around, drop a line, pick the guy up, bring him to the beach, amazing, and the enthusiasm afterwards and the debriefing was really, i was pumped. i am just a spectator. i just wanted to say -- no, i think the commissioner has that covered with his abilities in terms of the water. i just wanted to say how much i enjoyed that drill as well. thank you very much for that experience. i wanted to report it to the commission. the other thing i wanted to report, i think this is more of a request, when we are able to do the high-rise drill on june 8 th, can you please send a memo to the commissioners so we can be part of that terms of timing? the last high-rise drill i was in was because the chief was still there and we were able to witness all of that with the active shooter that will be there.

we talked about the visitors and the supervisors in terms of the budget advocacy, but i needed to advocate and thank olivia his downline and director corso for those arrangements and that data information. it is just wonderful to be part of the change. i just wanted to comment on those issues. last issue is i was attending an award committee dialogue with chief nicholson. i know she is revamping a lot of the communities, but it is just a good thing that we are trying to move towards it. every element of community format, try to revitalize it in some ways. in some ways, the structure. the timing of this administration, and the timing and momentum with the visiting of the firehouse and the members is just a good time, it is a good feel. we have a good start going. thank you very much for that, as well. that is all i have in terms of comments at this particular time

madam secretary? >> item seven, agenda for next and future commission meetings. >> i will ask for public comment on the agenda item number 7 for future fire commission meetings. at this particular point, in terms of agenda items, commissioners, the only thing that came about was perhaps a briefing that is down the road from our city attorney. >> i would just like a quick update on the program. >> an update on the drone program at the next meeting. >> we will take that in consideration and talk to chief nicholson and see where you can put that on the agenda and get that update. >> it doesn't have to be a separate item. if you could just maybe mention it as part of your section. >> thank you, very much. seeing no other comments in terms of that, we will work

towards that agenda with myself and the commission secretary. madam secretary. >> item eight, adjournment. >> any public comment on adjournment of item eight? other than that, i will need a motion and a second to adjourn. >> so moved. >> second it. >> it has been moved and seconded. this meeting is adjourned. thank you.

>> the meeting will now come to order. the welcome to the may 10t may 10th regular meeting of the joint city school district and city college select committee. i'm supervisor h arc neainey. our clerk is alyssa somera. this is the very first inaugural meeting of this select committee not only the first meeting that we'll have together as a committee but the first time this committee has even existed for awhile, there was a joint city school district committee which i sat on when i was a school board member. we had a joint school district

which i chaired as a commissioner on the school board but now we're coming together in the right place which i think is the right thing to do. there's tremendous possibilities with us working together as three institutions. i want to thank the trustees and commissioners who are here and i want to thank president cook in particular and president randolf. we are in a unique situation. we are the only county close to that situation and the goal is to align priorities and goals and work together to improve the lives of our children, young people, teachers, faculty and all those in our community who aspire to learn. this community will work on

building a stronger workforce, address the disparities in pre-k pipeline,en sure our city can recruit, support and maintain talented and dedicated educators and develop plans for better utilization of propertied, facilities and more i'm looking forward to working with all of you to what you want to use this committee for. this is all of our home and if there are items you want to bring here that you're working on or are important to your respect iinstitutions, this is the place for that. madam clerk -- and same to the community and the public and leadership, chancellor, superintendent, the mayor and obviously this will be a place for us to really work together and collaborate. madam clerk, do you have any announcements? >> yes. please make sure to silence all cell phone and electronic

devices and any documents to be included should be submitted to the clerk. >> i wanted to give an opportunity if there are any other members of the committee to provide opening comments. this is an opportunity to test out the -- click if you want to speak and i can recognise you from here or we can just move on, but if there is anybody who would like to provide opening comments. not from the public, i meant from the current committee members. we will have current comment at the end. thank you, madam clerk. we have a presidential action memo saying trustee temprano has been entrusted for today. (roll calling).

