RUSD Board of Education — June 14, 2022

Meeting Summary

Parents spent the night asking for crossing guards, controlled campus entries and playground supervision, while the board adopted a budget holding about $27 million in one-time state money it was not yet allowed to spend

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🚦 The night's real agenda: getting kids to and from school safely

Three weeks after the May 24, 2022 shooting in Uvalde, Texas, the part of the evening the community turned out for was not the two-volume agenda but the general comment period near the end.

Two parents from the same elementary school spoke back to back. The first said she had been told she could no longer supervise outdoors at all — including at her own daughter's end-of-year water day — after raising concerns that behavioral incidents and sexual harassment cluster during recess. She turned from there to the front door: visitors walk through a hallway to enter but are not required to pass through the office, so someone "could just walk into Highland Grove and walk onto campus" 1. Her PTA's fundraising conversations, she said, had shifted from art and after-school programs to safety equipment 2. The second parent said she had emailed the board about bullying and sexual harassment complaints, that behavioral problems had been "out of control this year," and that the PTA had looked into sleeves for classroom doors so teachers could barricade themselves in. She asked why her school has no crossing guard when a neighboring elementary school does 3.

A third parent brought numbers. The intersection nearest her child's school carries roughly 26,000 vehicles a day, about 50 cars a minute at the morning peak, and local traffic routinely ignores the flashing crosswalk installed a few years earlier. After months of calls to district staff, the sheriff, the Highway Patrol, county departments and Caltrans, she said district risk-assessment staff had told her the crossing guard contract is renewed each year without analysis or review of school-level concerns. Her ask was specific: crossing guards at Mentone Elementary before school resumed on August 9 4.

The safety block closed with an emailed letter read into the record, written by a parent of a preschooler who described rehearsing intruder scenarios during the morning routine. It asked the board to place POST-certified officers at every school site, subject to mental health screening and permitted to carry concealed; to install cameras at every entry and exit; to require visitors to be buzzed in through shatterproof glass and screened through the district's visitor system; and to offer tactical training to willing staff 5.

What the board said back

One trustee took the requests point by point, asking for a report on how many schools have crossing guards and how many do not, suggesting campus security officers be given electric bikes so they can move between nearby sites faster, and walking through the run-hide-fight intruder training already provided to staff — "a sad situation, but it's a reality" 6. Another thanked the parents for staying through the whole meeting 7. From the chair came an acknowledgement that safety "has already been mentioned, of course it's a priority, it's our number one priority," and a commitment that staff would look for gaps in safety protocols 8.

None of it was an agenda item. Community input on matters not on the agenda sits near the end of the order of business, after the consent blocks and before board comments 9, and the record shows no motion or formal board direction on it that night.

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💰 The budget: $27 million the district had to move out of its own reserve

The 2022-23 annual budget presentation was built entirely on the governor's May revision, with the legislature's competing proposal still unresolved 10. The headline assumptions:

• LCFF COLA of 6.56%, with an additional 3.2% in play between the governor and the legislature.
• Enrollment projected at 19,820, about 100 students below the prior year; ADA about 18,983, or 95.5% attendance; unduplicated pupil percentage 69.85%.
• About $27 million in one-time discretionary funding — $1,500 per unit of ADA — proposed for maintaining staffing, social-emotional health, ongoing district costs and pension-rate offsets.
• Out-year implied COLAs of 5.38% and 4.02%, continuing enrollment decline, a 35% property and liability insurance increase with cyber liability the fastest-rising coverage, and no settled bargaining agreement built into any out year.
• A 2021-22 ending fund balance of $79,485,496, growing to a little over $107 million at the end of 2022-23 as the one-time money lands unspent.

That last figure created the night's most consequential mechanical problem. Under a Proposition 98 reserve cap the district must hold its reserve below 10% in 2022-23, and the out years as budgeted do not comply. The answer put to the board was to commit the money: "I needed to move that money somewhere because we don't have it to spend it, but I have to reflect it in our budget" 10. The same resolution uncommitted $14 million from innovation and technology and recommitted $7 million each to the coming math and English textbook adoptions, bringing the committed balance to $48,136,533 against $28,460,113 in restricted funds.

