are under development right now and being finalized. and we're going to be having -- chairman maufas: i don't know what the special ed -- >> what are in these? >> as i said, it's under development right now. we are still having conversations on that. chairman maufas: it's not the guide that is not being finalized. it's the policy, the process. good. >> and we also have -- chairman maufas: i hope you have that before you start developing the guide. >> we also have the new maps. we're hoping to create an all in one map that shows all of our sites including our child development programs. hopefully that will be an improvement on our old map and this will be showing our new boundaries as well. we have a school tour document that we distribute as well as our new enrollment applications and we're also developing some marketing materials for some of our focus schools. what we have also done is we're

going to be setting up several workshops that we're going to kick off with discovery workshops and some workshops at the enrollment fair. this is going to include workshops on the new assignment process and a little application process as usual and we also hold a pre-k to k special education transition workshop and special education services are going to be offered as well, a workshop on that. and some workshops on english language learner programs as well as immersion programs. we're also going to be adding it, i think our conversation tonight is, a workshop possibly to talk about transportation. and as we continue on these discussions and in the planning process, we're hoping to be able to share some of those discussions with the public at the enrollment fair. this is going to be in addition to any other public engagement

activities that we're going to have involving transportation. we're also going to be holding a workshop and doing some specific outreach for the families that are at willie brown and we have some specific strategies that we're going to be using to make sure that those 90-plus families who are going to be affected from the closure are going to have complete information about how to apply for schools and what the process will be for them. we're expanding our discovery workshops. in the past we will hold four or five workshops throughout the city focused on specific areas. we have expanded that to hold more workshops and that way we will be able to reach all of the neighborhoods and all the levels, so all our discovery workshops are going to be structured around the new process as well as to give information about the

enrollment process at each level, elementary, middle, and high school. and this is something that we're very excited about. we have been working with the transportation department to establish e.p.c. and mobile center. this is our rolling rrment bus and we're going to -- enrollment bus. we have a portable e.p.c. that is going to be used in different neighborhoods to reach out to families in the neighborhood who have difficulty getting out to the e.p.c. down here. and we're going to be working with many partners to do some outreach and make sure that this is advertised and this information is shared with the public so well be creating fliers. i think you have a flier in your packet that we're going to be sharing with a lot of the organizations in those

neighborhoods and they have helped us to disseminate the information and get the families out to the enrollment bus. these are some of the places that we have identified where we will be going out with our enrollment center. and we're also going to be working specifically with our child development and pre-k programs. we have already done a training with our site managers. we're going to be setting up some outreach events with the pre-k programs and we're also going -- hoping to bring out some of our assessment team into the pre-k's and child development programs to do the assessment and counseling onsite. and another new aspect that we have is the walking the beat outreach where we're going to identify high traffic walking locations in different neighborhoods and we're going to be creating a little

postcard reminders and getting some of our information out to remind families to enroll. to tell them about the bus and to make sure they understand what the key dates are and what the process is. and something that we launched last year that we found very successful and received a lot of good feedback on is our satellite collection sites. usually the week or so before the enrollment deadline or the application deadline, we will go out to school sites to collect applications so that we don't have everybody having to come down here to the e.p.c. so we have identified certain, these schools to send our team out there and collect applications as well. and we're also going to be conducting our language assessments on saturdays so we

have scheduled 10 assessment dates and sites where we can go out to the community and do the assessments and the counseling at the same time. and we are also going to be some of our usual outreach activities such as newspaper and advertising in certain areas and we're going to be also developing our p.s.a.'s and getting our information out to the media through the media. we do a mailing every year through the housing authority as a reminder to families and we have already, you know, distributed a lot of our posters about the enrollment fair to merchants and hospitals and to libraries and a lot of community centers. and we're also looking at another recommendation from our family connectors is to use text messaging as maybe a way

to capture families and we also can consider using text messaging with our students, our middle and high school students are very good at text messaging. so this might be a good opportunity to utilize this new technology that families are connected to. and we're also going to be working specifically with some of our focus schools to try to establish some road trips. we're working with the fifth grade schools to try to enhance enrollment for some of our schools that are underenrolled and racially isolated, so we are working with those school sites to kind of do a welcome and to draw families in to get them to look at the schools and consider the schools and to take that first step to discover what the schools have to offer. we're also going to be working with the eighth grade counselors and the principals in our middle schools to

