Ms. Mandy Rogers 3:16 

Good evening. I'm sure a few of you know me already, but if not, you've undoubtedly heard my name, probably in the last few weeks. Tomorrow, November 17, I'll be releasing a petition I've created that will circulate throughout the community, including an embarrassingly long list of grievances that I cannot possibly name one by one in a two-minute limit.

The primary purpose of this petition is the immediate removal of Brad Wright as board chair. Notwithstanding any Brown Act violations, unethical behavior, conflicts of interest, and a myriad of strategic stunts that would make any politician proud 3:58. Mr. Wright, you're not even eligible to hold the board chair position you're in now.

One thing that's very clear in the bylaws is that parents of current students are not allowed to hold positions on the board, or at least, because it's a conflict of interest, it's not advisable. In the case of the board chair, the bylaws explicitly state that every effort has to be made to find a non-parent before, as a last resort, a parent of a current student is put in that position. You've been a parent of a current student since June of this year, which, by the way, legally nullifies every board decision, vote, and action you've been involved with since that moment, including the Disaffiliation for the ECR 4:16.

Let me be very clear that every parent, staff member, former board member hearing this has been contacting me over the last couple of months. Complaints are documented, fact-checked, or corroborated. All this information is public domain and in the media packet I created, which will go into the hands of two investigative reporters I've already been in contact with. I would urge you to take action on this immediately. I believe that you all know the rules of the bylaws, and as soon as something... the other things that are in this media packet are discussed publicly as they should be. I think the ….... 4:54 in 2016 is minuscule compared to what's going to happen.

Ms. Kristi Sunberg,5:28

Good evening. I actually didn't come prepared with any written statements. The first thing I want to say is thank you. Thank you for making El Camino a really amazing school. I have four kids. My oldest daughter went to the Cleveland Humanities Segment Program. My second went to El Camino. She is now studying at Berkeley. If it weren't for El Camino, she would not be at Berkeley, so I appreciate all the opportunities that El Camino provides.

I also have two tenth graders. We were deciding what high school to go to. We decided on El Camino because of the stellar community that it is and how it's perceived in the local community and the opportunities that you provided. My son decided on El Camino over TAP 6:28 because of your water polo program, because of your aquatics program. He chose not to go to the engineering program at TAP and said El Camino provided him a much broader experience.

We've been disappointed with the aquatics program. We've had a lot of discussions about it. I am super thankful for this year for Brett, one of our parent volunteers, to step up and take the boys' team to the finals, and only four seconds, they almost got it. Please make sure that we reimburse 7:02 Brett for his time. Please get us a pool to practice in. Please make it so that the boys want to be here. The girls continue to flourish. We really need, at least, to have a stellar, stellar aquatics program, and it's gone downhill. I think this is for a lot of the sports programs, but please make it so that my son doesn't come to me and say, "Mom, I want to leave El Camino, mom, I have friends that are asking me what school to go to, and I don't want them to come to El Camino because it seems to be going downhill." I don't want that. I want El Camino to be the place that it was and the place that got my daughter to Berkeley. I want us to continue. Please, please do something about the aquatics program, and whatever we can do as parents to help, we're there.

Ms. Olive Sanders, 7:50

Good evening. I am a sophomore on the Girl's Water polo team. During my two years on the team, we have had inconsistent practices and coaches. Our season is happening now, but we haven't had any girl’s practices, and we have our first game in two weeks, December 1. Our practice schedule has been canceled by the administration because they said we're getting a new coach. But Coach Brett has been a parent volunteer, and I see no logical reason for us to not have practices until this new coach is hired. It's just taking away more from our program, and it's not fair to the team to be denied the chance to actually grow as a team.

We have half of our team has either only played one season or never played before, and we haven't had any practices solely devoted to the girls. We practice during the boys' season, but we haven't had any of our own practices, and it's not okay. It's unacceptable for a student claiming athletic excellence to be deprived of the basics, namely a pool needed to be excellent at their sport.

Erin Sanders 9:25

Hi, Erin Sanders here, a community member, neighbor of ECR, and a parent of Olive Sanders, a student at ECR. I am here tonight to advocate for the aquatic program. We had the misfortune of having a coach loss early in the season, which had questionable problems with pool establishments that were brought to light after he was hired. We are fortunate to have a parent with water polo coaching experience step into fill the position as the season had already commenced. I do hope that Coach Hatcher 9:56 will be compensated for his time as he is well qualified and was interviewed by ECR for the position. 