Trustee questions were narrow and practical. One asked what restrictions attach to the one-time money 11 and was told there are none — the state "threw a lot of taglines on it," but it arrives unrestricted through LCFF 12. Another question from the dais asked whether there is a deadline to spend it, and drew the answer that nothing is specified yet and a time limit is not expected 13. A trustee also argued the textbook money should favor materials students reach through technology rather than print 14.

The board then worked through the action items in sequence 15: the election order 16, the AB 361 virtual-meeting authority and the ESSA federal addendum 17, the LCAP itself 18, then Resolution No. 46 on textbook due diligence and the commitment of one-time funds 19 and finally the budget 2021. Resolution No. 46 is worth noting for a second reason: it was taken up as item XII.e, and the published agenda jumps straight from XII.d to XII.f, so the resolution the budget turned on has no entry in the agenda document 21.

Committing one-time money against future textbook adoptions became standing practice. Two years later the board was asked to commit $6.2 million for current and future textbook adoptions alongside $8.5 million to offset projected deficits 22.

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🗣️ "You gather them in and you gather them out"

Two public hearings were on the agenda — one on the teachers association's initial bargaining proposal, one on the district's 2022-23 balances in excess of minimum reserve requirements 23. A single speaker addressed both, and his point was procedural: the board opens hearings, closes them, and "nothing is ever said," with no written material a constituent could react to for or against 24. The second hearing at least had an attachment, he allowed, but it did not explain what the board was actually doing when it consolidates and reallocates funds 25.

The district's answer, delivered later in the evening, was that initial proposals are sunshined in the local newspapers, which point readers to copies held at the public library and the district office, and that both hearings on the successor proposals would be held on July 12, 2022 26. Returning in general comment, the same speaker called that inadequate — "who reads a newspaper anymore?" — and added complaints about online textbook availability being promised inconsistently and about survey results being treated as a finding rather than a trigger for action 27. From the chair came a partial concession: the community paper is online, and a series of board-written explanatory articles, the next of them on school budgets, was already running 8.

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📊 Local indicators: all five requirements met, and a science-standards gap

The annual local indicators report — the perception-data half of the state dashboard — covered five priority areas 28:

• Basic services: zero teacher misassignments, zero students without their own standards-aligned materials, zero facilities failing the good-repair standard.
• Standards implementation: English language arts at 91.3% full implementation and math at 86.9%, against history and social science at 69.5% and the Next Generation Science Standards at 22.7% — tracking the age of each adoption.
• Parent engagement: about 5,700 responses to the Kelvin pulse survey, against roughly 800 under the district's previous tool. The highest-rated items concerned school-to-family communication; the lowest were teacher-to-parent updates on individual student progress.
• School climate: 7,826 student responses. At elementary, 84% said an adult at school would help them and 84% said they feel safe; the lowest-scoring items were students treating each other with respect (61%) and student drug and alcohol use as a campus problem (58%).
• Broad course of study: 83.9% at elementary and 92.3% at secondary, with visible gaps when disaggregated by English learners, economically disadvantaged students, students with disabilities and African American students.

The presentation was explicit that "requirement met" reflects administering, reporting and uploading the survey, not the quality of the results 28. A trustee pushed on the climate numbers, calling it concerning that only 84% of elementary students say they feel safe and that peer respect falls further at the high school level, and asked how soon the survey could be run again 29; the answer was that the survey goes out monthly but no new student data would arrive before the fall 30. The science gap narrowed over the following year: at the June 2023 local indicators report, NGSS full implementation was presented at just above 63% 31.

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🎒 Universal TK: the calendar is set, the staffing is not

The universal prekindergarten presentation walked through the state-mandated four-year expansion of transitional kindergarten 32:

The district runs 17 TK classrooms — 16 across its elementary schools and one at its academy and independent-study site — with average class sizes near 18, so the new 1:12 ratio requires roughly 17 additional paraprofessionals before school starts 33. A paraprofessional job fair, the district's first dedicated entirely to that classification, had been advertised at all four high schools 34. TK teachers must also hold 24 early-childhood units by August 2023; 19 multiple-subject teachers and two paraprofessionals were already in a district-funded cohort at the local community college, and the district's base and supplemental grant allocation of $341,636 had arrived the week before 32.

The plan sat in the Educational Services consent block, listed on the agenda as a condition of receiving grant funds projected at $343,000 21. Two replacement pages were handed out at the meeting, one revising the out-year staffing allocation figures and one removing an item that had been circled by mistake 35, before the block was approved 36.

