system, as well, so i am also going to strongly advocate, as an said earlier in the conversation, at the current system for kids who are not placed and are not accepting their assignments for next year. thanks very much. >> yes, my name is doors crawford. i have a daughter in high school, and we live where she should go to balboa. she is 4'1", 98 pounds. the crime -- the school is fine. i have been there. all of your schools are fine. it is your neighborhood you cannot fix. you're always talking about quality schools. it is quality schools. it is the neighborhoods that are not quality. that is why i refused to send my

daughter there. she is going to stay at home, and i will home teach her, or something. you cannot fix those neighborhoods, you know? the neighborhood has to fix itself. the people living here have to be wanting to fix it themselves. then they will have more people coming to their schools. >> good evening. my name is edmund. i am a parent of a soon-to-be third grader at lafayette, and i just wanted to say that i am also in support of the feeder pattern, and i would ask again that you keep in mind to the customers are. it is not just the parents. it is the children, because they are the ones who are going to be paying the price of how things

happen down the road, and i think that is why keeping them in their community, their local community, that allows them to be better learners. some parents said indicated that if they have to be shipped across the city, taking the bus, or even taking the school bus, it is going to be a very huge burden on them, and it makes it less able for them to learn, because they are tired. also, i think if you want to keep costs down and use the money in another way, again, consider keeping them in their communities so you do not have to ship them. ok. thank you very much. [applause] >> hi, my name is sharon kennedy. i was here a couple of months ago. i have a kindergartner that is being sent 5.2 miles away from my home. i am upset about it. e(zthe proposed feeder patterny

benefit us, which i do like that, but right now, what is a parent to do? you have an algorithm for everything. you have an algorithm for siblings, for a test score, for everything, but there is no algorithm to prevent a family from traveling 5.2 miles into a poor performer neighborhood? why would a pair of what to do that? it is one thing if you want to volunteer to make those schools better and get with other parents to try that, but i have no motivation to take my kids down there so far away from home. at the time and the money with gas. how can we afford to take them down there? how can you ask a parent to do that? it is so stressful. and then you are pinning families against one another. we are like fighting for the best of what we can get, and it is just not fair to have

families do that, and then i have one other thing. families to get somewhere in the system. i went around 1, route two. what is going to happen when school starts? how are you going to prioritize families who are still waiting to get in? there is no transparency whatsoever. commissioner: what area you are in? you were supposed to be offered the closest. >> i do not see why i would be given sheridan. commissioner: can you just take her name so we can see if we can find out? thank you.

to see where staff is. ok. we want to thank everybody for your testimony, your comments. we are not going to hear anything. if there is translation going on, they have to be really careful to not have side conversations. so if we could have the staff people, if we could see if we can squeeze in as many as we can, and then, a board member's comments? mr. yee? commissioner yee: they used an example about what would happen if there was a feeder system

versus what happened in 2010. it was nice to see, the issue of diversity. it would have been addressed adequately with this feeder system, so thank you, staff, for that. this is just a simple question. in counting up the slot for middle school, do we do this lot better in the k-8 schools? -- do we do this lot better in those? -- the slots? >> it is a significant number,

and we took that into account when we looking at the middle school capacity compared to the involvement projections. commissioner yee: so the numbers are in here? >> yes, they do reflect the 1300's k-8. commissioner yee: if a family did not want to go to the feeder school, do they have a choice, an option to go to another school? there is still a possibility? >> yes, it is still a choice system, and there is a tie- breaker for the middle school feeder, and then starting in 2017, it would become an offer. kind of light -- like the k-8

now. commissioner yee: for example, some of those in monroe, that is pretty much like 50 slots that is when to open up, is that correct but that is correct. commissioner yee -- is that correct? >> that is correct. commissioner yee: thank you. commissioner: commissioner norton? commissioner norton: to changing this a significant amount of time, and i ask that about having particular things in place, some of the special

education planning, and then the other question i want to ask you, and then i understand you'll probably have to answer for yourselves, but do you feel let the district presentation this evening and answered some of the questions that you have had at the beginning of this process, since you completed the community engagement? >> so i think to answer your first question, we read the proposals that were read at the may 24 meeting, which is the same proposal here. the date change was on that one, right? the first reading is the one i am talking about, thank you. said that date, before we wrote these questions, to be submitted

tonight, we did know about the date change affecting in coming kindergartners and the families, but i think we still stand by these questions. i think delaying it that one year still did not change sort of our questions around some of the bigger strategic questions around budget, around planning, and around language and around curriculum, and so i hope that answers your question. we did know about it. >> i do not feel that it does. there has been several changes. then the board agreed to delay it one year, and now we have a proposal before us that would

