Vania Rodriguez led the Pledge of Allegiance

Michelle Dorries

Hello. I'm here to just comment on an item on the agenda. I looked at the California dashboard that was recently released and noticed improvements around the school and wanted to highlight a few outstanding areas and people who are making El Camino look good by being effective at their jobs. First, the discipline has improved at ECR since last year and parents and students noticed your fights and cleaner bathrooms 4:17. I want to thank Mr. Jason Camp and the dean's office for that. Next, I want to recognize Dr. Minita Clark for her leadership in improving test scores in English consistently for over five years and the rising math scores. I have researched that increasing test scores in a school is no easy feat. Yet the teachers in the English and math department under Dr. Clark's leadership have made it happen. I would also like to thank Mr. Bennett for recognizing my contribution of the parent pamphlet in the administrators meeting last week. I'm requesting that you please extend multi-year contracts to all of the administrators as they are obviously putting in the work and making it account. Lastly, I want to add I am very disappointed the way I've been treated by the board chair Brad Wright as an active parent at the El Camino Charter Highschool.

Robin Lyon

Good evening board members. I just wanted to extend my appreciation to 2 board members in

particular who took the time out of their day to come to my classroom this week to watch my students in the digital marketing class speak about their capstone projects and these are two gentlemen that I've seen around campus quite a lot and I'm very appreciative. The first is Brad Wright and the second is Steven Kofahl. I also wanted to thank Mary Christensen. She is one of our technology gurus that I like to call her. She does such amazing work for our students and really keeps the tech department on top and I also wanted to thank Coach Colson Phillip. He's our cross-country coach and I'm very appreciative that he took the time out of his day to see how hard our students worked to go ahead and produce a wonderful addition to the athletic program at our school and that website. So thank you to those of you who came. Your presence made a difference and I'm so grateful that the students had an opportunity to experience the comments that you wrote out and the feedback you gave them. So once again thank you for being there for my class.

Academic Updates:

Tomorrow is the last day of finals. I know the teachers, the students, parents are probably happy. We'll have about three and a half weeks of break because of Martin Luther King's birthday. It’s going to be celebrated on Monday and then Tuesday is a pupil free day. So we will return to school on January 17th, Wednesday at 8:30.

Academic Achievements:

 Kudos to our music department for their fantastic semester ending shows. They were great performances. Also congratulations to the Theater Drama program for their great performance in Peter and the Star Catcher. I had a chance to catch one of the shows and the kids as always are fantastic. To the student council for their first-ever ECR Has Talent show. We have a lot of kids that have a lot of talent and they were showcased last Friday night and hopefully we can build that program up. And then to the teacher, staff members, administrators, students, and parents for a wonderful fall 2023 semester and we'll finish up that tomorrow and then start 2024 and get ready for graduation on June 7th.

Capitalization Updates: 

Next just to go over some capitalization updates. The digital marketing in front of the school. We're working on the structural and electrical engineer designs with an architectural firm. So we're waiting to submit that with LAUSD. The media center, the flooring abatement is done. Now we're just waiting for LAUSD to complete the ceiling tiles so we can do the painting and the flooring. The gym bleachers, LAUSD issued an RFP for the replacement of the bleachers. The LAUSD architect already came out to look at possible ADA upgrades so we're just waiting for LAUSD’s Board to approve the replacement of that project. The stadium audio. We're looking at different quotes, getting different quotes for that replacement. The PA system for the school in general. We're exploring costs to upgrade that system and then hydration systems that the parent group has asked for. We're also waiting for LAUSD. It's part of a bond approval  so we are waiting for LAUSD's board approval to get those hydration systems that the parents asked for. And then lastly, I just got an update yesterday on the field. Let me just read this real quick. “LAUSD is looking at the contractor mobilizing during the first week of January which will give them enough time to finish all the work required around the perimeter drains to have the field ready for AstroTurf to perform the plant installation the last week of January into February with testing in February and March.”

