Transcripts For SFGTV BOS Govt Audits And Oversight Committee 31016 20160318

Supervisor aaron peskin good morning and welcome to the government audit and Oversight Committee meeting. My name is aaron pes kin. I want to thank sf govtv for Live Streaming this meaning. Madam clerk, do you have any announcements . Yes, please silence all electronic devices. Items acted upon today will appear on the board of supervisors agenda. Thank you. Please call the first item. City clerk [public works code clarifying graffiti prohibition and establishing administrative penalties] sponsor peskin ordinance amending the public works code to clarify that prohibited graffiti extends to all public property, including all city assets; establish expedited notice and hearing procedures, create administrative penalties for an offending party, and renumber code sections; and affirming the planning departments determination under the California Environmental quality act. City clerk [public works code clarifying graffiti prohibition and establishing administrative penalties] sponsor peskin ordinance amending the public works code to clarify that prohibited graffiti extends to all public property, including all city assets; establish expedited notice and hearing procedures, create administrative penalties for an offending party, and renumber code sections; and affirming the planning departments determination under the California Environmental city clerk [public works code clarifying graffiti prohibition and establishing administrative penalties] sponsor peskin ordinance amending the public works code to clarify that prohibited graffiti extends to all public property, including all city assets; establish expedited notice and hearing procedures, create administrative penalties for an offending party, and renumber code sections; and affirming the planning departments determination under the California Environmental quality act. Thank you. P is 1234 i want to welcome supervisor london breed . The city has seen a string of bad actors and the City Attorney has taken action against this and most recently the Recording Company for justin beeber, universal music group. When it laid paint throughout the city, my colleagues offices got complaints who felt that corporate interest were getting off too easy and that we could combat this blight and injury. The city pays more to remove this type of graffiti and at all public as a tremendous job to prepare these services by preparing sidewalks and street removal and street cleaning. The department of public works needs stronger tools and this will allow banning on all public property and expediting this process by establish administrative penalties of up to 1,000 a day for parties and to include the well funded entries that have made this kind of vandalism a profitable tactic. I would like to ask rachel, director of public works to offer any comments about the legislation. Good morning. Presenter good morning supervisors and thank you for sponsoring this legislation. Supervisor breed last year sponsored another important tool to combat graffiti vandalism. We are very much in favor of this proposed law. We have seen that companies have had a complete disregard of laws to protect the public rightofway. We see the gorilla advertising as blight and sidewalks are not to be used for public billboards. Its another in our arsenal to combat this problem. Supervisor aaron peskin thank you. Are there any members of the public who would like to comment on this item. Is there any additional Public Comment . Seeing none, Public Comment is closed. Supervisor london breed as ms. Gordon mentioned, last year any other office sphere headed what it was a reform of our graffiti policy in the city and county of San Francisco. It gave the office the ability to go after those individuals who had regular offenses civilly so that we could collect damages on public property. We are talking about in excess of over 20 million annually that the city is spending to abate graffiti here in the county and city of San Francisco. The more tools we have to make this clear about our policies. I want to be clear that someone who is a former executive director of an arts organization, graffiti and without permission is vandalism. We have some amazing graffiti artist in the city and county of San Francisco who get the permits, follow the rules and work with Property Owners to do some amazing beautiful artwork all over this city. But vandalism is a whole other issue where you vandalize peoples property. You are vandalizing the sidewalks, you are vandalizing city muni bus and other public property. Thats just something that we have to be a lot tougher on because it is costing not only the city millions of dollars and Property Owners as well. This is a movement in the right direction. I wanted to not only add my name as a cosponsor for this legislation and thank supervisor peskin for working on this issue. Thank you. Supervisor breed is a sponsor of this matter. With that, colleagues can we send this to the board with a recommendation. That item is moved. Next item. City clerk [noe Valley Community benefit district annual reports to the city fy20142015] sponsor wiener resolution receiving and approving annual report for the noe Valley Community benefit district for fy20142015, submitted as required by the property and Business Improvement district law of 1994 california streets and highways code, sections 36600, et seq. , section 36650, and the districts Management Agreement with the city, section 3. 4city clerk sf 21234 supervisor aaron peskin good morning. I want to say that im delighted that you are in front of us today. Mr. Koergs, the floor is yours. Good morning, my name is chris koeshgs with the office of economic and Workforce Development. Im with the cdb program. One minute. 1 minute i need to get these slides over. Take your time. If not, maybe we can use the overhead if you are having trouble. There we go. Fantastic. Thank you. So, the noe valley and all Community Districts in San Francisco are governed by two legislations highway code 36600, the 1994 act and the regulation code article 15. This resolution will cover the report for fiscal year 20142015 for the know valley cbd. O ewden insures that all c bds bids are meeting their Management Plans and staff conducts an annual review of annual reports and cpa. Noe valley is found in the corridor and contains 211 parcels. A property base budget. It was established in 2005 and will expire on june 30, 2020. The executive director of the cbd is debra neeman. She will be presenting on the programmatic achievements. It includes the areas of public rightofway and sidewalk operations and district identity and street improvement and administration and corporate operations component. It included noe valley bench marks for oewd. Benchmark confirmation that noe valley received 5 of its budget and confirmed that noe valleys cbd budget and benchmark identified for carried for and projects designated for carried forward. So for benchmark one, noe valley met this requirement as their annual budget was in variance points of all Service Categories in its Management Plan. For their assessment revenue, noe valley cbd met this requirement as 10 of their revenue was from nonassessment sources. For benchmark 3, was in 10 Percentage Points of their budget. Noe valley also met benchmark four as they identified their carry over from fiscal year 20142015. For your record cbds typical carry over the operating budget for not receiving the assessment funds of the first 6 months of the new year. The findings and recommendations for the know valley cbd is that noe valley met all of their expectations and requirements by state code and administration and seeking funding for the longterm streetscape plan and identified the neighborhood and tracking visitors to patronize district merchants and implemented the oewds recommendation from fiscal year 20092015 annual reports. In conclusion, noe valley has performed well in implementing the service plan and continued to produce the events such as the Harvest Festival and Easter Egg Hunt and attended several subcommittees. Are there any questions . If not, debra is here to report on the programmatic achievements. Presenter good morning. This will be quick, but its show and tell time. Noe valley is 10 years old identified with the castro. Andrea will talk to you about it shortly. We want to give a shout out to scott wiener and duffy who helped us obtain this funding. The smallest cbd in San Francisco since the mission is no longer functioning. Right. Unfortunately. We have two street porters who work 7 days a week from 8 00 a. M. Until 5 00 p. M. We do ten steam cleanings a year. The only cbd that does this and along with mgm to remove the gum off the street. We did a long term Strategic Plan where we invited the community and asked to vote on various streetscape options and have been writing this plan for the last 10 years and have been successful for the plans that we have written. Its primarily what cbds do to create really good street improvement. We planted 137 trees. We did four sidewalk gardens. 16 planter boxes. In the initial phase of the program. We got 24 flower baskets and the high visibility crosswalks in the castro which are very busy pedestrian crosswalks. We also funded three bulldogs and planted planter boxes. We didnt like the citys bike racks so we wrote a grant and received a funding to put in our own bike racks. Which came along with the strategic design in terms of design. We have new benches. If there is a merchant that wants a bench in front of their store, we split the cost. We work very well with the merchants association. They are our true partners. We also work with the friends of noe valley, the key of residential group. We now have the town square which is going to be managed by recreation and parks. We do a lot of events. It doesnt look great if you are not go to activate it. We activated with three events in june, Harvest Festival and december we do 24 holidays and we put reindeer in the park woods which the department probably doesnt like, but thats okay. You have to tweak them occasionally. We are 10 years old. Thank you. Happy 10th birthday. Thank you for your incredible work. You are the model cbd. Thanks. Thats what i heard. We are the press conference about that. Thank you very much. Thank you again and thanks to your partners and to all of the 200 plus members who pay into that cbd. Without them you couldnt do all that work. Good Property Owners devote to tax themselves it took 18 months and 15 neighborhoods to do it. Norman knows that. Its a very tough thing to do. We are trying to replicate that on polk street and reviewing those that are promising. Perhaps well repeat that in north San Francisco in the months ahead. You have two strong leaders in polk. You will do there. Thank you. Is there any additional Public Comment . Seeing none, Public Comment is closed. Colleagues, can we have a motion to send this resolution to the full board with recommendation. I move. Moved by supervisor breed. Without objection, that is the order. Madam clerk, please call item no. 3. City clerk [castro upper market Community Benefit district annual reports to the city fy20142015] sponsor wiener resolution receiving and approving annual report for the castro upper market Community Benefit district for fy20142015, submitted as required by the property and Business Improvement district law of 1994 california streets and highways code, sections 36600, et seq. , section 36650, and the districts Management Agreement with the city, section 3. 4city clerk sf 31234 good morning. As you know the governing district is governed by state law 1994, and local law article 15. This report will cover the castro cbd market Community Benefit district annual reports to the city. We provide the board of supervisors with a summary memo regarding the cbds accomplishments and benchmark results. The castro cbd is found along the castro corridor and the longest in the city and contains 279 assessed parcels. It is a property based cbd. Its initial assessment budget is 413, 500 and is also set to expire on june 30, 2020. The director of the castro cbd is diane ayalo. Includes public rice and sidewalk operations, district identity and street improvements and administration and corporate operations. It reviews cbd in the city and for the various amounts of each category 10 points from the Management Plan. Benchmark two castro upper market cbd came from other than assessment revenue. Benchmark three for each Service Category 10 from the actuals and amounts carried over from the current fiscal year and designated projects. For benchmark 1, the castro upper market did meet these requirements as they were in ten variance points from their Management Plan budget. For benchmark 2, the castro upper market cbd exceeded this requirement as 31. 6 from revenue from nonassessment sources. From their Management Plan, for their actuals, they did meet this benchmark as all variances were under 10 variance points and for their carry over, the castro upper market did receive this requirement as they indicated any amount and what that money would be spent for in the coming fiscal year. For the finding and recommendations for the castro upper market cbd is the castro upper market cbd did a fantastic job of raising nonrevenue. Currently they have only one staff person and may be able to hire and additional staff and it is also their anniversary. So they will be having a celebration to celebrate the fantastic work they have done over the 10 years of operation. In conclusion. Cbd has continued to successfully market and produce events like live in the castro and harvey milk day. They have increased opportunities to work with Community Stakeholders and municipal agencies and continue to maintain an active and diverse board of directors and diverse robust committees. Any questions . No. Sounds like they did a spectacular job and have a lot of carry over funds. Ms. Ayolos . Good morning. Im glad to be here today. My report is actually on last year, 1415. Not our full 10 years. Although we are having a party on sunday which all of you are invited to celebrate our annual event and that should be a lot of fun. This is our map as chris showed you. We are long and its a real challenge to take care of such of a very, a lot of cbds are square or angular and ours has a lot of nooks and crannies. Its a lot of work. Our communities we have executive committee finance, streetscape committee, Service Committee and land use committee. We really couldnt do half of what we do without partnering without our wonderful neighborhood organizations and also the city organizations. We have a really strong relationship with the castro merchants and the triangle neighborhood association, safe ways and active partners of care programs. I cant say enough about the great work that ecology does to help keep the neighborhood clean and captain is part of the Leadership Team and to be part of the team on castro and on Market Street is a testament to his commitment. Our current grant is not current. Its from last year. Where we had a grant for oewd and Retail Strategies grant and funding through merchants and residents. So, cleaning is a biggest part of our budget. We have people who sweep the sidewalks and guters from 5 30 a. M. To 6 00 p. M. Everyday of the year, 365 days a year. They pick up about 250 bags of trash a month. We did an analysis and that comes to 11824 pounds of trash a month over the span of 10 years. So we did this because its our 10Year Anniversary. The amount of trash that has been collected is equal to the weight of three statutes of liberty. If you can imagine that, its pretty incredible the work that we do. As far as the safety piece of our Management Plan, we hire Patrol Special Police to patrol the neighborhoods. This is a collaboration with the nighttime businesses in the neighborhood. They are in the district walking a foot beat or driving around weekdays from 4 00 p. M. To 1 00 a. M. And weekends from 4 00 p. M. To 3 00 a. M. We put in our strategies and landscaping and additional agreeing strategies and district identity falls in there and marketing. So, what we do particularly in the castro is we have as chris said where over the weekend although in the summer we are getting new funding for next year and rolling out soon. We are going to be filling up with the events and Live Entertainment in the