vintage gallery is 777 beach street, tuesday-saturday 11-5 and monday 12-5. >> thank you president al exander. commissioner fisher. commissioner gup tu, here. commissioner, here. commissioner kim, here. thank you. commissioner ray, here. vice president, here. president alexander, here. >> thank you. just remind the public child care will be provided from 6 p.m. to 9

p.m. for children age 3 to 10, the child care is across the hall on the first floor. at this time rfx before the board goes into closed session i call for speakers in the closed sessioniterms. there is total of 5 minutes for speakers. are there any speakers for public comment? >> not in person 6789 >> there are none online. >> thank you. we-i was going to say something about expulsions but don't have any tonight. i'll recess at 501 p.m. and we'll see you back after closed session. [closed session]

is a big number. this message will be repeated in spanish and cantonese and listed as baloney if you go to san francisco open instead of beaches and you'll see this evening that pretty simple matter we will meet on our medical scene the number of telephonic exits or not there is already there is also those numbers face to face around the clock. let me say say cinco. never never say never see the face. thank you. gracias. candidates interpreter please. thank you. thank you luis i got my show feed i got time quality come on sam. fancy a little help? how quickly we will eat way you content don't want it don't i don't mean if i get on the watch for you will be my show you want to go for more my fans and tv and google meet the ama who am i going paying show yet support this regular meeting of

the san francisco board of education at 6:34 p.m.. just a reminder that just a reminder that child care is provided across the hall in the educational placement center for children ages 3 to 10. >> i want to ask if folks are having conversations so please take them out in the hallway because it's distracting for the meeting. child care is provided to 9 p.m. for ages children ages 3 to 10 across the hall and the educational placement center. we are going to move section d the annual organizational

er section f public comment in the agenda. so there was a little error in the order of the agenda so that we will have the opening items then we will have the then we will have public comment and then we will have the annual organizational meeting. >> um do we need indicate that there's no report out oh sorry there is a report out from closed session. yeah thank you for reminding me. i'm going to do the report for closed session in just a moment but before i do that if you want to make public comment this evening either on an agenda item or a non agenda item please go ahead and submit a speaker card here to mr. steele to your left. if you're a student please write student on top of the card because we like to give priority to students and if you're online and we'd like to make public comment we will indicate when when you can raise your hand. all right. um report from closed session in the matter of student e h versus s of usd h case number

(202) 310-0287 the board by a vote of six eyes one commissioner recusal ray gives the authority of the district to pay up to the stipulated amount in three matters of anticipated litigation the board by a vote of seven eyes gives a direction to the general council in one matter of anticipated litigation and the board by a vote of six eyes one commissioner of recusal fisher gives direction to the general council and on one matter of public education sorry public employee discipline dismissal release the board by a vote of seven eyes approved an amendment to the statement of charges. that's the report out from close session now we will move to item e the opening items and i will read our land acknowledgment. we the san francisco board of education acknowledge that we are on the unceded ancestral homeland of the roberts alumni who are the original

inhabitants of the san francisco peninsula as the indigenous stewards of this land and in accordance with their traditions the raw materials we have never ceded lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place as well as for all peoples who reside in their traditional territory as guests we recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland and we wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors elders and relatives of the roberts community and by affirming their sovereign rights as first peoples. we will now move to item e to the approval of board minutes from the regular meeting of december 10th 2020 four. may i have a motion and a second on the approval of the minutes so moved second thank you. >> are there any changes colleagues to the minutes? seeing none let's have a roll call vote please. thank you. student delegate montgomery yes

. student delegate lamb yes. commissioner fisher yes. commissioner gupta yes. commissioner huling yes. commissioner kim yes. commissioner ray yes. vice president whiteboard yes. president alexander. yes sir. nice pass. >> thank you. i will now turn it over to superintendent su for the superintendent's report. >> thank you. president alexander. good evening everyone. once again maria su, superintendent of s.f. usd. before i start my remarks i do want to acknowledge it. just take a moment to acknowledge the devastation, the devastation caused by the recent fires down in southern california. our thoughts are with the students families, educators and communities that have been

deeply impacted by this terrible tragedy. unfortunately here in the bay area we are no strangers to wildfires and we totally understand how quickly it can spread and get out of hand. i want to share that the state superintendent of public instruction tony thurman and the california department of education have partnered with a nonprofit organization called supply bank dot org and this organization's task is to collect and distribute donations to schools and to communities that are impacted by the wildfire. so please go on our website and you can learn more about this organization. if you are able to support and then also if you choose to go on to the california department of education's website to learn more about the work that the state is doing to support our

our sister city, our sister school districts. next slide please help. so i would like to be the first person to officially welcome our newest commissioners to their first board of education meeting. so on behalf of the school board of the san francisco unified school district, i want to welcome commissioner jaime howling commissioner parag gupta and premier commissioner superior ray to our board and then of course welcome back our dear commissioner matt alexander. >> i and the entire staff look forward to working with you and of course to the returning commissioner and making sure that we achieve the promise that we made to our students

and families of of getting and producing academic excellence as well as ensuring that we continue to uplift our school districts values and missions and goals. thank you. on the point of values and goals and mission of sb usd. as we prepare for the new federal administration and all the threats that was stated during the presidential campaign, i want to reiterate san francisco unified school district's commitment to protecting the rights of our students families and staff. before the winter break i sent out an email to our staff to make the statement but i want to continue to make this statement as often as i can in as many places as i can. despite any uncertainty or challenges that may arise with

the change of the federal administration i want to assure everyone that we have policies in place to protect the rights of our students and our staff. as a sanctuary school district as f usd upholds every young person's constant to tional right to feel safe and supported at school and we strive to expand the scope of our sanctuary eas to all families and we want to make sure that everyone feels the support and is reaffirmed of this sense of safety. we will share with you all soon a list of frequently asked questions that students and staff and families have shared with us. and so at a later time i will be sending that f aq out to everyone.

on a very important note here. i want to remind everyone that the deadline to apply to s.f. schools is quickly approaching. so you only have two and a half weeks left to apply because our deadline is january 31st at 1150 £0.09 if your child is entering transitional kindergarten kindergarten middle school or high school next year they will need to apply for a new school with the elimination of multiple applications rounds. it is really important for families to submit their applications before the deadline of january 31st. if you have already applied for the 2526 school year thank you . we are excited to welcome you your students and the entire family back to school if you have not yet applied. please go to our website and

step usd.edu/apply to learn how you can apply online or with a paper application. if you need additional help to apply you can come into our enrollment center here for support. they actually have office hours tomorrow so if you want to come in we're counselors will be here to support you in going through the application process . you can also call the center at (415) 241-6085 or visit us between the hours on mondays to fridays between the hours of 8 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.. you can also come out to our enrollment center bayview office at 1520 oakdale av this thursday from eight oh on

thursdays from 8 p.m. to 4:38 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.. thank you. speaking of the bayview neighborhood please come out and meet our wonderful principals teachers and staff from our elementary schools in the bayview at our bayview enrollment fair on january 22nd. participate in free raffles with great prizes from generation thrive, which is our partner at the warriors. you can get grab and go food. meet members of the parent advisory council including the african-american achievement and leadership initiative and the matua advisory council. our enrollment counselors will also be there and once again enrollment is due january 31st. so please come out and visit our schools and i want to share

that last wednesday are our 46th mayor was inaugurated into office mayor daniel lurie at a wonderful, beautiful ceremony over in civic center plaza. what made it even more beautiful was that our s.f. usd students were featured in a lot of the different performance is and events. i was so so proud to sit there and watch our balboa marching band played and as well as the color guard students out there welcoming guests in. we also had students from makeup in elementary school jacobo alvarado, willie brown middle school who spoke and introduced each of the different performances or public speakers. and then on december 19th i had

the great opportunity to join our school our teachers, staff community partners, parents and guardians in observing a fifth grade math lesson using the new teaching through problem solving curriculum and the use of lesson study. it was so amazing to watch how number one fantastic our teachers were and their bravery of putting themselves on display in front of hundreds of people. but it was super impressive to watch these fifth grade students also engaging and learning and asking such important questions. the lesson study was is a result of a collaboration in a research project with with our teachers from four from four different schools. sanchez i'm your daniel webster

and flynn. and we are so excited with the partnership with dc wyeth, the department of children, youth and their families to provide us with the resources to do this where we're bringing in innovative ways to work and support our teachers. and then as a reminder for everyone dr. martin luther king jr day is this coming monday school sites and offices will be closed in honor of dr. king's memory. school sites will also be closed to celebrate lunar new year on wednesday, january 29th. however, the district office will be open that day. so that concludes my superintend dence report. but i do want to close out my remarks and i would like to share my close out in an in

memoriam for hoover liddell hi mrs. marshall. thank you mrs. marshall so much for sharing with me well, for sharing me with me all these beautiful pictures of mr. liddell and and i just want to really read some a very brief obituary about him so it is with deep sadness that on december 17th, 2024 mr. liddell passed away at the age of 84. he was born in memphis tennessee, tennessee and moved to san francisco in his late 20s where he met and married his beloved margaret hodgkin to together they welcomed their daughter malaika in 1971. mr. liddell dedicated his career to education in san francisco, serving as a

teacher, principal and eventually as assistant superintendent. he was passionate about empowering african-american students and creating meaningful change in the lives of our young people. he was also deeply passionate about climbing mountains and running. he climbed mount kilimanjaro, mt. shasta, mt. diablo, mt. whitney and mt. rainier. he ran 11 marathons including the new york marathon. he ran countless races and was a regular participant in the san francisco bay to breakers. above all mr. liddell will be remembered for his selflessness and devotion to his family. and i truly believe mr. liddell's legacy of kindness, integrity and compassion lives on in all the lives of the wonderful people he touched. he was an extraordinary man and his san francisco unified

school district family will forever be proud and grateful to have him lead all of our students and families through all of these years. thank you to the liddell family for sharing him with us. and thank you so much for offering us all these beautiful pictures of him and his beautiful life. >> thank you. >> thank you superintendent su. i just will take a point of privilege as the president that when i was a new principal all almost 20 years ago hoover liddell was one of the kindest and and most caring mentors that anyone could ever ask for. he worked in the superintendent's office and i remember being intimidated by all the higher ups in the central office but he always went out of his way to make to listen to make folks like us who worked in schools feel comfortable and then to give us really good educational advice

because he was a really wise and expert educator and so just super grateful for him and his mentorship and also just want to honor his memory. so thank you for that and i'll pass it over to our student delegates for your report. thank you superintendent su for your report on behalf of your student delegates, we would like to give a warm welcome to jaime huling, parin gupta and supriya ray. we're excited to see what you have to offer for the students and most importantly we're looking forward to working with you all notably with our student advisory council the student advisory council known as the shc is a cohort of high school leaders amongst the district and we are always looking for guest speakers. so if there's opportunity resonates with you feel free to reach out and we would love to have you guys featured at one of our meetings. passing it on to langston. hello. welcome everyone. i want to welcome the new

commissioners as well. happy to see you. um, i want to start this report um by for the first time as student delegates acknowledging um one of the issues that we run into siac this last year um with the lack of a full time staff member um, we're running into issues as i see fully realizing and fleshing out our vision for what we want to do for our 60 students and many things we want to do like discuss our major topics review sac problems um are being are becoming more and more difficult to tackle without a full time position. um all of these problems are becoming more and more of a leadership issue that the sec has had to tackle. um and our amazing advisor judson has been there for us the entire time and has been a phenomenal voice for us and advisor for siac but the the lack of a full time position is

definitely hitting the sec. we have had our meetings cut in half. we've had half as many meetings in this amount of time as we weren't able to have last year. um and the full time position was originally supposed to be split but due to things shifting around here in the district it's then fallen solely on to judson who's done an amazing job with the hand that he's been given. but we are still feeling those effects of the multiple of his like multiple responses from multiple responsibilities that he has to have um which is leaving less time for shc which is making it difficult for shc to function without a dedicated staff position. yeah and adding on to langston the lack of attendance and structure coming from the sec has led to meeting times being extended or decreased. so in order to like hold our meetings and take action we need to have at least half of the sec there. and since we don't have a supervisor who could pay full attention to the ways we operate, we are unable to hold meetings with the whole sec and

