african-american students. peef has also ensured our [speaker not understood] remains low for low-income family. the goal continues that [speaker not understood] kindergarten they read at grade level by third grade, that they have excellent school attendance, they stay in school, they graduate high school and beyond. and i hope we can achieve this in less than 25 years but i'm really glad we have 25 years to do it. preschool for all, this is the point i really want to make. preschool for all is [speaker not understood]. it's known by thousands of teachers and directors and city departments and childhood advocates and community stakeholders. it's also known throughout the state and by other counties who are making efforts to replicate the model and achieve similar outcomes. we now have the opportunity to build on our successes with the re-authorization of peef and the children's fund. i'm glad that i'm standing here with barbara carlson and in the audience is carla brian who have been partners with me to achieve this.

so, i also think it would be great to include 3 and 4 year olds in preschool. we know that children with 2 years of high quality preschool exponentially better than those that have one. again, we cannot accomplish this with the current allocation so i'm glad to hear that we're going to have more funding available. [speaker not understood] subsidized children to have access but we have to continue to invest in high-quality improvement efforts and professional development. i wasn't going to say this. forgive me, barbara. i love that we're investing in our young children and in child care and [speaker not understood] care, but if we wanted to be an even greater city, we would need a targeted universal home visiting program, targeted universal health and developmental screening program, additional implemental subsidies that include middle -- low-income and middle income families and equality improvement initiative that build on the lessons we learn from pfa and state

quality [speaker not understood]. so, thank you. >> thank you, ms. kumar. >> good afternoon, supervisors. i'm barbara carlson and i'm the director of the office of early current education and to supplement what laurel said, while early education opportunities have improved tremendously for the city's 4 year olds, significant opportunity gaps still remain for children aged 0 to 3. we're hlsd the legislation addresses those issues ~. if it is adopted, the office of early care and education first five san francisco will work closely to achieve a smooth transition of funds from the first five commission to the office of early care and education. and finally, the office of early care and education welcomes the opportunity to work closely with first five, all of our other city agency partners, the school district, cpac and our community partners as well as the soon to be appointed office of early care and education community advisory council to develop a plan for our city's early care

and education services. thank you for the opportunity to offer support for this important legislation. >> thank you, ms. carlson. thank you very much. candice [speaker not understood], chair of the [speaker not understood] advisory committee. >> thank you, supervisors. i want to recognize supervisor avalos and kim for your work in this process. to make sure we're creating a consensus measure in which everyone can support, i also want to say all the other supervisors who i know all of you spent countless hours listening to the community and everyone to make sure that we're creating the best measure possible for our city. cpac as the appointed body through the board of education and the board of supervisors [speaker not understood] obviously, you know, we are very excited to see the

improved, you know, i think the plans around better coordination alignment of our work and services for the [speaker not understood] youth in this city. obviously first and foremost we want to work closely with the city around how we really move thoughtfully in the direction of early care and education for all in our city along with in our services to our youth population as well. you know, definitely, i'm glad to see as we're phasing this new -- this increased [speaker not understood] phase in over two years through resources that will come immediately to meet unmet needs. we obviously continue to have unmet needs in early care and education. we have well over 3,000 kids on the wait list who are eligible for subsidized child care. these are kids who are eligible from -- for subsidies because they are generally from low-income working families. i think we need to tackle that issue immediately. in terms of doing that, i think

we have to look at balancing in terms of how we're serving all of our kids. we need to seriously look at data in terms of if we have [speaker not understood] population which is one-third of the population of k through 18. we need to look at equity in term of how we allocate resources to support the unmet need in that area. and find more balance. including the need for addressing the, you know, having adequate licensed child care facilities to serve those kids and qualified teachers in our classrooms. cpac, we wanted to say we strongly support the consensus measure and we look forward to working with you to make sure that both the children's fund and peef is reauthorized. thank you. >> thank you. [speaker not understood]. >> i also want to echo my thanks to all members of the

board of supervisors. just want to say that san francisco has a long-standing commitment to children and families. and back in 1991, the community came together under leadership of strong children advocates like margaret saul in our community to ensure that san francisco has dedicated funding for children services and created our department, the department of children youth and their family. and with that, we, i are very grateful for that. we are still extremely community driven as represented through the process of trying to get to this place today. we have within our charter [speaker not understood] to have very open planning processes to assess needs throughout the community, throughout all 11 districts and 20 neighborhoods. we have [speaker not understood] to require community involvement around the planning allocation process for our policy.

