students which is really exciting because online learning is where we are going in the future and also we are starting to develop professional development around blended learning and moving to the new millennium of learning in that aspect. >>supervisor jane kim: actually supervisor had a question about this. >> what this report acknowledges all our strategies and it doesn't include our outcomes from the graduation class. what happened was we passed an a through g graduation requirement necessary to bring rigor and to give students opportunities to graduate because they are the minimum requirements to make you eligible to apply for a csu and uc. i think what happened is the board voted then to because of severe budget cuts to cut all of summer school and credit recovery options and the city camen and generously helped us fund. what we've seen through these strategies i think we should have brought our updated list on who is on track to graduate in 2014. we are actually so close. i was completely shocked. i was sort of blown away myself because many of us saw the thousands of students on track not to graduate and i was freaked out because we knew it was a higher bar. but what we've discovered and i think we'll have new numbers because we are just calculating our last term. that more and more students are on track to graduate through these credit recovery options and we are meeting our goal so close of graduating all students with the graduation requirements. this has been a great collaboration between the city and the hard work of our school district and also uc and in your department. thank you. >> thank you. actually my office did send in the numbers for this year's seniors class to graduate through 2005. this combines both the sophomores and juniors. i did want to ask about online classes. i'm sure there is a major improvement since. i was on the board of education. one feedback i often heard from students was that online classes were boring. they weren't a really fulfilling way to learn. a big concern i know needn't supplemental discussion last year is online classes the way to help support since they were offtrack to graduate. seems like there is other thinking around online classes and what does it mean to have just one coordinator. how does that make it a more enriching experience. >> let me address the first part of your question first. one of the reasons for the move to a new provider was that the classes were not very engaging or rigorous and thus weren't really serving our students other than just a factory of going 32 -- through the program. with this new provider we are very happy, it's a very rigorous program and we are finding the student are a great deal more engaged in the program and we are actually moving to, because it's so new and the capacity wasn't there, we are moving to develop a blended model, the students are in the lab with the students in that blending learning capacity to help support the students. it's just a one component of the credit recovery options or the menu or portfolio that we offer. but the new provider is actually pretty impressive on what they can do. most of the feedback, we can bring ms. yamamoto up. she's very much involved with this. the school administrators find this to be a much better product. >> okay. thank you. >> it's actually really exciting. the second part is how does one single person facilitate that process of fidelity and validity of online learning to support the students? what the data and research says is what happens is that sometimes when you get online learning is you release it to the schools without any professional development, without any support, without any kind of prior working knowledge of the program as well as with a lack of, i don't want to say tracking because it's kind of a negative word, without the responsibility of data with what the students are doing and how many are completing the program and how much time they are spending on it and what is the completion race -- rate, what is the difficulty and with ms. yamamoto she's able to manage. we are were just going to do a few pilot schools throughout the district, but because linda is so fabulous and has a great reputation with the school site, we are able to roll this program out everywhere in the district. she's able to provide the technical assistance, provide any kind of support that the schools need and also contract every student, every school and run data based on that so we can assess where we are and either make improvements or adjustments as we go forth. >> thank you. so this is something that i would like to talk about which we find very exciting and within the spirit of san francisco. so, this is something that our office came up withnd we call it sprout funding. what we found is we budgeted our money and we felt that really to meet the needs and goals of the students we wanted to provide an opportunity for local school sites to be able to design their own program of credit recovery without kind of the centralized top down management style. although we do have those very specific evening school summer school and online learning. what we wanted to do was provide them with micro funding to be able to assess what programs they need and the purpose of this is really to supplement programs, not to splant and to encourage renovation at the sight and be able to meet the needs of the students which meets the goals of the district equitable resources which is really exciting for us. we came up with a criteria of sprout funding and it's like i said micro funding. it's not really huge. but if a school needs to fund a teacher for a lab, for example, isa they had a need. some of the seniors needed to take a lit class and we funded a teacher there so we can approve those students access there to graduate. we have a partnership with bayview beacon center. we have the sowa school of the arts and sciences and partners with high schools and we offer biology and chemistry and i talked about the isa. we also have two new sprout funds which is an elementary learning lab with a lead led by dr. stevens. we are taking a cohort of eight teachers and providing an intensified learning lab for identified students in the elementary school. we are also working with dcyf as well as ycd to start a ninth grade bridge program at our high schools. so to provide them