establish some road trips out into some of our high schools. and we have also launched our enrollment website that is online now and we are currently trying to get that updated with some new information on -- and some of the new documents that we have developed and hopefully and we hear that a lot of families are using this and we are getting a lot of feedback as to what we need to develop and refine in terms of our enrollment website. we do have an interactive school selector that hopefully will be a good tool for families to search for schools based on certain criteria. i think we shared that at a previous meeting. we also are going to put in a tool where parents can type in their address and find out what their attendance area school is

and whether or not they live in a low test score area. they're not going to be able to know what the feeders are, but at some point when we do have feeders, they will also be able to see what their middle school feeder school is. all the maps and our applications will be online as well. our application template will be online. we haven't yet developed the infrastructure to be able to take applications online yet. families would be able to go on line and get the application and fill it out and print it out. and in the future, we still have some training. we're still going to be doing additional training with some family connectors as well as training parent liaisons that are working out at school sites. we are planning to do some traininging with school sites and principals. now that the school tours are

underway, we are getting some inquiries, from school sites, about what our process is. so we are going to be doing some training for school sites and some principals. the e.p.c. staff is going to undergo some very intensive professional development as well in terms of the new process and the counseling that they're going to be doing out in the community. we also want to make sure that after our march placement period that we continue to do outreach. we have many, many families that continue to move into the city and with our new process, they do have an opportunity to participate in our application, in our enrollment process and we want to make sure that after march, we continue to do outreach. we're probably going to use our mobile enrollment center to continue to go out to targeted areas where the families tend

to apply late or move into the city later on and we want to make sure that we continue to send out that message to encourage them to participate in our process. we're also going to be continuing to walk the beat out in the community. so we're going to end with our discover, apply, and enroll tagline and we look forward to hearing your feedback. chairman maufas: thank you. public comment. yes, is there any member of the public that would like to comment on this? please come up to the podium. >> hi, i'm the executive director of parents for public schools. i wanted to say thank you for that presentation. i just wanted to add to it because i think it's important to let you know what we're doing as an organization to really do the outreach around enrollment and the new process.

as always, for those parents that don't have a choice to go to public scoolts. we want them to consider and ultimately enroll in the public schools. for the parents who are choosing public schools, we want them to understand all of their options. so to quickly go down the list of what we're doing, we have 300 parent ambassadors in all of our schools. they can talk to perspective parents about their experience in the schools as a way of connecting to a prospective parent and promoting what is going on in those schools. of them, self of them become enrollment coaches. they increase their knowledge about the enrollment process itself and go out to counsel parents but how the process works. we also know that many of the preschool directors out there are sort of the next step to their own networks and if they're more informed about the process, they're able to counsel their own parents. so we do about 115, we call them key influencers. so people out there in the

community who are talking to the parents, whether they're health care providers, social workers, librarians, preschool directors and more. we have a great partnership with our public libraries. we're doing events in 12 different libraries across the city in three different languages to reach parents in their neighborhoods to talk about and feature the neighborhood schools through those parent to parent connections. we work with our partners, the jump-start, the family resource centers, the toys and backpack giveaways and our website gets about 50,000 hits a month this time of year. so it's a great resource for parents to get that information. and i also am really excited on what is going on in the schools and help them market their schools through the parents and for example, there is a spanish emergence school which we're excited about. we are also really excited about the scores at malcolm x and we're interested in helping the willie brown parents understand what is next for them. so just wanted to share that

with you. chairman maufas: thank you. we want to express our thanks to p.p.s. and all of the community partners who really are dedicated to helping with this. mr. david. >> my name is todd david, i'm a parent at alvarado elementary. i have a couple comments on the presentation that was given. i love the idea of the center, i think that's great and i love the tax thing. those are both great ideas. i think the main discovery workshops is confusing. what are you laughing at? yeah. the main discovery workshop is confusing. i think that people are not going to really know what that is. i know that you're trying to do discovery, apply, enroll. but enrollment workshops will be a little bit clearer, especially to new families trying to figure out what is going on. the collection sites, i wonder if it's possible to open them for more than a day each.