Mr. Wright: So much time are we talking more or less? 

Mr. Hussey: According to them, it should be done by early March.

I'll keep my comments brief because most of my materials are agendized separately. As we're finishing up the first semester, we have a lot of financial reports to discuss. In January before this board meets next, Governor Newsom will be issuing kind of a preliminary budget update in mid-January. So I'll be presenting what I learned at the next board meeting.

Even though the school will be out, my staff will be in because the payroll happens next week. So I will be having people coming in this weekend in preparation for that.

Brad Wright provided an update

Board Chair Updates are for members of the board that may have any kind of news they'd like to relay to the public.

And I'd like to say that so far, we've had a great year here at El Camino. Our teachers are pushing very hard. I'd like to thank everybody for your comments, be it positive or negative because this is what we are about. We're here to answer your questions. And the most important thing is if you're passionate and you have things you want to say that you don't feel you can say it to us, please remember that you can always write to the charter school division if you feel that the board is acting inappropriate in a way that should be recognized. And that way we have our checks and balances, which is what makes us a great school; that we have checks and balances. So please feel free to comment, please feel free to email any of us, I always try to get back within 72 hours if possible.

Board members wished everyone happy holidays.

Gregory Wood provided the November, 2023, Financial Update.

P1 Report: 

It's a report of our attendance. Three times a year, the state requires us to submit our attendance updates. This is the kind of the full detail. Nothing much for the board's attention. In this section, we show what students we have in terms of either on campus, we have a Special Ed, Nonpublic students and we have extended year students that took place over the summer. So basically this, this file says through the first four months of attendance. In this next slide, in these pie charts we've given the organization kind of what our enrollment was for month four. So you can see we had 3156 students on the pie chart which show that the number of students enrolled by grade level over to the right, we show that what our ADA was for the month of November. So we break it up into General Ed, Alt Ed, Independence study and Special Ed which comes to a total of 2947 for the month. And in the next section down below it compares to prior year enrollment which we are down in enrollment which is 3457, so we're down 300 slightly over. And what the ADA was for the month of November as well-3258.

Cafeteria Updates: 

Through the first four months of the year, while we are down in meals served- 4.6%, and since we are down almost 7% in enrollment for this year, being down only 4% on a per student basis, actually more students are participating based on the lower number. However, even with the lower students to the right there, you can see that our cumulative revenues for the year are we submitted claims of almost half a million dollars. We get claims with Internal monies raised for up to $516,000. The expenses are largely Chartwell related to food and labor. We have some internal costs for salaries and other repairs. And we also have had some repairs that are done to the tune of $59,000. So even with these investments, we're up almost $485,000. Funds that need to stay within the cafeteria plan. So we look forward to continue operating profits and continue reinvestment in our cafeteria system.

Mr. Wood, CBO, presented the November, 2023, ECRCHS Investment Update.

OPEB Trust: 

The month ending November, and I'll give a quick update for where we are in December. Our investments have really improved; the market both November and December are up quite a bit. We ended the month of October for our OPEB account at $24.7 million in October, which was actually down from where we started at $25.3 million. At the end of November though, we were up to $26.7 million. So as you can see over to the top right is the summary of how the accounts were doing. The year started at $25.3 million for the first two months- remember we are now showing in our reports that the OPEB account is paying for retirees. So the OPEB account has paid $100,000 to retirees. We're still making our contributions from the General Fund. So that's up $1,100,000. So the investment account has returned gains of $352,000. So the investment of the OPEB account in total is up 5.3% and the investment is up 1.4%. Through December, as of today, the OPEB account is actually over $27.5 million. So the market itself is in a very positive position. And so we continue to ride the wave of the good economic or financial news for our investments.

General Investments:

Over to the school’s general investments. We have investments with Beacon Pointe for three accounts. We have the Annuity that's getting a higher rate of 4.8% as opposed to the amount that was less than 2%. And we now have a T-bill that's replaced the other annuity Athene that's yielding almost 4.9%. So those two investments have done well also. We will be having, at the January meeting, our quarterly update from the investment advisor, Mike Brawler, who will be able to have a more detailed explanation of the investment.

