The Life Enrichment Committee convened on October 14, 2025, addressing routine approvals, a contract amendment for substitute teacher services, and federal Head Start grant allocations. Discussions focused on childcare staffing challenges, enrollment demographics, and equitable service delivery for Oakland's young children.
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the life enrichment committee meeting of Tuesday, October 14th, 2025. The night the time is now four twenty-five p.m. and this meeting shall come to order. Do the chair can the chamber door be closed, please. Before taking roll, I will provide the instructions on how to submit a speaker's card for this meeting. If you are here in chamber and wish to speak to any item on this agenda, please fill out a speaker's card and hand it to a clerk representative before the item is called into record. Speaker cards will be accepted when the first in the first ten minutes of this meeting, this meeting came to order at four twenty-five PM. Therefore, speaker cards should be submitted before or by four thirty-five PM. Online speaker requests were due twenty-four hours prior to the start of this meeting, which was yesterday, Monday by four p.m. I will now proceed with taking roll of members present. Moving to our first item, item number one, approval of a draft minutes from the committee meetings held on July eighth, twenty twenty-five, July twenty second, twenty twenty-five, and September thirtieth, twenty twenty-five, showing no speakers. From those previous meetings. Moving to item number two, determination of schedule of outstanding committee items. Any outstanding items from the administration. I'll entertain a motion. Second. This is moved by Councilmember Guile, seconded by Councilmember Wong to accept the draft to accept the pending list as is on roll. Council members. Guile? Aye. Houston. Aye. Wong. Aye. And chair five. Aye. The motion passes with four ayes to accept the pending list as is. Moving to item three. Adopt a resolution waiving the local small local business enterprise program requirement and waiving the competitive bidding process and authorizing the city administrator to execute a second amendment to a professional services agreement with childcare careers LLC to increase the amount of the previous contract by an additional $500,000 for a total amount not to exceed $1,250,000 for as needed substitute teacher staffing services for the contract period fiscal year 2022 through 2027. Thank you. We'll put five minutes on the clock for our presenter and we can go. You have the floor. Oh thank you. An additional $500,000 to this contract because they are the only substitute agency in the area that has responded to RFPs. We have used them for the last few years and they meet the requirements that are necessary for all of our state, federal, and local funds. They allow us to keep our services open, our classrooms open. Because we are funded by three different funding agencies, our ratios vary. So for infants, we have to have one qualified adult for three infants. Toddlers, it's four for one with to one adult, and then for preschoolers, it's one adult for eight children, which is very low if you look at private preschools. We cannot operate if we don't have those numbers. We also have recently moved to year-round option for our infants and toddlers to meet the need of working families, and also 10 hour days. Because of this, we have implemented a process with our teaching staff that where we still want to allow them the time they need to go to their children's events for vacations, they get sick, and so having these sub-services allow them to take care of themselves, meet their family needs without having to close our doors. Did you have anything to add? Um no, nothing else to add. Um we well, I'll add one more thing. So um also with these sub-services, we are able to request long-term subs. So we don't, if we need a sub and we know someone's gonna be out for a month or for two weeks, um, we can request them for what we call a long-term sub, which then allows that continuity of care, teachers get to know them, children get to know them, families get to know them, and um we've also had success in bringing them on as City of Oakland employees when we really like them too. So it's a good way for us to feel that out as well. Thank you.