and then, of course, we are also mandated to administer those dollars. currently dcyf provides funding for services from both all the way up to age 24. the children's fund portion of our department is used to provide funding for services up to age 17 and then we use general fund to go up to age 24. as a result, we are looking forward to the re-authorization of those funds with perhaps a new age range to allow us to have full flexibility and access to the funds. currently we use our dollars to ensure that we have funding for child care services at a school time program, teens, youth employment, violence prevention, family resource centers, [speaker not understood] health and wellness programs program we believe really meet the need of "er children and families throughout the city. we have programs in every neighborhood and we partner very closely with our school

district as well as other city departments such as rec and park department, department of public health, human services agency, our police departments and, of course, the hundreds of nonprofit agencies some of which you are seeing in the chambers here. they are all throughout the city. so, we're grateful for their partnership and without them we cannot do this work. in closing i also want to thank the dcyf cac and their support for the work that we're doing. i also want to thank members of our children or families stakeholder council for their leadership in going out and reaching our families and parents for the last several months to gather feedback for us to [speaker not understood] and develop the plans as we move forward. and, of course, i also want to thank the community for their participation and their support in this. i look forward to reauthorizing the funds, both the children's fund as well as public

education and enrichment fund and i look forward for us as a city to create a more cohesive and aligned system which at the end of the day will benefit all of us. and speaking as aes are debt of san francisco with two children in public school, i look forward for these funds to support all of us that we together as a community can lift every child and every child will be able to succeed in the city. so, thank you. ~ resident >> thank you. any questions of the speakers? seeing none, okay. you know what i'd like to do is start the public comments period right now. but i'd like to bring up as the first speaker bob [speaker not understood], superintendent of recreation and department of parks and recreation. >> good afternoon, supervisors. i actually had a powerpoint for you. you should have it in front of you. i won't go through it. i know we have a lot of people that want to get up here and speak and it's becoming a long day for everyone. i'd like to thank you all for

taking this item forward, also for allowing me to speak. again, i promise to be brief. the recreation and park department has been and continues to be at the table regarding the peef, through conversations with the school district staff as well as superintendent karanza. after school through all through the expandled learning collaborative and children and youth fund. as the city's largest provider of children and family recreational services in the city, we believe it's imperative to invest in the children's future and look forward to our role in this area. our department offers 3500 recreation programs each year annually. we have 12 afterschool programs. we are actually starting -- have started an additional 13th at [speaker not understood] recreation center where we're serving hillcrest elementary, as well as potentially new one in chinatown that we will be starting shortly. we also have 83 summer camps

that are located throughout the city at 48 different locations. we currently have over 15,000 kids enrolled in those programs. our programs range from early childhood development courses to city-wide senior programs, sports programs such as junior >> aye. giants, mission red girls basketball program. we have dance classes, zumba, yoga, adoptive classes for special needs kids as well. we also in our afterschool programs we've been working and participating as i said with the expanded learning collaborative and we look to -- you guys spoke to quality and how we're going to get to ensure that there was some universal quality across the board. and we've taken advantage of some of the collaborative and dcyf's gracious invitations to train our staff as well and we've participated in that. we're also working on standardizing our curriculums across the board to ensure that

what one kid gets on one side of the city another gets on the other. so, again, some of the other things that we're currently involved with, we have a lot of special programs that we're moving forward with and our healthy people healthy parks where we have walking classes that take place throughout the city. we also now are at 20 different locations throughout the city offering free zumba to families and children. we have asl immersion camp where people are learning american sign language. kids are learning at mission playground and a couple other locations. we have our mobile recreation program which we're able to take into different communities throughout the city new opportunities for kids that may not just want your typical baseball, basketball, those type of activities, but they want to get into some of the alternative sports like rock climbing and skateboarding and bmx and those things. we also have a green agers

program which serves 9 to 10th graders and they actually learn leadership and gardening skills. they take place at mclaren park , her ons head and bayview complexes. some of the things we're doing, targeting the teen population both in the programmatic side of things and employment, we have our late night basketball which we conduct at the recreation center, also hamilton recreation center. we also do our camp may 13 outdoor experience targeted at youth that are on probation or incarcerated and we do that along with jpd and sfpd and many of our cbo partners. one of the best things about that program is we're able to actually bring the kids back who are in the program in the years prior to serve as leaders in training, mentors to the kids that are currently on probation. we also have approximately 300

to 350 recreation leaders who are in the inmate population aged 18 to 24 who actually work in the rec centers currently and providing programs. we also are working closely with the ipo program where we have a number of folks that are having their salaries paid by hsa but were actually -- they're working on rec and park properties and we're supervising their work. currently right now they're working up at mclaren park as well as glenn eagles golf course and learning a lot of those horticultural skill. one of the thing we're really proud of, and i'll finish up, is our scholarship program. we had over $650,000 awarded alone in this summer just for summer camps. we've already allocated over a million dollars in scholarships for the entire year for our programs. one of the program that we have

for the youth population which we receive funding from dcyf and are very thankful for that is our recreation program. we are able to hire 235 to 240 youth this summer. there's also a number of youth that we hire throughout the school year. so, it's been a really terrific program. sort of in conclusion, we're excited about the city's efforts to enhance the lives of our children and their families and look forward to the opportunity to be engaged in the dialogue about our department's important role in that work. within all three of these items, the peef, the children's fund as well as the afterschool for [speaker not understood]. thank you very much. >> thank you. so, i'm going to call some speakers up now and we'll be giving two minutes. if you need two minutes. first one up is raquel cardenas.