Mr. Wood and Mr. Ilyas presented the First Interim 2023-2024 Report

Ms. Ilyas

We're going to discuss our First Interim report. First Interim is to provide stakeholders along with the state, a snapshot in time of how El Camino's finances are doing. In the private world, it'd be considered like a First Quarter report. We make projections based on the assumption that the state provides for us. In our financials, we're assuming an enrollment level of 3,145 kids and an ADA of 2,956 as of P1. And we're also going to talk about how some of the COVID act money is going to end this year.

Revenue/Expenditure Summary:

This is a high level summary of our revenue and expenditures. We are comparing from the time we adopted the budget when we made our revisions based on some of the projections that we learned about. And then our actuals to date, and then our First Interim projections. Looking at the revenue side were about a quarter of a way in receiving our revenue. And then the same thing with the expense side. Based on that information that we have, we've made the projections to increase some of the revenue based on some of the adjustments made at the state. And then also with the increase in revenue to follow these expenses.

Ms. Ilyas: sometimes it lags because it depends on when the money gets dispersed by either the feds or the state.

Just to show you a percentage of our revenue, like how much, how much of our revenue is State Aid, how much of it is from local sources, state and the federal, you can see the breakdown on the pie chart. Most of our revenue comes from the LCFF sources, which is generated by our attendance. And so here is some of the differences from comparing our adopted or projected and now our First Interim, some of the changes within the revenue. Overall, our revenue has gone up by $751,000 and this is why: On the federal side which we're experiencing the highest change in revenue, we've recognized some of the ESSER money that's coming in. And then on the state side, we experienced a decrease in, in one of the grants because the state has, has cut back some of the funding. However, we've also, we've also had an increase in revenue on the mental health service side. And then on the local side, we increased our tuition revenue for 40 exchange students by $243,000.

Mr. Wood: On the LCFF our projections that we did in our earlier budget when we reported on that, that P1 attendance report to the students, we were basically exactly on budget for the first four months back in September when we tried to project and figure out how much ADA we should have. That’s why you see no major increase decrease on the LCFF.

Mr. Wood & Ms. Ilyas: They come from foreign countries, and Families that can afford it whether they're wealthy or not. 

Mr. Wood: No. Mr. Hussey's in charge of that. He has more information if you're interested because he basically oversees everything to do with that, but that’s generally the source and nature of that.

Ms. Ilyas: Moving on, this is a comparison of our expenditures. So you can see that most of our expenses are on the salaries and benefits side, while the rest-30% is for other, other expenses. And then here is a comparison of our expenses. You can see on the far right column are the adjustments that we made. We made some adjustments in salaries and benefits, also supplies and services just based on the spending levels that we've been seeing, and on like the salaries side some of the vacancies that we have.

Expenditures: Revised vs First Interim:

So we lowered our salaries for two admin vacancies and also on the Classified side for some of the instructional aids. And when you lower salaries, you also get a little increase in the benefits side. And on supplies we reduced for textbooks because we saw that for some of the departments the cost of the books weren’t coming in as high.

Ms. Ilyas: No, it's not a direct cause and effect, it's just what we're seeing at the moment. 

Mr. Wood: Yes. We still have capacity to go back to older levels. Where you have some of that staff opening positions just through health, various reasons, as an example, some of the substitute costs are up at the school because we have a number of Certificated staff that are out on forms of leave that has caused our payroll to go down because they're not in a position to be here on a day to day basis, however, we're still servicing the students by obtaining short and long term substitutes. Longer term thought needs to be given to this if we have continued lower enrollment or ADA. We give out contracts in June so we don't necessarily know what potential enrollment we will have and no matter what it is, if you've already offered a teacher or even a Certificated person, a contract, we're obligated to fulfill the contract regardless of any substantial enrollment decreases.