plaza. We have ambassadors between may and october and welcome visitors. They welcome about 10,000 visitors a season. And we do landscaping and plaza and management and maintenance in the harvey milk plaza upstairs and the Jane Warner Plaza and Retail Strategies. We finished a Research Report and we are about ready to implement those recommendations in the next month. Some pictures of keeping the district clean. Graffiti abatement. Someone who was mentally ill turned over a planter and we were there. We are always steam cleaning the sidewalks. We never stop. Whether its spot cleaning or our regularly scheduled steam cleaning. We are always out there cleaning the sidewalks. This is an example of live in the castro. This is the flagers from flagging the park. They come up and perform in the castro. These are some of our volunteers and ambassadors. We hand out maps, information about what to do and see in the castro and that is available in six other languages. People are shocked, delighted. You can imagine some people from japan and we say we have a handout for you in japanese. Similarly the challenges are the assessment some people are living on the streets and some are mental disabled and substance users. We have a number of people who are really troubled. The commercial vacancies are double the citys average and we have dangerous situations on market and working to address. Our opportunity, we have formed this incredible collaborative to address the homeless issue and people who are at risk and living on the street with dedicated Homeless Services and dedicated additional law enforcement. That castro care pays to have additional dedicated sf hot workers on the street and additional dedicated Patrol Special Police and officers. Well be implementing the Retail Strategy Program very shortly and as i said we are collaborating with mta around vision zero. We will be working to improve pedestrian safety, for pedestrian bicycles, motorcycles, cruise vision zero. We are addressing some of these big challenges and collaborating with the Jane Warner Plaza. It was promises when it was developed that it would not become a homeless campment. It kind of has and we are working with the city to make improvements there. And then as i said, well be implementing the Retail Strategies project. Thank you, if there is any questions. Supervisor aaron peskin thank you for your work and i also want to acknowledge the individuals who came to the front to allow you to do that for the last decade and happy 10th anniversary. Thank you. Are there any questions from Committee Members . Is there any additional Public Comment . Seeing none, Public Comment is closed. May you thrive until 2020 when we will reauthorize you. You do a great job. Thank you and with that, colleagues, can we send this to the full board with a recommendation. Mr. Korgis, any last words . Seeing none, supervisor has sent this to the full board. Without objection that will be the recommendation. Madam clerk, item 4. City clerk [administrative code San Francisco homicide reward fund] sponsors breed; cohen ordinance amending the administrative code to establish the san city clerk [administrative code San Francisco homicide reward fund] sponsors breed; cohen ordinance amending the administrative code to establish the San Francisco city clerk [administrative code San Francisco homicide reward fund] sponsors breed; cohen ordinance amending the administrative code to establish the San Francisco homicide reward fund. City clerk [administrative code San Francisco homicide reward fund] sponsors breed; cohen ordinance amending the administrative code to establish the San Francisco homicide reward fund. Supervisor aaron peskin supervisor breed has brought this item forward. Supervisor london breed thank you. I wish i didnt have to bring this item to talk about today and i wish nobody has had to experience this. I hope that we can solve murders and in doing so maybe even help prevent them. My hope is that we can help. Colleagues, this legislation creates a permanent city reward fund to compensate those who provide information leading to an arrest and conviction in an unsolved murder case here in the county and city of San Francisco. In the past 8 years, we have averaged between 5080 homicides a year. Each one is a tragedy, and each one is a loss to a father, mother, a friend, brother and family member. Each one should be brought to justice. The city has at times offered rewards in specific cases but its done so on an ad hoc bases and there is no specific codified fund or process. So my legislation creates a Permanent Fund for rewards of up to 250,000 to help solve and prosecute unsolved murder cases. So, rewards are limited to cases in which the police have exhausted all investigative leads and for which the chief of police has in his or her discretion determined that public assistance and an award is necessary. The recipient of the reward cannot have been involved in the crime. While the chief of police gives a very broad discretion in offering a reward, anything over 100,000 will require the approval of the board of supervisors. The reward fund is open to annual budget appropriations by the mayor and the board with money from previous years carrying over and the fund can also accept donations. All in all, this will require a small amount of taxpayer money because thankfully we are talking about a small number of cases. But in those cases, this reward can make a world of difference and in those cases we should be doing everything we can. San francisco is according to most matrix the wealthiest city in the country and with that wealth comes obligation. Like the bible says, to whom much is given, much is expected. When it comes to crime, we should put the citys wealth to help the families and get the most violent offenders off the street. I want to thank the Police Department for their assistance and we have former police captain, greg is here from the department and i want to thank tom owen and parents. Ms. Mattie and miss car let. With that, i have one amendment to my legislation. Specifically i would like to move from page 2, line 15, letter a. I would like to completely remove letter a. Remove no one has been charged with the crime from 1 year of the date of incident. Yes. And letter b. We wont need at that point. In his or her judgment that the Police Department has exhausted all investigative leads. We need a and b. Supervisor london breed no. Only remove letter a completely. Supervisor aaron peskin right. Because we will read letters a and b. Yes. Thank you very much for that clarity. I would like to move a and b. Specifically when we looked at adding the amendment to look at no one has been charged with a crime for more than 1 year, i think that you know, its not fair to wait that long to provide a reward fund. So i didnt feel that was the best way to do this legislation because what we are talking about that happens in the case of these crimes, you have the department. They come out and do an investigation. The investigation may take several weeks or several months but oftentimes should not take a year. I think after all of these investigation leads are exhausted, there comes a time where this reward can be offered. So thats what im trying to get at. Im trying to get this reward on the table as quickly as possible because the longer you wait, the less likely we will be able to prosecute anybody for these crimes, and ultimately it is important that after all of the loss that weve experienced especially in the African American community, that we do everything we can to make it clear that no matter who is killed in this city, that we are going to do everything we can to put that murderer behind bars, and that is the most important thing here because what we dont want to see happen, we dont want to see that person kill another person, and you know what . We dont want to see anything happen to that person either. And at the end of the day we want justice. We want these crimes solved and we want our community to be safe and the next generation of our kids to grow up in a safe, healthy, thriving community. Thats what this is all about. So, again, i want to thank everyone for being here today. I want to thank my colleagues who have been very supportive with this. With that, i would turn it back over to the committee and im looking forward to hearing Public Comment on this item. Thank you, supervisor breed. Would you like to hear from commander mckakrin. He actually was our captain at northern station. Its hard for me to call you captain. Its not hard for him. He was captain for 3 years. We had a great relationship and i want to thank you for the work that you have done and what you often did prevent crimes from happening and getting people off the streets and going after these crimes in anyway shape or form. You have been a great captain. Congratulations on your promotion. You know what its like with these investigations and how they dont necessarily lead to convictions. We owe this to the families. Please give us your take on whats happening with investigation now, no. 1, and no. 2 your comments regarding this legislation. Presenter thank you very much. First of all good morning, supervisors, thank you very much. As mentioned my name is greg mckrek on, the commander of the San Francisco p. D. Im here speaking in support of this legislation brought forth by supervisor breed. As mentioned, the purpose behind this fund, i apologize if i echo what you said but i believe its important is to establish these funds in an amount up to 250,000 at the discretion of the chief on these homicide cases that have gotten the reports that are at thend of their leads and we are looking for assistance to try to solve those. There are a few things that the department has looked at. In the first is the homicides have a Significant Impact in the safety and well being of a community especially when they go unsolved. Some of Biggest Challenges we have with that is that we see that the Community Remains most at risk. When the Community Remains at risk there is obviously the opportunity for additional violent activity to occur. We have seen that the community oftentimes remains in fear because of the continued violent activity by the individuals that remain outside and we are trying to assist in alleviating that fear by making the additional appropriation when appropriate. The third thing that we looked at is our overall goal is to reduce the homicide total throughout the department and as supervisor breed mentioned, we average about 55 a year and some are a challenge and the goal is to reduce the homicide totals. We are challenged at times because of the limit of the award that can be given to individuals who can offer some significant information. Supervisor talked about a Financial Impact and i think that is a component that the Police Department has looked at as well. While, you would hope that an individual who has information on a homicide would come up with that information out of shear responsibility, we would be wrong to not think that person would fear and not come up with that information. If you are a witness to a homicide and looking to provide information but are concerned about your safety, this might help you to locate within another area in San Francisco and be able to support yourself and your family beyond what is currently allowed. If you want to be able to relocate that becomes an assistance as well. One example of a prior case that i think is important to kind of highlight is that a number of years ago we had a federal prosecution of a number of high level gang members within San Francisco that was prosecuted on a federal level where we had assistance from an individual. There were five homicide that were solved and a number of shootings in San Francisco as a result of the testimony that the individual gave. We were able to offer a reward for that person but at the time it was 20,000 for a person who solved five murders and other violent activities. There had to be Something Else done to relocate that person. In that instance, had we been able to offer a larger amount for that individual, it would not only have given him the opportunity to relocate and feel safe, but the opportunity for him to feel that he can get away from a location in a violent activity to continue. Its an opportunity for us to further that approach. What i think in my last. That is important for the Police Department and on a personal level is how this will affect the community and the police relationship. As you know, the Police Department has faced challenges recently with the community and the relationship that we have with the community and we are doing a number of things to try to do that and be partners with the community. This gives us an opportunity to do that. You know, there is two women sitting behind me that i know come to a number of meetings and there are more than two, but i know of two of them specifically that i have dealt with in the past and i have a personal knowledge of violence that occurs in the community that i live and others. Ms. Brown and they are looking for information on the murders of their family members. There is nothing more than the department would like to solve that and any other families, brothers or sisters that are victims of violence and give closure to them because they come to these meetings. Every year they come to the city hall and Police Commission meetings, and its important for us, not only the Police Department to let them know its important for us to solve that crime for them but as a City Government to tell them its important. The San Francisco chief of police and the San Francisco Police Department is in support of this so we can help solve these unsolved cases and communicate with the community and the support from the community for these unsolved cases. Thank you very much. I will be happy to answer any questions. Supervisor aaron peskin thank you and congratulations on your new job. If there are no other speakers, lets open up for Public Comment. First speaker, please. Public speaker good morning. My name is paulette brown. And thank you commander. Im glad to see you here and supervisor london breed thank you too for implementing this reward for the homicide posters. As a mother who has been on a battlefield for the last 9 years, i just want to say april 6th, of this year will be my sons birthday and august 14th of this year will be my sons anniversary. Its been 10 years, it will be 10 years for my sons case that has not been solved for 10 years now. Its really hurtful and painful for me that i have to live without my child for this long, my only son. But i want to think this is being implemented because it gives other mothers and fathers hope that maybe someone is going to come forth, and i think things even though this is coming forward, i have 250,000 reward which i would like to use the overhead, please. This is my son who was murdered august 14, 2006. He died saving someone elses life. He was shot 30 times to a semi automatic gun. I have a reward 250,000 for the last 9 years now and no one has come forward. I think something should be changed in the way that victims and people have to testify so they wont be afraid to implement this money or try to get this money. And i want to bring up that they have the perpetrators that killed my son. They are right here, all the names. People have come forth and given these names. Thompson hannibal, paris moffat, andrew videau, jason thomas, anthony hunter. How do we change the fact where people that want to testify they are not afraid of retaliation. They say the people know who killed her son, no witnesses. Thats what the issue is. If we can change the issues about people coming forth, maybe someone will come and implement it and try to get the money for their award. I bring up that i not only fight for my son, there is other mothers and father out there who have lost their children and all of these cases in San Francisco are homicides that have not been solved. These mothers and i, we all stand together. We run a healing circle group called the Soul Support Group for mothers and fathers who lost their children to the homicide. After the funeral is over, who is left . Its us grieving and we are still grieving. Please dont forget our children. I want to thank everybody for bringing awareness to this. You are giving other mothers and fathers hope that we can change this system. Thank you, ms. Brown. Thank