hereby call this meeting to order a roll call please Dr Hall president Mr sawales here Mrs Galbraith here Brown is here Mrs Walters vice president rupe here president Albert here please stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all huh okay we do have a couple of public comments tonight the first is Jake Graham and the topic is post-construction Bid And Award right but first we have to empower each student to positively impact the world for a bright new future thank you no that's right so you know that's right thank you so Jake you can have the mic there's your right hand and right right hand good evening ladies and gentlemen good evening good evening president Albrecht Madam superintendent serma and distinguished members of the board my name is Jake Graham this fine lady is Lashawn drones and we are with purebrite janitorial services as you all well know this summer like Last Summer the district is planning a lot of work in the district to its schools including asbestos abatement new flooring amongst other things our company purebrite was the contract awardee last year for the summertime post-construction cleanup we worked with our crews of over 60 people in the schools over a two and a half week period cleaning the schools after the construction was done getting them ready for the new school year working with Mr serma's office in the buildings and grounds Department we succeeded in our goals so much so that we received praise from principals Mr serma himself the building's grounds Department and we even received a glowing letter and even a lovely Christmas card this year an invitation to bitpack it was sent out again to do the same work with the same goals as last year for this coming summer there were two non-mandatory meetings scheduled regarding this contract as well as the bid packet that went out to the interested vendors two companies responded purebrite us and a company called custom today before you on the agenda you have a recommendation coming from the business manager's office to award custom this year's upcoming contract to do the work performed in Crete Monee 201u the bid proposals that the district received were vastly different and the reason they were vastly different is because there was conflicting information which I'd like to quickly share with the board and Mr serma which I believe you're going to just learn of this for the first time tonight the information was vastly different as I said and this would be fine and show a clear winner if if they if everybody had the same information but this is not what happened we are quite confident that Mr surma will be learning these issues again for the first time as well and let me start off by saying working with Mr surma's office as well as the buildings and grounds Department we've experienced nothing but the utmost of professionalism I want to start off with saying that the information shared at the pre-bid meeting and the information shared at the bid in the bid packet are similar but some there are Stark contradicting information which of course would affect the prices of the potential bidders we are the only company that showed up for the pre-bid meeting we met our team met with Mr McLean's team for hours and went over not only the bid specs but all the work that was going to be performed this coming summer as well as our team walked the schools and looked around and got all the information that information again is different from what appears in the bid packet our bid was based upon not only in the information that was based in the bid packet but all the information that was shared to us through Mr McLean and his team as well as our experience from last year because custom did not attend the pre-bin meeting and in order to prepare their bid they had only the bid packet to go off of as well as an addendum that was sent out after the fact and I'd like to just share just a quick few of those those things that I was discussing the discrepancies for example at the pre-bid meeting Mr McLean and his team shared that almost 90 percent of the district is getting all new flooring something that's called Texas granite this beautiful state of the art flooring that needs very little care uh but there's no mention of that anywhere in the bid packet none so Mr McLean said okay I'll send out a an addendum however the addendum was sent out after the due date for it to go out that was spelled out in the district's packet the district package said it would go out by March 9th it went out did not go out until March 11th went out late in addition to the addendum's information uh it just says that there's flooring being put down and that the flooring needs to be mopped swept and mopped however at the pre-bid meeting Mr McLean told our team that not only did need to be swept and mopped it also need to be scrubbed not waxed but scrubbed using swing machines those big janitor machines that people go back and forth with that takes two-man team one guy to do it the guy behind it soak up the water you're talking about a huge difference in pricing between just sweeping and mopping the whole District as opposed to scrubbing them with swing machines 15 machines heavy duty equipment all the teams in the man hours right there is one stark contrast in the information that we bid upon that custom did not can I ask for just a clarification yes sir which the scenario and what you just stated that was not in the RFP correct that was not correct sir and there was no addendum issue for that there was an addendum however it did not say that the floors had to be scrubbed okay so just swept them out this is just verbal correct and you did not ask for clarifications in writing to verify what exactly that oh no the addendum was sent out at our request okay yes okay so it got out was it a question and answering period throughout this bidding process from the time the bid was listed out there to the time it was awarded you had a question and answering period right correct and our request went in on time however the response came back late and it did not address what was spoke of at the pre-bid meeting which would greatly affect pricing did the response come back before the due date of the bid yes it did okay um in addition to that huge stark contrast on page seven the contract period lists lists Friday July 11th through August 12th a three week almost a three-week period in fact one day more than three weeks which matches up with our experience from last last year however on page 10 it says the work period is from three to seven days well that's a huge difference ladies and gentlemen three weeks compared to three to seven days in addition to that at the pre-bid meeting Mr McLean stated that we might possibly be able to start cleaning on June 9th or in the administration building on June 13th when abatement would begin on page 18 under the term section it states that the contract term is from April 18th through August 12th again adding to discrepancies which would of course would affect pricing big difference if you've got a if you turn it in a bid with all this stuff for three weeks as opposed to three three to seven days there is no mention anywhere in the bid packet of asbestos abatement Mr McLean and his team discussed it thoroughly with our team when there's asbestos abatement taking place an arc team is coming in after that to clean up personal protection equipment is very important if that adds cost again I just want to ask you the question yes sir and I apologize was abatement a bestest abatement in The Proposal no sir okay thank you and Nora was an amendment set out sent out about abatement on page 10 in the mid-pack it states there's a lot of furniture great deal in fact this is great deal of furniture that will be moved to storing storage that would have to be cleaned before brought back into the schools it ends there in the bid packet however at the meeting Mr McLean notified our team that we would in fact be doing the moving for two of the schools well in our proposal unlike our competitor we added all that extra labor to be furniture movers the other company would not have known about it because they did not attend the meeting on pages 15 16 19 and 23 there are uh it says that this is not in fact a proposal a bid proposal a pack excuse me for post-construction cleanup on pages 15 and 16.
um correctly listed in the agenda for those who signed up to speak during public participation you have the option this evening to either speak during the public participation or at during the hearing I will open up the hearing on the the special hearing on those two topics for public comment so you have your choice on if you want to speak then or if you want to speak during public participation it's just it's a matter of where we record the comments and the minutes of the of the meeting so first up on the agenda is the Pledge of Allegiance I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God and indivisible with liberty and justice for all and next up on the agenda this evening is recognitions and we have two Jacobs educator award adoption of the agenda oh I'm sorry I skipped adoption to the agenda did that last meeting too yeah do I have a motion Mr President I move we adopt the agenda for the April 11 2023 regular school board meeting is adopted and presented hi second thank you we have a motion in a second all those in favor signify by saying aye aye all those opposed motion passes 5-0 thank you sorry next up is recognition um we have two Jacobs educator Award winners with us this evening and I'm going to turn this over to Dr arkanov thank you sure and see who um who's our we have Aaron I thought we had our principles so I'm sorry there we go thank you Katie yes Katie there you are all right Katie would you come up and introduce our award winners please thank you okay so I'm initially going to introduce our award winner I'm going to introduce somebody else very important to our school district first and then she gets to introduce our fabulous Award winners so my name is Katie Brennan I'm the coordinator of connected learning and I am humbled to work alongside some of the most amazing Educators in the state and the Jacobs award is a very prestigious award for technology integration in the classroom and we have two Elementary Educators in our district that received that award we also have not many people know and existing Jacobs educator that works in our district it's Amanda Moore she's our Innovation coach and she works over at The Innovation Center and she supports computer science and stem K-12 throughout the district she came to us two years ago and she has been shaking things up since she showed up here and we are so grateful to have her and I believe Amanda is a big part of the reason we are starting to see so many really cool things happening in our classrooms so Amanda would you please talk a little bit about the award and then introduce our two Award winners hi I'm Amanda um I am so excited that two of our teachers get to be recognized as Jacob's Educators the Jacobs award is really focused around teachers using technology in their classroom and it is a national award so even though it's awarded by Indiana University teachers throughout the nation can be award recipients so the really cool thing about the Jacobs award is that teachers are not only recognized but then they're given the opportunity to create a product that can then influence other teachers and pre-service teachers also to help spread their knowledge so I'd like to talk for just a moment about our two Jacobs Educators if you guys both want to come up that'd be great so we have we have Katie Jones and Aaron Brown Katie was recognized for her use of computer science in the classroom this year she has done some really cool projects including integrating robots into her classroom to do things like creating a parade and also learning the basics of coding both with robots and through scratch and Aaron has been recognized this year for her use of technology in the classroom by using both hyperdocs and some other means to help her students follow along with what they're doing in class and also take ownership of their learning in order to advocate for themselves so congratulations Katie and Aaron you are so so deserving of this award [Applause] yeah oh wow congratulations ladies all right next up we have a presentation this evening from our partners at the Johnson County Public Library talk about the summer reading program hi everybody my name is Kelly Staton and County Public Library up on the screen is our 2022 year-end review for our explore summer program and I actually have some packets for the board members um you'll find that infographic in there as well as the library's year in review some upcoming programs and our current Library program guide just a couple things that we want to highlight from 2022 at jcpl we continue to check out more than one million items that are four branches every year and all over the county jcpel is making a difference in connecting our residents with resources and learning opportunities The Early Childhood Learning Centers at the White River branch and the Franklin branch have been remodeled a little bit and we're going to also redo the area at Trafalgar to make it similar to the new Clark Pleasant Play and Learn space we also started story times for families at the Bargersville town hall to try to bring some Library services to their Community we had a huge early literacy learning festival called the read to me Jamboree and we also collaborated with Johnson County Community Foundation Aspire and did a Arts based scavenger hunt last summer called the Great Arts Quest so as you can see explore summer will be starting in May it runs May 15th to July 31st and we would love for any Center Grove student to join last year we had over 5 000 people register and our goal this year is six thousand so as a community we read over three million minutes together and we're hoping to hit that goal and exceed that again in 2023 so another fun thing that we did with the program is we had a school competition and I think Creekside in Franklin won we would like for any of the elementary schools to join the school competition in the Center Grove School District and have a friendly little reading competition between the schools and the winner of that will receive a thousand dollars worth of something for your school so Creekside picked some equipment for their morning announcements last year so so if you could push that out to your students we'd love to see them involved and then we'll also have our regular prizes we'll have a Great Wolf Lodge getaway vacation package for our grand prize winner and then we have some Zoo tickets to give away if you hit your reading goal and want to keep reading so just a couple other programs to highlight we have two New York Times best-selling authors coming in May one is a young adults Prince award-winning author Angeline Bowie and then we also have Jack Carr who was a Navy SEAL and he writes the terminal list which is now on Amazon and stars Chris Pratt we'll have sharks from the Newport Aquarium a big teen event called random fandom we'll have an author panels some cosplay contests and fun things like that for the teens and then children's book character Lyle Crocodile is visiting and then we'll close out the summer with pool parties at the Franklin pool so anybody can register for explore summer even all you adults in the room so we'd love for you to join us and read with us and keep learning All Summer Long thank you for your time and allowing me to come talk about jcpl and our summer learning program [Applause] all right next on the agenda is public comments and and like I said if Mr Fox or Mr poor Mr Rodman want to speak now or at the hearing I'll give you guys you gentlemen the option okay as well please okay fantastic thank you next up on the agenda is the consent agenda do I have a motion thank you Mr Russell do I have a second we have a motion and a second all those in favor signify by saying aye all those opposed motion passes 5-0 thank you all right next up under action items 8.1 of approval of the 1028 determination hearing for the wellness center construction and multi-filled multi-facility construction and renovation Improvement products prod product projects Dr arcanov thank you Mr Alexander this evening I'm recommending that the board approve the 1028 determination hearing for the wellness center construction and multi-facility construction renovation and in uh renovation and Improvement projects so this this has been a a hearing that's been appropriately advertised and with that I I will turn it over to you to open up the here all right I now open this public hearing I'd like to turn it over to Dr long and Mr Taylor is it Mr Taylor this evening to present the project the financing on the project and the actions we're taken this evening thank you Mr Alexander um we won't go through too much on the presentation um we did do that at the February meeting again this is two projects if you want to go down to the slide with just the finances on it for me thank you it's a Wellness Center to be located just off Morgantown Road and a what a multi-use athletic space to be located off Trojan Lane is that still what it's called Dr Long at that spot um these projects both um can be constructed underneath the limit for a Geo bond that makes a little different than what we've done in the past some of our building projects obviously are much larger and require a full outright building lease and a separate bonding process for these though they're going to stay under that the statutory limit is 6.1 million and we're also including some other purchases Replacements upgrades soft costs loose finishing improvements and even land acquisition in these bonds some other miscellaneous projects that just our operations fund won't support and so uh Miss Howard has nicely put the kind of the break down to the two Bonds on the screen for you just a quick reminder as we scroll through go down two more slides for me this this maintains a level tax rate as it has for our other projects we were able to add this project in by other debt that's falling off it also keeps our tax rate we're still one cent lower than we were last year and we actually are fourth now in the county as you'll see behind Franklin Clark Pleasant and Edinburgh and the in relation to tax rate um last slide just real quick the project schedule tonight's we had the preliminary determination Hearing in February tonight's the final determination um we will follow that with an Appropriations hearing this evening and then we will look to do bids Dr long will take care of the next few steps here with taking bids and completing the workforce first Bond payments would start in 2025 and these are shorter term bonds they're not full length like a normal building project and we'll repay these back more similar to what we do in the fall when we do our maintenance and Technology bonds I think that's all I had to share Mr Alexander thank you Mr Taylor this is the appropriate time for members of the public to comment on the Wellness Center con Wellness Center construction the multi-fility multi-facility construction renovation Improvement projects and the information presented this evening are the members of the public president who would like to comment start you should come up to the come up to the microphone and name and address please hi I'm Bart Fox and I live at 5087 Center Brook Trace right across the street I I border the entire western edge of of the wellness project and I sent the board members an email we worked together with the the building committee on the an issue with the maintenance facility next door a much much smaller project and you know I was a little disappointed with how that went so um you know but I sent them those details and you know I I'd have to give that a d-minus I don't know if any of you read that email if you would give it a little higher grade or not um so my concern is you know if you're going to send if we're going to spend 6 million and I know we've got that limit but what we need to do to build this Wellness Center correctly you know I have a lot of friends and family that are teachers and and I hope they use the facility and you know Center Grove has a lot of great students and I mean I hope that we can build this and build it right and you know if it's six million's enough I don't know you know cost inflation cost overruns and that type of thing yeah but there were there were some Corners that were cut you know and I won't I don't want to dwell on the history but you know one of the things that you know we we were concerned so we showed up when when they had to go before the board of uh zoning appeals to get a variance and uh and one of the ideas was you know well there was a pledge made that that Landscaping would be done at 20-foot border and uh you know the the Landscaping is you know it looks more like a roll-off dumpster than than Landscaping so um that's why I felt like I needed to come here you know we got this big project I you know I don't know it 2 000 feet of Border along here and and the the project started you know you have to go and get drainage approval and we get a lot of drainage runoff naturally across the property already and we had a two inch rain March 3rd and I don't know where the rain is going to go because of all the the volume of the impervious surface area that that this Project's going to create so my concern is that you know we want to make sure we spend enough money that it that we can do proper drainage and and I have other environmental concerns you know lights you know the LED lights are as bright as ever and sometimes you know lights shine like this and you know proper lighting I know Greenwood you know the Johnson County is very relaxed and we don't have proper modern lighting restrictions but you know I would hope as a school community that we could do proper lighting you know on proper lighting it all points down you know lighting pollution it all goes up and and I I object to the design of the building you know they're putting 50 cars and half of those are 20 feet from my property line so um you know there's concern that you know and if they don't do any Landscaping which they have history of skipping you know cutting some corn or so so I'm concerned there and uh you know but I you know I I would hope that we can get this project and give it an A and or B plus or B when we're done you know that that's all I ask I you know whatever my taxes are going up 36 percent so you know as far as I'm concerned let's let's throw more money at it and I know you know you got that six million dollar limit but you get cost overruns and that type of thing so I I just wanted to say a few words that you know we can do better and I'm sure with the bigger project it'll get watched more closely and and a better job will be done so thank you thank you Mr Fox um one one comment I might encourage you to get time with Dr long to get into the specific concerns you have about the maintenance facility in this project I do know that when I reviewed the plans there's a retention Bond in the plan in the southwest corner of the property I I'm not exactly right I'm sure that came from drink drink uh the drain was born yeah sorry um which I sent and you know you have a professional engineer and they send this map in the regular and it's going to be real hard to see but you've got this fancy drainage area here but the runoff runs right into it so when the engineer in charge of the project it's important drainage is important doesn't consider existing water the pathway that that's a concern so you know just kind of we just need to kind of check on who we hire and make sure that they're on site I it appeared that the engineering and the drainage was done without an on-site visit you know you can see the where the grass is leaning over in the natural pathway of the water and it seems like they've got to overlooked part part of that's not on our property part of that's on the uh the Kensington Grove side but our engineer is a licensed engineer took the plan through the drainage board and and got it approved and he said we would try to capture that water that's not on our property but we'd try to capture that and hold that in the retain each Pond that that we're going to construct and you know maybe the board knows but you know when we build a project our requirement is to to to to have runoff be less than it is normally and to to capture that at a hundred year flood rate and so you know the the plans that we developed are that our Engineers developed for us and had approved by the County engineer and by the the planning are by the the the drainage board meet all those requirements that Johnson County has and we should see an improvement over there thank you Mr Buck I think that's all uh Mr poor thank you my name is Keith poor I'm a taxpayer I live at 5186 Cave Court Greenwood uh I want you to know that I met with the Administration and School Board this week earlier and they assured me that the Wellness Center was a valuable need for the teachers and the administrative staff for this thing I had concerns in the February meeting that uh the teachers and staff wouldn't use this facility in that greater numbers they assured me that there is plenty of use for this so I have to believe what they are telling me one thing for clarification here I noticed that we have two two things here on the agenda are we voting are you voting are these separate deals I thought that one deal was for the wellness center and the other was for the uh Sports field yeah that's the current action that is do the Appropriations for spending that money okay yeah all right so so after listening to them what they had to say and tell me I sort of have to agree that maybe this is a good project for uh and it will help retention of teachers and they will move forward so that we can have a good school system here then going on to the second item on the agenda here that is the sports package I still have a few thoughts about that do we build more Sports or do we build more academics I I think the it's nice to play golf it's nice to play softball I enjoy watching it on TV I enjoy it immensely but now when it comes down to putting the money where you really need to put the money let's build an academic situation such as the robotics place get that done and then look at doing a softball and golf hitting range uh I don't uh I'm I'm just a taxpayer out here I just want to see the taxes that all of us pay teachers principles everybody else pay goes to getting a quality education for these students thank you thank you Mr pork Mr Rodman yeah yeah okay we're a united front today Matt Rodman I live at 2549 Baywood Court here in Greenwood with me kale Hoover 3489 Streamside Drive Alyssa Coleman Speedway okay um I uh this isn't even so I'm a teacher here as well I teach Middle School over at Skinner Center of Middle School Central I'm here mostly to speak uh we I'm the high school boys golf coach High School varsity girls golf coach and High School girls softball coach so originally I was here to speak totally to that project but I do feel the need to address the wellness center as well and I I know from the constant fluctuation in turnover rate that we are experiencing just in my building alone at Middle School Central uh that the ways to the new teachers are looking for ways to be attracted to a school system and a project like a Wellness Center that has an exercise area and an ability for physical therapy is something that they are actually coming in because I've set in those interviews and things that they are asking for during those interviews so not just from a personal I have my own son we struggle to get into the Wellness Center here because the hours and the timing is crazy so to have some something like that is something we will use but I guarantee you it is something that will attract new teachers and New Quality staff members so that we don't have that constant turnover that we are experiencing at the moment but anyways the point I was really here for was to talk about the the indoor hitting facility so I have been the head boys golf coach now for seven years and during that seven year time we have seen an exponential growth in the amount of athletes that are participating in our program both at the middle school and the high school level and we have currently run out of the the space that we have available to use we are the one unique Athletic non-athletic program that we have no physical space on schools campus to do what we need to do we have attempted to use the indoor practice facility the Student Activity Center to hit to hit balls into the Nets are not made for impact resistant we left giant welts on them the one time we did it so we stopped because we didn't want to to ruin the the the nature of the building we have attempted to use the upper balconies to set up and pull out Nets and put them away every time but the 45 minutes that that takes takes away from the two hour limit that we're allowed to practice with them so we lose quality practice time when we're just setting up and taking down equipment because we have to take it down every time because they do need the academic space at the high school so just those simple things first of all we are lucky enough that now we have a great great relationship with the local golf courses that we have however golf is getting more and more popular it's one of the very few things that boomed during covet Golf and it just takes the snap for the golf courses to say hey we have to limit your space your time your ability to practice here so that all and we would have to say yes because we are at their beck and call every time we do what they tell us to do and we're the only sport that has to do and deal with that kind of a situation it doesn't even take into account some of the the more simple things golf is a sport that last week we were practicing Well we'd had tryouts and it was about 35 degrees and snowing so we needed an indoor space to try and use we have a lot of meetings in his room and but you run out of times for meetings to talk about the golf rules and then we will get to now our wonderful spring rainy season where we will miss on average eight to ten practices a season because of the weather the lightning can't really hold a golf club out in lightning but we just we're losing it the the quality time to practice with I I'm a person that I have always made every decision in my field teaching and coaching that what is uh student centered that's my Mantra in philosophy and I feel like doing things like that is being a student-centered decision selfishly currently all of my golf equipment is housed in my garage because I also have no place to put anything all of our practice training equipment the extra golf bags all the golf balls I