because of that we've had to compensate and do meetings online which is an option we preferably don't want to resort to. however, despite our minimal time we're still working on our annual youth summit. so in short the student advisory council the sec holds an annual summit where they invite leaders across the district to enhance their leadership skills and meet students of different backgrounds. and we also hold our student delegate debate their so like candidates can give a speech and present their endeavors for the following school year and in order to make this possible with the time we have the cabinet and sec representatives and alternatives have been working to connect with students speakers and local nonprofit organizations to prepare for the curation of this event and we currently have a working date as mentioned since we don't have as much time it's been hard to solidify that. but that said it will take place sometime during april and

our slogan for this event will be rise for rights, which will be a place for leaders to collaborate on issues and educate students across the districts on issues affecting us in the current. and finally on a very exciting note, the survey that i was i've been talking about at a couple different meetings now um we're in the process of now finalizing it for its launch at the end of this month to then go into february the official window will be announced by siac in just a couple of days so we're really excited to hear from student voices, high school students to really give siac some direction this year and really allow us to formulate our vision for siac and then incorporate some of that into what we're having here and board discussions to have siac and as a high school backed siac voice come into our board discussions to really focus on our student outcomes and what we want to see in our

school sites moving forward. and that concludes our report. thank you very much to both of you. we will now move to item f public comment. so this is your last chance to submit a speaker card in the next 30s. again please if you were uh okay. i see a few coming in. good. so we'll the way we'll do this is first we're going to have students public comment then we'll do public comment on agenda items and then we'll do public comment on non agenda items. uh approximately how many cards do we have now? mr. steele roughly probably about 3230. so so we will that's about uh let's say 35 minutes we will anticipate for in-person public comment which will leave us 20 to 25 minutes for online public comment after that, as i've

announced previously we make every effort to start our board business by 8 p.m. so that board discussion and votes on important issues can happen before 10 p.m.. you know and that's something that we've been trying to strike the right balance so that our meetings don't go late into the night and we have meetings that people can't access. so that's that's how we have been operating public comment it seems to be working pretty well and again i think tonight it seems like we have sufficient time for the vast majority of the comments so let's get started. great. thank you. >> president alexander i do have one student comment card. forgive me if i mispronounced kushal yeah to your right. hi my name is kushner coming on i am a third where are you? elementary school.

i would like a permanent pe teacher on fridays at my school so i can get better at soccer. thank you. thank you very much and for everyone else i'm going to note that we have a timer up here. if you aren't an expert at this it's right up there. you can check you can see the timer. >> it's one minute per person and please respect the timer when you see it. when it goes off they'll be beeping. please wrap up. that's out of respect for everybody so that we can have equal time and make sure that everybody has a chance to speak. thank you. thank you. yes. one minute each. i'm going to call the first five speakers so please come louder. but the podium amy zheng or anything i'm sorry i can't speak for jerry almanza, brigitte dyer and bella luna

and bernie produce casey. uh, leo and i have any logic among a you think so and so on pay take a coat on ucla going let's see why it is here for my mega coyote happier

or i am annie i support the agenda item for the position of the head head of communication and governance and i support the employment contract for our hong may pang our children children and their education is very important and the school district is an important point in time right now the school district needs to increase its ability to communicate and do governance as asian parents i hope the school district can appoint this uh position to change the way the district communicates with families especially having a crow access and overcoming language barriers. this position can help the district and assist to cooperate closely with our

diverse communities being able to communicate throughout and have a bridge to the external world to show the values of san francisco unified school district and to give even more education chances for our students. for example, how may in the past at chinese for affirmative action took our engagement team to schools and communities throughout to do engagement work and we went to different communities to engage to try to overcome these language barriers. i believe homi has the experience and ability to do this position. >> good afternoon. my name is jerry al-mansour. i'm the treasurer of unicef. i'm also a parent of a student at hoover. i was also a dac member and i've also been a long time educator. so wear many hats like many of you. i'm here today to strongly recommend that the new contract not be approved. as you all know, we've been struggling with financial solvency.

we have an appointment. we are under watch. at this point we cannot handle increasing central office. we had gotten a commitment on the dac that we were actually going to decrease the amount of people in central office. and at this point right now this is this would set a precedent. we understand that the board commissioners are not to micromanage the superintendent, but it does feel very disrespectful that a new position is being opened that's at a $275,000 position. while we educators are being asked to continue to give up right and we have classrooms that don't have teachers and we are being told that they're going to lay off 500 of us. so we you want to hire your home? i have 6000 homies that i need a job to buy and we have like 49,000 students. >> i need teachers in front of them.

thank you very. hi. is this one okay? so you all are going to be looking at bhm resolution about our right to return. there are some things missing from the resolution that i would like for you to add in the resolution. consider and think of one is we need to talk about transportation. you cannot take a public school mainly transit community and then put them all in the woods where there's literally barely any muni like we need busses we don't know only need busses for students. we need busses for staff. most of our staff lives in the east bay and takes bart because we live conveniently half a block away. i've been talking to some teachers and they said they're not sure if they're going to be able to go would be they come to the news luther burbank school site because they depend on bart. bart is their livelihood. they don't drive in the bartender on the car. so we need to think about public option. i mean anything about transportation that you are taking up for students and for staff, please put it together. okay.

the second thing also is you all need to make sure that luther burbank is tested for lead with the soil and the water. we have been facing too much. let it be the attempt please test what land and water for a commissioner fisher thank you so much for resolution 61. i did want to add a few things to it. i want to emphasize that the most important thing is making sure that the population that attends bhm which is 76% underserved has access to the transportation necessary to get to luther burbank. there's only one bus line we have to take two busses to get there. at the moment it's at least 30 minutes if everything lined up perfectly which it never does it's also adding a huge commute for our teachers. the commute for the community is asking parents to take an hour out of their day twice to get their kids to school and that's not something of an underserved community or a impoverished community can do. and the second thing that i'd

like to say is that yes i would love to i think it's probably seems obvious to test for led an argument at luther burbank given that we founded i guess to basically be it would be nice to know at least can you state your name please? my name is bridget dyer and i'm a parent at one of eastern horsemen fixed. yeah. hi. my name is bernice casey. i'm a parent of two children. when it whenever and when it lowell high school welcome new commissioners. i apologize to interpreters but i am able to speak really fast and have to speak on two issues. first yesterday dr. sue talked about having to make some hard choices about balancing the budget. please don't spend $275,000 that you don't have on a staff person. >> the child needs a pe

teacher. they need staff. i always talk about my kids but i want to talk about the kids that go to blaenau vista that have had no speech therapy. that's where your money needs to go instead of telling us to make hard choices you are basically volunteers. i know how much you're getting here. you're donating your time. you have to make the hard decisions. $275,000 does not go to someone else here at 555. franklin thank you so much, commissioner fisher for acknowledging the struggles that we've had and hearing our community. we never navistar for the ability for kids to go back again. please make sure we have transportation and a safe school. >> thank you. thank you mccall call the next five names please line up at the dais or at the podium. joetta lynn young you leave sara miskin. i can't read the full enough. josephine so and ruyi the right

right, right. hi commissioners. i'm a parent at harvey milk civil rights academy. the job description for the head of communications and governance includes several critical responsibilities such as promoting connections across divisions and between central office and schools correspondence to us of us staff and families and proactive media placement. i support the board in wanting to ensure someone carries out this important work. we need effective leaders who will prevent costly and harmful errors born from lack of communication within the central office who will engage in respectful and productive dialog with staff and families and who will proactively promote our wonderful schools so that more families enroll. please address any concerns that people are rightfully raising right now about this role so that you can move forward with this important work. thank you. >> thank you.

>> i dug a hole and you are you will go see. hang out. i'll have some fun see how quick or easy come on you guys don't have to go out on you delay, do you? >> i'm going take what happened in the school district. i support the head of

communication and government's position and i'm here today to support ms. hong may peng and taking up the position uh i hope the board of education can approve the her employment contract. i hope as a school district uh to know that our children their education is very important to us and the school district is facing at a critical moment to avoid repeating same days the school district should be uh strengthened their communications and governance. as an asian parent i hope that the school district can use this position, connect with parents and overcome provide equitable services and overcome language barriers. this position will help the school district work closely with a diverse communities and build better bridges to the outside world. uh i believe the hong me peng has the ability to do this job and her experience and ability shows that she can take on this unique position. >> thank you. >> hi, my name is sarah miskin

and i am the parent of a fourth grader at daniel webster and a sixth grader at james lake. i want to welcome the new commissioners. i hope that you all are going to be able to work together to improve a lot of the challenges that face our district, including improving the financial health of s.f. unified. as a parent and public school teacher myself. i want to also expressed concern about this new position. i'm really struggling to understand how the district can justify funding such a high salary when our school buildings are in need of remodeling, when our district is struggling to pay educators a living wage, when we're struggling to find special education teachers and when our students are in so many need of service and so many in n of so many services. in addition, the disruption to me seems vague at best and i think i speak on behalf of a lot of parents when i say that the public really deserves to know how this is benefiting our students how this is benefiting our educators and how this is benefiting our staff. i hope that you consider the impact that this has on

schools, teachers and our kids and make a decision that's in the best interests of all stakeholders. >> thank you. thank you. that concludes our four agenda items and i'll move on to non agenda items. recall the first five go back away so go away man so how come i got you

? >> good evening board commissioners. good evening, families. i am a mom of three children who attend school public schools. >> my name is i. i am here today to support the position of head of communication and governance. i proposed on tonight's agenda and support ms. hong may pang in taking up the position of the board of education. ken approves her employment contract. our children and their education are very important to us as the school district is facing a critical moment and to avoid repeating the same mistakes as the school district should strengthen their communication and governance ability. as an asian parent i hope that a school district can use this position to improve the way it connects with parents

especially providing equitable services and overcoming language barriers. >> this position will help the school district work closely with diverse their diverse communities, build better bridges with the external world and promote the values. the sense of unified school district provide better education opportunities for students. i believe ms. hong peng has the ability to take on this job uh and she has sufficient experience and ability to take on this position. thank you. for a long time issues from parents and our communities were not being reflected. the safe used policies were not being communicated in you know, down to the parents level and our feedback was not shared back. such as our need for equity and excellence such as supporting low emission and streamlining enrollment supporting language pathways. it calls for years of turmoils including school closure that

went wrong. i hope you'll find a way to have fruitful engagement and collaboration to prevent future faux pas. and i hope you support governance. thank you. >> okay. recall the next five names please let up at the podium. william patterson darcy ten blackburn. sarah saldana junior sir. and severe coumadin. >> hi. my name is will patterson on. on january 3rd the district offered over 100 families compensatory education with 33% of the services that were agreed to in the iep. this amounted to a cut of approximately $5,000 per family for the special education services that they were agreed to in their iep which is a legal contract. a few families were offered only 22 or 79 minutes by a

clerical error and that's why i was alerted to this. that was only a few families. but i want to point out that there the former superintendent got 100% of his severance package because he had an attorney. all right. why is it okay to reduce a contractual obligation to students with disabilities by a half $1 million? you have 100 students who are denied $5,000 a piece of services. that's $500,000. why is that okay? because they do not have attorneys across the board in the superintendent to rescind those offers to families and replace them with the full education they deserve. 22 hours of education is very different than 66. i teach dyslexic students. you can make a lot of progress in 66 hours. >> you can't do what 20 to you? good evening. i'm dr. chan blackburn. i am a teacher at sheridan elementary school and i'm here to tell you some things that are happening there. the district has decided to

take away a teacher next year so that we will be forced to have a kindergarten first split grade level class. >> we it is true that we have openings in our kinder classes . however, there is another factor at play. we have a family that moved out of san francisco last year but returned and i tried to reenroll their children at our school. one is of kindergarten age. abc turn them away saying that our kinder classes are full. we have openings but it turns out that epic has capped the enrollment of our kindld we will not send us any more students. essentially they manipulated things so that there is no chance for us to have more students move up to first grade so that they can justify creating a k one split. this is a situation that we know of. we can't help but wonder how long this practice has been taking place and if it has happened in past years. it clearly seems that you are leading us to closure by having