Components of Ending Fund Balance: 

One thing we'd like to point out is the Ending Fund Balance. In our First Interim Report that we report out to the state, we're saying that based on what we know today, we project that our ending balance after everything is said and done is going to be $41 million. However, of that $41 million, about $6.7 million is for capital assets and then the other $9.4 million is restricted, meaning the money is tied up with certain grants and certain purposes. You can see the list of where the money has been tied up in our ending balance. Our true net position that's unrestricted is $25.5 million.

COVID/CARE Act Summary:

And then lastly, we'd like to show our summary for the COVID CARES Act money. As we put it out in the beginning, a lot of the funds are going to sunset, meaning we have to spend the money down by September of 2024. So you see the list that's almost the majority of our one-time fund that we've received. 

Mr. Wright: Just for everybody to know, that money does not roll over, it has to be spent by September, and we have an accounting of how it’s going to be spent? I just want everyone to understand that. 

Ms. Ilyas: Yeah. So just for the board to think, for the following years, we're not going to have that extra money unless they come up with something else. 

Mr. Wright: So that money, we are saying it cannot be invested it must be spent within the school? 

Ms. Ilyas: Yes. And then we do report out quarterly to this day on what we're just spending the money on. So in January, we're going to have to complete a report saying, okay, we've spent this much in this quarter and this is what it was for.

Mr. Wood: I'm presenting this, but in the next board meeting, our audit manager will be here to kind of go through it. I can answer any questions, but that said, she will be here at the next board meeting to go over this in detail. But just for summary purposes we are required by the state of California to file our audit report by December 15. Here is that report. Every board member will be given a copy next month at the board meeting. Just to go over briefly the contents of it, the audit opinion that they signed is on page three, they have signed off on the audit report. Next, it just shows comparable balance sheets this year versus last year.

P&L:

This is our P&L where they break down our expenses compared to this year than last. Cash flows are included in the report as well

Unknown speaker 37:28: I see there's two columns. The column to the left has bigger numbers in the column on the right. Is that because we have more money to spend?

Mr. Wood: The column to the right is the prior years results. The column on the left is the current years result. We have just given you a comparative Financials of how much did we have in the bank or how much did we spend on salaries last year, meaning the year ending 22 versus the year ending 2023. They have the option of showing you just one year's worth of financials so it's just comparing the two.

Unknown speaker: I see the change in that asset on this page is 50% higher.

Mr. Wood: Yes.

Unknown speaker: So how do we do that every year?

Mr. Wood: We get an influx of funding, we have 300 more students in 23 than we had in prior, so just a variety of things.

Unknown speaker: So this could be from multiple sources.

Mr. Wood: Yes. Continuing. It gives the statements and gives you kind of the account policies and notes to the financials. 

Cash and Cash Equivalents:

There under Cash and Cash Equivalents they tell where a lot of our cash is. 

General Authorizations:

Under General Authorizations it has to do with our county treasury account. County Treasury has invested in multiple things. So they've given information on that in this report. 

Investments:

On to Investments, this here tells us the types of investments, and we also have Accounts

Receivable and they break down where the different types of receivables we had for the end of this year. It shows in our Capital Assets, what type of assets do we have and the depreciation. The report breaks down any of our Accounts Payable into different sources. 

OPEB:

Our OPEB account right there, you can kind of see one reason for the increase in our OPEB

liability. Our liability at the end of 2022 was 5.7 million dollars. So you can see it then the column to the right, we only had a $1.8 million liability as of June 30th of 2023. Previously we’ve talked about how we were 93% funded at the end of 2023. We're only 70% somewhat funded in the end of 2022. 

The report goes over the Employee Retirement Plans, how much we’ve contributed into STRS and PERS and the OPEB account.

Subsequent Events: 

Moving on to the Subsequent Events, things worth noting is that we're still putting in our financials. The Fulgent Matter 41:11, we are not recognizing that. We're still disputing that. I think as I mentioned at the last board meeting, our legal counsel has I said, they have not provided any evidence that supports their claim of the $1.271 million. So the state knows, we recognize it, but we're in with other charter schools and nobody has identified or has supported a penny of their invoices for the 1.271 million dollars. 

