>> good afternoon everyone and welcome to the thursday october 25th, 2012 meeting of the city and county of san francisco, city and school district select committee. my name is david campos and i'm the chair of the committee. we're joined by choice president chiu, commissioner hydra mendoza, commissioner sandra lee fewer. my understanding is that the other members of committee are en route. the clerk of the committee today is victor young and we want to thank the following

members of sfgovtv staff, michael freeman and jennifer lowe for covering the meeting and we thank the members of the public and staff who are at the meeting today. with that, mr. clerk, if you could please call i. item no. 1. >> hearing on the implementation of a-g course requirements in san francisco unified school district high schools. thank you very much. and this is an item, hearing request that was actually requested initially by supervisor carmen chu. commissioner fewer, do you want to say something? >> no. >> thank you. and i will now turn it to chris of the san francisco unified school district and we will be hearing from the school district shortly.

>> thank you. i am the director of development and local government relations. we have one speaker from san francisco unified school district, dr. janet schultz to present. >> i welcome dr. schultz and i have actually met dr. schultz a long time ago when i was a lawyer for the school district and we worked on the consent decree. we're happy to have you. thank you dr. schultz for being here and the floor is yours. thank you supervisors and commissioners and thank you for the opportunity to come back and present further details on the data, on the status of our current juniors and their graduation, as well as some action items we have taken since the last time we were all together. what i would like to do today is to really brief outline of the context, just to

give folks an idea of our overall graduation requirements and talk about the immediate action plan we have put in place since the last time we saw you, including the review of some data that is a little more detailed than before and answer any questions. so just to sort of set the context for folks, because it gets to be very complicated when we talk about graduation requirements, because we have so many different options for students. and so as we are now -- when we made the decision to raise our graduation requirements to meet and be aligned to the uc requirements, it was also at a time we were facing severe budget cuts. so within that context most of our schools have a six-period day rather than a seven-period day. just to give you a sense, in a six -period day a typical

student, a student would have four opportunitis to retake a course that he or she failed. or four opportunities to take a course that would be an elective for something that he or she choose in order to complete those requirements. students who receive special ed services ieps in in a regular six-period day would have less opportunities within that day, because this take a study skills course. many of them, as a way to help them with their classes, other classes throughout the day. so they would only have one opportunity within a four-year plan to retake a course. three if they are exempted from the world language requirement, which is a possibility. and then another large group of students that we have for the population in the school district are students who are english-language learnings and

english-language learners are varying degrees newcomers to long-term. but our students in a regular 6-period day have two opportunities within a four-year schedule to rotake a course. four if we exempt them from their world language requirement. so i wanted to just give you a sense of sort of what our students are facing in terms of opportunities as they go for their four-year graduation plan, as well as some of the challenges that they face in terms of getting the courses that they want. so you can see that as we have increased our requirements, we have decreased the opportunities that students have to meet those requirements. and then students who are more at-risk of meeting those requirements have even less of an opportunity to meet those requirements within a four-year plan. also one thing that is important to note about the context of san francisco is that we are unique in the state of california in that we are a

large urban district that is our own county. so our students also are in our continuation schools, and in our court and county schools as well, too. so we look across those programs and schools as well when we're thinking about our graduation rates. we also have students in a ged program as well. so looking at our current junior class, our class of 2014. these are the students who are the first students who will be held to the new graduation requirements next year when they are seniors. so what we did in making sure we were coming up with a targeted plan was the first thing we needed to do was really identify who these students are who are at-risk, so we could by name

know who the students are and what it is that they needed. and so that took us time to go through, work with our complicated data system and define what means to be "on-track/off-track." and i'll go through these individually. we developed an individual plan for all of those students and then we have a plan for some targeted community outreach. we want to expand our credit earning and recovery options and of course we want to make sure we're being transparent in public and being held accountable. so the first action that we did was really determine what is on-track and what is off-track? those are terms that get thrown around and lot and we want to be consistent with what the uc system does and consistent with what other school districts do, so we had a common vocabulary to start to think about who is on-track and who is off-track.

so folks from our curriculum development department, led by bill sanderson, who is here, the stanford leads program studied and wept went through went through and what it means to be on-track. there are markers that you should have made by that time that are aligned to the uc system courses in order to be considered "on-track." and so that whole group spent a lot of time and really define what is your address that means. so those are the definitions that we'll be using from now on in moving forward. it's beyond just the credits, but also the markers. excuse me. so "on-track" students have 110 credits, which is the number of credits you need to be a junior and we're defining this for the current class of 2014. so we