Redlands Unified School District — School Board Awards Ceremony, November 29, 2022

Meeting Summary

A ceremony with nothing on it to decide. Redlands Unified gave the evening over to fall student honors, and the item at the top of the program had already left the planet: a Redlands High School experiment reached the International Space Station two days before the ceremony.

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🗒️ What this page can and cannot say

This was not a business meeting. The evening opened from the dais with a welcome to "our student and staff appreciation evening" 1, and the published program is two pages of honorees grouped by award: outstanding fall student athletes, the space-flight experiment and patch teams, and National Merit semifinalists on the first page 2; Advanced Placement honors and distinction recognitions and three categories of statewide-assessment perfect scores on the second 3. There is no roll call on it, no consent calendar, no action item and no community-input period, and none of those appear on the recording either.

No adopted minutes for this ceremony exist in the archive, and that decides the shape of this page. With no official record pairing a name to a spoken word, nothing said that evening is attributed here to anyone, and honorees are described by award, level and school rather than listed by name. The program that carries the full lists is the district's own document and is one click away in the sources below.

Remarks from the dais said that board members who could not attend were absent "for various reasons, although they are here in spirit" and had made sure they would be represented, framed the evening as a chance to "quiet the noise from our board meetings", and noted that the ceremony was being streamed and would be posted to the district website so relatives who could not attend could watch it later 4.

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🚀 The experiment that had already left the planet

The most consequential thing recognized all evening had happened in orbit, in the days before the ceremony. Staff told the room that a Redlands High School research proposal on the effect of microgravity on weevils found in rice had been selected for Mission 16 of the Student Spaceflight Experiment Program, that it launched to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX Dragon CRS-26 on November 26, 2022, that it was one of 22 experiments selected nationwide by the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education, and that it would return to Earth after six months for the students to retrieve and analyze 5.

The program's own public record confirms the selection and sharpens the numbers. It lists the Redlands entry as The Effect of Microgravity on Weevils (Sitophilus Oryzae) Found in Rice, from grades 9 and 10 at Redlands High School, with a proposal summary saying the experiment "will be able to identify how weevil growth on rice is different from free fall to gravity" and will "help identify how in the future, foods can be transported and stored in space". It also records 22 participating communities in Mission 16, with 21 flight experiments selected in the mission's first review round and three more in the second, so the figure read out at the ceremony tracks the number of communities rather than the number of experiments. Two further Redlands High School proposals, on copper sulfate as a root killer and on bacteriophages in free fall, are listed there as honorable-mention finalists 6.

Staff added that the capsule "docked onto the International Space Station yesterday", that a matching control experiment would run at Redlands High School the next day, and that it was "a proud moment for Redlands Unified" 7. Spaceflight Now reported that the cargo ship in fact docked at 7:39 a.m. EST on Sunday, November 27 — two days before the ceremony rather than one 8. Two Citrus Valley High School students designed mission patches to fly with the experiment, under a teacher advisor at that school; the program lists all three 72.

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🏅 Four fall athletes, chosen by their own schools

Four outstanding fall student-athletes were honored, one from each of the four high schools named on the program: Orangewood, Redlands East Valley, Citrus Valley and Redlands 2. The presentation called the award a long-standing district tradition and was explicit that the district office does not pick the winners — "It's not a selection I make. It's the school that really takes ownership in that" — with each school choosing a star athlete for each season of sport out of the hundreds who compete 9.

That division of labour is what the district's own rules prescribe. Administrative Regulation 5126, Awards for Achievement, last revised on February 28, 2006, provides that the superintendent or designee "may appoint an awards committee at each school to consider student accomplishments" — administrators, teachers, parents and community members — and that "The committee shall submit recommendations for student awards to the Superintendent or designee for approval" 10. Board Policy 1150, Commendations and Awards, revised on June 14, 2022, five months before this ceremony, covers recognition of individuals and organizations in the community and lists "a public ceremony" among the forms that recognition may take 11.

Each athlete's presentation ran through season statistics, coaches' assessments, grade-point averages and, in one case, recruitment by Division I football programs 9. The format recurred: at the March 14, 2023 regular meeting the winter-sports version of the same award was presented with the same framing, a district tradition in which each school's athletic department chooses one athlete from the 300 to 400 who compete every season 12.