mr. chair one have a quorum. >> supervisor will be serves as vice chair and supervisor ma arr will be the alternate. >> before we move on can we get a motion to excuse trustee randolph? >> so moved. >> trustee temprano and we need a second. seconded. >> thank you. imadam clerk, the first item. >> a hearing on city college of san francisco's proposed course

change and radi reductions. >> thank you, madam clerk. before we begin with our presentations, i want to provide some brief comments and introduction. today we have called a hearing on the proposed course changeses and reductions at city college. i think we would agree that city college is the most essential institutions in our city. many of our city's young people use it as a stepping stone to higher education and it also serves many adults, seniors, immigrants and people with a wide diverse set of backgrounds and needs. this is a good thing that we must all work to maintain and defend. of the 63,000 students city college served last year, a majority were women and two-third were over the age of 25 and 80% of the people who took classes were people of colour. i believe these numbers show city college is a crucial asset to our city and serving all of our residents and a key tool in

addressing inequity. the district i represent, district 6, is among the most diverse districts this san francisco. we have an incredible mix of people who rely on city college including our civic center campus and soon again our tenderloin campus. this is important for immigrants who want to learn english and new skills to serve our city. city college directly certainlies thserves theneeded f needs of our city. we passed proposition w which made san francisco free to make the access to education accessible to those in need and now that we have made city college more accessible to those who need it, we have to ensure that the courses that are offered continue to benefit all of our communities. we must make sure that we offer classes that allow student studo achieve their goals whether they

are ready to transfer or learn an important skill or getting an associate's degree. today we will analyze and discuss and learn about the plans that city college has to maintain in the context of, i think, a continued underfunding by our state of public education and what our city can do to step up andorr and to do our part and provide the support and resources to ensure all students can thrive. we are in this together and we must all step up and do more. this is why the first item to be heard in our new joint school's city college, city committee will cover this critical issue. we'll learn more about what is happening at the college, what it's plans are and what it's economic situation is and financial situation is. some of the plans they have for facilities and growth and i want

to thank everyone who is here, who has joined us for this hearing and i want to thank in advance all of our speakers and we will hear from the city college administration and the chancelor, aft local 2121, the student assembly to grow our city college coalition and also sciu, if they are here. would any of my -- i want to recognise supervisor gordon marr. would anyone else on the committee like to make any opening remarks or do you want to get into the presentations? ok. with that, we'll bring up our first presenter which is the -- i believe it's the chancellor and the representative from city college. thank you. >> thank you, supervisor and chair of the committee. thank you supervisor walton, supervisor marr for forming this

committee. this is a wonderful opportunity for us to come together, show you what we're doing at city college and why we're doing it and to move forward. this is a great institution is dedicated to the american dream and middle-class jobs. i had the opportunity to see supervisor hainey and walton for the sun reporter newspaper, the african-american newspaper. and the speaker at that dinner was kamala harris and she give an inspiring, inspiring talk and one of the main things at the heart of it was how important teachers were. this is the last day, may 10t may 10th, of teacher appreciation week. i'm a practicing english teacher

and we have many colleagues here who are practicing teachers. i know my colleagues and i want to thank all teacher in our life who got us into this room today and for all of the blessings they've gimp us. thank you very much. pai(applause). >> so i do have a power point presentation and i see it on the screen and i'll move through this fairly quickly. i did want to introduce briefly my colleagues on the senior executive team of city college. i have the chief financial officer of the college, diana gonzalez and general counsel steven productman and tom vogel and associate vice chancellor who is subbing for dr. smith. and many times a ceo calls his top leadership or her top

leadership the brain trust. this is not the brain trust. this is the heart trust and these people lead with their hearts. what we're trying to do is to achieve the veterinarianio visis first and we're all wearing the same jersey. so we have a very, very specific equity vision which aligns, by the way with sfusd's vision 2025. that by our 90's anniversary in 2025, city college of san francisco will be the number one community college in the state of california for degree graduations, transfers to university and work for certificate completion for african-american, r latinos and ati students. there will be no achievement gap at city college. here are the highlights, this presentation will give you highlights of how city college