ak1, two three and a 4 or 5 split at our site. more to the point is how are we serving our students? we're not. we're not giving them the education they deserve. >> hi, i'm sara saldana principal at jean parker elementary and usaf member school leaders are eager to share our perspectives to inform the staffing and budget plans. we understand that our central staffing allocation in will decrease. it's a reality of the numbers. like many schools we have unique funding needs and opportunities at jean parker because of the needs of our specific students. we were awarded three grants two from the state and one from the city to use as our community bases fit to meet the needs of the children in our care. these funds can help soften the blows that are coming babies. those of us in this position want agency over how we use the

grants awarded to our schools including using them for positions we know we can fill and we need to know early in the planning timeline that we will be allowed to do so. to give as much assurance to our community as we can in these times. >> thank you. >> i'm gina chair reading specialist at. for over 20 years the budgeting process assigned an average cost for a teacher or para. that cost came out of the sites budget last year that changed to charging schools the actual cost. this has caused and will continue to cause age discrimination. a school with older experienced teachers in an out of classroom position may no longer be able to afford that person full time and cut back the hours sites pay for general education pairs and reading specialist intervention teachers out of discretionary funds. sites should want and be able

to afford experienced people in these positions. a person's experience and skill directly influence how effectively they will be working with students. with this change sites may not be able to afford the most qualified candidate. how long before sites are unable to hire the most qualified candidate because their years of experience make them unaffordable? this is age discrimination. please consider averaging these costs so that sites will not be forced to discriminate based on a candidate's age. thank you. hi, i'm samir camden. i'm a parent at your elementary. i'm a supporter of the resource alignment initiative. i'm even one of the talking heads in the video. keeping small schools and rtant criteria in the slides in the sessions i attended. so i was obviously disheartened to see a small community school a blue ribbon school included

in that list that's known for its diversity community and academics. this year, despite the uncertainty our scores have gone up. our grade school rating has gone up. but just this semester in our third grade class alone we lost three kids to private school. so i hope you can keep sort of sight of the big picture and when you work on the next criteria you take small schools and tight knit communities into account. thank you. >> thank you. call the next five names please come up to the podium at o'clock after eddie hilinski. >> quadros adam brown. susan peng wong. hi. hi. good evening. i'm anna. after president of usaf and principal at independence high school, i'm here to demand that school leaders be brought in to develop the budgets for our school sites a one size fits all staffing model does not

work with our varied schools and programs. take independence high for example. we've been intentional in developing a model that serves a huge need for us of usd. last year we had a 94% graduation rate with 100% of our black and students with ieps graduating 100%. you don't get those results with a staffing model like at a traditional high school. you get that by providing what students need as have used guardrails as the superintendent will not allow resources to be allocated without transparently communicating how the allocations are sufficient and addressing equitable input and creating more equity and excellence in student outcomes . site leaders know what schools need. it's time to bring us into the conversation. >> thank you. thank you for. hello dr. soo and new and

returning commissioners and student delegates. my name is andy hilinski and i'm a supervisor of psychological services in our special ed department. and i'm also the secretary of united administrators of san francisco. this is my first time in my 19 years with sfe ever speaking a public comment in a board meeting. so i want to say that we understand that unprecedented unprecedented reductions are just around the corner to achieve fiscal solvency and prevent a state takeover. at this critical time we are deeply concerned about the lack of meaningful engagement from experienced site and central office leaders those with real world experience running public schools and central offices to ensure that the impact of any cuts are more than just numbers on a page a one size fits all staffing model and uniform reduction to central office support are not students centered or diversity driven. two of our core values. >> thank you.

>> good evening dr. su commissioners student delegates and mr. steele. my name is myra quadros and i am the current principal of new traditions elementary school and the vice president of usf. >> welcome to our new commissioners. i was able to attend your swearing in ceremony at that very inspired and motivate and motivated by your words last friday. i hope that your actions align with your words. i'm here tonight to say that we as site and central office leaders understand large budget cuts are necessary and we want to partner with the executive board and central office making these decisions. so budget cuts are done with us and not to us. we have asked since the start of school to be partners and yet we are still anxiously awaiting to be invited to any conversation. please invite school and

central office leaders to the table so we can together discuss the best way to allocate our budget. it will be devastating to receive our budgets late on a friday night with no opportunity to share our school context and the moneys we already have secured to supplement the school needs and bite us. we want to work with you and you are welcome to my site any time. >> thank you. thank you. >> hi everyone. good evening. my name is autumn brown garibay. i am a parent at leonard flynn elementary school. my kids are in fourth grade in kindergarten and i also have the privilege of serving as the pta president at flynn. flynn is a school on the mission bernal border serving 45% english language learners and 70% socio economically disadvantaged students. i'm here to share about flynn because it's critical for the board to understand the needs and strengths of schools across our diverse city. flynn is a microcosm of both the challenges and the opportunities within esposti flynn families are deeply committed to student success from creating parent led

tutoring to ensure our students are passing the lpac to advocating and replacing fixtures for clean water at our school we have stepped up and we have made sure that our grassroots efforts are making a difference for our students. what i want to urge is a few things in my 10s left operations need to be on on point student centered budgeting needs to be happening proven strategies to make sure that our bi literate students are passing their classes and also a clear focus and vision. thank you. thank you. hello. hello. hello. my name is susan fong wong. i'm the parent of three alumni from sfi usd they started alice fong you and they graduated from balboa washington and then lo but anyway i'm happy to see new faces and hopefully new thinking at the school district and i feel that at the minimum the school district needs to work together to right the

fiscal ship and to improve educational outcomes. we really need more uh high dosage tutoring. we need i think an outside audit of just everything fiscally that the school district does. it needs to be able to generate useful data like if somebody's struggling with a student is struggling with reading then they should have scores and sort of real time to say okay they didn't um uh master some parts of their phonics. um so anyway there's a lot of things the school districts do better but i'm hopeful that uh in the future we can all work together. >> thank you. thank you. have seven more cards. well recall the names that you can line up meredith dodson, janelle blackwell, stephanie falcons, dean victor ward. laura kennedy. virginia marshall and then frank lara as well.

hi superintendent sue board commissioners i'm meredith dodson, mom of two of us kiddos executive director of as a parent coalition and organizer for equitable and excellent public schools. um i'm going to shorten my generic comment so i can just comment on some of the things we're hearing from the school leaders. but we've a brand new year before us and with it a whole new opportunity for us of us to get things back on track for our students. we know there are huge obstacles facing us and we're hopeful for the new board that you're going to get things under control. we know things won't be easy and we're already hearing this week from families about terrible cuts that are starting to make their way to schools. and so now i would also add that it's very concerning to hear from these schools state leaders and principals that they have not been incorporated into the planning process around the school staffing model. we know a lot of work was done last year around the still school staffing model but it's

a different year, different leadership different board and these state leaders can't just be thrown something that is old from a former superintendent who you kicked out or sorry who left and they need to be incorporated and we need to hear from them what they need. >> thank you. thank you. hi, my name is stephanie falken stein. i'm a parent of a third grader at jacquot elementary. as dr. maria su noted we are just a few weeks away from the enrollment deadline before this deadline i ask that s.f. usd makes a statement to reduce the continued harm done to schools that were on the closure list. we have current and potential families afraid of the future of equal if s.f. u.s. resumes the closure process i would assume that it would truly be focused on future stronger schools and actual neighborhood schools. it would not as in the case of your quote close a blue ribbon school send students to lower performing schools academically and social and social

emotionally across all student levels and vocal groups so a less equitable schools forced families into cars and neighborhoods where more than half of households don't have a car and over 80% of students walk to school. we also assume it would not eliminate community schools for four adjacent neighborhoods of hill russian hill upper chinatown and north beach. >> thank you. >> hi. um so now blackwell and i just want to welcome to the new board members the three and congratulation and congratulate um alexander um, the fourth with and um doctor sue and um it's comforting to know that you um, going to make sure that uh, the money whatever is going on there is not going to affect natalie that we will the students will get what they need and that's what i want to go back to student outcome make

sure that there will be student outcome and make sure that um i'm hearing about the um the money and i'm hoping that this money be like whatever money you do use it wisely not waste any money from last year from consulting that didn't need to be have consultants not waste that kind of money to make sure that students with iep and five offers do not be um fallen by the cracks because i do have a son that graduated in 2024. i don't want that happened to him and also i have a son here now who is a fifth grader and i want to make sure that he gets the resources they need along with the san francisco public thank you. good evening board and superintendent my name is victor ward as you probably know about one and a half years ago the san mateo county board of education sued big tech instagram facebook

tiktok youtube. but social media isn't going anywhere. people love it. students love it. even if something like tik tok gets banned, people will just go to a different platform. my suggestion is that educators offer an alternative a social media just for schools just for students. my company cruz media provides just that and under the umbrella of proposition 28 we have built a digital video yearbook where students get to upload their own pictures, their own videos, their own memories and we built this platform specifically so that it could help both schools and districts generate their own revenue. after this meeting i hope to briefly speak with you superintendent sue just to find out whom i can follow up with. >> thank you. thank you. we may be out of order.

>> i don't know. okay. hello. i'm laura. i am a parent to a kindergartner at york. well i wanted to share a sign that my kindergartner drew. it says we love you. whoa. and in celebration of public schools here that he and his other kindergartner classmates are now reading books as a daily assignment including english language learners. we love you. well we love our public schools. and so i want to share a quick welcome basket with some additional information you may not know about yet. well you already heard that we are a blue ribbon and national blue ribbon school. we're one of six elementary schools in the district to receive this recognition in the last five years it's not only for high academic performance but also at closing the achievement gap. number two, we're also one of six elementary schools across fs usd that is supporting students with special moderate to extensive needs. in our special day classes we have 20 to 30% of our students outside of that on ieps and lastly jacquot is short for jacquot alternative elementary

school. we have a rich history as being a small school by design. we are not under enrolled. we are small by design and it's working. thank you so much. thank you. good evening to commissioner alexander. the returning commissioners welcome to the new commissioners. we love your swearing in last week to serve as the superior superintendent maria sue. thank you for inviting reverend brown and me. we had a vip seat and we loved it. thank you so much to mr. justin steele who does all the hard work behind the scenes and to our student delegates i have a special place in my heart for student delegates. >> i love every word you say at every board meeting continue when i'm here to represent to talk about my supervisor who will lilydale i have a blessing and a privilege to have and an educator extraordinaire as my supervisor for several years

here and as of usd i went with him all over the city from malcolm x where he taught a weekly math class to the students who lived in public housing to a law high school where andy ishibashi hired him to work with african-american students at lowell high school. if there was an issue on the weekend we went there as well. he was my support person for the african-american honor roll for 16 years and i said if i got a call from a parent who said mrs. marshall my child and special ed they need the services for the ceremony. he was the last one. i can't do it. call whoever he said don't worry about virginia. i got it. so i have this bell in my hand. you know if on the playground but also in the african-american community this bill means a lot to us before social media, before acts and twitter and facebook when something happened in our town my grandpa will go to our small town and ring the bell at the church. so i'm going to ring this bell for whoville ideal and is all educator i'm going to ring this

bell for who will i bell a wonderful son a devoted husband, a loving father and grandfather. >> and i'm going to ring this bell for whoville ideal who enrich our lives so much here in san francisco and the bay area as an extra ordinary educator. >> yeah we do. >> and we say thank you to whoville ideal his daughter is online back in maryland watching this and who i want you to know she said your comments brought tears to her eyes so thank you so much. they're going to have a celebration in may who will love to learn beta breakers? so please sign up for beta breakers. i'm going to walk it and then she will have a celebration of life that through a weekend as well. i will keep you posted. brown is online to make his comments virtually thank you. >> think it was mark thank you miss me and before i thank you again miss marshall and before you go frank, i just wanted to

