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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2015-05-14 City Schools Liaison Committee Summary Minutes City/School Liaison Committee Meeting Page 1 SCHOOL/CITY LIAISON COMMITTEE PALO ALTO UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT CITY OF PALO ALTO DATE: May 14, 2015 MINUTES FOR MEETING OF May 14, 2015 Opening The School/City Committee held a special meeting in the District Conference Room A at 25 Churchill Ave, Palo Alto. The meeting was called to order at 8:07 a.m. * All handouts can be viewed in the Business Services Office 25 Churchill Ave. Palo Alto Unified School District Representatives: Camille Townsend, Board Member, Committee Chair Terry Godfrey, Board Member Cathy Mak, Chief Business Officer City of Palo Alto Representatives: Pat Burt, Council Member Tom DuBois, Council Member Khashayar Alaee, Assistant City Manager Approval of Minutes The April 23, 2015, minutes were approved. Oral Communications No oral communications. Review of Recent City Council/PAUSD Board Meetings District Update: Townsend said another committee is working on the middle school athletics and some of issues that were brought up at the last meeting. In regards to the building issues, Cubberley and the like, McGee would like to work directly with Keene on this. Bob Golton is in charge of overseeing these contracts. McGee would to be brought up to speed and is going to meet with Golton on this. Townsend will circle back and check on next steps with McGee. Burt said on something like Ventura there will be key roles for Keene and Max but only following policy direction. They presently do not have policy direction from either of the bodies in order to act. The question then becomes, does this Committee begin the discussion around potential changes and return to their respective bodies with their ideas. Townsend recommends that if there is an issue that is pending, that they bring it up to their Boards and see where they are on that. Townsend was asked by the Board to share with this Committee the fact that they have 200-400 more students coming to Gunn at about 8:25 a.m. and dispersed through the day and they want to ensure the City Traffic staff is aware. Burt asked they dropped zero period but adopted a block schedule. Godffrey explained that it starts at 8:25 a.m. but without zero period the students that would have had zero period will now be coming at 8:25 a.m. Townsend reported that the Enrollment Advisory Management Committee started their work. City Update: DuBois reported they passed an emergency order on retail protection. They also discussed their urban forest master plan. They had a discussion on a potential location for police station. The location they are looking at more seriously is the parking lot on California and Sherman Avenue. If they do go with this location, they will build a parking garage on California Avenue. They also had a meeting with their Historic Resource Board regarding updating their inventory of historic buildings in Palo Alto. No building after World War II is on that list. DuBois stated the non-profit Caritas has joined the Buena Vista mobile home park effort. Caritas runs several mobile home parks throughout the state of California. The City Council’s final ruling will be on City/School Liaison Committee Meeting Page 2 MINUTES FOR MEETING OF May 14, 2015 the May 26th and will be reviewing next steps. After the 26th if nothing changes, they can start evictions in six months. Burt reported Council accepted the urban forest master plan but gave them direction to return in six to nine months with an updated plan because they did not believe it adequately incorporated a lot of the vision of their environmental groups around the urban forest plan. It should have a greater emphasis on natural vegetation and indigenous species of trees as well as other flora to help rebuild an ecosystem outside their natural area and a de-emphasis on ornamental. They also had their water plan update for the drought. Palo Alto achieved 16% reduction last year but had an allocation of 24% on the statewide bases so they have their plan to achieve the remaining 8%. They would be interested on whether the District has a corresponding plan. The City Policy and Services Committee took on the smoking ordinance. They had three elements to consider, two were recommended to the Council to adoption, the third was over multi-family homes and they will be having a second hearing for additional information. Some of this affects schools and teen students. In particular, they extended their current smoking ordinance to cover vaping. They are recommending to Council the licensing sale of tobacco products. They had a discussion about limiting sales within a certain distance of schools. If sellers lose their permits when they violate the ordinance, they feel that is really the key. Parcel Tax Update Mak reported on the recently passed Parcel Tax Measure A with the following slides: -Investment to support struggling students The new measure is $2.3 million more than the current parcel tax. The new expenditures will fund health and wellness services and academics. -Investment for STEAM The District will also invest in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics). Class size for these electives will be at 30 students per class. Townsend asked when collection of this parcel tax begins. Mak answered on July 1, 2015, it is a six year parcel tax with a two percent annual escalation. City Auditor’s Update on National Citizen Survey City Auditor Harriet Richardson reported on the National Citizen Survey: Every year they conduct a national citizen survey, this is their 12th year. This year they contracted with the National Research Center. In the past they have sent out 1,200 surveys; this year they extended the survey to 3,000 households in an attempt to understand why people answer certain ways. There is a north/south distribution and six clusters of neighborhood areas and based on that they received a 27% response rate, 796 surveys. They will present the survey and their annual performance report to Council at the June 1, 2015, study session. They are working with software called Tablo which allows people to look at data interactively on their open data website. Burt asked about when the surveys went out? Richardson answered the surveys went out in August and they had a four week collection period. It was published in January on the City Auditor’s website. Dubois asked about area 5 (College Terrace/Palo Alto Hills) on the survey. Richardson worked with Claudia Keith in the Communications department and spoke to several people in the City Manager’s office on what made sense and they came up with it based on that. DuBois said College Terrace is a very active and a very cohesive neighborhood and the survey does not reflect that. Richardson stated at this point they would have to go back to the National Research Center and have them reorganize. DuBois asked if only College Terrace results could be displayed. Richardson answered no because City/School Liaison Committee Meeting Page 3 MINUTES