Seattle City Council Governance & Education Committee 6821

Welcome back.

Good afternoon.

The June 8th, 2021 Governance and Education Committee meeting will come to order.

The time is 2.02 p.m.

I'm Lorena Gonzalez, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Juarez?

Here.

Council Member Ersawant?

Present.

Council Member Strauss?

Present.

Chair Gonzalez?

Here.

That's for present, Madam Chair.

Great, thank you so much.

If there's no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is now adopted.

This is the period of time when we usually do public comment, colleagues, but we don't have anyone signed up for public comment, so I'm not gonna put us all through the regular script that we usually read in order to open up public comment.

I'll just sort of look one more time on our public comment sign-up sheet and confirm that there is no one on it.

There is no one on the public comment sheet.

And just before we got started, our IT folks confirmed for me once again that there was no one in the queue.

So we are going to go ahead and close out the period of public comment since no one is signed up.

And I will go ahead and move us now into items of business on the agenda.

Will the clerk please read agenda items one and two into the record?

Agenda items one and two, appointments 01945 and 01946, the appointments of Rory O'Sullivan and Alicia Juarez as members, districting commission for briefing, discussion, and possible vote.

Great, wonderful.

And I will note for the record that we have been joined by council member Mosqueda.

Welcome.

Thank you very much, Council President.

Good to have you here.

Okay.

We will go ahead and now start on agenda items one and two.

I am going to, we are going to do some introductions in a moment for the record, but first we're going to, we're going to hand it over to Lish Whitson of Council Central staff to give the committee and members of the viewing public some background information about the Districting Commission and the redistricting process.

So I'm going to hand it over to Lish so he can introduce himself for the record and walk us through his presentation.

Good afternoon, Lish Whitson, Council Central staff.

I'm excited to talk about the Seattle Districting Commission.

This afternoon, this is the first time the council will appoint members to a districting commission.

The requirement for a commission was created by Charter Amendment 19 in 2013. This was the charter amendment that created council districts.

Every 10 years when new census data becomes available, the boundaries of council districts are redrawn to ensure equal population in the districts.

The charter calls for a five-member commission to lead this process and determine the final boundaries.

The council appoints two members to the commission via a two-thirds vote of the council.

The mayor appoints two members, and the commission will appoint one additional member.

The duties of the commission are to appoint a districting master or a consultant to draw maps, hold a public forum in each current council district, and draw compact districts with populations that are within 1% of each other.

The council is required to provide support for the commission to function.

You'll see some funding provided in the next supplemental budget to support the work of the commission and the Department of Neighborhoods is providing staff support to the commission.

The commission under state law is required to submit their plan by November 15, 2022. The requirements for serving on the commission are fairly vague.

According to the charter, no person may serve on the commission who is an elected official, a registered lobbyist, a candidate for elected office, or a city employee.

The council's president's office put out a call for members of the commission, received feedback from council offices, and interviewed a number of strong candidates, and you have two candidates in front of you today.

I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you, Lish, so much for that summary.

And we will make sure to allow colleagues to ask you, Lish, any questions about the districting process as the conversation unfolds here.

So colleagues, I'm really excited to be putting forward these two nominees for your consideration as the city council appointments to the districting committee.

During the application and interview process, Eliseo, EJ, Juarez, and Rory O'Sullivan each demonstrated strong equity lenses, deep knowledge of electoral systems, and meaningful experience in organizing communities towards strengthening our democratic institution and processes.

So I am excited to have both Rory and EJ with us today.

So I'm going to go ahead and get us to move.

through this pretty quickly because I know Rory has a hard stop at 2.30 p.m.

so I'm hoping we can have this conversation and wrap up a vote before Rory has to sign off.

I know EJ has a little bit more time but hopefully we'll be able to get this done in the next 20 minutes or so.

Okay, so Rory, why don't we start with you?

Feel free to introduce yourself to us, make some introductory comments, and then we'll have an opportunity to ask you some follow-up questions.

Thank you so much, Council President Gonzalez.

It's such an honor to be considered for this position by the Seattle City Council.

Throughout my career, I have focused my advocacy and activism on ensuring that we continue to improve our democracy and the ways in which we elect our leaders.

In 2003, I helped to found Washington Public Campaigns, an organization that later changed its name to Fix Democracy First.

I maintained my focus on electoral reform.

And in 2015, I was one of the authors of the initiative that created Seattle's Innovative Democracy Voucher Program.

I spent more than two decades working on these issues because I believe that ensuring all people are fairly represented and have a voice in the electoral process is the truest test of democracy.

The Democracy Voucher Program has helped to lift the voices of traditionally underrepresented communities and people of color.

And I would like to continue that work by ensuring that the Seattle districts are drawn in a way that ensures cohesive communities are able to communicate their desires through participation in the electoral process.

Thanks again for considering my nomination, and I look forward to being able to participate in this process.

Thank you, Rory, so much for taking the time to be with us and for your willingness to serve in this really important role.

Let's head over to EJ really quickly.

EJ, why don't you introduce yourself for the record, similar fashion, name, and just some opening remarks.

And then we'll dig into some questions for both candidates.

Great.

Thank you so much.

My name is Eliseo Juarez.

I go by EJ.

This is my 11th year here in Seattle.

I'm a former District 5 resident.

I now live in the Westwood neighborhood in West Seattle.

And I am so excited to be here to talk to you all today and have this opportunity in front of really the city.

I think it's a transformational moment for us to envision what redistricting can mean to people.

Given that this will be the city's first time conducting this work after the switch a number of years ago, I think that we can really say this is an intentionally designed process that brings in as many people as possible and that frames this as what it is in its essence.

It's about power block by block by block.

And I think that building a process where everybody can participate, where everybody has that ability to envision their future and dream that up is really important to me.

It's how I've spent my career.

And I'm happy to answer any questions from you all today.

Thank you, EJ.

Thank you so much to both of you for being with us.

Really appreciate, again, all of the work that both of you have done in the past in community, and particularly as it relates to building integrity and engagement within our democratic system.

And I am going to go ahead and open it up to other colleagues on the council who may have comments or questions for either of you now.

And then I'll pitch in some questions too.

Colleagues, any comments or questions?

Man, oops.

Yes, Council President, I I did something.

I can see you, but it doesn't matter.

So first of all, I just want to say I'm really, really supportive of EJ.