you very much. Supervisor aaron peskin next speaker, please. Public speaker wouldnt want to be swept away, far away from the one that i love. Hold this item tight. Government oversight. Make it through. I want everything to be well. Aint no sunshine when you are gone. Only darkness everyday. Aint know sunshine when you are gone and sometimes you are always gone. Make it turnout right. Dont make it wrong. Thank you, next speaker. Public speaker good morning and thank you so very much everybody for being present here. President breed, members of the board, commander. My name is maggie scott, the founder of healing for our families in our nation. Im just so elated that this is finally going forward. On july 17, 1996, my son was killed and this marks the 20th Year Anniversary of my son. We have represented over 500 parents in this city who have lost their children to gun violence. I stand before you represent is those mothers who are not able to be here today and the fathers as well. Its been a 20year journey and im not alone, we are not alone. We want to thank you supervisor breed and others. Like alma jackson lane, ceo of the Civil Service agency, elizabeth torres, kaleta jackson, and so many people who have been on board with us for a long time to help us stop the violence and stop the killing and start the healing. I also want to say that we are so grateful that chief suhr and officer commander endorsed our next of kin program. Charles ramsey of philadelphia and in charge with help and in greater support of nonviolence. I know we have to Work Together no matter what. How we feel, i guess i have been angry for a long time, but i have generated my anger in a positive way and look forward to supporting you through all of us. Thank you very much for everything that you have done. We are in it to win it and we are going to win this world on violence. Public speaker im not going to get up here and talk political crap. This is about our children that are being murdered. Get down with why we are here. Its a shame. My son right here. They found the worst damn picture. Excuse my expression. That boy was trying to cash his check working at the japanese restaurant. I aint got time. Solution or revolution. I was told about being here. I wasnt prepared to talk to people. My son was shot down. I have been talking about these unsolved homicide thats been in this country from generation to generation. We are not going to rest in the justice is done. Im not going to beg you to solve our murders. I dont have time for this. Its about the black agenda. Its time for our reparation. Every nationality can get up and speak on this and nobody wants to acknowledge whats happening with our people. I am tired of talking about all of this political crap. It wasnt an award until i fought for 3 months and demonstrates. Dont play the game with me. Im sick of it. The bottom line is its been 2 years and my sons case is not solved. If you are not going to respond before, you are not going to respond for one. I want you to know about the memory of my son. His birthday, a documentary is being done on him. He was in the star rise program being paid by the fortune 500. Mentored by willie brown. I want you to know whats going on with our boys being shot down. You dont have to wait a process for a case to be solved when that white womans case was solved in 2 weeks. Dont try to put this pressure on us and tell us that we are supposed to wait. Its talking about circumstantial evidence. Black lives dont matter. Im not waiting on you. Im going to do something about my son being murdered. Im going to do manage about it. Im sure you want to do the right thing and put it in place for all these children that dont have a reward in place when they are shot down because we realize you say that they put this here. They found the worst dog gone pictures. You found the worse picture that you could find of my son when he was 15 years old. What about when he died in his uniform at benihanas that night. So this is the reason why you dont have the rewards now because you say they are all gangsters. If they are gangsters, why are you not calling on the rico act and start putting the sensors on the cars. Its all about gangsters and bringing the fbi and cia. I bet you would bring it if it happened to the chinese and caucasians. I know you are going to do whats right. If you dont do whats right, you are going to pay the price. Im not begging you for nothing. Supervisor aaron peskin thank you. Any other members would like to testify . Please come forward. Public speaker my name is clet a jackson. The director of the Foster Family Service agencies. I have been in San Francisco since i was 5 years old. I went to our foster family agencies has been in business for 26 years. I want you to know im here today to commend you, supervisor breed, for actually trying to set up a system whereby we have a permanent way of doing homicide reform. I want to use the exact phrase you used. Sorry about that. What i wanted to say is our agency was healing for families in our nation and working with San Francisco Unified School District. The point by this having these rewards , it gives the message to the children that their lives do in fact matter. They are watching the homicide and wondering if anyone is going to do anything and they have to feel safe. When the chief commander was speaking, he talked about the effects of violence on the community. And what it really boils down to is the constant fear. So when you have a fear that turns into a rage like what just happened before i came to this podium, it lets you know how real and desperate this situation in. So we as a San Francisco and you as leadership, we do need every possible mechanism to move forward. I just wanted to say, in terms of San Francisco unified, we have so many children that are in foster care who are coming from violent situations. We have parents incarcerated, members of family who have been lost to gun violence and they know the actual children they went to school with. So weve had nt rece shootings in the western edition by mcdonalds, the quadruple homicide and a woman losing her life in the mall. What it says is not only do we have this black on black and brown on brown crime, but we have younger and younger ages of children losing their lives. This is an opportunity to say, yes, we have the mario woods case, we have the alex nieto, in terms of police shootings. But our Community Needs to know that the deaths that are occurring and the previous case of unsolved murders around black on black crimes are just as important so these mothers and residents of San Francisco just like me who have one son. That they can feel that their life here and their childrens lives matter. We commend you for this opportunity to have the reward and for it to be permanent so its not just a hit and miss because our Community Needs to heal and we need to have a Good Relationship with the Police Department. Thank you very kindly. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Public speaker can i get this, please. Just real briefly, i want to you see this picture. I want to thank supervisor breed and yee and peskin for taking action on this. I want you to see my brother. I have been doing this for 20 years. At the executive director of brothers against guns. And as you see the mothers paulette and maggie scott and as you see, i was once like that 20 years ago. I was angry, upset, mad. Didnt want to hear anybody and didnt want to know what anybody had to say, frustrated. Unfortunately the young man that killed my brother was caught and arrested. 4 years later my Second Brother was murdered. That homicide has still not been solved. So i stand here and say 250,000, thats a start. We can do better. We are one of the richest cities in the United States, and we commend you guys for taking the lead on this. We appreciate this, but i think we can do better because i see the frustration and as the mothers grieve and fathers grieve. Im a brother. No longer is my mother or father here or my brother. Im here by myself as a brother who started this organization of brothers against guns. I understand the hurt and pain. Just recently i lost a cousin the other day in the tenderloin who was murdered. So i understand the grief that these mothers and fathers go through. At the same time, im going to keep pointing this out that we are one of the richest cities in the United States and we can did better to support these families, these mothers and father. I have been on the battle line for 20 years fighting this and im dedicated an committed to this where there is city dollars, foundation dollars, whatever dollars, im going to continue to do this brothers against guns until i leave this earth. As you can see this grief going on with these families, they are hurting and they can never get passed it. Every birthday, every holiday, every time they see a kid that looks like their kid, it reminds them of what their child should have been and would that child been here. I save that everyday and as i work with kids everyday and deal with kids on that level everyday, i feel the heart pain what these families go through. This is a start and a beginning, it can be more done for these families. I understand that these families will never ever ever forget about their loved ones and this pain will never go away. There is not enough money in the world to get them to do a way with what they are dealing. As you see these mothers grieving, dont take it personal. Take it to where you understand. I have told many mothers, fathers, brothers and aunties and cousins, get involved so it doesnt come to your doorstep. I say this to you supervisors, pass this. Make it work for families. I keep saying this, is that 250,000 is a start. But as one of the richest cities in the United States, we can do better and support these families a lot more and a lot better than what we are supporting them by giving them the comfort to get this frustration out and let them understand that its okay. So i support the families. I support you supervisor breed, peskin, supervisor yee. Thank you, guys, for pushing this, but look deeper and do better than what we are doing. Thank you. About the other unsolved. I cant let you up. We let you go well beyond. Im not allowed to do that. I just want to show you what mothers and fathers are suffering from. I just want to show you this. Can you show this at least show this. This is what we have left of our children. Can i put it over the overhead real quick. Please. This is about our children. I totally understand. This is my son laying on a gurney lifeless that we have 9 years later. Im still in pain. I need you to know this. You talk about rage. Its a mothers rage. Dont cut me off, please. Im still in pain. 2 minutes. 10 years that i have to deal with this. Yes, i advocate for other mothers, but when it comes time to myself, its hard for me because this is what i have left of my son. Take that into consideration. Acknowledge my pain. We do. Thats why we are here today, right . So please acknowledge my pain. We do acknowledge it. Solve these homicides. Im tired of coming to the Police Commission supervisors meetings every wednesday and tuesday standing in front of city hall and screaming from the top of my voice. Listen to us. We are. Thats why we are here today. Are there any other members of the public who would like to testify on this item . Is there any additional Public Comment . Seeing none, Public Comment is closed. Supervisor breed . Supervisor yee . Supervisor norman yee thank you. I would like to thank everyone for coming out and expressing your frustration. Thank you commander for your support of this legislation. I dont take it personally. I take it as a way for me to continue to be motivated to help anyway i can. President breed, thank you for bringing this legislation to us and i would love to be added as a coauthor and support this. Supervisor aaron peskin colleagues, we will list supervisor yee and myself as cosponsors of this measure and if there is no objection, we will send this item. Supervisor london breed thank you. I want to thank you all for your words. As mattie scott would say, oftentimes, her people hurt people. Too many people have been hurting people in our community. When we lose people in our community, we lose a lot more than just that individual. I know that many of you mothers who have lost their son even if its 2 days ago, 1 year ago, 20 years ago, it still hurts. And part of what we have to do as a community is come together and heal. We have to pray with one another, we have to support each other. Yes, we dont need to be apologetic or acknowledging people or say the kinds of things we need to say. You dont have to apologize to me for anything. I grew up in the western edition. I have lost friends, family members, loved ones. We talk about this when stacy got killed in the tunnel when i was 12. Stacy who was a good person. Stacy who always had a dollar for you. Stacy, the kindest person you ever want to meet. Why stacey . . Why does it continue to be our young African American boys and men. Part of what we have to do as a community is we have to come together, we have to hold one another up and lift each other up in prayer. We have to hold other people accountable. They know what their kids are doing. They know what their kids are doing. We know some of the people in the quadruple homicide. I talked to some of those parents directly. I talked to the department. I want to see those crimes solved. Consuelo and i talked about this when we were kids. We played together. This is important to me. This is not just about being supervisors. This is about trying to use this position to do everything i can whether it be legislation, money, resources to try to correct a lot of the wrongs of the past in this city. This is a hard job. Let me just also say this, before i was supervisor, my whole life has been dedicated to changing lives in the community, to working with peoples kids to making sure that before they even get to a. Point where they become involved in crimes that we give them the positive encouragement. I have seen violence, crimes, i have seen drugs, despair and all the crap that we have had to endure far too long. Nothing is more important to me in doing everything i can in this role whether im in this role or not to change this city, to make things better for us. To make sure that not one other person has to go through what we have all endured for far too long. Know this is not enough. Know its not enough. We have to do more and im committed to continue to work with you all to try and do more. You know, this is one tiny step in the right direction. We have a lot of work to do. I know this. And there is not a day that goes by that im not trying to do everything i can to make sure that we are not losing. To make sure that we have a voice in city hall. That we have a voice in this city. We might have few in numbers, but together as long as we stand together, we are mighty. You know, not every mother is here, but there are enough mothers here representing those mothers. That is mighty. That is mighty and we are going to continue to do everything we can in this city as long as im on this board of supervisors to change our behavior, to change our legislation, to change our attitude towards how we support and protect folks in the African American community. Im committed to that and i want to thank you colleagues for your support. I ask that you support my amendment and move this to the full board with positive recommendation. Supervisor aaron peskin thank you, supervisor breed. We have a motion made by supervisor breed to amend at page 2 line 15 to remove clause a and reletter clause a and b and clause c as clause b. Can we take that without objection and recommend to the full board without objection. Supervisor aaron peskin madam clerk, please call the next item. City clerk [hearing chronic absenteeism at San Francisco Public Schools] sponsor yee hearing to discuss chronic absenteeism within the San Francisco Unified School District sfusd and preventative strategies to reduce absenteeism; and requesting the sfusd to report. City clerk sf 51234 thank you, madam clerk. Supervisor yee, this is your item. Would you like to make opening comments . Supervisor norman yee thank you. Colleagues, im calling this hearing today on chronic absenteeism because there is a permeating crisis at too many of our schools that are not receiving enough attention. Being absent at schools is affecting our most vulnerable students. There is an effect as many children who are absent and not meeting grade level expectations. Studies have found that as students move through to middle school and high school years, there are several predictive key measures associated with high school graduation. Thats including attendance. However, we see chronic absenteeism and too often people dont understand what it is. I have to say this is a definition for chronic absenteeism. Its not truancy. This is basically looking at those that miss at least 10 of the school days including preschoolers. Now, what does it really mean 10 . It doesnt mean for some, lets quantify this. Of the 10 months of so that you go to school that means that you miss at least 1 month of no school. For educators and parents alike, they understand, we all understand if you are not in school, you are not learning. When you are not learning you fall behind. When you fall behind, its very very difficult to catch up. At some point, students get frustrated to the. Where they stop coming to school. They drop out. Now, there is no Strong Research thats telling me that, but for someone thats been in education and working with children for over 40 years, this is what i have seen over and over again. So if we want to improve our Graduation Rate in San Francisco, we need to focus on chronic absenteeism. Its a strong indicator. Im looking forward to the most current data being presented. But at 40 of our Elementary Schools and 67 of our high schools have a rate of chronic absenteeism we have to act now. As i look at the data, 20 had a rate of higher than 15 . One school alone had 40 of students defined as chronic absent. 