we need everybody to be present and we need ways to get substitute teachers into the believe when teachers are absent. our members were provides special education services are drowning, too much work and too little training. this is a national problem. when i go to meetings for unions around the country, we hear this all of the time. one moment of hope today i was on a conference call and there is a campaign that people are working on to make sure the federal government provides the fundings at the rate it is supposed to be provided, 45%. it provides 17 to 18%.

thathat is a solution we can wok on. i also as representative of hard-working special education educators, i want you to know, and you have heard other people really hard to get the work done. they can't get it dawn l done. they want to provide the services. there are so many things to be done correctly with too little support. until we address that we will not see 100% compliance. thank you. >> i am here wearing both hats today. my day job special education advocate. evening job other than parent is to be the chair of the past chair of the community advisory community.

special education advocate looks at this to say validation. this is everything we have been screaming about as lock as i have been involved in the district. this cac chair says we look forward to fixing this. i cannot echo the comments enough. we are at a staffing crisis right now. we are doing so much work in so many great areas with big plans and no one to implement be them. this is a perfect example. we are screening kids for dix fe dyslexia. when i write forspire to

implement with fidelity in slide six with fidelity, that is this half an hour each day five days a week in some group instruction. at this rate we need to hire a couple more rsps for school sites for dyslexia, not a.d.h.d. or autism. we need more support to properly educate our children. if we don't deal with students' needs in the classroom, that turns into behaviors that go through the entire system and end up in discipline. it starts here. we need to address it. thank you.

>> thank you. you mentioned timelines not being met. first of all, thank you for the presentation. it seems like we are perpetually under some review. at least six years ago we were under a mandate to correct. what is the difference between that and this? >> it took about three years to exit that one. the comprehensive review. in apply scope of new zealanding it, it is different. would that be fair? this one the comprehensive

review, i don't recall what pivoted the verification review. that is when i first came back to special education. comprehensive was based on? grid and the different things. >> there is no time line to exit. we need to meet demand of the review. >> right now we have a few timelines. one is to push out the training by november 14, 15. we are meeting our timelines in terms of communications and due diligence on corrective actions. wwe are not perfect. the other ones should be harder. we will be pulling out of the pir, performance indicator review and pulling out of disproportionalty.

those are the big challenges that are going to keep us? our comprehensive review unless we pull factors together. >> kids get placed in nonpublic schools and we have to pay for it. can we calculate what that cost last year? can that be done? folks have been floating the idea of iep case managers. you would have one iep manager for two schoo schools. they would manage timelines to make sure they are met. the money we expands yearly on

not meeting the timelines if we were able to invest in case managers to red to reduce. could we do that to save money? we are not meeting timelines. i want to know if that is a cost-effective way of dealing with this into the future, hiring the ip case managers and saving money and meeting timelines? what do you think? >> i am histan hesitant to enga. we need to see what it is driving what we do in closed

session in these meetings? what i am concerned about is staffing. if we have schools with openings for teaching positions or paraowepara--paraeducator posit. who is teaching the kids? we have reps that are doing a thousand things each day. it is a bigger conversation. i am not saying it is bad. i was a resource specialist. that is not new. we somebody drowning for a while. that is why we are taking this time and investment to build a thoughtful five year strategic plan. i would love that conversation. it is the panacea that will keep us out of these situations. >> we can do an audit on last

year's settlements and everything we paid out and what caused them. if it was the case the timelines weren't met and it was costing us $10 million and it costs $3 million to hire the case managers and not be on the hook for the next years. our staff can do the work. th is worthwhile to pursue. >> some of it is arounds assessment. there is a shortage of psychologists that is part of the whiteboard activity i want to have with you.

>> a lot of our public school playsments are done at iep meetings because we don't have a appropriate place to serve the child. i think we should start with data to see what it tells us. i also just have a little treppe pedation about your idea. it sounds like it is about checking boxes. at the end of the day meeting the timelines is not supposed to be about the paperwork. it is what do kids need and what is the best way to provide it?

we should look at this. it is not a terrible idea. let's not talk about serving kids. >> it is not my idea. it is floated many times. >> that is the first thought i had. just to go back to some of the parent communications training that you did, i mean i will just say one of my long-standing pet peeves is that parents at the iep meeting getting the assessment report. that is one thing that i would love to see us change is to give parents the written assessment reports which they are entitled to so they have time to read and think about them and respond before sitting at the meeting to discuss the report.

can you tell me more. can you tell me about the parent communication piece of the training you provided? >> in parent communications it was exactly it is at the 400 staff members. it does need to go home. it is that simple and the language. the prior written notice. when the parent brings up the ask, we need to respond to it. this is why we will go forward or not go forward. parents ask for things. we need to communicate back with

the prior written notice. they also have a reason why it is not recommended in writing. >> those are the things in the audits. they find the missing pieces of paper that summed up to being the parent communication topic, but you knew from experience. >> i just think that is an area. you both have heard me say that before. it is an area where i think if we can keep from going on the road of family feeling angry and lied to and that loss of trust. if we can communicate better and serve better upfront before people get mad, then we will be better off because they are less likely to sue if they are not

mad or that is the world i live in. >> the last comment i want to make is just in response to the staffing conversation. i want to relay that i ran into a teacher that had worked with my daughter many years in the school district who was one of the first inclusion specialists in the district and is now because of the way that we are large r largely because of the advo cassie that i did we don't talk about inclusion and resources being separate things. she was talking about the caseload up to 22 students, mild moderate. if she were still an inconclusion support teacher in the old -- inclusion support teacher she would have 10 to 12.