with an opportunity to become acclimated to what's required and what's expected of them at the high school level. i'm probably leaving something out. but i think you get idea of it. once you hear about the summer bridge program. so we are going toef two cohorts at two sites at marshall and balboa with incoming ninth graders with with san francisco unified and contributors to support the sprout idea. and for more information feel free to give me a call and i will try to answer questions to the best of my ability. i would like to thank you for your support. i came from los angeles and i have to say my seven 1/2 months in san francisco has been absolutely amazing working with the board of education and their forward thinking and their willingness to invest in the students and future citizens of san francisco and the city and partnership that i have been in contact with has really eye opening what can be done when everybody comes to work with a level of commitment to the students. this you for that opportunity. >> thank you, mr. coffman and welcome to san francisco. i don't see any comments from committee members. i want to open to public comment and perhaps some comments in discussion and questions will come out of that. if you would like to speak on this item, please come up. you will get 3 minutes. >> hello, my name is ariel. i'm in the youth commission. this year i'm the chair of the house education and wellness committee and i was in the committee last year where we focused on closing the achievement gap. last year the student advisory council we passed a resolution to urge the board of supervisors and board of education and the mayor to urge the district to value -- evaluate the current program. we are really happy with the budget supplemental and the funding for more opportunities for credit recovery program and we are also happy that we heard that the district hired a team this summer to work on a macro level sites evaluation for this credit recovery program. we want to see more of a micro level program for student perspectives. like what supervisor kim was saying about if the classes are interesting or not and we want to know why the students are not gaining more credits or also there is negative change. we want to know why and an example would be to have surveys or have visiting programs of classes or sites to get a youth perspective and as always our committee is always willing to help with some sort of evaluation like this and engaging the youth in determining what services are very beneficial inclosing the achievement gap. i hope to hear from you. >> thank you. i do of a question for you. when i was on the board of education we worked to pass a resolution on a student evaluation form for teachers in high school. i was curious as to how that program was going and if we continue to do that work? >> yeah. this year i think they launched like a pilot teacher survey at low well high school and you were able to rank a survey about teachers and i think they are analyzing that data too. >> great. thank you. >> you're welcome. >> is there any other comment on this item? if there is none, i will close. >> we are trying to decide who is going next. i won. thank you supervisors and commissioners. my name is kevin bogus and work with children and youth. i think we are really excited to see the presentation and get some of the data that's coming out. i think the only thing that we have that is similar to what the commissioners and supervisors brought about having better data that is more detailed and disaggregated especially since we know that more african american and latino students are having more difficulty in succeeding. it's up to ufc to have that information broken out and highlight the issues that students have to face and make sure they are being served and with special education students and trying to make sure we have data that is clear and transparent so we can analyze what we can do to really improve the serves for students. thank you very much. >> hello. i live in the soma area and i'm in the youth commission. i took night school classes with the credit recovery program. i had positive outcomes which it really helped me to get my grades up and be where i'm now. my class now my math teacher helps me a lot and she's genuinely caring about students passing. some challenges were getting home from high school last semester and it was also daylight savings and i would get home at 6:00 p.m. or 6:30 p.m.. most students have a tough time getting home. for example it would be nice to have a nice school class near my house so i wouldn't have timing problems. also to have passionate teachers who care on learning at the night school class itself. and i think that's it and also thank you and i support the credit recovery program and i hope it continues and gives more options. thank you. >> may i ask you a question, are you a senior this year? >> junior. >> are you on track now? >> now i am. >> congratulations. >> thank you. >> are there any other members of the public that would like to speak on this item? >> i will close public comment and now at this time i will open for committee questions or feedback or discussions. great. you guys did such a great job. i just want to say a couple things and if you can conclude, that would be great. it's great to hear some feedback directly from students on how the program is going. i think from an adult perspective we sometimes look at the data and numbers. but i'm really understanding on whether or not it's happening at the right time and happening at convenient locations and whether or not the teachers are engaging is so important. i always thought that our best teachers should be teaching summer school and classes. it shouldn't be based on seniority system. it should be our best teachers because you want our students to succeed. i'm really looking forward to the student evaluations of the program and how they feel the program is going and of course the data on whether or not students are passing and it's great to hear from commissioner fewer that graduation rates are going well. i would like the numbers from 2012-2013. i'm curious as to what that rate is. it's great to see that the school district is going up every year in our graduation rate. there is something that i know that gets lost in graduation rates of course is it the