The boys' team nearly won, as you have heard before, but won the CIF Division 1 championships. They were winning, and Cleveland tied it up with only four seconds to go. Pretty impressive for how much less time they had to practice. They also have half of the pool practice time as other teams, some of which also don't have a pool of their own. So that should not be an excuse. 

Now the girls' season has begun, and just announced was that a new coach was being onboarded. We hope they will have an open line of communication between the athletes, parents, and administrators so the kids can have adequate practices. The existing practice schedule is one to two practices a week and is insufficient to compete with other schools in the division. 

I hope that the board and athletic department will decide to be proactive and make changes to the program that will allow ECR to be a beacon to surrounding schools and therefore attract coaches and athletes to ECR. That is one way you can address the declining enrollment at the school. Please take a serious look at the program. There's always room for improvement, and we can do so much better.

Ms. …….11:30

Thank you for letting me speak. My son is a senior, and we've been at El Camino for these four years. It's been a rocky road experience. Some very excellent teachers—very thankful for Ms. Franklin. But, as has been expressed already, we've had very little support. Emails, calls, no response. We've had just a lack of communication, and it's been very frustrating.

Many high school athletes are high-achieving students. If you're wondering why there's a sharp decline— not a small decline, but a sharp decline, as can be seen year after year, especially in the freshman class—you might want to take a good, long look and ask the parents, the families that are here supporting their children. We're the ones that drive them to practice; we're the ones that do the fundraising and support them in every way. To have just a little lack of support from the administration is very frustrating.

We came to a meeting some time ago; the entire football team was here. Mr. Wood spoke about finances, and that was quite eye-opening. I'm a busy working parent. I don't have time to come to all these meetings. I tried to read through the financial meeting, and it looks like there's money. There's money around. There was money that can come out of a $25 million fund to pay for benefits, and it's coming out of the general fund.

So, I would implore all of you community members, parents, to come to the meeting, speak up, advocate for your kids, and follow the money. Invest in our students, invest in the kids, pay for coaches, for programs so you attract and retain coaches and people to lead these programs. 

Ms. Allison Law 13:41
I'm a freshman this year at El Camino, and I'm a part of the girls Water Polo team. I'm an active member here at the school. I started a club already, I'm taking an AP class, and out of everything—organization and other sports, water polo—I've never seen so disorganized. We don't have an official coach, and it's just very confusing for a lot of the teammates.

El Camino has presented itself as strong in both academics and sports. But in the short time that I've been present, the aquatic’s team hasn't had a stable coach nor pool. I understand that there isn't one on campus, but the disorganization in scheduling and renting a pool makes it extremely difficult for me and my teammates to properly practice more than once a week. I saw this in the boys' pool season as well as now in the girls' season.

I've been swimming most of my life, and I'm very passionate about this sport. The rest of my team is too, and we haven't been able to practice more than once on dry land since our season started a couple of weeks ago. We have a game in two weeks for girls' polo, and we haven't had an official coach yet. The rest of this week's practice has been canceled because of that.

In my culinary arts class, I've heard from multiple upperclassmen that their teammates from clubs outside El Camino have left El Camino while being a freshman or sophomore because of the disorganization around sports, including soccer and basketball. In summary, I beg all of you to help give El Camino aquatics team more attention.

Sports Updates: First of all, some kudos to the boys' water polo team as they were finalists in the Division I category. Congratulations also to our girls volleyball team who won the Open Division Championship at CSUN 15:47. A couple of weeks ago, they played in the state tournament and unfortunately did not advance, but we'll congratulate them as well. Also, our marching band has been selected to compete in the CSBOA 16:06 field championships in Division I. They will have their competition this Saturday, November 18th, at Downey High School. So if you're free on Saturday, head down to Downey.

California Dashboard: Next, just an update for board members. The California Dashboard is going to be available for public release on December 15th. So at the next board meeting, I will definitely go over the Dashboard and explain where El Camino falls on the California Dashboard.

School Closure: El Camino applied for the J13A waiver with LUSD 16:46. We submitted it in time. I got an email back saying that they did not approve it because we have 180 instructional days, and we're only required to have 175. But we notified them that the school closure will have caused us to fall short of the required 64,800 minutes required by headcoat 17:16. So we resubmitted the J13A waiver.