leadership, that's our board of trustees, and i think trustee temprono and chanel williams of how we're adding and expanding classes to grow for api students. i'll start with this slide and come back to it. one of the reasons why a purpose of the meeting as chairman hainey pointed out was to make sure we're spending the taxpayer's money in a responsible way. our first duty is fiscal responsibility. on june 27, i will submit the officers true balanced operating budget of a city college in over ten years. i'll come back to this slide and actually show you the budget. that, by the way, is a hyperlink. anybody can go on that hyperlink and see our budget and the

developing budget as it is happening. we don't give it to you after it's done but while this process. ok, and so here are some of the things we've added recently. some of the investments we made, because there's absolutely no question that we are reducing some class sections, but we've done that to secure resources to do several things. number one, to provide higher salaries for faculty. last year, we came to a three-year agreement with our friends in a f-2 121 that raised salaries by 9 million dollars by $9 million by thebay contract tt ratio and number two, last year, and this goes un sungsung, we he horle facultaddedmore faculty n.

64 new faculty and we're proud of that and the most diverse group in a long time. these are not stocked photos, by the way. that is our state championship basketball coach, this is our esl teacher and these are city college family. number three, we'll talk about what we're reducing and we will give you clear answers but let's talk ba we're adding. about what we're adding. we're adding manua math sectiond tutoring support. you cannot transfer unless you get through college english and math and we need to add support for english and math. what are we adding? we're adding new associate degrees this year.

starting in the fall of 2019 city college is adding three new associate degrees for transfer to san francisco state university and the csu. lbtq studies, social justices and we work closery with the labor studies department on making sure they have a home in that degree programme and latin american studies. those are three degree programmes that we're wadding. . and then, this is very, very important. we're adding funding for our career training facility upgrade in the bayview hunter's point at 1400 evans. we propose to the board of trustees last time that we would take $27 million in proposed bond funding to ren foe renovate evans campus at bayvie bayview s point. we're offering more programmes

with the city and that wonderful programme that's been going on for over ten years and for career training programmes for middle-class jobs. middle-class jobs are not just a slogan. 1*bs. our airport campus is full to the brim if a fairly full facility and we train aircraft trans ministertransmissions to m and when he come out, they will come out with a job that pays $100,000 a year. so those are the programme we're adding. we is an important campus that's in the heart of our social justice surface and right in the heart of the ter tenderloin andt has been closed five years because of a need for a seismic

retrofit. we recommended to the board we reopen it and we have secured funds from the state to reopen the tenderloin campus and to actually expand our service in that area. transitional studies are what we call, what many people call ged. people who don't have a high school degree do not have basic career skills. we take them in and get them through their ged and on to entry level employment. this just happened last friday in and i'm grateful to vince matthews. we have added funding for sfusd and one of the results was last friday, our joint frisco day, in a single day, registered 670

graduates sfusd seniors, an increase of 39% over last year. our enrollment is growing. these full-time students to be registered for an average unit load of 12.75 units. thus qualifying each one for a maximum financial aid and this is really cool. of these 767 new students, 15 of these students got their i.d. with their preferred name. the support of trustee t -rbgs mprano, that programme didn't exist two years ago. we're going from last fall, we had 2432 sections and this fall

we will have 2190 and you can see the reduction in class sections, but be clear, there are no courses that are being cut. there are no programmes being cut and there are no departments that are being cut. there are no majors or degrees or career training programmes that are being cut. none. so last year, though, the problem is, right, if you're southwest airlines you cannot fly your planes empty. so last year we offered a schedule with 86,600 seats and 17,000 of those seats were empty. only 69,000 of unrollments. not only, that's great. that's why we're so important to the community. so we're becoming more efficient and offering 77,000 seats that is larger by 12% than last year's enrollment.