He's phenomenal.

We've worked with him in the past.

He's going to be great.

I'm very disappointed that he left D5 to go to West Seattle, but I'll let that go.

We've watched EJ's career over the years, particularly his role at Solid Ground and other work that he's done and the Commission on Hispanic Affairs.

So thank you, EJ, for stepping up, and thank you, Council President, for, I think this is a recommendation from you, correct?

Not the executive.

So great.

So thank you.

I just want to be supportive of EJ.

No relation to me, by the way.

And that's not the reason why you're supporting him.

Yes, thank you.

He's got a cool last name.

Yes.

I'll have somebody help me figure out what I did wrong here.

That's all right.

That's all right.

Colleagues, any other comments or questions for either of our nominees?

Thanks, President.

Yes, Council Member Esqueda, please.

Hello.

Thank you so much.

Sorry, I am not on camera.

It is wonderful to see you, though.

And I just wanted to weigh in and express my appreciation for your interest in serving.

I'm very supportive of the candidates.

And also, thank you, Council President, for your office's role in making sure that we had greater diversity as we look to make sure that there's more representative democracy and folks who are looking for that.

important pillar as well.

Thanks for this process and thank you both for your interest in serving.

Thank you all.

Thank you so much Council Member Musqueda.

Any other comments or questions?

Um, we did for the benefit of the viewing public.

Um, we do put together appointment packets and there was an application process.

And so these two candidates come to us after being pretty well vetted.

Um, and I want to thank Cody writer in my office who did a really excellent job in making sure all of all nine council member offices were being kept apprised of information relevant to this process, to the vetting, and to the ultimate identification of these two nominees that come before us.

So we've had an opportunity to spend some time with both Rory and EJ.

Of course, many of us on the council are familiar with both Rory and EJ in terms of their work before this point in time.

And so I know that you all will take very seriously your your responsibility to really bring in underrepresented voices into this districting commission and ultimately districting process.

And for you all colleagues and the viewing public, one of the things that I really wanted to prioritize is identifying candidates who know what it means to engage community and who know what it means to prioritize those voices of our community members who have been historically underrepresented and continue to be underrepresented.

within our democratic systems and I think EJ and Rory very much understand the significance of deep, meaningful, authentic relationship with members of our community who have not been engaged In some instances at all in our democratic process and and really the the districting process is going to be about engaging those hardest to reach communities like we did in the census process to really make sure that the districting lines are.

drafted in a way that are truly representative and fulfill our responsibility to upholding our democracy.

So I am really excited about these two nominees.

I don't have any questions for either of them since I've been, since my office has been spending a lot of time with them on understanding their experience.

So if there's no other questions, I'm gonna make a motion.

No other questions or comments.

Easy peasy.

All right.

So Council Members, I move the committee recommends confirmation of appointments 1945 and 1946. Is there a second?

Second.

It's been moved and seconded to recommend confirmation of the appointments.

Are there any additional comments?

Hearing none, will the clerk please call the roll on the committee recommendation that the appointments be confirmed?

Council Member Juarez?

Aye.

Council Member Mosqueda?

Aye.

Council Member Sawant?

Yes.

Yes.

Madam chair Gonzalez.

Aye.

That's all.

That's five in favor.

None opposed.

The motion carries and the committee recommendation that the appointments be confirmed will be sent to the June 14th.

city council meeting.

So congratulations EJ and Rory.

We will take up your final appointment at the June 14th city council meeting.

You do not have to call in for that or dial in.

I assume that it will go through without a hitch but if anything else arises we'll make sure to let you know.

Otherwise we look forward to working with you and again thanks to Lish Woodson for his hard work on helping us with all of the novel issues that have arisen in trying to determine how to do this at the local level for the first time in the history of the city.

Also, big thanks to Cody Reiter in my office for really driving this process.

And big thanks to Council Member Lewis who flagged this in the first place and expressed a lot of interest and has been a good partner with us in making sure we moved this body of work forward.

So thanks to everyone and thanks for being with us.

And we will let you know what the result is of the June 14th meeting.

Take care.

Thank you.

Bye.

All right, item three.

Will the clerk please read item three into the record?

Agenda item number three, appointment 01939, the appointment of Manuela Sly as member of the Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise Levy Oversight Committee for a term to December 31st, 2023 for briefing, discussion, and possible vote.

Thank you so much, Madam Clerk.

I am really excited to sponsor today's appointment to the FAP Levy Oversight Committee.

Manuela Sly is a tremendous advocate and one that my office has had the honor to learn from even before she agreed to step up and agree to serve at many levels of the education spectrum, especially in bilingual modes for learning and instruction.

So I really am excited that Manuela is willing to serve in this really important capacity.

And I will hand it over to Director Chappelle, who's with us this afternoon, for his introduction and his presentation or any additional information he might want to share about our nominee, Manuela.

Good afternoon.

Yes, good afternoon.

It's great to see you all today.

Yes, so I will share some information about Manuela Sly.

As you mentioned, Manuela Sly, she is the current president of the Seattle Council PTSA, and she's been a dedicated early learning educator.

Manuela has, she's founded the West Seattle's first Spanish immersion preschool in West Seattle, and it's called Cometa.

It's called Cometa Play School.

And Manuela's work with the Seattle PTSA, Council PTSA has been extremely instrumental in bettering and connecting Seattle families to school district leadership, the school board, public health, King County, and public health officials and more.

Manuela is an experienced advocate for racial equity and culturally responsive practices in education.

And we look forward to having her knowledge and expertise and brilliance as part of our levy oversight committee.

Thank you so much, Director Chappelle for providing that additional texture to the nomination of Manuela.

I'm not sure Manuela is with us yet, because we have been moving really fast through this agenda, and so I think we may have given her a different later time.

But we do have the benefit of having her application materials in packet, and I think several of us on this committee actually know or have interacted with Manuela in the past and so do want to provide council members you an opportunity to ask Director Chappelle any questions you might have about what you read in Manuela's application packet and I'm just going to scan the room really quickly here to see if anyone has any I'm not seeing any hands raised.

So, and I still don't see Manuela in the room here.

So colleagues, if there's no objection, I know normally we have the nominee with us, especially if it's a new appointment, but if there's no objection or concerns, I would like to go ahead and make a motion for us to confirm this appointment.

Is there any objection to doing so?