Mr. Wright: You said 180. I think it's 179 days. 

Mr. Hussey: No, with the closure, we still have 179 days. So we are okay day-wise, but we're not okay instructional minute-wise, so that was resubmitted.

Covid Tests: Next, we passed out over 3,400 COVID tests today. And we will do that again right before Christmas to all our students and our families. So everybody should have received a COVID test today. If they did not receive one today, they can pick one up tomorrow in any one of the offices.

Finals Week: In 3 weeks, we end the regular portion of our school semester and then we have finals weeks, which concludes on December 22nd this year. So students should be getting ready, and teachers are preparing them for final exams.

Field Update: We haven't had a field here for 2 years now. I just got an update from LAUSD. I'll read, “Based on the report from Geo Tech and our civil engineering team's review of the DSA approved plans, we'll have a clear scope completed by tomorrow to give it to a contractor that is available to perform work on an emergency contract. They are available to complete the scope of work in the month of December, barring any significant weather delays, which will work well with the availability of the asterisk turf 14:12 to return to complete the turf and fill installation in January and February and complete the testing in February and March, we hope for an early April occupancy.” So hopefully, we can reach out to LAUSD, and hopefully, they can push this a little faster than what they have told us in an email. But that's the newest update and delayed update of the field right now.

Financial Reports Preparation: It's a busy time in the business office as financial statements are being prepared and have to be sent to the CDE, LAUSD, and the Los Angeles County Office of Education. We are currently working on the first interim financial report, which will be presented at the next board meeting. This report will include our October year-to-date actuals and any new forecasts for the remainder of the year. The December meeting will provide these financial results.

Audit Reports: Additionally, we are also heading towards the finish line for the 2022-2023 audit report, which needs to be prepared and finished with our auditors by December 15. There is currently nothing to report that should prevent us from meeting this deadline, and the audit report will be completed as required.

Fullgent Update: 21:14 We've had an ongoing dispute. Fullgent was our COVID testing agency that during the pandemic, they would give the COVID tests and would initially charge the government but charges two thirds the way into the year; they started billing us for the tests. The billing was not clear in detail and information was very inconsistent. We joined four other charter schools in Los Angeles that used Fullgent. So there's four charter schools engaged in a legal action against Fullgent. They've billed us $1.27 million for those tests. And so we have retained Young Mini Corp 22:05 to do a class action representation with Fullgent. So the update I have as of yesterday is the same update that they gave us a year ago. Fullgent hasn't been proceeding. They haven't contacted us. Granada 22:20 has been used as the test case with Fullgent. They're a little more active in the conversation. But to be honest that even with Granada, there has been no movement in terms of whether they're just going to accept the payments that the insurance agencies gave. They have not indicated where they're going to proceed at all against any of the charter. Since that's a possible settlement, we will put that in our financial statements to let everybody know that we are continuing to be in a dispute relative to the Fullgent bills.

Enrollment and Attendance: Enrollment and attendance data is available in the packet and on screen. While we started the year with lower enrollment, we are holding steady, and there isn't a significant loss. However, our enrollment is down by almost 300 compared to last year, primarily in ninth and tenth grades. Our ADA percentage is up, but the decline in enrollment is a concern as it directly impacts our funding. We have adjusted our budget based on the knowledge of lower ADA for the year, and we will continue to monitor and report on ADA during the first interim report.

Appreciation for Retirees: I'd like to say something to our retirees. I get your emails, and believe me, we're doing everything we can; we're listening. I think you're valuable to our school, for our community, and most of all, the dedication you've had towards our kids. We haven't forgotten about you.

Encouragement for Passionate Individuals: Another thing I'd like to encourage people with passion. Come out and speak. The thing with this school here, if there are any malfeasance, don't think it stops with us. People think, well, it's going to stop here and it gets buried. No, it doesn't. We have somebody that we answer to. And that would be the charter school division. If you feel that there's anything wrong, I encourage you to reach out to the charter school division. Because if there is, this is also my school, and we shouldn't have to take it if there's something wrong. So I encourage you to please speak out. Come to the meetings. Another thing, if you want to speak to us in public for the two minutes, we can't respond, but if you send me an email, anybody can tell you, I respond within 72 hours. I will respond. That's one thing. And I'm here for you. So if there's anything that you feel is wrong, please let us know.