40 , and guess what, those schools that had the highest chronic absenteeism rate were schools that were failing. When i looked at the data then and looked at the schools that are not failing and succeeding. All of these rates. If we want to do good for students, we need to address this issue. Thats when i offer the resolution for the San Francisco Unified School District to focus on this and make it a priority. In fact, for following the resolution, some of the rates actually went down. So, now 6 years later, im eager to hear the current data. I have been out of the school board for 3 years and to see whats been implemented in our School District to reduce chronic absenteeism. I have a list of speakers today and i would love to have them come up. I will start with katie chang, who is the director of attendance works and i would like to say that it was about five or 6 years ago when nobody heard of chronic absenteeism and brought it to my attention. I said, oh, my god people should know about this. This is something she was trying to bring attention locally and allow has become a national movement. Katie chang, thank you for coming. Presenter thank you for all of your championship over the years. You know, this story, i run a national initiative. We are working nationally with the u. S. Department of education and working as part of my brothers keeper because chronic absenteeism and its not related to the conversation we had before because when kids arent in school, they cant succeed and their hopelessness results in the kind of violence that takes away important lives. This quick story because supervisor breed, this is a story that is connected to a school because my kids went to Public School here in San Francisco in your district. My son graduating from lowell, when he was starting in Elementary School he had a little boy in Elementary School. He had everything my kid had. He was bright, he was excited, but he didnt have, and he had a caring mother. His mom lived in the projects and maybe you knew her. She was struggling to get off welfare and struggling to raise her son in the projects. When he was in sixth grade, his mom died. And he got placed with his aunty downtown and i saw his attendance plummet. When i take a look at kids missing too much school its a sign that they were not on track for success and school in life. At the time, we all cared. We didnt know enough about this subject to figure out how we can turn it around. I spent the last 10 years figuring out what it means to turn this around going across the entire country. What i know though is that im still a resident of this city and what i do nationally i have to come home. As for the African American brothers and sisters and families you are not alone because this is a problem that all of us together have to solve and its affecting this entire city regardless of who you are. When one young life doesnt make it, we all suffer. Le me say through a couple of quick slides. As norman said, chronic absence is more than 10 , which is the chronic absence defined in california as miss is 10 . I dont care why a kid is missing school. If they are not in class whether its suspensions, excused or unexcused absences they are not learning. This has been a long time, norman. You will recognize this slide. When we first got to this district to look at this data, you saw truancy and we need to start a different metric to start this action. We know from National Research across the country, if kids miss too much School Starting in preschool, by second grade, they are offtrack for reading by the end of third grade. If you cant read by the end of third grade, you fall behind in all of your subjects, you are higher risk for suspensions. By middle school you have scaffolded subjects like algebra, if you miss, you are far behind and you are not going to graduate. You can, but if we identify it earlier we can help them graduate. We have not been using the data to be able to identify kids, provide them with the supports they need so we can turn it around before they actually are offtrack. But we also know that turning this around requires not what i still worry about this data the first time the first thought is thats because families dont care when it is not the case. What we need to do in order to turn this around is figure out why kids are correct me if correct me if chronically absent. Some of the barriers of chronic disease and parents responsibilities. Trauma is one and chronic absence is the highest in our communities that are the most violent. It can also be aversion because if families didnt have a good experience in school, sometimes they actually avoid school because they dont want to be subjected to where they are feeling embarrassed and they are not being supported. Poor School Climate, our School Suspensions issues, this is all connected. Some of it is engagement because we have failed to make schools. The places that are vibrant for places particularly for middle school and High School Kids should see why they should be there in the first place. When we figure out why the kids are absent, we should figure out the solutions. We should know about taking a tiered approach. We are using this data and recognizing improved attendance and noticing everyday the kids that have the most challenging in attendance to engage these kids. The kids should be motivated about school and because they are excited to be there. And we know that what brings kids back to school is when they know that someone in that building misses them and they will help be a provider and support. And then we have had some of this in place. Its our legal supports, our coordinated support and deep services. The problem is that San Francisco like so many other places has for too long only because we have looked at truancy only been in that responding when the kids are in the deep end before and we dont take advantage of the opportunity to take the much less costly, much more inexpensive Effective Solutions by investing in tier one and two. What we know is we need to build a system to do this and positive engagement to make sure that caring relationships and positive School Climate to motivate climate actions and we need to take actions as early as possible and we need schools and our Community Partners to Work Together and we have shared accountability and we are using that accountability to promote these actions. It starts with our School Districts and im so glad that our School Districts have been a partner and working on this vision and it also takes responsibilities. It is not just up to our schools to change that. Our schools alone dont have the capacity the do that. As a community we can send those kinds of message to help students know we believe in their future and willing to work with them, with their families to get them to school to help them realize our future. Thank you very much. Supervisor norman yee as you have gone from one place to another beyond San Francisco, how are you seeing other School Districts prioritize this issue and are there Lessons Learned from other places where we can apply this in San Francisco. Im not just talking about this School District, but im talking about this city as a whole . Yes, first of all its about using our data in a way that we are strategic and targeted. Chronic absence is not a problem everywhere. I know that our district will talk more about this. Its about some schools and some neighborhoods. We need to get the information and figure out where and partner with kids and families so we understand from their perspective. They have to be part of their solution so they can give us insights and some of this is actually, and this is being started in San Francisco and we referred to but like Walking School buses where you engage the community in being in those solutions. What i have seen is the communities that have made a difference when they share their data, they use it to target and look at both messaging and addressing real barriers and its also a long standing commitment. This doesnt get turned around in just 1 year. Its a longstanding an on going commitment. One other thing that i will just say, is the office for civil rights at the federal level is going to be releasing chronic absence data in may and in it will be chronic absence data by School District level and state and that is going to, i think, have a galvanizing effect on our country and we need to be prepared to leverage that effect to call for greater action here in San Francisco particularly in the communities most affected. Thank you very much for your presentation and thank you for your work on this issue. As you mentioned, im a strong believer that the more we can do upfront in terms of helping our children get in the path of being successful, the better off well be at the end. Thank you very much at this time i would like to bring up jill harris. Shes one of the few elected officials that really is an educator and she got this issue and understand this. Its a really big deal. When we brought this issue out to the attention of the public in 2010, she was right there right alongside us saying yes, this is what we need to focus on to ensure that our kids succeed. The floor is yours. Presenter thank you very much, supervisor yee. Thank you for having me here today. Im jill, as you mentioned this work began when attorney general harris was District Attorney in San Francisco and learned that of the homicide victims of the city that were under the age of 25 years when they were killed, 94 of those victims were High School Drop outs. Those drop outs had begun to miss too much school. Many of them were missing up to 80 days from the school year. Attorney general harris partnered with the ymca. I want to share a couple of resources from the attorney general to San Francisco to help continue to move this forward. First of all attorney general harris, the most recent report was released last september. We commissioned data from across the state to look at this issue statewide and identify for the first time how many of our Elementary School students are chronically absent and at risk for academic set backs as a result of their absenteeism. Some of those resources that are available for data is this about why it matters. 83 of students who are chronically absent in kindergarten and first grade are not able to read at grade level in the third grade and as a result they drop out. In california, we see that nearly a quarter of a Million Students miss school each year. So many children fall behind. We see a disparity in income levels. 75 of students are low income and disparities along racial lines particularly among African American girls and boys. We urge every School District in the state to collect and monitor the same data at the district level to identify who individually and across subgroups is missing too much school and at what grade level to mobilize resource to help those families. We have data of suspension across the state to see across the gender and race disparities. Thats important not just because of the Racial Discrimination disparity issue about school push out but also important from a learning perspective that as those kids that are not in the classroom, they are not learning from the instruction they should be getting. One resource i want to share with the board that we just published a week ago is a positive parent messaging tool kit. We partnered with entities to release a tool kit for parents on the impact of early absences and getting kids to school everyday. We conducted research with parents cubed across the state and talked to them about addressing this with their children and how to address this across the state. Our tool kit includes research findings, tip sheets and other tools for parents, educators and Community Based organizations. Everyone who works with parents on a regular basis and strategy recommendations for things that you can implement at the local level to work directly with parents. As a snapshot we learned the many reasons for absences. Some are traceable to misunderstandings that parents have about early attendance and most importance about early absences. They like many of us tend to assume that absence in the early grades are not as important as in later grades, that a few grades here or there will not result in academic set backs and absences are fine as long as parents sign off. Those understandings we need to avoid absences and we reinforce some of these myths by sending in only personal letters to families and not having the teachers address this with the parents and families. So families get the message that attendance isnt the most important issue and absences is not a problem for their childrens academic development. A few things that we found that are immediately applicable to the School District and anyone working with families is that message about absences are more effective at communicating with parents and messages about attendance and they assume thats what they are already doing. As they are missing from 1020 of the school year they are missing to 90 of the time. And focusing on the child and what they are missing academically and what needs to be corrected and what resources are necessary to help that family and address the misunderstanding of how many days have an impact on children. Most parents werent aware that just missing 2 days could have an impact on children. These are tools that we can correct to move on to the resources, gynecological cancer engagement to help the families. Thank you very much. Are they in other languages . They are in spanish and we are working on other languages. Thank you very much. Mayor edwin m. Lee next up is San Francisco Unified School District. We have robin and kevin. Thank you for being here, kevin. Chief student and family of Community Support division. You are one that understand this issue an has been working on it. Im glad that you still are working on these issues and trying to improve the situation. At this moment, i have my reading glasses on. Sandy fewer, i think you are here. Presenter thank you for allowing us the opportunity the talk about the work that the school is doing around attendance. And i appreciate that headey got up and talked about this earlier and the work we are doing with attendance work. Its really important in some of the message that were addressed. The things that we are looking at are really about the barriers to School Attendance. What we see happening is later on those attendance, when the students are becoming disengaged in learning because they have been absent, we find later in the later grades that students find other ways to get out of class because they have missed class and what happens is they start