the afterschool programming piece is part of that discussion. on page 20, so we're reducing the general education transportation formentry schools, i know that we -- for elementary schools, i know that we still transport middle and high are those going to be eliminated completely or is that just for special ed? who's currently being transported to middle and high? and what's that going to look like? >> this year, we eliminated as part of the budget deficit action plan we eliminated high school general education transportation. we do have i believe about five buses that make trips to -- i don't know if it's a combination. i shouldn't say. but we do have buses that make trips to middle schools. our proposal for now is to -- given that we haven't -- that

we've put off some middle school feeder patterns for development over this next year, that we keep those middle school routes until we have a middle school student assignment policy. >> i'm just curious, if we're going to go from 44 buses to 25 buses, what happens to the surplus fleets? are -- >> the contract is reduced or the buses -- if we wanted to add, it would just add, it would just increase our contract, but so the buses would just go away. they are not ours. >> right, commissioner. we have a contract with, per student that basically under which we pay for the buses that we use on a daily basis throughout the year.

so if we were to reduce the number of buses in the fleet next year, the year after that or at any year during the term of the contract, then we would see a proportional reduction in the amount that we pay the contractor. there are some limitations going the other way that if we were to contract for a certain number of buses, and depending on the availability of buses in the contractors fleet overall and how many are committed to other school districts, i don't think this is the situation that we're in, but just so you know, if we were to contract for a certain number of buses and then for whatever reason find ourselves wanting more, then there might not as much flexibility to increase the number of buses above the number that we had contracted for. but going the other way, we would see a reduction in the costs. >> great, thank you. that is actually helping, we own some of the buses and we

did sell them. >> thank you. >> commissioner norton. commissioner norton: so i have to say that afterschool plan really, really gives me the heebies-jeebies. this looks like pulling the rug out from under the families that really depend on this transportation. i would feel more comfortable going -- i think the broad priorities are the right priorities. i would feel more comfortable with the afterschool part of it if we could say to schools where we're eliminating a bus to an offsite afterschool program that is not sfusd, that we will guaranteed you a capacity onsite program. that is where we want to be and where we should be going. it's such a huge ask to say to parents, sorry, you signed up for this school and you have been busing your kids offsite

to this afterschool program. it's not available anymore and we'll send you somewhere else. i don't think we can say that. if we're prepared to say instead every time we take way a route to an offsite afterschool program, we will provide you the capacity of anon site afterschool program at the school. >> thank you, commissioner. we will have an afterschool program in the event that there is not one available at the elementary school. currently there are some schools that offer afterschool to maybe two child development programs and for nonsfusd program. so any given school may have six afterschool programs it provides transportation to. we're recommending exploring, for example, in any situation, is transportation is afterschool available at the school site? if it is, that would obviously be questionable as to why we would provide transportation as it can be provided at the

school site and that we would look to see how many afterschool programs would we need to provide transportation to, is one child development center sufficient or would it not have the capacity, what would we need to maintain two? do our child development programs do not have the capacity to support the students and if not, what afterschool programs would we need to maintain in order to make sure the students would have access to it. we recognize the district has this initiative that it's looking to provide onsite afterschool programs to the students. that's the potential direction the district is going. we'll work very closely with that team to make sure we're supporting the future vision for it so it would be aligned with that rather than working in isolation. commissioner norton: i appreciate that. i don't think it's good enough. i think that we need to guarantee that we will -- that we will -- there will be capacity onsite for students that are losing their transportation to a nonsfusd

program offsite. i really think we have to do that. that's where we're going anyway. i am thinking of my own daughterer's elementary school and there are various children who go it to various offsite school programs and others are bussed to over programs two of which are not sfusd. it's a mess. it's a total mess. if we're also -- so what are we going to do? are we going to say to the kids who are bussed to the non-sfusd program,, you need to go a different offsite afterschool program but not the one that we have been busing you to? that leads us down a path we don't want goal. and the goal for the district has been very clear, that we want capacity on our sites, at our elementary sites for every student that needs afterschool. if we are going to, as part of this, it seems important that we make this commitment that onsite we're going to build the capacity and as we do that, we're going to take away the

capacity to the offsite programs. so that's my, i mean that's my major reaction to this. i have one more thing i wanted to say and i got myself all worked up and i don't remember what it was. if i think of it. chairman maufas: communicationer yee. commissioner yee: so i actually like the way you have framed the goals and objectives. i'm very supportive of it because we have had this discussion of reducing the costs of transportation for a while, but in the past when we had that discussion, we really had no framework to work from except reduce the cost. so if we at some point agree with these goals that you have set forth, i think it would make it a lot easier to have a