As I indicated during my CBO report, the detailed financial updates are one, due to the early nature of this meeting and two, we need a little extra time; we are in the process of doing the first interim. So I don't have any updates relative to the overall financials.

There is an agenda item on tonight's board meeting to approve a textbook request, just as perspective for the full board. 

Current Expenditure and Unspent Textbook Budget:This is our up-to-date textbook worksheet. This sheet, in summary, shows that there were originally $286,000 worth of textbook requests that were requested by all the departments. And we ultimately approved and passed a budget, which is the next column. Let's just say it's $700,000.

To date, we have only spent $239,000. So there's about $460,000 of unspent textbooks, even though I'm aware the math department is in the process of putting in some textbook requests. 

Perspective on the Textbook Request:Historically, from my perspective, hopefully most of the textbook requests are processed, at least by the first semester because if we have a budget for it, it doesn't do our current students much good if we end up starting buying textbooks for the kids in March or April. What good does that do the kids if you're putting in requests? So I guess I would make a statement that with this textbook request, the budget in terms of the overall school budget would not be impacted by this textbook request, given that we have $460,000. We would be under budget at the moment by $460,000. So with that request that I am aware of, I would support and say that our budget would not be adversely affected by any much-needed textbook request.

Unknown Speaker: 29:33: Is the math department planning on using…...

Mr. Wood: The math department is in the process; we have POs that haven't been done. So yes, the math department has put together some POs, and since they haven't been sent into our process… but the math department is in the process.

Unknown Speaker: 29:50 But they are going to use the entire 235k?

Mr. Wood: I won't say that the whole 235 is going to be spent, but there will be a substantial dent in the 235.

Mr. Steven Kofah?: 29:57 On the special ed line, their request was for 12,500, and the administrative team recommended 1500. It seems like they have a great need and we have no money.

Mr. Wood: So that column existed, and we tried to retain the authenticity of the request out of that 12,500, but we ended up doing, and it was talked about at the June board meeting, a lot of their requests weren't textbook in nature. We reclassified the majority of the others. The only amount that they requested that was textbook related was $1,500.

Miss Elias: Some of the items were moved to other categories.

Mr. Steven Kofah continued: 31:16 Well, looking at this page, it looks like special ed is being short-changed or made a significant error in one column or the other. If you resolved that, great.

Mr. Wood: We made that report on other budget update pages. It is not on this page. Their budget requests were all approved, but they were moved to different categories.

Mr. Hussey added: Special Ed doesn't have special books. All the books that are ordered within the other departments are also ordered for the special classes, so it may not look like they're spending a lot of money on textbook requests, but it's embedded in the other subjects. So they get the same books as the gen ed students. But there are, as Mr. Wood also said, and Miss Ilya said, there were some budget items that weren't necessarily textbook requests that were moved to other, other requests.

OPEB Account: This report has been changed slightly to reflect a number of changes that we've incurred. The last board meeting, the board approved the use of the OPEB account to pay the retiree health premiums. So we are now reflecting that. The month of October shows that we used $50,830 worth of the OPEB funds, and they are now directly paying the healthcare provider for retiree benefits. Looking in total, the OPEB account in the upper right of the executive summary now shows that we still have the $25.3 million that the school year started with. The next row on an accumulative basis shows how much out of the account got spent for OPEB payments. So, since it's only one, you'll see a reduction of $50,000. The school continues to fund the OPEB account with $220,000 a month, so to date, there's been $880,000 worth of contributions. Again, the market has been in decline for the first four months of the year. As of the end of October, we had $1.4 million worth of losses in our investments, and the current amount we're reporting is $24.77 million. One note of good news on the right, as of yesterday, the investments markets have surged, so the OPEB account as of November 15th is now $26.1 million.

General Investments: This report also now shows in terms of the general investments. I've updated our annuity account that we approved rolling over. It's $406,000. But now the other annuity, the ATHEEN, we closed that out and opened up the T-bill. There's a T-bill with US bank getting a 4.8% interest. It's a two-year T-bill, so we will be reflecting that on a go-forward basis.

ASB Account: So this is our check register for the ASB account for the month of October. You can see the vendors that have been paid, what we’ve paid, what it was for, and what trust account the expense came out of since all the trust accounts for teams and clubs are housed in ASB. You can see the various expenses that have been paid for October.