contributing to suspensions. We noticed in the district that for particularly for African American students, even though they makeup only 9 of our district, they makeup 50 of suspensions and at the High School Level we see average African American students miss 19 more days than their high school peers. The problem is that more than 70 of those were in regards to suspensions. We are finding ways that even for many of our African American students, even if they wanted to come to school, we were telling them you cant because you are suspended. What we have done which has been very helpful is that we did pass a resolution for safe and Supportive Schools that ban the use of willful de and that students are acting up in class. Unless im providing access, im going to act up a little bit more. We are now providing that to teachers so it doesnt lead to suspension. It comes down to attendance and starts in the very early grades. Im going to bring up thomas gravns. His office over sees chronic truancy and absence and you will hear from hope sf which is an Important Program and we have a this program that has been very successful. Thomas . Presenter good morning, supervisors. Im going to take you through the data real quickly. We talk about chronic absenteeism. I dont want i have to go through this definition. When you see chronic absenteeism. We took a really careful look at last fall and made sure we went through every section in our new Information System and got a very accurate picture. This is for last year. Its very recent data. You can see we have a high disparity of chronic absenteeism with some ethnic groups triple the generate which is 8 overall. You can see the groups that are sometimes double that. Here you can see that within the chronic absenteeism group is there are significant portions of those chronically truant. There is a challenge within the challenge so to speak. Im going to show you the greater rate for chronic absenteeism supervisor london breed can i also ask a question. I believe the numbers are very helpful, but do you have the percentages of the numbers as an example . Yes, that is a very important distinction. For our schools we do it by percentage and number. We can get that for you. We didnt do it in this presentation. That would be helpful to know because when we look at the percentage as you had noted earlier, we look at the percentage of African Americans that are actually in the School District and the number of African Americans, they have a higher suspension rates, the higher drop out rates, the higher, the attendance is problematic. It would be helpful to understand that actual number. Are we talking about out of 4,000 African American students are we talking about maybe 200. That kind of information would be helpful. Very good point. I want to talk about this topic, last year the schools received the data on chronic absenteeism including the percentage of the overall schools, the percentage of subgroups and the number and every school above 10 in any one category they wrote their attendance target and what their strategies were going to be and we broke that down by percentage and they got it in their profiles and we included that and suspensions also by percentage and individual number of students. I appreciate you bringing that up. Thank you. We can bring that back up. We do that all the time, that breakdown. I apologize for not bringing it today. I will get it to you. So, when you look at the chronic absence by grade you can see the pattern that these previous speakers refer to that in kindergarten is higher and talking about educating folks about why kindergarten is important. When you look at grades 612, that is a little misleading. We know that the chronic, the challenge here is that we measure the chronic absence by one single period. If you are there for one period, you are considered present for the day and we amount the areas where they are missing. We have that but we dont have that for you. We were hoping to have it for you today but we dont. I want you to know that secondary chronic absence rate is a little misleading when you look at it this way. Here we are looking at absenteeism by grade. You can see the ethnic breakdown with the pretty alarming selfevident rates. Similarly when you go to the secondary level you can see even with the limitations of this particular secondary school you see the significant proportionality and these numbers jump out. At this point i want to bring up one of our senior truancy persons in the district. Tiana who has been working on truancy. Good morning, im a drop out prevention specialist and Child Welfare for the district. Where there are seven of us. I have to say that it has been quite an adventure. The shift that has happened from just focusing on truancy to looking at absenteeism, all absences has been an eye opener for us for a long time in our department we focus on the highest tier of absenteeism and truancy. We focus on a lot of the kids who are chronically truant. Now being able to look at all absences has been very eye opening, not just for us but our schools as well. What we are doing to start addressing chronic absenteeism. The best thing that has happened to our department is being able to have access to data and to have data and to have access to. In that system they are able to pull up reports for their own individual schools to identify the students who have needs, not just for behavior or for other issues before attendance as well. We are using a 3tiered approach and aligned with what we are doing with tds. The team was the last team to get there because we were still looking at truancy and not absenteeism. But the great thing thats happening is there is a great conversation at tier one. What can we do for whole school, we are talking about climate, incentives, things like that to reengage our students. What i hear from my students is the school doesnt care if im here or not. So now we are showing them that we do and that we are paying attention. We are also making sure that we are giving them the most updated information to our students, to our parents and to our staff at the school sites. There are attendance workshops being held at the school sites and we are having conversations with all of our families, especially in the Elementary Schools because thats where the habits are forming in our k2 students. And we are really really pushing our positive incentives with our families. This is some of the data that is available in our new system that the school sites have access to. They have the information on chronic absenteeism by grade level so we know where our efforts should be really targeted at and broken down. At the bottom is a snapshot of an ex cell report and who are these students that these numbers represent. What i like about these reports is you can use the same system to see if there have been any interventions to students on this list so they know who they should be focused on and this is information that they will bring to their meetings when we are talking about school wide concerns. This is a really nice resource that was given by attendance. Shes been working really closely within the year 1 2 together. We did an activity with some of our leaders of our schools where they were coming up with their own attendance plan at their school sites. So each school was given their numbers. The number of kids in tier one, tier 2, tier 3 with their attendance and then they were coming up with different activities they can be doing in each of these tiers. They are finding it very helpful to be able to find it this way to work with all students and not just tier one and 2 and 3. Its all students. We are going to continue to flush that out more. We do collaborate with the courts of San Francisco and coming up with a program. Initially it was to combat truancy. It is called, truancy action partnership. Its a Pilot Program happening in three Elementary Schools right now. Brave hard, valley and el dorado. Its through superior court and San Francisco sd. We are working with families at the school sites who are having challenges with absenteeism. The purpose is to identify the barriers with kids coming to school and helping to give support. Its not just about giving referrals to say to do this, but walking out through this and we had families who had kids at different schools and the ability to take their kids to school and through challenging things like Domestic Violence because the mother was afraid to bring her kids to school. And we had a mother who was homeless and was living house to house with different families. They were very grateful. Its creating this familys care team. They meet weekly. Its not just one time. They meet consistently for weeks. We continually ask them. What are your barriers, what do you need in order to support you. What can you do. We hold ourselves accountable and hold them accountable and looking at their attendance along the way and watching the gains that are happening and we also are talking with the students and watching their behavior and academic. Its really small right now. We are only seeing about 56 families at a time. We are hoping to expand it. We are going to look at how thats going to happen. Its going to be really positive program thats happening. Im looking at five people in the photo here. What are the roles again. Its a collaboration. So you have the superior court of San Francisco. There are two judges there and then we have our administration at the school site. Its the principal and social workers at the table an then you have your Child Welfare at the district there to support. You have someone from the department and Human Services at the table and someone from the department of Mental Health at the table. That makes up the care theme and then with them is also the family. District supports that we have, like we have our Child Welfare attendance liaisons, there are seven in the district. There are four in elementary, one in middle school and two in high school where we give supports to the schools. Its best practices around attendance and incentives and interventions. We are part of the School Review team and the teams. We do attendance workshops, school wide, intervention home visits and represent the district at Truancy Court and we have truancy officers that attend the hearings at the District Office and come to Truancy Court. With truancy superior court and the judges joins us through actions and partnerships. This is the start of our plans in the School District. Im going to have mr. Graham to talk about other initiatives. Okay, we are at this. Where we have a good solid data system. Its really a point where we know almost in realtime. This is a huge step forward for us and it was a lot of work to get it in place. The challenge we have is how can we be accountable for every kid that is chronically absent. And so, we want to take and also support all kids in attendance. We have this campaign that we are putting together and we are talking to you a little bit about it now. The first step is we now have the ability to generate for every school on the 10th of every month, celebratory certificates for attendance. This is difficult to do individually because it has to calculate perfectly and kids get excited about, they are very precise about holding the School Accountable over who should exactly get the certificate. This is something welcome do with technology and we are asking every site to celebrate attendance every month and thats part of our collaboration with attendance to understand how important celebrating tier win one attendance is. Section two is going to be a game changer for us. We want the school to contact the chronically absent and ask each family what the questions and barriers are for nonattendance. We want to compile that data in a searchable way to look for more, a Bigger Picture things for asking what comes up a lot on what is holding kids back from school whether its transportation issues and do we have issues where families are not as comfortable come to our schools and we would like to use the system to identify that. At the same time, we want to, when ever we agree to an intervention and use that tracking system to hold those accountability and intervention. We want to ensure every principal gets a report for those who finish the threshold for each chronic absenteeism. We are asking for information from each and every chronic situation why and what are the barriers and then step three, we would partner across the city to address the issues that we see arising from these services. In terms of the analysis, its something that didnt exist 6 years ago. A couple of questions around data. One of the things that i spoke about several years ago was their need for the city and the community and the City Partners and i noticed also that in your description of your campaign, much of it was internal which is good. Im glad that the district is going to focus on it. The other thing that i brought up 6 years ago was that, we need to utilize the resources outside of the School District. I dont think this is a School District standalone problem. I think its a city problem. Im hoping that well do a better job when we look at the resources that we have to address the citywide problem. No. 1, are we sharing data. Thank you, supervisor yee, i represent the district on the shared use data base committee. We do have an mou still going back and forth to the City Attorneys office. We eventually that data, its a shared data base within each district. Juvenile probation. There are triggers, each of the institutions of certain triggers that will red flag when a family and individual triggers that agency and support. Or triggers is one of the indicated in attendance. When a student is 10 , that student will be red flagged and well alert the other agencies. We are not using it yet. We are still meeting. This has been years and years in meeting but we are on the homestretch and well address that soon. Let me press on this one a little bit now. The homestretch is around the block . I dont know. Your guess is as good as mine. What are the barriers at this point . Is there something we can do from this seat . I really dont know. Its language. Im sitting here and i have heard similar discussions years ago and im, you know, you are frustrated, im frustrated. Frustration by itself doesnt do anything. What is it that we need to get this moving. We cant be sitting around and having more kids fail. We need to share with the Community Members and they need to be doing their part in this. Its really frustrating to me that we are not there yet. Supervisor yee, i agree that frustration goes no where if we just sit here and hearing the presentationarily yes, sir, it gives us a sense of urgency to do something. I have to say through your leadership in developing the childrens and Families Council really is that leverage for data agreement work forward. Now we have a piece of legislation to point our City Attorneys to to say look, its in the charter. We have to do this. Whatever it takes to move and to move past our separate institutions, thats what they are working on. You know, its understandable that each City Attorney on each institution trying to make sure the best interest of children at the end of the day is protected. So, i think we are moving forward and unfortunately taking a little bit more time. I have to say through your legislation, 2 years ago that is really helping to kick this a little further. One other question about the, i know that it wasnt presented, but we also know that there is quite a few that are in the category of having high percentages of chronically absent students. Correct me if i am wrong, currently there is 12 high schools, 67 of them have chronic absenteeism rate above 11 . And when you look at Elementary Schools, 29 of 72 of schools have it above 11 . One of the more disheartening information i have gotten that one of the schools has 39 of the kids chronically absent which is 6 years ago there was one school that has 39 , close to 40 . Is that 40 of the students that be chronically absent and now we still have not maybe one school. This is really frightening that we still have a school with that high rate. Is the Data Available and then, no. 1, to really specifying. The purpose to date for me is i would like to see if there is any improvement over all. Yes, i think the Big Development each schools chronic absenteeism is recording that data that