place the system on tiebreakers for the next five years, i think. and that is the newest change, so you still wrote those questions knowing that information. >> let me clarify. at our very last meeting, we did not know that. we're still very unhappy with the details that are not presented in this year pattern. and not enough information is there for us to recommend it. we know, and i was going to say this in conclusion, if, in fact, you did decide to pass this feeder system, there are some things that we voted on that we would recommend to you, and i can talk about those right now. first, to change the order of the tie breakers to make equity and higher priority in the feeder school. we recommended the tie breakers to be sibling priority over any other party mechanism, and many

of us are from the southeast side of town, and we do not like the idea of our children being locked into a new -- underperformance or, and most of the parents that are happy with the feeder system are being sent to the highest achieving middle schools. it does not give any of the rest of us parents, who are already into lower achieving schools, a way into those schools. we are behind everybody else, so we do not recommend it that you pass the feeder system as it is, the proposal, because we want more information on the transportation, how equity is ç i know we will probably have to go through this conversation again if it is not passed, but as we all know, the devil is in

the details, and we all would like to see more details. >> i am sorry. i was one to answer your second question. i am sorry, commissioner norton. i misunderstood. we did know about that, and we did develop that after the first reading, so we did know about that. that is the short answer. to answer your second question, i thought tonight's presentation was very well presented, and i really like the fact that the district addressed the priorities and addressed a lot of the recommendations that we made. what i feel sad about is the community did not get to hear any of that, and i feel that it is happening after we have gone out to the community. i think the district made a strong case tonight for a lot of things, but i feel like the committee heard sort of a different thing, so i would urge

continued dialogue in a lot of ways on a lot of these points with people, and i also think that some of what is also sitting there for me are some of the strategic questions sort of about implementation, and the planning process is different from our user experience and have kids and parents sort of have to deal with the day-to- day, and so, for example, predictability is nice when it comes to assignment and knowing where you are going, but it is very hard to use it if it means more predictable school is very far away and inconvenient to get to, so it is those kinds of things. commissioner: commissioner

mendoza? commissioner mendoza: i think this makes more sense than anything i have heard in a while. if this is what we had out there, i think the conversation would have been a little bit different than what it is. this will always be very personal. as your child goes through this experience, it is very personal, and if you read a fourth grader, you are feeling really anxious, and if you're the fifth great parent who was banking on the feeder pattern to start to kick in this year, and it did not, you are pissed, and this speaks to so much of what we have been

talking about for a long time. if you like your neighborhood and where your kid is at, you are going to support neighborhood schools. this is why we left high school the way that we did. and i always feel a little jaded around this because my kids went to schools that no one wanted to go to, and i was part of public schools for half of my life, it feels like, and that will conversation was about going in and taking charge of your school and not having your school take charge of you, and really changing what our schools look like, and i think we have been able to successfully do that because of support in our elementary schools, but we still have so many of our schools where families date that they are the only in town, and this

line that shows the diversity fees from kids from all over the city that go to these particular schools, it is very powerful, because we're not talking about where schools are located as much as we are muley recognizing families traveled from all over the city to get to a school that they really feel strongly about, but i also feel that the work we're doing is simultaneous to a large degree, and middle school quality, working on quality middle schools is not -- we did not start doing this when we started talking about -- this was going on when another was in charge. this has been a conversation we have been having for some time and really thinking about what it is that our middle schools need, and i think a lot more

time has been spent focused on doing assessments across the board about making sure all of the schools have what all of the schools need to have, since you are not looking at particular schools because you do not have special education at one place or something. so we are working on making that he's more solid at all of the schools -- making neckpiece more solid. -- making that piece more solid and it is not clear. it is becoming more clear as we look at the data with the kids are coming from and they are still coming from across the city. we have to remember that a lot of families are not choosing to go to some of the schools that we are expecting them to choose.

