pack up I want you to just fill out the valuation then I just have one little closing short activity really sure yeah do you see where is it in their QR code yeah it's in the CSBA folder right I'm like where is it it's on the right side yes okay yeah go ahead

[20956] Kat Jones: and complete that, if you will.

Pause: 39.7s

[21026] SPEAKER_08: K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12

Pause: 37.4s

7. ADJOURNMENT

7.1 Adjournment

[21093] K-12 school board meeting

Pause: 10.3s

[21134] SPEAKER_14: K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 I don't know if it's going to work out. I haven't started yet. How it ends is always the question. Butler. When things go south, they go real bad south with him. All right. Hey, thanks for filling that out. Just in closing, I just wanted to hear, just if you have to describe where you are in one word or phrase, one word or phrase, where are you at the end of today's workshop? Or what do you think about today's workshop, one word or phrase? K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting for me it would be a grateful a grateful that you're spending the time to have this conversation it doesn't just happen and I think it's really valuable in order to do so normally to kind of understand perspective as we were talking perspective I thought about showing this earlier this is so true right perspective often depends on where you where you stay where you are this whole and I knew that we would not be quote-unquote complete and the reality is just like we say we're married you're never really complete it's just ongoing work I got some ideas about what would be the next steps too and I wrote down some of them as we go along what I normally do at the end of this is I send a summary of this workshop to the board president and superintendent it's just a summary and it but includes some recommendations there too you don't have to do them or not don't but it's just recommendations right but I do think it's important maybe to have a conversation about what the what the next steps might be I've offered something like okay maybe their governance calendar might be something any time another one boards up evaluation and making you might already have them I can get the memo the summary memo from the July workshop but it might if I can get my hands on that I might reinforce some of those ideas because you probably establish the next step as president I don't know sometime I would just send it to the soup to but I don't know I know a transition and I don't know CSBA asked me to send a summary a summary of the workshop within two weeks I'm gonna and apologize in advance. But I'll get in there probably before. I'm freezing my time, April, so something like that, right? So something like that. I just want to be honest and upfront with you. But thanks again for allowing me to join your family for the last six hours. It was really, really, really helpful. And anecdotally, I'm going to say this. Now, this is off script. Rep. I don't share whatever I experience with CSB workshops with the broader community but people ask just in the superintendent world they're going to ask me they're going to ask you they're going to ask people what's the board like and now I'm like conflicted I have to say I have to say stuff I have to sell them hey look give them a shot give them a shot it's really it's really important because people we're gonna talk I don't lie to people and they don't they won't know about this workshop they just know no I'm in the area they're gonna look at previous superintendents right so what I'm asking of you is hey yeah get this flow going that you want people saying great things about you I'm saying the board because it will help to attract talent even if you don't get a you know upper-level staff that has tons of experience and all that it might be prohibiting factors right and I think it's the first district that I've attended. You know who normally does this in the district where I have facilitated? K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting and I was trying to get a hold of his

[21523] office and I got his personal recording voicemail. I love it.

[21530] SPEAKER_14: Nice to meet you. I get to facilitate one of my favorite modules on collective bargaining. Collective bargaining in Negotiations, collective bargaining is one of them. I can't remember. Oh, human resources. That's the one that we deal with that. It's time to trust. Collective bargaining, are you right in the middle?

[21564] Austin Block: We also were overdue on previous one.

[21568] SPEAKER_14: For your teachers?

[21569] SPEAKER_13: Yeah, and classified. Oh, gosh. And then there's an upcoming one in the fall.

[21573] SPEAKER_14: Have people sun shined yet? Don't ask me. Because you would know if they did. You're not at the table then, but it's coming up really. Okay. Okay, yeah. Yeah, we'll get into it. I get a little passionate for that. All right, I'll see you later. The energy will be high.

[21591] All right, thanks again.

[21594] SPEAKER_14: All right, everybody.

[21596] SPEAKER_18: Thank you.

[21597] SPEAKER_14: Thank you. Are you sure? Yeah, I was just at the equity symposium eating too much.

[21607] Austin Block: What's this?

[21608] SPEAKER_14: It's something else. I'm good. I'll take it. Okay, good. I'll do my part in El Palo.

[21613] Kat Jones: So the challenge of turning this thing off won't be as challenging as turning it on, huh?

[21630] Tracey Vackar: No, it won't be. Once you unplug, you're good.

[21634] SPEAKER_14: I'm good. Let me shake this up down. Oh, man. Tracy, I'm assuming you're staying up this weekend.

[21646] Tracey Vackar: I am.

[21646] SPEAKER_14: You are.

[21647] Tracey Vackar: I'm up here most weekends, quite frankly. I try to get home at least one weekend a month. Occasionally I get home, too.

[21654] SPEAKER_14: There's like a holiday weekend in there, but... How do you feel about the... You heard about Southwest and their new thing that they're moving to, huh?

[21662] Tracey Vackar: It doesn't matter to me, quite frankly. I mean, honestly, I just take my bag and go.

[21665] SPEAKER_14: I just... Oh, you don't... Oh, you leave... You have a set of stuff here and a set of stuff there.

[21671] Tracey Vackar: Yeah, I can take a small bag, but I just do carry.

[21673] SPEAKER_14: Oh, so it won't impact you then? It doesn't impact me at all.

[21678] Lucky.

[21680] Tracey Vackar: And I'm a life hacker. People sometimes laugh how loud I am. My husband's like, are you, you don't have anything left? And so I did my laundry before I came.

[21688] SPEAKER_14: And he's like, oh. Okay. I like your space. And I wish you luck with that move to the chambers. Yeah, the city home.