but let's dig deeper. and here we have some of our students here who are registering now for fall. first of all, most of the reduction should not affect any continuing student. there are some new students coming in who may have some of their electives reduced, but they will be able to proceed quickly, but if any student here today is saying their class is cut and they can't make progrese and so on -- we would libel to o sit down with that student and get her the class she needs because we have 695 pages of classes we're offering and we have it in troop o front of us. if you want to get to san francisco state, you have to fill requirements in a, b, c,

d, f, g and h. we had 54,000 enrollmented last year. those are the required areas students have to have. next fall, we are offering 61,400 seats. that's 7,000 more seats than we had in enrollment last year and we think that makes sense. i a highlight next to end nick d women's enrollment. this coming fall, we will have capacity for over 5,000 students which is 20% more than we had enrollment in these courses last year. these are required courses. keep going. we have an enormously important service to our students to

employ. these are the sections in els and you'll see that last year we had full-time equivalent students of 54,146. this year, we're scheduling it. we are reducing the number of sections to be more efficient but this year we're offering a capacity of 61,000, which is far more than last year's capacity. and i should also say, one of the things that is nearest and dearest to my heart, because my grandmother was never a citizen of the united states, is esl citizenship. those classes enroll high. 30 students in a class and you have our commitment that if more students show up for those classes, we will open new sections. so that's esl. lead keep going. the public, the city, the mayor,

thank you for free city. thank you, thank you and thank you.

the bridge that we have is strong and sturdy and has been constructed in last two years. increased financial aid applications, there are 350,000 working adults who right this moment are working in san francisco and will go home some place else. we need to market to those studentses anstudents and keep . new career training programmes and a facility's bond to renovate and replace our facilities. ok, now i'm back to the budget. let me see if this works for me. this is an actual link.

when i took over, there was no budget committee, none. we formed it. and not only did we form it, the trustees insisted that we have all of the information available on the website in real-time so that not when it comes out in june. so if you go here, this is actually the city college website and i'm doing a dare-devil act and our chief financial officer, diana gonzalez is the chair. and if you click on the handouts for april 30th, and that was just last week, you will see the actual minutes of the budget committee, ok, and so on. so i don't want go through this

whole thing in the interest of time and members of the community, so i'm going to close this and then what i want to do is -- that was our leadership retreat a year ago where we made a lot of plans. i'll click do this, take this down and go to the budget. this is the sheet that if you go online, this is the sheet that you will see. that's our budget. is that up? can you see it there? and i'll see if i can p make mas a little larger. this is the actual budget of the

college and this is not the lass budget. that is the budget as we visit so far and as we move to the june 27th submission to the board of trustees of this budget. you will see up at the top our current revenue of our current year in yellow, 2018-'19 is 184 million and this year, our fund interesting the state, the governor's revised budget is 188 million. but many of you have heard about the so-called 32 million deficit and it's real. because in the year that we're in, $184 million of revenue in and $217 million of expenditures

out. i took office on july 1, 2017. the college had $300 million of stability money that was given by the state to get it through the accreditation crisis. that money ran out the day before i took office. so what we did is last year, we had a $25 million deficit and we reduced it, as you can see, to $11 million in a single year. but we did that, frankly, as you can see and this gets complicated with the transfers in and this is money that we held in abeyance and reserve accounts. it came in and we patched in $125 million and at the end of this year we will hit our projection of $11.5 million deficit.

next year, there are no transfers in. there's no trampoline money, to reserve or safety money. so we have to support the first true balanced budget that the colleges have in ten years. and like i say, i'm an english teacher, not a math guy but i do know this, that if you have $188 million in and if you want a balanced budget, you can only have $188 million out. and right now, the number that diana and her budget committee, which includes fundamental, facf and students, they're at 198 million. so i'm $10 million over budget and i have about 40 days to get this to zero. so how are we going do that? our board of trustees has courage. you can see, again, i could take

a long time and off-line, we would be glad to sit down with you, but you can see the biggest area, historically for the college. we've most of our money certificated money and you can see we're $6 million over our target and the board has asked us to get into target and the way to do that is not to take it all out of sections, because we've reduced sections, not courses, but we did reduce 250 sections as shown there. but many of the reductions are coming as you can see by reducing add mai administratorsg from 8.5 million to 7 million. that's a 20% cult.