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🔬 Summer STEM academies with UC Riverside and UC Davis

The educational services block was given over to students and staff "who have won awards in competitive events in school year 22-23", and opened with a video about the district's summer STEM academies 13. The video framed the academies as a product of RUSD 2025: Excellence for All Students, the multi-year vision it dated to 2018, and specifically of its "enhanced learning through innovation" tenet, the basis for partnerships with UC Riverside and UC Davis to build a pre-college STEM pathway 14.

Four academies ran that summer 15:

• Middle School Robotics, High School Engineering and High School Artificial Intelligence, organized with UC Riverside and held on the UCR campus.
• Middle School C-STEM, organized with UC Davis and held at Clement Middle School.
• 40 hours of curriculum written by UC Riverside and UC Davis faculty, delivered by UCR graduate students under faculty supervision.
• Around 200 Redlands Unified students completed an academy.

An instructor said in the video that the integrated approach "convinced students that a STEM-oriented college education is actually feasible" 16; another said students were "excited by the notion of being a part of a college community", evident in how they responded to the freedom they had during lunch and to a campus tour 17; a presenter described the middle school C-STEM academy as giving students "opportunity for productive struggle" 18. Students who appeared in the video described assembling and coding a car that could trace a track, identify an obstacle and turn around 19, training an artificial-intelligence model for traffic-sign detection as a capstone project 20, and building and programming robots with block coding 21.

How this connects to the rest of the archive. The same "enhanced learning through innovation" strand had come to the board five weeks earlier for its annual update, where staff said that when the roadmap was drawn in 2017 "none of this existed in our school district systematically" — a year earlier than the date the ceremony video gave for the vision's introduction 22. The UC Davis side of the partnership kept growing after the ceremony: a $24,000 agreement with the Regents of the University of California for a four-day, on-site C-STEM professional development training for K-14 teachers appeared on the board's March 14, 2023 agenda, described there as the fourth course in a joint UC Davis and UC Riverside computer-science credential sequence 23. UC Davis reported in June 2023 that Redlands had adopted C-STEM in 2018 to narrow gaps in math, and that students in C-STEM classes gained more than 13 percent on mathematics diagnostic testing between 2018-19 and 2021-22 against peers in traditional classes at the same schools 24.

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🎓 National Merit semifinalists

Four district students were recognized as National Merit Scholarship semifinalists, described from the stage as the highest-scoring students in each state and roughly the top 0.5 percent of a state's seniors, on the strength of the PSAT taken in junior year 7. The program lists three of them at Redlands High School and one at Citrus Valley; one of the four also appears on the fall athletics list, a second recognition the same evening 2.

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📈 AP scholars and perfect statewide scores

The longest block of the evening was academic testing, and its scale forced a change of format: rather than read every name, staff put up slide decks of names and schools and asked the room to applaud each slide, saying they wanted to honor every student in every category despite the numbers 25.

Two Advanced Placement categories were recognized, with the criteria read out 25:

• AP Scholar with Honors — an average of at least 3.25 across all AP exams taken, and scores of 3 or higher on four or more exams.
• AP Scholar with Distinction — an average of at least 3.5 across all AP exams taken, and scores of 3 or higher on five or more exams.

Recipients in both categories came from Citrus Valley, Redlands East Valley and Redlands High School, with the Redlands High lists long enough to need two slides in each category, and the district's eAcademy had a recipient in the Distinction category 2526.

The evening then turned to the Smarter Balanced assessment. Staff said the previous school year was the first in which the test had been fully reinstated for all students in grades three through eight and grade eleven after the pandemic, that every student who earned a perfect score in English language arts or in mathematics was being recognized, and that certificates had already gone out to school sites that week so campuses could celebrate their own students 26. The run-through covered elementary, middle and high school campuses across the district, in English language arts, in mathematics, or in both 26.

Five students earned the night's rarest distinction, a perfect score in both subjects, and were called up individually for plaques with their principals and families invited up alongside them 26. The program lists one of the five at a middle school, three at high schools and one at eAcademy 3.

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🎤 How it ended

Closing remarks from the dais congratulated the honorees present and absent, on behalf of the school board and the staff in the room — "if there's someone here who isn't impressed, there's something wrong with you" — reminded the room that finals were still ahead, and pointed everyone to the snacks at the back 27.

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No adopted minutes exist for this ceremony. Under the archive's attribution policy for minutes-less meetings, this page attributes no statement to any named person and does not reproduce the honoree lists; the two-page program that carries them is the district's own published document, linked from the sources below.