Nathan Gildersleeve

Mr. Hawkins
American Government, Period 5
1 October 2015
At the Educational Services Center there were seven board members present and around
31 citizens in attendance. When meeting began the board gave a report of what happened during
the 6:00pm closed session. After a moment of silence for another school shooting that has
occurred recently, the pledge of allegiance was sung and the agenda was approved. With a brief
report on the sufficiency of instructional materials, the first major topic was a presentation about
a new software called iResult. The Co-Founder & Vice President of iResult, Nia Rosete, gave a
lengthy presentation on the features of the program and demonstrated the usefulness of it to the
board. Once done with her presentation the VUSD board asked her questions like if parents
would be able to access the software, since right now its focused on school principals and staff.
In the end the board was excited about the software and look forward to using it. The next two
topics was an update on the Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP), which was presented by
Danielle Storey, Assistant Superintendent Educational Services, and the Superintendents Facility
Advisory Committee (SFAC) update, which was given by Director of Facilities Dan Banowetz.
Both of these updates however where hard to follow and stay focused on for me, most of the
information presented to me didnt make that much sense and seemed uninteresting. However
the Student Board Representative Reports where then given from the four following schools:
Buckingham Charter Magnet High School, Country High School Report, Vacaville High School,
Will C. Wood High School. This was more interesting because I was able witness the boards
interest in how our school is doing and what activities we have done. Unfortunately board later

began a long discussion and explanation on how they would rank issues amongst each other. By
this time two hours have passed since the meeting, with only about one-third of the agenda
completed. At that point I decided to leave the meeting, since I needed time to complete this
typed evaluation of the meeting.
Similar to the city council meeting I attended, the VUSD Board followed a similar
democratic system when discussing subjects. The public was given a time to comment for three
minutes per person, with a maximum of twenty minutes per topic. The board members were also
respectful to each other and the presenter when discussing. However the meeting was much
longer. Besides having a much larger agenda, a lot of time was spent discussing and even
working out certain actions amongst the board. These actions where probably necessary, since
the board wants to make sure they are making the best decision. However this was very time
consuming and it was clear this meeting would run for a long time. In my opinion on the topics I
thought the iResult software would be a nifty idea and would save a lot of time. The other topics
that I witnessed were mainly updates about things that I didnt really understand or pay attention
to. One major thing I learned from this experience is that not all meetings are nice short like the
previous city council meeting; some can go on for several hours based on the current agenda or
the amount of discussion.