Senate Bill 114: The other item of note that maybe some people haven't recognized is the Senate Bill 114. On July 10th, they passed the motion that our charter got extended one year. So our charter now ends June 30 of the 2027. So we were the beneficiary of the state Senate allowing for primarily COVID related, but our charter automatically got extended so we don’t have to submit a new charter petition until the end of 2027.

Board Members:

Moving on you see all our board members recognized and their terms. 

ADA: 

Here’s our ADA that they audited for the year. We lost the one day of attendance. This is more a conversation about this year. You can see how many minutes that we were required to provide our students 64,800. So last year we had 64,933, which would have been the same number as this year. The number of days is 180, the state requirement for the number of days is only 175. So we are still following trying to get an exemption for our instructional minutes. Losing that one day doesn't make us in any violation for the number of days. But as you can see, we exceeded the minutes requirement by 133, and losing that one day would cause us not to be in compliance with the minutes required. That's more of a comment for this school year. 

Adjustments: 

On to adjustments. We had some adjustments made between our unaudited actuals and our audited more perfunctory adjustments that they made. 

Audit Opinions: 

The last page I would to go over is here where they give opinions and we're in good shape. The page tells everybody how good we performed. For any outside auditor, “Unmodified” is the best in the audit world. Some people call it a clean opinion in the non-educational world. So we got the best possible audit opinion. And in the other section that says did they have any weaknesses or findings? The answer was “No” so no findings in any of these areas. And findings, the CSD when they come and do our fiscal review will automatically cause our score to get lowered by one.

Mr. Hussey led the discussion on the Request for One Period Coach Authorization During 2023-2024, including verification of request and consent for the following sports/courses and authorized Teachers/Coaches:

I don’t know if the board remembers at the beginning of fall, we did a lot of requests for one-time period coaching authorization. It allows a teacher who holds a credential in any subject other than P.E. to coach a competitive sport, which students receive PE credit for one period of the day. Currently, our lacrosse coach Richard Russell does not have a teaching credential, so he would need somebody to oversee the class while he coaches. So this year we would like to have Mr. Bennett be that person so our students, boys, and girls can get the credit.

Mr. Hussey:

I just want to thank Chef Gommez. She has changed our culinary arts program at the school. It's fabulous. We’ve upgraded a lot of the kitchen stations. The one thing we’ve put over the edges is having a camera in the classroom so that kids can see what Chef Gommez is doing as far as cutting or doing that sort of stuff. So we need to put televisions around the classroom and then a camera that can show directly her presentation so kids can actually see what she's doing from their seats.

Mr. Wright: Something to be discussed, for example, I was in this class the other day, and I thought there was a camera there. I felt uncomfortable. How do the teachers feel about this?

Mr. Hussey: It's only a one-camera system, and she has requested it. So the camera is just showing how she is preparing food or giving a presentation. Unless kids are doing presentations, it's a single camera that's focused on her. To answer that question in case other people ask, if we were to put cameras, we would probably not put cameras in classrooms. But if we were to put cameras in classrooms, that's a bargaining issue, so that would have to be bargained with UTLA, and we're well aware of that and so is UTLA.

Mr. Guinto:

So the admin team 49:28 actually did visit Granada to get a sense of how the setup for their kitchen was. And we actually did present this to the finance committee in the last meeting. And we received guidance from them because two vendors came in for a site visit to provide a quote. Unfortunately, one of the vendors decided that they want to know how much budget was required to be able to give us a quote. And we said that we cannot provide that. You need to give us exactly based on the parameters that we set. The finance committee advised us to get another vendor to provide a quote, which we were able to find a vendor that was capable of doing it.