know my wife would really appreciate it if I could have a place an actual coach's office to put those things but that's just selfishly and that's not a student-centered thing so that's not the big driving Factor here there are some members of the boys program and parents that are here as well I just asked them to come out and support because they feel just as passionately about that as we do that this really will we have a golf program that in seven years has had two state titles two State Runners up and we're just trying to continue to compete with all of the groups that are having the same access to these kinds of facilities that we need to to continue our our competitive nature and to give the kids the access they deserve I'll finish just by saying because there is a financial component our program spends thousands of dollars on a yearly basis to try and find access to an indoor facility and that is coming out of fundraising that we're doing ourselves but also from the parents Pockets because we can't adequately provide them a space to do it on campus thank you um the only thing I have to add is it's going to help every program the space is limited and as band and everything that's coming including the robotics everyone's fighting for space so our program goes in the morning and off season just to get the adequate space so it's truly not just helping our programs but every student athlete and and academic student there to get the means that they need and want um because we are expanding we're exploding it's it's great but the space is is needed for everyone's sake so that they can get the quality time that he mentioned that they need thank you thank you are there any other members of the public who like to speak come up to the microphone and name and address please name is Jamie beats 3270 greensview Drive I didn't prepare anything I didn't know I was going to come up here actually today but uh I just want to say as a parent they've already done a really good job the coaches have of speaking about the programs and what what their needs are and I think they've done a really good job of thinking this through and put a lot of time and effort into it and I've been a part of it in terms of just listening to what coach Rodman and Coach Hoover have told me about this and I think it's a great opportunity the time is now to do it speaking as a parent the fact that they're able to coordinate this between Golf and softball I think is a really big win not only for for these programs and the fact that the coaches work together like that and came up with this is a is a great great credit to them so I appreciate what they do I appreciate what the board does as well and just speaking as a parent the taxpayer had two kids graduate from Center Grove one played volleyball one played golf and he's playing at Marion University right now and if it wasn't for golf I don't know if he would be at Marion in that situation and it's doing well in school and I think coach Rodman coachever and the other coaches here really push the academic along with the athletic piece of this so you from a parent standpoint I think they do a great job and I think they've thought this through so I'm just here to support them and support the kids and just say I think this is uh is the right time to do this if we wait it's just going to get more expensive so yeah that's that's all I have to say thank you thank you yes sir hi my name is Chris Herrmann I live at 236 Runyan Court here in Greenwood and I am here to talk in support of the facility I am also the president of the Center Grove Lassie Lake just down the street in Morgantown so um I'm going to speak specifically to to why I think this is important for for young women I know as the president we're a non-profit we get no City money it's tough to get sponsors it's tough to get things and for women young women and and to to empower young women to to look at the same types of facilities maybe that that other people have that men that young men have uh and so building this facility um and Coach Coleman and the other coaches coach who were taught they spoke about um you know why it's important about space but but I believe it's it's a lot about equality and showing our young women specifically in the softball Arena girls golf that this the school the corporation that the community cares about women's sports and and are willing to put in the money and the time and the effort into supporting those types of things and I'm all for academics I'm all for for you know band and before whatever but I think this is the time and you know Center Grove's got a great tradition we we literally have the largest uh Rec program in the state right down the street we continually put through um Quality kids into the into this program that bring five state championships five five runner-ups we've got an amazing New Field and facility that a lot of colleges would be very very proud of uh and and so what I want to just kind of finish with is is that I think it's just important that the community support the women the young women and show them that we're behind them thank you thank you any other members of the public I now close this public hearing are there board members who have any comments or questions Mr President let me just add some curriculum wise we are building um numerous new rooms at both middle schools you will see this uh summer the elementary that was my elementary and all my siblings went through is going to be coming down to make room for a multi-level curriculum Rooms To Go in for the high school there and we are in search already for another place for a new Elementary so we are trying our best and taking care of and I will add to that also within the high school that you may not see when you drive by but each hallway has gotten upgrades or we've rearranged things there if you've never been in there and seen our art Department you really ought to ought to see that it's it's better in most colleges that we are working on our curriculum things because that is our first thing that we do here at Center Grove but also uh as a community and as a board we have to look at what is that well-rounded situation to have for the students who come through here they all have different interests and likes and things so we do our best to provide for all those different things and I will tell you as far as our sporting things you know at my age I have a lot of friends at other schools and when they come over with their grandkids uh they're they're just they're I wouldn't say they're in awe but they just really appreciate all our sporting facilities and how well they're put together for the kids to play on because they don't have that at their schools a lot of them so I'm very proud of that but I would remind everybody that that is our job is the well-roundedness that we can do for kids and the most opportunities we can do for those kids because we just have many many situations for the kids that come here at Center Grove thank you Mr Russell I just have a couple things to add I guess I I like what I hear Lassie League come up and talk about opportunities for young women I had two daughters that played volleyball and basketball and I was on volleyball you know Dad in the stands and basketball board and coached way too many games but loved every minute of it so I'm glad to hear that and you know we it's important the board is important to the community to educate the entire child we talk about that a lot and educating the entire child is providing additional opportunities and just because we're building going to vote on building a couple of facilities here one being a heavy facility one being a Wellness Center Mr Russell makes a wonderful point we're also looking to expand academics we rejected a robotics proposal that came to us not because we don't want to build it but because it came in over budget so we're looking for a way to still build it within our means another thing that's important in here is school buses we're going to be moving school buses from a from our operations fund and funding it a different way to try to free up some additional money for operations funds that hopefully we can use in a very positive way to help to help our our many our our staff and our our others that are employees of the school so I appreciate everybody's comment I also want to build it right I appreciate your comments and I appreciate the warnings from what you said happen with the last facility and I I also want to get an A minus B plus heck I want to get an A on everything we build but don't think just because we approve one building doesn't mean we're not looking at the next don't think because as a growing District we've got to put the kids somewhere we've got to put the people somewhere and I think we do a pretty darn good job of that so I thank everybody for speaking tonight but I don't want to lose focus on educating the entire child any other comments yes so I I raised um 2018 my son graduated and he was baseball so he had a great facility I have a seventh grader who's travel softball so I'm also raising softball and um so I'm excited to see the same you know opportunity that my son had given to my daughters as well so but I would really I know Dr long is going to kill me but I would love for you two to stick around because I have a question for you after the board meeting sorry but you know what I'm going to talk to her about so anyway that's awesome it's going to create work for you Dr long I suspect that's what's about to happen all right any additional comments all right seeing none do I have a motion a movie do what it says Mr President I move we approve the 1028 determination hearing for wellness center construction and multi-facility construction renovation Improvement projects second thank you we have a motion and the second all those in favor signify by saying aye all those opposed the motion passes 5-0 we did not close the hearing yes I did you did I'm sorry I missed that I closed it okay I didn't hear you say it okay okay just as long as you did it I did hearings always cause a wrinkle in the in the meeting says we don't do them at every meeting so all right 8.2 additional appropriation hearing and resolutions for the wellness center Construction multi-facility Construction renovation Improvement projects Mr Quackenbush can we figure out how to condense those names then Dr arcanov thank you Mr Alexander this evening I'm recommending that the board approved the resolution confirming lease approving Insurance of the bonds and resolution approving additional Appropriations and Mr Taylor will provide you with some additional information yes as Mr Alexander reported Out Mr welcome bush is with us as well he has prepared these documents for us this is the step the second step to this process so all the work up until this what I need to open the public I'm so sorry I'll now open this public hearing and turn it over to to Mr Taylor to present the financing Jeff's over there now just prepare these documents for us this is a two-step process everything up at this point has just been a conceptual are we okay with building these facilities with this money now is it really given the school corporation the authority and the administration to spend this money and this will be put on record with State Board of accounts as Appropriations for these projects um the documents have been prepared for the board they're they're in this very similar format to what we've signed in the past any questions you may have thank you Mr Taylor this is the appropriate time for members of the public to comment on the bonding for the project are there any comments about the financing or the bonding okay um I now close this public hearing to catch up you closed it right yeah I did are there any oh I'm sorry are there any board members who have questions or comments can I still comment after you yes yeah that's the last bullet point yes you know you're the attorney so I the only comment I would make is one of the things we did prior to the meeting tonight we met with the building Corporation and we actually um assigned the documents to refinance some of our older bonds because the interest has uh gotten much better than when we signed those bonds 10 years ago yeah 15 years ago definitely so Mr qualcombush and his team along with Mr Taylor always looking at opportunities even on some of the older bonds that we have out there to refinance those and I'm sure they've got some kind of review cycle that that they do these on but as we as we look at Future projects and those types of things those are always those types of activities are always going on in the background and I'd like to thank Mr qualcombush for keeping tabs on all that for us so every Bond we sell has a call date this one happened to be 15.
meeting the order would you please join me in a pledge of the flag then remain standing for a moment of silence I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible liberty and justice for all please keep in your thoughts this evening representative Frank Moran a graduate of the school lost his father last week and also the men and women protecting us around the world and thank you very much when you have a moment could you call the role for the purpose of attendance Miss Fitzgerald yeah Miss tisler Mr Hayden Mr cirilla miss Mama Mr taubox Mr LaMontagne here okay minutes from March we have two sets of minutes here don't forget the others are in front of you through the March 28th minutes have a motion on those please discussion all those in favor and you want to post okay the April 3rd Special meeting of April 3rd the minutes of April 3rd can I have a motion on those please she said you put them out there you have them they're in the book okay I have a motion on minutes of April 3rd please discussion all those in favor I suppose opposed could you uh call the roll when you have a moment please top box the minutes of April 3rd the special meeting that we had last Tuesday last Monday sorry Miss Fitzgerald yes Miss disler yes yes Mr Hayden yes yes Mr Cirillo Mr LaMontagne yes okay uh this is the Stefano could we get a cash balance report please cash balance report as of April 4th 2023 the account balance on March 21st 2023 was 851 707.15 we had deposits from March 22nd to April 4th of 3 million 308 948.74 less payroll on March 23rd of 1179.84 payroll on March 30th of 1 million ten thousand eight fifty two fifty six less warrant number 36 on March 20 on March 22nd of sixty four thousand sixty two dollars and want number 37 on March 29th of one million three hundred and forty thousand nine eighty two forty leaves us with a book balance on April 4th of 579.09 and the corresponding bank balance on the same day of 3 million 423 430 27 in our mmdt account the account balance on March 21st was 11 million 331 372 spot 43 year-to-date interest was 206 796.01 uh um leaving us with a balance of 11 million 538 168 44 and interest for March of 46 000 894.65.
the meeting is open and the live stream has started good evening everyone Welcome to our Tuesday April 11 2023 meeting of the Azusa Unified School District governing board tonight's meeting is a regular meeting and a study session the time is now 5 29.
um I'm just here today to talk to you all about the walkout that we had today at Adams City High School um we were raising awareness against gun violence as well as other issues in our community um and here I am today to ask you guys um to work with students um to improvise our lockdown standards um I know we had an incident earlier this year and it kind of fell on students and staff um and so I just want to work with our board to improve those lockdowns so our teachers don't have to worry about their students and our students don't have to worry about their safety so I'm just here to raise awareness of course I've set out those posters that we had today and I really want to thank the board for allowing this to occur and for supporting our students today and so yeah thank you very much thank you so much thank you thank you uh next Christy Douglas please join us the podium good evening everyone thank you for allowing me to speak and uh I am here to recognize Aaliyah he just spoke because she had the fourth rate thinking to organize the the walk out today and to recognize that we have a crisis with gun violence our own family has had that experience with our daughter being a teacher at Hinckley High School where there was a shooting in the parking lot we spent that entire afternoon we were on a tour for CDOT and we were not able to leave wouldn't have done us any good to go over there anyway however we spent the whole afternoon being traumatized and terrorized by knowing that our daughter was crawling on the floor across a classroom trying to figure out how best to protect her kids in that classroom teachers are teachers not because of the money they are teachers because they love kids and they want to protect them but how can they be in a position of being able to protect them when they're they're always worried about how that could happen at any minute and that the circumstances are always going to be different and that they're going to have to be thinking about how to protect those kids in those different circumstances and so for this Brave young woman who happens to be on our Karma City youth commission which I am the council one of the council Representatives along with council member Craig Kim I was the council rep for one year by myself no one else would step up to the plate and then when councilman member Kim was appointed he he joined me and it's been wonderful having him and and being able to learn from these incredible students who are our future we have to figure out some way to stop this madness and we all have to work together stop the hate if you hear someone remotely speaking in a vicious manner please stand up to them and and stop them if you see suspicious Behavior please stand up and put a stop to it we all have to work together these kids are our future and I want to thank you Alia for being the person that you are and being such a fearless leader thank you well thank you all for um being brave and coming this evening we don't normally respond to a public comment but I hope we stick around for the rest of the meeting and um hopefully board members will have something to say um next on the agenda is 5.1 superintendent Lydia's updates I'm Dr Lauria yes um thank you madam president members of the board whoops okay members of the board I I do have a couple of things on my updates and one of them actually was um the workout today or walk in I um was there this this afternoon when it happened and I just want to Echo you know the things that have been shared about the leadership of our students I was so proud and I am so proud of our of our leaders of Elijah and um just um to see our very gifted students demonstrate and bring awareness of something that they care about in such an organized and professional manner so this is what Global Citizens look like this is what a great communicators look like this is what critical thinkers look like and um so I do I just want to say also I know many of you were there actually all of you most of you were there and you were able to witness it but we will continue working with the students we will continue working with families and staff to really rethink how we do in and envision safety because it's no longer physical safety is emotional safety it is cyber safety it is also physical safety so thank you Aliyah Aliyah for for your leadership definitely we're talking about on cabinet how the district is going to be you know her district and you know all the students that we are we have in our schools in 20 30 years so certainly if the Future Leaders look anything like our students we're going to be in a much better place in 30 years I'm just saying because they were phenomenal the other thing that I wanted to give an update to you and the community I was invited by two national organizations knapsby is the National Alliance for black student schools Association and also Alaska Association of Latino administrators and superintendents to go to Washington DC and participate in a congressional briefing address I there were 100 superintendents invited Nationwide they were hand selected Nationwide and out of the 100 superintendents five were selected to actually provide an address in you know two Congressional staff I was one of them uh and I was very uh proud there just representing our narrative our story uh we had five as I said there were five superintendents including Miami-Dade Arlington Public Schools they were superintendents from Arizona there were 21 states represented and this is the first time since the Inception of the Nazi and the alas organizations to actually come together with one voice so this was a huge deal soon after two days later we had been invited also by the National Association National School Board Association to also do a presentation to tell our narrative and our story and we were there you you were there as we had been invited to go and present for for our district so we are changing The Narrative of our students we are working very hard to ensure that students like Elijah have a a different opportunity just because of how or what people will know us for and that is for um you know having lots of linguistically gifted students who will be a new a new breed of leaders that are well needed so the other thing I wanted to share is we are having work sessions for our parents Spanish-speaking parents specifically through parida this is something that the community had come to me several times actually before I got here I remember almost I would say now two years ago and I I was doing some research about the district before you know to go through the process of the superintendent search and remember looking at watching videos of parents asking for this kind of support and I'm telling you this two three years old already and that was not happening and they we started already we are partnering with them so paridad will be having sessions for um for our parents to really Empower our parents on how to ask questions at the schools how to advocate for their students understanding the the educational system to ensure that their students have also opportunities for um for you know studies After High School so the date is going to be from April 8th through May the 13th is going to happen on Saturdays from 9 to 12 30 p.m and 9 in the morning to 12 30.
it's a 30-year franchise this is pretty traditional in the field in fact in Michigan most franchises are 30 years it's a traditional franchise largely governing the rights of way it expires in 2027 but also in Michigan the franchises are revocable at will unless they go to a vote of the people and a vote of the people can allow them to extend beyond 30 years but that's rarely done because things change right and 30 years is a lot a lot of time so we're going to get the best deal you can and then you you go about your business no I do also want to point out that in Michigan you must have a franchise to provide a utility service in a second I'll talk about some of the research we've been doing on our side there are parts of the country right now that have continued having Utility Services while still negotiating an expired franchise that would not be legal in Michigan so we must have a franchise to provide a given service and we are very very interested in looking to integrate our residence desires for Clean safe healthy affordable and reliable heat into any future franchise and I have franchises because we are open to lots of different Pathways for how we can achieve these goals of Clean safe healthy affordable Reliable Heating for our residents and I'm going to use the word heating but I want to name heating it's truly what we're talking about here if you think about you heat your food you eat your home you heat your water okay so that's sorry that's a framework we'll stick with on this so just quickly in terms of what we've done today we have been uh reviewing a lot of City franchises especially newer franchises and franchises from peer cities that have similarly aggressive climate and Equity goals we've spoken to a number of our peers around the nation so certainly we've read the materials that they have but we've also talked to them about their experience why they chose to do what they did how they negotiated for what they did the kind of the rationale and their thinking we certainly reviewed Ann Arbor's previous franchise and you can find that actually if you're interested it's listed online um and then we started speaking internally with our other staffs about opportunity for improvement right so thinking about the folks that work in the rights of way what what's working really really well right now in terms of coordination and what's not and where are there opportunities for refinement uh and then we have continued to look at and start talking to other utilities that are doing really aggressive uh things around affordability safety health and climate action to understand kind of the heating solutions that they're pursuing and then you know this Council adopted a resolution a few weeks ago directing the city administrator to begin negotiating a new franchise uh importantly that franchise and that resolution is agnostic to the provider of the service but reiterates the goals and the objectives we also launched a website that we're keeping up to date as we're finding more information and you can see that and we have launched an email address to start Gathering feedback and we have received some feedback from residents it's franchise feedback at 82gov.org where we're just looking for residence ideas they're concerns uh what they're hopeful for in terms of what a franchise looks like what they want to make sure that we're thinking about we're seeing some stories of individuals their lived experience and what they want to make sure that we're very intentional about addressing as we move forward in this process so this is the last kind of talking thing I'm going to put out there this slide and the next slide just has some general seating questions this is generative only please don't take this there's anything other than that but the idea as we looked across all these other franchises and we've been thinking about the goals that we have in the community some of the things that we've started talking about are negotiating around contract length certainly the rights of way how people operate the communications in that system finding alternative sources of heating such as District geothermal or network geothermal systems having deeper Energy Efficiency programs creating new low income programs enhancing safety gas is not an inherently safe system so what are we going to do to make sure that we have safety improvements working on air quality and health enhancements price stabilization right we've seen fluctuations over the last two years in terms of our Energy prices what can we do in that space a greater accountability greater transparency into how things operate coordination or and of course climate action so these are some of the variables I just want to put forward as you're as you're starting to think and now I'm going to be quiet I'm not meant to answer questions in this session as you can probably tell I don't think my voice could take much more I'm just going to start taking notes but these are up here just to kind of get you thinking um so chairman I think I'll turn it over to you and I'm going to grab a pen and paper thank you missy so um I think that's really an excellent Framing and one that leaves things wide open for uh our input and for discussion and that's exactly what we wanted to do tonight and I think I can safely say since uh this is a process that is likely to take a couple of years that um just because you don't say something tonight that doesn't mean that you can't raise a point next week or next month or potentially even next year so keep that in mind and I'm sure that we will be as a commission as well as the city and as well as any maybe support resources we're using we'll be looking at developments in this field across the country so that we'll we're able to use those lessons learns and best practices here so um with that said um I'd like to open things up for comments and discussion Council or commissioner Macomber I'm um curious to know how much leverage we have um have other cities have been able to exercise leverage to um achieve some of these goals through their franchise negotiations so I'll take that question but I really don't mean to have a q a right now I'm not going to be my voice isn't going to take it I'm sorry so um I'll just share that yes they have and there's that's why we pointed to some other examples happy to come back with more yeah that's good so what we'll do here is um where where it's appropriate and possible we're just going to capture these points and um the city has a website uh as was shown and so hopefully some of these questions Missy maybe uh I maybe we can just say that um I can't remember if there's an FAQ I think there is is there FAQ already there and we we do point to some other cities so right um explicitly right with with that in mind let's let's take this as an opportunity to add questions that could be addressed on the FAQ not only for our purposes but also to inform the general public so um commissioner Smith okay thank you uh yeah so certainly um a great starting point in terms of uh you know ideas to consider as part of uh you know franchise here uh I'd be interested and totally understood that this uh you know answered me uh need to be forthcoming um but if you could share the outcomes um of the peer City review and any learnings um in that process to uh you know help us potentially leverage this opportunity to not only further decarbonization goals but provide uh you know clean safe uh reliable energy um uh here I think that may be helpful if if at all possible um and then I think we could provide you know be able to let better lovers out to provide more specific recommendations in terms hmm thank you commissioner McKenna thank you um first of all thank you so much Missy for being here and for sharing this with us it means a lot to me that we kind of get to um to look at it together first before it really goes out um to the broader audience and I look forward to participating along the way um I want to share a couple of of things that come to mind um you know having worked in um kind of uh I guess policy strategy not specifically in policy but in strategy like I mentioned uh previously in my work with Massachusetts cities and towns that were um trying to ban Natural Gas there was an effort there and I know that that Missy may be already looking to this but there was an effort there in Massachusetts because of actually a natural gas explosion that occurred I believe it was in 2017.
