due diligence, we would have these questions at hand and we would have received the agenda ahead of time. i am as guilty as other board members of not doing due diligence to the spirit i would appreciate a postponement of this vote so that we cannot allow staff time to answer these questions versus going back and forth about clarification. that is my opinion. >commissioner wynns: i am in favor of postponing. it would be our normal process. what we have to do is not vote

-- taking it up for a vote tonight. we can postpone that until the next meeting or whenever we want to. i appreciate why dr. murasi said. this is long and complex. we need more eyes and discussion on this. we talked about doing this as a commission as a whole. instead, we decided to augment the committee meeting. i think that submitting questions is a good idea. this is the discussion that we wanted to have at the committee meeting. i want to suggest that if will submit questions, that is great. what we ought to do is have some kind of committee at home. we have to agree to all sit down at a meeting whose only

purpose is to review this. our plan is to use this process to do all parts of the manual so that this won't ever have to happen again. it has happened without completion how many times? four or five times in the last 10 years? i do not think we are ignoring our responsibility. it is about how we operate. this discussion makes us realize that we need another step. >> can we agree to do this as a

committee as a whole? is that what we are hearing? >> we had this discussion over rules committee. part of why we make the decision is that we had so many topics to discuss at the committee and the meetings which we keep postponing and postponing. several got dropped already. we made some agreement that we wanted to reduce the committee rules from twice a month to once a month. >> now it is zero. >> to me, it is ok. my preference is to keep it at the rules committee. i think that murasi is doing a

great jobs during the discussion. every time we go through it, we find something else. i think i am in favor of having another step and having it augmented in the rules committee. we can treat it almost like a committee. this way, we do not take away a topic that we would otherwise covered. if you really want a committee, you have to understand what we are going to cover. >> i will plead guilty to not coming to the augmented rules committee. the difference between a committee as a whole and a committee is that when we discussed the rules for our committee, we all felt that we wanted to trust our committee to

share the work of the board. that committee as a whole is really the acknowledgement that this is work that we need to participate in. you cannot do this effectively by having three people and not having all of the members of the board. i hear what your saying, commissioner yee. there are so many topics that i do not want to give up. i will say that getting this on the board agenda to a meeting that i know i'm going to attend got me to read it. i think we have to say, either it is a priority for us to get our policies in the manual and suck it up and do more meetings, where i have to say that we are going to have the rules committee do it and have some things slip through that we

later do not like. we started two years ago. we just need to finish the work and have the committees as a whole that we need to have. >> commissioner, did you have a comment? i am going to suggest having yet in the committee as a whole. it is a whole board discussion. i think that you can bring to the committee as a whole some of the elements that occurred during the committee meeting which i think are important and valuable. i think this is more of a lack of time and ability to come to another meeting than we are just completely flaking on it. next year you can think about

all of the committee as a whole meetings we are talking about. can we hold some of the other conversations in a board meeting? we do have meetings where it would be more appropriate to have something larger that is not as deep and controversial. this is not controversial. this is just a lot of fine print and a lot of details. it has to be really clean. for us to find so many questions that we have unanswered, that makes us a little bit nervous to go forward. >> i am satisfied that my colleagues appreciate the magnitude of this work. it is really important. we did speak at length. we wanted all seven of us to roll up our sleeves and do what commissioner norton did tonight.

commissioner mendoza identified the issues you have with it. these are the most important policies. they cover and -- govern us. the third monday in january as a holiday. we may not have a rules committee. i am happy to have it at committee as a whole. i suggest that we get our questions and concerns to staff in advance. they have spent many, many hours on this already. >> does everybody have their redline and board copy? your responsibility is to search through this just as you did tonight. you have to get questions on this so that we can have a full, clear discussion.

it can be one of our first committee as a whole meetings. this could be our first committee as a whole meetings we have in the next year. thank you for all of your effort on this and for moving this forward. and what you're hearing from us is a clear commitment to move this forward. >> i do not know if this item -- i am questioning the first item for the committee as a whole. we did postpone a very important discussion last week. was it two weeks ago? that is exactly what the

supervisor brought up about how important that was. i wanted to suggest that perhaps it is our second meeting. >> i think you enter staff and the leadership will have to go through and make some decisions about priority and went to present it to the board. >> i just wanted to also recognize somebody that came all the way from sacramento for this. i just want to thank you for your help to us through this process and apologize that we are pushing it off for a third month. >> i was right in san diego when i told you. >> i should be charging by the hour. >> we're glad you're laughing.