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🎭 Curriculum: a musical theatre course, a sex-ed reckoning, five policy first readings

The evening's only comment on an agendized item was about a new elective, Training the Musical Theatre Artist, recommended by the District Curriculum Committee alongside Piano II 21. A parent asked whether the course would be offered at all four high schools, whether new staff would be hired to teach it, and whether existing drama teachers were qualified 37. He was referred from the chair to a staff member who happened to be in the room, and no answer was given on the record 38. Both courses were approved within the consent block 36.

A sharper curriculum question came in general comment. A parent of two district students said progress toward adopting a comprehensive sex education curriculum had stalled — staff had cited the pandemic and the controversial nature of selecting materials — and argued the district was falling short of the California Healthy Youth Act, with students at two of four middle schools receiving no health or sex education that year and the high school health credit dropped without replacement: "I know it's controversial. I know it will cause debate. None of that matters" 39. A Safe and Supportive Schools Resource Center profile of the district, dated four months later, records the answers Redlands Unified gave about its own sexual health education, including that student participation in the subject is "Mandatory/Opt-out only" 42.

The same consent block carried first readings of five attendance and student-health policies: absences and excuses, chronic absence and truancy, interdistrict attendance, administering medication, and immunizations required for enrollment 2140, all of them approved within the block 36. The district's policy manual now records all of them as last revised on July 12, 2022, the date of the next board meeting, which is where a first reading normally returns 41.

Two other speakers rounded out the period: one argued the district should treat nutrition as a health intervention, teaching students to grow and prepare nutrient-dense food rather than serving processed meals 43; another described a daughter who caught COVID in January, never caught up, and failed an English class under a no-late-work policy, and asked the board to examine high school grading practices as other large districts had 44.

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📋 Consent business, in brief

The Business Services block, items XI.b through XI.jj, carried the Gaggle student-safety monitoring agreement for Google accounts at up to $88,642.40 and a $121,000 equity-team training series for principals and building leaders 45, a $503,952.07 radio system upgrade, $319,000 in hydration station installations and $763,480 in laboratory casework replacement at the continuation high school 48, a $285,000 architectural contract for phase one of the Redlands East Valley pool renovation 49, and payment transmittals of $6,708,562.79 15. One item was corrected from the table before the vote: the soil inspection and testing contract for the Redlands East Valley track and field project reads $76,844.25, not the $76,844.25.00 printed in the agenda 46. The Gaggle agreement was welcomed from the dais as giving teachers visibility into what students do on district technology 47. The block was then approved 16.

Tucked into the same block was the second reading of Administrative Regulation 3515.6, Criminal Background Checks for Contractors 15 — the rule that lets the district require contractors' employees to work outside school hours, never alone around students, and to carry visible identification 50. The policy manual records that regulation as last revised on June 14, 2022.

A stipulated expulsion for student 2021-2022-031 was the only Educational Services action item 4051, and the Human Resources block — the district's entire 2022-23 staffing roster, items XV.b through XV.hhh — was approved without discussion 52. The board also announced 14 administrative appointments made in closed session: a director for behavioral and mental health services, a transportation director, two coordinators, a principal for alternative programs and adult education, and nine assistant principals, most effective July 1, 2022. The announcements were moved from the end of the agenda to the top of the meeting so appointees and their families could go home early 38.

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🎓 Recognitions and farewells

The LCAP committee was recognized on stage — 48 members serving two-year terms, drawn from managers, certificated and classified staff, community members, parents and students, half of them finishing a second term and half completing a first 53. The board read out its student trustees and alternates for 2022-23, one or two from each of five campuses 54. Retirement tributes went to an assistant principal at an elementary school leaving after 35 years with the district, an assistant principal at Redlands East Valley, and the board's longtime administrative assistant, attending a final board meeting 55 after service the chair reckoned had spanned four superintendents 8.

Board reports also revisited the recent Redlands East Valley stadium groundbreaking, described from the dais as well attended and covered in the local paper 56. Community Forward Redlands later reported that construction on the facility began in 2022 and was funded in part by Measure D, the bond approved by Redlands voters 57.

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This summary was written from the meeting agenda and the video transcript. No minutes document is on file for this meeting in the archive, so no statement, comment or position from this meeting is attributed to any named individual.