say to remind folks that us f our educators union has a provision in their contract that actually provides additional time to address the board so they don't adhere to the one minute time limit for the us staff representative. once once frank is done then we'll move to online public comment for approximately 15 minutes. go ahead mr. lara thank you for president evening and thank you for that that the virginia marshall city has a lot of beautiful history. evening commissioners welcome to the new board as well paying a lot of respects to you and particularly those who have pledged their commitment to quality public schools and supporting our educators. i do kind of want to apologize because i would prefer to spend my time as an educator over ten years and also leading the union the last four years as the executive vice president of usf to offer some context and maybe some words of wisdom but unfortunately that's not the case. so i apologize for my tone. i do want to express the

concerns over the potential hire of another position for central office not because it's an issue of money. i know we keep raising that this district does tens of millions of dollars of unaccountable funds into construction and has done that and we've seen that with the notes. so it's not the issue that i do want to emphasize to our family what the big concern is the spending of political capital how much it takes to advocate for this particular resource. families should highlight that and should be aware of that that political capital is not being spent on your families, not political capital when we're drowning in the classroom that's not what's being spent. i want to note the silence around the issue of the staffing coming from the state advisors state appointed advisory. i've been to every board meeting i listen to it and everything a board meeting there was press release after press release about the financial situation about how this is plummeting and every

time we tried to reach out to the district leadership about cost it was like the state advisor you know again we've mentioned we said it's not an impartial thing because all of a sudden leaks would come out to the media would express the concerns silence over this particular issue. so i point again to the political capital that families and students should be aware of where it's spent and where it's not spent. our families must know that what we've been advocating from us standpoint is staffing the classroom because that's who serves the students. you can't come in i'm telling you as a spanish language teacher right now there's 140 staff hired in the district families has demanded language programs 70 of them 50% of them are an emergency credential. you're not going to fix language programs with one individual. this is a problem of leading a district to make sure people are held accountable. you don't do that by switching out one individual to the new board. again, we appreciate the

campaign that you ran and i think the very need is an honesty to stay out of politics and i don't think it's fair neither does usf think it's fair that this vote get presented to you because it's a very political one. we need honesty. we need the leadership and even when the honesty is against us individually if the union's making mistakes let us be accountable right? you tell us what we're doing wrong. tell us where you need the collaboration. but what we don't want to see what is extremely frustrating to see is what we see in happening at the frustration at a city level with a new election. right. we're now seeing that type of politic move into the district, right? so let's be clear whatever your vote is tonight, stay true to your principles straight through. i've been a teacher here ten years. everybody talks about a new i've been seeing 4 or 5 superintendents right. as much as we want things to be

different, they stay the same. it takes a lot of courage to move in an opposite direction. so again thank you so much for your time. let's keep building with our families. >> let's keep building with our students. we deserve better. >> thank you. so correction we have one last in-person non agenda, correct? mr. steele correct. and then we'll move to online for 15 minutes. yeah. joanna when hi. >> thanks for coming back to me. i want to urge you to develop staffing models with these four things in mind support staff such as social worker student advisors and librarians are critical for schools to support student wellbeing reduce attendance barriers and help the district reach its third grade literacy goals. these are critical positions at every school of every size. smaller schools enable many schools for students to thrive as we've heard tonight from a lot of families that you know and those students require full time support every day not only part of a day or on certain days of a week. you've heard a lot about how once this staffing model is not

going to serve our diverse schools. i completely agree. please give our schools the autonomy to decide what positions that they want to staff with their budget allocations. we have different needs and different sources of funds available to us so give us the flexibility to meet our most critical needs. third size allocations must reflect the funds that san francisco voters dedicated to teachers librarians and art and music teachers. the district made cuts to these positions the school year even though pe funds do not come out of the general budget, please restore the funding that remains available for these critical positions. and lastly thank you. please allow peatos to continue to fill these gaps that are otherwise going to fall through the cracks when s.f. fails to provide critical positions regardless of where the money comes from. >> thank you. students suffer. thank you. thank you. that concludes in-person public comment present i was going to we're now moving on to virtual public comment. please raise your hand if you care to speak. a gentle reminder each speaker will have one minute. can we please have that

repeated in spanish and chinese ? why not just first of all i want to get some comment that a public thank you vanessa. hi. can you hear me? >> yes we can hear you. happy new year. this is vanessa, the executive director for parents of public schools of san francisco. i wanted to express my congratulations to the principal and dependents for the remarkable achievements that she just noted. i think it's really important that the superintendent when she does her introductory update include what are the

update around student achievement that are happening because there's a lot of good stuff happening in our public schools right now i'm in d.c. talking to other city leaders about school closures and i know that that's not going to happen and sap usd but one of the things that i'm really concerned about is not working with principals on their budgets. i have been a principal and i know that it is probably the most hardest job to do and really encourage the new superintendent to collaborate with the principals on the budget for next year as well as provide infrastructure around immigration. we have imminent threat for immigration from the trump administration and i encourage dr. sue to organize a workgroup so that we're monitoring what is happening within our school sites. thank you. thank you, shula shula sara.

hi. >> my name is sarah wilson and i'm the parent of a fifth grader in the district and also work for seiu local 10 to 1. we represent custody ins clerks school secretaries, school nutrition workers and i was also an appointee for seiu to the district advisory committee on resource alignment. >> i'm just want to speak about the new administrator position that's before you and welcome to the new board members and focus on two quick things one

is this is about resources. you all know about the budget deficit. we've all been told 500 layoffs. it's unclear how the the financial advisors think that this is okay to create this new administrator position. the district has committed to the public not to contribute to central office administrator bloat and i want to echo what jerry all months have said. >> we did hear that on the district advisory committee as well but so one has to do with the resources and the budget the hard decisions folks referred to earlier that are going to have to be made. but the other thing sara, i'm so sorry to have to interrupt you that is your time. thank you. thank you. reverend brown.

>> good evening mr. chairman. members of the board the superintendent and to the audience i'm sorry that i'm not able to be there this evening. however i just would not i didn't mean to fail to not technology say to you i want to thank the superintendent again for her commitment to help this african american community deal with the egregious i acts of hate crimes and downright bigotry and hate well activity in our school district this is uncivilized is not becoming of this city and i know that we are going to get more allies who will fulfill that good role

that golden says do unto others as you would have them do unto you. next i want to acknowledge the outstanding incredible services one of lord of the board and excuse me but reverend, thank you so much. reverend brown. thank you. thank you, tom. yeah hi. my name is tom. i'm a special ed teacher and so is my wife in the district and we have two kids in the district as a special education teacher we're always told give students what they need right? if we don't have the minutes right now and we're going to work as a team to figure it out, give them what they need this new position i don't see how it's going to help students. what would help students is if

we don't cut teachers paraprofessionals and try to find these easy way out when you later debate these topics are you going to be with the students and the staff or saying trust us, trust us, it's too late to trust when you put it in backhanded like this. i've been checking the agenda and it comes out but i don't have time to read it when i'm teaching and trying to be a parent. so please not just vote with your conscience but vote for the students and those that are less fortunate. thank you. thank you, alison hi. >> my name's allison and i'm a high school parent in the district and i wanted to thank superintendents too for your statement on the sanctuary district and also for sending a district representative to the immigrant rights commission yesterday. i really look forward to hearing more from this board on

how you'll be addressing incoming threats from this new administration the threats to our immigrant families, the promised cuts to adhd and the threats to our trans kids such as today when the house voted to ban trans students from sports. i know that you are under pressure to only discuss test scores at these meetings but you all know that kids can't get high test scores when they're literally scared for their lives. and secondly, assuming the state fiscal advisor is listening, please give the sec their staff member so our next generation of leaders can do their work. thank you. thank you, cliff. hi cliff. yea there are superintendents sue and commissioners. happy new year. what's going on? my name is christie and i'm a

parent of two elementary school students and a board member with the seven school parent coalition. >> i just want to acknowledge and thank you all for taking on this critical role at this time especially given the status of usd. again, we are faced with many adaptive challenges that have a direct impact on on our staff on our students and i'm really invested in making sure that our district is one of the best where every student at the district can thrive. so look forward to hearing more about the progress over the next few months to ensure that student outcomes are at the center of your decision making processes. thank you. thank you, charles. charles yes?

i'm sorry as a taxpayer i have some comments. i welcome the new members and i hope they bring fiscal stewardship first admit higher taxes are coming when the politics get difficult. is a ballot measure planned for the november 2025 ballot for a $4 billion bond. second what percentage of the people who take early retirement are will get laid off this spring will be classroom teachers? it's 100% i bet and that fact will be hidden from the public while the board of education rubber stamps another position for life at 55548 third please do not tell teachers or staff to interfere in ice deportation actions by armed federal agents people should not be forced to break federal law to be employed as opposed fourth please do not make this next

four years about trump a balanced budget and student outcomes should be your focus. >> thank you for your time. thank you. rex. rex go ahead please. rhonda hi, this is rex. can you hear me? yes, i'm you want me to wait and rhonda, i'm going to call you right after i call rex. go ahead please, rex. >> okay. i'm so sorry i was on you. rex ridgeway. i am on the students success fund advisory council and i just want to step forward to say that how they have come up

with the person to fill the position of the communications governess how may paying she was part of the student six she was part of the mayor's stabilization team when they agreed took over the $8.4 million and allocated students excess funds from last year and hung they paying was part of that group that made sure that on december 12th that that $8.4 million was released to the to be able to be apply to buy the school sites. so as we speak now every school site could apply for either 100,000 $150,000 that $8.4 million that was something that hung they paying was part of making sure that happened also when she was at the mayor's department she would champion proposition j proposition j passed and now no student success funds can be touched by anybody else other than for students for the school sites.

so i'm just here to say that i have dealt with her and she has proven to me that she can do the job whether or not the the position if you guys vote for it. thank you. i'm so sorry to interrupt you but is your time. thank you. rionda so good evening board commissioners and welcome to the new commissioners and superintendents to and to our student delegate and everyone in attendance tonight. we're calling in tonight to offer our sincere condolences to hoover liddell and the family and to express our sincere gratitude for how he championed blacks, students families and educators and in his legacy we ask how are we recruiting retaining like educators and black central office leaders? also we like to know how we are going to keep black students and students in general as a focus going forward. we understand that we are in a

time of budget crisis. so if we can please ensure that everything that we do is student centered and focused. thank you. thank you chris. i'm chris class a sped teacher and department head at washington high school and unfortunately my google doc is not accessible so i'm going to have to do this live but i'm on a time limit so the district is asking that you approve a new position with a salary of over $200,000. i find it discouraging that the district is adding this expensive position when just today i was informed that the district is considering sending out pink slips to assistant principals and every school needs their assistant principal they attend ieps ensure that educator evaluations take place on schedule, support students and communicate directly with families.

