this evening i'm going to represent p.a.c. to give you an update on forums. >> [speaking foreign language] >> in policy with parents public schools and district staff, we conducted a total of 17 committee meetings, including forums at 12 middle schools and four elementary schools plus a spanish language focus group. we only count on the meetings where we led the same conversations based on our discussion guide. we know some schools had their own meetings about this. over 150 people participated. some people attended multiple forums but not that many. attendance ranged from about a dozen to 200 people. the average being about 50 people. >> [speaking foreign language] >> we learned a few things over the past five years of leading community engagement in district policy. parents who actively contact education members or parents who come to speak about policy don't always represent the perspectives or persistence of the broader parent community. people who attend large centralized events don't tend to reflect the demographics of t

some of us p.a.c. members gathered today to take a look at that research because we are also very interested. what was nice is that some of our recommendations that we suggested for quality schools were also the same kind of things that they were also recommending as is in your strategic plans for improving middle schools. some of those things are rigor, strong instructional teaching practices, strong principal leadership, using data, having curriculum focus on standards and having standards focus based on benchmark assessments throughout the whole district. we, as we are looking at the research, we are having a hard time still finding the correlation between quality schools and feeder patterns. we notice that feeder patterns were referred to not very often until the rigor, the high teaching quality standards and all those other things were more emphasized than that. in fact, it was -- we were actually with somebody who is used to reading educational research so i'm trusting that was going on, but we m

the reports will be available in english, spanish and chinese to the p.a.c. and the district's website. thank you. president mendoza: thank you. any questions? members? commissioner murase: i just want to really thank the p.a.c. for this outreach effort. several of us attended the -- one of the last community conversations at the sal valley and it wasn't well attend but the people who were there really valued the interaction, learned a lot and it's so essential. i really do take to heart your conclusion about the format because i participated in these when they were school-based and we had really rich conversations, there was very good attendance. it's something that we should think about in terms of our outreach, that's the best format for getting diverse feedback. thank you again. vice president yee: i also want to echo my appreciation of p.a.c. in doing these 17 workshops. it's true. it was tough. i went to a few of them and some were calm and some weren't so calm. and some of the parents in uncalm types of situations were heckling and weren't very nice pe

this evening i'm going to represent p.a.c.give you an update on forums. >> [speaking foreign language] >> in policy with parents public schools and district staff, we conducted a total of 17 committee meetings, including forums at 12 middle schools and four elementary schools plus a spanish language focus group. we only count on the meetings where we led the same conversations based on our discussion guide. we know some schools had their own meetings about this.

government contractors already disclose contributions and expenditures by their p.a.c.'s and those who contribute to them. contributions by the officers and directors of government contractors are also required to be disclosed. should we eliminate those provisions too? of course not. a sec argument made by the opponents is that contracting officers might review political conversations -- contributions in order to reward allies or punish foes. by awarding or without -- withholding government contracts. again, this could happen now. under current disclosure rules. but federal procurement law prohibits this. the draft executive order also reiterates that, and i quote, every stage of the contracting process must be free from the undue influence of factors extraneous to the underlying merits of the contracting decision making such as political activity or political favoritism, end of quote. a third argument is that the draft executive order violates the first amendment. that's also grossly misplaced. even in the recent decision of sit zepps united, eight of the nine supreme c