cut and every gat gorcategory is reduced. we can't run a college without our classified staff and our friends in sci, cannot. and their budget is also being reduced from 37 million in regular salaries to 34 and you can see the reductions right there. so it is true that we're cutting class sections to be more efficient or to be more accurate and it is true that we're cutting empty seats that we had last year. but it is also true that every single individual in the college is going to make a sacrifice in order to get us on goal. and supervisor hainey, i am at an end. >> thank you, chancelor.

committee members, any questions? supervisor walton? >> thank you, chair and thank you so much for your presentation, doctor. just a couple of questions i have for clarification and also specific to certain area of the city but on slide eight, you mentioned bo bond funding and te focus on city college campus 1400 evans. is that current bond funding? >> that is current bond and proposed bond. so thank you for the question supervisor walton. dr. smith -- let me get to that page -- our board of trustees -- there we are, our board of trustees recently approved $4.4 million out of the current

bond. we have a bond balance of give or take about $37 million. and so, we've already 4.4 of that existing money. we already that money in and moving forward and then, as you know, others of our partners in the mayor's office and supervisors of city hall, dr. smith is preparing a proposed facility's bond for an upcoming election and we're working on that with the mayor's office. when that bond comes on, then the balance of the money we need will come there. so we'll come from the future bond. so part is from the current bond and part from the future bond. >> so no future bond, we don't realize this. >> that would be correct. >> also, just out of curiosity and you don't have to answer this now, but if you do know, do you have a figure for what an

esl class would cost at a city college satellite campus or at a facility off-site? orsyou're saying if we take a class, with the teacher, 25 students, and we want the teacher to say lincoln high, how much would that cost? >> yeah, if you don't have that now -- >> we kind of use models, but give or take just the salary cost is about $10,000. and then you've got -- >> per course. >> yes. tom can give you specifics because we can show you, it's kind of boring, every single class in that schedule and what the cost of it is. so if you have that. >> i was thinking about access and city-wide for a lot of our families. >> i can tell you from our consultation with people from southeast, in our southeast campus, our evans' campus, we're

not offering enough there. one of the reasons why we're trying to reduce or increase efficiency so we can more money to closing the achievement gap. the people in southeast, the people at evans strongly support us, expanding general education and dr. smith has proposed expanding that campus. >> i want to make sure i heard you correctly during the presentation, because i believe you said that if enrollment is warranted, you would open more classes. >> that is true. that is a collect statement. i was speaking specifically of the one that's closest to my heart, the citizen's class because my grandmother never was a citizen of the united states. so that citizenship class, that fills.

we get lots of students and that's why we want to reopen the campus. if more students come than we can serve, then we will open new sections of that course. a schedule a plastic and changes up to the last day. so if we see there's demand, we would always open the section and also, if we see there's nine or ten students no one, the, the that section down. >> i think we can get more excited understanding fill philosophically, we will open more sections. >> that's why we're excited to hear from more students because there's no current student who should be slowed up in their

process. so if a student feels that, we want to make sure they sit down with tom today or one of our councillors on monday to make sure she gets the schedule she needs. >> on slide 14, item 6, where you talk about the needs, is this about making the current programmes exist more robust? >> both, but we have many programmes and i'm thinking primarily in, say, areas like cybersecurity, areas like computer science, software applications. we have some courses in those, but we don't have programmes that clearly tracked to the huge employment that's available here in san francisco. other areas in healthcare. we would like to expand our

nursing programme. we would like to offer things in the area of health in terms of healthcare advocacy, healthcare data a anlitticsand thaanalytic. we're expanding or construction programme and if, god willing, we get the bond, we plan to a major internship in so students can track through their bootcamp 18 weeks and into our bond construction programme. >> i wanted to apologize in advance i won't be able to stay for the entirety of this hearing but i wanted to thank the

chancelor, trail first of all, l of your leadership sips you sinu stepped into the role, working with the faculty, the staff and students at city to continue to move the college forward. i think the focus that you all had brought to, like, on equity issues at city college is commendable. fair treatment of the staff and faculty and addressing the serious deferred maintenance and facility's needs at the college, as well. and then, from your presentation today, really think it's great to see adding new programs and really expanding the partnerships with the unified school districts. so there's a lot of great progress and i think, to me, as i've started to look into the issues -- and i look forward to hearing, you know, the perspectives of the students