well this new position inflate the high level district's spending that is taking resources away from schools and deepening the district's fiscal woes. we're also cuts planned how many educators will be pink slips continue to fund redundant high level administrative positions. our sites know what they need. why is control of state budgets being exerted by people not directly serving those communities? how is this centralized district control community based and student centered? we need fully staffed schools not cuts. >> thank you, eliot. >> hi there. my name is ali tam tim asset parents. i'm a parent of two as of use usd students as well as a teacher in the district. i'm glad to see that the boe has been taking the current budget crisis more seriously lately with the new commissioners coming on board i am hopeful for further thoughtful progress i also want to remind the commissioners that they represent the voting public, public and most importantly the

students and parents that rely on public education. >> thank you. thank you, kate. and finally uncle brandi and then josephine. brandi, go ahead please. hi. my name is brandi bachmann public school parent. i'm tired of families being gaslit and told we have to deal with hard choices and the prospect of educators being laid off at school sites at the same time when the superintendent wants to hire another direct report to work in the central office i notice the person who's being considered this this position is a former direct report to mayor london breed and mayor larry did not bring her on to his team as if he was giving her a $275,000 a year job. seems like cronyism and the cronyism and pushing politics in san francisco or what failing or san francisco students families and educators that was on full display last

week in the board of its swearing in ceremony was for the first time since i can remember during the day at city hall instead of it and said he was city school so that our families and educators can attend this sends a message to the growing disconnect between the school board and the community. to the board please steward our tech staff this ethically and vote no on this appointment. the buck stops with you and you should not be a rubber stamp also so the public aware is aware the san francisco coalition is. thank you. i'm so sorry to have to interrupt you. that is your time. thank you. josephine. >> hi. my name is josephine zhao. congratulations to commissioners who link up to and rate. i like to call to your attention that emergency preparedness our schools are not prepared for a fire and other disasters just like right after the passing of the e responsible proposition to close the great highway we are

experiencing two earthquakes in a week as will nami warning in an hour a fire in one month cutting the website in danger news just said that the city agency labs to inspect one third of the school on emergency preparedness if fail to include 26 moments because they didn't know they existed. ank you. thank you president alexander that does conclude the amount of time allotted. >> thank you everyone and thanks so much for everyone who made comments. we're now going to move on to part d the annual organizational meeting. like i said, we move this from where it had been previously in the agenda and so this part of the agenda has three parts the re adoption of the board of education rules and procedures

approving the ethics and conflict of interest statement and then the election of board officers. but i'd like to open it by echoing the welcome that was given by several others to our new commissioners to my new colleagues commissioner ray. commissioner gupta and commissioner huling. i'm really excited to work with all three of you and glad that you've joined the board and just feel like we have a really strong team all collectively here and i am just feeling optimistic and hopeful for our work together. so let's get to work and let's let's first adopt our rules and procedures so as stipulated in the board policy nine 9100 the board salary adopt its rules and rules and procedures at the first regular board meeting of each year. thus may i hear a motion in a second for annual re adoption of the board of ed rules and procedures motion second all right are there comments or any

suggested edits or anything from board members? >> mr. fisher yes. thank you very much for. first of all i want to recognize the work that our previous board did and especially under our previous board previous board president jenny lamb to bring us into the student outcomes focused governance to really align us around student outcomes, be more student centered in the work we did. having said that, in rewriting a lot of our board rules we swung our pendulum very, very far in the other direction from what our meetings used to be. there are some really i think great benefits to that and i think we've seen some concerns how we we keep hearing over and over that community members want additional ways to engage with us as a board we had for a

while last semester our fiscal and operational health committee we heard in public comment tonight some concern about the some of the things that are on consent agenda and there's no real place to address a lot of this with the community right now we have millions of dollars on our consent agenda that we're just going to vote either yes or no with no discussion because we don't have a facilities committee and we are in a time of a huge budget crisis where we really need to be doing a lot to rebuild the public trust. so i'm hoping that we as a board as we as we vote to as we vote for these policies we really have a lot of reflection. we need to do to be stronger governors of the work. so i'm hoping that the appetite is amongst more than just me to

maybe form an ad hoc committee on governance something to take a look at how we're doing business what's working what's not, how we can better reflect the values of the community, how we can really make sure that our budget is working for our students and every decision we're making is student focused and i think there's a lot of opportunity with this new board to do that work. so i'm going to vote yes with the understanding that i think we have a lot of work to do and these aren't quite what we need but they are a really good start in getting us there. thanks commissioner fisher and just for the new board members and the public that we do have in our in our board rules the ability to form an ad hoc committee and as she referenced i think that would be the way if we wanted to make detailed revisions to these policies would be to create a committee. those committees have to be time limited. they have to have a clear outcome and they were appointed by board leadership for a period of time and then then the committee would report back with the product of that work

for the board to consider. so that would be kind of the methodology if folks wanted to make any kind of substantive changes. are there other comments before we vote on this one discretionary. >> thank you commissioner alexandra i also would be interested in revisiting some of our board rules and policies and procedures and talking you know, discussing whether it's with a subcommittee or otherwise among all of us together which ones we might want to update or change in order to be more responsive and effective. thank you. any other comments? great. well it's well that our board leadership take that into consideration moving forward so with that we'll have a roll call vote please. you're still thank you. student delegate montgomery yes . student delegate lamb. yes. mr. fisher. yes. commissioner gupta. yes.

commissioner huling. yes. mr. kim. yes. commissioner ray. yes. vice president wiseman ward. yes. president alexander. yes sir. thank you. all right. the next item is approving our ethics and conflict of interest statement. so also as part of our new approach to governance we adopted a new ethics and conflict of interest statement. we actually created an ad hoc committee on ethics and that committee with which the two of us run research different the local and state and other ethics and conflict of interest requirements. and we created this statement that i think everyone's had a chance to review and we now have it as a as a practice and policy to review this and vote on it each year at the organizational meeting and then to ask board members to sign it. so are there any. >> well first of all may i have a motion and a second on

this item? so moved second. >> great. thank you. are there comments from board members? seeing none. a roll call vote please. great. student delegate montgomery yes. student olga lamb. yes. mr. fisher. yes. commissioner gupta. yes. mr. huling. yes. mr. kim. yes. mr. ray. yes. vice president wiseman ward. yes. president alexander. yes, sir. thank you. and mr. steele, are you going to collect our. should we pass these to you? i will. okay great. well maybe we can give them to you after reading them too. okay. all right. >> and then the the more exciting part of the annual organizational meeting is the el as a board we elect our president and vice president on an annual basis. the way our election procedure procedures work is that any commissioner may nominate

another commissioner or themselves. if a commissioner is nominated by a colleague they have that commissioner who got nominated has to accept i mean they don't have to accept but they have to accept in order to be considered sorry. and nominations do not require a second. commissioners may vote for themselves. once nominations are received then we'll have some time to make comments and then we will vote. just a reminder that our rules and our new rules say that if that in order to be elected at this meeting board officers need to receive or receive a supermajority or five of the seven votes if for some reason that didn't happen we would need to revote. if it was a43 vote we would have to revote at the next meeting. so i now declare the nominations open for the president of the board of education for the year 2025. are there nominations? i i'd like to nominate phil kim.

phil served as a dedicated member of staff and courageously stepped up into serve as a board member in the middle of a tumultuous time. i appreciate both his enthusiasm and every time you know as he helps create something. i've heard staff educators and families ask for more institutionalized processes procedures. so with that i nominate phil kim as president and if there are no further nominations seeing none i declare nominations closed. are there any comments before we vote? commissioner fisher thank you for the nomination. commissioner gupta. before we vote i just wanted to thank both current president alexander and current vice president weissman ward for your amazing leadership this year through i think it the phrase unprecedented times is

going to be on everyone's bingo card this year. but if it were a drinking game we would all need liver pumping after last year. so i just wanted to thank you both very much for your dedication. the i think you put in enough hours together for like ten board presidents and ten board vice presidents and through everything through all the adult caused drama you kept students at the center in all of your decision making and we're really level headed and just i don't think we would be in the more stable and less chaotic position if it hadn't been for the two of you working together to get us here. so i just really wanted to recognize your work and for you president alexander to do that in an election year and with

all the work that you do on behalf of the immigrant community too did you get any sleep at all? um but i i really appreciate everything so thank you both. >> thank you. and and and i just want to say i'm really grateful that commissioner kim well, actually i didn't ask do you accept the nomination? i forgot to ask that part. he may he might after your comments he may reject it but i'm hoping he'll accept it now i. >> yes. >> okay. okay. and thank you for your willingness to serve in what is as as she indicated can be a very challenging role. but i think you know, as a board you know, i think again i think we're really well positioned to do this work together and to work together and have strong leadership. so are there other comments before we vote on president i don't know go so i'll make a comment about commissioner kim

and then a comment about president current president alexander. so i want to echo sort of the thanks from president alexander about your willingness to to step up into a role that is time consuming and challenging and will require a lot. so the fact that you are willing to give your time and energy to the board and to the district is is really important. so thank you. and it's we only actually serve together and this this is my second stint as vice president. i like to think of myself as a being in the caretaker role sometimes but it was there was a lot that went on after the then president met how many resigned and you moved from vice president to president and i transitioned into vice president a lot of really, really hard decisions a lot of hard conversations and sometimes hard conversations between the two of us. and one of the things that i think i was most grateful for was our ability to engage in

dialog and differ and always know that the end of the day we respected each other and each other's opinions deeply and i think that those qualities are hard to find especially in a space that can be so politicized and so about ego and so i i'm really grateful to have had the opportunity to to work with you in leadership. thank you. likewise very much. likewise. other comments at the time when everyone the an senate president it's yeah everything is unprecedented so likewise just to acknowledge as well there have been incredible leaders before us sitting on this dais who have done incredible work to bring our district to where we are today. one of those people i do think president alexander you um we

too had many calls where we exchanged lively conversation and every single time without a doubt one thing i found so incredible about our working relationship is that you've you've looked at me you've acknowledged me and though we might have disagreed or we just saw things differently i think there was always a uh at the end of the day an acknowledgment that we were in it for the right things and we were aligned in wanting to do what's right and so thank you for your leadership and speak separately about you. well and that's why and and commissioner kim that's why i'm excited that you're willing to step up in this role and about your leadership because i do think i think differences of opinion and differences of view are actually a strength when when people can do so with respect and mutual in in relationship and trust. right. and i think that's that's what

i've experienced with my colleagues my career. >> i and that's what i've experienced and working with with you and with my other colleagues on the board and i just hope as a board we can really build on that and continue that. i think we all talked those of us who spoke at the swearing in on friday talked a lot about unity and i've actually in the last year really experienced that on this board in a powerful way and i think i'm excited to to build on that and continue that with all of you so thank you. and do you want to say okay if i might um, president alexander i just want to say i have really really enjoyed getting to know you better over the last month to year and i have been just incredibly impressed by your dedication to the students of san francisco to the educators of san francisco to communities in san francisco that are not always heard and

your dedication is also matched by an incredible deep institutional knowledge of as of usd and i think that that knowledge comes from love not just experience that you really have gone to incredible lengths to get to know the city, the school, the systems and how to pull different organizational levers in order to best serve our students and educators and schools. and so i look forward to continuing to work with you on the board and i hope that you find it in your heart to continue to give the new leadership your expertise and experience and guidance as we move forward as a unified board . thank you. definitely definitely. all right. let's vote and forgive me if i missed it. do we move in? second item we don't need to we

don't know. just nominations and then yeah, got it right. thank you. he accepted. i heard him. >> he did accept it. yeah, i did hear that he cleared that up. >> great. all right. so for a kim campus president of student delegate montgomery . >> yes. to delegate limb. yes. commissioner fisher. yes. mr. gupta. yes. mr. huling. yes. commissioner kim. yes. mr. ray. yes. vice president was one word yes. president alexander. yes. >> seven nice relations. excellent. phil kim has been elected president of the board of education for 2025. >> congratulations. >> i now declare nominations are open for the vice president of the board of education for the year 2025. vice president wiseman as current vice president i am thrilled to be able to nominate commissioner huling as

potential future vice president. same potential because i know we need to vote on it. i believe that commissioner huling will be an excellent part of the boys leadership team. she is thoughtful. she is incredibly smart. okay. that's just me keeping her humble. she's wicked smart. she's insightful. she is committed to dialog and consensus and during these challenging times both locally and nationally i feel confident and a sense of calm knowing that commissioner huling who is so fiercely committed to protecting and respecting the rights of those who have been historically marginalized and disenfranchized will be at the helm. so from one public school mom to another public school mom from one social justice attorney to another social justice attorney, i hope that you will accept this nomination and to my fellow board members i hope you will join me in voting for commissioner huling as vice president.