Mr. Wood: So in total, $63,300 worth of checks impacted the ASB.

Ms. Ilyas: And then, sticking to the subject of ASB, this is our trust account balances, a year-to-date of balances within each club and team account. So there's a total of like $644,000.

Checking Register: So this is the account we use to pay everyday expenses such as utility bills and bills for supplies. It's formatted the same way—you can see the vendor, what we paid, and what pot of money it came out of.

Mr. Kofah asked: 38:11 Can I ask a question on the graduating class of 2024? 

Ms. Ilyas: Yeah, so that balance is negative because they're inheriting the balance of grad class of 2023. It's just that we need the class to vote on it before we make the official 38:37 funds.

Mr. Kofah: Oh, so they'll be reimbursed? And from where?

Ms. Ilyas: More or less, yeah. 2023 is gone, but the money's still there. It's still in that trust account. So it was the class of the official vote (…cross talk) 38:57 to transfer that money then, within like the next month, you'll see the grad class of 2023's balance at 0. And then you'll see the grad class of 2024's balance.

General Account: This is where we pay our large monthly expenses, the significant ones like our health insurance bill and retiree benefits. You can see who we paid, what it was for, and which fund the money came from. We've also noted below how much retiree benefits were paid out of our investment account since the board had voted in the prior meeting to pay the retiree benefits from what's sitting in the investment account.

Mr. Wood: So in essence, the line that says "Self-Insured Schools of California" for the month of October shows $348,416. If we had done nothing in terms of that $41,000 and $8,000 at the bottom, it would have been $398 that the school would have paid out of the general fund if the board hadn't approved the OPEB account.

Unknown Speaker 40:33: And the logistics, hasn't there been any hiccups with the logistics of the OPEB account trying to pay for the retiree benefits from the OPEB account? 

Mr. Wood: It's electronic, as opposed to a cheque. 

Ms. Ilyas: And it's also the first month, too, so we're still ironing out the details of it. 

Mr. Wood: We're investigating the timing between when the OPEB account did that electronic transfer and when SIS received the transfers. We're investigating if there's a delay for whatever reason. We haven't found out since it's the first time; just know that we were paying it that way.

Vendors YTD: This is the list of all the vendors we have paid thus far, how much we paid them this month, and how much we paid them since July. This is the current fiscal year, starting in July.

Mr. Wood: The first column is October 2023, the second column is all year to date.

Unknown speaker 41:43: $5,590 to Birmingham? 

Ms. Ilyas: For the pool. 

Mr. Wright: So, let me ask you a question. If we're doing that, why are girls having the problems that they've been talking about? 

Mr. Wood: The availability of the pool, Birmingham has been paid for, I think, there are practices or there are games. I believe Mr. Russell might be able to tell everybody, but I think that's for the actual games. We have other pools for practices, like Calabasas. So, we're recording on multiple fronts because Birmingham can't necessarily accommodate every daily request to use the pool when they have their water polo activities.

Approval Process: Every month, we receive our credit card statement from the credit card company, and we summarize and provide information to our stakeholders about each charge before it can be processed. The purchase order has to be created, and the relevant requesters have to approve the transaction before one of the two cardholders, Mr. Hussey and Mr. Wood, will allow that charge to happen on their credit card.

Charge Breakdown: This sheet shows the charges, who is being paid with the credit card, the nature of the expense, whose card was being used, and who requested the charge. Mr. Hussey's charges for the month total $15,887, and Mr. Wood, the other cardholder, has charges totaling $6,060.72. The total of both cards, reflected on the credit card statement, was $21,948.

This provides clarity on who charged what, and details are provided in the organization's records. For example, if you see a charge like "all paid for $21.50," the organization goes back to the purchase order to provide details about what the amounts represent.

Mr. Steven Kofahl: I see on this big summary page, there are a lot of airline charges. But there's nothing about hotel bills or where they spent the night. Is that paid on a different account? 

Mr. Wood: This summary represents the credit card charges. If the school paid for those hotels, it would have been paid either to the hotel name, or the individual did all the coordination, so it could be one of two things. In all likelihood, either the employee's name is listed on the check register, and John Doe was reimbursed $4,300 for hotel stays for their trip, or a Hilton hotel (or another hotel name) would have been paid directly.