FOR MEETING OF May 14, 2015 the National Research Center can only do six groups as a whole so they cannot identify which surveys came from where but this is good feedback for next year. Townsend asked about year to year comparisons? Harriet said yes, the report does include year to year comparisons. Townsend asked if she could find general gross data on the survey on how the schools did last year. Richardson answered yes, there is a section on year to year data but for data on specific areas, they would need to look at the part of the survey that breaks it up by geographic subgroups. Richardson reported 91-95% of residents rated the City of Palo Alto as an excellent place to live, an excellent place to raise children, their neighborhood as an excellent place to live, and the quality of life. Burt encouraged the Committee to look at the table on the bottom page 7 of the survey. It is suggestive of answers to specific questions that are reflection of overall outlook. Townsend pointed out that page 17 shows residents are satisfied with K-12 services. The information is helpful to the District and it gives them the opportunity to compare data with the District’s internal survey. Richardson reported that in the past, questions on Palo Alto transportation were on specific transportation services, this year the survey asked a single question about Palo Alto public transportation. This might make it difficult to do year to year comparisons. Townsend asked where she could find last year’s data on K-12 education. Harriet said on page 6 there are year to year comparisons. Dubois asked if they lost the ability to benchmark against other cities. Richardson answered that they discovered that many of these cities and counties do not do the National Citizen Survey so the National Research Center gathers their data and attempts to match the questions but the questions were not the same and so there was not enough data to match up. Townsend asked if they try to compare to cities of equivalent wealth? Harriet said no, they do not. They try to pick out cities that are comparable with similar survey questions but 90% of the questions came back as N/A and it was not useful data. Townsend said the Districts tried to benchmark across the nation to other like districts of wealth. Harriet said in the future, they will try to go out of the area to find cities that are more like Palo Alto. Burt said they are some meaningful data sets that would address City School joint issues. The community characteristics/education enrichment area on page 17, there are questions about affordable childcare. The southwest Palo Alto is considerably lower than some of the other areas. If they look at what childcare is available in that area, there is not a lot of childcare available in those areas. This is another example where this Committee could do meaningful work on and begin a discussion on what are the needs. Burt pointed out the table on page 16, there is a question about opportunity to learn about City services through social media websites and south Palo Alto has less ability to access social media and that is not true. Godfrey pointed out that it could be an age thing. Burt said it could be, but he believes it is an overall outlook of the City. There is very valuable information and it is important to do the work with interpretation, additional research, and discussions. Richardson pointed out pages 16 – 17 on recreation and wellness, there is a question about City/School Liaison Committee Meeting Page 4 MINUTES FOR MEETING OF May 14, 2015 availability of affordable quality mental health care on table 14. The ratings for this are fairly low. Townsend pointed out the question about neighborliness of people on table 16, openness and acceptance of the community towards people of diverse background. The District has something called developmental assets, where they try to help students feel connected and it looks like their parents do not feel connected. Godfrey would be interested in the benchmark on this and whether it is a common perspective or if it is particular to Palo Alto. Burt stated this is something that is worth looking at in the context of urban design and the physical environment. Many of the elements of new urbanism have to do with what are the physical environments that create a more interactive community. Burt pointed out that on quality mental health care, they have a breakdown by geographic area but they do not have a breakdown by ethnicity. Richardson mentioned they could do that in Tablo. Richardson said their office offers this information to policy makers to identify whether they need to focus on specific areas. Richardson mentioned they did four multiple choice questions and one open ended question. The open ended question on page 11 was what Palo Alto can do to make Palo Alto residents happier. There were three key items, affordable housing and reducing development, reducing traffic and improving mobility and improving parking. Townsend pointed out page 55, table 5, the question about how many years have they lived in Palo Alto and wonders how the economy impacts this. If they were to go through the data bank, could they see through the years whether these are constant or if they go up and down? Richardson said they could go back and do comparisons through the years. Townsend mentioned she would like to know how many people stay while their kids are in school. Richardson said there is a question on retirement in Palo Alto on table 17 that might give them an idea on that. Godfrey pointed out that the question about whether there are children younger than 17 years old in the household, might also help. Burt stated that traditionally they have occasionally used the data to inform additional discussions but not systematically and he believes it has some greater value. Council perhaps should be looking at making better use of this to address priorities. Burt mentioned that before Terman Middle School was reopened, it used to be a community center with a neighborhood library and there was also the Jewish Community Center at that time. This neighborhood now lacks all of these services and has very little childcare. This points to areas the City should be looking at and 20 years ago there had been City School collaboration to address some of those issues. Godfrey asked when the City comprehensive plan is refreshed, does the City and District work on the parts where they might discuss community centers within a certain number of miles and population or park land per capita? Burt answered that cities have driven that historically. When they had creation of the Terman community center and library, there was City School collaboration around those things. Richardson pointed out that questions 1-17 were custom questions and they do have that ability every year. If there is a question they would like included in the survey they could email Richardson by the end of July. Future Meetings and Agendas The next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, June 11, 2015 at 8:00 a.m. at the District office. Adjournment The meeting was adjourned at 9:34 a.m.