i think those are great. i think it's great to have satellite collection sites if you gave people a week because any one day they could forget. the road trip focus, i'm wondering why in addition to that, why we're not having principals of elementary schools and the principals of the potential feeder middle schools getting parent groups together now to talk to each other as opposed to having parents go visit the new school. i think that having parent groups talking to each other would be a really good idea. those are my comments. i would like to make one other comment that is kind of more to the general of what this committee deals with in general. i recently discovered or was told or heard that some decisions were made about not using the stanford and m.i.t. consultants who helped create the programs and not use them

for oversight of the new enrollment process and that that decision was made in a private session of, i believe, this committee, if not of the general board or the whole board. i really, i really have some concerns about a big decision like that being made in a closed session that i think that it would be much more helpful for parents to fully understand what that decision was and why because i can remember very well sitting here listening to the stanford and m.i.t. people saying that they will be here to help make adjustments to the process if the results are different than what we had hoped. so there is definitely some concerns. it feels like from a parent's point of view that the district doesn't, it doesn't want oversight. and that fields like whether it's fair or not, the perception of the district and

specifically of the enrollment process has been such that there hasn't always been a lot of transparency and that a lot of things have seemed unclear so i would ask you to err on the side of transparency. chairman maufas: i want to make clear the committee hasn't done that and does not meet in closed session. only in the restricted areas that we can. >> if i could request of the staff and to the chair that perhaps at the november meeting of this committee that we can have an update first of all in our progress towards creating a new algorithm and possibly some discussion of why we're going the route that we're going, i think that would be helpful to people to kind of understand our thinking on this and i also would like to and i don't know if november is soon enough, but if november is too soon, i would like to explore the idea

of eventually making the algorithm open source so that once it's written and once we have done a run that the public can see it, that they can bang on it and see how it works. i think, you know, software companies do this. it's not impossible to do and we should consider doing that. chairman maufas: thank you. if you d don't mind, do you wan to respond to this and then we'll -- >> yes, thank you, commissioners. yes, at the november meeting, we will have a more elaborate discussion, but just to make sure there is no misunderstanding out there and the reason that we are not having the stanford folks write the algorithm is not at all a concern about the jordan site. it's not at all connected to oversight. we are working to put together a group that will serve as an oversight committee for the board and the superintendent on this issue in a nutshell, we will go into deeper discussion in november. the big concern had to do with the request and return for

their assistance in writing the algorithm. they were going to have a graduate student write the software and in return they would have liked access to 17 years worth of data, 10 years of historical data, and seven years into the future. it wasn't data just about student assignments. it was about achievements, teachers, principals, student discipline. it was a desire to have access to every piece of data the district collects about students and teachers and staff. we just thought that that, first of all, there was some legal concerns and then there was also just wanting to make sure we're being responsible about student and staff data. and that's why we have gone in a different direction in terms of the software development but the oversight piece of student assignment is and continues to be a priority for the superintendent and we are working to establish a committee of experts that will be a resource to the district

moving forward on that. chairman maufas: thank you. go ahead. >> hi, my name is valerie higgins and i'm here with parents for public schools. i just want to say they also think that the text messaging will be helpful and am glad that you guys are having the mobile buses and just want to thank you for helping us with enrollment. we know that enrollment is such a huge thing in the district and in terms of reaching out to the -- not hard to reach communities, but communities that are often left out of the outreach. i just want to thank you for helping with that and also in regards to taking over on the willie brown outreach for the informing the parents that they have slots available in three middle schools and that they also can go to all schools in san francisco. so i just want to thank you guys for all of your help and support. chairman maufas: thank you.

>> my name is galina and my question is not regarding today's discussion. i am a grandmother of two kids. one of them is disabled and my question is the school district , we were told that board of education can include the discussion of your case in our meeting and make a decision. >> mr. wynns, i'm sorry to interrupt the speaker. i need to race the point that i have had the pleasure of meeting her before. i believe the issue that is of concern to her is not --