One of the things that we wanted to make sure was for this project to be able to get done during the winter break because if we're not able to do this during winter break, the next time we're going to be able to do it may be spring break, and if not during summer school; that classroom is being used, so it's going to be tricky. So with the other two vendors that we were able to reach out, this particular vendor was able to commit that they can put their resources to get this project done if we approved them to be the winning bid.

There's a much more simpler approach compared to the initial one that we have. So this one actually there's going to be two cameras. One will be on the presentation area and then the other one would be in the stove area. So the teacher wanted to be able to show in detail the things that she's doing on the presentation area. So this diagram just basically shows there's number one and number two button. The number one button automatically when she presses it shows the presentation area and she can start doing her teaching. And then if she presses number two, it would go to the stove area and would show in detail what she's doing in that particular area. And that's pretty much it. It's a much more simplified approach compared to the other one. It has a lot more bells and whistles. They're planning on replacing the audio. This one they're going to try to use or they will be using the existing audio system that is currently in the classroom. And also features such as streaming, all that stuff, being able to control what display is occurring on one of the TVs and then have a different one in the other. So when we got this proposal, we did reach out to the teacher again and make sure that this solution is adequate for her needs, and she did confirm and actually she's very happy that, you know, there's a more simpler approach and it can do exactly what she intended to use for this particular project. So with that being said, this is the winning bid. The total amount, I believe is $14,665 for the labor and the equipment cost of $7,787.

Mr. Wright: How many companies have we gone to for the bids?

Mr. Guinto: So a total of four, one did not want because we weren't able to disclose the budget. And then the other one is not able to commit the resources for the winter break. So we only had two that's capable of doing it. And then this is the cheapest.

Mr. Hussey: This bid is $22,452.33, the other bid was $72,232.

Unknown speaker 53:41: One of those bids was 3 times more than this bid. Were we going to get 3 times more equipment or quality?

Mr. Guinto: Yes. As I mentioned, they were planning on replacing everything. They're planning on adding a new audio system in there; there's going to be a new sort of cabinet that would house all the equipment. This one is more like a straightforward approach. As you can see here in the diagram, we only have that one box that allows the teachers to be able to switch between two of the cameras. All those other buttons that are in there, she's not going to be able to utilize because there's no equipment to support that. But again, consulting with the teacher, that's exactly the only thing that she needs. But the good thing about it, and I forgot to mention, is that if we do decide to scale it up to kind of the same specs as what Granada has, we're still capable of doing it.

Unknown speaker: Okay, so we can start low and build on that?

Mr. Guinto: Yes.

Mr. Hussey led the discussion

As I mentioned in the last board meeting on December 15th, the California dashboard released their results for the 2023 school year. I just want to go over a couple of these items so we all know what we're looking at. So you have Suspension Rate, English Learner Process, Graduation Rate, College/Careers, English Language Arts, and Mathematics; that is our SBAC. And then we have Basics on the Implementation of Academic Standards, Parent and Family Engagement, Local Climate Survey, Access to a Broad Course of Study. We met all those standards.

Suspension Rate: 

So going over to the Suspension Rate, it's in the orange, which we don't want to be in the orange, but last year, as Ms. Doria said, there were some issues at the beginning of the year. Unfortunately, we had to suspend many kids because of fighting and that kind of stuff. What we've worked on over this year is we reduced the fights from last year. I think they were sort of justice 56:36 that the dean has been doing; it's been helping with that. We also have the PBIS program, the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support that have helped us reduce suspensions on top of, I think having fewer students on the campus has been a big effect as well. You don't have the amount of students on campus, so there's not as many.

Mr. Wright: You're talking about during the period that they have to leave the campus, not not having students enrolled?

Mr. Hussey: There are positives and negatives to having a big campus. Some of the positives are there's less commotion, there's less crowdedness, so that's a good thing. The other thing is the deans have been working with the counselors and the special services offices to try to combat some of the suspensions.

Mr. Wright: How are they trying to combat the suspensions?

