21 October 2023 Palo Alto School Board Meeting
5e Classified Staff
4 1:1 Mild-Mod Aides
5 Mild Mod Aides
4 Mod Severe Aides
5 Therapeutic Aides
12 Behavioral Support Aides
25 Substitute Mild-Mod Aide
5 Hires
1 Resigned
As it doesn’t look like the actual vacancies get updated routinely in the job announcements, it is an open question as to how many actual vacancies there are in the district.
As this is pretty much the most important function of the District staff, I hope the board insists on better staffing and vacancy reporting.
4b JLS – Equity
No discussion of students with disabilities or other disadvantaged groups beyond race in this presentation. As of 2022…
English Learners – 69
Socioeconomic Disadvantaged -109
Students with Disabilities – 106
making them notable populations within the school
… so I asked my daughter who is at JLS about all this…
One thing she brought up was that the “houses” were diffferently diverse – not surprising when Connections gives such a huge advantage to “family legacies”
and I asked if she thought her disabled brother should go to JLS.
Her answer was an immediate “No”.
7a Middle School Math
Presentation – Very confusing… we have numbers for 9th grade math, but not for 8th grade. There is something called “NCP/SAI Algebra 1” which I assume is for special education, but there doesn’t seem to be an analog in 8th grade. It would be nice of the “non-standard path” was at least listed and discussed.
In the written report, no marginalized groups were brokenfor enrollment
While the increased enrollment for SWD is great – how are students doing?
There continue to be notable gender gaps in the higher level math.
Are the SWD who are included excluding those in “Special Education” or “Futures”?
The “matched cohort” data in the full report is disheartening for SWD and it looks like other groups as well.
(the last several pages of the written report).
8A Reading
Virtually every group of interest in this report have been on a slight downward trend since 2020-21 and these numbers seem inconsistent with the patterns on other assessments.