I'm not seeing anyone object.

So council members, I'm going to move that the committee recommend confirmation of appointment 1939. Is there a second?

Second.

It's been moved and seconded to recommend confirmation of the appointment.

Are there any additional comments?

Hearing none, will the clerk please call the roll on the committee recommendation that the appointment be confirmed?

Council Member Juarez?

Aye.

Council Member Mosqueda?

Aye.

Council Member Sawant?

Yes.

Councilor Strauss?

Yes.

Chair Gonzalez?

Aye.

That's five in favor, none opposed, Madam Chair.

The motion carries, and the committee recommendation that the appointment be confirmed will be sent to the June 14th City Council meeting.

And we'll have to send Manuela a note not to dial in, because she'll be unpleasantly surprised, or pleasantly surprised to know that we already voted on her confirmation.

All right, thanks, Director Chappelle.

Next up is item four.

Will the clerk please read item four into the record?

Agenda item number four, steps toward an equitable recovery by the Seattle Immigrant and Refugee Commission for briefing and discussion.

Okay, thanks so much, Madam Clerk, really appreciate it.

Today, I'm honored to welcome our Immigrant and Refugee Commission to present to this committee.

They are here to highlight important considerations for us, especially as we continue to engage in building out our city's recovery strategies as a result of the COVID pandemic.

So I'm going to turn it over to, I think Peggy is going to, excuse me, Peggy from our Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs is going to get us started today.

So I'm going to scan the room for Peggy and see if I see Peggy.

I don't see Peggy.

V, do you know if anybody from OIR, OIRA is going to be with us?

Yes, Peggy is supposed to be on, but we are moving very fast today.

So I just pinged everybody to make sure they're jumping on.

We do have a few of the commissioners with us today.

So maybe they, maybe Shalani or Gina or anyone, if you want to introduce yourselves, this would be a great time.

Great.

So why don't we do that?

We didn't think we were going to be moving so quickly.

So it's good news, I guess.

So do the commissioners want to go ahead and introduce themselves?

And maybe we can start with Gina.

And then, Gina, you can popcorn it to one of your fellow commissioners and so on and so forth until we finish introductions.

Sounds good.

Thank you, Council President, for having us here and council members.

My name is Nahid Gina Aftab.

I go by she, her pronouns.

I am the co-chair of the City of Seattle Immigrant Refugee Commission.

This is my second year as co-chair.

I co-chair with Shalani.

And we are very excited to be here and speak with you today.

Shalani, do you want to go next?

Sure.

Hi, everyone.

Thank you for having us.

My name is Shalani Vania Sinkham.

And I am the co-chair with Gina.

I am a new co-chair.

I just started earlier this year.

I also use she, her pronouns, and I'm just happy to be here in this space and be able to have this discussion with everyone.

And I'm going to turn it over to El-Rohi.

Thank you, Gina and Shalani.

And thank you, Council President Gonzalez and all the council members present today for giving us this great opportunity to present our ideas.

My name is Elrohi Shugie.

I also go by she, her pronouns.

I'm a commissioner.

I'm a first year commissioner for the Immigrant Refugees Board for Seattle.

I am a graduate.

I'm currently in the process of graduating from the University of Washington.

I hope to get my law degree in the next couple of years.

And I'm just really excited to be here as a representative of the immigrant community.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you so much for being with us to the three of you.

I know there's going to be a presentation.

Do you all want to just go ahead and dig into the presentation?

I know it's really, it's really robust and meaty.

So I think the fact that we're running a little ahead of time, is Game Point Advantage for all of you.

So, V, are you gonna be running that presentation?

Yes, I have it ready to go, so I'm pulling it up now.

Let's go ahead and pull it up.

We can go ahead and dig in to the presentation, and if folks from OIRA join us, we can certainly give them an opportunity to share some thoughts to round out the conversation.

So, who wants to kick us off?

Is that gonna be you, Gina, or Elrohi, or Shalani?

I'm going to get us started, and then we'll turn it over to the next commissioners.

Perfect.

Yeah, so this is the thank you, and thank you for having us here.

We are excited to get a chance to talk to you all about this.

It's been an interesting year, year and a half with the commission and with our communities.

So I'm very happy to be able to be in front of you today.

We are, obviously we could present a lot, we could give you lots and lots of details, lots and lots of information.

We know that you're all up on the statistics and the data and on the efforts of the city.

So we won't go into that.

We're going to just give you a slice of what we're hearing from the community and what we think should be prioritized as we move forward in the next, um, I don't know, one to five years.

I mean, some of these are longer term goals.

Just so we have a normalization process that gets us to a more equitable place than we were even pre-COVID.

There's three things that we need for our communities, but There's a fourth piece which we want to highlight as the sort of effective overall theme that would make the other processes possible.

And that is effective language access.

I think that if we don't have this one foundational piece in our work, then none of the other measures, policies, et cetera, will have the impact that they need to have.

So I think that that's sort of like the grounding that we want to set right now, effective language access.

And I'm sure you know what that means, but if you want us to go into more definition, we can do that at the end.

The three things that we are asking for is learning from the successes of the vaccination rollout this year and finding ways to institutionalize that.

The second is to support small businesses through education.

and assistance in navigating the system.

And the final one is to increase opportunities and decrease barriers for our communities.

Within each of these, we'll have a little bit more detail in each of these points.

And we have a few testimonials from our community that we'll read out to you.

Vi, can you go to the next slide, please?

So we want to first and foremost recognize the successes that our city has had with education, information, with the quarantining, just all the measures and then the vaccination process.

in how the city has focused on BIPOC communities.

And the piece I want to highlight there is that we know that focusing on BIPOC communities works, and it works by partnering with community-based organizations and having good language access.

So how can we make these efforts in these efforts are sort of foundational for other policies and measures as we move forward.

One of the things in learning about what worked this time is to, and I don't know if this is possible, is to have disaggregated data.

on the BIPOC population and the vaccination process.

I've seen the data, we've seen the data on how many of the BIPOC populations have been vaccinated and where and through which efforts.

And I wonder if there's a way that we can desegregate this data and recognize what the immigrant and refugee populations are doing, especially those that are undocumented, are English learners, and or do not have access to health care.

I think that that disaggregated data will give us a lot more information on how we can address health inequalities at a larger scale so that when the next pandemic or the next vaccine comes out, we know how to roll forward.