>> are there other seeing no other than oh, there is another nomination? no. okay. your nominees no, no. i'm going to see if there's any other nominations seeing none now would you like to accept this nomination? thank you. i would accept the generous nomination. excellent. further comments. were you going to make a comment, commissioner? good. i was and i just like to second everything that commissioner weissman ward said. i had the great pleasure of working closely with commissioner huling over the last 7 or 8 months and commissioner huling is one of the most dedicated people i've seen to our students, to our families to our educators. whip-smart has as i indicated and an incredible asset and i feel the team of soon to be president kim as well as commissioner huling as vice president will be quite a duo with everything that commissioner kim brings with

his knowledge of of s.f. you'll see in everything that commissioner huling brings with her knowledge especially in these times where we have to protect our communities to this role and i hope that that serves as a complementary to a much like and and my thanks and gratitude to both of you. vice president wiseman ward and you president alexander for everything you've done during this tumultuous time and always keeping an open air your your yes okay. um i am thrilled to be working potentially alongside you uh, vice president huling vice president elect huling. nevertheless and wanted to just express my sincere gratitude to commissioner wiseman award of vice president wiseman board and uh, there is a unique time i feel like we're in right now both in our country and our

city and there are few people that i can think of that i would turn to for pretty much all things and it might actually be you sitting next to me right now but your your calm and your steady hand uh, has has really kind of shifted energies and rooms and that i think has has done our boa urd at times where things felt chaotic and and so thank you for your steadfast leadership and your focus and your generosity of time and in knowing that you are doing incredible things on behalf of immigrant communities and families and yet you still make the space to serve in this capacity and so thank you so much for your service. thank you. >> yes. thank you so much. vice president what's been word as i said earlier it was an honor and privilege to serve in leadership with you. all right. if there's no other uh, comments we will vote.

thank you for jaime huling as vice president student delegate montgomery yes. student delegate. lamb yes. mr. fisher yes. commissioner gupta yes. commissioner huling yes. mr. kim yes. commissioner ray yes. vice president west board yes. president alexander yes i when i graduate and i announce that jamie huling has been elected vice president of the board of education for the year 2020. all right. we will now take a brief recess so that we can switch seats and we'l call this meeting back to order i that loud enough okay yeah. oh i want to begin by just sharing a few words. thank you again to commissioner alexander and commissioner wiseman award for your stewardship of the board the

last four months and thank you to my colleagues for your trust in me. i'm honored to do my part in leading this board and in partnership with our fabulous superintendent dr. sue and in collaboration with our families educators, staff and students as a proud product of k-12 public schools, i have had the honor of serving as an educator for over a decade as a teacher and leader at the local, state and national levels including here in the us and it is a privilege to be here today and to serve this great city, our district and this board. we have a lot of work ahead of us very challenging work that will require us to double down on our vision and values and i'm hopeful that together we will continue to make the necessary shifts towards financial stability operational excellence and most importantly to improve student outcomes. it's going to take all of us clear eyed and focused committed to doing what it takes to build a world class public school system that our students and families deserve.

we have a responsibility to protect our immigrant and undocumented families to surround our lgbtq students with support to attend to the academic and social emotional needs of our young people and close persistent opportunity gaps. and we must do this in partnership with our educators administrators or our friends at city hall the many community partners who are showing up for our kids every day and always centering our families and students. i know that we can come together to do right by our students and families and i thank you again for your trust and support in this and i'm excited to do this work together. so thank you. with that said we will move forward to item g1251-1 for esp one approval of a new position head of communications and governance can i have a motion in a second please? so moved second and at this time i'll call on the superintendent or designee to

read into the record well before i handed over to our associate superintendent amy baer. i wanted to just take a few minutes to share some words regarding this particular item which is the approval of a new position named head of communications and governance. i want to say that over the last three months as i have gone out and visited schools and had conversations with educators and families and young people, you've heard me say that my three priorities are to balance our budget, make sure that our operation of health are the best and strongest and of course rebuild trust with our community during all these visits i've heard very consistently the need for us to improve our community engagement and communications and to deepen our collaboration as a school district with our community.

as the district continues to invest in our ambitious goals to improve student outcomes, i am excited to work with this new newly minted board and our leadership i am bringing forward this position as a crucial next step to implementing the district's vision values, goals and guardrails i want to make it clear that this position will not increase the number of staff in the superintendent's office nor will it increase the budget in the superintendent office we will be using unspent funds from vacant positions that are currently in the superintendent's office for this position. this position will support our governance work by creating better alignment across multiple touchpoints within and outside the district particularly as it relates to

our goal guardrails one and two and five guardrail one which requires the superintendent to work with our community as i as we make difficult decisions together. guardrail five requires the superintend to collaborate with the city and the state and federal agencies and nonprofit agencies as we make difficult decisions together. i recognize that this is a sensitive time for this district as we grapple with resource constraints. that is why i am very, very intentional about making sure that this position will be budget neutral and once again not increasing positions within the superintendent's office nor increasing the budget of the superintendents office. i will also be providing additional information in the

coming months about how i am going to restructure and reorganize the superintendent office as well as creating better efficiencies and increasing efficiencies within within the district. we have been in consultation with our state advisor and i am grateful for their support and advice on this proposal. i want to be clear that as we embark on this position we did engage in an open recruitment process that associates superintendent amy baer will share a little bit more about but i am really excited that we are able to bring back very high quality former staffer of staff used to come back and continue to provide the support that our school district needs all have heard in public comment that the person in for item for the next item we have

identified homi pang as the selected candidate for this position and as you have also heard that she is clearly a trusted and well respected person within our community. hongwei has spent the last decade in community and in public service of san francisco unified school district. she has a very strong track record in the community she has agreed to return and once again it speaks to the fact that we are turning the curve and we are able to bring back very strong high quality leaders in the district. and so i definitely i hope that we will be able to approve this position as well as the contract moving forward. i'm going to hand this over to our associate superintendent amy bear for to share a little additional details about the position. thanks. dr.. so so this item presents for

approval a new position on grade seven of the management salary schedule. it was publicly posted through our regular process. we had an interview process with two rounds and i'm happy to answer any questions about the job description the position or the posting at this time. i'll take comments from the board if you want to just raise your hands i'll keep track of our later commissioner fisher thank you superintendent sue for your comments and i really appreciate your feedback about being budget neutral and as we heard so much during public comment tonight there are a lot of concerns about the impact that this might have on the budget. one of the comments that stood out to me was transparency and accountability and the

vagueness of this job description. so miss baer, i actually would i want to be mindful of my job as a commissioner. i have one employee the superintendent this position reports to you not us. so i don't want to veer into micromanaging it. but as it relates to being able to engage with the community and the impact on our goals and guardrails, if there's any additional additional information that you could share from that frame around the job duties that this person would have and how that would help us move forward with our goals and guardrails and and better communicating with the public i would i would appreciate that. so so yes this person's for regarding the governance part of the job well, i just want to be clear it's although we call it the head of communications and governance, what i really am envisioning is this person supporting our deep community

engagement which is a commitment that i've made to our parents to our families, to our educators. so it's one number two my vision as we move forward in restructuring my superintendent's office is to be forward thinking regarding the roles and duties that i would like for the office to continue one of which is to ensure that we provide additional supports to staff of this board. so to the board office staff this the the this person will provide that supervision and support to the board office staff and hopefully continue to support our student leaders here on staff. let me see if there's other comments or questions from other board members. commissioner ray you know, good

evening and thank you for being here. i really appreciate it. thank you as well, superintendent. so i have a number of questions some of which were partially addressed by the staff responses to questions that commissioners posed when the draft agenda came out. i also have some additional questions that i wanted to ask about and along those lines can you describe for me just i don't know if that attachment has been made present now but in the information i initially received there wasn't a salary schedule attached to the contract and perhaps that's been you know, that's been made available since. but can you describe what the terms are of this position in terms of compensation or severance, for example, if the position were to be eliminated before the end of the 18 month term? and can you also, you know,

give the public a sense of what sort of process you went through to arrive at this? thank you. so i can address the process. i believe that the contract questions would come in the next item of that's fine i can i can hold off on that question until then. so the position was publicly posted for five days which is the minimum requirement we had four applicants and three candidates were determined to have met the minimum qualifications and they were selected for interview. the interview process had a first round panel of four employees of the district of diverse backgrounds and positions as they recommended to candidates to move forward for a second round. round two was conducted by the superintend tonight who did select one finalist so that that addresses the process question before i ask anything else i want to make sure that other folks have an opportunity. >> thank you. i'll come back around if there's more space.

uh commissioner alexander thanks. yeah, i have been as my colleagues i think know a long time skeptic of bloated central office spending, upper management spending. so so i have to admit i approached when i first heard about this i was i was quite skeptical and i guess i just want to i just want to kind of confirm a couple of points but i think i've already heard from the superintendent but one is in terms of the budget neutral aspect of it, especially moving forward like i understand there was vacant positions this year to cover it but in the budget moving forward am i correct that as we go into the 2526 budget you're going to it sounded like you were saying you were going to reorganize reorganize the superintendent's office and as part of that you're going to show us how this is budget neutral or how you're paying for this essentially. is that right? yes, that's correct. okay. because yeah, i think that's a

key piece for me that and i and again to the point of micromanaging my instinct is to to you know if the superintendent is spending x dollars in upper management as long as that amount is not increasing i'm not going to complain about how it's being used. right. if she decides i'd rather have one slightly higher paid person and in place of two slightly lower paid people or whatever it is i guess my gut feeling would be as long as you're spending less then then then then i want to trust your judgment in that. so that's am i correct in the sort of basically that's what's happening here? yes, that's correct. and and once again i just want to emphasize that guardrails guardrails one and five mandates that the superintendent engages with the community to ensure that we have deep community engagement as we make decisions. yeah. and so i want to this is why this position is so crucial for

me to be successful. right? and it's clear that i mean i've worked with hong may pang in her previous role in the district and clear she has a skill set i mean you know for that particular piece of work so i get that 100% but i guess my my guess i'm really looking i just finish by saying i'm really looking forward to seeing kind of that reorg because i think a lot of these questions around our effectiveness as a district actually have to do with um i mean there's obviously the superintendents leadership but then there's this cascading of all the people that report to the superintendent and then sort of the what i've described as the bureaucratic stuff that happens below that which which frankly there's so many good people working in those roles but there's culturally stuck and then the layers of bureaucracy create actually make it harder often in terms of communication. so just looking forward to sort of moving forward hearing how this is going to help contribute to an improvement there. thank you.

student delegate lam once again thank you maria su for your clarification. however i'm still facing some disconnects with this position. i understand that you as our new superintendent could benefit from the head of communications and governance position especially when it comes to giving you understanding of what our district needs and building communication across the board. however, what about the over 48,000 students across the district who are left without teachers? what about the educators who are struggling financially and now have the fear of losing their positions due to the implementation of this position? how is this position going to benefit students with what they need right now? in short, an educator who could be present and administration that could continue supporting students in ways that they should. also what's considered unspent funding if we don't have enough funding to provide for special education students or to even

keep schools open. where is this funding coming from? we as a whole our students are the future educators educators shaping the next generation and most importantly people with needs that have not been met. we're currently in a budget deficit and yet we're putting money into a position that could be used towards student needs. i believe that the attention should be focused on student outcomes rather than another position. and at the end of the day we also have a whole communication team within us of usd. we have the whole board of education sitting here right now we have 60 staff members students, parents and teachers who continuously vocalize which direction we need to be leading. so i believe that we need to finally hear each other's needs whether it regards budget cuts or taking away from students resources and put our focus there. you also mentioned recently that this position could make your term more successful. but what about student success?

i wholeheartedly believe that this position is not needed. >> thank you. student delegate lam for those comments. i hear your frustration and i hear your concerns. i will say that part of this the role of this position is to ensure deeper connection with our local state and federal agencies as well as our philanthropic partners. that's how we're going to be able to work with other jurisdictions and potential philanthropic partners to support our district. however, that is a long term strategy. it takes time to build partnerships with all those entities but we have to start and that's why i believe that this position will will help us move towards that and and i commit to you because i hear the fear as well of just what would that mean for our

classrooms what will that mean for our students? i commit to you to to work really closely with our entire executive team to to turn over every single rock to try to find the resources necessary to keep our classrooms filled. in order to do that we need to work closely with our local state and federal and philanthropic agencies. can i ask one more question? how is this going to benefits students with what they need in the current? once again as we build philanthropic partners to fundraise to bring in more resources and funding to the school district, those those dollars can then translate right into the classrooms. all right. thank you so much. uh commissioner montgomery. commissioner delegate montgomery. thank you.