is that what it is been yes that'll be new number six under action items is there anything else for the agenda without any objection I'll move to approve with that change is there is there a second second by Miss Anna Marie Stevens go ahead Ben [Music] okay with that we'll continue number two is our approval of the March 8 2023 regular board meeting minutes um or without any objection we'll go ahead and approve as well uh March 28 2023 special board meeting a motion to approve is there a second second by Miss Anna Marie Stevens all those in favor of the motion watchable thank you number four is our call to the audience for the record we have no call to the audience this evening will continue with our agenda letter e is our information items number one is the barbecue Unified School District students of the month uh superintendent Diaz president via members of the board members of the community um [Music] hmm it is and it's a pleasure to be serving it on our Autumn Community as the superintendent and at this point I would like my principal for the primary school to present to the podium students from the primary and if you are the student of the month for the primary please go forward and I'm gonna need your support in coming up here uh in front um right behind me so you can go up the staircase Primary students of the month please come up foreign take it away um good evening governing board president buendia governing board members superintendent Diaz um I don't know if she's here at pre-k Leah rain cloud are you here not Alex Alex Reyna not here sorry okay for first grade he is here his name or he was nominated by Miss Black he is in the house of isabindi um Alexander Juan was nominated for student of the month because he works hard in the classroom he is always in class on time and ready to learn Alexander has sharpened his skills in all areas in ela math and reading Alexander has become a great role model he follows directions quickly he has a great friend to all he is kind and patient Alexander is one of the group leaders and does his job with passion when he grows up Alexander wants to be a firefighter congratulations Alexander [Applause] very nice yeah [Applause] for second grade we have from Mr Health's class also from the house of Issa Bindi is Jaden Pablo [Applause] Jaden is a model student for all the following reasons Jaden quietly cares for his fellow students in many roles and is well thought of among his classmates Jaden is a very polite kind and thoughtful young man Jaden is always ready to come to the aid of his fellow students in their time of need Jaden has been in Mr Health's homeroom student in his homeroom class as his Tech Helper and takes on the self-appointed role of door holder class Helper and any jobs he finds were a little more help and support is needed as one of the stronger students in Reading Ela and math we often asked Jaden to help us as a small group and assist other students who need extra support consequently he is highly thought of as a class leader and supporter among his teachers and peers Jaden you are a vital member of the class and it is a pleasure and honor that you are nominated as March 2023 second grade student of the month [Applause] when he grows up he does want to join the United States Navy and help bring peace and protection to our world [Applause] our third grade students is Nayana Escalante [Applause] Nayana is in Miss Jackson's class and she belongs to the house of alturismo she has exceeded her goals in all areas in ela math writing and reading fluency she is currently in a 4.1 in SFA which is fourth grade reading and continues to score above proficient in her assessments she is a joy and it is honored to have her in my class congratulations Nana [Applause] and our final student of the month is Talia Ochoa she was nominated by our court our second grade culture teacher Mrs Francisco she is in the house of Revere Miss Francisco has observed Talia over several months and she has grown academically she has always been of help to miss Francisco in the classroom she is a role model for the Autumn language and values without being boastful she is always willing to help out her classmates if they need help with the language Talia is her go-to person in the classroom when she was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up it took her several days to think about this question and her decision on this question is she wants to be an awesome excuse me a person that heals others with her gift and healing powers Miss Francisco is encouraged by her decision because a person so young rarely thinks that becoming a medicine person congratulations thank you [Applause] very good and then just checking did Alex or Leah walk in no all right I will turn it over to intermediate campus good evening I'm Miss leyba I'm the assistant principal at the intermediate campus and this evening I am representing Miss Begay Lewis as she is out of town today so do we have any of our student of the month from intermediate one and a couple of the teachers were here that would like to present Mr Flores is tubalia come on up I'd like to present Mr Flores who will be presenting the award for his fourth grade student foreign Diaz school principals teachers staff parents Guardians and Learners fourth grade teacher of Walt Georgi Intermediate School I have the honor of introducing to you the March 4th grade student of the month this student maintains an admirably high rate of attendance and has made significant academic progress across the board his kindness openness dependability optimism and sense of responsibility in school and at home as he openly discussed what he does before going to school I mean he returns home helped his family in his straightforward style amazed me and further convinced me of examination his laudable aim is to one day build homes for the homeless so that no one will have to leave industry without comfort and safety friends it gives me great pleasure to introduce Casey Manuel as a fourth grade student of the month with proud ma'am is Tanya sudam and family true [Applause] game Miss Hannah I am very thrilled and excited to present to you uh the sixth grade student of the month Miss Alexandria Birdsall Alexandria is the daughter of Mr Carl Birdsall and her very own faculty member Mrs narissa Birdsall Alexandria tops every test that we do may it be Ela Math Science Social Studies School City test and fingers crossed the state test she has a positive attitude towards learning as she is driven and motivated on wanting to know more and wanting to learn more she learns fast and each day she comes to school with a grin on her her's face and willingness to learn and improve she consistently shows respect to both her peers and the teachers and her manners give always impress me and I'm glad to be her teacher and when I asked Alexandria how will you make the world a better place she wrote I would make the world a better place by wasting less water and picking up trash even though it may not be yours because it might get stuck on bird and animals who will try to eat it that's Alexandria's selfless and kind help me welcome on stage Miss Alexandria bird cell and with her dad on the audience um thank you very much [Applause] thank you okay the next student do we have savior Romero here yet or thailana Pablo no okay I will um quickly read what Mr Cody wrote for savior Romero who is his student of the month savior Romero comes to us from big fields he is an excellent student who is very polite to his fellow classmates and is very helpful in the third quarter savior has shown great Improvement in mathematics and science savior has improved his vocabulary and math skills and fractions and when asked how he can make a better the world a better place he said I will be generous and finally um Miss olumba has chosen thailana Pablo thailana is a representation of respect in no way or fashion have I ever seen her not be respectful whether it's in library or during the brief time in teaching the math class that she was in she is considerate of others and herself she never has an attitude and she is always willing to help she is attentive and very polite when asked how she would make the world a better place she said she would like to give the homeless a place to live thank you good evening board president buendia governing board members and Mr Diaz I am proud to present our secondary students of the month and for seventh grade I'd like to call up Soraya Anton Soraya are you here the seventh grade team names named Soraya Antonis a March student of the month Soraya is the daughter of Diana Antone and Shaylin Patricio her home Village is tapawa in Baba kivre District Soraya is a good student with excellent attendance she is also an athlete playing both basketball and softball with the Lady Cougars her favorite class is thought Anthem history with Miss Martin because Miss Martin is awesome and Soraya likes to learn about culture and himathe after graduating from BHS Soraya plans on going to college she's currently considering a career in medicine or law the people that Soraya most greatly admired admires are her uncle Merle Anton and her brother Devin Antoine because they push her to follow the right path and do what is right she is grateful for them congratulations Soraya [Applause] our eighth grade student of the month is Alize wieger are you here Alize is a student of the month for eighth grade Alice's Guardians are Miriam and Damon Ramon her home Village is in sales District Alison is a strong student with good attendance who turns in her work on time she is an athlete too playing basketball for the Lady coovers Cougars and serving as manager for the lady cougar softball team her favorite class is Donald Trump culture with Miss Martin because it's interesting and fun after graduating she plans to go to college and play basketball her dream career is to play in the WNBA for the Memphis Grizzlies one person Alison greatly admires is her Grandpa Lester Lopez because he always took care of her and continues to push her to be her best congratulations Alize keep clean our freshman student of the month cyan Francisco come on up sure all right cyan Francisco is the Freshman Class student in the month for March cyan's parents are Christopher Francisco Francisco and Marion Toro his home Village is coma Bobby instructor District cyan is an excellent student with very strong attendance he participates in sports with his classmates in PE um cyan and Joyce's online classes with Miss Long his love for online learning has deepened because of this class he also likes Automotive class because he learns through Hands-On activities according to Mr Francisco he and cyan have done a few auto repairs cyan is very focused on finishing and passing all of his classes this year he is working hard in creating sex success every day congratulations Siam you're ready yes [Applause] all right if Christopher Pablo gem Roque and Malachi Chavez are here can you please come line up at the uh stairway please all right our sophomore class student of the month is Christopher Pablo [Applause] Christopher Pablo's parents are Carmella and Milton Pablo his home Village is San Miguel in Chicago District Christopher is a very strong student with excellent attendance his favorite class is art with Miss roach because it's very relaxing his favorite teacher is Mr saligan because he gets the job done but is not too serious after graduating from Baba Kiri High School Christopher plans to go to college but where is still an option an open question his career goals are also open but Christopher is interested in learning about psychology if Christopher had a superpower it would be teleportation because he likes to travel and see the world you're doing a wonderful job Christopher congratulations [Applause] our junior class student of the month is Gem Roque she is the daughter of Joseph D Roque and cherisel Roque her hometown is Bacolod City in Negros Occidental region in Philippines she is an outstanding student with excellent attendance in addition to her academics she is involved in extracurriculars as well she is the secretary of the yearbook club and serves as the manager for the lady Warriors softball team when asked if when asked if she has any favorite classes or teachers Jen says that she enjoys all her classes and teachers equally after graduating from Bobby keevery high school she plans on going to college to and studying medicine her current career goal is to become a Dermatologist one person that Jim greatly admires mid Myers is her older brother Charles Roque she looks up to him because he is a great leader in example congratulations Jim [Applause] and our senior student of the month is Malachi Chavez Malachi is the son of Aaron Chavez and Elena Andrews his home Village is San Luis in guachi District Malachi is a strong student with outstanding attendance he is active in Wyda playing six different instruments in the BSC wide event he is also a member of Biden a traditional white of hand he made with his friends his favorite class is Wida and his favorite teachers are Mr Enriquez Miss Lopez and Mr Hooten after graduating in May Malachi plans on attending college and studying to become a systems administrator the people that Malachi admires the most are his parents because they helped him to know right from wrong taught him so much about the world and always pushed himself that pushed him to be his best self we are proud of you Malachi congratulations [Applause] thank you I just got word that Alize has arrived in the building Alize can you come up our eighth grade student of the month is Alize Weger her Guardians are Miriam and Damon Ramon her home Village's cells she is a strong student with good attendance who turns in her work on time she is an athlete too playing basketball for the Lady Cougars and serving as a manager for the lady cougar softball team her favorite class of final Anthem culture with Miss Martin because it's interesting and fun after graduating she plans to go to college and play basketball her dream career is to play in the WNBA for the Memphis Grizzlies one person Alize greatly admires is her Grandpa Lester Lopez because he always took care of her and continues to push her to be her best keep up the good work Alize congratulations [Applause] just a smile thank you all right and I will pass it off to Mr Fox with BBQ re-accelerated Academy [Applause] congratulations young lady good evening everybody good to see you we'll only need that one uh my name is Barry Fox I am the principal of the accelerated campus next to intermediate our sister campus and for seventh grade we have a student that we're going to recognize tonight not only because he's an outstanding online student but his circumstances and how he came to us was quite different him and his family experience their house burning down he and his family experienced their house on fire so he's been living The Sweet Life in Tucson for the past month and a half I say that because they're living in a hotel right now but his name is Daniel Rivas and what the Neo has done in that time that he's been with us is 96 activities that's pretty impressive for him coming from secondary where he was very successful where he will be going back but he Blended in so smoothly into the online program that we were just so proud of him for doing that we had to recognize him so I hope you're listening Mr Rivas congratulations [Applause] okay Jessica make your way down here come on Jess [Applause] so for the high school our student of the month is Miss Jessica Puella she could have been student of the month every single month if if that were permissible um just this month she did 288 activities and I know it's too late to correct my board report a record break corrected me in the past she has done more than that in a month uh Jessica is the type of students who work she works all day then she goes home and we see Edgenuity that she's been doing it from three o'clock in the morning until 5 30 until she gets back to school she is an amazing wonderful beautiful young person who's gonna be going to tocc in the summer and starting her college career we are just so proud of this young lady okay [Applause] they want some pictures come on [Music] yes uh first I want to say because isabindi had the most students of the month I think they deserve a house point [Music] did it not yeah excellent I just like to do that because he likes to talk about Amistad all the time so I just wanted to set up but thank you so much um for the evening uh again this is the best part of our whole agenda it is to recognize the achievements and the and the greatness that is our students thank you so much to all of our families our our supporters everyone who helps these kids get up every day and who gives them the encouragement and to the students themselves who encourage themselves from time to time the motivation is definitely there and we're hopeful and grateful to be able to help support that thank you on behalf of the barbecue governing board we'll go ahead and take a break at this time to allow for pictures and mingling in the in the foyer but other than that we'll take a break thank you there was like this really huge one and it was very I got to go inside and actually uh kind of move around the mechanics and actually know um a lot about the Flames um it was very hot that day I had to buy a hat because I didn't bring one um I think out of all the people that went it was a very fun experience and actually getting to see the Thunderbirds that was a very cool experience thank you [Applause] um I would like to speak about the BHS alumni visits a student council has been recently inviting BHS alumni back onto campus it's been nice hearing from BHS graduates they've shared with us their experiences in high school and in college so far we had three presenters Leilani Jose who is an architect major from the University of Arizona Susie Garcia is a recent graduate of the University of Arizona who majored in criminal justice and hanum Garcia who will graduate this may from the University of Arizona with her Bachelor's in criminal justice we're looking forward to welcoming more alumni back onto campus during the month of March we also recognized our student students for their accomplishments for the third quarter after the ceremony student council provided popcorn for the students and their families we are so proud of the all student Award winners [Applause] hello hello my name is Uriah Lewis I am a freshman at barbecuebrew high school and we would also on behalf of student council would like to thank superintendent Diaz with being able to make time to come with our Twitter to our monthly meetings with student council we would also like to give a big thanks to the our board members for making time and to come to student council and to visit around the campus and another thing is the on May 5th there will be a basketball tournament against all four houses isabindi River Amistad and altruismo in the basketball tournament at the primary on May 5th is there any questions president I just want to take a moment to give a big shout out to our student council leaders our young leaders and I'm going to need everyone so please help me to recognize him and give him a big hand not for a couple of things number one I'm very impressed at the amount of activities that you guys organize every single month number two having to stay in front of the audience and having to prepare it's a skill and it's a skill that you're gonna take with you forever um as as scary as you may seem you did a wonderful phenomenal job I want you to know that I'm very proud of you thank you anything else on the board anything else Anna yes thank you thank you for inviting us to your campus it was a great experience to be there and also to honor the seniors that were gonna be that are going to be graduating and just sharing that information I had a good time playing the games and the questions you asked will explain [Music] um I had so much fun that day it was really fun and to be able to witness one of your meetings and um and see how you all were involved in that meeting it was really good to see and I'm so happy that you guys are able to come and be a part of our board meetings because it is going to help you in the long run and um I'm looking at you um you when you said that um you were scared before and now you're okay and it shows it shows you guys are really stepping up and and moving forward and I'm really glad and can't wait to see next month Miss Hendrix hi I just wanted to um say that I'm sorry that I had to miss your uh your luncheon or your lunch meeting I actually got sick that week and unfortunately I was kind of kind of really disappointed that I wasn't going to be able to attend but I did get a lot of positive um uh comments from other board members on how well your meeting went and all the accomplishments that you're doing all the activities that you're doing I think they're really great and I think that uh if you continue doing this I think you will build the best morale around here on your campus thank you thank you thank you to the board members thank you guys so much it is definitely a truly an honor to have you present I think that it's it's something we we genuinely have tried to push for so I'm really glad that you guys are stepping up and willing to come out and getting a little bit more comfortable so trust me trust me it doesn't get as easier but the more your practice is at it um it starts to get a little bit better so thank you okay number three is our Barbecue University president superintendent news president and at this point I would like to um ask Mr Martinez and Mr Dan to come up to the podium we have um a couple of awards that we would like to present today and it's on honor for special guest to be here today to receive those Awards so Mr Martinez and Miss Sudan please come up thank you good evening president board uh buendia's board members superintendent Diaz um I would like to congratulate Miss uh Roque uh she's our ESS teacher for the uh intermediate campus she has been doing an exemplary job within this month in regards to our ESS compliances as well as physical agendas and preparedness in regards to our services so big congratulations to uh Mr okay and um just an added Point uh we are currently working on our ESS parental surveys so big shout out to Mr okay for having 100 of those uh completed surveys being done so thank you thank you for your domination Mr Martinez um at this point if you don't mind presenting your nominations thank you good evening again I'd like to call up Dr Francis Dr Karen Francis Begay and Martha Lee from The University of Arizona [Applause] um I nominated them for the hematic award because we've been working closely with them for the last several months to develop a dual enrollment program that would allow our students to experience Student Life at the University level this plan has come with logistical challenges but Dr Francis Begay and Miss Lee have always been Solutions minded to eliminate as many barriers as possible as a part of building up this collaboration we planned a college tour so students could begin to gain familiarity with the campus and begin to Envision themselves as students the college visit was specifically designed for our Bobby high school students students learned about admission financial aid and housing they were connected to valuable student resources that supported indigenous students such as the Native American students of student affairs where they met other Anthem college students and participated in an activity with a mentor program called native soar the day concluded with a self-guided tour and a women's basketball game and and we showed those highlights in last month's board video the work that Dr Francis Begay and Miss Lee did to provide our students this opportunity went above and beyond our expectations and it was evident that students enjoyed themselves and began to picture themselves as future Wildcats so I'd really like to thank them for their support [Applause] congratulations and they're asking for permission to share a couple of words president and if they want to come up as well for the picture foreign good evening I'm Dr Karen Francis Begay assistant Vice Provost for Native American initiatives and happy to be joined by my colleague Martha Lee who is a program coordinator in our office we just really had a wonderful time organizing this visit for the students in support of us being able to help them Envision college and see themselves at the University of Arizona Wednesday leave barbecue free high school we do have a special gift for the principal sudam as well as the board and administration so when the students were at the basketball game we had a professional photographer who took a group picture of the students Juniors and seniors down on the basketball court students were really excited to be on the court but also to meet some of the basketball women basketball players as well as some of the former basketball players that are now in the WNBA who were there for that night's game so just lots of excitement but we have the image blown up had the title put on it and so there's two copies here and just want to leave that with the district and with the school thank you [Applause] please come back to the middle so we can take an interview with the awards [Music] um [Music] foreign [Music] just as a quick announcement I know especially for the hemlock award and the recognitions I really am grateful whenever we have anyone who is recognized especially for that honor I think it's important to be able to recognize Community Partners and individuals within the within our within our district that are definitely being able to um provide whatever your assistance or or encouragement especially for our students so thank you so much to everyone and and to those that are nominating please do continue to nominate as much as possible I think it's important to address and acknowledge those individuals as much as possible so thank you thank you superintendo Diaz Mr Martinez I miss you Dan appreciate it number four this evening is a presentation by Miss Vivian Saunders thank you [Music] uh Sanders um school school board good evening school board members um chairman bendia superintendent Diaz and recognize Mr sabala for assisting me through this process and it's really an honor to be here and thank you for providing me the time uh this evening I have April 12th uh all right I thought the meeting was tomorrow but so um would like to um first of all state that I am here for two reasons I want to present to you um my dissertation outline I am also a student learning as lifelong and also to make a request of the school board and leave it to you to to decide um at the end of the presentation and I'm more than welcome or happy to return if you have additional questions in the future I'm a member of the Donald commission from which is that's south of here and I'm also a proud graduate of Bobby caver High School class of 1977 when the high school was in sales at the middle school I'm very um heartfelt to to see all of the awards for Senate this evening and all of the recognition and all of the wonderful work that the school is doing for um all students within our nation currently I'm enrolled at Grand Canyon University College of doctoral studies in organizational leadership I'm a EDD candidate and I began my program in the fall of 2020 and that was at the height of the pandemic and this kept me saying um to be honest and I um I want to acknowledge my husband Richard who's here this evening um been very supportive throughout this journey um I have a master of arts degree from the University of Arizona in American Indian studies and public policy and Bachelor of Arts of Education from Arizona State University the purpose of tonight's presentation is to update the school board on the research study and to request permission and assistance by notifying school students who completed College and Career Readiness program from 2018 to 2021 to contact myself if they are interested in participating in the research study the research study itself the title of my dissertation is how American Indian and Alaska native students perceive College and Career Readiness programs the methodology is qualitative descriptive design and I wanted to um just Express that this type of research generates data that describes the who what and where of events or experiences from a subjective perspective and it's a citation Kim at l2027.
and so these where the funds are being derived any questions I'm happy to answer no questions I I did have a question about the 2000 but that you answered that so all right so can we have a recommendation to approve item 2.7 Chuck a second from Margaret all in favor that looks a lot unanimous okay item 3.1 this superintendent recommends it's a government board approve the proposed resolution to receive financial assistance under disaster The Disaster Relief act you want to explain you explained to me what this is absolutely important for those that are listening and we've applied for some covid funding um last year and is it in the amount of about thirty thousand dollars where it it's probably a long shot to get it but we still want to try and so in order for us to be considered we have to have this resolution posted and passed it by the board as it is reflected on this agenda any questions in regard to that so can we have a motion for item 3.1 to reflect this resolution I have a second from Diana all in favor at two's unanimous all right all right item 3.2 recommendation to approve Junior Leadership Academy the GLA um Dr Wright there again I'm turning it over to you and Jackie Solomon Vick he's here and I think shimles help us out with that Michael and Beth we'll turn the time over too the three of you thank you very much for having us Vicki Solomon with Nexus Coalition for drug prevention executive director and something really cool about this program this will be the 15th year for Blue Ridge for the junior Leadership Academy we also do one in White River and we have taught snowflake into their third year so we're trying to expand the program for the for those of you who don't know what Junior Leadership Academy is it's just a short-term program and we did a pilot program two years ago in Blue Ridge to do an after-school program and we met with the schimmels and we as a group decided that the after school program was actually more beneficial and easier on the students and the parents and so we have switched the summer program for Blue Ridge to to an after-school program so we've been doing the after school program for the last two years and we plan on doing that again in May first through 12th right May 1 through 12th and so we just wanted to come and the schimmels have created a short three-minute video for you to watch what went on last year for the after school program and if you don't mind we'll take that three minutes and watch that and then I'll have the channel speak for just a minute foreign [Music] super serious programs you can tell we don't have a whole lot of fun with this at all we're watching those I'm just going to read some things that the kids are getting out of the program it's self-awareness through social skills and learning style and development self-advocacy physical fitness Community collaboration life skills leadership responsibility choices positive decision making and problem solving team building and collaborating and networking goal setting life skills and career exposures drug abuse prevention and awareness including a parent education components community service integrating career and life tasks foreign [Music] foreign [Music] excellent so you know the last several years have been really hard on everybody and it's been especially hard on our youth and we've got a lot of mental health challenges and I feel that Junior Leadership Academy addresses some of those and what brings more joy than laughter for these kids and I believe that these kids that go through the program this is something that 40 years from now they're going to remember the junior Leadership Academy and they're going to remember the shimmels so I'm going to turn some time over to them oh hi everybody hey Diana I haven't seen you in a while good senior um you know all I'll say is looking back over the video I was just thinking about how much easier that has made this teaching year a lot of those kids were fourth graders uh last year when we had them and then we get them after having spent those two weeks with them and the relationship that's already there it was easy to build on this year and then watching some of those kids are sitting there looking at the Roseman kid zip and a class and the kids amazing but I don't know if I would have guessed on that last year but the time we spent with the kids getting them to interact with each other that I don't know the last couple years of covet I think smashed some kids really hard and it was really sad to see so getting the kids to work together getting them in front of some old people no you guys uh but we're going to take them down to soltera and see some people even older than you own and uh and uh you know have them interview these these folks and talk to them about their life we're going to have people come in and talk to them about making good choices you know of course super important and and you know the thing that blows me away every year is these kids after these simple two weeks together and some of them say it's the best thing I ever did and it just blows my mind and even even to the point of they they can't wait for the food we give them but it's it's helpful how tough it is for some of these kids so um anyways let's thank you very very much the shimmels are fantastic I told them I wish I had a coffee machine so we can put them throughout the whole Navajo County because we we need more shimbals to do what they do so thank you very much if you guys have any questions we're happy to answer anything about the junior Leadership Academy yeah I guess could you elaborate on the criteria you use to select kids for this program absolutely so most importantly our teachers are with those kids every single day so it's a combination of the teachers the principals and the parents and we look for kids that are struggling could be academically it could be emotionally could be some physical whatever the struggles are that they just need just a little bit of TLC and those are the kids that we're looking for those aren't the only ones in the program we we have found through trial and error we want to have mentors that are in the program as well so that we have kiddos that are sending example for those that are struggling and it seems to work very well when we have that combination and even if you're a breathing human being right now you're gonna you're having struggles so any you that get into the program I think it's going to help and just move them up a level thank you I just my only regret is Mike and Beth didn't have 12 kids yeah that'd have been nice and Greg and Amy too if he'd had 24 schimel kids and we still had them in school it'd be awesome yeah year two of your your youngest one of your youngest sons and your nephew moved me in almost nine years ago and they were gentlemen and so they're a great reflection of both of you thank you for what you do gonna miss you oh [Laughter] [Music] maybe with all your free time you can cut my grass I'm just kidding thank you thank you can we have a recommendation for item 3.2 which is to approve the junior Leadership Academy for another year I have a motion and a second all in favor that again unanimous Dr Wright we're going to turn some time over to you for a district update absolutely the first thing I want to do is just highlight a couple of things that was shared with the board that I don't know if I know I know the board knows I know most the people in the audience know but I don't think you can say it enough do you recognize the regret the gravity of having two young women accepted into Elite military academies two years in a row from 650 kids we have amazing students outstanding teachers and we do that this is not Xavier or Brophy prep we're not in the middle of ala and a bunch of wealthy kids most of our kids are Middle America in fact 40 percent of our kids live below poverty it doesn't stop them it doesn't it doesn't reduce any of the efforts of our staff and faculty they pour themselves into helping these kids one of the kids that one of the students that received a full ride to Cornell his his brothers at Columbia it's not an accident schools that were were getting these kids into are tough schools to get into and so I'm very proud of these results I'm proud of our teachers I'm proud of our support staff or Administration it's not an accident it's hard work and in many cases it's years of hard work so the board should be proud of the product that we're putting out our community should be very proud we'll have our banners up on the fence again this year announcing the accomplishments of this class and the past and we we just we can't say enough good about what these kids are doing our young lady last year that is about Victorian she's at Brown University in the full ride getting into University at Berkeley you know University of California Berkeley and Stanford the year before that we had a full ride to Stanford these are really amazing kids and and we're we're loving we're proud of them thank you I'll get into the other report I want to announce this and make sure we have this on Facebook we only have two social media Outlets that's Blue Ridge that is branded and approved and authorized and that's Facebook and Twitter anything else irrespective of what you see is not ours if we do not do Tick Tock we don't have anything on Tick Tock we don't have anything on anything else but Facebook and Twitter we can't not be responsible for everything our kids post all 24 7.