Fund effective language access, we know that that's important.

And the one thing that I keep thinking about working with these sort of like big systems is that if this process is in somebody's, these great city workers who have made this happen, it's in their heads and on their laptops, if they leave this job, do we reinvent the wheel next time?

There needs to be a way that we can document and learn from this process for the next round.

Vy, can you move forward a slide, please?

So this is a testimonial on translated.

So this is her translation of a Spanish.

a testimonial.

It was quite a long testimonial and we've cut it short so it works in this presentation and I'm going to read it out loud.

Quote, in a matter of days we had to learn how to impart preschool and pre-kindergarten classes in a virtual format.

It was difficult for many adults, now imagine the same for small children.

The majority of our families decided to support us and give it a try to online classes for their children.

Some others, after seeing things were not improving, decided to cancel their participation, which made an impact on my payroll budget.

There was a lot of confusion from the government on how they could support us.

The only clarity we had was when they demanded that our childcare needed to remain open as we were considered, quote-unquote, essential workers.

To be honest, I felt that even my work was essential, I, Ixchel, was not.

And if you, I don't know if you gleaned from this quote, but she...

Healthcare center.

Vi, can you move forward one, please?

And I'm gonna at this point turn it over to my colleague Shalani.

Thanks Gina.

So my part of this is on small businesses and education and funding for small businesses and navigating those systems.

We wanted to just once again recognize the success that Seattle has with the COVID Immigrant Fund and the Small Business Stabilization Fund.

Both of those things have helped our communities immensely and we have heard that back from our communities.

The rental support through United Way has also been crucial in this time.

And once again, our ongoing theme for all of this is language access.

Having the language access to have these opportunities, to know what's coming, to know what's out there is critical in making sure that our immigrant and refugee communities have the right support that they need to go through these kind of, you know, big life things.

In the future, what we want to see is more digital access and financial literacy support.

What we were thinking would be great is, you know, like kind of having how we did the pop-up vaccination clinics, something like that in terms of having a pop-up event for, you know, let's apply for a PPP.

How does that work?

have like a question and answer kind of in person and having that available for our immigrant and refugee communities would be really helpful in navigating all these different things that sometimes there's a lot of confusion and questions about.

And as part of that as well, you know, having that assistance available in different languages would be super helpful.

We also heard that mobile based application processes is something that a lot of immigrant refugee communities want.

If they don't have access to a library, for example, there's no home computer.

Everyone has a cell phone that they're using.

And it's much easier for folks to pull up an application and apply for something on their phone.

And so we wanted to mention that that's something we really think is important as we think about how to better provide access in the future.

And back to the in-person application opportunities, along with those pop-up clinics, we thought that something like that would have a greater chance for immigrant refugees to be able to go, get their questions answered, their application filled out, and get some in-person support for whatever issue or question that they have.

Vy, could you please go on to the next slide?

This is a testimonial that we received from someone who would like to remain anonymous.

I'm just going to read it out as they wrote it.

My father is an immigrant, self-employed truck driver, and heard a lot about the Payment Protection Program.

He reached out to me to ask for guidance and assistance.

But even with a master's in public administration, I found myself unsure about what to recommend, especially around it being a loan.

and not being clear on what parts of it could be forgivable.

My father was thankfully able to connect with a financial advisor that knew more and gave sound information, but I can only imagine how challenging navigating this great program could be for other immigrants and refugees.

Vy, could you please go to the next slide?

I'm going to turn it back over to Gina.

Sorry, I was muted.

You would think I'd get used to this by now.

Our third ask is that we increase opportunities and decrease barriers to funding opportunities for our communities.

We know that, like we mentioned, in terms of the funding that's out there, much appreciated.

But if someone is unable to reach those funds, It doesn't matter to them that X number of funds have been distributed and it did not help them out in any way.

So I think that, and from what we've heard from communities and also just government offices, that the funding has been a drop in the bucket.

And I think, especially for rental assistance with the moratorium and issues like that coming up, I think that families are worried and they're stressed out about what will be coming in the future.

Some more funding opportunities.

Funding opportunities that have less restrictions on use and who can apply for them.

Again, undocumented families and individuals easier application process, but also just direct cash rather than, for example, rental support or food vouchers.

We know that a good number of our community members are choosing to pay rent and get food from the food banks any other methods of feeding themselves or they might be even going hungry because they fear homelessness or houselessness and what might be coming in the future with that.

So that is a concern that a lot of our community members have expressed.

The other piece that I wanted to highlight, and this goes Beyond just the economic recovery, this is, for me, as a mother, it's an important piece of education.

I think that we don't even know where our underserved students are until we get them back in the classroom, because I think there are a good number of students, at least in our communities, that are just not able to attend online schooling for various reasons.

I live by the Skyway Library, and there are kids with their iPads or phones doing school outside to get Wi-Fi.

And I think that this access to the internet is an important issue to address when we're thinking about barriers.

Okay, and I'm gonna turn it, Vy, can you go to the next slide, please?

And I'm gonna turn it to Elrohi.

Thank you, Gina and Shalani.

I'm gonna be giving my testimony on how as an undocumented immigrant, my family and I were impacted by the current pandemic.

I'll just read it off and then kind of give more details after.

So I wrote the lack of institutional and legal support as an undocumented immigrant.

During the global pandemic was extremely challenging.

Learning how to navigate my education in the midst of a global pandemic with no support from the federal government made my reality unbearable.

This past new year when diagnosed with the COVID virus along with my family, I was more than terrified.

Due to our status, we have never been able to qualify for health care insurance.

The pandemic made it extremely difficult for me to fully put my focus on my education as I was faced with the tremendous obstacle of legal, financial, and social barriers.

Sorry, I'm a little emotional.

But yeah, I'm currently a University of Washington student.

This pandemic has been extremely hard as an undocumented student.

who is currently learning how to navigate different systems.

Sorry, I didn't plan on getting emotional, but it just happens every time.

It's been really challenging because like Gina and Shalani have covered the lack of institutional support has been extremely challenging because it has presented social and legal and financial barriers, but mostly financial barriers because we didn't lack, we didn't qualify for funding from the government due to our status.

So we were unable to qualify for any kind of stimulus check or any kind of economical check from the government because of the lack of support from the federal government.

And so we had to really stress about rents.