discussion around what to reduce or keep or whatever. one clarifying question that i would like to ask before i say anything else. in terms of our reimbursement for transportation about using general funds, what is that amount? >> we receive four general ed transportation, this is not including the transportation for students with disabilities, we receive dedicated funding of about $2.2 million from the state. so that is not flexible money. it's not two or three, so that has to be spent on transportation. commissioner yee: that's helpful. my thinking is that as a baseline of how many buses we

would support, it would be that amount of money. and it seems like the 25 you want to get it down to is pretty much that amount of money. so i guess the way i'm looking at it is i am in support of reducing the buses to that number as a baseline and then we could then build back up in terms of looking at the special things that we need. i support commissioner kim's statements that one of the alternatives to just us paying for the buses is that parents should be able to pay for some of the bus costs. so if the 25 were the baseline and then we find out that, oh, geez, for instance, the afterschool programs are not

san francisco school district-related, maybe the parents were willing to pay for transportation to the private, to their private afterschool programs. basically we're supplementing those programs at this moment. so that could increase the number of buses. you go back up on to it. that's the way i would approach it is really look what the baseline is and what we could afford and then figure out some of the issues that we have and see somehow parents could pay for it and then make a decision whether or not we want to dip into our general funds or not to do other thing. so that's sort of my general comment for, that you asked. was that the question you asked? ok. chairman maufas: commissioner

wynns, could i add one clarification to the discussion about the dedicated resources? also, we were -- what i commented on was the state categorical funding for transportation. there is one other piece that i had put as a related point of information, which is that under no child left behind, we still, who knows when the s. c.a. is going to get reauthorized and when that happens, what provisions will be in place regarding transportation, but under current law, we and all the other districts that get title one funds do have a reservation to spent at least 5% of our title one funds each year on supporting transportation to students who would authorized be assigned to or attend to program improvement schools. that in a way under current law again, subject to change, but right now it could be thought of in a similar way as

dedicated funding. >> how much is that? >> i think it's about $500,000 but we actually spend more than that because we can -- >> we moved some of that money, title one, some of the general fund program support for general ed transportation on to title one funds because of that provision, correct? >> correct. the minimum is to spend 5% on transportation. we spent more than that because in our view, if our current system, we think that's a higher priority in some respects than the you will ter in that use of those funds which is for supplemental services, private tutoring. >> to follow up, are we considering that in our calculations here, what we are thinking about. we don't know if it's going to be sustained as a provision.

>> i would say we are considering that inasmuch as through this three-year phase in. commissioner yee: i want to say that i also agree with the phasin. i'm glad you're -- phase-in. i'm glad you're not doing it all at once. when i add up the amounts, it barely covers the elementary schools. we haven't even talked about the middle or if we're going to have high school and that is going to be additional costs. chairman maufas: commissioner norton. commissioner norton: i was actually going to talk about the same thing and express a little bit of doubt about that. i mean, on the surface, it seems -- that seems like a good thin to do to give parents time and maybe it is a good thing to do. i do sort of wonder if it doesn't, though, also add to the overall climate of uncertainty that people will be

facing in making decisions about where they want to go and what school, you know, i mean, the schedule that you put up on the screen doesn't really give much help to somebody who is choosing a school, who is going into a tran is situational, really kindergarten this year -- transitional, really kindergarten this year if i'm looking at elementary school. if i'm looking at elementary schools, well, this elementary school has three afterschool programs that they bus to, so there might be space for my child in any one of them. so if i get that school, then i can sign up for that, but i won't know until july whether i'm going to have access to that afterschool program the whole time i'm in elementary schools, three years i'm in elementary school or i might lose it the first year i'm in elementary school. it seems to me that we have -- i mean, to say we're phasing in over three years is nice, but

it also, i just think it still is going to add to a lot of anxiety and uncertainty for parents. i also wanted to just say that the thing about parents paying for buses to afterschool programs -- >> before we leave that, i want to talk about the phase-in. i'm thinking of it more as a phase out, not as a face-in. i think in our outreach we should be telling parents do not select an elementary school based on the presumption that you're going to have that busing because unless it is within these guidelines. unless you leave in the area or the schools that we're trying to maintain a diverse pool of applicants or whatever because i was thinking the phaseout is, what is going to happen is you have someone in kindergarten this year and they're going to get transportation for maybe three years or two years, what are they going to do for the fourth and fifth grade? that's a question we have to