also we had a first semester Awards assembly um great turnout lots of students to celebrate and I want to thank Mrs Cuevas Mr Nathan and our awesome support staff who shows up and works beyond the Call of Duty to make it all happen you'll see some pictures there of some of our kids so we're very very proud of your semester success Jazz fourth grade musical where are my fourth grade students do we have any in here fourth grade all right okay Mr Lane you wish um thank you this is valetti for another successful grade level musical our former University did an amazing job so we are very very proud of Miss valetti and what she's done this year featuring grade level musicals to highlight our kids parent advisory we had our last meeting and we decided to move our last meeting to April because may get super hectic for everybody um but we discussed our A-Plus School of Excellence application that you will hear more about because we are going to be putting together our application to be submitted in on Facebook will be reaching out to different community members parents and staff as well I also shared the state of College and Career Readiness at K-12 which is a report done by Zello where 122 teachers 27 leaders and seven counselors responded and the key findings were that 78 think that creating a sense of community is important or very important and successful College and Career ready at work and um that we have great Community involvement you know when we have our family nights our literacy nights our math nights um it truly is a community effort and when we think about all the community members that support fundamental through tax credit through donations um it's incredible so we are well on our way to attributing to this community also 55 of respondents felt strongly that Community Support was a key factor in helping students achieve future success and it was interesting because the top four indicators for Success Beyond High School were all around Community Support Workforce Readiness social emotional learning competencies and grades so when you think about our goal to produce well-rounded children who are College and Career ready grades was actually the fourth indicator right because a lot of times as parents and teachers we feel that sometimes the grades don't truly reflect the ability of our kids because we do know that our kids are good characters they are critical thinkers and sometimes it's not demonstrated in the grades that they receive so the report clearly supports and justifies our Avid efforts in College and Career Readiness and working closely um in Avid to close that opportunity gap for all students K-12 so we do have copies of the report if you'd like to see it board members you have it there in front of you and um we can actually scan this report into um a link in our next newsletter for you to have as well for reference okay National paraprofessional day we celebrated last week so just a huge thank you to all of our parapros our programmatic assistance and playground monitors and preschool parent Pros who work so hard to keep our students learning and providing the extra security and safety of our students and we truly do expect them to be the eyes and the ears of our cult family in terms of letting us know what's going on as teachers are busy teaching and focused on standards we depends a lot of non-parent Pros so I think I fried maybe 120 tacos for them on Thursday to come through and kids you can see they've made posters and cards for them that were very well appreciated by our parents so thank you boys and girls for helping us make that day special for them Transportation update congratulations to Tom and Josette for becoming our newest members of the Continental Transportation family also a state that transportation and software is being upgraded and will go live on 526 at the end of May so it is replacing our current software that we've had the new platform is supposed to be user-friendly and easier to navigate and Mr main is going to work through all the bugs and keys from me to get us ready for a great start in August and our staffing needs always we need five to six drivers to cover different routes and possibly a new special education route we have two candidates currently in pipeline so please keep your eyes and ears open also and send any potential drivers our way thank you have a great evening that concludes my report for this month all right thank you enough for the fun part of our meeting don't forget the pizza in the back um this is where we um recognize our cultivate with that Mr Lathan will kind of kick it off course and square us okay we can get all our tools of the month they're coming up we're going to start with preschooling the front the kids are first until I'm back all the way to 8th grade right now is everybody here parents were free to come and take pictures strip feel free to do that too Samuel kinder this is Lathan from our library our librarian nominated Samuel and she writes Samuel comes to the library each week ready to learn he brings his book almost every week and follows the rules he's a great leader in the library he's always following the directions sits quietly and is willing to be helpful whenever needed thank you Samuel for being such a great Library friend foreign so much in her behavior and has learned to be responsible by completing her assignments and staying on test she's nice and kind to her classmates she follows the safety rules in and out of the class she's one of the most improved students in our class this year and I'm very happy to teach her every day she's a great addition to our classroom congratulations foreign student she's kind and gentle with her friends and she's a wonderful helper Natalie happily gets her working and always is working at her best she participates in all of our activities and encourages others Natalie's always calm and positive presence in our class I feel so lucky to be her teacher congratulations Natalie foreign Miss Madness writes for the month of March I nominate Harper for being kind safe and responsible I catch her often being kind to others and always smiling she's safe and responsible with her own things in the classroom but more than that she's always there to help others and make sure to stay safe she shines bright in our class and on the school campus keep up the great work Harper congratulations my name's aren't you and I'm in first grade so our June teacher rights our June is a terrific student it has polite manners and is kind to teachers and students too our term uses all his school supplies and equipment correctly and safely every day he demonstrates responsibility when he completes his classwork and he's ready to learn our tune is responsible because he takes good care of his belongings and the materials he uses too thanks for being a good part of our classroom Arjun keep up the good work foreign [Music] Brooklyn is always ready to help her peers she's kind smart witty and an overall amazing student congratulations Brooklyn foreign [Music] Miss Jones writes Renata demonstrates kindness safety and responsibility every day she's inclusive of everyone she follows directions and stays focused on doing her best way to go Renata congratulations foreign [Music] rapes Giovanna has been an exceptional student this month and has made the best efforts in class and outside of the classroom she's been considerate of the classroom rules that makes her very safe kind of responsible when it comes to her actions towards the teacher and her classmates Giovanna has proven to be on testing class and she shows kindness to others when they've been hurt congratulations foreign Isabella is an exceptional young lady she gives her best effort in the tasks we accomplish in class Isabella treats her peers with kindness she's a great example of a continental cult congratulations thank you [Applause] Foundation my name is Landon and I'm in sixth grade softball one of our Middle School teachers writes Landon joined Continental School at the beginning of the second semester in just a few days Langdon demonstrated that he was very kind students accepted him as part of their group he plays Sports and is aware of following the rules and the expected vehicle Landon uses his time wisely turns his work on time and is always eager to learn and help we're happy to have a land in with us once a cult always a cult congratulations foreign Macy is an outstanding student who always puts forth her best effort in all of her work she's always careful in both science and PE making sure to follow rules during her projects Macy is very helpful in assisting other students and always has a smile and a kind word she's a delight to have in her class congratulations thank you my name is eighth grade the middle school team writes Caden is kind-hearted and incredibly smart he is knowledgeable on many subjects and can easily teach the rest of us he's considerate of others we are excited to see what great things he accomplishes once he leaves Middle School congratulations Katie congratulations parents you have a wonderful wonderful children please come back up once more we're going to take a picture and then parents who can come up and take pictures too and then we're going to do our Golden Horseshoe of the month which is our staff members um if you can please stay standing we're going to redo our golden horse show award which serves as our employee of the month to where we have very everybody should be awarded for every work they come into here daily but this award is voted on by the colleagues of the school and so our first award goes to Maureen nurse Maureen Schwarzenegger her colleagues right right and wrote nurse Maureen swartzenshuper is a rock star she's so very thoughtful and is always on the lookout for how she can bless someone on my first day of work I found a simple bouquet of wildflowers it's a welcome milk and a thoughtful gift she randomly brought in treats for Groundhog's Day she supplied most if not all of the items for the staff gift basket for the sweetheart Gala we really appreciate her servant's heart and this is a compilation of a lot of people's conflict nursing is always supporting our students and us she continues to make all students safe here at Continental no matter what she is doing she will always try and help out she's a true team player Maureen is always thinking of others staff and students she's very thoughtful and a generous person if there is a need Maureen always contributes in some way she's always ready to help and goes above and beyond for this thank you we're going to add a couple words ourselves here [Music] um Marine is probably one of the bravest nurses that I've ever worked with she was brave enough to stand with us as an Administration to keep our school open during covet I know that wasn't this year but for her being willing to stand with us be creative think of the different strategies that we could use working with Pima County day in and day out and all the reporting that she did during those covered years that was required by the county for us to stay open countless hours like for poor husband we thank him too Joe is here because she would have to take those reports home because she couldn't get them done during their school day crack job and we're at nights and weekends to make sure that we can open again on Monday so honestly Your brave is one of the most dedicated individuals that I've had the pleasure to work with and I really appreciate her her dedication her time not only the continentalism organization but the staff and students held well and safe foreign had that she truly is the woman of all trades because she's a great nurse she's a great caretaker she's a great cook she baits she cooks she she rides the tractor during campus cleanup day so I just really appreciate Maureen for her willingness to always step in and help get the job done and again also Joe her husband for supporting her and allowing her and also supporting us and being here on campus on different occasions so thank you both but thank you Maureen we really appreciate you thank you I would like to say thank you too because you always have a smile on your face you're always making us laugh but you are a very thoughtful person and it's good for students to hear this about their staff members and their teachers and their nurse because they're great role models here on our campus too so thank you and um Mrs Gracia got nominated she's one of our teachers she's our kindergarten teacher unfortunately she wasn't able to make it tonight but we will make sure that we honor her at one of our upcoming staff meetings so congratulations to Mrs Garcia she was very honorable foreign t-shirt did you get your t-shirts and thank you for everything you guys are free okay so you got everybody's welcome to stay and see all the rest of the exciting meeting or um okay thank you [Music] for a second any comments [Music] and that leads us questions for you tonight you have the district financial report I believe that was accurate as of 8.4 um I overheard any questions that you may have on the district finances you just can't get that seven six going there I can but it would be wrong I'll miss the lady anybody have a motion to approve the district financial report a second okay any discussion okay yes this is somebody else yes Mr mcgibbon yes yes a new business day the annual superintendent summative evaluation that we went over in executive session um I need a motion to approve as discussed in the executive I'll make that motion to approve the evaluation as discussed previously in the example session a second okay any discussion Mrs left Weaver yes thank you and 11b the 301 plan for next year so with this plan um we have looked at it and this is first draft so we wanted to see if the board members had any thoughts on it what we have done is since we have early release Wednesdays every Wednesday which was not the case two three years ago a lot of the 301 committee work was after hours three to four o'clock and we realized that it's not um it's quality versus quantity of hours and time so you'll see that some of the Committees the way we've structured Wednesdays because we do have professional development we do have data digs we do have planning meetings and professional development for teachers during that time that that is their that is the primary role of the teachers in terms of teaching and learning and so we've kind of eliminated we've eliminated the curriculum committee the admin advisory committee because those will happen throughout our Wednesdays and early release with key people because we were kind of just working more towards compliance rather than commitment there are a few things as we look at the language that we would like to change just to kind of make it a little bit more positive and not so punitive because as you go through the document and there's a lot of highlighted areas of must mandatory required and and it's all about accountability and so we just wanted to tweak some of the language and we will bring it back to you for next month with blue lines on what we've added in red light work being taken off but one example naive you can scroll a little bit to the next page you'll see on the Chrome page where it says be responsible for their activity some of that language is not necessary and we do Post our 301 plan on our website so we do want it to to be more positive when you see at the bottom where it says staff enrolled in online classes are not exempt from track meet participation so we are going to to me one more time with the career ladder via the 301 steering committee to clarify some of this and if you scroll another one Miami um go back on top where it says administrators cannot assign alternative duties for any category that the administrator the building principle does have to have input into this plan so we're going to change recommend to the committee that we change that verbiage to the site principle along with the 301 steering committee that will assign alternative duties because we understand that life happens emergencies happen and you know you could be an outstanding Rockstar teacher but if unfortunately something happens there's always something that we can do to um assign them an alternative Duty so the point of clarification is not good you're asking for approval of concept rather than specifics because this is a draft right right so we just wanted you to approve the concept and the purpose of kind of what we've eliminated it'll be replaced by an actress yes yes so it's really still I think just a discussion yeah it's still a discussion realm we don't really have to vote on it today because we will vote on the final one but I did want you to have an ability of time to discuss the drafts those sound like a pretty good ideas soften it was on okay that was just a discussion do you really any discussion questions let me roughly what's that sorry what's that going to be the amount so they come out with the preliminary figure for weighted student account [Music] um we haven't put anything together on what that's actually going to be it didn't look like it was an increase though over over this year okay I want to say it was 757 dollars per weighted student account where this year it was already around 7 40.
with respect to exploring ways to increase private and grant funding it is a highlight that our one-of-a-kind partnership with Rush Medical will be continuing for the third consecutive calendar year and this partnership in in other efforts similar to that where we're reducing barriers to care for our employees and our medical insurance has been a Cornerstone of our strategy to keep medical insurance rates steady for six consecutive calendar years more importantly 36 percent of our employees that have District 308 medical insurance have never seen their premiums adjusted upwards that's more than one in three of our staff have never had to see their deductions go up come January 15th because of the need to increase our premiums now in looking back to last year and what we and how we intended to further the district's progress toward our goals we wanted to ensure that we had updated onboarding programs for all categories in place that we were identifying high quality and diverse teacher prep programs and prioritizing placement from those programs when all requests couldn't be honored that we were updating performance evaluation for different categories of employees and that we increased the utilization of Rush Medical as a percentage of our medical claims spent it's a pleasure to say that we have updated our administrator and teacher onboarding and training programs and that we're currently working on revising the onboarding program for support staff our student teachers for 2223 are coming to us from in-state institutions that have teaching programs with demographics that are aligned to our goals and I'm also pleased to report that we have had no need to prioritize placement because we have many cooperating teachers who are interested in sharing their skills and expertise with the next generation of teachers we have not yet but we are planning to update our performance evaluations for oespa ocma and our non-boarding support staff as many of our efforts this year were focused on revising certified evaluations to comply with new legislation and also our outpatient and Doctor claims at Rush Medical did represent an increased proportion of our medical claims compared to the prior year additionally we also entered into a memorandum of understanding with the oespa to assist in our retention efforts and we also negotiated an amazing contract with the OTA that will boost our Recruitment and Retention efforts for years to come when we're looking at what we're hoping to be able to accomplish for next year we're currently in negotiations with the oea and we're looking to negotiate a successor agreement that will enhance our climate and culture and increase student learning we're also hoping to be able to conduct a market analysis for compensation and benefits to facilitate our efforts to recruit and retain with a focus on those areas that are traditionally harder to staff we're seeking to build relationships with regional universities and organizations that reflect the community that we serve so that way we can further our efforts to recruit and retain high quality staff and also continue our partnership with Rush Medical and build upon that in focusing on the connections that we have to other areas Across The Envision 308 plan our efforts to negotiate an amazing contract with the OTA and to negotiate a retention-focused mou with the oespa will reduce turnover in the accompanying Financial impact of turnover on the district conservatively speaking turnover averages between 50 and 200 percent of the annual salary of the staff that is departing depending upon the level in the organization and so by keeping those numbers down not only are we going to be able to retain the investment in organizational knowledge and expertise that these staff members have picked up but we're also going to be able to help the bottom line at the same time so this focus on reducing turnover and increasing representation among our staff is also going to have a positive impact on students in our efforts to increase the breadth and depth of our onboarding programs will better equip them to be responsive to our student needs not only now but in the years to come finally our partnership with Rush Medical and also our new partnership with first stop health for telemedicine has created a Continuum of Care with no net out-of-pocket expenses for employees on our medical plan now not only has this allowed the district to keep medical rates steady for six consecutive calendar years but it's also reduced barriers to access for our staff to get the care they need when and where they need it so I know I've just covered a lot of ground in a very short amount of time so are there any questions that the board might have first off Ken I would just like to say congratulations on what you've done with the benefit plan for our employees here in District 308 you know six years of of consistency and 36 percent of our employees never knowing what it is like to increase in the in their cost of benefits is outstanding for uh for any organization especially in today's day and age so congratulations on that thank you um I just have one question um and for those of us for those of us that are teachers and um those of us certainly who are talking to our colleagues and so forth um it it seems like we have as our as our student population diversifies right um we have many um by by having by not having diversity in the staff we have many um teachers who are people of people of color many times that are dealing with larger amounts of students who are choosing them as their trusted adult and one of my concerns and I'm curious what we're doing is to ensure that we're not burning them out right in other words if um these teachers many times are having larger amounts of students who are who are engaging them and and and that can be um that can be a lot to put on someone's plate and I am just uh I'm happy to see us uh diversifying and and and and bringing in more diversity but my concern is for those that are already here I don't want to burn burn them out and I hope the question makes sense and if you need me to clarify one I'm just curious what we're doing to make sure that that's not occurring it is really stressful especially for our Junior High and our high school teachers we're not hearing that as much from the elementary that are there but certainly at Junior High that is a concern that you have so many people that are leaning you know to them one of the ideas that we're discussing it wouldn't be until the fall is to have some Affinity groups of those people to be able to come together not another after school meeting but something during the day that what what can what can we do to better support them in talking with other districts I haven't really seen somebody come up with a great here's what we need to do but maybe by gathering them we could at least show them some appreciation and maybe they have some ideas I had a quick question if that's all right um I think it was really interesting that you brought this up because it's something I'm going to talk about later in my little report but um you mentioned hiring uh diverse teachers having diverse faculty and this is something that I recently discussed with a group of students um that having diverse faculty makes students feel seen and heard and it builds a sense of community and safety that you feel at school that you don't really know you didn't have until you see it for the first time and I know I definitely felt that because we've had more teachers that look like me come into the school recently and I do realize that I'm leaning them on them a bit more so maybe having more diverse staff will prevent that burnout but I guess my specific question is are you looking at student demographics in any capacity when you're figuring out which demographics of teachers and faculty are bringing in because of course like I guess bringing in the correct demographics of stuff that get students can lean on might be important as well and that could be a factor but I'm not sure if that's something you're looking at right now well really what we're focused on is taking a look because we don't want recruitment efforts to become zero-sum where our gain is coming at someone else's loss as far as the existing overall makeup of teachers within the state of Illinois are those that are licensed to be able to come to Illinois to teach what I'm looking at is from data that's gathered by the Illinois Board of higher education in their degree in enrollment data tools what are the demographics of those teachers those people who are graduating with bachelor's degrees or master's degrees in education from in-state institutions of higher education what is the pool of available talent that exists and are our hiring practices mirroring those that are coming into the profession because otherwise we get into a zero-sum type situation where where all all districts are doing is robbing Peter to be able to pay Paul and at the end of the day that's I want to see us be able to grow and I want us I want to see this District be able to take advantage of the talent that's that's coming into the ranks of Education who are motivated who are excited to be here who just spent four years or longer of their lives honing their craft to be able to step in front of students for the first time in an official capacity that's that's an area that we definitely want to be able to focus on because to do anything else would would in invariably as we go down you know as you go two or three moves out on the chessboard becomes Zero Sum at that point so thank you in addition to what Mr Miller said um one of the strategies that we use this year was to expand the pool that we're drawing from so we about tripled quadrupled our attendance at job fairs we went outside of our typical um kind of within the two hours and we actually went to our surrounding states both urban and rural and Suburban areas to really try to diversify the candidate pool that we were trying to attract myself members of HR and Mrs comidas are working to also rebuild that recruitment website because we're looking at a new generation also of talent and um looking at different recruitment strategies based not only about the schools and recruiting to the schools but also to the area also there's a lot that we have to offer in our community and surrounding areas that we want to kind of get us out on the map and recruit a wide variety of people to come to meet our students needs and reflect our students for our staff thank you thank you for saying that Dr Kincaid did you get your question answered on you um to some degree it wasn't exactly what I expected but I got the question answered so thank you both so much I think it's really important and I challenge the administration here and whoever the new superintendent might be that it can we can go beyond Educators our our Dean's assistants our Deans our um custodial Crews our I would like to see some more diversification in our Administration um it doesn't have to be a teacher I know when I was growing up and going through school wasn't always a teacher that became my trusted adult it could have been mine was the librarian it can be anybody so I challenge our administrators our higher those that are hiring in our district to look Beyond and continue to make sure that our staff and its entire entity reflects our community and our student body I wanted to ask the question regarding like our grow your own um exploration we have been you know looking at it and reviewing it and I would like to understand like what are the challenges around growing your own and what you know are we interested in going that route what do we need to be doing about about that and then the other thing is I know that there are teachers who live in our district and they work somewhere else so what is the you know what what is what is that about um I can guess but just wondering people just don't want to teach and work in the same Community okay I know and I'm sure they're probably they're probably more more issues right than just that yeah but um I would love to understand like the grow your own piece and where what what what has stopped us from doing it what is it that and we know that it's a benefit there are many other districts who do it and do a really good job at it so what is it about us that we we can't get off the ground with that and by growing your own you're talking about having high school students experience teaching and giving them time to do that and not just them but like other individual in our school system who are currently work for us putting them in a program that would help them be to become teachers as well so we currently have a few opportunities right now we had a partnership with a local University this past fall where they were working on their administrative endorsement so we in essence worked collaboratively at the University to give them release time from their teaching responsibilities to be able to do that internship that's required similar to a student teaching for their admin endorsement we also currently have a a cohort that are working on their El certification that we are funding some of the tuition so there are programs going on within the district to help grow our own or expand the opportunities for our current staff we definitely could look at expanding that program but there are some programs currently in place within the district so those programs are they producing in yield for us what we expect I'm very excited about the El endorsement we've utilized a couple of the recent pieces already for our staffing for the fall in hard to reach areas so that's been exciting and where we really struggle sometimes in having teachers that have the proper certification for English Learners this year we do not have near as many gaps absolutely so our university has a program and we're not partners with them in this District but there are universities the problem at the end of the day boils down to who can you get to go into teaching and who wants to do that and you have to do that with you educator programs in your or clubs in your buildings and at the end of the day you have to get them in college you have to get them through college and they have to graduate college but I just like I would I hear what you're saying a hundred percent I would just caution that sometimes when we talk about we need to add more diversity I want to caution us not to hire some all things being the same I think you should hire someone that is diverse but I don't want us to start a I don't want us to start just hiring somebody based on a peer you know what I mean on a culture I just like I don't think that's the intention I don't it's not the intention but like sometimes when we talk about it like people hear what they want to hear so I I just I think people people um and I think we could do more for our Tas too because we have Tas in our building who are incredibly different that population of Tas is incredibly diverse and if you could get them in a teacher program and somehow help them out and get them into their teaching degrees I mean these are people who are working with our highest need Kids all the Time those are the kind of adults you want in your buildings as staff and we don't currently do anything for them and there is a organization called grow your own that you that you can look at to model it's it's a phenomenal organization but it is hard to get people to take I mean as you know the decline of of people going into education but I think the opportunity within the TA population is tremendous I think also what you choose to measure and what you focus on um is incredibly important writing down those goals and I think on the flip side of that I think that's the easy part is um pulling down barriers when organic opportunities come I do know that our talk hike program has started to take their mentors and go into different schools and so the and honestly Caitlyn you can probably speak to this more than than myself but that is such an incredible way to create those um the grow your own organically which is their their meeting with their mentors they're they're programming with their mentors their