We had to stress about doing the table.

And when we got diagnosed, we were all diagnosed with COVID-19.

Luckily, we were able to get free testing and free support to vaccination.

But all while that, my dad got extremely sick.

He fell extremely ill, and we didn't have health care insurance.

We had to take care of them at the house and it was really, really difficult.

But I was able to thankfully get really extremely a lot of support from the Immigrant Refugee Commission.

They gave me a lot of aid, assistance on how to apply for aid in the state.

And what made it easier was the support of Washington State and the presence of the availability of these small aids that me and my family can apply to.

It helped us so much.

And it was a relief that we were able even to qualify for a little bit amount of money because there was just so much on our plate and so much we needed at the time, whether that was groceries, whether that's masks, hand sanitizers, and just all these sanitary items, and even little stuff like a little stuff like health care items.

Like when my dad got sick, he needed diabetic shots because he got diabetes through COVID.

And so there was all these post health complications and pertaining to it that we didn't have any institutional support for.

And so it was really hard.

And being able to be here now and just looking back and the mental health aspect of it is definitely still present in our community because nobody likes to talk about these things.

And so the stigma of that is also very much present.

And we're very much thankful for spaces like these that turn our very much reality and sense a policy.

So even if it's just like just being able to give my story out here, it means a lot because I'm definitely one of the data, one of the BIPOC community data that have been impacted by this.

And so I'll just turn it over to Gina because I'm really getting emotional and choked up.

I'd like to say thank you so much for the opportunity and thank you for hearing us out.

V, can you go to the next page?

This is our last page reiterating the three things that we need for our community.

Institutionalizing what we've learned from the vaccination rollout and the community health that the city has done.

Supporting small businesses through increased education and assistance in navigating the system.

and maybe replicating some of the vaccine rollouts as a way to roll out some of these funding processes.

One thing that we did notice with the city level, when people could apply for funding, it was gone within a matter of hours or days.

So if people were not hearing about the process, if they were not able to navigate the system, the funding was gone.

Increased opportunities, which means increasing funding and decreasing barriers to the funding and how the funding can be used.

And with that, if you have any questions, please feel free to, yeah, we're here.

Great.

Thank you so much for that presentation.

And really want to thank all three of you, of course, for being with us and sharing your expertise.

And particularly for El-Rohi, thank you so much for sharing your personal experience with us.

I know that's never easy.

And it's okay to be it's okay to be vulnerable in this space and in any space and just really want to want to thank you for being willing to share some of your own personal experience and your family's experience with us, because it does help us as policymakers to not only understand why this work is important, but to identify ways to constantly improve.

And that's our goal, is to constantly improve so that we're lifting up those that need our help the most.

you know, first and foremost in our policies and in decisions that we're making about how to appropriate really important dollars.

So thanks for being with us today.

Colleagues, any comments or questions on the presentation?

All right, I'm not seeing any hands raised.

Really well done, you all.

And thank you so much for sending us an updated presentation, um, we'll make sure to keep, um, keep that presentation.

The presentation is part of the public record.

It's part of, um, our, um, sort of packets for this committee today.

And as we consider, we continue to consider investments, um, in, in the city.

I think it'll be really helpful to us to, to have that as a reference, uh, as we are thinking about how to make sure that we are again, um, identifying and prioritizing populations and communities within the city of Seattle who really don't have access to a lot of other resources, right?

So even now when we're talking about ARPA dollars and how we're gonna utilize federal dollars, right?

Those come with obvious restrictions that impact negatively our immigrant and refugee community members.

I am really proud of the work that we've all been able to do collectively as an immigrant refugee community in terms of how we are addressing COVID and how we address sort of equitable distribution of vaccinations.

I'm also really proud of the work that we did at the state this year in, you know, championing a massive historic investment specifically for undocumented immigrants is huge.

And obviously the need is great as we heard from Elrohi and the presentation in general.

But I think that the victory that we had at the state level is directly attributable to all of the advocacy and great organizing that's been happening within the immigrant refugee community.

So really proud of all of those wins as well.

Much more work to do, but thanks so much for being willing to be with us today to share with us a little bit more about the commission's perspective.

And I do see that Peggy is with us.

And Peggy, if you'd like to add anything or say anything, I definitely want to give you the opportunity to do that before we shift gears to our final agenda item.

Thank you.

Yeah, I really think.

Thank you commissioners.

Co-chairs for being here and share with us your experience and personal stories.

I just want to add that has been working closely with the commission, and we will keep continue doing so.

And so, just.

to show our commitment out there.

And then thank you for amplifying the importance of language access.

I think that's very important.

And that's also a area that we put in a lot of effort and want to sustain what positive outcome that we have produced because of COVID and then sustain that moving forward.

Thank you.

Yeah.

We're always talking about how to increase our language justice and language access efforts.

So I think that's a really well taken point.

Sort of how do we make sure that we memorialize and capture that as part of our muscle memory moving forward.

This is a really critical opportunity to be able to do that.

So really appreciate you all lifting that up throughout the presentation.

All right, last call for questions or comments.

Any questions or comments?

All right, hearing none, we're going to go ahead and move to our next agenda item.

Thank you, Gina, Shalani, Elrohi, Peggy for being with us today.

And please extend our gratitude and thanks to the rest of the commissioners who aren't with us today.

And we look forward to continuing to stay in contact as we consider additional policy changes and other budget priorities.

So we'll be in touch with all of you soon, I'm sure.

Thanks for being with us.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, folks, let's move to our last agenda item, which is item number five.

Will the clerk please read item five into the record?

Agenda item number five, the Families Education Preschool and Promise Levy update K-12 and Seattle Preschool Program for briefing and discussion.

Thank you so much, Madam Clerk.

We do have two presenters with us today from the Department of Education and Early Learning.

We are going to be rejoined by Dr. Chappelle, Director of DEEL, or as he'd like to say, proud director of the Department of Education and Early Learning.

And we also have Dr. Ismael Fajardo, also with the Department of Education and Early Learning.

So today's presentation from DL marks the first year of the Families Education Preschool and Promise Levy as the transition year from the Families and Education Levy.

That's probably a little confusing, but I'm sure our presenters are going to explain a little bit more about what I mean.

Next month deal will be back to back here in committee to share the first the first the result of the first year of the FEPP levy investments.

