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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2015-06-11 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: June 11, 2015 MINUTES FOR MEETING OF June 11, 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 8:05 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 (Absent) 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 May 14, 2015, minutes were approved. Oral Communications No oral communications. Review of Recent City Council/PAUSD Board Meetings District Update: Caswell reported construction on the Paly gym will start soon and this will create more traffic on Churchill Avenue due to less parking on that side but they have placed more bike racks so that should help. Also, the Paly Performing Arts Center will be complete and that will open up more parking. Burt asked if they have added enough bike racks to compensate for all the anticipated additional biking needs. Caswell asked Mak to bring this question back to Bob Golton. Mak will also touch base with the City School Traffic Safety Committee on this. Burt mentioned the City’s expanded shuttle program might also help mitigate this. Caswell reported there is a new bell schedule at Gunn High School and they are working with the City School Traffic Safety Committee on this. Townsend informed that the first day of school is August 18. Burt asked if full summer school would be reinstated next year. Caswell said they have not had that discussion and the budget has not been approved. DuBois asked if it will include all the electives. Caswell answered that it is not clear but it would be available to all students. De Geus asked when that discussion will happen because they do so many summer programs that complement each other. Caswell asked Mak to take this back as something they need to follow-up on in August. Caswell shared that the Paly students won first place for solving a math modeling problem that was associated with casting a film. The students were invited to Hong Kong to receive their award. City Update: DuBois reported they had a discussion about Project Safety Net (PSN) at their Policy and Services meeting. They took some good steps towards revitalizing the program and allot significantly more funding. Caswell stated the Superintendent has realigned the District’s goals making it clear who is part of PSN. Burt asked when they will receive that information. Caswell answered that the Board will approve this plan at the next meeting and they will then send the information to the City. Townsend mentioned the District’s Student Services Director Brenda Carillo is very involved with PSN and will continue in that role. City/School Liaison Committee Meeting Page 2 MINUTES FOR MEETING OF June 11, 2015 Dubois reported they approved extra funds for AEDs to be in every police vehicle. They also approved some money for the Cubberley Master Plan. The City had their Comp Plan Summit and over 100 people attended. They are forming a citizens’ group to participate in the comp plan update. One of the criteria Council identified was to get parents of school age children. Applications are due June 15. Caswell suggested reaching out to Susan Usman, PTA President. Dubois said it was Gunn Music Week and on May 18, the Mayor recognized them for all the awards they received throughout the year. Caswell asked if they could send the Board information on this event. De Geus reported they have a great plan for summer camps and at the moment have about 5,000 registrations. Townsend mentioned the Enrollment Management Advisory Committee (EMAC) continues to meet and working through models of what a new school should look like whether it is K-8 or K-5. Burt asked if there is a City representative on EMAC. Mak said no. They agreed a City representative would be helpful. Burt stated that at a minimum a staff from the City’s Planning department. He suggested reaching out to their Planning and Urban Environment Director Hilary Gitelman. Mak will follow-up with her. Burt touched again on the City’s recent PSN discussion, stating that the collective impact model is becoming solidified. This is a more deliberate process that takes these collaborative results in identifying a set of shared objectives, measurements, coordination, and deeper communication. For the time being, the City is the backbone agency but that is not necessarily the long term outcome. The next step would be the hiring of an executive director with experience and skills around this collective impact model and they have increased their budget to allow for that. They also discussed the need to have funding for deeper data interpretation and analysis. They have quite a bit of data collected and that data is extremely valuable and under-utilized. Caswell asked about the Stanford funds placed aside specifically for PSN. Burt said they have already used some of those funds for PSN. In this year’s budget they have $700,000 including track watch which is over $500,000 a year. They are rapidly draining the Stanford funds and they do not have a sustainable funding source for these expenditures. Caswell asked when the next meeting will take place. Burt said much of the discussion occurred on Tuesday at the Council meeting. De Geus said Council will approve the funding for the collect impact model at Monday’s Council meeting and they will have a variety of meetings over the summer. He does not know when this will go to the Board; he will discuss that with Brenda Carillo. Library Programs and Services City of Palo Alto Library Director Monique Le Conge reported there are five library branches in Palo Alto. They have a summer reading program from birth to adult. Hoopla is a new online service that provides free downloadable videos, e-books, audio, and more. Every year they host book discussions with the community and this year they partnered with Acterra on this. The library foundation which supported the fundraising for facilities will seize operation as of June 30, 2015. The foundation raised more than $4 million to fund furnishing and anything else that was needed plus $1 million dollars for library collections. Friends of the library will continue and this year they are committed to $130,000 to support library programs. They developed a strategic plan that they will be doing a study session on with Council after the break. The developmental assets are a big part of how they present programs and how they think about them. It has been included in their budget as a measurement for the last 3-4 years. Le Conge stated they have hired librarians focusing on youth and youth services. They have several City/School Liaison Committee Meeting Page 3 MINUTES FOR MEETING OF June 11, 2015 at Mitchell Park and one at Riconada who will focus on being a school liaison outreach. They recently did a school library drive pilot at Terman Middle School in collaboration with the school librarian. They would like to have some school librarians come to their meetings. They also reach out to the private schools as well. The libraries do offer to teach everyone how to download the eBooks. Their children’s programming supports a lot of early literacy work that is in line with the latest research. They are also setting up a family place library program based on family development where young children will do activities that will develop their ability to learn. They have a girls’ coding club at Mitchell Park but they are thinking of going more for a coding for kids so there is more participation. They are also working on developing an inclusive story time for disabled participants and looking at continuing to build their partnerships with schools and outside businesses. A couple of years ago they worked on a grant from the California State Library with the art center to develop MakeX. They won an award as a top innovator from the Urban Library Council. Community Services department will oversee the mobile app project. The library will be doing a program called Maker+ to develop design thinking and Public Services Assistant Director Eric Howard will be working on that. Howard stated they are piloting a project that they received funding for through a grant. They put out a notice for students to apply and it exceeded the number of students they can really handle but they are still accepting applications. They want to use the energy, enthusiasm, and creativity of students to develop a new type of lab that will address big social challenges. They will try to get them to look at issues that are beyond themselves. They will then see what they can to do to apply the technological solutions they come up with. This project is in line with many of the developmental assets. They have also partnered with a group of students that was born out of Harvard called Peace First which also does many of things they are trying to do with the developmental assets. It places kids on the driver seat to create their own solutions using technologies. Caswell asked if this project is time limited. Howard answered the idea is to have the students create it, develop it and use the grant money to help support it. La Conge reported there are many services the libraries offer and any programming they are doing can be found on the events calendar. She said the hours by virtue of budget at Mitchell Park and Riconada libraries are 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Thursday and 10 a.m.-6p.m. Friday-Sunday. The Children’s Library will also be open 7 days a week. Caswell suggested working together to communicate these changes to the schools. Dubois asked if it has ever been given any thought to using the school identification as a valid library card. Kellerman said the vendors do not allow it. Paly Librarian Rachel Kellerman and Nancy Pang presented on the District library programs on the following slides: -Overview -Libraries and Teachers Librarians -Mission of Library Program -Our beliefs -Initiatives and Actions -Support common core standards -LibGuides City/School Liaison Committee Meeting Page 4 MINUTES FOR MEETING OF June 11, 2015 -Strong School Libraries -Survey Results -Moving Forward Kellerman stated they do connect with the public libraries to ensure there are choices available to students for pleasure reading and they also want to make sure that all students have access to all the technologies they need to be successful. Townsend asked if the City is involved in the preservation of their history. Kellerman answered yes, the City owns the archive collection. They are working together to digitize the Paly Campanile collection from 1895 forward. Mitchell Park Community Center Recreation Supervisor Lacee Kortsen reported on the variety of programs at Mitchell Park Community Center. Some of the summer camp program highlights are Design for Video Game, Digital Art for Kinders, Lego Robotics, Foothill Adventures and Extremes for teens and IdeaFarm is a new design thinking pilot based on a D school at Stanford. They also have a counselor training program where they essentially receive a lot of leadership, team building and communication training. In the fall, they have additional programs that run for a series of eight weeks and meet once or twice a week. The teen center is at the Mitchell Park Community Center. It offers a variety of activities such as video games, a tennis table, and a foosball table. They want to bring back dances but want to be careful of how they will be structured since parents were concerned about incidents that happened in the past. The center is open for drop-off for the summer from 3-7 p.m. and they are getting new funding to expand hours. They are also launching monthly special events with a special events team and teen advisory board. They will advise the teen center staff on what is new and good in their world. They also want to launch a teen volunteer program. Townsend asked what ages they target. Kortsen answered middle school to high school students. Le Conge explained that they are required to fingerprint all kids who volunteer. Townsend asked if this is City or State requirement. Alaee answered that it is a City requirement but it is all done onsite and they have discussed adding more fingerprinting machines at the sites. Kortsen explained that they leased out the Bryant Street Teen Center several years ago and it was determined a portion of that revenue would go to funding teen programs. A pilot they tried this year was to encourage teens to submit proposals for ideas on programs or service projects. A teen program specialist is working with all these groups. There were 200 teens for this program and they have over 15 programs, some were one-time and some were over multiple weeks. They include projects like clickpa.org which is an events website for teens, MakeX, Project Anybody, Girl Up, Science for Site, a talent show and tons of other programs that teens came up with themselves. The Palo Alto Youth Council just had a study session with City Council to discuss their work over the year. They do break for summer but will start up again in September. The Teen Advisory Board informs them on activities and events they can do for teens. SWAG is a collaboration that is done with Youth Community Services (YCS) and it is a service learning leadership club that will begin in September. Burt stated that clickpa.org is intended to be a central website for all teen activities at the City and believes there is a real opportunity to funnel district activities into the same website. Townsend mentioned the PTA newsletters do go out to all parents in the District and suggested reaching out to PTA President Susan Usman. Le Conge stated they do have sending information out to the PTA on their PR checklist. Burt indicated they need to figure out how to make this happen systematically and not just anecdotally. City/School Liaison Committee Meeting Page 5 MINUTES FOR MEETING OF June 11, 2015 City/District Budget Update This item was postponed to the August 20, 2015, meeting due to time constraints. Future Meetings and Agendas The next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, August 20, 2015 at 8:00 a.m. at the District office. Adjournment The meeting was adjourned at 9:38 a.m.