mentors then go to their what would you call it their home school if you will so what's your home school um mine's Old Post but we haven't run a hike that's actually next week so we haven't yet to do it at Old Post but I know a lot of people do it um box Chase is one of them in Boulder Hill I believe but um the feedback I've heard from that is really great and students look forward to seeing those mentors and I think it's really good to make those connections especially with older students and then having whatever that population is of our mentors who want to go into teaching how do we then support them through the process but how do we also remove that we find out that this program works how do we want replicate that success and remove barriers so that it can work across verticals like not just teaching but like maybe it's custodial maybe it's technology maybe it's I can't of all the ones but you know where do we take that and why don't we make that a goal and write it down and then really focus on that so because Latonya I wrote that as my second bullet point what is going on with growing your own because we keep talking about it but we're not focusing on it and measuring it and so yeah and so jump um with regard to accountability because you brought that up and Ali brought it up earlier um we know what gets measured gets done right and so where where you know what are we doing in terms of our evaluations that would help us to um achieve more success if we are evaluating and holding people accountable for um you know these areas that we're interested in you know Mr simultane the second question you asked is uh you know why do teachers why do people work in school systems you know that live here in other places and I can I can tell you over over my time here that's the one question and I always ask anyone that says they're in education and say why don't you why don't you work here in 308 and you know you can get you can get a you get a variety of answers for that just like one just like aliens in regards to um sometimes people just don't want to work actually in the same schools where their kids go to school um sometimes it's that they moved here they moved here and they already have tenure in another school district so they're you know they're they already have they're already stable in that school district what have you sometimes they just love their school districts sometimes they just love the school district they're in that's true so I think there's a lot of I think there's a lot of answers to that question thank you want to share your answer [Music] well you know me I I sometimes I'm an open book to a fault but I actually did apply here a number of years ago yeah and uh no but the reason I bring it up is because I knew going in that I was probably not going to get to the position I don't want to speak ill the position was more geared towards a language arts position and the social studies it was half language arts half social studies and for my fellow social studies teachers out there you'll probably be able to relate to the following story um I knew that um they wanted somebody who was stronger in ela then in social studies and I was I had my endorsement uh Ela at the middle school level but my primary focus was social studies so sometimes it's also a matter of what's available here and what what you can teach and so I never took it personal or anything like that and to be honest with you to Ali's point I find it extreme rewarding to serve the community I I live in here this way and serve the community that I work for and there's a lot of lessons that can be learned learned from bringing those pieces in I talked to a lot of Educators quite often in this District who work elsewhere and it is it is educational to share those experiences and so I I get the desire to have people here but there's also and and I see the downside but there's also there's also a positive to that which is many of those Educators have enlightened me quite a bit over my tenure here as far as some of the things that are going on in their own District good and bad right I just didn't want to teach chemistry I got offered the job I thought I went straight for the physics job see many many reasons many reasons thank you thank you Mr thank you Ken well done all right moving on to 6.1 superintendent report all right good evening board tonight I have a few items I'd like to cover um as we all know on March 27th there was a school shooting in Tennessee our hearts go out to the community and the victims families whenever tragedies such as the one in Nashville happen it causes us to think about school security and what we can do to help prevent these types of things from happening within our own community another way to look at the question is to look at what we've done and what and to reflect on what else can be done uh Mr Plover and I were talking last week uh in regards to this and I felt that I should highlight some of the advancements in school security that we've made over the past 10 years within our school district Safety and Security is always something that we take very seriously when thinking about Safety and Security there are many things to consider ten years ago we started out by adding alarms to our schools to ensure that they're secure in the evening hours we then looked at security measures during the day we've created secure vestibule entrances where people are able to enter the vestibule but not the building here we've added air phones and video equipment where front office Personnel are able to screen people prior to entering the main offices we are currently in the process of adding another layer to this where the vestibule entrance will soon be locked and visitors will be screened prior to entering it once admitted admittance is given into that vestibule the door to the main offices remain closed with video surveillance to ensure that the only person that has entered a vestibule is the person that that we that we admitted once in the main office we have the Raptor system which screens visitors against sex offenders and Custom Custom databases prior to gaining entry into the building outside of the main office and then to gain entry into the main school you have to get through another secure entrance over the years we've added hundreds of security cameras throughout all the buildings of our district that are used to Monitor and record information we've also looked at the exterior of our buildings to ensure what Security Experts consider line of sights around all of our campuses we've implemented Alice alert lockdown and form counter and evacuate training in all of our schools our administrators are trained in Alice and we conduct an active Intruder drills at all of our buildings we allow the police to use our vacant robber building to conduct training drills with an in an actual School we also work with our law enforcement to help ensure that they have the tools if an event does arise they have maps of all of our schools and we are working on providing them camera access to in an event that just in case any type of situation to help in any type of response this year we hired a safety and security coordinator for our district who is also looking at additional screening and prevention technology and over the years we've promoted see something say something to what with all of our students we have the safe to help as well it's a free service that allows students to reach out 24 7 by way of phone text or Internet in our obligations as school administrators to report clear and present danger also helped to create a safer state in Illinois pursuant to the Firearms owner identification card act when a student or other person demonstrates threatening physical or verbal Behavior determined to pose a clear and present danger to themselves or others School administrators must submit a report to the Illinois State Police within 24 hours and the state police evaluate these reports and prevent individuals who pose a danger from Legally accessing firearms for firearm Ammunition by revoking that individual's FOID card from preventing them uh that will get it preventing them to get one in the future so those are some of the ways that we've increased security and safety in School District 308 over the past 10 years because again when whenever we have such a tragedy such as the one that happened in Nashville people want to say well what what are you going to do and it's not so much what are we going to do it's what have we done and then as I said when I first started my comments as always continually looking at what else can we do to to ensure to the best of our abilities the safety of our students and our staff on March 22nd we held our community advisory committee meeting and Mr Bell executive director of student services started us out with a high level overview of the changes to the 23 24 student rights of responsibilities that we are going to be the board's going to be asked to approve this evening they were Rich discussions at each table and at the beginning of the meeting each administrator at each table provided feedback for each of the groups that rotated through feedback also being that also from that evening is included in the document that we're asking you to approve this evening two other quick items I wanted to share that Dave Jeffers uh building engineer Brokaw Early Learning Center is a top 10 finalist in the sentis custodian of the Year contest yes Cintas will offer 5000 and census and Rubbermaid products and services to the winter school and the winter school will also receive a facility assessment and Consulting package from Issa the worldwide cleaning industry Association valued at thirty thousand dollars the winner is determined by the number of votes one receives information is on our website and how to vote this would be a great tribute to one of our employees to be recognized as the custodian of the year as well as a benefit to our school district so I Contin I encourage you to visit the website and vote and you can vote until April 14th and we wish Dave the best and on a final note last week was National assistant principles week I'd like to take an opportunity to thank our assistant principals for all that they do their commitment to our staff our students in the community of SD 308 they are all very much appreciated I know that report was a little lengthy but but that is my report for this evening so thank you Ms Hamilton I I just want to say thank you for addressing that I know I have quite a bit um since since the event and a lot of concerned um community members and parents so I'll appreciate you addressing uh addressing that tonight great thank you can I comment as well I think something that as I've transitioned from a parent and Community member to a board member that I think is incredibly important to touch on when we do have um something happened in the in the community in the schools whether it be a school lockdown whether it be the I don't know a variety of things oftentimes our human um nature is to go to the internet and start talking about what may or may not have happened and why hasn't the school called us and why hasn't the district informed us and um I just want to make a plea to our parents and community members out there that our staff is so myopically focused on the safety of our students and our staff when something happens they are going to communicate as soon as it's safe they are going to communicate as soon as they know that all of the checks and balances that have been put in place have been checked and balanced so I encourage parents when they are like well my child texted me my student texted me and told me this my student students have such a small purview into what actually is going on in totality but I also know that our communication in times of Crisis is incredibly quick but please know that there is a process happening behind the scenes to ensure the safety of all of our students and all all of our staff and you will be communicated to as soon as it's safe I appreciate that because as quick as we are we can't be as fast as social media and uh and as you said the number one priority always is the safety security of the situation at hand and the second is the communication piece so thank you for that appreciate it we get a little bit you know the board wants to know as well because we start getting phone calls and it's taken some time to for myself to train myself not to be like I just heard on you know the Oswego mom's page that this happened what's going on John you know and so it has been I just ask that we all do that and give our administrators and our teachers and our students the time to get to a safe point and all of the correct information will come from the school as soon as it's possible there's also a whole set of things that you didn't share tonight that happened in buildings in our district that we are not purview and should not be purviewed to to also increase the safety of our staff and our students and so there is so much that goes on behind the scenes that I just want to thank all of our administrators and teachers for um for keeping our our students and staff safe very good all right 6.2 student ambassador report hi everyone so the ssac plans to meet twice next week uh we finally finished our survey surrounded surrounding mental health and we hope to finalize some of those last minute details and plan for a day when we are sending this out to the student body uh just as a reminder this survey is going to have three sections including student-to-student interactions student to teacher interactions and building accessibility it'll have long answer questions and multiple choice questions in order for us to best receive feedback from our student body today we also got the chance to talk with other students in a focus group surrounding the search for the new superintendent and it was split by schools but I thought it was very impactful to hear the voices of other students and something that was I it was really strange but I thought it was really awesome that we all had such different perspectives in our group but we all share the same goal of wanting to help our student body and I feel like in all the other conversations I've had with other students I never really got that same feeling and drive in students and everyone wanted something different so I think today our little focus group was very impactful in how we talked about our community and our schools and how students are interacting with each other in them um Oswego East also had focus groups and artists took place right here at the school we also were talking about the search for the new superintendent and one thing that I would love to add to Caitlyn's point is that it was really interesting to see students really take the opportunity to use their voice if they're provided the opportunity and Caitlin and I had to work hard to like find people that represented a wide portion of our student body because of course you can't have all like 3 000 of us heading to a room to talk it's a little bit difficult but I saw people that weren't really comfortable speaking in big groups and I saw people who love speaking in big groups and people who had a lot of opinions and people who didn't know they had as many opinions coming into this room but they all really took advantage of the opportunity to be able to advocate for their students and they really took to heart that they weren't just representing themselves they were representing their like their fellow students I guess I just wanted to talk about some of of the big points that they emphasized a lot throughout the meeting that I was definitely touched by the first one was diversity which is like a super big topic so I guess I'll break it down a bit um first they wanted to talk a little bit about teachers faculty how certain students have uh teachers that are from the same Faith as them or who look like them or share beliefs with them and they're able to find a community with that and they really appreciated that they talked about the fact that having different communities that are recognized by teachers in schools and respected by teachers in schools is extremely important because when they feel unheard or unseen by teachers for who they completely are it's hard to thrive in that learning environment they talked a lot about the fact that especially oahs because I can't speak for OHS but add to this if you definitely agree but there's a lot of extracurricular opportunities in our district we have so many opportunities for students to express their interests and that's that's really amazing but a lot of the time these aren't pushed as much for a lot of students who don't even know that they exist or who don't know that Mental Health Resources exist or where they are in schools um we were talking about the fact that when we're getting a new superintendent but also when we're working on building bridges between Administration teachers students and parents we want to emphasize these resources a lot more and I guess the last thing that we talked about was making sure that we are communicating effectively and in a way that's receptive to students especially we did feel that information is being communicated to our community a little bit better especially in recent years and we appreciate that but a lot of the times like high school students get the information first and we're all deliberating privately and then like a day later we'll get some information and it's like totally different and we're all really confused and there's several events that have happened this year that caused that to happen so I guess one thing we really wanted to talk about was not just strengthening like Administration to community and parent conversations but directly Administration to student conversations as well especially at the high school level that was a lot of talking but thank you so much I think that was everything from my side did you want to add anything um maybe just like a couple of the bigger things we talked about too we talked a lot about staff diversity that was one of the first things that got brought up um even by like we've talked about this in other meetings before and it was brought up by students who didn't even attend those meetings so that was really great to know that students will share their voice like Anya said and we also talked about how there are a lot of clubs and extracurriculars that students want to do but the accessibility and engagement in them has started to like fall back and we might have the resources to put on a club or activity for school but the engagement is so low that it doesn't always succeed and then that causes them not to continue in the future I was just yeah I know I'm not I'm always wild but yeah I was thinking about how when our search firm asked us to identify students for a focus group and we were sharing with them that we have student Representatives on our board and that we have every confidence that we could put that into your hands and that you would do a fabulous job of handling it and so I loved when you said we wanted to make sure we worked really hard to make sure that all voices are being heard that you Diversified the group of students in the room so that you would make sure that you had the voices in the room that needed to be there and so I so appreciate the efforts that you've made toward that in and we knew we would be able to have confidence and if we put that in your hands so thank you for the opportunity the search firm also told us that they had much more fun with you than us so they got a lot from you yeah they said don't take any offense but the student Forum was the coolest best so we're just like well which by the way on that note committee report um I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna turn to you a little bit because um we'll get there but don't go anywhere whatever you do because I want to hear your voice on that student voice okay well we're here now that first yeah 6.3 board committee reports is that what you're referring to I am yeah and I would love to start off because I'm going to tell you that I don't want to speak for for Mr Cerrone here but I have to say that that was promoting uh tell them what you're talking about I'm sorry our Dei committee Equity advisory committee yeah Equity advisory committee sorry sorry my fault sure I'll hear about that one um but it was probably one of the most rewarding experiences I've had as a board member and I'm not going to sit here and talk about it but I would love to because we have two people and I understand I get it that there's notes on that and everything but the the premise of this is we brought in many students we had some very um awesome conversations but I'd actually love to love to hear from them if they want to offer anything can you just preference it by saying well why were they there what was the topic that kind of thing sure although I I would I would love to hear from them but if you want me you want me to do it that's fine why were they there like we decided do you want me to speak or yes yes okay so we decided when we were doing this one of the things we wanted to do was we wanted to dear from students we like you know that's that's we talk about Equity so we wanted to hear directly from a group of students and um so we sat down and we did a lot of listening and was very interesting okay I would love to hear it we would love to hear it thank you Caitlyn so I'm kidding so the conversation was about equity and learning environments like it was that broad yep you're asking me yeah yes yes awesome that is such a big topic um but it's definitely one especially in my second year in this position that Dr Waller has definitely emphasized a lot she's big on that and I'll admit I didn't know much about it before she talked to me about it so I guess when we're talking about equity in the learning environments I'm sure I don't need to tell you guys this but I guess I'll just give like my student outlook on what that means to me um and what it means to students it means that we're being given an equal chance to thrive in the learning environment and that doesn't always mean we get the exact same resources or the exact same opportunities because someone might need a different opportunity to thrive just as well or just as much as they need to in comparison to another student when we're talking about equity in the learning environment I think the most important aspect that I've seen among the communities I know in my school is on that individualized diversity Spectrum because when we're looking at students who have who come from extremely different backgrounds or different values when they're not having those parts of themselves addressed in the learning environment whether that be part of the curriculum or not it inhibits from that and it feels so I guess my the example that I'm thinking of in my head when I'm saying this is I was in my AP human geography class and we were learning about different cultures and there was one religion that was talked about and one culture that was talked about like for about like five weeks and then there was one of those taught taught in like maybe three or four days um that's of course based on the AP Human Geography curriculum but when when we're in a class that's talking about you know the entire world at scale perhaps deviating a bit from that very rigorous curriculum to make sure that everyone is feeling hurt in that learning environment is important now does that necessarily mean that you're getting an opportunity from that no it's not like you're getting like an internship or something but you're getting an opportunity to learn and when you learn about different cultures especially in a world that's as diverse as ours right now you're more likely to succeed because you'll be able to meet different people you'll be able to talk to them in the future and you'll be able to understand them better I don't think that diversity is taught the way that it needs to be and that's taking away from our students ability to thrive in the future when they'll inevitably be people who are extremely diverse that's one of the biggest ones that I've seen so far that we actually talked a lot about today in our student focus groups I'm done [Applause] I mean I know we might as well and thank you brother yeah I do we actually scripted it so I rehearsed for a really long time that's so important especially if they Dr Kincaid I mean I think that's so important when we take that back to you know when curriculum is being purchased or developed I think that is something that lens that needs to it needs to go through that lens because you kind of heard it from being responsive and sustained practices yes yeah wow um so at our table for this meeting we talked a lot about safety um and we were we acknowledged that we do love all the clubs and things that we have at our school and we have been able to Foster environments within those clubs for students to feel safe and to have teachers to go to the sponsors who run our clubs are very good and they will reach out with helping students when they need it um So within those individualized clubs we do have supports for students in places where they can accomplish the goals that they want to accomplish but with that also came people saying as soon as they stepped out of those clubs they don't feel safe in the hallways they don't feel safe in their classes um and we talked a lot about like knowledge and people just don't understand that some of their actions are um can like be taken in different ways and they are negative and they they don't create environments where students feel safe and I think that's also a really important thing is knowledge people always say knowledge is power and I think that some people take that very lightly but I really think that if you're knowledgeable about something even if you don't fully support it if you know about it and you have the ability to ability to understand and put forth like the effort to care about others then we can really create environments where students feel safe in our schools [Applause] absolutely I want to click a clarifying question physically safe psychologically safe both um I think we talked a little bit about both intellectually safe all of those things yeah yeah all of them I think that is something that the administration needs to hear and understand what that means and how that's those supports can be better resourced so thank you for bringing that yeah it was we just got it was very it was it was a lot it was in the classroom it was in the hallways it was in any physical space it was you know in diverse of staff there was yeah it was great conversation it was also uh you know recognizing differences uh in in the school culture because we were listening to high schoolers so it was it was very cool so you guys aren't just sitting you are putting forth ideas and thoughts and giving us insight and it's our responsibility to act on those things and so we hear you and this is really working it's working really well yeah yeah Mr pluger you said that you talk to other students too about equity in the learning environment um could I ask like some of the things that they brought up because I know there's a lot of like more academic focuses on Equity that I don't know if they brought that up or not yeah and you know it kind of relates to my you know I I really was able to relate to what you were saying with with e-classes and as some AP it can be frustrating because at on one point you're really trying to prepare your students and on the other point they bring up the exact same things you do which is p you know students want to see themselves right they want to be able to relate um and and sometimes right sometimes teachers certainly and Educators I should say can certainly help by by stepping out of their comfort zone or getting to know um what's going on um and and it's sometimes it's hard to describe you know um and sometimes I have to keep my mouth quiet because I gotta share the time up here but when we had the example of um you know trying to bring in staff um there was an example here at OE where my my son he runs cross country and and all of a sudden um we have an uh an all-girls Muslim school that was here running against them and I look over and it's it's my it's my former student right who's the coach uh which was just awesome um but one of the things I learned because I learned from my students constantly is she did not go to school to be a teacher she would school be an accountant and this was her way and she was explaining this to me that she was giving back right so she was doing a year of giving back um and teaching and of course me as the educator I was like hey well you know you never know and it's like no no Mr plugger I'm gonna be an accountant I'm like okay um but but it's those little nuances and I think sometimes listening and sometimes to your point everything you're you're you're saying I I sit here because my with my own students I hear that there's this feeling it doesn't matter whether it's reality or not it's the feeling of not being heard I ironically I'm going to say I hear that loud and clear but um and that seems to be a common a common theme and I understand that we as adults have um our own perceptions and our own feelings and our own things with that but uh and and we do need to prepare our students for the reality of the world on the other hand in some ways our students and this is uncomfortable for many adults to admit in some ways our students are more in tune with the reality of the world than we are and I think that's uncomfortable at some times to to point out and talk about it's an uncomfortable conversation for adults because they have to go into a place that they're not comfortable with and one of those things that I hear all the time is you know um where where is where is my community here right um and and sometimes to your point yes there there are but then like how much pressure is on those those uh those faculty those those Educators because that's a huge that's a huge burden at that point and I don't think we understand sometimes that feel like they're always on you know under under a microscope more so appreciate the question I hope I answered it did I answer yeah and thank you I guess for like talking about that a lot too because I guess it's nice from like the student perspective to get the full picture of how things work around here because of course like I didn't know that before I came up here so thank you [Music] come all of these reports Equity finance and facilities and policy committee reports are online or in board Docs um and then do we have any other questions on any of the other ones I just would actually like to invite our community and our students to our teaching the learning meeting tomorrow evening at The District administration Center room 61 at is it six or six thirty six right the agenda is to discuss three policies six colon 130 program for the gifted six colon 260 complaints about curriculum and six colon 290 homework we are also on the agenda to discuss parent teacher conferences parent involvement controversial topics the curriculum objection form and we would really love any student and or parents to join us and provide feedback so I just wanted to throw that out there very good all right 6.4 board member comments any board member comments trying to make it quick uh I made quite a few School visits because as we mentioned earlier uh some of us Educators work in different districts so it's always an interesting two weeks where this district is on spring break and I'm not and then the following week I am on spring break and and this District isn't so um I'll make this quick visited Prairie Point uh noticed uh phonics instruction stuck out to me the dhh program always sticks out to me when I go there Library I'm always impressed with our libraries I don't know why but I always uh Churchill was definitely one of the highlights and fun I get to exercise do calisthenics with some kindergarteners one actually asked me if I was a rock star that was interesting uh no I'm not although it wasn't a band back in the day but that's yeah they literally asked me that and that was that was funny I love kindergartners they're great um the homestead the fourth and fifth graders they grilled me on government wow oh yeah and that was awesome uh to say the least uh so that was uh that was fun uh like it's great going to these schools uh an old post the thing that stuck out to me was the SEI programs I could sit here and talk about it forever but no one wants that I know so but thank you to all the staff and the principals and assistant principals at those schools I appreciated it should we copyright calisthenics with kindergarteners that's a nice ring to it it was it was it was cool like uh yeah it was a great brain break and yeah it was awesome I have one I had a phenomenal opportunity and I have a picture but I promise I burned it already uh I was I had a phenomenal opportunity to attend an event uh the BSA black Excellence um event that was held last week and the purpose of the event was really to provide the students with the opportunity to showcase and to celebrate Black excellence and and I all of these student events that we attend from sporting events to Fine Arts I'm just always to even the academic events there's another well I'll talk about that in a second um it