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. this process is designed with a lot of well-intentioned, and i hope it is going to work a lot better than the process has in the past. the same limitations are there. people have to believe it is going to work, and only then can we see the effectiveness. i presume that is going to change over time. that is the idea, if this worked as we hope it will, it

will work much more effectively and it won't work up to our expectations the first year, but we will get better over time. i guess i just want to say that we are going to need a lot of data about the people that apply and what school they apply to. and these questions should help us find out more about how they are applying. i hope we will be able to do that. i am hoping that we will be able to develop data that makes that clear somewhere, that maybe some of these things are always at the footnote or have a column saying that this is the pool of applicants, and these are the schools to which these people applied and this is how it changes over time in order to

learn and show the public about the effectiveness. if it is ok with everybody, i would like to ask if there is any public comment on this? we are going to get too far if we wait for public comment. if you want to comment on just this part, come out to the microphone and identify yourself for the record. >> a couple of comments. it might have been addressed about the software and open source. i think it is incredibly important to make sure that people can see that. the other thing about the race question, i want to reiterate, the public does not believe that race is not taken into consideration. if there is any way to get that information after assignments

are made, it would go a long way the building trust and that is not being used. the final comment -- i think they have touched on this little bit, a lot of the racial isolation that currently exists as a result of the fact that there are certain communities that do not participate in the assignment process now. we can have the best assignment process and the world, but if communities do not participate, there will be racial isolation. the question is, why do we think that there will be better participation? if not, what is the district doing to try to get better participation? >> i wanted to echo what the

previous speaker said about releasing the software that is going to be used for the summons system. i think pursuant to his point earlier, it will go away -- a long way to establishing trust. they can look at and in general foster better trust. >> my name is matthew nathan and i am the parent of an incoming kindergarten student next year. i wanted to thank you for approving a system that appears to be with a more transparent than the previous one. and i want to echo some of the comments made earlier. in terms of data collection, i understand there is a lot of different data that we need to collect, like using different colored paper and having different sheets of information

to have low-cost ways and further communique the separateness and distinct message of the data. having not applied to the schools, i did not know the rationale for why we are collecting the ethnicity information or home language information, so it is a different section that has the ethnicity data, there might be ways to communicate that more effectively to parents. and i want to echo the call for more assignment data early. preliminary data, initial data. i think it will go a long way to continue to develop trust, that the process really is working and there isn't a secret

black box and i do not know how to dispel the rumor, but is there. >> i just wanted to make a brief comment about what come fewer said about having a more uniform start time. i know that when i was looking at schools, one of the things that i loved about that was it was a late start time. and there are other people in the community that shows garfield because it was a much earlier start time and that worked better for their schedules. from what i have heard in the community, i don't know if a uniform start time would work the best for all parents. >> i am hoping that we will also look at the 2010 census and see

how those numbers sort of, you know, correlate with our numbers about attendants and to is actually living here. thanks. >> items wanted to make sure i have captured the key point. one of those is looking at data just beyond the assignment data and looking at the census data. when looking at capacity for attendance area and in drawing the attendance area, we are not able to draw areas that will accommodate all of the students that live there. we know that there will be attendance areas that can't accommodate all of the applicants. we want to see if they are applying to the school and other information about the attendance area. a number of commissioners suggested some of the things that we collect data on

including start times, after school, and having a deeper understanding of what kind of surveys would look like. we can share them with the board and make sure that you are aware of what we have been collecting. we look to include information about pre-k. and also, a number of commissioners suggested that we think about having certain data available for the first annual report so we can determine if there is anything that needs to be changed for the second year and looking at attendance areas and other factors to see if adjustments should be made. commissionaire er yee: another

thing that could be useful is looking at the number of applicants, the people applying for kindergarten. since we have that data, to me, it is useful because if the gap gets narrowed, they are probably doing a better job. >> let me go on to the transportation presentation. >> on changing topic to transportation -- >> sorry. we know that we have people that are here for the special- education assignment process. we were wondering if therir

desire is to hear that item and leave? i do not know if we have people who are here specifically to hear about or testify on the transportation issue? we will do the transportation first. please go ahead. >> i will talk briefly about the fall 2010 community engagement process, the substitute motion, and the approach we are taking to develop that information. susan is going to go in more detail about the -- exploring the possibility of revenue, gathering revenue for transportation. there is a document that

describes the student assignments -- i mean, the transportation policies. we are going to talk through that first, and there is a substitute motion as well. these documents are available for the public also. the first document is called the new transportation policy for general ed students. it also provides background content, some of which was shared at the last committee meeting. we have had a number of different conversations with different community groups and different public agencies like the department of public health. we talked to the folks involved with safe route to school. one of the things that has become clear to us, if we are going to have the community engagement process, they need something more concrete than

just policy goals and objectives. they want to know how they will be impacted. will i still beat the -- or will i still be getting a bus? we are not at this stage where we have that level of detail until the winter or january. the first is sharing policy level information with community stakeholders. it doesn't have ride level information, but it has information about why we are changing transportation, what kind of transportation currently exists, what are the policy goals and objectives? and what kind of questions are we going to explore? that information is outlined in this document that is called a new transportation policy for general education students. the other document a wanted to bring to your attention with the

substitute motion itself. we are submitting a substantive motion because it is different enough from the first motion to be considered substitute rather that amended. what we really attempt to do in this, while the concept hasn't changed much, we're hoping to provide a lot more transparency and it makes it clear to families what the goals and objectives of the new policy would be. there are seven goals that are outlined. the first is about supporting choice as a tactic in school assignment to create a diverse learning environment. the second is supporting equitable access and also providing limited transportation to support reasonable access for area schools and to support the middle school assignment process, and transportation

isn't contemplated for high school. we want transportation ltd. to after-school programs -- and limited to after-school programs. yet to provide general and -- ed programs. there are a series of questions that are outlined in this public engagement process document. those questions start on page 4 of the document. we articulate the series of questions that we would explore. and the answers to these questions will help us determine where we should