[21702] Tracey Vackar: Wow. Yeah, that would be interesting. that's for sure. And it's very great for them to offer their space. We have horrible technology challenges here. So we're not investing anymore in the building. We know that this is going to be sold with a bigger complex or whatever it is we do with it when it goes to the 7-11. So this is tied to the school that closed down. Well, you think that this might be sold eventually, isn't it? Something. 7-11 will decide what we're going to do with it exactly. But yeah, there'll be something that happens.

[21730] SPEAKER_12: Are you going to be so open to it? I have. Yeah, I'm good. Okay.

[21733] Tracey Vackar: K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting K-12 school board meeting

1.3 Meeting Practices and Information (Removed by Board)

4.5 Other (Removed by Board)

[0] 1. CALL TO ORDER

[22] 1.2 Pledge of Allegiance

[36] 1.1 Roll Call

[67] 2. APPROVAL OF THE AGENDA

[67] 2.1 Approval of the Agenda

[118] 3. PUBLIC COMMENT

[118] 3.1 Public Comment on Agenda Items

[570] 4. BOARD WORKSHOP SESSION

[574] 4.1 Team Building (Estimating)

[963] 4.2 Roles and Responsibilities

[1379] 4.3 Establish Structure

[1379] 4.4 Governance Handbook (update for 2025-26)

[7229] 5. BOARD OF EDUCATION COMMENTS

[7229] 5.1 Board of Education Comments

[20788] 6. Superintendent Comments

[20788] 6.1 Superintendent's Concluding Comments, Updates, and Future Agenda Items

[21093] 7. ADJOURNMENT

[21093] 7.1 Adjournment

[99999] 1.3 Meeting Practices and Information (Removed by Board)

[99999] 4.5 Other (Removed by Board)

1. CALL TO ORDER

1.1 Roll Call

Type                         Procedural

Goals                           MISSION: The Newark Unified School District will inspire and educate all students to
                                achieve their full potential and be responsible, respectful, and productive citizens.
                                VISION: The Newark Unified School District, in partnership with the community, will be a
                                model of world-class education that develops the unique abilities of every student.

 TRUSTEES:

 President Katherine Jones
 Vice President Nancy Thomas
 Member Aiden Hill
 Member Austin Block
 Member Gabriel Anguiano Jr.

1.2 Pledge of Allegiance

Type                         Procedural

PURPOSE:

The Governance Team will recite the Pledge of Allegiance

1.3 Meeting Practices and Information

Type                         Information, Procedural

IN-PERSON MEETING INFORMATION:

Please see the attached meeting information in English and Spanish.

OBSERVE THE BOARD OF EDUCATION MEETING:

Members of the public may observe the meeting in-person at the NUSD Boardroom.

PUBLIC COMMENT: The public will have the opportunity to address the Board of Education regarding agendized items by submitting a speaker-card with the Executive Assistant.

File Attachments Board Meeting Protocols_ENG(1).pdf (69 KB) Protocolos de la Reunion de la Mesa Directiva_ESP (1).pdf (65 KB) Original Board Meeting Guidelines (3).pdf (263 KB)

2. APPROVAL OF THE AGENDA

2.1 Approval of the Agenda

Type                         Action

Recommended                  The recommendation is that the Board of Education approve the agenda for this meeting.
Action

PURPOSE:

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

3. PUBLIC COMMENT

3.1 Public Comment on Agenda Items

Type                         Procedural

The Board of Education encourages the community's participation in its deliberations and tries to make it convenient for members of the community to express their views to the Board.

If a constituent wishes to address the Board on any agenda item: In-Person Comment: please submit a completed speaker card before the start of the meeting.

4. BOARD WORKSHOP SESSION

4.1 Team Building

Type                         Discussion, Information

PURPOSE:

The purpose is to allow the board of trustees to connect, build solid relationships, and work collaboratively with the superintendent and to provide guidance, support, promote, and champion support for NUSD.

4.2 Roles and Responsibilites

Type                       Discussion, Information

PURPOSE:

The purpose is to review the board's roles and responsibilities to strengthen trust and establish processes and protocols to enhance unity of Newark Unified School District and support the Mission, Vision, and Goals.

    The Board
    The Superintendent

4.3 Establish Structure

Type                       Discussion, Information

PURPOSE:

The purpose is to review and strengthen the board structures.

    Governance Protocols

4.4 Governance Handbook (update for 2025-26)

Type                       Discussion, Information

Goals                         MISSION: The Newark Unified School District will inspire and educate all students to
                              achieve their full potential and be responsible, respectful, and productive citizens.
                              VISION: The Newark Unified School District, in partnership with the community, will be a
                              model of world-class education that develops the unique abilities of every student.

PURPOSE:

The purpose is to review and update the School Board's Governance Handbook for the 2025-26 school year. Updates that are necessary can come back at a future board meeting.

4.5 Other

Type                       Discussion, Information

PURPOSE:

The purpose is to allow for an open forum to address any additional matters or concerns that may arise during the board workshop. This item provides flexibility for board members to bring forth topics that may not be covered by the pre- established agenda, fostering a dynamic and responsive discussion environment.

BACKGROUND:

5. BOARD OF EDUCATION COMMENTS

5.1 Board of Education Comments

Type                          Discussion, Information

PURPOSE:

DEBRIEF AND DISCUSSION: The Trustees may debrief and discuss items.

6. Superintendent Comments

6.1 Superintendent's Concluding Comments, Updates, and Future Agenda Items

Type                          Information

PURPOSE:

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

7. ADJOURNMENT

7.1 Adjournment

Type                          Action

Recommended                   The recommendation is that the Board of Education adjourns this meeting.
Action

PURPOSE:

No items will be considered after 3:00 p.m. unless it is determined by a majority of the Board to extend to a specific time.

This action will conclude the meeting.

No minutes available.