Mr. Hussey: Before issues arise, they're talking to students. They're talking to students with counselors; they're talking to students that have IEPs to try to come up with ways to avoid getting into altercations. It's not a good or bad thing, but I always look at what groups of students are getting suspended. If you look at all the kids that are following the Orange category are African-American, Asian, Filipino, Hispanic, Two or more Races, Socioeconomically, Disadvantaged, Students with Disabilities, and White. So as a school, you can see, all right, we're all in the same category, so we need to focus on all those. What would be discouraging to me is if African-American and Hispanic students were in the red and everybody else was in the green; then we would have to look internally to say, hey, are we treating kids differently? Are we looking at suspending these kids more often than others? This shows me that, hey, it looks like we're treating everyone equally, so everyone's getting suspended equally, which is a good and bad thing. I want to thank Mr. Camp, the deans, for working on this and our teachers.

Graduation: 

Graduation rate, we're in yellow right now, so there's room for improvement there. This one is where I would say, we need to look internally a little more. African-American, Two More races, students with disabilities and socioeconomic disadvantage, we need to look at putting more resources and making sure these kids are on track to graduate. Yellow are Filipino, Hispanic.

Mr. Wright: What kind of resources?

Mr. Hussey: Maybe having counselors, the intervention coordinators working with these students a little more, putting these kids in study skills classes as they're falling behind, identifying these students so they can get into the Flex program, or if they need the independent study program, to make sure that those supports are there for them.

Mr. Wright: How does tutoring work with the kids?

Mr. Hussey: Our tutoring system is all voluntary, but that's something we can look at, maybe make it mandatory.

Mr. Wright: The question is, how do we supplement our teachers if they're spending extra time to make their students understand how they're teaching?

Mr. Hussey: Teachers get paid for tutoring.

Mr. Wright: I understand, but I'm saying, is there anything extra?

Mr. Hussey: Tutoring is extra. Any time that teachers spend after school, they're compensated for that.

Mr. Wright: So that’s something to report. I guess what I want to make sure is that our teachers are a very valuable resource. As I said before, without the board, the school can get another board, without the administrator, the teacher, the heart of our school, and I want to make sure that they're compensated or they're happy with it,

College and Career: 

Right now we're in medium, and then Mr. Abba is working on raising that to the next level, which would be high. Some of the things that we're doing are creating the CTE pathways. Right now we have the culinary and woodworking that will be in year two this year, so that will help some of our students achieve their career goal. Next year, graphic design and music production will have a career pathway. We've also increased our dual enrollment, our collaboration with Church College. Last year, our cohort had 18 students. This year we have 42 students. So that's a tremendous they are getting college credit and being able to use that to meet the college level, and then we're also capturing more college classes that our kids take off-campus. So our kids are taking a lot of APs and honors classes here, but those kids are also taking college classes. We haven't captured those classes here on our transcripts, so we're doing that as well. So we hope by next year, we go from medium to high.

English Language Arts and Mathematics: 

This is our SBAC scores. I want to thank Dr. Clark, our teachers buying into the professional learning communities. I think a lot of our kids have increased their scores, which is a good thing. We're still working on the math, but our English language arts has definitely taken off, as you can see, we only have one group in the orange, and then most of our groups in the green and blue. And then as we identified with WASC, our students with disabilities are in the orange level, so with the PLCs and teachers raising that rigor, I think, with our students with disabilities hopefully we can move them up on the chart as well. 

That's overall, there's a lot of reports that you can write. It's very easy if you just type in California dashboard, type in El Camino, if you want to dive deeper into some of the data points, then you can do that, or you can send me an email, but that's a basic overview that we see, like in suspension, we see we have to change or attack it in a different way. And the English Language Arts and Mathematics, you can see that slowly we've been, attacking that area and those people should be commended for that.

Mr. Write: Okay, any questions from Board Members; my colleagues?

Unknown speaker 1:3:48: Does that website show previous years?

Mr. Hussey: Yes, 

Discuss survey results of the IB Programme including teacher, student, and parents data.