And with that in mind, I'm going to go ahead and hand this over to Director Chappelle to walk us through the presentation with his colleague, Dr. Fajardo.

Welcome back.

Yes, thank you.

Thank you again.

And also, again, good afternoon, council members.

It's always a pleasure to be here and to see you again.

As council president said, I'm Dr. Duane Chappell, the proud director of the Department of Education and Early Learning.

Dr. Fajardo, he's our interim data and evaluation director, and we will be presenting to you our Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise Levy year one annual report.

And really, this report is truly a testament to the hard and intentional work of the DEEL team, as well as the hundreds of community members, partners, families, and institutional partners like Seattle Public Schools, our Public Health King County, the Seattle Colleges, who really are a part of this collective effort.

So I'm super excited about this.

Next slide, please.

Thank you.

So today I will provide just a brief overview of the FEPP levy and its goals.

I'm going to share our executive summary, or what I like to call the FEPP by the numbers.

And then Dr. Fajardo will share our progress towards achieving the FEPP results, as well as some of the data limitations we've experienced due to COVID.

And you'll also note that a Word document appendix was submitted as a clerk file to ensure that we satisfy the reporting requirements that's outlined in the FEPP legislation.

And we intend to take approximately 20 minutes of your time and just save some remaining time for any questions or discussion.

Next slide, please.

Okay, thank you.

So our department strives to achieve what you see right here, these four results for all Seattle children and youth and young adults.

And the four results are that all Seattle families have access to high quality affordable childcare, that Seattle children are kindergarten ready, that our students graduate high school on time, and they're ready for college or career.

and that our students complete the post-secondary path of their choice.

Those are our four results.

Next slide, please.

Okay, so before we get into the numbers and results, what I want to do is ground us in the overall vision for the FEPP levy, which is to partner with families and communities to achieve educational equity, close opportunity gaps, and build a better economic future for Seattle students.

I wanted just to ground us in that for a quick moment.

Thank you.

So here you can see, you can see our FEPP year by one, FEPP year one by the numbers.

And what I want to draw your attention to is the amount of work by DEEL staff and the amount of work that DEEL staff led.

10 competitive funding processes, that's a lot.

That included 40 community review panelists, and six youth panelists.

DEEL has taken efforts to make our funding processes more equitable.

And this was really important for the first year of the levy.

And some things that we did to make it more equitable included compensating youth and community members who served on our review panelists or who served on the review panels for their time.

We provided anti-bias training before panelists scored any applicants.

We also allow participants to provide an interview or presentation as part of the review process.

So we were ultimately just moving away from written word as the sole determinant for an applicant score.

And we're also normalizing these practices so that our partners have a common experience across all of Veal's funding processes.

And we're just so grateful to our Seattle voters for this opportunity to steward these FEPP levy investments on behalf of our community.

And we really know that these numbers present a strong foundation for our future years of levy implementation.

Next slide, please.

Thank you.

Okay, so.

Now what I also want to do again is ground us in where we are in the levees implementation.

So you'll hear today that, well, should I say what you will hear today is a discussion of the first year results, which is where you see the green bar right there.

We are currently in year two, which is the pink bar.

And in this first year of the FEPP, our levy oversight members and council, they supported the use of FEPP funds to launch emergency childcare program, utilizing our FEPP preschool and early learning investment area as in utilizing our FEPP preschool and early learning investments area funds.

Next slide, please.

Okay, so ultimately school buildings closed in March of 2020, and the emergency child care program for essential workers was DEEL's first COVID-19 adoption.

We invested $2 million to operate the emergency child care from April through June, and it served 256 children from 196 families.

I wanted to really make sure we highlighted that one.

Next slide, please.

So Dr. Fajardo, in a moment, is going to be sharing some meaty data with you today.

But the top things that you can take away are literally right here.

What you'll see, you'll see that Seattle Preschool Program participants are more kindergarten ready than previous years, and race-based opportunity gaps are gradually closing.

The second is high school graduation rates for partner schools increased compared to the previous years.

And the third one is that our Seattle Promise cohort of 2018, from fall to fall, retention was higher than Seattle College students overall.

And two-year completion rates are comparable to the last dollar Promise program.

Next slide, please.

Okay, thank you.

So now what I want to do is I want to point out that the spending you see here is for the 2020 calendar year, not strictly for the 19-20 school year.

And if you have specific questions, as always, we're happy to have our finance team follow up with central staff to make sure that we're addressing them.

For 2020, this actually impacted our spending, both in early learning and K-12.

Most of our underspend in 2020 occurred in preschool and early learning, which was about $9.8 million.

And some of the things that account for this are deal, we modified our regular SPP programming to include remote hybrid and remote and hybrid preschool instruction to ultimately meet the needs of the families and providers during the pandemic, which paid out at a reduced rate.

Also, Seattle Public Schools, which is our largest SPP provider, they offered 100% remote programming for over 12 months, which also reduced costs and deal also saw a reduced and comprehensive support costs that is normally provided to SPS students.

And our professional development and training was halted for several months for the spring of 2020. And then it was changed to a remote service model in the fall, which actually resulted in more cost savings.

And an additional 1.6 million in underspending occurred in K-12.

And this specifically, this underspend was largely driven by the remote learning context for the school-based investments and the unearned base and performance pay from contracts.

So what you can also see from this table is the underspend for the year was $11.5 million.

However, in June, we received a notification that property tax or levy collections were $2.2 million less than anticipated.

or should I say less than expected.

So the net underspend is actually 9.3 million with this adjustment.

And with all of this said, we truly look forward to additional conversations with our levy oversight committee and our council on how to best reinvest these funds.

And so what I'll do now is pass this over to Dr. Fajardo to lead us through progress towards our results.

Thank you, Director Chappell.

So today we're going to cover progress towards our results, which is our FEPP year one.

Again, this is last year and what happened.

Duane covered some kind of COVID impacts that occurred, so kind of keep that framing when I go through the results.

Okay, so with the FEPP levy ordinance, it requires DO to report on annual progress towards achieving educational equity as part of the city's accountability to taxpayers.

So what that means is that we have some reporting requirements.

One, we need to share access to our services and progress in meeting our levy goals.

report on demographic data when discussing our goals and our outcomes.

There were also some additional requirements that were made in the FIP, Implementation and Evaluation Plan, more information on the Seattle Promise, participant experience, administrative decisions or modifications, and then also some council priorities identified.