i don't want to piggyback off what my fellow student delegate said and i just kind of want clarification wise this is sort of more of like a connectivity position to make us more interconnected easily streamline things moving through the district and locally with the city. >> thank you. student delegate for that question yes and no. so i believe that we need we can do much better in ensuring that there is there's there full communication loop happens. i believe that we need to do better and engaging with our different focal populations in the city as well as our students. the other part of the job which is the governance part of the job is that we need to do a better job in building deeper relationships with our our state, federal local philanthropic partners.

and so this role is a combination of two big roles together and and so it's it's not just day to day communications. it's going to be around deep community engagement as well as building those relationships that honestly used truly truly needs right now. and just a really quick follow up. what does that look like as a concrete example moving forward? how do we how would students staff in school sites every day see that then moving forward? well on the governance side it would be making sure that we are in deep regular communications with both our local, state, federal agencies as as we're rolling out say productions to prevent ice raids at our schools or to

advocate for additional dollars at the state level for mental health services or to ensure the that our state level understand the importance of the literacy curriculum that we have here as usd or to know that we need more community schools funding. so that's that's a direct correlation to what this person can do at the state level. that will come down and support us in terms of funding at the within our district and that will go into the classroom. commissioner gupta thank you president kim. so first i want to acknowledge the public comment that's been given. i know sometimes especially having been on the opposite end you speak into the microphone, you're told you have a minute and you you don't know if you're just speaking into the void. so no that we hear you and we

hear that concern and that that concern certainly setsts with us i know for for this position you know i certainly have felt a bit disillusioned in the past with some of the communication and i say that as a parent i feel like we only have to look at the last two months with the resourc alignment initiative and not to pick on our staff. i mean i was on the outside but i mean that that would have taken an expert crisis communicator in order to handle that just given how much it was just you know staff on top of staff on top of staff and i'm just using staff in that. but it just it was not it it was clear that we needed someone that was an expert and i just it was it was disheartening at that time. so i am glad that that there is someone at a at a high skilled

level that that may be coming into this i guess to pick up on the process outputs that you were just talking about. superintendent su how will you know i mean i understand this position will take time to get going to understand if it's being successful but you know how will you know this is successful say within a year or two is there and forgive my ignorance you know, ask for grace as a new commissioner but is there a family survey you envision? is it does it manifest in, you know greater fundraising that that we are receiving as has the fewest. thank you commissioner gupta for the question. well i think number one how will i know right away is that we're hiring a person that has been a former staff and so there is there's very little ramp up time. it's going to be a person who's going to come in and be ready

to go on day one. this person has already established relationships on the city side with lots of our city departments and so there will be there's already deep relationships. so therefore a phone call can be made to a certain department to try to move an obstacle that is that we're hearing from students in the classroom that's happening. we can we can feel that right away in terms of future benchmarks. yes. bringing in additional resources into the district is exactly what we need right now and there are lots of grants that are out there on the state level on the federal level and potential partnerships that we should definitely build in the philanthropic community and we need additional staff to do that. are there any other commissioners who would like to ask a question before i circle back to folks like uh,

commissioner ray i think so, yeah. thank you. i appreciate it. i do have some additional questions. a couple of things i wanted to ask is i understand from what superintendent sue said that this position is not actually going to be addressing governance although that is in the the title of the position if i'm understanding correctly. it is essentially external relations and work with the board office. so i want to make sure that that is a correct understanding of of what the position is. that is correct. okay. so a follow on question to that then relates to the board office and one of the responses that staff provided was that board operations and governance were up to the board specifically the board

president. how does this position can you explain how this position affects the board? like what aspects of it affect the board and what consultation if any was there with members of the board? thank. so my desire for this for this position is moving forward. this position will assume the supervision of the the staff of the board and so as as the staff of the board this person will be working with leadership the new leadership of the board and and in making sure that the board continues to also meet the vision values goals and guardrails. uh when i was thinking about having a creating this position i did talk to our board president who as he shared had concerns and we talked through those concerns which is why we

made sure that the scope of the position was was was that broad, that it was around external affairs it was around ensuring that we were going to be able to meet both guardrails one and guardrails five that we are all going to be held accountable to those two guardrails. may i ask additional questions or see if there's any other other questions as well? just yeah, sure. uh commissioner alexander well i was just going to comment on the board governance piece. i do think there's a that that is one of the areas where i think there's there are some areas where i think i can see that we need additional support at a high level which is why sort of like i said, i have this initial skepticism and still am skeptical of additional upper management positions to be honest. but i think this one and again i'm looking forward to seeing other reductions at that level

and this particular one makes sense to me in the sense of the need for strategic communications both internal and external as the superintend is talking about. but the other piece that was just discussed was around board governance where we've seen one of the things i had the privilege of doing last year was was in as board president talking to board presidents and vice presidents from around the country, particularly ones that were doing the type student outcomes focused governance and seeing the level of capacity they had of staff support not necessarily in lots of people but people that had a high level of understanding to be able to support good effective um, you know governance when i say governance i'm not trying to use some like obfuscating term i mean actually holding the superintendent and staff accountable to students learning more right? i mean that's basically what we're trying to do. and so to have that level of expertise there i think is really valuable bringing in

more resources makes a lot of sense to me and the strategic communication piece of those to me as in my role as board leadership those do seem like areas of growth or need at a high level in the district. um i don't know if that makes sense to colleagues but commissioner fischer i appreciate this conversation everyone um i would like to remind us all and the public as well that we are both a county office of education and an earlier local education agency. it's very rare, very unique. there's only a couple of us in the state and we're the only one of our size and very often districts can go to the county office of ed for the governance help for the you know for for some of the work that this position will hopefully do. we do not have that luxury. and so i think i'm hoping that i talked earlier about the desire for better understanding our governance work and i think

that's part of it. teasing apart our county office of ed functions from our school district functions. um i also do want to raise especially when it does come to our governance structure um when we as the board have the superintendent reporting to us yet our staff that's responsible for carrying out our data requests and and some of the work we have to do actually reports to our employee instead of us in times when there is disagreement between the board and the superintendent not that that's ever happened and not that that's ever happened recently but there can be a little bit of a conflict of interest there and so i really want to name that and so i'm hoping superintendent is part of your reorg and your leadership work will look at that. there are many other districts of our size where instead of board staff reporting to the superintendent's office they report to the legal department for example because we have a dotted line connection to legal and so that could potentially be some of the work the governance work we do is

benchmarking to the need of deliverables if we're going to have an ad hoc committee or anything like that making sure that you know, we benchmark how other effective districts large urban districts um govern effectively you know we should benchmark and see what other successful models are out there that might even help with your leadership remarks as well. thank you. commissioner fisher at this time i just want to ask if there are questions that will help to inform a decision by a board member if not i think we would like to just move forward to a vote. yeah. i'm sorry mr. kent, but i do have a question. would it be possible to thank you synthesize your questions? yes. just for time for time purposes ? absolutely. so looking at this on the agenda and being asked to make a decision on a position to be created and filled in the same board meeting is fundamentally troubling to me as a matter of of good governance and

practice. so i wanted to name that but i think that we want to be as transparent as we possibly can be in order to, you know, inspire the trust and earn the trust of the public. so i'm concerned on that ground. and one of the discrepancies that i've seen, for instance, is that sites have been told that unspent funds go to reduce the deficit and ultimately the staff response on this was that unspent funds were going to be used to fund this position and we do have other folks to do communications and i completely agree that we need better communications. we clearly do. but i'm troubled by how this has come about and by the discrepancy between what school sites are told and then what you know what we are doing at a higher level as well i feel like so i mean i guess i'd like to know what response if any you have on that and whether we're continuing to tell school sites that unspent funds are going to the deficit and how we might account for this position in some other way than just

turning unspent funds over to the position. thank you. so once again the scope of the position is is quite broad. it includes community engagement, communications as well as the relationship the external relationships with our city the state federal agencies as well as philanthropic partners. so the scope of that is quite large. so one and and then in terms of the need for this position as you shared commissioner ray we we need to do a better job at engaging with engaging with our community, engaging with our families engaging with our young people. so that's why i feel like it's really important to have this disposition to make sure that as we hear from our students,

from our families, from our educators what their needs are, we will be then able to translate that to translate that into conversations when this person and hopefully myself will be having at the local level at the state level, at the federal level with philanthropic partners about what we need in this district for us to be successful as this person helped with bringing in additional resources. i believe that those resources will be able to help compensate for the salary of this person. at this time i'd like to move forward to a roll call vote. mr. steele yes, thank you. on the new position head of communications and governance a student delegate montgomery no . student delegate lamb no. mr. fisher no, we do the vice

president present last week? yes. okay. commissioner gupta yes. mr. ewing. >> yes. oh, okay. i'm sorry. you're right. you're right. sorry i got the memo this year. all right. once i got where should i start over or we'll get all right. okay. so commissioner kim excuse me. commissioner ray no. mr. wiseman ward yes. commissioner alexander yes. vice president healey yes. president kim yes. do you have to six eyes passes . thank you. i move to item g2251-1 for speed to implement contracts for district executive head of

governance and communication and i get a motion a second please. so moved. >> seconded. great. i'll turn to the superintendent or designee to read into the record now this item presents for your approval the employment contract for hungry paying as the head of communications and governance the position that you just approved. thank you. pursuant to the brown act before the board actually votes on a employment agreement for any executive position and we are required to orally report the substantive terms of the agreement. and so for the position of head of head of communications and governance the proposed employment agreement sets out two terms starting on january 29th 2025 through june 30th 2026 salary is grade seven step

four of the management salary schedule the work year vacation and health benefits are the same as all management employees and that is the mandatory read out for the for the employment agreement for the head of communications and governance. thank you. and just to note we had excuses to delegates at 9 p.m. so just to note thatts from the board. commissioner fisher um i when i was the chair of the community advisory committee for special education i had the distinct pleasure and honor of working with miss hung mae ping as when she was in her first spend with the district and during the pandemic. i don't know how many of you remember community engagement

via thought partner but even just using the term thought partner brings up ptsd for many of us. so i'm kind of um but through that um hung may pang even with many of the difficulties was able to really help keep so many of our family and community partners engaged and active and address our questions and concerns and was especially during such a tough time for so many families definitely at spot in leadership and so superintend so i was really excited to see her name listed here as the finalist. i'm sure you had many other great candidates who would have also done wonderf but um i just want to honor her previous experience and and the work that she really did with so many of of our our families and community partners so i have very high hopes for what this what hung may to point out

will be like in in your leadership team so thank you. any other comments from the board? thank you. just briefly echoing commissioner fisher, i think in addition to the the skill set that she will bring, i think that specifically also background in organizing around immigrants rights around working with communities that we know have been and will continue to be targeted is really important and so to have someone in the position who understands the need to protect every single one of our as a few sd community members including our students and our our educators is is also really important. so i think that lends that focus on justice as she engages and with with community and with philanthropy and with the state and local entities will

be very important. so any other comments seeing none. roll call vote mr. steel thank you employment contract for head of governance and communications i'm so sorry mr. steel. i'm sorry for that miss commissioner eight go for it. i just really question that i'm sorry. thank you so much. i just wanted to follow up on the question that i had asked earlier about the salary schedule. i want to be sure that we're informing the public as much as possible for purposes of transparency and i see that it says a copy of the salary schedule is attached as attachment a i didn't see it on mine so if you could let folks know you know what the salary would be in such a case and any severance terms that would be great. maybe i'm looking at the wrong thing but i never did see an attachment. thank you. thanks for that. yeah. our salary schedules are all

public and they're all online. they can be accessed on our labor relations page and so i apologize that it's not linked in this agenda. i didn't read out the financial terms of the contract and so we can talk about that. it's step seven. um sorry grade seven step four on the management salary schedule. so the salary is $220,841 annually. you asked about the buyout provision and there is a six month buyout provision in the case of release and you asked whether that was typical in an 18 month contract. it's it's typical for san francisco. all of our employment contracts for executives have a six month buyout clause given on our one year contracts. i wouldn't say that's typical for other educational institutions but that is the typical san francisco unified

contract. thank you. thank you. thank you. assistant superintendent barrett. let's resume the roll call vote. uh mr. steel when you're ready. >> thank you. thank you. president kim on the employment contract of head of governance and communications. mr. alexander. yes. commissioner fisher. yes, commissioner gupta. yes. commissioner healey. >> i'm sorry. i'm sorry i reduced this to commissioner ray. yes, but i note that i voted no on the position do for the reasons i stated earlier. thank you. thank you. commissioner wiseman work? yes. vice president healey. yes. president kim yes. thank you. seven eyes moving to item 3 to