[speaker not understood]. [speaker not understood] walters. [speaker not understood]. good afternoon, supervisors. i thank you for your support. i'm a mother of two children and both my children are in child care. here before you is my grandson making all this ruckus and i'm the one that takes care of him. although the pay isn't great, but the reward is much better. please support the increase. what we don't pay for now we will in the end. thank you very much. >> thank you. (applause) >> and thank you for bringing your grandchild. good afternoon. thank you for giving us the opportunity to speak to you. monica walters from [speaker not understood] children's services. i'm here really just to say candice long emphasized the points that i wanted to make which is that we do have a very long wait list for our really early care education subsidy program. i think today it was 35 90 total.

we are so excited about the opportunity to expand services through the additional dollars in the measure. and also the coordination that's going to occur so that we are sure that we have an equitable portion of the funding going to our 0 to 5 population. it's not about how you slice the pie now but we're making the pie bigger and it's really exciting. i want to thank you again for bringing our voices to the table and listening to us and taking such a great deal of good discernment in coming up with i think a measure that the public will support. again, thank you very much and from the ec community we really appreciate everything that you're doing to make sure that our very youngest citizens, residents of san francisco get what they need. hi, i'm sandy black man, executive director of children's council, vice-chair of cpac and also very involved in the children's fund community coalition.

i'd also like to echo what monica said and what candice said. at children's council every week we see hundreds of families that are looking for quality child care and subsidies to pay for child care . as monica and candice said, there are about 3600 families that are still on that waiting list for child care ~. we really, we really -- both children's fund and peef have made a tremendous difference, increasing access and quality in the early care and education system. we are really please today see this consensus around an increase for children's fund and the other changes, the increased flexibility in peef, the removal of the trigger in peef, the increased sunset, the children and families council that will create increased alignment, and the proposal for the oversight committee.

so, i want to thank you all for the tremendous amount of time that you've put into this and your support and we're really pleased that this re-authorization is going forward. thank you. >> thank you. [speaker not understood]. judith [speaker not understood]. donna cahill. nancy fuentes. rosie [speaker not understood]. [speaker not understood]. hi, thank you. i thank you all for sponsoring this hearing and being open to the recommendation that is coming from the community about the children's fund. so, i'd like to take you all back to 1999. i was 18 years old, turning on the verge of 19. some of you actually here in this room never thought about being a supervisor actually knew me at that time. i was appointed by then supervisor mark leno to be on the san francisco youth commission. at that time there were no district wide elections, closed

to city-wide seats. so, i was appointed. while i was on the youth commission i became homeless and that's rough. so, i was 19 years old. actually working campaigning getting children's fund passed. john avalos [speaker not understood], people at coleman advocates. and i remember during this time campaigning, i remember writing legislation at city hall. i thought to myself, where am i going to sleep tonight? the reason why it was so bad, one was called the [speaker not understood]. i was on the waiting list of guerrero house run by catholic charities. the other was [speaker not understood] the first supportive transitional youth housing in the [speaker not understood] in san francisco. those two saved my life. they allowed me to [speaker not understood] legislation that changed the facet of this city. the reason why we are now talking about transitional age youth. so, in thinking about that i was able to go to city college. i was able to go to mills college.

i currently work at [speaker not understood] and i work inside the school district helping people with long-term futures. i urge you to include transitional age youth 18 to 24 and children's fund [speaker not understood]. thank you. >> thank you. (applause) hi, my name is rosie kennedy. i'm director of [speaker not understood] former child care provider. i know we stand on a lot of shoulders today that have already been mentioned, but i only have two minutes. so, but i did want to say when children are all right we all do better and we all benefit when children youth and family have the support when they need it and the opportunities to be at their best. we also, the children are a priority. san francisco really, really needs to make a long-term sustained and very thoughtful investment. today tonight i really want to emphasize the infants and toddlers, the most stressful

period for young families, working families is when they're raising their infants and todd letters. infants and their moms and dad's are not in important budget meetings. neither are they child care providers ~ most of the times. but what happens to them when they experience this every day has a profound and permanent impact not only on them, their family, but on the rest of us. and i wish to be a family to another family child care. i care for all ages and i soon learned that i was having the most impact for the program was having the most impact in the youngest children from birth to 2. and, so, i just want to make sure that you remember them [speaker not understood] and peef going forward. i also strongly support the child care planning council's recommendation. and thank you so much. hi, my name is nancy