All of the last three bullets can be found in the data appendix.

So we won't cover those last three bullets today.

As Director Chappelle mentioned, there are some data limitations to some of the data that we're going to be discussing.

But just keep in mind that we're using the best available data.

And as Duane talked about, there were some data collection disruptions in spring and summer of 2020 for both early learning and K-12 investments.

In this presentation, we try to provide historical trend analysis just to kind of provide some framing to existing baselines.

And we do that where it's appropriate.

Today's focus is mainly on student level outcomes.

And these are the outcomes that were decided within the FEPP and I&E plan.

And then also racial data disaggregation.

I said it, I think last time I was presented to council, but as an awareness of deal has multiple internal and external data systems across our investment areas, and not all systems collect the same level of data, data disaggregation.

And also acknowledging that there was interest in the previous time that I presented about understanding about further disaggregation of the Latinx and the Asian community.

Unfortunately, we have not done that for this presentation because this was written a few months ago, but we look forward in ensuring that future presentations has that level of data disaggregation.

So the FEPP implementation evaluation plan lays out deals approach to evaluating the impact of levy investments.

In the FEPP plan we detail our evaluation values and the cadence of process and outcome evaluations on specific investments.

So what you see on the slide is Uh, we have three ways we monitor our investments.

The green is, uh, you know, we track and report on key progress outcomes, which is the main focus of today.

Uh, but we also have process and outcome evaluations that we monitor and we conduct, uh, based on, uh, on specific investments.

The other part that I wanted to acknowledge is that, you know, in monitoring and performance management, we use this data to ensure that we're always looking at the data to ensure that we're making continuous quality improvement efforts, and then also for accountability to deal, and then also to serve our partners.

Okay, so for today, I'm going to walk you through how DEAL tracks our investments through a results-based accountability framework.

For each investment area, we remind you the strategies, who we serve, and how we measure our progress towards our goal.

So who is accessing our services?

What's our progress towards our goal?

We do that by looking at data from year to year.

And then we also take an equity analysis on the headline indicator to ensure that we're closing our race-based gaps.

So we're looking at the preschool and early learning investment here.

Director Chappelle talked about that we want kindergarten readiness for all of our Seattle children.

Within the preschool and early learning, we have several strategies that we think will help us get there.

And you see that we have multiple participants.

So we have the three and four-year-olds, we have providers, we have coaches, and we have families that all play a role in ensuring that we meet our result.

On the right-hand side, we have headline indicators, which is ensuring that our children are meeting WAC Kids Readiness Standards, so that they're prepared when they enter kindergarten, and also monitoring to make sure that opportunity gaps are closed within our students.

And I won't cover too many supporting indicators, but this is supporting indicators that we feel will help us get our result that we want with WAC Kids Readiness.

So to start off, the Seattle Preschool Program is providing access across the whole city.

We have 23 provider agencies.

We have 68 sites.

During the 2019-2020 year, we served over 1,800 children.

The map on the left-hand side is broken up by council districts, where the orange dots are the sites, so the 68 sites, and the blue is the darker the blue, the more children that we served during 2019-2020.

So as you can see, we have the most children being served in Council District 2. So within our children, The Seattle Physical Program served about 77% of BIPOC children.

We had an equal distribution between female and male children.

We serve a large percentage of low income children and families.

And we had a 37% were identified as refugee or immigrant families that were accessing our program.

So when Duane mentioned that I had meaty data, this is what Duane was talking about.

So there's a lot to unpack here.

But really, when you're looking at this table, on the left-hand column, you have the years.

So again, we're tracking historical trends.

We have data that dates back to our first FPP when it was implemented in 2015-2016.

Uh, we are tracking how m serve.

Uh, we're also tra sure that our preschool s their teachers strategy g expectations.

So basicall And then the headline indicator is basically what happens to the students when they enroll in kindergarten.

So are they ready?

And we see and we measure that by the WOC kids readiness standards assessment.

And then finally, you have the percentage of race based opportunity gaps.

making sure that we are closing these gaps.

So in one way, the way that we calculated here is we take the lowest race percentage that are meeting the WAC kids standard to the highest percentage that are meeting that WAC kids standards.

And that's how we get the gap.

So obviously we want this gap to be closer to zero, but also ensuring that all kids, all children are meeting the standard.

So there's a lot of data that we kind of want to walk through.

But the big takeaway here is that SVP is serving children more and more every year.

We started in 2015, 2016 with 274 children, and in 2019, 2020, we served over 1,800.

Within our supporting indicators, we kind of see a small or little growth within this, and that is mainly attributed to the sample size of the cohort getting bigger.

I do want to highlight that in 2019-2020, we did not collect data for TSG due to COVID.

And right now, we're in the process of processing the WOC kids readiness standard for 2019-2020.

So unfortunately, today, we won't be able to cover much on the 2019-2020.

But what we will do is we'll take a deep dive within the 2018-2019 cohort.

which experienced SPP, but in 2019, 2020, those were kindergartners.

Okay, so taking a deep dive on that 2018, 2019, and this is our equity analysis where we take a deep dive on the kindergarten and readiness gaps.

Here, I'm showing all of the data by race groups.

We're looking at the race groups, the all, and then the seven race ethnic groups.

And then we're actually looking to see how many kindergarten students were in that group.

In 2018, 2019, there were about a little over 4,000 children.

The parentheses is the sphere of influence.

So how many of those children were SVP children?

So we had about 15%.

The next column, we're looking at how many of all SPS children were meeting kindergarten readiness.

And we see that the sixty seven were meeting kindergarten readiness.

And when you look at of those that were SVP children, how many were kindergarten ready?

It was fifty nine, which is gives us a percentage difference of negative eight for SVP.

When we take a kind of closer look at how this plays out by race, I will say that there are some highlights.

within our black and African-American children.

In general, SPS kindergarten readiness is 49% that are meeting WACids readiness standards.

But if you participated in the SVP program, you are more likely to be kindergarten readiness.

So we have about a 10% increase for our black African-American children.

Okay, so moving us on, we're in our K-12 school and community-based investments.

Just as a reminder, Council President Gonzalez mentioned that we had a transition year.

So I do want to acknowledge that we do have school-based investments, but those schools were different within the transition year than they are for the year two of the FEPP levy.

But we also have strategies that still happened.