deal with when the time comes. i think that and i don't want to go there yet, but the segue into the discussion into the outreach, that is the kind of thing we should be saying to people. this is the direction in which the district's transportation system is going away from sort of scatter shot all over the place elementary school transportation. don't make your selections counting on that and second, phasing out afterschool transportation a lot, we don't know exactly how much but a lot more over the next three years and maybe even beyond that. i think that's the kind of thing we should be talking about. commissioner norton: also to finish my thought about the idea of paying for transportation, this is something we have talked about and i certainly would take it off the table. my preference would be if we're going to ask parents, i mean parents are already paying a lot of money for the non-sfusd offsite afterschool programs in

many cases. i mean, i have no problem with asking parents to do some kind of a sliding scale and asking them to pay for service at an onsite program if we're going to take away their transportation to the offsite. i would much rather to ask them to pay for a service and have us invest in a service that is going to actually enrich a child's day than saying we'll just, you can write a check for the bus. it just seems like that's a better use of parents' money to say if you're going to invest in something, invest in an actual program that your child can go to at their school site. then they really get something for that investment and that change that we're asking them to make. i just think we should think in terms -- i don't think we should rule out asking parents to pay something if we're going to give them something, but the first thing i would ask them to pay for wouldn't necessarily be a bus, it would be a program. >> i'm presuming they're going to have to pay for both if they want one or the other.

it is not our plan to provide free afterschool care for the parents. commissioner norton: that's not our plan. i mean, because i know what is going to happen as soon as we unveil a plan that we're going to eliminate a bhuss to this first afterschool program. the first question is asked what if parents raise money to restore the bus service. i don't know if we want to go down that road. i mean, i would rather it -- there are going to be parents who would say we would like to raise the money and restore our bus service. that adds to the inequity in the patchwork that we're already experiencing. >> from our point of view and commissioner kim brought this up and the concept of paying for transportation which we have discussed for years, this is my perception, where we are now. the information that we have is that the amount of money that we're allowed to charge for transportation is not adequate to pay for the buses. so we would need to -- it's quite a lot of money. it's $5 a trip.

so in other words it's costing us more than that to transport kids to school because we know that amount of money is not adequate to pay for the service. so we, i'm not truthfully, what i think now after what we have learned about it and thinking about it for years is that i don't think given the current or foreseeable budget situation that we actually want to be in the position of investing a lot in transportation when we can make some policy changes that will minimize the need for it or doing it in order to facilitate private afterschool care or things that are, albeit extremely important and convenient for people, not our obligation. so i'm not as interested in doing that, although i do think one piece of information we don't have, which i would like to know, is whether such

restrictions on how much we could charge apply to afterschool and whether they apply to transportation to private, not public facilities. in other words, if we could actually -- if somebody wants to make a deal to, we just facilitate -- let the bus stop at our school and let somebody else arrange for transportation, i'm being a little facetious, but i think we need to be thinking more in those terms. commissioner norton: why wouldn't he want to build the capacity in general of our afterschool? >> exactly, that's what we want to do. i don't know. before all of this discussion started, my initial response to this presentation was that there is not quite enough in the afterschool transportation recommendation because i would like to know what discussions,

parallel discussions in alignment have been had with the people that are realigning the afterschool programs in sfusd. for instance, i'm unwilling to say that i support the idea that we wouldn't take away transportation to private afterschool program unless we guarantee a spot at the school because all those issues still exist. the licensing, the capacity, the rules of doing it onsite, the ramp-up in capacity for every child to stay on their elementary school site for afterschool is a huge multi-year enterprise that we have, i'm happy that we began that discussion last year, but after all we postponed even making the decisions and having the discussion let alone actually doing it. we know that's not happening next year or the year after or the year after that in this phaseout period if we go with that that we will have enough

capacity on every afterschool site for every child to be there for an afterschool program. still, as i said, i think the concept is there, but the content is a little thin for us . at least, i would like to know what the progress is or what the status is of the re-alignment of afterschool discussions going on in the district at the same time. i think we need to know that. i think the board certainly needs to know it before we vote on the transportation policy that would have some significant reduction in afterschool transportation, but i'm hoping that you could bring that us next month or at least an update of what is going on there so we have a sense whether there is some context there in that is real and that we would be on the road toward significant ramp up in capacity. commissioner norton. commissioner norton: as a further request on that. i really would like to know who we're talking about depriving

