>> what about if the tiebreaker was ranked above the seated one tie breaker? it was reserved for students that lived in the attendance area. i know it gets kind of confusing after a while. basically, your testing to see if the order of the tiebreakers was shifted, what would the impact be on school composition

and also on choice outcomes for parents? that is what we are planning to kind of simulate and provide data about it in the annual report that we generated. the first annual report was january 2012. we want to make sure that we are looking at the actual enrollment of the schools. we wanted to talk a bit about the researchers and to help with the simulations. we are grateful for the work that they did. they were wonderful to work with to help us think through the tiebreakers we are using in the student assignment system. we spent a lot of time working with them to do an mlu.

in exchange for data. as we work to negotiate, we got to a point where the costs were too high for the district. in return for their assistance, they wanted 17 years of data. 10 years of historical data and seven years of data into the future. they wanted to talk about everything from discipline, where they lived, any and all data we collected about students, teachers, and principals and staff. there was also concerned about liability for the intentional or negligent release of personal data. we are confident that with this team of experts to think through monitoring student assignment, we have the capacity to monitor closely and be very transparent

about the outcome and share that information publicly. we are also confident that we can develop the software and also the key features that they talked about. they talked about simplicity -- we should not consider rank. where students listed the choice on application forms should not impact -- everyone would get tentatively assigned based on whether they lived in the attendance area. they could get tentatively assigned to more than one school based on those tiebreakers and we would go into a cycle of swapping. why not let somebody swap with

somebody else and get a higher rank choice if it did not cause harm to anybody else? we are going to be building in the software that process, and that is looking at students in the request order. the school is still up based on the tiebreaker. the second process transfers students to finding other placements for them might have ranked higher. we will provide -- or we can provide to the board and make public the requirements document and everything that will make it really clear what is happening in the various stages and the software will work for the cycle. that is the presentation we have on the monitoring. i am not sure if the board would like ask questions on that now or move on to the transportation

fees. >> i have a couple of brief questions. you mentioned monitoring the characteristic, and i am wondering how we will know what the race and ethnicity of those candidates are? is it based on when students actually arrive in schools and was reported in the student data and student information system? >> the race and ethnicity of a student is not needed for student assignment. however, it is needed for other reasons and the district. i think it is for federal reasons. we have occurred less racial and ethnic data. those questions are still on the application form so we will be able to use that as part of the analysis. >> i thought we were only going ask for the list of choices and

your address on the application. >> that is all we need for student assignment, but there are lots of other elements of the district where they require different types of information for different purposes and want to collect it at the point of entry. a lot of the questions, for example, a question about the military. the question about home language. we need that for english learners. i am happy to forward the draft of it along to you so that you can see there are lots of questions that the district needs to gather information about even though it is not for student assignment. >> does it say that this information will not be used for student assignment purposes? it does? >> no one has ever believed us.

they will continue not to believe it. >> presumably, that will be taken care of by the transparency when we show them how the program runs and how it has made the decisions. and it doesn't consider those things, that will help. that is a good reason and to make sure that they do it. >> i understand the major monitoring report will be available in january 2012. will there be any data released preliminarily or otherwise about the success or outcomes of the system? the way there will be a question about how things work or how they didn't work. >> we will include that after the fact.

>> the other question i wanted to ask was, about the requirements document and the process flows for the new algorithm. are those available now? when did you plan to be able to make those public? >> we will continue building and testing the system. and we will hope to have that information available by february. >commissioner fewer: did we ask about after-school? i believe that is what impacted telephone surveys and that was a huge consideration for families. if we can get indication of that, i also wanted to know if start times was part of the consideration. if we are going to look at

eliminating transportation routes, perhaps we can get on a more uniform the start time for our children. i know that we very start times because of transportation, so i am wondering as we trend, if the district gets more aligned with the things, it is not as difficult for parents to navigate their lives around it. >> we will include that. commissioner yee: so, it looks like you are going to be asking a lot of questions. one of the missing pieces of you did not mention is the whole pre-k piece.

what impact does that have with student assignment? most of the pre-pay programs are subsidized for low-income -- pre-k programs are subsidized for low-income people. the annual report that you will come up with in january of 2012, one of the things that we talked about early on the in the discussion was that as we roll this out the first year, we're probably going to make adjustments and so forth. it is a living document and it might change the following year. i am not sure how we would change it for the school year if we are not going to get that report center than when that date.

the other thing -- i have not frame the question around this, but until we get to the point where we have consistent after- school programs, it seems that we should ask some questions are around that. does the type of the after- school program influence what kind of diversity we have in our particular school? it seems like that is worth looking at. >> i have a few questions. i am very interested that we want to try to monitor student engagement. but it is a very hard thing to assess. as i understood, you are saying that you are going to monitor that through family surveys or is yours didn't engage? what do we think about that?

>> each year we administer family and student surveys. and we would explore the possibility of having specific questions to gather feedback. and we would have to spend some time defining what we mean by that. >> we have talked in our strategic planning process about things we would like to measure. i don't know -- i don't know where that process is. there were things like, are you engaged in curricular -- coker regular activities at school -- co-curricular activities, that kind of stuff? what i want is some kind of the bay. i presume that there are things there that are more in the mode

of our general planning process that would help understand. so i would like to know -- i am sure your thinking about where we are in the thinking process about how the general surveying that we do or other things. we might not have asked other people if they are engaged in co-curricular activities. i am interested in how people are beginning to think that we can glean information. that is my first question. second, i am interested in this issue of capacity. do we have enough room for the people that live in the attendance area? then i realize that what we need is to actually apply to go to

school there. that is kind of a core, basic, bottom-line question to the workability of the attendance area. and so, i guess that means -- we are going to need to lose -- use that in our outreach. that way, over time, we can ascertain the capacity question. i suspect we will be disappointed that will have under enroll schools in areas that are, we think, everybody was there, we would be over- enrolled. i guess that that is an area at that i don't want to wait until

that after reporting to know about. that is one of the main things we are going to need to be able to tell people to change their perception of how the student assignment process works. we are telling people that we are presuming he had that if they actually live in the attendance area of the traditionally over-general school, they have a much greater chance of going there. we are also saying that based on these principles, we presume that to be true but we do not know it. i think that we want to know that. and not a year-and-a-half down the line, but as soon as we can. and also, when you were talking about trying to assess questions to assess the effectiveness, it has to be linked to transportation. i want to know how many people applied the schools to which we

provide transportation that are not the attendance area schools and how many people apply where we don't provide transportation. that wasn't mentioned. and i have a question, a follow- up on commissioner yee's question. one of the things that has not been mentioned lately is this a priority for people in the district child development program within the area. so i really want to know -- i think we have asked before and have not gotten the information about how many people are in that situation, which i think is much smaller than most people think it is because the part they don't hear when we talk about that is only the child

development program that is in the attendance area in which you live. that is not very many people. we will be a lot of information to make sure that we monitor that if it is effective, useful, and we will also need that for the redesign of the after-school program. last question is this. these are the tiebreaker questions. all of these things i have kind of referred to this a little bit in my earlier question. all of these questions have the same limitations that all the data we have collected up until now have. the only people for whom we can collect information are people who apply to schools at which they apply. thisro