that is not what i intended and i hope that is not what any of us intended. what are we doing about that? that is just >> with our uesf special education committee around case loads. so if you're an rsp teacher and you have two students who are fully committed, imagine the level of impact on your day-to-day runnings. if you have highly impacted kids. so in the five-year strategic plan that we're working on with our consultant, we're going to look at that. maybe we do need to suss out a new situation on how we're going to address kids. nothing has to change around where they are and how they're receiving services, but we might need to have a different situation around their case management.

i'm open to that. i feel like i've been with you all the way. inclusion became this thing that is interpreted through everybody's lens differently amongst the 120 schools that we have. so i think calibration of our thoughts around this notion of inclusion, that's one of my biggest lists and calibrating and then figuring out -- i don't even know what to call them. are they pathways or the little book for multilinguist -- multilingual, what does a specialist do or a mild moderate teacher -- we have a multi-ability class, but then we have autism focus. i think all of that, we have to drill down and define who we are

and understand that together. that's one of the first things that we're going to take on in communicating. >> in a lot of ways i'm so proud in the progress that the district has made and that we are just more thoughtful about placement and how we make sure that our students are accessing the general curriculum and the general things in the school day. obviously it's not tenable to have -- >> it's not. >> -- a case load of 22 mild/moderate kids because there's not enough hours in the day. i think there is just a tremendous amount of stress that i'm hearing. >> i think mild became moderate and moderate became severe. it's bumped up. i just also have to recognize the best intentions of so many people in the field that are trying with our limited

resources. in the more allocations that we put out there, there are no positions. even though we need support, it's time to think differently. >> maybe case managers would be part of the solution. i don't know. i'm trying to think creatively and it sounds like uesf is trying to think differently. i know you are devoted to this work and want -- you've been wanting to do this for a long time. >> sort of. it's the dream job i was always afraid to think about. >> i appreciate your willingness to try to take it on and be whole-hearted about it. obviously we have a lot of work today. >> we do. our work continues. >> commissioner carles.

>> thank you for this presentation. i do want to recognize that this is a challenge that goes beyond our district, and i very much appreciate the work that you and your district are doing with very limited resources. i also want to go -- i looked at the report and thank you for making that available. i would love it if it could be at the top level of our board docs. i do think this is a helpful document for the community. even though it's not positive, it does validate the experience of a lot of educators and parents. one thing it does state is that school sites were visited and service logs were reviewed. 11 of the records tested were found to be compliant and nine of the records tested were found to be non-compliant for the

provision of services written in the i.e.p. i did the math and if i'm right, that means 45% were non-compliant. one of the questions i have is are we doing this type of sampling. is this something that we do as a district with our -- i mean, i would hope that we were doing this without the c.b.e. checking our own selves. do we have any protocols in place to do this kind of checking? >> i would say no, and i'm speaking honestly. >> thank you so much for just answering that. i really appreciate it. it feels like gaslighting when we hear parents and teachers saying things are not happening and to know this is the first step of figuring this out together. >> i don't believe we have the

capacity right now as a district to do this. i think ultimately we want the l.a.e. reps to keep the teachers compliant. but i know how i rolled for 18 years and i didn't do that. i mean, i did a lot, but i didn't go through brown folders with my staff. i think about my staff on this level and did they have the capacity to do that. at this point, no, they don't. should we? yes. this is the kind of document that is going to drive some of our restructuring and how we do things because clearly 45% is not okay, it's not okay with me. >> i appreciate that. my dad was a researcher, and i don't know what the term is, but he said there is a term that talks about when you look at something, you actually change it approximate. when you research something, when you pay attention to something, you actually become a part of changing it. i used that, when i was a

teacher i said i am going to be grading students on helpful behaviors, and all of a sudden kids started doing them so they could get stickers or points and it was a joke and intentional, but when we do show our attention to something -- we show that with testing on assessment results and things like that, so we have a lot of activities that we do in schools and things that focus around that kind of data. i'm really interested in implementation data. i also want to recognize, i really appreciate susan soloman's comments, we have so many hard-working education workers, but my heart goes out to the para educators. i had positive experience with para educators. i co-taught a class with a para

educator. that wouldn't be been possible without our relationship and that we worked as a team. i wanted to pull out from this report it states that some interviews indicated that regularly teachers are being pulled from their regular duties to act as substitute teachers. that's heart-breaking to me. they should be there for those with the most need and not the general ed teams. those are the teachers that are kind of the most overloaded are pinch-hitting for other educators. then it said several -- and then also we see a shortage of para educators. it states administration at sites that had had less para educator turnover increased their retention rate.

there i see an opportunity, because as i mentioned i had a really great rapport with my para educator. i shared my lesson plans with her and she told me and we worked professionally as a team and we had a mutual respect. i believe it made it fun for us to work together. i think in many cases, depending on psych culture, i think that there are some schools that do a very good job of including para educators adds part of this team, and there are some schools where para educators are pinch-hitting here and there, or they're not included or treated as professionals or they're not trained to properly support students. that can definitely lead to overload and feelings of burnout in general. i also wanted to thank commissioner norton for bringing

this up. even if you're totally committed and loving your kids, there's only so much. i think in some cases what we see is a tipping point where people max out and we just burn people out. i guess i'm wondering which site -- are there certain sites we're seeing this more than others, do they send to have certain characters? which sites are doing well? maybe we can learn from that and we can beef up supports from schools that have these turnover issues. finally i also wanted to thank commissioner norton for bringing up education. i've been pushing our district to educate families. i'm a 20-year educator in this district, and i still don't understand all the ins and outs of