this access to, each if we're talking about phasing out that access over several years. i mean, i just, you know, i'm not sure that the idea of guaranteeing as you take away an offsite route, you build up capacity at a school site, i'm just not convinced that that is undoable as you think it is. it may be, but i would like us to look in that drix. it may be. if we're going to make such a dramatic change and a change that's going to upset and offend life for so many families, i would like to make sure we're giving them something and that we're moving in a direction that is generally the district's priority. i mean we all -- i think we have articulated this vision that where we want to be is onsite afterschool for every child at every school. i just don't want to do anything that make that vision go further away rather than getting closer to it. chairman maufas: mr. yee.

commissioner yee: yeah, i think what would be helpful for us is actually getting -- i think somebody already mentioned this, getting a better idea of where these offsite nonschool district sites are because my guess is that several of them or many of them are basically wanting to go back to the neighborhood programs. if they're going to school across town, even if you had afterschool program there, they still might prefer to go back to the neighborhood. my guess is that some of these afterschool programs could be like a block from a school that they're going back to the neighbor, so if that's the case, i mean, i'm guessing, i'm really guessing that oftentimes

it's a bus that goes back to a particular neighborhood that was going to have a stop at the school, but two blocks away, the afterschool program so it's on the route, so we may want to look at that and see how close they are to existing school sites. you might find out that a percentage of them, whether or not you bus them directly to the afterschool program or to the school that's a block away, it wouldn't have as big as an impact as you think. i know there are others that will be, people just want a swimming pool, you know, for the afterschool program. they want the type of program and it has nothing to do with proximity to their homes. chairman maufas: thank you. i did want to point out in response to that and you can tell me if i'm wrong, though, that may be true today, what we're basically proposing is not to bus those kids at all anymore.

so we wouldn't be busing them back to the school near their home because we're not going to provide nearly as much elementary school transportation at all. the thing that i wanted to see that commissioner yee's comments reminded me of, we haven't had any discussion, i presume this is, that we could have that in the budget committee, although i'm not certain i want mr. lee to comment on this. when we looked at the costs of transportation, one of the things that we saw is a lot more kids right the bus in the afternoon than the morning. so is that still true and have we looked that as an efficiency? is there some way to do something about that? i mean, i'm not going to force them on to the bus. what i mean is incorporate that into our thinking more so that presumably what is happening is a lot of these kids that are not riding the bus in the morning are taking them to school and then going to an

afterschool program. tell me how that is being considered in your discussion about the new policy, if at all. >> so one of the things that we're doing in order have a better understanding of what we're currently doing and it's very hard to do that, we're looking to compare morning and afternoon routes. we took a couple of sample schools and we wanted to see if there was an alignment between them. in one school, for example, where the buses were coming from the morning and where they were going to in the afternoon were not aligned. that would be part of the evaluation of the current routes. commissioner yee made a good observation, a good suggestion to do a deeper analysis of what is happening in transportation and the children are getting on the buses, are they even going to the afterschool program or just home because it's in the area and there isn't transportation home. we have limited opportunities to do analysis because we don't know what is happening at the nonsfusd afterschool programs. we have 19 that are sfusd and

31 that are not that we provide transportation to. for the one that are sfusd afterschool programs, we have received data from the child development program giving us the h.o. numbers of all of the students at the afterschool programs and we can use that to do some analysis and share with the board in terms of the demographics of the students and where they live and that. we will be able to share that with you. i don't know if that answers your question. chairman maufas: ok. you have enough feedback? more than enough, thank you. so now can we go on to the second part of the presentation and then we'll see if anybody wants to comment on that and then we'll have some discussion, we'll do it quickly. we think we're half an hour more on the meeting, but go ahead. >> good evening, commissioners.

i'm going to talk a little bit about the plans that we are making to outreach and recruit families to participate in our enrollment process with this new system. the first thing we want to share with you is our new tagline, discover, apply, and enroll which is going to be branded on all of our new documents. er hoping this will resonate with families. these are three actions that they really need to take in process. they need to go out and visit our schools, the websites, go to workshops. they need to apply. that means submitting an application on time or during our placement periods and they need to enroll. so after they have received an assignment, they will be going out to the school sites to enroll. we're hoping that this message will resonate with families and he