many of our families in the bayview want to stay in the bayview. they want to be close to home as well. families have always been felt like they are being pushed out on the east side. one of your statements in your report that you make that it would block most students from gaining admission to higher performing schools on the west side. i don't agree with that. i don't think that is how networks. a lot of it, i think, is making sure that east side families know what their options are. or if east side families want to stay on the east side. it feels very hitting, something that i think is very hot and not helpful. i am still concerned about families changing schools

midstream as we are starting to roll this out. family is going out of their current schools so they can go with the feeder school is where they wanted to be. i am actually supportive of the 17 between hard and fast because it gives us time for families to cycle through and have the option of going any school in the district with really clear tiebreakers. i ever vitiate the recommendation from the staff and i am leaning towards supporting the recommendation from the staff because i think we can continue to talk about this for a long time as we have and as we have shown. or we can start really doing something about addressing the

priority that we identified over the last several years which i think his staff has been a really good job of plugging in what goals we are meeting. meeting the course of action that we are trying to take on this. it is a little bit longer until we vote, i suppose. i feel a lot better about doing this, and it is interesting. since the last presentation, we have gotten more correspondence and e-mail through people that have been satisfied that we have ever. it is being threatened so people need to come out and speak out about it. as you are going out and talking to folks in and people are fine with it, that is not the voice that we are here in.

all of the sudden, there is this a voice that is coming through saying, wait a minute. we like the way that you have chosen to be set up in the first place. but i do want to thank you for your continued work on this. we could not do this without the help you have given. and of the staff has put a tremendous amount of time and effort into making this a lot more lay for us to understand. >> as a coment, -- comment, i don't know if you of the demographics of the people you have heard from in support of the feeder system. we actually went to more under- represented groups. those people that go out on their own initiative. their parents are saying the same thing, that we are

representing that voice. although you are hearing a big onslaught recently, i wanted to make it clear what the recommendations are, representing more of the parents across the board. i am sorry that you feel like we're getting -- pitting ideas against each other. we want to move forward as well. i love your theory of action that is in your presentation. but this is not an action plan. it does not show what you're doing to move ahead in these theories of action. as i said before, we would like a policy in a system that reflects the board's priorities and acknowledging effort from parents that involves plans for implementing these policies. we don't feel like that

information is there. commissioner murase: there are some things that everyone in this room can agree to. one of them is that student assignment is a symptom of a problem. the problem of uneven quality across the district. i want to really acknowledge the work that they did in their report. there are 22 recommendations. what we are focused on tonight is about two of them. this is a road map for how we can come together and really try to set our minds to improving the middle schools. i encourage everyone to take a look at it. i agree with 20 of the 22 recommendations. u;m"the two recommendations ti

have a disagreement with is about how to best achieve more even as across the district, the recommendation not to implement a feeder pattern. but i do have a couple of questions that have come out as people have given me feedback. one of the questions i pointed out in the report is parents not feeling like they know what are the strength and weaknesses of each middle school. parents don't consider the full array of choices. when you are in elementary school, you're too busy fund- raising to think about what is going on at the middle school ahead of you. parents and families really need that information about the strength and weaknesses of each school. one of my concerns is the identified students having an available honors program verses

differentiated instructions. there are not a lot of parents to understand the differences of honors verses differentiated. you think honors has got to be the way to go, but maybe with some outreach and education about differentiated strategies, it could be a viable option for folks. i think there is generally a lack of information that families need to make decisions or evaluations about middle schools. i know at an earlier meeting, they put together asset inventories and they have been working very hard to gather information along dozens of different criteria. what are the test scores? what% of teachers -- what percent of teachers support it? there is a quality and option

that lists foreign language lectives -- electives or gate differentiated instructions. what is the status of gathering all this information? is there a strategy to put it in a family friendly format so that as people are looking to evaluate peter plan, evaluating the middle school, they can have better information other than that they heard that this is the best known school. i would appreciate an update from staff on the status of that exercise. >> dr. murase, thank you for that question. we are looking at putting that on the web site. we have completed the inventory

asset matrix. we have not included the honors program for each of middle school. we have done that as a separate entity, understand that commissioner norton will bring that next monday. i think you for asking that question, we are in a process of hosting that inventory on the web site. commissioner norton: we will be looking at the beginnings of the honors approaches on monday. the meeting will start at 5:00 p.m.. the pac and pps have agreed to send people as part of their agreement strategy. they learned a lot about what is going on at all of our middle schools. they are going to share with us their impressions of some of the

ways that schools are meeting the needs of students. some of the great programs that they sought and some of the missing pieces that they identified. i think it will be a really interesting discussion. commissioner maufas: i just wanted to comment really quickly, again. if it hasn't been expressed by me where you understood, i do appreciate the work that hthe pac and pps have done. it's monumental. i think with a combination of timing in staff, what is going on, all the different initiatives that we could have mustered the person power to get it done in the appropriate amount of time. i am grateful to you will for doing that. i also want to cnt