staff is pulling there. And it is part of the schools report card. We used to have something call the the api, the academic performance index. The new index is now the sqii which addresses the chronic absenteeism and also looks at the subgroups. We are in a much more accountable era for attendance. What you are seeing there, is we are looking at it as a baseline. Because we now have all of this new data system potentials to address the students individually and also support individual schools with individual intensive plans which is our intention. What i want to just add is yes, we have the numbers now. We have percentage and data, but we need to move beyond that. We are supervisor london breed when we look at the children that we are having challenges with, i see one of the districts supports is home visits. We know that not every kid has possibly the best home environment, and i know that can be challenging and especially now more than ever with the passage of peace and the Childrens Fund and all of this new money thats being poured into the School Districts and services we have to do a better job at being more aggressive when we know these children are having trouble in their home environment, that is no. 1 and no. 2, we knew in many instances these children were in unhealthy environments and we brought in School Districts, social workers and even the police to help that child grow and thrive in school. There was just really no solution, no real possibility of somehow getting that child into a better environment or no link between getting a child in a healthy home environment to getting them into a healthy home environment. I remember one situation where there was one of the women who had children, somebody i grew up with and there were just some real challenges around her children being used to commit illegal activities by her, by the mother. The bringing the mother and family in and trying to correct the behavior and help her with a job opportunity, help her with social services and getting her on the right path, the follow through was not there. My grandmother raised us and my brother would skill school all the time and spent his whole life in and out of jail and hes still incarcerated right now. My grandmother did her best, but she couldnt control my brother, but there was no one really knocking on our door saying why isnt he in school. We would get phone calls. Eventually he never even graduated from high school. So, i would like to see a little bit more of the folks who work for the School District adding more people to do home visits, to meet people where they are and be committed in their faces. The reason why i did well was because i ended up working for the mayors Youth Employment Training Program and i had these mentors and i didnt why they were helping but they were in my face all the time and holding me accountable and i had these grown ups who cared about me and asked me about my life and what was going on and working with me and my grandmother and eventually i did okay and i even went to college. What im saying here is we need more adults who are handson with our children, and who are not just picking up the phone and making the calls, but nothing on the doors and people who really care about focusing on these individual children and just doing a real wrap around Service Support to get them on the right path. Its not a perfect solution, but working with one kid and i will give you an example. I had, when i was at the African American art and culture complex, there was one kid, grandmother was raising him but she was drinking and had problems and eventually i had him come stay with me. I worked with the grandmother, i made sure he had tutors and got him on the right path. He graduated from high school and now working on a program for the city and doing clean up and graffiti abatement. The point is these kids need an advocate and doesnt have just someone showing up because its their job but because it is an advocacy. We need more people and social workers to do this job. It is a hard job and you dont get a lot of praise for it but hopefully these kids end up doing well and they can take care of themselves and they dont end up being locked up. I just want to really target them early and make sure that there is compassion, that there is support, that there is consistency and we dont let up. Elementary school is easy. Once they get to junior high and high school, we are talking about another ball game. We should be just as persistent and supporting them. I want to make sure that we add those components to what we are doing when we talk about home visits. Mayor edwin m. Lee thank you, supervisor breed. Supervisor breed, you hit the nail on the head. I have to say that sometimes it really takes our personal experiences to realize what works and what doesnt work. Certainly one of my Early Experiences as a teacher for a Public School where kids were bussing from the mission, none of the parents showed up for teacher parent conference and i didnt just say, oh, its too bad. I went to visit them in the evening on my own town and it made such a big difference. And years later, when it was my organization, we had the largest number of parent liaison doing Home Visiting in any organization in San Francisco, and so, yes, i really do support your notion in this and at the end this hearing, i will ask for an action plan for this. I want to bring up the rest of the community. Sorry to keep you guys waiting. Thank you very much for your presentation, mr. Gravn. Maria su and ocof and ocff. Because you are part of the School District, this is not public testimony right now, but you are part of the School District. Presenter thank you supervisors for allowing me to speak right now. Im from the San Francisco board of education. I would like to thank you for bringing up this topic. Its a call for action for us and how its so directly related to the academic achievement of our students. We had a presentation on the African American achievement and chronic absenteeism as one of the challenges. Im glad that we are Getting Better data and i want to. That it disproportionately affects a Certain Group of children, and we are talking about our African American and latino children. Its a few things that are in common. It is the responsibility of our district and the city to address it in those terms. We are talking about schools and how its concentrate in certain schools. We look at those schools and they have the highest concentration of those populations and uncredentialed teachers and the highest concentration of turnover of teachers. They also have the highest concentration of students that do not show up. We promise to the families to give them a high quality consistent education. We are now facing an unprecedented teachers and substitute teachers. They are underpaid and they are not showing up and they are affecting the education of these students. We say to the parents everyday that a day your child is not in school is without instruction. I think that is a partnership we should work on between the city and also our School District. Then we can talk about families and the younger grades and when we get to the older grades that is a different story. So what are we doing with the older grades for those in school and why are they not making this successful and in the lessons that they are learning and also in the courses that we are teaching. Are they relevant to their lives. I think those are the things that we should be looking at because it is also, i have also asked that we look at, our African American students actually shift around a lot from school to school. That is unusual among other groups. So i just ask for the School District to look into how this shifting from school to school transferring 23 schools, how does that affect a childs education. Do the Services Following that child. Are they immediately enrolling into school and immediately a lifetime. I know that every time that her family situation was not as supportive with the family, and i know that every time that the school said to the parents that her mother would shift to schools and there was a time in between leaving one school and enrolling into the next school. Can we capture that time and follow those types of things. Our promise also to the parents are if you get them to school, our promise is we will educate your child. Their support is on our side. On the citys side, we need to look at these groups and heavy transportation and not so much for the school system. We know that transportation in the city is not distributed. And for those that never show up. That is an issue also. This is a continuous problem. Which means once we get our family on board and they are sending their child to school, we could not give up. We could not disregard that family and say now they dont need that service because these children will fall back into chronic absenteeism. Thank you for calling this, supervisor yee. It is a call to action and every time we talk about this and also when we see the data. Thank you very much, commissioner feuer. It is a pleasure sitting on the board of education with you because it were one of the commissioners that knew what i was talking about when everybody was looking at me like i was crazy. Thank you for being here. Maria sue. Presenter i just want to thank supervisor yee for calling this hearing and apply president breed for moving the item forward. To me its very very helpful. So as you have already heard from a lot of our speakers. Chronic absenteeism is a huge issue and we need to understand the consequences of chronic absenteeism on the families and on the system. In looking forward to the support services, we need to address the legal system, community, families, social services as well as faith based communities and other leaders in our community to help our students and young people succeed. I do believe that it is our responsibility as a city to ensure that all young people are equipped with educational and knowledge to be successful. Promoting School Attendance is an important part of our responsibility and one of the goals of our department. I want to highlight a couple of key initiatives that our department is doing and then yield the rest of the time to some of the other departments that will actually share a lot of the initiatives that president breed mentioned like Family Support and coordinated Family Management which i believe are the right strategies to support chronic absenteeism. I want to start by highlighting violence prevention in Case Management programs. Between july 2012june 2014. We have 28 programs that offer kid Management Services and it was for 3078 people. The majority services they provide is support for education attainment. A lot of these young people are at risk for entering the juvenile Justice System and most of our case managers provide a lot of support and to our School District to the Justice System and through their peer relationships and their community. 2 quarters of youth show risk in the years prior to or in the years their in Case Management with our cbos. Out of 1719 youth of that data, 76 had school risk meaning they are at risk of getting a d or f or dropping out of school. Another thing i wanted to highlight is tours at the Resources Center and in full partnership with the School District, the d. A. s office, juvenile Probation Department and cbos. Served 120 students last year and report 88 of students that received services through tarp received more than 100 hours of Management Services to reengage them into their schools. The other initiative i want to highlight is a new one that we got funding from the department of justice. The juvenile alternatives to suspension program. We are running this initiative out of valley middle school. Thats primarily because we really acknowledge there is a shortage of programs and support for our middle School Students. This initiative is in partnership with juvenile probation, School District and our cb o provider, rock, real opportunities for kids. Its a school base Behavioral Health program and once again its there to support our middle School Students at visitation valley to engage in school and to participate in a more full manner at school. The last couple of initiatives i want to highlight are our Summer Transition Program which is intended to compliment academic instruction that the School District provides at the school year in summer months to support the students to transition and support middle School Students to transition to high school. And then our last two our teen program and Wellness Programs. Of the teen program and Wellness Programs the majority of those programs serve young people who have academic needs and need academic support to stay engaged in schools. We truly believe that in order to address chronic absenteeism we need every person in the village to come together an Work Together because it is multifaceted. There are issues ranging from the young person not feeling great in school and the parents being involved. Every child that doesnt go to school, that child doesnt learn. We know its very important for that young person to go to school and its important to be a part of multicollaborative efforts to move this forward. I once again thank you supervisor yee for calling attention to this very important issue. Thank you, dr. Sue, you aligned a few initiatives. Im just curious. I know you also go through your planning process in terms of whats going to be part of your accomplishments for the upcoming years and spending your plan. Im just wondering, how is chronic absenteeism being developed into the Community Needs. Of all the resources and funding we can talk only one. Similar to what president breed was mentioned before, we are very fortunate that dcyf received not only in our extension in the departments life but also decreasing in the life to our department. We have been in the last year or so, engaging our Community Partners and actually convening Community Meetings at all districts and well continue to do that for the next several months to talk about what are the needs out there to support our children and youth and families to be successful. The things that we are hearing a lot are Family Support. So, its great that over the past several years, dcyf has prioritized and creating more access for people and creating quality proclamation. What we have not done enough of is supporting their parents and supporting their guardians and caregivers. Like first five and the Human Services agencies is how do we provide that level of support for our families and caregivers. Also in terms of conversations with our School Districts is how do we create a continuum of learning for young people that not only tarts starts in the school day but continues in communities after school hours and now its more intentional what that looks like. Both of these lead to addressing some of the issues that leads a young person to be chronically absent. Supervisor norman yee thank you very much. Supervisor breed . Supervisor london breed thank you, ms. Sue, for all the work you do to support the programs. I know its really challenging and i want to make a few comments and ask a few questions. When i think about all the money thats being spent on a lot of programs in our city and whether or not those programs are actually delivering, thats important to me because we are talking about the difference between life and death when we are allocating funds to an organization and that organization is responsible for working with our children and they are not effective, they are not serving our children effectively. I want to comment that i appreciate all the work that you have done to work with organizations and to hold them accountable. I know it is hard to take away funding from programs, but i want to make it clear that a case to be made if a program is not supporting our children properly that it is appropriate to stop funding because there are other programs that need money. There are other programs that are serving a lot of children that dont have the capacity to serve our children and we should not award them with our dollars. I also want to talk about stipends and other programs. With i was 14 not too long ago, almost anyone who wanted a job who i was growing up with, we knew that as soon as we turned 14, we were going to be able to get a work permit to get a job to start working. That is so important because, you know, i grew up