>> let me finish, please. >> within the jurisdiction of the committee. chairman maufas: i understand. neither the board of education for the committee is -- we do not have the authority to discuss a specific student assignment case. that is a discussion you have to have with the staff and the legal staff, not the board. >> because think case is regarding the revocation of school assignments. chairman maufas: it's a specific case related to a specific student, not something that the board of education -- >> it's not your function. chairman maufas: no, not at all. >> so the school district in sacramento was wrong when they told us this information. chairman maufas: if they told you that the board of education specifically and this committee could make such a decision, they were wrong. >> they were wrong. thank you for the explanation and i will make my own decision. chairman maufas: thank you. board members, commissioner

mendoza. excuse me? staff is following up on that, correct? thank you. commissioner mendoza. commissioner mendoza: thank you. i always love the whole outreach piece of it because it has grope significantly from knocking on doors or something. it's great to see all of the ways that we are reaching out to our families. just a couple of clarifying pieces. on page 32 when we talk about the discovery workshops, i just want to be really mindful on the english language learner programs that we have clarity in our own programs what we're offering to our e.l. families. we continue to talk about immersion for our e.l.'s and is that the appropriate conversation that we want to be having and is that the push that we have been doing or is it a discussion about bilingual

immersion and general ed? i just want to make sure that we're providing very clear options for our e.l. families. if not, i'm getting a lot of feedback on how our e.l.'s are doing and make sure. on the discovery workshops themselves at the schools, what will those look like? will they be presentations between 10 and 12, or will they be breakout sessions that folks can kind of pick and choose where they want to go in certain classrooms every half hour or what will that look like? >> well, i think that we are working with our marketing firm and they are helping us develop a user friendly kind of powerpoint that is going to walk them through the new policy and our guidelines in terms of enrollment. we haven't really cooked it all up yet, fully cooked it up. these workshops are really

designed to address students at all levels. we used to break it out where it was kindergarten and we did a middle school one and a high school one. we wanted to capture all families and more families in these workshops. so we might be doing a presentation with the entire group and then do some breakouts according to the levels. >> commissioner mendoza: and the training on paming 24, i want folks to know we have been working with the city on 311. you have been training 311 so i want to be able to offer that information to families that if they can't get into a line at sfusd, they can go to 311. they are trained to help the school district on that. one of the organizations that were mentioned was the family centers. i want to make sure we're tapping into them and getting regular information to them. they really do reach a lot of

families. everything else just looked really great, you guys. at some point having our application online would be terrific. i know that we try to do that once upon a time and it was a disaster and so it just seems like something that we should be able to do at some point and so i want to make sure that we continue to lean towards that as our goal. it's terrific outreach and i'm really excited about attending some of the events. so thank you. chairman maufas: just as a follow-up, if you could, in the discussion about applying online, can you just update us, it doesn't have to be now, about what, how anybody thinks that could be done when you have to have verification of your address, which is even more key in our new system than it has been in the past, so i just would like to know. if you want to say something now -- >> that's the challenge and we are having discussions and we

wanted to at least think about phasing that in so that's why we have the template that is online where families can fill it out and then print it out, but they won't be able to submit it. so we have to have a certain kind of infrastructure in terms of our technology to be able to receive those applications online. then we have to figure out how we're going to do the address verification and collect those documents from families subsequently after they turn them in. chairman maufas: are we investigating that? reinvestigating anybody that is verifying what we need to verify online? >> we are exploring that and seeing how other districts are doing that. >> even having a director verification with pg&e or at&t, they confirm or somewhere in the city where there is verification, those are things that can happen. chairman maufas: commissioner norton.

commissioner norton: i was curious about the road trips because i was assuming in the presentation that we were talking about students, but did you actually mean parents were going? >> no, we meant students, yeah. commissioner norton: so students, we're having actually field trips that students are taking. >> a field trip, arrange to pick them up at school and bring them over to the high schools. we are focusing on -- commissioner norton: that's not where we got the idea, though, right? [laughter] commissioner norton: and what schools are going to be participating in that? >> we're going to be focusing more on the schools that are in the superintendent zones as well as some of the schools that are underenrolled. we're working with those principals to see where they feel or where they feel the students might be coming from, where they're more inclined to come from, what school sites and what neighborhoods. commissioner norton: and i know

you probably don't have the answer to this question now, but i do have to say i'm getting a lot of questions from people around about the address verification. particularly the big question i seem to be getting asked is how quickly can you change your address if you apply with one address and then you change your address to another address, which it seems to me there is a lot of people kind of looking for the loopholes and the ins and outs of the new system. i'm just wondering, first of all, are we deep into developing regulations around that and sort of what is our thinking around that and i think we're going to need to be very clear out of the gate when we're talking about the process to families about what's going to be acceptable and what's not acceptable under the new process. chairman maufas: commissioner yee. commissioner yee: