Redlands Unified School District — Special Board Meeting, May 17, 2022

Meeting Summary

A recognition-only special meeting: 116 graduating seniors earned the State Seal of Biliteracy in ten languages, and AVID seniors from four campuses were honored one at a time. The agenda ran to a single page, there was nothing on it to act on, and nobody spoke during community input.

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🎓 A one-page agenda and a two-hour meeting

The meeting was called for 6:00 p.m. in the Blackstone Theater on the Redlands East Valley High School campus. The published agenda ran to a single page: the pledge of allegiance, roll call, community input on agendized items, two presentations, board comments and adjournment 1. There were no action items.

The roll call ran through five members, each answering present 23. No one had signed up to speak under community input, so the meeting went straight to the presentations 3. The rest of the evening belonged to graduating seniors; the recording runs beyond the two-hour mark before the adjournment 4.

That imbalance is worth stating plainly, because it shapes what this page can say. Almost everything this meeting did is on the recording and almost none of it is in a document: the one-page agenda gives item headings and the staff assigned to present them and nothing more, and no adopted minutes for this meeting exist in the archive. Where the account below describes what was said, the recording is the source; where it describes structure, the agenda is.

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🌐 State Seal of Biliteracy: 116 seniors, ten languages

The first presentation began by defining the award — a state recognition for high school graduates who have "attained a high level of proficiency in speaking, reading, and writing in one or more languages in addition to English", with several possible routes to it — staff cited test scores and proficiency among them. Staff framed the benefits broadly: promoting language instruction, certifying biliteracy and in some cases triliteracy, equipping students for the workforce, and giving universities a way to grant academic credit for an applicant's language proficiency 5.

That framing sits on a standing district rule. Board Policy 6174, Education for English Learners — last revised on November 10, 2021, six months before this meeting — commits the board to curriculum and instruction that maximize English proficiency and "advance multilingual capabilities" alongside it 6. The department that runs the award still publishes the district's English-learner reclassification rules and links the Seal of Biliteracy qualification criteria from the same page 7.

The headline number came a few minutes later: "Tonight, we celebrate 116 seniors in 10 different languages." — Arabic, Chinese, French, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, with more languages promised for the following year 8.

A structural change had made the award more useful that year. The county office of education launched its first Seal of Multiliteracy the previous October, a county award distinct from the state seal; applying the state criteria, the district identified 106 seniors already on the pathway and recognized them in the fall, and the district was itself featured at the county's October event 5. The reason the earlier date mattered was practical — the state seal reaches students at the end of the school year, while an October recognition can go on a college application 9.

Testing capacity had widened too. Redlands High School had piloted an outside language-proficiency assessment for two years 10. The effort had been put on hold by the pandemic, and only scaled up once the county said it would pay for the tests, which let staff work down the senior list and check whether students who already qualified in English also qualified in a second language 11. The test's brand name is garbled in the only transcript of this meeting now on file, so it is described here rather than spelled.

Site administrators then read the recipients campus by campus:

• Citrus Valley High School — 16 seniors, in French and Spanish 12.
• Redlands East Valley High School — recipients in four languages: Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, French and Spanish 13.
• Redlands High School — "over 60 students in eight different languages", including Latin and Korean, and four trilingual recipients honored in pairs: French and Russian, Arabic and French, Portuguese and Spanish, and French and Spanish 14.

One cross-check is available on the last of those. Redlands High School's own later school profile records 74 Seal of Biliteracy recipients across nine languages for 2021-22 — the year being celebrated that night — against the "over 60" in eight announced from the stage, and 110 recipients in eight languages the year after 15. The stage count was a conservative one.

During board comments a trustee came back to the totals, singling out the 116 seniors and the "four with a triple" 16.

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📚 AVID: the pipeline on paper and on stage

The second presentation covered AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination), the district's college-readiness elective. Staff opened by recognizing the site coordinators at each participating campus and noted that the program sits inside the district's Local Control and Accountability Plan 17. The structure presented that night:

• Redlands East Valley High School held AVID National Demonstration School status, attained in February 2020 — "right before we shut down" — and had been an AVID site of distinction for six years, a count staff worked out aloud on the spot 18.
• Cope Middle School was also an AVID site of distinction 18.
• The pipeline began at six elementary schools and expanded each year, ran through all four middle schools and on into the high schools; the district had hosted AVID 6C training at Redlands East Valley and provided model training for the county 18.
• On outcomes, the rate of C-or-better grades for AVID students was reported as significantly higher than for their non-AVID peers 18.

Those claims line up with what the board saw in writing two months later, in the School Plans for Student Achievement that came to the July 12, 2022 meeting. Citrus Valley's plan budgeted continued AVID scale-up across campus, with district-funded staffing, professional development and consortium membership fees supplemented by site funds for College App Day, college workshops and campus visits 19. Cope Middle School's plan set the goal explicitly: move beyond the current status of "AVID School of Distinction" and toward becoming an "AVID National Demonstration School." 20 And the elementary end of the pipeline appears there too, with McKinley Elementary planning to scale AVID up across classrooms 21.

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🐉 Orangewood: the segment that reframed the evening

The most striking stretch of the AVID presentation came from Orangewood Continuation High School, which has run a certified AVID program since its inception six years earlier 22.

The segment set expectations deliberately against the comprehensive high schools that followed. These slides would not show 4.0 GPAs, long AP lists or university acceptances; what the students had instead was grit, perseverance and courage, many of them earning credits while dealing with homelessness, foster care, food insecurity and the churn of having attended a multitude of schools. "There's a reason they're at Orangewood, and it's not due to a lack of character. It's a lack of credits" 22.

The programming described was built around widening what students could picture for themselves rather than pushing everyone toward a four-year degree: a ropes-course retreat through the SOAR program at Cedar Lake; a University of Redlands visit that was "the first time many of our students ever set foot on a university campus"; a Crafton Hills senior day and a day at Valley Community College where students could register for classes then and there; and a speaker series spanning tattoo artists, welders, EMTs and cosmetologists. The school takes in and graduates students on a rolling basis, new students arriving every three weeks 22.

The district's own published record for that school year supports the description with numbers. Orangewood's 2021-22 School Accountability Report Card reports 201 students enrolled, 85.6% socioeconomically disadvantaged and 18.9% homeless, and states that students "enroll at Orangewood when they have fallen far enough behind in graduation credits that they will not graduate if they remain in a comprehensive high school setting" 23.

The same campus is still working the same gap from another angle four years on. The 2026-27 Local Control and Accountability Plan that came to the board in June 2026 responds to College and Career Indicator gaps identified in the 2025 California School Dashboard by redirecting an Orangewood action into staffing for dual enrollment courses on campus, so students earn college credit without the transportation and administrative barriers of going off site 24.

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💵 The money, and a quiet shift toward community college

• Citrus Valley High School reported that every AVID senior had been accepted to college, with "nearly $679,590 in scholarships" 25. The campus has a partnership the others do not: the Rochford Program through the University of Redlands, which hand-selects and interviews students from the middle-school level and pairs mentoring, family workshops, tutoring and community-service planning with an annual $30,000 scholarship to the university for students who complete it from sixth grade through twelfth 26. The segment also played a recruitment video made by the school's own AVID students and ran through second-semester college-going field trips to Cal State Fullerton, Cal Baptist University and a 66ers game 27.
• Redlands High School presented 36 AVID seniors, described as the largest senior class in the program's certification history at that campus and all college-bound, with five college tutors recruited from Crafton Hills College, UC Riverside and Cal Baptist University, a College Month tradition running since 2017, and projected growth the following year from 36 to 51 seniors and from 56 to 64 juniors 28.
• Redlands East Valley High School put the most numbers on the board: 12 AVID sections, five elective teachers, about 15% of the student body, a 98% attendance rate, 34% taking an AP course, 29% in dual enrollment, 17% earning a Seal of Biliteracy that same night, 59% on free or reduced-price lunch and 62% in at least their third year of the program. 85% of its seniors were receiving some form of scholarship or grant, totalling $1.14 million from that senior class alone. Behind that aggregate sat three regional AVID scholar winners, thirteen more campus AVID scholarships funded by donations from former students and families and still to be announced on May 31, two students on full athletic scholarships and four on partial ones 29. The same segment paused to praise the Orangewood program from the podium, with a hedged aside that it was "still the only continuation school in all the nation" doing this 29.

The Redlands East Valley segment also delivered the evening's one note of economic realism. More seniors than usual were starting at community college, and the reason given was blunt: "COVID was a huge hit on people's savings accounts." Some students were carrying the cost of their own education, and where four-year offers fell short they planned to start at a junior college and transfer — many of them still leaving home to do it. The same segment described senior "adulting 101" video projects made for school-wide use, a school-wide Focus Notes push the math department had taken up, and a March campus visit from district and county leadership 29.

This was not a one-off evening. At the equivalent recognition night a year later, the AVID presentation opened by noting it was "about the 10th time, 10 years in a row now" that graduating AVID students had been brought before the board 30.

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🗣️ Board comments and adjournment

Item four was board comments 31, and they were congratulatory throughout. The one that touched money came from a board member: "I'm proud that we will continue to put more dollars in this program because it is just awesome" — an individual comment on an agenda with nothing to act on, not a commitment by the board 32. The longest ran a couple of minutes and worked through a string of A-words for the AVID seniors — "amazing, awesome, astonishing, astounding, and really awe-inspiring" — before turning the wordplay back on the program's own name and reminding the students that their success was not theirs alone — "Someone has placed that determination in you" — then asking the room to applaud the coordinators and teachers 33. A district administrator then closed by thanking students, teachers and coordinators for holding the program together through the pandemic years, and thanked the parents in the audience for their trust 34. The meeting ended with thanks to the support and technical staff and to the host campus, and adjourned 4.

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No adopted minutes for this meeting are on file in the archive. Because minutes are the only record that reliably pairs a name to a statement, this summary describes what was said without naming who said it.