go ahead. >> i just wanted to mention that the way csba breaks down its policies is that it has zero- 9000. there is no 8000. after 9000, there are seven remaining. keep in mind that 9000 -- it first went through csba and took its policies and signs our policies and integrates their policies into their board policies. they make recommendations and suggestions. it went to the rules committee two times.

we have been thinking of this as something that we might have gotten through in the spring. this is also something that you might have wanted to get to during the 12-13 school year. this is important. do you want to hear what the best intents of this somewhat painful process art? we have citations within each policy to the government code. people can look at what is behind us. we have accessibility as commissioner. it is not just online, but it is online and searchable. they can say, what is the policy

for retention, keeping a child behind? they can do a search for that. it is taylored with the csb process of integrating it with ours. we get the change in the law. we have some policies dating back to the 1980's. we have policies that are a bit older than that as well. once we have gotten everything updated, we want to make sure that our policies are up to date. there are a lot of benefits of going through this process. it is time consuming. i want you to have in mind that there are seven more series to come. >> remember, the board has passed policies that are

related to all of those other seven sections. however, what they actually governed much more, they certainly are you need policies related to those things. but they actually the fine is the way the school district is run. this is about the way we run the board. i think we can reasonably expect that. most of the review we will do is done by staff. they will be telling us, here is the old regulation that was unworkable. the administrative policy is coming out of our ears. it is the longer necessary. it should be different. it may be endless and take

forever. we did this one first knowing that it was our expertise that were relevant here. it was our most complex group. our expectation all along is that we were doing the hardest work first and that the others were being more staff driven. think about how long is going to take us. >> i wanted to see if the commissioner will articulate how we are going to move forward in terms of the other series and how we are sinking about allowing the other school board committees to tackle it instead

of the rules committee. would you like to say something about that? >> we have the discussion about the eight other sections. they go with personnel issues that could go to the personnel committee. some deal with facilities issues. i do think that there is a shared responsibility for different committees to take on different sections rather than have the rules committee look at all eight remaining. we just do not have the expertise. that was the recommendation from the rules committee. >> ok. do we procedurally need to do anything for postponing? we voted to suspend the rules, but we are not actually going to do an action? >> i move that we postpone action on this until the call of the chair.

>> to the call of the board chair? >> at our first meeting in january, we always re-adopt our rules. we would have to adopt a new version of this. >> suspend the rules and not re- adopt the rules. that would tell the public that we are in the process of doing best. >> if we did not approve the rules in january and postponed those until we get through them, then we could potentially do that. >> i need a second on commissioner wynns notion. commissioner fewer: yes. commissioner maufas: yes. commissioner norton: yes.

vice-president yee: aye. president mendoza: yes. >> it is unanimous. >> do you want to have a deadline by which you give us your comments? should we say january 15? we are about to launch into the holiday. >> the second? >> how about that monday or tuesday. over the holiday, if you could skim through this and get your questions to kathy. >> does everybody have the red line version electronically? >> i sent it through pdf?

>> do you want people to give your comments on the redline or other version? >> whichever is easier for the individual commissioner. thank you both. thank you all for your work on this. item r is a board member's proposal for first reading put on by commissioner yee. comment on what you like to do with this. vice-president yee: by the time i received it, we do not have enough time to look at it carefully. i might want to reword it. president mendoza: he is not

ready to submit it for first reading. we are going to postpone first reading until next meeting. is that correct? ok. everybody get out? item r which is adopting board policy with emigrant and non- immigrant board policy is for employees. item f is board members reports. commissioner maufas, do you have anything else on rules? commissioner maufas: the only additional items were state and federal policy updates. a lot of the update was superseded by the triggers that had just spent pu -- just been pulled. >> the report of the augmented

buildings and grounds committee, we recommended lead john o'connell high school name change. we had an rfp on the street. we received several proposals on that. the north auditorium lease is in full swing. we had city come out and talk to us. the report on the tap water installation. we had a great report on what was happening around all of that. we had an update. there was an rfp out on that as well. there has not been any other movement on that.