dealing with some of the class-cut issues or course reduction issues, it seems like one of the big problems is at the state government ands as chair hainey referred to the long-term underfunding in california, including the community colleges and also, i understand there's recent changes to the funding formula for state funding formula for community colleges that prioritize certain programmes and courses over others. and i was wondering if you could just sort of maybe talk about how the state -- the squar overl funding allocation and the funding formula impacts and is a cause of the financial challenges that we're facing now.

this shows how community colleges and college throughout the country have been underfinished but our cfo spend most spending on governor newsome's revised budget. he continues that and the online college and i think one of the things that we're trying to do -- what's the morally right thing to do? graduate more students of colour. we need to do that whether there is a financial incentive or not but the state is funding us huge changes this year and i've been

in this business for 35 years and used to be just based on he count. and now it's like 80% on head count and 20% on -- i'm sorry. it's 85% and 15% on the number of students you graduate, basically. and this year, we are able to get that squeeze in the governor's budget from, i think, 115 is a15 to 10, and if we cane more students and we must, and it will help those students and help us balance the budget and move forward. and i think that there are areas of the city that we still do not serve. we need to be in expansion mode, not retrench mode and to to that, we need to to do pruning and weeding and so on and take

courses that are primarily elective, primarily elective courses and those into the courses that are required while together we all, all of us fight no one direction for the funding for the fair funding for this community college and all community colleges, so yes. so that century foundation document is there for you to take a look at. >> it says guest one but i believe that's vice president temprano. i wanted to thank chancellor r orangerocha and thank you for ig the city college for this

committee on not just our coming course schedule but on all of the work that we are doing at city college to better serve our students and frankly, all challenges that are decades in the making, that this administration and this board is tackling for the first time. i had a few questions that will likely be for your chancellor and maybe for some of the administrative team. when i first joined this board and prior, there was a fundamental disagreement between the -- you know, the oftentimes faculty and classified staff and the administration and they couldn't even agree on the newspapers in our budget, which made it doing anything particularly difficult. so i was hoping you could speak to the progress we've made in that and note the findings and recommendations of our annual, independent audit that we received in february. >> well, the architect of that is our chief negotiator, diana

gonzalez and i'll letter answer. diana, how is it that the numbers are accurate? there was a lot of mistrust two and a half years ago and a lot was lack of transparency and how the budget was developed. one of the key pieces, for example, was, we would often hear there is really money and most of those funds were tied up in the position so budgeted but unbudgeted vacancies. that was true. we had vacancies in the faculty ranks and also within classified and we worked very hard with all of our unions, especially aft and sefu through the leadership and directorship to fill those vacancies and just be more

transportransparent during the . during our negotiations with aft that became critical to be on the same page as it relates to the budget. once you have agreement on the number, then the discussion can be about, ok, how do we spend that money? so it's just been through, really, partnering with our employee groups and, for example, with aft during negotiations in additio. in addition, there was a smaller group that met every tuesday and thursday to go through the budget. we're going through the same thing with sciu with respect to developing a recruitment plan for next fiscal year. so in terms of how that evolve within it was spending time and

going through our budget. >> could you speak to the finding of the independent audit? >> of course, we're required each year to bring in an independent audit and their findings with respect to the budget and i have to say, this was also reflected in the standard rating which we did very well. however, they were cautious, as was our finding with the independent auditor and what they noted was years of deficit spending and we did -- and this year's budget had planned deficit spending, not a balanced budget in the current year and so essentially, the finding is, wore running out of runway and so you'll see that in the budget document itself, that we've tapped into the reserves that dr. rocha mentioned earlier and we will end the year as planned but for next year we have to have top discussions to say where are the reductions. because we're programmed to keep our revenue flat and that doesn't sound encouraging, but in an environment with other districts are experiencing declining enrollment, ours is