was a fun it's always phenomenal for me just to watch the um the talent that we have in our schools and so we had we were able to observe Runway walks to poems to cello performances uh to trumpet and cello Duets um art and and digital art displays we have such phenomenal talent in our district and I just always am impressed and and thankful to have the opportunity to display so wonderful event most definitely in poems although I'm sorry I don't know if I said that but wonderful event and was glad I had an opportunity to attend at the end I guess it's custom that they call everyone up from the audience to come and dance but I did not know that there was a photographer there taking pictures when I was forced to go up there but it was fun I enjoyed uh doing the wobble with the kids you know what I I um I invited the community last meeting to attend the uh MSA fassathon I went ahead and participated um I failed on the drinking water part um and I admitted it I didn't realize that part but um I made it all the way till eight or whatever got a nice uh nice meal there there were some great speakers they had a trivia contest um on you know your what you know about Islam and Muslims and it was uh it was great yeah and one of the speakers talked about you know the benefits Universal benefits of fasting um temperament you know ground you makes you appreciate what you have I I didn't write down I I did but I didn't bring those notes here and then there was another lady she was an author of a book um she was an Egyptian uh Muslim and uh you know her experience in in Plano and you know how she has uh you know there's misinformation and you know a lot of different things so it was it was it was great to go so I just figured I'd indicate that as well yeah um I just wanted to remind the community that he um search for the new superintendent the um survey is available online on the District home page if you'd like to access it it's about 20 Questions shouldn't take you very long at all if you'd like to fill it out I had asked Dr sparlin um and he assured me that our students and our staff would be able to take the survey during school hours so we're looking forward to setting aside some time for them to take that so that they can participate and then just a reminder that tomorrow there is a open forum for our entire community at is it six o'clock or six thirty six thirty and where is it it's at Old Post in the gymnasium and they should use door number one to get in Old pulse in the gymnasium and use door number one and then there's an open form for staff only at 4 30 4 30 where same place same place okay and also tomorrow your kids should get some sleep because the SAT is happening it's good to know I just wanted to make um too quick I just wanted to share two quick things um before our policy meeting um not this last one the one before that Pathways um if you don't know has two micro businesses one of them is Creations by Pathways and the Phoenix Cafe we were very lucky to right before our policy meeting to attend the Creations by Pathways craft show and it absolutely blew me away what our young students are learning with regard to Independent Living skills employability skills functional academic skills absolutely unbelievable work going on there I just wanted to give a huge shout out to principal Mecklenburg and the entire staff over there I bought some of the coolest products that I um that I now treasure for Easter that we'll have in my home that will always remember and just to see our students selling things behind the cash register like adding things up and doing things skills that I think we all could have a refresher in was just incredible to see what was going on over there and then I just also wanted to share an email that was actually shared with me and how I just am so proud of our students I'm so proud of the things that they do the voice that they use and this one happens to be from a student who was writing to his teacher I'm not going to say the names but dear so and so I wanted to thank you for reaching out to me as you see that I'm having a horrible time recovering from such a horrific illness I just wanted to thank you personally this news was really exciting to me and I'm not going to share what that was about that it almost brought me to tears it's no exaggeration when I say that I am incredibly blessed and honored to attend this school and to be your pupil I truly can't remember a time as a child where I could confidently say that the entire school had my back until I attended goal once again thank you a thousand times I just I was so touched when that email was shared with me and it just goes to show that our students are thriving in all of the different programs that we offer and I'm incredibly proud of our staff for the incredible work that they're doing here all right moving on to 7.1 consent agenda agenda are there any questions on the consent agenda um I have a question at some point too so foia's I'm curious what is our process for alerting the board when the Attorney General finds we did not release enough information for a foil Dr Betsy would you like to answer it yeah so um any uh any person who requests a foia can uh not agree with our response or feel like we're not sharing as much information as they think we should and so they can request to the attorney general or the Public Public Access um and they can have the foia reviewed and what we do in that process is we give the attorney general or someone on their staff the unredacted uh response and the redacted response and then they determine whether or not we were in line with the redactions so uh anyone can do that and it doesn't change our process in my honestly in my 17 years I've had three people question uh this last time we did have one person question and uh if anything was found to be an error then we would notify the Board of Education about that but otherwise we fulfilled Our obligation in fulfilling the foia request and we didn't notify the board at that time so if we want something to change or if you want to know if we're challenged we can certainly let you know that too I just want to know the process I appreciate it thank you yeah you're welcome all right can I have a motion to approve the consent agenda I make a motion to approve all items under consent including minutes from the Board of Education meeting on March 20th 2023 open and close session and to acknowledge the foia request received by the district second Miss Swanson aye Mr Cerrone aye Ms simultan aye Mr Gatewood aye Miss Johnson aye Mr ploger aye motion passes 6-0 8 win his financial statements does the board have any questions on what has been presented this evening item 8.2 uh Dr petsky all right it's always nice to change seats for presentation um tonight um on the agenda what I've got is just a conversation and see if there's any questions that the board might have but the village of Montgomery is actually looking at some development and so what I want to do is take this opportunity to talk the board about what development commercial industrial manufacturing development could look like and uh what exactly number one it is and why we're talking about that so presented by me but obviously in the background I'm working very closely with our property attorneys uh Brittany feast and Stuart Witt just to make sure that uh we're dotting the eyes and crossing the t's on this so some of the project background just so that you're aware of the last three to six months we've been working with the village of Montgomery's Economic Development Office they've been working on a series of projects that include several Parcels of land that are currently in our district it is a very competitive market so the commercial properties that were looking at developing there's the developers could go anywhere they want to go and they're choosing to look at Montgomery so uh they're they're right now the Montgomery economic develop Corporation is working with the village of Montgomery waubonsie Community College Kendall County and the school district to see about what incentives or our appetite for incentives otherwise known as abatements that we're willing to support so just to fill in on what an abatement is a property tax abatement is just a way to support or promote the expansion of businesses at the locations for new businesses um basically a business that receives approval from a taxing body what they get is um they're going to invest dollars to develop a site to build infrastructure um to buy the property to do a bunch of things to have their business there um what we'll receive is a benefit uh will receive increased property values um and things of that nature but Wilder while they're doing those Investments what they'd like to do is instead of paying us the full percentage of the updates to the property tax or the properties that they would be updating they would be seeking an abatement so in other words they would they let's say they have a ten thousand dollar parcel of land and they develop it and it's now all of a sudden worth a hundred thousand dollars we would get more tax dollars because of those Investments but in order to go from ten ten thousand to a hundred thousand they have to invest in that property as well so when they pay their taxes on those developments or those updates they they would be able to pay a lesser lesser property tax value use that to invest and then after a certain amount of time we would collect the full assessed value on that property probably the worst explanation on a property tax abatement I've ever given if there's questions on that um we'll we'll definitely talk about that a little bit more what I did want to show the board today in the community was just uh the location the property property that we're talking about um so if you look up here we're looking at Galena Road and Orchard Road it's kind of where the old Caterpillar plant was there's vacant land in that area in green that you can see to the west and to the south of that plant and on the picture to the right you can see how they're looking at developing that putting in some some commercial industrial distribution facilities in that area and in very very tiny writing in that blue box you can see some of the developments that are happening there as well so what I wanted to show the board today is okay that property you're collecting some assess assessments on that property now we are it's about 204 acres and if you look uh those four pin parcels and the number of Acres you can see what the current assess value is and then what the extension is so basically the school district is getting about uh six thousand dollars in tax revenue from those properties when it's developed we will get much more than that so I really want to just talk and offer that to the board and and kind of offer these recommendations number one is just to see um uh the administration is recommending that the board kind of provides some acknowledgment of its support for the development in those areas are there any questions you have as uh as they look at developing that for commercial industrial manufacturing types of facilities and those are questions that I can bring to the developers and things that I can have answered for you but also I'd like to ask the Board of Education provide some direction to the administration to allow myself and whitlaw to work with the village of Montgomery the Montgomery Economic Development Corporation and the other taxing bodies to really to really get the formal proposal what exactly are they asking for in terms of abatement how much how long and I'll be able to put some financials to that and tell you what the financial impact of that would be as well So based on that information just wondered if there were any questions or discussion as we move forward I have one how do you guarantee that it's not that it's business in that housing yeah because we've been down this road before where they've said it was senior housing and then it became something and then it was going to be veteran housing and then it became low income housing right so I have zero interest in abating I mean clearly I won't be here but I wouldn't Abate housing but I would have made business yeah so I I hear what you're saying so the residential component right absolutely not and uh but for commercial it depends on the investment and the and the uh what that's what that provides okay but I'm looking for a guarantee yeah and we can actually work that into the abatement agreement it's like what is this property to be used for so they don't change the use on us as well I would agree with with that piece but one thing I will say is um I have 100 appreciated um I want to acknowledge that the communication that comes out of the village of Montgomery and their board um you do an excellent job of of communicating and working with with their partners and um I have nothing but good things to say and nothing but good experiences and so um this is a controversial issue for sure um I get it uh but but to your point ali um we need more than houses here we need we need business along Orchard Road and um the other piece is you know I I am hopeful and I'm sure they are but I'm hopeful that they're doing whatever they can to make sure that that business stays here um and I I understand that this is part of that and that would be my my only message to them other than the one that Ali brings up which I think is valid too is okay we but we're also you know making this investment too so um and and I'm sure they are I have a lot of faith in them but um I want to acknowledge um I think they're great good that's nice to hear I've I've had some really good dealings with them as well so the village of Montgomery the Montgomery Economic Development uh committee they've been doing some really uh really close coordination um keeping us up to date on where they are yes as far as as far as I'm concerned yeah obviously your second bullet you know work with with law I'd be more interested in the details of the you know the abatements um and the long-term prospects um because obviously right now it's six grand but you know if we if there wasn't an abatement did we suspect it would be another 20 years before this developed kind of things along those lines I I just don't know the those kind of details um and there are there are some um in the village of Montgomery they do have some rules about abatements and things like that so we're going over those uh we're going over those and finding out how this fits and how exactly they're looking at quantifying the abatement amount and the time so we'll be engaging in those conversations oh yeah I'd love to see that yeah all right thank you Dr petsky most appreciated uh additional commercial industrial property with our 308 boundaries is a is a good thing so yeah um our next item is 8.3 this is an informational presentation and how to improve our transportation services and I know Dr petsky and Mr DeArmond are going to share some information with the board of education so with that it's all yours good evening thank you for letting me come and share with you tonight so we'd like to uh persist to the board for consideration developing and working with Tyler Tyler systems to for a system called Tyler Drive and then also part of that system will be another apparent app called versatrans my stop so what is all right so what is what is uh Tyler Drive so it's a it's a tablet solution it's uh it's a GPS solution so it's essentially uh nuts and bolts it's a it's a turn by turn drive a turn by turn GPS for the drivers but it's a multitude of other things too the technology allows us to do lots of things so one of the key safety features that we want to develop as part of the program is to have our students actually check in and on on off the bus I don't know if anybody's been in the uh I think Faith was with me in in the beginning of the school year when when police officers come knocking on transportation's door looking for kindergartner students that happen to get put on the wrong bus is that seems to be a repetitive thing every year they get put on the wrong bus or don't get off at the right bus stop uh with the check-in and check off software we would actually know what buses students got on we would know if they got off tried to get off at the wrong stop because it'll actually give you an alert if they're trying to get off at the wrong stop on the high school level it would keep students who aren't supposed to be on that bus off that bus sometimes we have that issue but definitely a strong safety feature that I'm really proponent of additionally route changes so right now in the craziness of being short staffed we're always making changes last second changes last minute changes a driver becomes available something changes we have them at the school but they don't have the route so now our process is we have to print off the route we have to create a PDF or scan it in at the printer send it to the we have to email it to whatever school they're at somebody in the school's got to get it off and print it off over there somebody's got to walk it out to the bus and and it's even happened that sometimes between all that they still end up getting the wrong route um so we could actually all they have to do now is just type in a code on the tablet and voila there they have the route and they have GPS directions so a driver potentially a driver that's never been in Oswego before could have GPS directions for a route right in front of him in a matter of seconds instead of going through the whole process of a driver trying to read a route sheet that's in about eight font eight five size eight font that I'm driving and trying to keep track of 40 elementary students and go down the road at the same time so anyhow so that that kind of moved right into that so substitute drivers new drivers people not familiar familiar with the area it would uh definitely be more safe for them to have this type of situation system in place um and then again kind of lastly our contractors they use different types of GPS systems with a tablet system we could actually provide tablets to our contractors and then we could all be under one GPS system you know currently somebody calls looking for a First Student Bus well now now I've got to go look into for students GPS system and dial up and I got to figure out which bus that is it can be become penitious but now with this type of system we can actually provide them the tablets and we would all be under one platform that we could view it from I think the question is probably going to arise well how is GPS better or than a paper if they've got to watch the GPS it's actually designed to go dark when the bus is moving and it's Audio Only so it would be Audio Only GPS system when they're actually moving so that they aren't distracted by that so what does Tyler Drive offer like I said it's a turn by turn navigation it helps eliminate the paper route sheets uh the Tyler drive integrates with our current versus trans routing and planning software which is also another Tyler product so it it integrates I don't want to say seamlessly because there is no such thing as technology integrating seamlessly but it integrates better and they've they've been doing this for a while they were kind of the innovators for this type of system so they've been around and they've done this a few times so also like I said gives us the ability to adjust in real time for route changes even even such something as simple as hey I've I got three students that didn't ride today I can take those students off the off the route right there on the tablet and the tablet will re re uh reroute for me automatically so I can take you know I can maybe knock 20 minutes off my route if these kids are way out of the way that aren't on the route also again increased accuracy for our ridership management and tracking I can get real-time updates on who's on the bus again to keep students reporting the wrong bus one of the things I'm really looking forward to would be is real-time student accounts which allow us to respond quicker to bus inefficiencies otherwise buses that aren't as full as they should be and or overcrowded buses um and you know so sometimes trying to get head counts uh actual head counts is sometimes difficult and usually it takes you know two three days over a week a week a period of trying to track to get those numbers so but with this with someone actually swiping their card on and off the bus we could actually have instant accounts almost every day now versatrans my stop what is that so part of this uh versus trans myself is a parent app it's a it's basically a ETA notification type app that would allow the would hopefully reduce it would reduce incoming calls to Transportation you know from people asking asking our dispatchers Hey where's the bus you know these things are this is always always worse when dispatchers need to focus the most uh you know first days of school bad weather when our dispatchers really need to be concentrating on what where the buses are and what they're doing and what's going on those are always the days when we get the most phone calls get the most people wanting to know Hey where's my bus what's going on where's you know so my stop would help us eliminate or reduce that it would also allow us another level of communication with our community with our members it's an app so we could actually push out notifications to that app so whoever's got the app would be able to get those and then it would also the mobile app would allow us to have multiple student families with multiple users so parents and students both will be able to view the bus ETA and receive those push notifications and why that's important is because as we go through here so communication is it Transportation everyone knows that the buses unfortunately are going to be late sometime but and it's the thing I always hear just tell me let me know let me communicate that to me that the buses that the bus is running late parents don't get so frustrated with the bus running late as they do the not knowing it's running late so this would allow us to be more timely because it's automatic it automatically gives you the ETA when the bus is going to arrive at your stop you can also set up what we call geofences so you could actually receive a notification say it passes through a certain intersection at a certain time you know that it's got to pass through that intersection five minutes before it gets to your house you can set up a notification so when it crosses that intersection you know you get a notification you know you got five minutes to get out to the bus stop currently our current notification process through Blackboard just rather time consuming you kind of got to jump back and forth from systems you got to jump into a system into Blackboard and it's very like I say time consuming susceptible to making mistakes then also again our incoming parent calls tend to overwhelm our office staff especially on the days like I said that they need to be most more focused and then again some of the issues I've received are the with Blackboard our students our students don't receive uh tend to not receive text messages because the because those that contact information comes out of Tyler sis and that information is usually just parent contact phone numbers so it goes parents get those messages but students tend not to so our Junior High and high school students you have to rely on their parents to contact them with the information if a bus is running like whereas if they have the app on their phone they can get direct contact uh get a direct message and they can actually have like again say they would have the app they would actually get etas live on their app on their phone and that's basically all I have to share about that thank you to Mr DeArmond what questions do you have uh Forum at this time you know I um I'm sorry I didn't send these in advance um I love the safety features um other districts that use this and their experience 204 uses it uh I talked to them quite a bit with Ron Johnson over there he loves it again it's it is technology it's it's based on a database so you got to keep your database current you got to stay on top of it you get you get out of it what do you put into it so so but yeah everybody I've talked to I was at a a conference um and a couple weeks ago and uh just before spring break and several people that I and they were Transportation directors uh several of them in there in districts similar to inside stars or larger use that type of system use the Tyler system year one is um oh year one is um on the the fees is that Hardware mostly yeah yeah it would be the tablet would be the installations uh it would be the card readers um I'm trying to think what else professional development and training that's involved they would they would do the installs so even even that part is at the reimbursable rate yeah so okay yeah because yours two through forever it's definitely an easy hurdle um and then it's budgeted yeah we already had a line Engine line item in place uh you know our Hope was to kind of split it over to budget periods so we could get the initial contract established and pick first initial payments and then final payments in the next budget year and this is this here's a final question um the app um is that limited to people that are in our database or yeah it would be limited to basically who we set it up as you know you know they would have to we could set it up that we actually and I'm sure our tech department will love me for this but we can actually set it up so that we establish the credentials and that it's it's secret you know yeah that's that's the only I love the safety feature there but that was my only safety concern and that's why I asked yeah you got to have a student ID or or something related to that in a credential to get into it yeah I'd hate somebody to download the app and know exactly where such and such buses you know what I'm saying yeah so okay two-part question so thinking about the the challenges that we had uh last year and thinking about um some of those greatest challenges and or root causes how will this system I'm not expecting you to rehash the presentation but with thinking about some of those root cause causes how will this system address those which I guess I mean which which exactly well I'm not con I'm thinking about the the issues I'm thinking about making sure that when we invest into the system that we still can ensure that it's going to address some of the concerns that we had last year yeah so like I said I think a lot of the issue is not knowing where the bus was you know with the driver shortage um you know not having buses at all and and then our being overwhelmed in our office that we weren't able to get those messages out um or if they were you know the bus is running 30 minutes late 40 minutes an hour two hours we can more quickly because you can go right through the app you can be right in the app on a dashboard basically we can see where all the buses are and then that dashboard actually allows us to send those push messages out to specific buses so it's a little bit cleaner than what the Blackboard is as a former Tech guy I would I would get very frustrated going into the transportation office and knowing we have all of this data in versatrans and all I'm asking is simple questions I want to know this route this bus I want to know who's on it and I want to know how we've Consolidated those routes and took to watch the process of having to go in and manually do it what this software in this system allows us to do is it automates all of that so it automates three things routing and routing assignments it automates the uh attendance and then the uh and just tracking of those buses so by having that database accessible to uh to us all of the data is there there's not a whole lot more data massaging that we need to put in it's now just having a system that can give us the data we want out so will it decrease the the delays that we had or will it just increase our opportunity to communicate it will increase our opportunity to communicate but it'll decrease the amount of time it takes when we decide when we finally decide we need to make those changes to be more efficient we can do that much quicker in real time than having to manually manually do the process can I throw a wrench in your attendance so here's a thought as a senior well not a senior he's a sophomore as a Sport parent in general you have sports who run some Seasons you have kids who go in go work out you have kids who only take a bus home but they're entitled to the bus home then they get to that bus and oh wait a minute we don't have room for you so then they get on the wrong bus and they end up across town we've been there right um so like my concern is when you guys are talking about real-time attendance not every kid is going to take the bus because the bus doesn't come when they need it right so how do you ensure that those kids who you know like I get it if they're getting a parking pass they probably don't need to be on the bus those kind of things I get but my concern comes in when so now my kids in football he's not going to need it until whatever November right or now he's in wrestling and he's not going to need it until March whatever it is right so how do you ensure that he still gets a spot on that bus if he needs one yeah communication I mean it's it's a two-way street too I mean it clearly states on our website that if you know we have somebody that hasn't ridden a bus for several weeks that we'll probably drop them off the bus you know we'll probably drop them off the route but on the converse let me ask this have you ever communicated that with parents because it might be on their website but nobody ever called me because my kid never takes the bus to school because he's always working out or he catches a ride with the neighbor but nobody's ever communicated with me that he lost his spot on a bus well doesn't mean that the driver always communicated that the student wasn't writing either well whose job is it that's my question well I'm saying if we have this type of system that would make it easier to make those decisions it would make it would kind of take that take the weight of that decision off of the driver right and bring it back into the administrators to my point who is a crapload of money on another system that could help us communicate better but we're still not communicating it gives us the data it gives us the information gives us the data and the information to know what we're dealing with like right now we're not getting some of that information so part of the challenges for transportation is we have to provide transportation for students who are with with a farther I'm clearly but now how many of those families really ride we rely on the bus drivers to share and update that information with us and sometimes we don't get the full picture with this we'll have much more information to make much more quality decisions now how that translates necessarily to the the Athletics and whatnot we'll we can monitor that I think that there is some ways that we can communicate better about now that we've got some system and we know what those we know who's riding and who's not we can clarify some Communications to those families who opt not to ride is this permanent is this temporary what is the reason for that and I'm sure the system can you know we can take some notes on student ridership and one that needs to be accommodated I would just I would caution taking kids off a bus if they're in a sport because sometimes kids get hurt and then they're not in their sport but my other question was I know that we have to get new software because our Tyler system is right so how will this work with that do a Power School whatever it is PowerSchool has been around the block a few times too right but how do they we have no concerns about PowerSchool communicating with Tyler with our versus trans or with but have we checked I've I've worked with it at other school districts when I was a first student a lot of our school districts use PowerSchool to communicate with our versus trains so I I really have no concern about powers for a little but to that point I guess what I'm interested in is two things number one when would if this was approved what is the rollout plan because you have a wide variety of drivers with different skill levels when it comes to technology so I don't want to see a rollout and a training program like two weeks before school starts like what is that number two um how are how does this address exactly kind of what Ali said but all of the things that we have discussed over the last couple of years for instance um I know one thing it will solve right when our buses were late last year at my home school what was happening was they were so late that information only the principal would have to go find the emails from those parents and sent I mean it was just a clunky system but those kids were missing their bus to get home to get to go to sports so I see that but what about the kids that maybe at the wrong bus stop but got left there and not picked up what about the fact that we heard from a lot of parents that buses were um overloaded and Michael knows that I've off I've come to him and say I heard there were you know 80 kids on the bus and he's like okay there were really only 62.