graduation rate of seniors that come in in august or is it of when they comen as a freshman? >> the cdg has a complicated formula, the 4-year cohort graduation rate. they look at the beginning of ninth grade and see how they do at the end of 12th grade. they also lead schools that come and leave the district. it follows the kids from 9-12th grade. >> when you say in sfusd we graduated the percent of students, that 82 percent of ninth grade that started 4 years ago? >> yes. >> that's amazing. >> if they are still in the district. students leave and sometimes they come back. actually sfusd doesn't calculate. we use cde's numbers because they have a complicated formula. students that leave, if they left at 10th grade, they won't count that student anymore. >> what does it mean to leave the district? >> they went to another district like oakland unified. >> can it calculate the students that go to other districts? >> the second comment, it's not a question but it could be or comment that i like to make is something that i would like to hear from a city's perspective is how the city can support our students from graduating. sfusd policy leaders in curriculum and education and that's not a place that i think we can give a lot of feedback on but where we can be supportive is knowing what external circumstances impact the success of our students. so is it families having stable affordable housing, is it public safety, if we know what those top external issues are how can we support you when we are talking about the summer bridge program. and that factor of students not succeeding, how can we get organizations like students at bishop to applying for affordable housing. what can we do to support the external circumstances would be really helpful? >> to answer that question, i can do two ways. first i think the beauty of this is in the wisdom of the commissioner of the board of education where they design the office where the external learning and support. i myself i'm a licensed clinical social worker and specialize in community and policy development. that's something that my team and i will be looking at. i have had a lot of experience in safe school passages working in los angeles and actually really the whole system's perspective in working with the parents and the schools to really develop a systemic approach to that whole child and supporting them iechl know there is conversations about the metro in transportation and the timing of it. we were double stacked in one school and we realize a student leaving at 8:00 is not the safest thing. it's exciting that you are interested to doing that because you will definitely hear from us for recommendations. >> you brought up certain things for us if students need bus lines and accommodating to get back and forth to school. that is the purpose of the committee that we have the school and the city and what can we do as a city to support schools. recently i was at an elementary school and what impacts the students. the principal said hunger. if that is an issue, we need to make sure we are feeding our kids and the city is coming to support meal programs. that is something we feel we should support you on. if there are known factors we can be supporting on that is something that i would like this community to be able to have stronger discussions on. >> 2 points i wanted to point out on the public comment. on the student voice in the classroom, the state superintendant released standard for expanded learn and one of them was including student voice in the choosing of classes and opportunities. it's something that we are aligning our program to now. it just came out. we'll be aligning, i don't have them memorized. one is to voice and we'll be working in our office to develop a policy and plan to implement that kind of stuff. that's exciting to hear that. the second is to address the better classes that are being offered. one of the things that we are actually going to be able to do now through peef in our strategic planning through our logic model is to have tsa's, teachers on special assignment, because of curriculum instruction design intervention specific curriculum that is going to establish some super standards that are aligned to the common core for standards that is more relevant for the students. you can call me and i would love to talk and do it. and to get your input and maybe be on the focus group to start to develop that curriculum is that we realize that our students who are in credit recovery might need a different type of in instruction that they receive in a regular school day and we want toen sure we are using a smarter approach to addressing those needs of students. we are a firm believer in that and we are excited with how we are going forward with that. thanks. >> okay. seeing no further comments, thank you mr. coffman and ms. chan for the presentation. our next select committee will be on the third wednesday of march now. and we have on deck we have the children's fund hearing that supervisor avalos and yee have called for and hopefully the controllers office will have finished the data for all hearing request that supervisor mark farrell has called for. >> we want to do the after school hearing in april because kevin will not be here for the march meeting. i think we better check on that because if it's the third week, he might be here. i will have him check for that. >> it's during spring break. >> let me check. we don't want to do the hearing until he's ready. although actually they are very ready, but he wants to be here. >> i know for april i was planning to call a hearing on summer school programming and summer jobs. so we include that with after school for all and we can have a robust discussion on it and in march we'll have the hearing on the children's fund. that is a large discussion itself. we were hoping a lot of young people would be able to engage in that hearing. for those that are not going away they will be able to participate in that conversation then. okay. so seeing no further items, meeting is adjourned. >> >> [ meeting is adjourned ] >> >> >> - (clapping) 10 years ago pam and i were here at the at&t park to celebrate the hearts of san francisco who's vision i know we've told you over the years the long xoufl and wonderfully to nancy and her partner. since then this is our way of caring on parse