We had opportunity and access, wraparound services, culturally specific and responsive.

Here are all the participants within our investment area.

And the headline indicator for this investment is ensuring that that students graduate within four years.

We also have some supporting indicators, whether students are meeting a third or eighth grade proficiency in English language arts and math, and we'll cover that in the next few slides.

And here was that reminder that I talked about, so I'm going to keep us moving.

Okay, so our catered services again are providing access across the whole entire city.

We had 63 grantees school and community based organizations.

We have 41 school partners and during 2019 2020 we served over 2300 children and students.

The orange dots are our partner sites, so the 41. And again, the darker the blue, the more students were being served in that district.

So again, we have Council District 2 with more of our students participating in K-12 levy services.

Within our K-12 services, we had 66% of our students served, identified as BIPOC.

We had an equal distribution between female and male.

And we had a good percentage of our students that were free and reduced lunch also participated in our program at 46% on the right-hand side.

But we also track immigrant and refugee families, whether they were ELL learners, special education, and if they were experiencing homelessness.

So keeping our eye on the result, we want students to graduate high school in four years.

So here, very similar to the early learning slide, we are looking at a historical trend by years.

We're figuring out who did we serve within that year, and where are we in our supporting indicators that kind of lets us know if we're on track to meet our headline indicator, which in this case is graduation.

So within our who did we serve in 2017-2018, we had 22,000.

And we increased slightly to over 2,300.

As we noticed in the early learning, COVID played an impact in our assessment data.

That means that we don't have a common way to assess student learning and the third to eighth grade ELA and math.

But we did have a graduation data for this 2019-2020 school year.

And one thing that I do wanna highlight is with each year, you'll see that graduation rates for levy funded high schools has improved every year and the race-based opportunity gaps appears to be closing.

So we're gonna take a deep dive on 2019-2020 and take a look at the 85% graduation and the 24% racial gap.

OK, so when looking at the class of 2020, again, this class had an 86 percent graduation level for all SPS graduates.

And when looking at only levy funded schools, we were it was eighty five.

So a percentage difference of minus one.

But keeping in mind that levy funded schools were selected, due to their academic needs that were set forth when they applied to receive funding.

I will highlight that there is room to grow between the Latinx and the Black African-American children.

But we also did see some highlights within our Asian and two or more races when meeting this graduation.

Obviously, this is data points that we will continue to monitor.

And we're excited with what we saw with our levy-funded school results.

Moving on to the K-12 school health investment area, We have seven provider agencies at 28 sites that served over 9,000 students.

Same as the previous slides, the orange are the school-based health center sites.

The darker the blue, the more students attended that school in that council district.

69% of students identified as BIPOC students.

And in this case, we actually had more female students participate in K through 12 health services.

And there's a 10% percentage difference.

And we had a 32% that identified as immigrant and refugee families.

So within our result that we're trying to achieve, so students are healthy and ready to learn, here we have three years of historical data with 2019-2020 being the year COVID impacted our services on that spring of 2020. So you get to see we decreased the amount of students that were served.

Some of the supporting indicators that we're monitoring are whether students are receiving oral screening, whether they're fully immunized, their strengths and difficulties questionnaire that they fill out, which is kind of geared towards social-emotional learning and kind of trying to get a sense for what are their needs.

With that, the number of SDQ did go down.

Although we did have, you know, telehealth play a role in the spring of 2020. So that is expected for who is served.

But it was good to see that the number of students receiving oral health screening stayed on par with the previous year.

And the same can be said for students that are being fully immunized.

The other thing I wanted to highlight here are our headline indicators that we're monitoring.

So attendance is one.

Here we see that every year there has been an improvement in attendance and the same for those that are graduating four years.

Although there are some differences and bigger gaps within the race, basic opportunity gaps that we're trying to close for both attendance and graduation.

Actually, no, graduation is actually improving.

Attendance is staying stagnant.

OK, so shifting to the Seattle Promise.

So here, again, we're looking at 2019-2020.

And during this time, we had 397 Promise Scholars enrolled.

That included Cohort 2018 second year and Cohort 2019 first year.

At this time, we had six eligible high schools.

So we had Ingram, Garfield, Chief Sealth, Cleveland, West Seattle, and Rainier Beach.

Most students during this year were enrolled at South Seattle College and you can see that with the larger orange circle and most scholars are being spread out across the city, or at least from those six schools.

I will acknowledge that for next year's report, we'll be excited to share data on all the 17 high school eligible students.

And we will also be able to track and report on the retention and graduation.

So I'm really excited to share the 2020-2021 report with council.

And I'm gonna let Director Chappelle close us out.

Oh, sure.

Well, great job.

Thank you, Dr. Fajardo.

And just really wanted to say that we will be back next month.

As you see, we love coming to present.

It'll be our early learning director, our K-12 and post-secondary directors will be here as well.

But we're also happy to take any questions you have regarding data and any of the program monitoring questions.

Thank you, Director Chappelle and Dr. Fajardo.

Thank you so much for this really good presentation.

Colleagues, any comments or questions about the presentation?

Really well done.

I mean, I think I mean, I think it's sort of the gold standard in terms of how we make sure that we're being good stewards of taxpayer dollars and also just how we are really making sure that these dollars are being utilized to achieve concrete goals that really do benefit our community members.

And I'm just so appreciative of all of the important hard work that goes into making sure that we are getting these investments out quickly.

And we've been really flexible this last year.

I don't think any of us expected that our first year of this levy would be during a global pandemic.

And so it really did test the department and us as a city in terms of our ability to be nimble and still true to the quality standards that we wanna subscribe to, so huge thanks to all of you for that.

Colleagues, anyone else have any questions or comments?

Just want to do one last scan here.

All right.

I don't see any hands raised.

Director Chappelle or Dr. Fajardo, anything else to share with us before we adjourn?

Not at all, just thank you again and we look forward to seeing you all next next month.

We look forward to seeing you all next month to you all are a regular fixture in this committee and I really appreciate your willingness to continue to come back and report out because I think these investment areas in this program areas are really important.

All right, colleagues, if there is no further business to come before the committee, the committee will be adjourned.

Hearing no further business, that does conclude our meeting for today, and the meeting is now adjourned.

Thanks, everybody, for tuning in.

Take care.

Thank you, Council President.

Recording stopped.

Bye.