it says this is a proposal a bid proposal packet for asphalt repair on pages 19 and 23 it states that this bid packet is for lawn care and landscaping for the district adding to more confusion ladies and gentlemen we did the work for you last year we want to come back and if we lose the bid fair and square we've got no problem with that however this was not fair and square you've got two companies bidding on completely different sets of information so in addition to our formal protests which will be in writing to the board and to Mr surma's office into the state we respectfully ask the board to reject the office offices recommendation to award custom and instead give leeway for the office to clean up all these discrepancies within the bid make clear concise exactly what the district is looking for how many people how many man hours how many days exactly what needs to be done make the meetings mandatory so that the vendors can both be bidding on the exact same thing Apples to Apples and then make a fair determination and uh that's all I got thank you very much for your time thank you Katie we have one other public comment uh it's uh mayor Einhorn and the topic is uh Tiff extensions yep well if I is that working okay um I kind of got pulled out of the Dugout to do this at the last second um because a lot of people having scheduling issues but the long and the short of it is we'd like to request the standard 12-year extension to our tiffs we all of our tips are performing but they're not performing very well and we've actually we're coming to the end of one that is very important to us at shift number two which covers a downtown area and if you think about it's been a long time since we've been we've been working on that and now we're first starting to get some traction and we don't want to be bound up with getting into projects and not being able to finance them I can tell you that I probably have in Tif number two alone somewhere in the neighborhood of seven or eight million dollars worth of work that I have uh identified and scheduled that would not be able to be completed between now and and 28 which is when it when it expires in Tiff number uh four which is out along 394.
we would have loved to have sold it last year at this time when interest rates were lower but we still were able to save some money in the upcoming years for for any future projects we may have or in our debt service account and we are looking at current bonds that we sell to keep that call day to 10 years or less if we can so that in hopes that interest rate would be lower at that time than it is currently all right do I have a motion Mr President I moved to approve the resolution confirming lease approving the issuance of the bonds and resolution approving additional appropriation thank you Mr Robinson we have a motion and a second all those in favor signify by saying aye all those opposed motion passes five zero thank you all right announcements April 24th 2023 we have a special board meeting at 7 A.M here in the boardroom May 25th we have an extended executive session that begins at 2 p.m and on May 25th we have our regular board meeting that begins at 7 pm are there any board member reports this evening Mr Russell just to figure out how I'm going to be here okay no scouts [Music] I know that our Education Foundation um I'm sure she's maybe still has tickets left for us to join her at the gala so um and I'll be there as well I know a lot of our everybody will be here so join us please support our teachers and and that's going to be a great time April 22nd thank you I forgot that yeah Mr Robinson anything Steven nothing to save me um one other thing for me it's not your turn yet okay okay um the Johnson County Redevelopment commission um at our at our last meeting there was continued conversation about um the projects at Smith Valley and I guess I got to call it 69 now I gotta get out of the habit of using 37.
um leaves us with an mmdt balance on April 4th of 11 million 585.06309 and a total operating cash balance on the same day of 13 million 328 642 18. you should appreciate a motion please you have a second discussion all those in favor anyone opposed okay uh Consolidated cash Reconciliation Report there was a handout involving funds in the packet budget reports of the packet questions on those Mrs uh the Cheryl I had a question on one of the warrant articles it was PO number 13189 made payable to Communications Incorporated and I looked and I saw what it was for for the marketing web design but for some reason I thought we were going to tie that in with our new marketing approach um I know that uh both the superintendent and our principal spoke about putting together a committee so I didn't know if we were putting the cot before the horse or whether we were going to come up with an overall plan that would include our new web design and so that ten thousand dollar warrant article was for the company that has been hired I guess to do the web design but I my question is are they already on board are they going to wait to get input from all of us of how we want to go forward so I know that that New England school public Association that our principal had talked about I didn't know how this was all gonna tie in I just don't want us to go okay we'll do this here and then we'll do this here because then we're going to be right back at square one and at our meeting two weeks ago we decided that we wanted a solid approach so I'll take any feedback I have no problem with hiring this firm but I don't want them to jump in without some input here thank you superintendent your microphone junk please so our principal has been leading this our principle has been leading this effort in terms of uh working on our website has been somewhat look has been involved in it since the beginning of the school year but step one was certainly to hire a consulting firm to work with us and so there was a committee put together to do the work to determine who that might be that she's overseen and uh I can let Susan explain a little more to you also but anyways if it's on their recommendation and the work that they had done that this committee was selected there is a committee that is working to develop and move forward on our website there's also been a lot of research work that's already been done a lot of work behind the scenes by people on the committee and this committee will be continuing to work to move forward to complete this task of our new web design but I'll let Susan if Susan wants to explain a little bit more she can talk to you a little bit more about because she's been deeply involved in this effort thank you yeah I can just share that Communications Inc we looked at several different web design companies we also looked at trying to design something in-house and we did choose Communications Inc in terms of who we decided to go with to design our new website that is just one part the first thing that we did was phase one they came in and with a small group they did a visioning activity with a small group of Representatives in terms of people from technology in different areas of the building that we could give input in terms of like what they want to see in our website what's missing that's phase one so what they're going to do is in two to three weeks we expect to get back from them what they call like a framing which they're going to come back and say from what you gave the information you gave us from what we've looked at your website from what we know from what works in terms of websites they're going to give us a framing of recommended Framing and then we're lucky enough to have people internally that are working on developing the content Eleanor Stafford who's with us this year she's working with multiple departments to kind of curate the content so you know we have different departments and they know what they need so we also have Cassandra working on what type of you know how we want to represent into in terms of photo stock stock photos of all of our things after that once we get that the next phase would be to get what they call testers or more input so they want different users they want parents they want community members we can certainly have representatives from this team they want to have different users to kind of test out to see what the experience would look like that in terms of the website this company it's called Communications Inc we did not hire them as part of our overall Communications plan that just happens to be the name of their company that's the cut they do a a lot of communications they do strategy but we're starting with them specifically on our website Maryland any other questions okay fiscal year FY 24 budget Ms Martel is going to present it and the administration is looking for us to vote on it this evening this Motel so I'm not presenting the budget but at the last meeting I handed out the fiscal year 24 budget book and hopefully you all had a chance to review it I didn't get any feedback so hoping everything looks okay in here um there was one addition that we made after I presented the budget but it did go into the budget book and that is what you'll be voting on tonight so last year we earmarked a million dollars for the paving project and then when we got the quotes in they came in almost at Double what we had earmarked for it so we decided to put the project on hold and wait for the cost of petroleum to come down and we've decided to put that back out to bid this probably the spring and we'd like to earmark five another five hundred thousand for that project so it'll be 1.5 earmarked to do the paving but I just need you all to vote on the using the 500 000 of e d and if you look in your packet I've included this is a page straight out of the budget book the revenue page and you'll see on there the end at the 500 000.
moving to item 1.2 we have our flag salute which will be led by Miss Zoe Stapleton a student at Longfellow dual immersion preschool hi Zoe hi hi we're ready for you all right [Music] ready begin I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands explanation under God is invisible with liberty and justice for all yeah thank you Zoe so much for being so brave and leading us in our flag salute today have a great night um [Music] tambien they think I'm buenas noches moving to item 1.3 approval of the agenda I may have a motion make a motion to approve okay moved and seconded well is there any discussion move to a vote and the motion passes unanimously 1.4 roll call Board member benavidez board vice president Rodriguez Pena president Ford clerk Ariana here I'm sorry Ariana I'm sorry and board member Greer here thank you moving on to item 2.0 items from the floor public comment on agenda or non-agenda items hope do we have uh blue cards for any member of members of the public presence tonight good evening I'm here on behalf of the Azusa Women's Club my name is Vanessa Jones I'm the first vice president and Dean of Paris for the organization um as our students round out the year I wanted to remind them and their parents of all the amazing scholarship opportunities that are available throughout the community and Beyond including one from the Azusa Women's Club the mission of the Azusa Women's Club is the remote education and support our community Through events and fundraising all year long culminating in our annual scholarship board graduating students are invited to apply for the Azusa Women's Club scholarship by submitting an application which includes a personal essay question created by the scholarship committee applications are currently available through your school's counseling office they have all the information already every year the club Awards One minimum 500 scholarship to a student from each of the Azusa Unified School District High School each of the three high schools are eligible and encouraged July by April 20th that's the deadline I am excited to announce that through community support and approval of the executive board we're able to award a thousand dollar scholarship each of the selected scholarship recipients this year all students applying to post-secondary education are eligible to apply recipients of the awards are based on financial need academic achievement and Community involvement again the deadline is April 20th and if you have any questions you can contact us at the azusawomensclub.info at email and thank you for your have a good evening thank you so much Lika do we have any members of the public online we have no one online for public comment thank you we'll now move to item 3.0 presentation of surplus property update Mr Ortega thank you Dr Bill uh tonight uh we're going to spend the next uh couple of hours hour and a half um diving into this uh when we're internally referred to as phase three of school reorganization which is uh dealing with our Surplus property um as everyone knows uh we have a surplus property committee actually the the chair is uh among us tonight um and um we want to make sure that as we are going through this process that the Board of Education um is is coming along uh to understand where we are in the process and the information that's being uh shared eventually the goal uh of the 7-Eleven Surplus property committee uh will be to submit a recommendation via a report uh to the board of education and so we find it important that um as we work towards that goal uh when that arrives you would have had context information and background to make this next step of decisions um as informative as possible and so I'm very pleased tonight we we have uh two uh guests with us tonight we have Sarah Polito from uh our legal firm uh F uh three uh and she will be introducing our second guest but at this moment we'd like to call Sarah to the podium thank you all right just want to make sure this is working great um hello everyone it's great to be with you this evening again I'm Sarah Polito from F3 I'm the attorney that's been working with the district for about a year now on our Surplus property um so so before we dive in to the great content that Lauren has from dcg I just wanted to give kind of a brief summary of what's happened so far in the timeline um just so you all are up to date on everything that's happened here um so far with the Surplus properties um so just to recap uh the 7-Eleven committee was created on August 9th of 22 there was a resolution that was brought to the board then uh the 11 members of the committee were appointed on February the 7th we had our first meeting of the 7-Eleven on March 8th in which uh the properties were introduced all six of them uh the purpose of the committee was reviewed with the committee members we discussed um some of the laws and rules that apply to the operation of the committee and then um and a chairwoman was elected she's here with us tonight um so our next meeting is tomorrow and this this same set of information is also going to be provided to the 7-Eleven and so um just as was introduced by superintendent Ortega we wanted to ensure that you all had this information in advance of it going to the 7-Eleven committee for review um so dcg is a commercial real estate expert firm um right they they are Brokers and realtors that have expertise in the field of of commercial real estate and they were tasked with reviewing the six sites and identifying some Alternatives um so what they did is cause is called the feasibility analysis right and they looked at at a variety of factors that Lauren will go into much more detail into but essentially their goal was just to review all of the options for these properties and identify based on um you know certain limitations like land use planning and zoning and feedback from City officials what the most likely options were for potential use of these properties if the district decides that they um are Surplus for district needs um I I want to say you were all provided with a written summary of the findings that Lauren will go over in your board packets as well as um like a glossary of terms just in case any of those are unfamiliar those things should be helpful um and then I also want to highlight that the board is not being asked to take any action tonight or to make any final decisions about you know what to do with these properties that's um that's a part of the goal of the 7-Eleven is they're going to review this information and provide a recommendation so don't feel like you have to make a decision or that you're being asked to do any of that tonight it's really just um lots and lots of preliminary information to assist you in making those decisions later on when the time is right so with that I will leave the floor to Lauren to guide our discussion tonight thank you awesome well good this evening yet good late afternoon everyone my name is Lauren Jennings I'm with dcg strategies and I'm sure we've already heard what today's study session will be focused on the potential underutilized and potential Surplus properties that the district has identified for our firm um and so as you are aware our team we were hired by the school district um via request for proposal and so you as the school district released a request for proposal last summer and the request for proposal was specifically for a development consultant and someone who could come in and assist the district with assessing and really analyzing alternative use options for six pre-identified properties and so we'll talk through those properties on the next few slides but that is what our team has endeavored to do over the past few months has been again in response to the request proposals that was released by the school district and so um the we have a lot of information to go through today um so I have built in a couple of different pauses throughout however if at any point you have a question that comes up or point of clarification that will be helpful for the entire group definitely obviously feel free to either raise your hand or just stop me and let me know um and I can answer questions on the spot as well too but again I've built in three particular portions of time um following the sides for some questions and answers um and I have about an hour to an hour and a half of information so I can go as slow or as quickly as you need me to again um we're going to spend a lot of time diving deep into the general process that our team went through we'll also discuss just some of the market realities of the Azusa area and then we'll go into the actual development feasibility and findings themselves on the next few slide and so with that we will Jump Right In and so obviously this session is not at all about us but just wanted to provide some context in terms of who we are so our firm dcg strategies we've been in business since 2005 so we've been around for nearly 20 years um and we work with and we specialize in working with public schools and districts throughout the state of California and so we are a full-service real estate team meaning that we provide Consulting development and brokerage services to local educational agencies throughout the state of California a fun fact about us is that we are the exclusive real estate services provider for California school boards Association so csbs selected us as their exclusive real estate services provider and so through that we regularly provide workshops and seminars to csba members throughout the state of California and so moving on as I mentioned in response to the RFP you as a school district pre-selected six sites that you wanted studied for potential alternative use options and so those sites are listed right here on the slide today as I mentioned the presentation will go over some high-level information on the process we'll go over marketing for the general area and then we'll discuss each of these sites one by one and so when we talk about alternative use often this slide really depicts what we deem to be best practice when analyzing and assessing feasibility for specifically School District property and so I'll go through um this slide here in general but this was the process that our team has been on over the past few weeks um and so the first step involves introductory conversations and that's our team had an opportunity to meet with staff um and we're really trying to understand what our current market realities and then also really diving deep into what our board goals and priorities and potentially objectives that you want us to cover and one thing that we heard loud and clear from staff is that the board does not have any predispositions to really any use at all um the staff let us know that you as the board were open to all options and you really wanted our team to bring back what potential options are so that you can make fully informed decisions we always say that our role is we do not provide recommendations our role is to give you reliable data so that you in turn can make a fully informed decision um one of the the big things about obviously being on a board is there's a lot of decisions that you have to make and so we want you to feel comfortable when you make those decisions to know that you have all of the information available to to you so again you make a fully informed decision and so that was the the first step and again this is really what we deem to be best practice um and then the second step is really understanding a site constraint review and when we say a site constraint review essentially what we're saying is that is there anything physically on a site that could potentially prohibit and or limit development one example that I'll give you which is why this is important is that we're working with another school district they gave us five sites to study similar to how your school district is at one of the sites was just over 16 Acres our team did review a site strength analysis on the property and determine that of the 16 Acres only two and a half of those Acres were actually developable that is a huge difference and that's something that you need to know as board members because alternative use options for a 16 Acre Site are likely maybe going to be different than alternative use options for a two and a half acre site so part of what we do is really understanding is there anything that could prohibit and or limit the developable acreage of a property um I also want to just emphasize here that we did not do any formal soil studies or formal physical due diligence that involves a lot of resources a lot of outside consultants and we typically say to protect your resources to wait and to wait to do those studies once a formal decision has been made but so we did preliminary site constraint analysis and I'll get go through in a future slide on what that means um getting into really the meat of it is step three the land use analysis and that's really the bulk of the work that we do and I can share a little bit more about what that means and also to level set I would say um and so in as a part of a land use analysis what we study is what are the current approved uses for a property um but then not only what are the current approved uses but also what are potential uses that are likely to be approved and so taking a little bit of a step back when you talk about real estate and development nothing is haphazard everything is planned and everything is detailed years in advance and in development each jurisdiction has what's called a general plan as well as a zoning ordinance at per municipal code and essentially those documents are really the rule book and the jurisdiction is essentially saying that these are the uses that we want in these particular areas um and so the I always say the general plan and the zoning ordinance are like sisters the general plan is the bigger older sister um the general plan is the long-term blueprint right and so when a city is planning for future development they typically will plan 20 to 30 years in advance and so the general plan will say you know in the next 20 to 30 years this is what we want to see where then the zoning ordinance has to align with the general plan however the zoning ordinance provides a lot more detail so it'll give specific uses that are allowed within those land use designations as well as development standards such as you know this is the height limit this is the setback these are you know the the look and feel of properties in general and so a part of of what we do is we look at those contextual influences to better understand again what is already approved but then what's likely to be and I say what's likely to be approved because essentially in modern development um cities want to make sure that everything fits and everything aligns right it's highly unlikely that you're going to have a single family home next to let's say a 10 foot or 10 story excuse me apartment building that's by Design not by just happenstance that is that's by Design and so it's really important to understand the surrounding area um and so that's a land use portion um the fourth step really is okay well after we assess what are the approved uses and the potentially a potential approved uses um we only want to give you vetted options right we don't want to give you options that say well maybe you can do this but we're not sure so we actually will vet the options and a part of that as Sarah mentioned is we have informal conversations with the local jurisdiction I might always have to give the caveat to say that nothing is ever guaranteed these are completely informal conversations um nothing is guaranteed until you actually go through the formal application and perming process but generally speaking we can get a good feel of what is likely to be approved and so we did vet those uses and then the final step is we package them up into a presentation and then we present you with the findings for you to ask questions um with an end goal of making it a future decision not a future okay so then uh moving on this is we're still Level setting right now so we're not getting into the nitty-gritty yet we're still Level setting um but highest and best use is a term that you will see on some of the future slides and so I wanted just to take a second to pause and make sure that we all understand what I mean when I say highest and best use so highest and best use uh contrary to its name because when you think of best it kind of can sound like subjective but it's an objective term highest and best use is a actually an appraisal term that is identified by the appraisal Institute and essentially the definition of it means it is a use the most probable use that is going to provide a property owner with the maximum Revenue so that's essentially what it is it highest and best use um rates I would say revenue and it says what what option is going to give us the highest revenue and so there's four tests that are applied when you consider and determine what a highest and best use of a property is and so those four are listed here and it's essentially um it's saying what's physically possible on a site and so that's a part of what we talked about in our process slide of you have to understand what's physically possible first um the second question or outline that it that it asks is what's legally permissible and that's what we talked about the approved uses and likely to be approved uses with the zoning and general plan um the third test so to speak that is answered is what it what of those uses what is financially feasible because essentially we want to use that is at least going to um not put the property owner to deficit um and then the final test is of the uses that are physically possible legally permissible and financially feasible which use gives us the maximum productivity I.E Returns the highest revenue um and so when you go through that test you essentially are ended with one option and that's what's called the highest and best use and so when we talk about highest and best use I just want to make sure we're all on the same page that it's purely Revenue um it has we also understand in working with school districts and School District property that there are other things that come into play when you're assessing ice and best use right um sometimes it's not all revenue it sometimes it has to do with what are the board goals and objectives right A lot of times we work with school districts where they say revenue is important but it's not the highest and so we really want to take into account other factors and so again I wanted to make sure that that you know I hear you and I understand highest and best use is purely just revenue and then other things that it could be Community goals right highest and best use does not take into account Community goals and so we're purely talking about Revenue here all right so I'll pause here um that was sort of just the intro to levels that make sure we understand key terms um any questions about any of the information that was just shared and thank you I have a couple of questions one you said that you would be providing options and not recommendations but this is information that's going to the 711 committee so maybe this is a question for you represented this is going to the 7-Eleven committee who is providing recommendation not not up so so they are getting up they're sending a recommendation and I imagine along with that recommendation we would also get the menu of options yeah I can ask Sarah to provide more but yes essentially that is correct uh the 711 committee will gather information just like the way we're gathering information on now and they are tasked uh to create a report uh that will make a recommendation to the Board of Education in terms of the uh possible uses for the um for the sites uh we have we've set the stage with the 7-Eleven to let them know that they are not a decision-making body um they will be recommending and the the decision-making body is the Board of Education I don't know if you want to add anything to that Sarah yeah just uh just very briefly so the 7-Eleven doesn't normally within the content of the report provide the board with all of the options they normally kind of explain the process that's happened as a part of their uh their meetings and their review and then they provide a recommendation which can be as broad or as specific as they come to um so they they will have a um usually it's relatively specific and that they won't say like you know here are 12 options of things you can do they'll say you know we've looked at all of the data that's been presented by staff and by consultants and we think for each property this is the use that the board should do and again it's just a recommendation the board can decide to you know to take that to modify it to do something completely different it's just um essentially the board has tasked this committee with doing the hard work of looking into all of the data so that you know you have something that you can rely on when you're making your final decision so I would say it's going to be more recommendation and less all of the options they will have looked at all the options but ultimately they're going to send you um a relatively specific like set of recommendations for the sites okay and with your question so will we be able to also look at the options from where they finalize their recommendation that was one of the questions yeah well so I think you'll be presented with some options today certainly the same ones at the 7-Eleven will see and then we can we can walk through uh whether it be in written form or in a future board meeting or a different you know form of a study session a kind of a more extensive review of the options but really that's what you'll see tonight is that dcg has looked at you know based on all the factors that you just heard what what are all the options for these properties given given some of the limitations um now there there are some things we'll talk about at the very end of today about things that um you know some internal uses maybe that you may consider for these sites right and so that that may be kind of a bigger conversation with staff to identify what things outside of like disposition of the properties may be potential uses for these sites as well does that make sense great um my question is um I know you talked about the zoning so we would know um where the site is located if that site is zoning right for for apartments or a store or you know it's residential so it makes that makes a difference where the property is located at oh you're exactly right so to answer your question yes okay so every single parcel that is anywhere is has a zoning assigned to it it has a land use designation which is defined for your general plan and then it has the little sister which is the zoning that's defined per municipal code and zoning ordinance and so the zoning ordinance essentially says there's a name to it so for example let's just call it institutional slash school which some of your properties are Zone institutional slash School it'll say what the purpose of that zone is and then it'll already tell you these are permitted uses that whoever the local jurisdiction is has approved to have on this particular parcel then it'll say what conditionally permitted uses are and both of those terms are in the glossary of terms that I provided for it for you guys and so essentially everything is already thought through far in advance from the governing jurisdiction and that's perfect but also um because we do have our schools our properties I should say and through different cities step does each City have different zonings right do they yeah so we'll go through that so you're already you you're on to my next Point perfect okay sorry no no don't be sorry so there are three different jurisdictions so there's six properties and we'll talk about this a little more on further slides But to answer your question yes there's three different jurisdictions that govern your six properties which sort of makes it a little complicated because that's essentially three different sets of rules that you have to abide by um per property and so because of that each jurisdiction has its own rulebook which is its own General plan and Zoning code so we also have them in the unincorporated which is LA County yes exactly so that's so so one of them is city of Glendora um three of the sites are located in city of Azusa and then two of the sites are in unincorporated areas and essentially an unincorporated area means that it's not within official City Limits and so anytime you have unincorporated land the governing Authority is the county so you have two of the sites correct that are located within or under the jurisdiction of the County of Los Angeles yeah I was actually surprised to see I didn't realize that one of the properties were unincorporated well yeah so we'll talk about that because technically four of the sites have um an address of Azusa so you would just assume oh they're all four within Azusa now only three of them are within Azusa City Limits the fourth one has the Azusa address but it's outside of official City Limits which is fairly common I know it