slightly increasing, not all expenditures but that's from the independent auditor. >> thank you. i did -- president randolph let us know he's watching from hong kong and wanted to say hello to the room and that our student trustee is here and so thank you, students trustee hirschburg for attending. i would like to know what the plan is to maintain our 5% required reserve in this budget and also, if you could speak to the importance to our accreditation in maintaining sound reserves. >> yes, so through the state chancellor's office, a recommended reserve is 5%, a minimum of 5% and i understand that a few years ago, the board, our board of trustees at the time had required an 8% reserve. so with the deficit spending

we're currently engaged in, maintaining a 5% reserve is challenging. we have been asked to see what 7%, 8%, 9% within all the way to 10%. i believe the state-wide average is in the double digits. the purpose of the reserve, again, is for emergencies, the rainy day fund. so how it affects not just the accreditation but it affects our bond rating, as well. and so very low reserve or not meeting that reserve indicates poor fiscal health i think it would be of interesting too talk

about our interest of 8705. >> that's the law that was passed last year and goes into implementation this year and in common policy, it's a law wiping out remedial education in english and math. as you know, the csu has wiped it out and by law, it's been wiped out in community colleges. although, there is a transition of two years to get to the point of where every student now has the right, the right, not to go through the placement tests, not to go through all of the drills and the barrier, but to register directly into english and math. i'm very, very proud of our english and math departments because they've been on top of this and saw it coming, and esl, too. and they've been on top of this and so what they've done, we've added, tom, how many as

sections, the support sections? >> we've got easily two dozen for english 1a, plan for fall of 2019. our prerequisite courses started a semester prior to the requirement for the state requirement for implementation. >> so students who do and we were trying to get them into english and math early, who have concerns about their abilit abio pass the course will have a parallel course, tutorial course to succeed the first time. english and math are the number one barrier to getting students graduated and transferred in a timely way. so yeah, that's ab705 and that's been a big, big change, but you know, our city college faculty,

english and math, they're on it. >> thank you, chancellor. i do think it's important, especially for commissioners who i know share the board of trustee's concerns for black and brown students to note that our board has seen -- i mean, awful numbers about it taking sometimes up to six years for black and brown students to be able to transfer out of city college, six years to transfer. and i'm grateful for our administration's efforts to quickly implement ab705 to hedge keep our students out of that remedial education trap. so thank you for that. i think i also did want to acknowledge, too, and we have angela thomas from sciu10-1 who is here, but wanted to -- hi, angela -- but wanted to note that our classified staff have also taken a particular hit in the balancing of this budget and if you could -- i know that we a few years ago had a thousand

classified staff and are into the 500s. if you think about the critical influences that our classified staff perform at the college is very troubling. but wanted, if you could speak about the impacts of the surp and why it was required to even balance the budget we have, that would be helpful, i think. >> one of the things that i didn't into the presentation is that one of the things to ease the budget is that we spent money on a special supplemental early requirement programme for the first time that was offered to all full-time faculty, all part-time faculty and all classified staff. and so we had in total, how many that take the surp? >> just over 200. >> 200, so we have from the workforce of this year, we have 200 people, faculty and staff,

aft sciu, a few administrators who are retiring. what that does, we pay them some money for an additional annuity, monthly payment in their pension, but in return, we get savings to the budget and so that was the reason for that. that was another investment we made. so as to your question about the classified, angela,athena, diana, rubin and i were in the room yesterday going over exactly this. we will bring to the board on may 30th, a classified staffing plan for how we will back some of those positions and what our long-term plan is to get sciu up to their head count and the head count is important, not just as a labor negotiating item, although it is important

to sciu and it should be, but it's important because the classified staff do so much of the, you know, day in, day out, front line work of the college. thank you. >> president cook. >> thank you, chair, for pulling this committee together. i wanted to acknowledge your leadership before i got into the comments. we started this conversation in january and now it's may. so it takes time and i really be appreciate this is our first presentation. thank you, chancellor, for the first press. i don't think i have one family member that hasn't been through city college. my family's story is deeply connected to city college. i had a few questions about