in poverty. So we didnt have money and my grandmother, she didnt have money to always give me for lunch or other things in high school and its tough when you cant buy the latest fashion or go somewhere else and do the things a lot of kids can do. Especially when you are a teenager, Employment Opportunity is very important. So having this fund and all the additional dollars that we have on the table, is it possible to get a commitment from the department of youth and families to ensure that every teenager especially in our Public School system will have the opportunity to work once they turn 14 especially in the summer and possibly yearround . Yes, its possible. The mayor has made it very public that jobs and Employment Opportunities are a priority for him. And hes directed to us partner with the office of economic and Workforce Development and with the Human Services agencies to think about how do we provide appropriate Youth Employment opportunities for young people. Its not to say that every young person is ready for a job right off the bat. You, supervisor breed, might be, but other young people would need a little bit more support such as barrier removal. Believe me, i was a problem child. I have gotten suspended. I talked back and i was at the principals office. I went through my challenges too, and again, having an opportunity and working with my first job at 14 was at the family school. And it was for women who were over 18 who had children who needed child care and working to get their ged. All of a sudden im getting paid and im getting responsibility and im having these adults talking to me and telling me about life and telling me about my future and potential things that could help change my life. I get what you are saying because i have had those same kids who were not ready to work for me at the cultural center. They werent ready, but it wasnt about whether they were ready, we were ready to making sure they were going to be ready for us to work with them. Getting those children into an opportunity where they are getting paid is so important especially when they dont have Household Income that can help support them especially at teenagers. I just want us to do what we can to do better. It just takes making sure we are identifying locations that really care about working with our kids so that we can and then making it a little bit easier for them to do the paperwork associated with getting reimbursed with all the other thing that you have to do to get funding. Those are the programs that i want to support, the ones that are effective and roll up their sleeves and work with our children that have challenges and work with stipends and jobs as an option. I think we have to make a commitment and make that a priority. I get the truancy issue that can be a problem if they are missing school especially if they have an opportunity to get a job yearround and get paid to be part of a program somehow. I think that makes a really big difference. I wanted to also say that and thank you for your work. Thank you very much, supervisor breed. Supervisor norman yee right now im going to move it along and bring up dr. Skolari from ocf, the our children and our familys council. Presenter thank you very much. I would like to acknowledge you supervisor yee for our support of our childs council. You may recall there was an initiative from proposition c in 2014 to align the city and county initiatives with the School District and the community. So the goal of it overall is to improve outcomes for all of our children and families throughout the city. With the em assist on those with greatest needs. The council itself is cochaired by the mayor and the superintendent. There are 13 county leaders from the School Districts from the mayor that sit on this council and come together to address issues such as chronic absenteeism. There are over 15 individuals participating on working groups actively working to addressed all the issues that are outlined by the council itself. I would like to give you a copy. I have a few copies here from the outcomes framework recently released. Its 180 pages. I hope you have the at some point to look through it at some point. For our children and families there are deliverables. The first is to look at the outcomes framework that you have before you now. It was adopted by the council on january 28th of this year. That framework itself outlines the milestones that the ste a School District and Community Want all children and all families in San Francisco to reach. So, for the council has come to gather to create this framework itself that we can align our priorities as a city together. Now that we have that framework created, the next phase of the work is to create a 5year plan to create that do you document. That plan as to how to make this come to life and how to make the changes happen for youth and families across the city. The third one is data sharing. Now as mentioned by dr. Sue, we have an initiative written into legislation that says we must share data, we must figure out how to share data across the School District and the city and we have a convening workgroup cochaired at the Mayors Office and john burr at the School District and 25 individuals who work on data across the city and get to the issue. Why cant we get the data sharing agreements together. They are stuck in legal is what we hear. We are bringing together 25 leaders coming together to finally address this issue in a form of a working group. The first data deliverable is the Service Inventory to create a citywide online one stop shop for all services for children and family youth across the city. We are starting this summer by organizing all of the Summer Services on a summer piety on line that goes live tomorrow and the coming year well add all the services across the city. I would like to point you to the outcomes framework on page 17 on the larger document that you have or it is in the shorter powerpoint. The outcomes framework itself outlines five major goals that we have come to agree as a city that we need to reach. The goals and there are 19 measures. We have 5 major goals an 19 measures. Within one of those goals is School Attendance and thats when we get to the issue of chronic absenteeism. What we know is that you cannot address the issue of School Attendance without looking at the whole child. So its important to connect whats happening around chronic absenteeism to the larger goal which is if we want students to thrive in a 21st century learning environment that the child must attend school regularly and looking at the whole child. We also need them to live in a nurturing environment, we need them to obtain economic stability and housing security and we need to make sure they are physically and emotionally and mentally healthy and if we can get them to attend school regularly they will thrive in a learning environment and e, they will succeed in post secondary education and able to earn a wage in this city. We are looking at the whole, all of these initiatives. It was brought up earlier. The goal around our children and aligning all of these Services Together but with a particular focus on equity. The powerpoint that you have in front of you is bringing up the issue around chronic absenteeism and which are the groups affected by absenteeism. We know that African American and islanders of the school are the once with the most problems around attendance. We need to look at it in other lenses. What we are pushing for is to look at are there equity gaps around neighborhood of residents. Are there gaps around primary language, grade level, crossreferencing the issue of chronic absenteeism and all other issues of lenses of equity. Thats a basic overview so you can understand how chronic absenteeism list these 19 measures overall. Supervisor norman yee thank you for your presentation. The report framework that you are talking about. The framework is what i had hoped for in terms of incorporating beyond just children in the services. As you mentioned and as supervisor breed will understand, this is not just about the services of children and Everything Else that impacts them whether its housing, Employment Opportunities. Im glad this is in here. I hope you flush out chronic absenteeism in a more visible way. I would love to see some wordings in there. This is only the basic framework. The next phase is a 5year plan which will be created around july and you will see more around that goal, d, we will have a working group coming together to talk around the four measures that sit within goal d including regular School Attendance. We will have more content to share with you. Thank you very much. Keep up the good work. Right now i would like to bring up the first five, raymond lane to do a short presentation. I would like to mention at the time 6 years ago when we were talking about this, the preschool level was not part of this description. It wasnt ready. Im glad to see that now we are ready and im a believer that its not just at kindergarten when we need to get started. We need to get to this much earlier. The floor is yours. Presenter thank you for including first five in this important discussion. A lot of the patterns that we see in our elementary and secondary Education Systems establish themselves much earlier as the children enter formal education. In San Francisco in part to your leadership, education starts before kindergarten. We have 83 of the children going to the district now have an chance to go through the school system. Im going to speak about the care and education aspects of chronic absenteeism, but im going to ask shelly and to speak more on the first four department side and address the issue holistically. We are currently serving about some where between 5,0006,000 children a year in San Francisco. We have had a very strong focus on making opportunities available to children to go to these programs, but also to improve the quality of the programs so children are getting the most they can out of it. The research has been very clear and more is better in the area of early care and education. Full day programs are better for children and park day programs. Children that participate for 2 years in a Quality Program benefit more than children that only attend for 1 year. It stands for reason that a child that attendance regularly is going to do better than one who only attendance sporadically. The School District has been making these opportunities to making high quality Education Programs available to as many children as possible. I thank katie chang for bringing this to our attention years ago that we should be paying attention to these patterns because it speaks to maximizing the benefits for children especially those African American and latino children who is outcomes are certainly not there in terms of our k12 program education. Until very recently, it was very difficult to sort of get any kind of information about attendance in early care and Education Programs. Most of the programs are operated by small nonprofits or sort of Small Business owners in the case of family care homes. So you dont have Big Information Technology departments backing these programs or data analyst. So about 8 years ago, first five wanted to improve the capacity of these programs to look at their own data and we created a system called coco which is used among 50 plus sites around the city that are participating in preschool for all. About 23 years ago we actually started trying to think of ways that we can start to system some of the education around. We have eight sites around the city piloting a program where they drop off their kids they sign off on a tablet computer much on when you go get a cup of coffee and when they do that, the system logs their child as being present and over the course of the year you have a data base that contains a lot of information about children with attendance patterns and why they maybe absent. Now, this is all very preliminary, and so, i cant really sort of speak to this as being a pattern of the city across the whole but this is working on children of color and southeast part of the city as well as the mission district. Thats where the major thrust of this work has been. I can tell you there are really no surprises here, but the problem of chronic absenteeism does start as early as preschool. We have children alarming numbers of children that are missing 20 of the days that they could be there and that is going to have a very dramatic effect on their readiness as they enter kindergarten. What i can also tell you is that the reasons for absence are 99 times out of 100 is going to be something related to illness either of the child or the parent affecting the childs ability to go to school. Im not sure yet without digging a little bit deeper and having greater conversations with these programs how many of those cases are legitimate illnesses and if they are, i think we have a Public Health issue we are going to have the address in the community. The other issue we might be dealing with and this is something that maybe more within the realm of Care Capacity of programs to do something about which is preSchool Attendance not mandatory. Im not saying that it has to be but i think we can maybe do a better job message to go families that whenever a child is in school that is contributing to that childs readiness. Missing a day no matter what the reason is, is a lost opportunity. So, i think that as we explore the data further and dig deeper to talk to the teachers and the administrators that work with the children in our universal preschool programs will get a better handle on what exactly the root causes of the absences are. Those that we have within our control we have to do something about, and those that speak to broader issues with Public Health or Chronic Health issues i think we are going do have to talk with our Community Partners. Supervisor norman yee thank you very much. You mentioned Family Support. Presenter thank you supervisor yee. Im with Family Support. I wanted to let you know that we are also concerned around chronic absence. We run a jointly funded family Resources Center initiative along with cyf and Family Services. We have programs all throughout San Francisco and the impacted neighborhoods and populations that have been spoken about today, all have one if not more Family Resources in the neighborhood includes Case Management, Parent Support groups and developmental screening. As we know some of the reasons why parents are not able to get their children to school especially at the young ages is because of barriers and issues in their lives. Family support services that we provide are designed to address that so that kids can have success in school. Supervisor norman yee thank you very much. So next up is hope sf. Presenter good afternoon, supervisors, and members of the public. Im with hope sfchlt. Im here to work with health and wellness with education and housing stability. Thank you very much for the opportunity to be able to present today on this important issue of chronic absenteeism. Excuse me while i just pull up my slides. The work is the focus on the rebuild of the hopes sf sites. There are many things that make the work of hope sf unique in the world of Affordable Housing and Public Housing which is our drive to take an equity approach to this transformation. As you can see from these latest select statistics hope sf residents and communities have experienced this in revoking trauma and see this across all areas with experience. Particularly relevant to todays discussion we see the data that 53 of our students attend sf usd schools will complete school. We have partnerships to improve these outcomes. Housing and infrastructure alone will not resolve the challenges and repairs of these neighborhoods and it will take more than these programs to address this challenge. We believe this requires an integrated Systems Approach. As such, in addition to the physical rebuild of these communities, hope sf holds ambitious capitals and integrated care and education support. This epitomizes the practice to our work. With a began as a pilot for a systems strategy with public investment. Im proud to say that our city departments are represented here. As well as our cbo partners some of who are members of the public today. This slide at the end here represents this integrated Systems Approach to our work. Hope sf has worked with sf usd to integrate housing