Mr. Hussey: It might also be that the hotel was charged in November, so it wouldn’t be on this statement. They went at the end of October into early November. So that may be the reason you don't see a hotel on this statement.

It was noted that Mr Gregg Solkovits exited the meeting at 6:15 before the vote

Mr. Hussey: So, as Mr. Wood said, there is room in the textbook budget to cover the cost of these chemistry books. We'll just have to readjust some of the areas where the monies are being spent, and I’ll let Miss Evens discuss why the science department decided that they needed these chemistry books sooner rather than later.

Miss Evens: I know that what Mr. Wood said about the fact that it seems kind of silly to be ordering them now. We are still hoping to get them and get them into the hands of the students who are currently taking chemistry. I have been at El Camino for five years now. This is my 35th year of teaching now. And when I arrived, we did not have any chemistry books; we used a PDF. We have 37 books on campus. Those books are always distributed to students that ……..(50:50) say that they must have a physical copy and, in fact, sometimes two physical copies. We’ve had an administrative change this year, and our new administrator realized we didn't have the books for Williams compliance 51:04. We started looking at books at the very beginning of the school year. The chemistry department has got together and examined a bunch of textbooks, and we’ve settled on the Zoom book doll Zoom doll book 51:16. Some people in that chemistry might be familiar with that particular set of authors. And so we have settled on that book. We are ordering a conservative number of textbooks. We're trying to keep it conservative, but the bill does come up to be $102,000. We're not ordering extras; we feel we know how to supplement. The book is a good in-between for regular chemistry and the honors chemistry. We can, you could offer for 51:38 honors even more, and we can use it as is and cut out some very difficult concepts for the other students. We have done a lot of due diligence in trying to choose a particular textbook that will be selected. And we're not getting ancillaries. We talked about getting the ancillaries; they're not going to assist us all that much. 

The comprehensive school safety plan was developed by administration, teachers, out-of-classroom personnel, staff members. So, I just want to highlight the changes that were made to this massive document. They're about eight.

Page 5: We just updated the members to reflect the people that are now on the school safety committee. As you can see, administrators, school police officer, deans, plant managers, teacher rep, staff rep, parent rep, and then student reps.

Page 6 and 7: They reviewed the goals from 22-23.

Page 8: They created new goals for the upcoming school year. So, ECR will participate activities to create a positive and nurturing environment for a school community. And then ECR will participate activities to clean and beautify the campus to make it more inviting for the school community. So, those are the two major goals for this new year.

Page 9: The assessment of school data. Those were our suspensions for last year.

Page 35 and 36: We talked about the pickup in the parking lot. Fortunately, we have hired more teachers and clerical staff. So, we needed more staff parking. On the map, the top part reflects how we needed to take that parking lot for the teachers.

Page 58 through 66: You’ll see the members of each of the safety committees. And then you have different Incident Commander Centers, so we had to change people in there, updating just the people that are currently working here. So, those are all in the emergency operations plan.

Page 76 to 79: We updated this information with our students with special needs in an emergency. So, we updated this section.

Page 115: We updated our template to report the most recent version of the district's incident report. So, if there is a major incident on campus, then we need to notify CSD, and we follow this protocol. And those were the changes in this massive document.

Mr. Steven Kofahl: 56:46 Are we given some mandate by the state or the district for how many days we're supposed to be able to accommodate our students without resources from the outside? 

Mr. Hussy: I don't know. I'll have to look. I don't want to give you a wrong answer. I'll have to look at that. But we usually have supplies for three to five days per student and we have emergency bins out in the stadium and near the flex program, and then we also can use cafeteria stuff. And CSD charter school division comes out and checks to make sure that we are replenishing our water supply periodically and to make sure our food supply is adequate. What we've done is we staggered the payment of those emergency blocks of food. So we don't have to spend all the money in one year. So we try to spread it out. Okay. If there is none, they would like to make a motion to approve the comprehensive school safety plan for 2020-2024."

Attendance Policy: We have two quick changes to the parent-student handbook. The first is on attendance. Basically what we did, we took our policies and procedures and we simply added to the bottom of the procedure section in the book so that the parents can see it online. I think the biggest change to our attendance policy this year is for the early policy, and we have moved to more automated systems in the morning 59:38.

