RUSD Board of Education — August 9, 2022

Meeting Summary

On the night before the first day of school, district staff walked the board through a package of new adult-student safety rules, and the board gave its consent to a comprehensive sex education curriculum whose rollout had been on hold since the pandemic hit — with staff saying nothing would start in the fall and second semester the earliest it could begin.

📝 A note on names. No official minutes for this meeting are on file in this archive, and the transcript's speaker labels are automated voice matches rather than the official record — so this page describes what was said and decided without attaching names to it.

🔒 A safety package, announced the night before school opened

The longest stretch of the evening was the report from district administration, and most of it was about student safety 1. Alongside protocols already in place — single points of entry during school hours, Raptor visitor screening, closed campus perimeters, school resource officers at the high schools and the See Something, Say Something posters — staff set out what was new for 2022-23:

• An adult-student boundaries pamphlet, sent home with the parent welcome letter and handbook, laying out the processes for filing three different types of formal complaint 1.
• Monthly staff micro-trainings, added this year "in working with the grand jury" and beginning in September; August was reserved for the annual mandatory sexual harassment prevention, child abuse prevention and mandated-reporter trainings that every employee takes 1.
• A third-person visibility standard — any space where students work with adults should let a third person view in, with site administrators given "the green light" to have windows put into rooms that had none 1.
• A district-wide hall pass policy, requiring administrative pre-approval before a secondary teacher pulls a student out of another teacher's class, with recurring schedules such as speech and occupational therapy exempt 1.

Staff also described a practice begun in the spring and continuing into the new year: daily inspections of every classroom and learning space, on a deliberately "non-predictable schedule," logged in software so the district can follow trends and spot rooms that need physical changes 1.

None of that was improvised for one school year. Community Forward Redlands reported in May 2024 that the district's letter to families, written after a US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights review, listed among the measures put in place between January 2022 and March 2023 monthly safety protocols and micro-trainings for all staff, a district-wide hall pass policy and a district-wide daily safety walks policy — the same three things described at this meeting 2. The campaign carried on into the fall as well: a month later staff told the board the district had produced five two-minute video vignettes on its safety protocols and played two of them, including one on its anonymous reporting tools, which warns that submitting a report through either of them "does not fulfill your legal reporting requirements" for a mandated reporter 3.

📚 Sex education: consensus to proceed, but nothing in the fall

The evening's one discussion item was item 18. There was no vote — the board was asked for consensus to move ahead with a curriculum that had already been "approved by the committee," and copies were passed around the table that night 4. The answer came quickly: "Let's move forward" 5. A board member was specific about why, saying the curriculum "aligns more conservative to match our community" and "aligns with the previous curriculum a little bit better" 6.

Staff then set expectations. The program can run as a teacher-supervised online course or as direct classroom instruction; parents are notified at the beginning of the year and may opt a child out, but the opt-out is all or nothing — "you can't opt out of portions" 7. That notification is not a local courtesy. The board's own policy on sexual health and HIV/AIDS prevention instruction, last revised in March 2006 and so the policy in force that night, requires that "At the beginning of each school year, or at the time of a student's enrollment, parents/guardians shall be notified about instruction in comprehensive sexual health education and HIV/AIDS prevention education," and that the notice tell them they "may request in writing that their child not receive comprehensive sexual health or HIV/AIDS prevention education" 8.

A trustee asked when it would actually begin, noting that the plan on paper started "in ninth grade as a pilot" 9. Staff said the plan drawn up a year and a half earlier put the course "once in middle school and once in high school," with the middle school placement — likely seventh grade, probably in PE — still to be agreed with teachers 10. Then came the caveats: the training delivered back then would have to be refreshed for teachers who had left and arrived since, and the parent notification that travels with registration paperwork had already gone out for the year without it 11. Nothing would start in the fall. Staff put second semester as the earliest possibility and "fall of next school year" as the more likely one, and promised to come back with an implementation timeline 12.

The item had a recent history in this room. Two months earlier a parent had asked the board to direct the district to "resume work towards the adoption of a comprehensive sex education curriculum," telling it that California's Healthy Youth Act had required the instruction in grades 7 through 12 since January 2016, that progress in Redlands had stalled, and that students at two of the district's four middle schools had received no health or sex education that year 13. The work behind it is older still: Redlands Community News reported in June 2019 that a parent/teacher advisory committee "was established in May 2019 and composed of nine parents and three teachers," and that the district then planned three weeks of instruction in seventh and ninth grade through PE once the board approved a curriculum — the same two grade levels still being discussed three years later 14.