>> thank you, president mendoza. we met and we looked at the stat e budget. >> we have some news. why do we not have the superintendent give us that brief news? >> i will be glad to do so until i am instructed otherwise. limited on the agenda. trying to stick to what was reported and what was discussed at the budget and business services committee. staff did provide an update on the state budget picture. on the occasion that the committee met. that included the legislative analyst forecast, which was available by the time the committee met. that was the first of two

forecasts that will be the basis for determining the triggers. we did report at that meeting that the second of the two forecasts would be delivered by the department of forecasts sometime by the end of this week. we expected that that forecast would be made available around december 14. a quick update on that. the forecast from the department of finance was actually released today. we provided for commissioners a brief update about the implication of that through a brief e-mail. we will provide a more complete email to follow-up on that. it turned out to be an improvement on the legislative analyst forecast. as the superintendent mentioned, it is still not very good news in the big picture for school districts, including

ours. >> thank you, deputy superintendent. we had a review of site-based budgets. there was a great discrepancy at some of our schools. some of them were large about school funding being out of line with anticipated school enrollment. for example, i think it was thurgood marshall that lost 174 students, which was an incredible impact on the school budget. we were interested in a discussion about that. i would like to let the listening public know that we will have another budget meeting in january. i believe it will be january 26, which is the first tuesday of the month. i will not be president, but commissioner yee will

>> thank you, so an update from the curriculum committee, commissioner norton? >> yes, the curriculum committee met on monday, december fifth. we devoted the meeting to an update on the special education redesign and it was a good time to kind of pause and say, ok, it's been a year since we had -- more than a year since we had our review. she gave a very frank presentation on the challenges that we're still facing in special ed and also talked in a fair amount of detail about some of the change efforts they have going on and -- ms. casco, did other board members get a copy of her handouts because the two i want to call to your attention specifically are a very detailed

list of change efforts over the past year, three pages, and also guiding principles regarding inclusive education practices in the district. this is something that went out as a news advisory, as well, from our public education department and it's a newish document for us so it was nice to see. and as the superintendent did allude to, we should have news on a new head of special education in the district, so i know that the parent and educator community is very, very interested in that person and will want to the hear all about her. one more thing. the next meeting of the committee, we are still trying to set a date but it tentatively appears to be january 18 at 5:00 p.m. we'll be devoting the meeting to

transitional kindergarten. >> thank you. ad hoc committee on personnel matters. >> thank you, president mendoza. this committee doesn't meet monthly but meets on an as-needed basis but because of the length of this past meeting on thursday, december 8, about 3 1/2 hours and we were cutting the conversation short, we discerned that may be we needed to meet more regularly than once every six months. i'll hit some of the highlights and note that many of these items will go forward to the february meeting because we just need to continue the conversation. our topics were the t-10 staffing report and it will continue, again, to the february meeting because there were many questions left outstanding and i understand that the h.r. department believes school sites will have historical context to the reduction in hours for our

t-10 staff and we'll hear back from school sites as to how that's affected their schools. also, a report around one of the t-10's duties at the elementary school level if they are there, security aides, versus a high school. we wanted to know that information. also, we had a fabulous report from our h.r. department on the hiring season for 2011-2012. it was quite comprehensive and i actually -- because the report is so in depth, i would request that maybe this come forward in the early part of next year as informational item for other education because i believe many more of us besides the personnel committee need to hear about the really good work that our h.r. department is doing. i know they have a new person, scott gabeer, who was hired as

the director of recruitment. and he presented. i want to thank our director and his right hand for giving us quite a bit of information that is really outstanding in how we are serving our students and families via putting really great staff at our school sites. that's the second year in a row that our first day of school opened up with really just two vacancies and that's amazing for the entire school district and the report is so comprehensive, i hope it comes forward in early next year as a other educational item information because i believe everybody needs to hear it and i want to applaud the h.r. department for how diligently they work and their level of professionalism because i hear so many more positive reports about staff interactions with the h.r. department and that