Prior to this, the students had come in and dropped off notes throughout the morning and sometimes in the first period, and then we would call home and verify. Now we have a system where it is done with confidence, and the parents can email it in, and then after 8:30, that’s when parents actually coming in and willing to check out the policy 59:58.

Tardies and Consequences: Then we moved on to our Tardies and Consequences, and we added one section in there. If you take a look at the very top of the changes, five Tardies now equal one school detention. How we've had it before was five Tardies in any period would equal a detention. So theoretically speaking, the student could have 24 Tardies before they actually ever experience a detention."

Mr. Wright: Is it possible that Tardies can also be excused?

Mr. Camp responded: Yes, they can. So we have opportunities to excuse. The Tardies, come after school tutoring sessions. We will have by lunchtime detention on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, and once the students can have the opportunity to clear one detention, they have to report within five minutes, and we're going to have lunch in there for them to choose if they want as well. And then we will have Saturday's detentions. We're looking at twice a month right now. A Saturday's detention is roughly three hours, which would allow some of the students with larger accumulations of Tardies and detention to wipe out about six in a Saturday.

Mr. Wright: Say there was an accident of some kind, can that student be excused without having to go through this? How do we have a basis?

Mr. Hussey: If you look at exceptions, there's non-medical legal-related Tardies cleared by parent or guardian - 2 per semester - We're not trying to punish kids. We just want them to realize that it's important to get to class.

Unknown speaker 1:01:56: How much time do they have between classes?

Mr. Hussey: Seven minutes.

Unknown speaker added: 1:01:59 And then, when you're at that time, they're like in the heat all day. Going through the lockers.

Mr. Camp clarified: The locker assignments are staggered throughout each year, and it just keeps rotating around, and some years you'll be closer to others, and sometimes you'll have a lot farther distance, so it's up to the students to plan to make sure they grab the proper books and make sure they get to class in time. There's always a two-hour break, two classes break, two classes break, so they can make that work.

Mr. Hussey: Once we started, we had over 200 Tardies, two periods, two through six. After we started implementing this, we have it down under 100 Tardies now.

Mr. Camp: Wednesday was the 18th, which was the week before we started; we had 463 Tardies throughout the day, we are 3,300 students. The following Wednesday after we initiated the initial plan (1:03:00 talking too fast), we're at 48%. It is effective for working. We are partnering with our teachers to make sure that we're providing information through the loudspeakers; our teachers are standing at the door. They're working with the students to get to class, and it's a collaboration.

Mr. Hussey: I think the next issue we're going to need to address, we want to get the kids when they're here, is our Tardies to 1st period? The majority of those Tardies are about 100 and something Tardies to 1st period

So as you guys recall in the last board meeting, we requested approval to purchase CCTV cameras for our school campus, not because of the purchase amount, but because of the multi-year contract on every camera that we purchased. And for that, we quickly realized that if we were to purchase any cameras moving forward, we would need to continue to request approval from the board to get approval because of our FPP. So with that being said, we would like to request that the board approve us on purchasing future cameras with the parameters that we stick to the budget amount that was approved last June, and that we could provide updates to the Finance Committee, Board Finance Committee, if there's any or as needed budgetary updates, and also to the Capital Board Committee for the progress of the project."

Mr. Wright: What is the price?

Mr. Guinto: For the last month, the price that was approved was around $25,000, and then the budget amount that was approved last June was $240,000. 1:05:44.

Went into closed session 6:37PM

There being nothing to report from the closed session, the board moved on to the next item on the agenda.

The contract is in the packet that was sent to all the board members. After an extensive review and going through committees, El Camino would like to offer the job to Vania Rodriguez.

Mr. Wright: I wanted to push that aside for right now because we have all the negotiations with UPOA 1:11:13. I think that it’ll cause problems. Although Mr. Hussey has mentioned that he supports this, I think that we should just maybe move this until after we get to the negotiations. And move on from there. I think doing it now would be very mature and cause more problems within our community. That would be up to the board, but that's just what my thoughts are. Unknown speaker 1:11:30: So do we want to table that?

Unknown speaker 2 agrees 1:11:32, Yeah, table that for next time.

Mr. Wright clarifies: For the record, I am for it, but I just want to table it for now.

Item was tabled as well based on the reasons given in item 6 C of this minutes.