[speaker not understood], i'm a child care provider at omi where john avalos, his neighborhood. and i'm currently -- i have different hats. you could say i'm also omi leader. as well and i'm also a member of the family shelter association and i'm currently a teacher at psa and i'm really thankful for the supervisors supporting and i hope november 6 they could help us pass the bill for psa because i think it's really important for preschool. they are going to be our future for tomorrow. we don't know what they're going to be. however, not least forgetting the infants and toddlers as well. pretty much that's t. justify want today say how thankful i am and for the support we have now in the community and hope that we continue to have this support. thank you.

good afternoon, supervisors. thank you. my name is judith [speaker not understood]. i'm on the board of the child care providers association. i'm also the director of montessori children's center. you had many words spoken this afternoon. i want to go along with all of those. i would like to say that i would like to see the inclusion of three-year olds if it's a possibility. and if you can go any lower than three because life does begin at birth and that's a lot of the development begins to take place. also, i support the re-authorization. i support peef. i'm sure you already are aware of that. but the development of the committee i feel would be a good idea for the oversight. thank you very much and i look

forward to working with all of you in the future. >> donna, before you speak, i want to call some more names. andrew padillas. marisa lewis -- louise. [speaker not understood]. cody rodriguez or caddy rodriguez. stephanie [speaker not understood]. and william rivas. hi, my name is donna cahill. i'm the executive director of holy family day hill, earliest education center founded in 1900. i'm also a member of the board of the child care provider association. and i think i speak on behalf of probably everybody in this room and city when i say

[speaker not understood] when i say how moving it was to hear supervisors yee, avalos and kim emphasize the expansion of early childhood education. those words have been long awaited by all of us and it's heart warming to see all of you try to coalesce around a consensus. i've been in my position a little over 17 years. i do not want to go back to the days of pre-peef. and in order to be able to serve the children and the behaviors that are manifested by them, we need these dollars and we need the expansion. as it has already been said, we need the expansion to support the unmet needs.

and we also ask for a fair, equitable and transparent distribution of these funds. thank you. hello, my name is [speaker not understood] and i'm the provider of [speaker not understood]. after teaching in preschool for ten years, i'm here to advocate for providers as well as children 0 do 5. it's hard and sad to think there are children on the waiting list. when i was a young mother i was a student in city college and i was pretty fortunate that i was able to send my children to an affordable preschool sponsored by city college so that i could continue staying in school and to become a teacher. if my children had been put on a waiting list, i might not be here today. also, my children are not junior and senior in high school and they both benefited

from attending public schools where they were also supported by the peef program. the creative arts charter school which was a school started by many educators, musicians, artists striving to survive in san francisco. it was fortunate they had the funds available to support those programs. and, so, i would just like to ask for an increase in the benefits for children 0 to 5. thank you. hello, supervisors. my name is angie gutierrez. i'm a [speaker not understood] as well as college graduate, former intern of norman yee. so, i'm glad to be here. i'm actually going to speak in support of the children youth fund. i want to tell you a little about lyric and how it has been a safe space for queer youth of color, one of the most

vulnerable communities here in san francisco. lyric has been able to build valuable skills that have made it necessary for us to survive here and one of the most expensive as well as harshest economies in the nation. after graduating from s.f. state, i've experienced personally the devastating realities of trying to find a good paying job here in this economy in san francisco so that i can remain here as well as build a life in this city. this city that not only includes us, but also celebrates my identity as an lgbt youth. through the children's fund, lyric has invested in my leadership development and now today i have become inspired to work with other youth leaders through the sequoia leadership institute that focuses on developing future lgbt youth to make a positive change within our community. through the children's fund lyric has been able to mentor, train and develop hundreds of youth leaders because some of

us as we see here today are youth leader. for us this is very important because we believe that not only for children as well as the [speaker not understood] are the foundation of san francisco's future. so, i thank you very much. hi, [speaker not understood] thank you for letting me share my story today. it means a lot today. i'm 17, and it hurts my heart to know i won't be able to [speaker not understood]. all these things weigh very heavily on me. a long time i thought suicide was my only option and [speaker not understood] that plagued my soul. [speaker not understood] offered me a safe place to express myself. it gave me hope and helped me to be prideful. i learned so much about gender identity and queer issues and i utilized this knowledge to educate my peers. [speaker not understood] break barriers.