David Hussey led the discusion

We sent out three emails to parents and students. I sent out multiple emails to teachers. The discouraging results are only 10 teachers responded to any interest in the IB program.

Mr. Write: How many teachers do we have?

Mr. Hussey: I would say, say 140.

Mr. Write: What else can we do to maybe have a better response?

Mr. Hussey: Unless we do a professional development?

Mr. Write: The administrators, are there any talking to teachers, and saying this is going on? Sometimes teachers have a lot on their minds, and passing things up.

Mr. Hussey: I mean, I think there's plenty of correspondence that was sent out. As far as the parents and students, we will only got 96 responses. I think to answer your question, Mr. Wright, I think it can be a good program for the school. Like I said before, our school has always been focused on APs. Maybe they don't realize what the true benefits of the IB program are, so we will look at other sources, other presentations to see if people will buy into the school.

Mr. Write: Sounds good. Do we have any questions from me and my colleagues? I see there isn’t so we’ll move on.

When we went into COVID, we dropped the graduation requirement to 210 credits. And so we're just correcting the handbook to go back to the 230 credits. And those 20 credits are coming from the elective category. So it doesn't change any of the core requirements. And those are the only two changes in the handbook.

Did the state requirements change and they changed back or?

Mr. Hussey: No, it was just during COVID, the state said we could drop the credits. So we dropped it for the COVID years. And actually, this should have been changed last year, but no one caught the oversight, so we just want to correct it for the record.

And are other schools the same level?

Mr. Hussey: No, other schools require fewer credits, but they may require more specific classes. So everybody's a little different. But we've fulfilled all the state, all the state requirements.

David Hussey, presented the School's Compliance Monitoring and Certification of Board Compliance Review 2023-2024 Checklist Items on behalf of Dean Bennett, Administrative Director

This is a Compliance Monitoring and Certification of Board Compliance Review. This is for the charter school division. In October, we did the preliminary, which is in the yellow. So those were all compliant. On page five were the 700 documents. We were in progress at that time. We will have that completed now. And the charter school meets 1:9:18 the provisions of eligibility and participants federal programs under grants. So as of right now, I could say that this is all completed. So as you can see on October 26, I signed off that we had either completed or were in progress, and we sent this to the charter school division by November 3. And then today, Mr. Wright, I will ask the board to approve that you will be able to check out that we're compliant with all this, and then you will sign off, and we will submit this by January 12, 2024. 

Mr. Wright: With that being said, any questions? If not, let's vote.

David Hussey, Executive Director, led the discussion on the Independent Study Plan

This Independent Study Plan is only in the event of an emergency. It's not an independent study plan for everybody. What we are looking at is if there's a school closure of greater than three consecutive days, we would like to be able to initiate an independent study program for all of our students so they don't fall behind like we did before. 

Mr. Wright: So will that be online or? 

Mr. Hussey: Yes, most likely because the only way the school is going to close is if kids can't come into school. 

Mr. Wright: My question is, will there be a teacher? 

Mr. Hussey: Yes. This is the program that all of our students will be able to access some kind of education. It's only in the event of a school emergency. And this was one of the items that the charter school division asked because when we were closed on the 1st, they wanted to know if we had an independent study plan. So this will be another document to show them that we have a plan. But we have to have a school closure of greater than three days for this to kick in. 

Mr. Wright: Any questions from my colleagues? There’s none, so we’ll move on to voting.

There being nothing to report from the Closed Session, the meeting moved on to the next agenda item.

We've given contracts to the Administrative Directors. And so far, all but one have signed, and we'll work with that person, making sure that we're accurate with everything. But with the people who did sign, would anyone like to make a motion to approve their contracts? 

Unknown speaker 1:15:00: We should mention the names. 

Mr. Wright: The people that did sign were: Mr. Bennett, Dr. Clark, Mr. Jason Camp, and Mr. Alba, and Mr. Larew is standing by for the clarification of hers, so she has not signed yet 1:15:05.