🎓 The student trustees take their seats

After the hearings, the board met its 2022-23 student trustees and alternates, asking each of them to pull the microphone down and introduce themselves 15. One was abroad and sent a pre-recorded video instead 16. A board member framed it with some candor — "They have no idea what they're getting into. And quite honestly, we're not sure either" — describing the point as hearing "what life is like on our campuses" and calling the venture "record-setting" and "history-making" 17.

The archive shows how new it was. By May 2023, at the end of the first year, the arrangement was described from the dais as the first student trustee board of education in RUSD's history and as unusual statewide, because "instead of having just one student trustee representative" the district had given each of its secondary schools — the comprehensive high schools, Orangewood and the eAcademy — its own representative 18.

🗣️ Public comment: school meals, and whether kids are relearning how to be around each other

No one spoke at either public hearing — on the board's initial bargaining proposal to the Redlands Education Support Professionals Association, and on the statutory school fee increase — or on any agenda item 15. Two people spoke during the open comment period later in the evening.

School meals. The first speaker opened with a warning: "As elected officials, listen to the concerns of your constituents and take action and create dialogue. If not, we will actively seek and elect new board members." The speaker then argued that district meals lack the nutrients students need, tying meal quality to immune function during COVID, to academic performance and mental health, and to diabetes and cancer risk from sugar and carbohydrates, and citing conversations with district teachers and principals, with the district's child nutrition director and counterparts in other districts, and with the state Secretary of Food and Agriculture. The ask was to "build a kitchen" and to bring vitamins, minerals and herbs into school meals 19. For context on the first half of that request, the district already operates a central kitchen: a revised job description for a Lead Child Nutrition Services Worker / Central Kitchen Lead, whose holder would "plan, organize, schedule, lead, control, and participate in the daily activities" of it, had been in the board's own packet a month earlier 20.

Learning to be together again. The second speaker turned the district's own post-COVID focus into a measurement question: how many instructional minutes middle and high schools actually spend teaching students "to interact with each other after being out with COVID, being kind to each other, being able to relate to each other." The same speaker asked whether high schools had cut back interactive events such as pep rallies and whether that was "about instructional minutes" or about budget; what the district does to build community across schools rather than between rival campuses; and, while crediting the new student trustees, said that for a district focused on equity "you're missing something in the representation" 21.

🧾 The rest of the agenda

The meeting opened with a moment of silence for two district employees who had died: an employee who joined in 2006 as a child nutrition services substitute and later became a campus monitor at Victoria Elementary School, remembered for advocating for students, and a data technician who started in 1997 as one of the original staff who opened Redlands East Valley High School and spent her whole career there 22. Four of the five board members were present, and there were no minutes to approve 15.

Routine business moved fast. The business services consent calendar, items 12B through 12AF, was approved 23. Resolution No. 7, 2022-23, approving an increase in statutory school fees on new residential and commercial/industrial construction under Education Code 17620 and Government Code 65995, was adopted 2324, and Resolution No. 8 followed, annexing additional territory into Community Facilities District No. 2021-1 and authorizing a special tax within it 2425.

⏳ Resolution No. 10, continuing the board's authority to meet virtually under AB 361, drew the evening's other genuine question: "How long is this going to go?" 26. The reply from the front of the room was that "there's no set date for this bill," that a sunset probably existed but had not arrived, and that the authority has no practical effect unless the board has to use it; the resolution was adopted 27. The reason it kept coming back was spelled out in the previous month's agenda, where the same item appeared as Resolution No. 5 with the explanation that AB 361 requires the board to make findings justifying continued virtual meetings within 30 days of the first virtual meeting after October 1, and every 30 days after that, each resolution establishing the status of the ongoing state of emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic 28.

The educational services consent calendar, items 14B through 14H, was approved 2930, and so was the human resources consent calendar, items 16B through 16AF 3032, after a correction to item 16B was distributed at board members' places 31. Resolution No. 9, approving employment of certificated personnel for 2022-23 on the basis of Commission on Teacher Credentialing requirements, was adopted 3435, and the board established a Child Nutrition Services Warehouse Driver 2 position at range 23 of the classified salary schedule, on a 12-month work-year calendar, effective August 10 354.

Two closed-session appointments were reported out in open session: a Coordinator 1 in Special Services effective August 10, 2022 32, and an Administrative Secretary in Business Services with a start date to be determined 33, both at year three of the management team salary schedule.

🏟️ From the committee reports: the coalition raising money to finish the Redlands East Valley athletic stadium was looking for business and community partners, had a partnership with the Redlands Community Foundation that makes donations tax-deductible, had opened a GoFundMe page called "Together We Will Build Rev Stadium," and was discussing recognition options such as personalized bricks and a donor wall for the stadium entrance 36.