5 1-143 resolution appointing the 2024 proposition a bond oversight committee can have a motion a second please. so moved second and i'll turn to the superintendent or designee to read this into the record. thank you. great. thank you. superintendents too. good evening commissioners and welcome to the new commissioners of the board. my name is lucinda berry and i'm the director of the bond program tonight we are here contextually to talk about next steps in the 2024 bond. i think all of the commissioners are aware because for new commissioners we were able to brief each of you as candidates that the san francisco voters did approve a $790 million authorization of new bond funds for as opposed to continue its capital program tonight we can move to the second slide tonight we the item before you is to form the independent citizen's bond

oversight committee for the 2024 bond. i wanted to take the opportunity to provide just a little bit more context. i will be a fixture here at monthly regular meetings for the next several months as we really establish the 2024 bond and get it going and get into our first bond issuance of this new authorization tonight. the resolution, as i said is to form the independent citizen's bond oversight committee. this is a requirement by the california education code. in december the prior board approved a resolution declaring the results. it's basically just publicly the board of education saying that the election happened and that the voters passed it and so that's already been approved and then within 60 days of approving that resolution, the board must also establish the citizen's bond oversight committee. so the the resolution that's on the agenda tonight does that in just by note the 2016 see back does operate under a set of

bylaws. bylaws are not required by the education code but are a practice that many see box will use and this the bylaws themselves to inform this committee are not part of this resolution but will be will follow at a subsequent meeting of the board. >> go ahead to the next slide just as a refresher again an opportunity for new board members to to be refreshed on what this bond entails. the total authorization is 790 million. the categories are as shown here modernization, core functionality, student nutrition services, technology upgrades squared outdoor learning and security. sorry excuse me. the numbers to the right are not documented in the bond measure language itself but are the allocations that we've been discussing publicly for the last couple of years as bond planning has moved forward? we are now in the process of

working towards selection of sites where these projects will happen. on the next slide is also a piece of the public information from the bond planning process where we attempted to put a number try to imagine what we could do with the money as described in the prior slide by investment category. these are not firm commitments. this is an idea of what you could buy generally with with that amount of money without having scoped any of these projects yet. and so just a refresher that this is what we said we would do and that we intend to meet at least in spirit as we move forward to implementation. important to note as we move into site selection that we do have many projects underway now and this is really for two reasons one because construction was expensive on the 2016 bond and some projects did go over budget and the other reason is because in

anticipation of the 2024 bond we initiated design on several projects that they would be sort of shovel ready when the 2024 bond passed. we like to have a consistent construction program that keeps our expenditures high if we slow down construction and the contractors move elsewhere it's more difficult for us to mobilize the program. and so this is generally good practice for large districts that have kind of serial bond programs, the projects that are in design and requiring additional funds from the 2024 bond are listed here including west portal elementary and diamond middle school both of which what was portals under construction the construction contract for dunman middle school is on the agenda on the consent calendar tonight one of us to horace mann k-8 which we expect to bid for summer construction start thurgood marshall burton high school and lincoln high school have each have independent scopes of work

that are in design and then we are completing pa system improvements at at various sites across the district as part of our security commitments and that program. and so we anticipate coming back to the board to present the site selection the sites that have been selected for modernization projects as part of this year's facilities master plan update which in keeping with last year would be in april. thank you. that's it. thank you. i'll open it up for comments from commissioners or questions . i have one clarifying question am i correct to understand that in continuing the 2016 see back to the 2024 c back we were essentially allowing the previous body to serve as the same the same role as a governing body for the new bond

and extending the body. but we are not extending the term of service of any individual currently on the c block yes and that was a change that we sort of discussed jointly with the c block. there had been different language proposed in a draft resolution but it was important to see board members that there would be sort of a staggered ending of c block terms and so they preferred to maintain their current position and sunsetting of those positions and currently z board members are allowed three terms no one is in their third term the most senior members in terms of you know just how many how long they've been on the c block are in the middle of their or i guess there's a couple that are at the end of their second term so unless people left voluntarily for other commitments there would be no change for the next several years. michelle ventre just to clarify in question because i just i

had a request that i had forwarded to staff about someone who wanted to join the c back. are there going to be new openings coming up? >> so one former member of the c bach has stepped off the body so in accordance with the number of positions that the board of education has approved previously there would be one vacancy that could requires a minimum of seven members. the board decides how many members there should be. so if you wanted to have 100 members please i hope that you don't but you could do that. and so the way that we have been handling membership over the last several rounds of kind of applications and this is really this was guided by former superintendent wayne was to have kind of a committee of it with two staff members to see board members and then to independent members who actually are now our key advisors to just sort of present neutral bodies.

it's really the job of the board to appoint members and the superintendent would recommend sort of in this format at the board meeting. and so i'm really we would be looking for direction from the superintendent and the board leadership to figure out how we would continue to do this in the future. >> does that answer your question? well i was just trying and it was a more technical question in a way because i just got a request and i wasn't even sure if there was space and where to direct the person i sent it to staff and just hadn't gotten a response. this was several weeks ago so i just wasn't sure what was going on that was it was more of a can people join now or no it sounds like there may be a vacancy. >> yes there is currently a vacancy on this team. i guess and we have probably nine nine people who have expressed interest through the application that's on our oh okay. >> so that is happening. yeah. >> yes i think that's what i was asking. so that's going on right now. yes and we have really been trying to you know, do these logistical items setting it up, kind of establishing the bylaws

and then got it and now you're going to go to the you're going to do that? >> yeah, because we are above our statutory minimum. so it's sort of like i don't know if these items seemed more pressing but no, no no that's great. >> i was sorry. i just didn't know. >> okay? i was trying to figure out what was going on. commissioner fisher to follow that vein of thought i mean we have other committees like the p cap where we each appoint two members to the committee. i'm wondering why with the c block we don't all have certain appointments and maybe our new head of governance can help coordinate all these appointments and this process is so that we can have a thoughtful what wow. thank you, commissioner alexander had i love this line of thinking. i think my first of all i want to step back and think the

voters for passing prop a because my goodness you know we have a lot of work that needs to be done and who this is going to be fantastic. i think my questions are really about in rewriting the bylaws who's going to be the ultimate decision maker and how the bylaws get rewritten. is that going to be committee members? is it going to be staff? i think i just especially when it comes to such oversight like who you know, what is the decision making process? you know, is there a matrix that's followed or a rubric as far as if we have more members in appointment who gets i would just like to see a little bit more transparency moving forward in the process. but as commissioner alexander pointed out maybe some of this could be clarified through our governance work. but $792 million is not an insignia vacant amount of money. so making sure that we have a system set up that is rebuilding public trust and spending this money wisely i

volunteer down at sheridan elementary school which was recently renovated and yeah, i volunteer in a kindergarten classroom with a leaky roof so just like making sure we're holding our contractors accountable to doing the work they promise thank you. commission is is so important and the transparency and accountability into all of these millions of dollars it's important in meeting our guardrails. thank you. d you want to ask a question as well? there? no i think there were like three questions in there. i mean do you want me to to use amount instead of my rant there? i'm happy to and i'm not necessarily expecting an answer right now. okay. so i'll rephrase them as wonderings i guess how about that to be tied up into work to be done by this board. okay thank you commissioner. well is there something that you wanted to respond to right

now? commissioner ray just following up on commissioner fisher's comments, can you can you confirm we are not addressing the bylaws in this meeting? correct. we are just addressing the appointment of the committee. that's correct. thank you. any other questions? okay. uh thank you. roll call vote mr. steele. thank you. and then putting 2020 for a bond oversight committee president alexander? yes, commissioner alexander, thank you for re promoting me but no thank you. thank you and yes on the vote for meeting yeah. q mr. fisher yes. mr. gupta yes. commissioner ray yes commissioner wiseman ward yes. vice president huling yes. >> president kim yes sir. thank you. moving on to item h consent calendar can you get a motion

and second so moved second are there any items withdrawn or corrected by the superintendent there are none. do we can i just make a correction to public comment? i was given credit for the resolution under 61 and i want to make sure that the superintendent and melillo smith get credit for actually writing that not me. thank you commissioner fisher great. we'll do a roll call vote on the consent calendar, please. mr. steele thank you, commissioner alexander yes. commissioner fisher yes. commissioner gupta. yes. mr. real. yes. commissioner wiseman. ward yes. vice president huling yes. president kim yes. i'm moving on to item i board member reports. are there any reports of board member delegates to membership organizations or other board members seeing none i during

this meeting at 9:27 p.m. thank you for your

>> we are the risk takers the dreamers the expires we are the creative the artists th makers and the innovators from the gold rush and shaped by earthquake and cool by the fog. rocked by itself people. we been here we grow here and take a a chap here we have roots here. we found ourselves here. and we are the small businesses. >> with 2040 opened in san francisco where we met supportive people to help every step and stage and breaking. >> to welcoming the first encumbers and from idea to

opening san francisco listened to our dreams and made them real. start your legacies the city of offer a program that presides one by one financial counseling. financial counseling is on to anyone who guess so or work or receives serves in san francisco are you looking to build our credit reduce students loans or open a safe and volleyball bathing one-on-one counseling could be a good fit for you meet with a cloubt through preview your explore to help chief our goals

throat that financials counsels can provide in english or spanish and can access interpretation services for my oat language use the service regardless of great recession good evening stated to get starting vital our >> who doesn't love cable cars? charging emissions and we're free which we're proud of you know it's not much free left in the world anymore so we managed to do that through donations and through our gift shops. you got a real look and real appreciation of what early transit systems are like. this was the transit of the day from about 1875 to about 1893 or later, you know. cable car museum is free come on in. take a day. come down. rediscover the city. you can spend as time you want and you don't have to make reservations and it's important to be free

because we want them to develop a love for cable cars so they do continue to support whether they live here or other places and people come in and say, yes, i have passed by and heard of this and never come in and they always enjoy themselves. people love cable cars and there's none left in the world so if you want to ride a cable car, you've got to come to san francisco. that what makes the city. without the cable cars you lose part of that you know because people who come here and they love it and they love the history ask they can ride a cable car that has been running since 1888 or 1889. wow! that's something. can't do that with other historical museums. rarely have i run into anybody from outside who didn't come in and didn't feel better from knowing something about the city. it's a true experience you'll remember. i hope they walk away with a greater appreciation for the history, with the mechanics with people are fascinated by the

winding machine and i hope the appreciation which is a part of our mission and these young kids will appreciate cable cars and the ones who live here and other places they can make sure there will always be cable cars in san francisco because once they are gone they are gone. it's the heartbeat of san francisco that founded the cable and the slot and without the cable cars yeah we would lose something in san francisco. we would lose part of its heart and soul. it wouldn't be san francisco without cable cars. [bell ringing]

>> brainchild the executive director 6 housing clinic in the neighborhood for it 90 years and talking about the history like the first web about family history and a lot of the clinicians found with a group of the community members. with the owner of cadillac the housing on

the west coast and the tenderloin is a permanent climax of history of the neighborhood and the community art gorilla for whatever reason artists in the neighborhood. and we do public events as well as walk in (unintelligible) for residents we have been known for has nothing to do with historically artist surveys and that makes us very unique and work producing about the cafe and a riot happened in the neighborhood in 1966 helping us on market street year-round indefinitely we think that the arts is an incredible way of experiencing history and really helps people think of themselves as history persons

and especially for the house play really a part of the - and think that is generates for the - we are aware the art is important for people and important for the community mba and can be a really assessable and engaging way to see history well. >> those are the ways as the art and history you're not going to see emotionally in the

good morning like to call our december meeting oft jpa to order. it is our last meeting of 2024. i'm the board chair and this is in person at san francisco city