developments. This is the hope sf schools. Those eight schools on the outside and you will note their relationship to the neighborhoods. Hunters view and potrero and sunnyvale. Each hope sf site has targeted partnerships with two hope sf schools represented in the outer circle. Each one has one full time liaison, two with the centers. They are responsible on programs that focus on reducing chronic absenteeism through a dual family generation approach. They are Staff Members of resource centers, funding by dcf and acts as a conduit between the housing and school sites and partner with schools and help families navigate services and school systems. Because they are located within the system, they are able to connect families to the plethora of dual services some of which were mentioned today and the Parent Child Services offered and our other cbo partners. Through the support of sf us d include the sites. The activities include but not limited to attending iep meetings and engaging families in teacher parent conferences and enrolling students in programming and attended families at the housing site, operating Walking School buses, things of that nature. In addition we know that student attendance is linked to parents ability and working with families to connect to additional Case Management, support and services that parents need in addition to support. In addition to potrero, the services wide is working to create a Pilot Program to support education and the overall objective of this work. Finally the hope sf education approach includes the tables at all intersections of this model in front of you. For shared professional development to family and strengthening approaches and the knowledge needed to address Public Housing. This needs to increase their understanding, their steps of understanding. They used the terms cultural competence. I think there is a lot of work that needs to be done to really have our schools understand the needs of Public Housing residents and to bridge that divide. We have these two placed based services if you will, we have housing in the community and we have schools in the community. They currently arent connected. They are not talking and they dont understand each other. If we want to improve our rates of attendance, that connection, that understanding is very important. That relationship on bridges is really an important piece of this as well as to train the family liasons around this important issue. This work is challenging and to the dedication and partnerships from the partners, we have seen great success. As an example, at griffith we have 28 students at risk factors working with an education liaison working to improve Educational Attainment and we have seen great work through the principal and work through the family which is being reviewed by the work and its continuing to evolving and we appreciate the many partnerships in this room that have come together to make this work possible. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for your work. We have a public speaker. The Division Director at the Neighborhood Centers. Public speaker good afternoon. Thank you norman, thank you supervisors for calling this. Youve heard from the departments, youve heard from some of my colleagues, youve heard from the interest that the City Investment has made on the chronic issue that we continue to have with chronic absenteeism. I serve the Southeast Community and we need to make sure that we are talking about absenteeism linked to poverty and the stresses that we understand have been communicated today by framework to strategies, interventions, policies, dollars that we need to invest in the 2generation support. I serve predominantly latino communities and the African American and Samoan Community and others. These communities in some instances are marginalized to housing complex that sf hope just spoke about and we see huge disparities of linkages with schools. We have been working with first five and with attendance works now and we have a model of head start and staep supported programs and that allows us to have staff that not only are teachers, but staff that are Family Service are advocates. They do Case Management. So what weve begun to identify in terms of strategy is to look at the families not from a deficit perspective but from a positive spin of intergenerational support with them. We are hosting apparent cafes parent cafes to talk about this and for them to do their own sign in when they come through stars and recognize children who have not had any absences. We have seen increase in attendance because of the short and small intervention. Supervisor norman yee i know your type time is up but i want to ask you a question because i know your program does good work. What supposed would benefit your staff in working with the families . Thank you for the question. I think that one of the things that we all lack here together is a more coordinated effort of messaging. Every year i transition 240 children approximately out of my system to either unified or to of charters or the private catholics. We are arent messaging together the value and the importance of what chronic absenteeism does and how it unfortunately builds in lack of skill sets at they move along the school communities. I think the second thing is, it would be important for us to, i really appreciate, though it was a lengthy conversation, i really appreciate the different players that are here and how can we come together to coordinate our thoughts, strategies and investments to ensure the messaging is getting done correctly to both the parent and to the staff that operationalize this. Supervisor norman yee thank you very much. Next up and one more speaker after that. Good morning. You have love this. You target the families and teach them how to write a grant. When the family itself is targeted and you teach them how to write a grant. That means all of these little dots are granted by billions of dollars. This might be a curriculum idea. Start teaching early on each individual family how to write a grant. You understand what im saying. If you have one grant writer in the family, then that family can become its own nonprofit. Think about that because then the funds wouldnt have to come from school. I have been doing it a lot around the schools in the city and including universities. Learn to write a grant. You can do it right here. You can write each individual family, a family can become a nonprofit. Think about that and this city wouldnt have to pay a dime of its own money because that comes from a bunch of different money. For example, rent Freeze Foundation is called angels. She has billions of dollars waiting at the World Foundation grant center. Correct . What do you think of that idea . Each family becomes its own nonprofit. That is something to think about. That wouldnt cost the city a penny. Ask me a question about that. Its pretty good. Anyway, i love america. Think about that as a new curriculum idea for the schools of San Francisco. Supervisor norman yee thank you. Youre welcome. You ms. Breed, have a great day. Youre welcome. Public speaker good afternoon, supervisors and public. My name is betty canton for potrero housing. The opportunities to speak to share with you the experience about what is happening in the neighborhood. The potrero Housing Project through hope San Francisco and ymca, what its doing is Building Support in the community thank you. Last speaker. Public speaker to learn to something good. Yes. Tell me that you like to learn. Yeah. This time i know good luck youre going to stay. Good luck. I hope you are going to stay. Cmon now. Come see about school. Thank you. Is there any additional Public Comment . Seeing none, Public Comment is closed. Supervisor london breed i can looking forward to getting the breakdowns. With a we didnt talk about is our kids who are homeless and living in shelters and the absenteeism and what we are doing to connect those families with services. I want to make sure we are looking at the number of students we are talking about and taking a holistic approach to providing that support and doing everything we can to connect those families to resources working to get them signed up for housing and getting with our neighborhood preference legislation folks who live in a district priority in terms of Affordable Housing for those particular homeless families and when we build more Affordable Housing in the southeast sector and other parts of this city that we are working with them to try and help get them into housing in someway and making them a priority. I want to make sure that we are just taking things a step further. That we are not only supporting and taking care of our kids who are thriving and doing well and that they are not neglected. But we are looking at the ones that need more wrap around services for them an their families and how we can do a better job collaborating to support them so they can support and thrive. Because sometimes when we are helping the kids and working with the kids, there are still a lot of wounds at home and challenges at home. We want to make sure we remove as many barriers to success as possible and thats just a lot of work. Im grateful to the voters of San Francisco who are supporting this fund and making sure we are invest negative investing in our future. I would like to thank the providers for working on this solution to get rid of this problem once and for all. Its sad in california in terms of our investment and some of the issues we deal with, we are one of the wealthiest cities in San Francisco and california is one of the wealthiest states, and we are in the bottom ten in performance of our kids. Im glad we have committed folks at the table helping us move things forward. Im committed to support your efforts, support your plans. I was one of those kids who was problematic and thanks there were a lot of programs and adults and i am here today. As a result, im president of the board, but my brother wasnt so fortunate. This is the difference it makes. We hope our kids dont end up in that situation. Thank you, supervisor yee for holding this important hearing and hopefully we can get some results out of this and changing the situation now to better. Supervisor norman yee thank you very much. Thank you for your patience. I want to thank all the Department People and all the individuals who have come out to this hearing. I know its been longer than what i anticipated. But its to me and obviously to you a really important issue. If we dont address this issue and tax those kids and the families lives in the future. It was 83 that students that are chronically absent in kindergarten do not read at grade level and Research Shows that students are more than likely to drop out if by third grade they are not reading at third grade level. We have data and continue to see trends that really to me arent new. Many of the same schools in 2010 are still showing the highest rates of chronic absenteeism. San Francisco Unified School District only presented some of this data. Im hoping to see more of it. The first five is collecting preliminary date at the younger age. Thats really one of the more refreshing data that i have heard. I know the connection between the younger age and kindergarten. The population that we are failing and the most vulnerable are the African American children and latino population. We have programs in the city departments on this issue. Through prop c we have strengthened and increased our citywide planning bodies. The ocof which we heard today was passed unanimously in january. Close out chronic absenteeism and as a key measure for youth and transitional youth need to be addressed. We are going to have it thrive in the 21st century and discussion with the Neighborhood Centers for preschool programs working with educational liaison through first five and families who are connected to hope sf. We really need to continue to support these efforts but create a district and across the board systemwide collaboration to address this. Our data must be sound which it seems we are being, we are taking that as a first step and strategies must be developed. For this reason, sometimes we just end up hearing about things and thats the end of the hearing. Im willing to take this a step further and i hope supervisor breed will join me. I want to create an ad hoc group under the ocof and come up with a plan within the next 6month. I would like to be comprised of attendance works, sfusd, first five, oece, its going to be under them, dcyf. The ad hoc workgroup will develop a comprehensive plan for strategies for policies and implementation to reduce absenteeism in Public Schools. The plan should include programmatic activities to support not only the students but parents in school sites and Research Intervention and starting prevention in preschool effective to addressing School Attendance. We also know to successfully address this issue, we must use the multiprone approach which includes our citys agencies, our School District departments and Community Based organizations and our thought leaders. It was mentioned today, one of these that we should talk about is this common messaging that we should have so we are not all talking about different things. In our approach we should consider more staff that is working with parents where there is parent liasons based at the school sites or Community Based organizations. We should discuss the what are some incentives that can get our parents to focus on bringing the children to school everyday. Sometimes, i remember when i was with the San Francisco foundation focused on one particular grant across the bay and it was really talking about this issue. They didnt know what the words were but somehow the parents are not coming to school and we dont have enough people to talk to these parents. When they do talk to them, sometimes the issues are very very serious and complex. But sometimes they are issues that are not that serious and complex and once we talk to them, we found out what it is. We found out these parents werent bringing the kids to school when its raining. Why are you not bringing the kids to school when its raining . We dont have money to buy umbrellas. Or i work in the evening and i cant get up. Im just too tired to bring my kid to school. So the parent liaison arranged for some of the neighbors to pick up the kids and help out. We need to do that. I want to create this workgroup and hope everybody will join in this effort. Im committed to also look for resources thats going to fund this effort. So thats my commitment and again, i thank you for being here. Is there a motion to file this hearing. So moved. Okay. Any objection . This hearing is filed. This matter is filed with member of peskin being absent. Yes. Anything else on the agenda. That completes the agenda for today. Supervisor norman yee thank you very much. This meeting is adjourned. [ meeting is adjourned ] 5, 4, 3, 2 , 1. Cut. We are here to celebrate the opening of this community garden. A place that used to look a lot darker and today is sun is shining and its beautiful and its been completely redone and been a Gathering Place for this community. I have been waiting for this garden for 3 decades. That is not a joke. I live in an Apartment Building three floors up and i have potted plants and have dreamt the whole time i have lived there to have some ability to build this dirt. Let me tell you handout you how to build a community garden. You start with a really good idea and add Community Support from echo media and levis and take management and water and sun and this is what we have. This is great. Its about environment and stewardship. Its also for the we implemented several practices in our successes of the site. That is made up of the pockets like wool but they are made of recycled plastic bottles. I dont know how they do it. There is acres and acres of parkland throughout golden gate park, but not necessarily through Golden Community garden. We have it right in the middle of power its all around us in the sun and the winds and caves waves power that lights our homes while protecting our Natural Resources clean power will provide power to san franciscans how about works right now our power is from pg e from nonrenewable systems that comes over pg e maintained lines with clean power your energy about think generated by caesarean more renewable sources come to our home e. R. Businesses to the pg e lines