sounds odd it's like why would they have an Azusa address but they can't give it a LA County address I guess so they give it Azusa address but it's outside of official City Limits and so that's just a part of you know when you look up property knowing how to navigate and who the local jurisdiction is so you're absolutely correct thank you yes thank you just a couple other quick questions so as we're looking at at ice and best use and I appreciate how you defined that to clarify that it's a technical and objective firm um would if if part of what we're looking at and and it doesn't take into account board goals Community goals I I know you said we spoke to staff at what point in the process does the board speak into uh what those goals are on the front end where I where a concern that I have is as the 7 11 committee is is working and doing some work if they are not informed with uh with with per some of that perspective and what some of those goals are from the board then do we run into a situation where the 7-Eleven committee has gone ahead and done some work that is that is detached from what some of those goals are and so now we're needing to either walk some of that work back so I see I see some potential room for for greater levels of partnership and collaboration on on the front end that that is potentially concerning uh and then the the second piece is you talked about you would bring forward vetted options but you said that there would not be soil or other Environmental Studies that that would happen until a bit later so does that mean that um they'd be vetted up to that point or or are you saying that the options that you bring forward at that point you would do some of those Environmental Studies so give you a short answer um essentially they are vetted meaning that they have a likelihood of being approved your first hurdle is really is the the boss the local jurisdiction going to allow it because if they don't allow it then you it's like a hard stop um in development there are um you essentially most the time would need to do some sort of soil study to say you know is the soil conducive to the type of development we want um the reason why we don't recommend doing those type of studies now is one they cost a lot of money but then two you really the the type of studies that are needed are based off of the use the anticipated use so because there's no decision on what use that you want there right now um we would essentially be sort of going into it blind um and I will also say that um and this is obviously with the caveat of if the school district is keeping the properties and if you're not you know using another entity on the site then you obviously would do the studies but in some instances if you decide to either lease the property or potentially sell it those are costs that would likely nine times out of ten be borne by the tenant and or the buyer so those because of those reasons I mean you can spend the money now but we recommend not to and then I I can answer you're probably best yeah I was just going to speak to your first question sorry um so to your first question I certainly think if they're if there are goals or particular things that come to mind even tonight when you're reviewing this presentation are there things you've already thought of you know feel free to share those here or with staff you know privately in another Forum depending on um you know how you how you feel is appropriate but I think that's kind of our goal tonight is to start to give you as much data as we can about the review that's been done so that you can start to kind of formulate those ideas about things you may use these sites for internally or on the other side if ultimately like disposition is really what the board wants um so you know for example things to think about if there are some goals about some use of sites which sites would make most sense to do that as opposed to which sites maybe would we want to maximize value so we could put some money into those uses that you plan to do on some of those sites for example so so to your point um our our goal is for the 7-Eleven to operate along with recommendation from the board and staff so that there isn't that kind of like mismatch in the timeline um we didn't though kind of want to force that on the board a bit too early right like we want you to have information to be able to think about what really makes sense on which site does that make sense so that you're you know you're not making decisions at a point too early before you you know you've seen things that will go into that decision I think just one more thing to add to that is that right now the system that we are building is that again we would be doing a parallel kind of process right and so we would be coming to the board on a frequent basis as we're going to the 7-Eleven to to have those kind of opportunities maybe not extensive like study sessions but definitely in in regular board meetings to have agenda items where we can preview what's coming and then have moments to speak into as well my question I'm not sure again if I'm speaking to early but go ahead um I would like to know how can the funds be used for the when we sell lease or whatever with these properties or where are we going to use these funds or how can they be used yeah so that's a great question and actually it was asked by our 7-Eleven so it is something that's on the mind of our of our committee members as well um so they're they're uh there are restrictions on the use of funds that come from Sailor lease of surplus property they essentially have to be put back into Capital Improvements right so so facilities improvements that are going to happen on District sites um so a lot of the time like I mentioned before for example there there are times when you know the board may be thinking about well if we want to Surplus a couple of these sites and the revenue from those things can go back into other facilities right to build a new um a new and better facility or to upgrade one that you decide to keep um so yes so it is important to highlight that there are restrictions but essentially they go back into facilities improvements thank you all right any other question before we move on we'll have more time for questions as well okay so uh this slide right here jumping back in uh you know now that we sort of like I said we I feel like we've level set it a little bit we've defined some key terms um now we'll jump a bit more into the process and then some of our preliminary findings um and so this slide right here really um is meant to be parallel with the process slide that we talked about I think it was two slides prior um and this is uh just some of the the overall obviously we've done a lot more than this but this is some of the overall steps that our team has taken so in terms of of Step One Like I said we did have introductory conversations with staff as well as District legal counsel we completed some general uh property history research as well as just general property exploration um our team did obviously complete um exterior site visits of the properties I'm driving the neighborhoods just to make sure that we have a general understanding of location and then the problem properties themselves for the site constraint review as I mentioned we did not do any environmental analysis or any physical studies so we did not study the soil I always have to make sure I emphasize that um however we did receive preliminary title reports and so a title report I believe that's also on the glossary of turns but it's essentially a document that is prepared by a title company that goes back as far as they can with the life of the property and shows the chain of title a title report will also show if there's any easements or any liens on a property and easement is essentially if there is if someone else has permission to use the property in some way so for example a lot of properties have utility easements from like the utility company or even really the city so a couple of the properties had a city easements where the city owns them and the U.S School District at some point in time or maybe even a prior owner gave the city permission to put uh utility underneath it or add a sidewalk or whatever have you so um those are a part of understanding if there's any physical constraints on the property that would limit the developable area so we did review the preliminary title report and then we did review what's called a plotted easement map and so when you get the preliminary title report it has all of your easements but they're all in like legal terms not even legal terms but they're um like a it's not it's not plotted on a map it's all words and it says you know this north of this and it's like how do you read that so A plotted easement map is essentially where a title company will plot it and it'll show your parcel and it'll say this is where the utility easement is and so we did review um both of those reports for the properties and um some of the most of the properties did have easements but none of them would really severely limit development or even prohibit development and they're just essentially things to be aware of but they could be uh worked around if anything were on the sites um as I mentioned we did complete a land use analysis and so we did preliminary development feasibility um and then preliminary capacity review essentially like what is the capacity of the property itself and then as I mentioned we um vetted those the potential use options and so that was vetted via informal conversations with planning with the three different jurisdictions um and then really looking at local land use Trends and so um in summary um and also to your point when we call it a preliminary development analysis it's preliminary because we didn't study any soil but it was based off of what's listed on the site there just the local Landing starts like regulations at General development patterns and then those informal conversations with the city and county staff one thing I'll say which will go into on some of the the future slides is that um the informal conversations with City and County Planning staff are really key uh because once again they are they have the end-all be-all in terms of what uses are allowed on the property and so we really take those conversations um seriously uh because we want to make sure that any use that is that we presents or any option that we present aligns with both either the city or the County's goal for the property so again just wanting to note that okay so now we start to sort of get into like the fun stuff so uh this is just a general summary of findings and so in general as I mentioned we studied six sites um in total for land acreage it was just over 58 Acres so 58.51 acres to be exact and as we discussed the properties are located within three jurisdictions and so we sort of talked about it already but just again to make sure we're all clear the jurisdiction is essentially who has the governing authority over over your property and so as I mentioned four of the properties have city of Azusa address however only three of them are within city of Azusa City Limits and so I'll talk through on the future slides what three properties are governed by the city of Azusa one of the properties had the city of Glendora address and so it's governed by the city of Glendora and then the final two properties one is in Azusa and one is um excuse it has an Azusa address and the last one has a Covina address but they're both located in unincorporated areas of Azusa and Covina so thus they fall under the County of Los Angeles Dona excuse me um jurisdiction um and so um as we'll also see and you'll learn the properties hold a variety of different zoning designations and we talked a little bit about the importance of what that is and why that's important but we'll go through what that means but there was a variety of different zoning designations raining for ranging from classifications reserved for public agencies which makes sense because you are a public agency um two various forms of residential uh what was interesting is that some of the properties are already zoned for residential use even though you as a school district are using them as a school so it's something obviously to take into consideration as we learn or excuse me as we discuss the alternative use options and then one thing which I'll talk about on the next few slides but just wanted to make sure I think it's no uh surprise that California is in a housing crisis we have been in a housing crisis and um I'm hoping it won't be too much longer than winter housing crisis but California we need housing and so one thing that we heard loud and clear across the board even though we talked to three different jurisdictions each jurisdiction in terms of the cities and the counties are are all aligned and their goal to increase housing stock and I'll talk through some of the legislation that is really at the Forefront of their minds in terms of what is making this such a priority for them but one thing again that we've heard loud and clear is that the entire county is in real need of housing um and um the jurisdictions are making that a priority with any new development that's taking place um and so all right so here's where we'll now talk into some of the findings and so uh when we think of just the General market landscape uh this is focused obviously just on Azusa just because that's where we're located but most of the majority of the properties are located actually in Asus itself um what was interesting that that we found in reading the general plan the current General plan that currently um oversees the uh the properties is was adopted in 2004. so what is that almost 20 years it's about 20 years but again that's standard because General plans look at a 20 to 30 year Horizon so in 2004 when the general plan was approved for the area um the general plan noted that open space for development was sparth um in 2004 the general plan noted that the entire city of Azusa was pretty much already developed and so that's important to understand because obviously that was 20 years ago and generally speaking it's probably only gotten worse um again the general plan noted that there really wasn't open space and so when you don't have vacant land for development when you don't have vacant land to build the necessary housing that's needed um you're essentially left with what's called infill development this is another term that's included in the glossary sheet that was provided for you but infill development is essentially development that is already on developed land and so that could be essentially a parking lot that is used as a parking lot and they say no we want to develop it for infield development um it could be industrial land that once housed an industrial warehouse but they change it to residential development because there's nowhere else to develop and so one thing that was noted again back in 2004 was that the city was really focused on infill development to meet their goals and their development needs essentially because there was no other land that they could focus on if everything's developed you have to focus on what's already developed yeah and so um that was one key term and then we'll talk about a little bit in terms of uh The Orchards and the agriculture that applies to actually two of your sites so I'll save that for when we go to those slides um but again in general development was was very sparse and I say it again the local city as well as the jurisdictions are aligned in terms of policy makers and staff and their goal to increase housing stocks okay so now this is getting in drilling down even further to some State legislation um and so the reason why housing is on the Forefront of everyone's mind is for what we call the Regional Housing needs allocation um this is short for arena so rhna is this uh shorthand term for it so if you ever hear anybody say Arena and they're talking about housing chances are they're talking about the Regional Housing needs allocation and so essentially um there's a lot of different layers involved with Arena um but this it is a mandate from the state of California so the California Department of Housing and Community Development which is also known as hcd essentially determines how many housing units are needed throughout the state of California and they also determine how affordable those housing units need to be and it's the cycle that they go through every eight years and so every eight years hcd says to every region you need to allow for X number of housing units and this is how affordable those housing units need to be um so then every region then forms an association so in your case it's the Southern California Association of governments also called skag and so if you hear that term that's what they're referring to so the Southern California Association of governments then takes the number that hcd gives them which in your case is just over 1.3 million units um and skag will then attribute a a reasonable share or proportion to each City town and jurisdiction within their region and so um we have listed on the slide here um but again so the the current cycle again it's an eight year cycle it happens every eight years the current cycle is from March excuse me October 2021 to October 2029.
so I know they will be coming in to speak to you we already talked about that so it's going to be probably in May that they're going to be here sharing a little bit of the work they're doing so this is the first of several offerings that we are putting together to engage and Empower our parents as well and um I do have also well that's 845.1 because the other this one is coming now 5.1 so those are my general updates great thank you yeah I've seen many many social uh posts about paridad and thank you for bringing that because I um gosh I think it's been almost three years because it was one of our first meetings I don't even think I was elected to get um at Our Lady mother of the church that was hosted and they were asking for that because it's I believe based in Boulder is that based in Boulder there was a um a hefty research that our parents led to select who they wanted to um to bring up I'm gonna say I was very proud of listening to our parents it was a research well done in a presentation well done where they selected this group we are in conversations with them actually to rather than having them come because the groups are 25 between 20 and 30 parents but we are engaging with them also to start training trainers so we have parents training parents and and supporting other parents not an organization so that we can start building structures for sustainability so um it's it's quite interesting and the parents are very excited congratulations on all friends yeah um great um next um still under you Dr Olivia a strategic plan process um this is something that we've been very excited about um it's been a long time in the works um and so Dr Lydia would you like to give us an updates yes Madam president it's about 5.1 I think you're going my is not coming up my is a strategic plan but I have five point um this is misplaced so I guess it was still part of 5.1 the monitoring reports but I if you want I can do this one and then we'll go back there whatever whichever you prefer do you mind continuing on Five Point the previous one to make sure yeah yes yes because I just realized the other one is not 5.0 this is okay so um continuing with 5.1 superintendent updates um in a little bit of context for the for our community members and and um those out there listening the Board of Education adopted policy governance in February and as we move forward they're very specific ends or formerly called goals that the board has recognized and identified for our district you're gonna this group is going to hear a little bit about it during the strategic planning presentation that I have after this but part of those goals they're very specific um limitations that they give me and things that they are expecting for the superintendent to do and part of this governance policy is on there's a calendar that we are building for the year in every month they're going to be different reports that are coming to the board where I as a superintendent report the work that my team is doing in following those ends and staying within the limitations that you that you clearly provide for me so this is going to be our second month that we bring one I do have two monitoring reports to bring one is reported for executive limitation number eight school year calendar and executive limitation number 16 Financial Administration for the month of April all this expectations can be found in board docs we have an area in there and it can also be found in our website so if anybody would like to go and is curious about it uh today I'm going to be presenting one uh on a although I present in two for you to accept I will be providing an update uh with a PowerPoint on one of them um the second one for the financial Administration will further discuss this on um during the next executive not executive I'm sorry study session uh in two weeks so we're gonna um I'm presented it today but the presentation specifically only for el8 so this is the internal reporting for the school calendar and what I'm gonna do I'm I'm explaining the little the the few steps that I'm going to take in this presentation since we're starting here we're just getting to find our Rhythm and see if this is going to work for this way of presentation is going to work for the board um the the first few slides I do have the wording of the policy itself so it is known for although the board knows about it it's also information for the community and uh it basically says that the superintendent will not fail to provide an adaba District calendar not only for the district but also it could be for individual schools if if there's a merit for that there is a administrative policy that we have within the district that is policy that the superintendent owned under policy governance and that is very clear on the different steps so I will be sharing about those steps that we followed and um the there are six basic things that you have provided me you know in this executive limitations that must be in place as we follow the process of identifying or or approving and adopting or adopting an approving a calendar our first one is that I will not fail to take reasonable steps to allow public input so you will hear in the few slides the committee who was part of that the process the days that we met and also the work that we had with labor to ensure our teachers um you know through them also have input superintendent will not fail to take reasonable steps to provide copy of the calendar to parents or Guardians once it is adopted I will bring to your attention that this was adopted by the board in in January so this is explaining the process we had then uh the third um expectation or limitation is that a superintendent will not fail to give adequate And Timely notice to students parents and teachers specifically specifically 30 days before the implementation of the calendar um you know in that on the table in this case the calendar that you approved was for next school year 23 24 and also 24 25.
um there was a um I think there was a utility gas utility bankruptcy that happened there and ultimately there was a chance for actually it was um like a self-organized non-profit along with with city um Town governments to come together to actually propose a change like almost um you know very similar in the nature of what's being proposed or at least the idea that's being proposed and the kinds of goals around affordability safety um definitely climate was was at the top of a list of goals and what was proposed um in Eastern Massachusetts was was this idea of a geothermal Network that would provide heating Services um to businesses and homes um in these mainly residential districts on the east coast and and so I looked at that as one of the um I believe that they're implementing it now it was funded through like I mentioned this um bankruptcy um of the utility and so it's cool because they had a lot of funds going into it and a lot of um movement around right like a bit of a crisis um so I don't know I wasn't intending to say this but I guess I would just um advocate for us all to think about actually what we're in as our own kind of Crisis and our own kind of opportunity and although it's not being um motivated by you know something incredibly tragic I think that that's great for us um but I think that we should still move with urgency and I really support what's being proposed um but I will say um I love the idea of um these um the research being done with other cities uh and States but I I would like to kind of raise my concern for I think the most intricate part of what um what what would need to happen to actually make an alternative heating franchise work which is that uh that Baker basically proper um in measurements not a great word from psychology but like um mixing of Energy Efficiency retrofits and whatever Alternative Energy System or Energy System is proposed um I think that that's a place where Ann Arbor could really be a leader and I know that um a lot of work in Energy Efficiency retrofits has already been proposed we heard some great information last time Missy about um the kind of like deeper um engagement with with citizens um through the concierge process or just like really getting folks what they need and so yeah I would just stress my support for high quality retrofits coming along with anything that's proposed in terms of uh renegotiation or franchise or a potential alternative energy source I think like uh just Ann Arbor has the potential to really go above and beyond even what other cities have done and I think that we shouldn't limit ourselves to just um kind of sitting within the uh what others have done but really taking the opportunity given the opportunity that we have with this two and a half or three years to renegotiate to really dream this up I think putting everything we have behind it um is is a great a great move so thanks for sharing thank you uh before I call on the next Commissioners I just want to piggyback on that uh for other Commissioners and for the general Public's interests um there's a non-profit in the Boston area called heat h-e-e-t and I encourage everyone to look at their website um there are also um a couple of videos um actually several videos um where they're um like webinars or talking about the the piloting process I think um Claire mentioned there's Pilots that are already at least in process um so um I encourage all of you to look at what's going on there and there's probably other other such uh developments because this is something that's obviously starting to catch on there's a lot of other people that are looking this at an opportunity so um uh I uh maybe Missy you can just give a thumbs up or thumbs down is is he mentioned on the city web page for the gas franchise and I don't know if they are but we've talked them a lot so I can easily ask them I am going to risk it and say two things really quick one um commissioner Comber uh just and Claire you mentioned this too the examples I gave are from other franchises right like so the ideas of contract length or efficiency like that's coming from other franchise agreements so you're starting to see like that right the kinds of things no one has asked for everything that I put on that list but some that last for many of those things and then secondly um I've heard uh it a few times that this will take until 2027.
thank you and and just to share that what you have in front of you is 15 pages but I condensed that from a 40 page document and I did provide Mr sabala a copy of that 40 page document in in case you want a copy of that my literature review consists of 15 or more citations but I pulled just two for your information Nelson and Youngblood 2022 repeat reported that only 19 of American Indian and Alaska native aged 18 to 24 are currently enrolled in post-secondary institutions Nelson and young blood in 2022 reported that the U.S census data shows that institutions of higher education are failing to provide College Pathways for indigenous students I will also state that um it's been very difficult to find um research within the last five years on American Indian Alaska native students in high school and transitioning to um institutions of Higher Learning the problem space found at l2022 suggested that drawing from the voices of indigenous students could form the foundation from which indigenous Center surveys could capture more nuanced conceptualization of success so that's um just one of many citations they tell us that we're not experts until we receive our doctoral degree and if there's a problem that we want to solve too bad we have to look at existing research and pull from that and expand and move forward theoretical Foundation that I selected is low at L 2019 reported that Native American Reliance emerged due to a limited or available Native American theoretical Frameworks and um been working with my dissertation committee they had other suggestions which were also excellent suggestions however I thought that it was important to to stick with a native um themed Foundation and I'm not sure if you can see this but it's a native Reliance Theory seeking truth Making Connections um being responsible caring to provide having an income requesting assistance for um what is necessary caring for others respecting others being present being accountable calling on the Creator in our need being disciplined seeking a vision um making decisions based on um reading that on honor and defending the vision sharing the vision um counseling with Elders accepting the vision speaking the vision in traditional native language and I want to thank you all of you especially who will make an effort to speak our language and and to recognize the importance of our language uh being confident um having a sense of identity being proud of a native Heritage accepting native beliefs and having a sense of self-worth um my first year in in college I went to Central Arizona Junior College um they asked me to to describe myself using my last name I could not think of anything positive to say about myself using my last name and as the years went by what came to my mind is Juan In A Million one of a kind and so I started to feel more confident in myself as just as a person and that is attributed to many mentors in my life the research study um Dean has 10 themes that I only pulled three to share with you tonight being responsible understanding that as members of our community we are asked to help our community and to help make decisions and um while 2020 advocated that we must remain aware of our own individual responsibility in our tribal societies and without a high school diploma GED students cannot enroll in college and model reported that as a result of American Indian Alaska native high school students not graduating from high school fewer American Indians are eligible for post-secondary Education than any other group a personal decision making is critical such as a student who took responsibility by acknowledging that what she was faced with challenges in in school she failed to inform her instructor of personal things that she was faced with um and there's a tendency for for American Indian Alaska native students to fall in that category um because we sometimes feel like others won't understand our our culture so to speak being disciplined to promote self-efficacy beliefs personal goals to help students become disciplined understanding student perception of CCR programs help instill discipline in students and it's also important for institutions of Higher Learning to welcome students um Fung 2021 reported that dominant narratives can move away from blaming students for a lack of resilience and move towards into institutional responsibility and structural changes being confident being in a majority population build self-confidence but once you step up the nation and especially in the University setting oftentimes American Indian Alaska native students are the only student in the class of 100.
however when they use our likeness or our logo that gives us some room and when they when they despair it make disparaging marks about other students if they're bullying them we do call them on that and we take whatever action we can our Authority stops at the school doors for most of this you need to understand that but we also take it very seriously however sometimes that Authority can extend out into the law enforcement if threats are made and we don't take any of the threats slightly but just remember it's not us if it's not Facebook it's not Twitter and so we want to make sure that we're doing that we have an Instagram too that's just it we do have an Instagram we don't have Tick Tock though I know that so thank you for that late night news the uh I want to make a couple announcements one is April 17th will be at 5 PM the district boardroom here for a work study to consider potentially a four-day school schedule for the 24-25 school year there if you remember how long it took for the sex ed this is just as long it takes about a nine month period to get through and uh well that has been created so the community and staff and people can you know I've been meeting with people that have come to me and asked for meetings on it we'll uh we'll Reserve any opinions until we've had time to do that and then we'll also look at a bond and override election we're going to reduce our current Year's budget next year for the 23-24 school year by over eight hundred thousand dollars we have about a 1.4 million dollar Gap doesn't get us all the way there it gets us mostly there and then we'll talk about and make a strong case for an override or a bond and do the best we can in 2023 hopefully to achieve additional resources as we had mentioned before the Esser dollars the last three years over 5.4 million dollars has kept us from having to make any of these hard choices or reductions that money has been largely put into classrooms the Footloose production you saw here earlier a little preview of that April 27th to 29th at 7 pm again at May 4th and 5th at 7 pm and there's a matinee on May 6th at 2 p.m you can see the quality of the production we're really proud of our kids and we do have a brand new stage we have brand new lights that won't be done in time and and mounted but we're working with the lights that are there but our stage is nice I've had a lot of compliments and I think I've shared that with the board before the Baccalaureate for the class of 2023 is May 16th at 7 pm at that time we show the the video of the kids and the kids organize and run this and it has it has been gaining populated the last several years and we hope that you can make it there we'll notice a possible Quorum for all these events for the board to enable you to attend whatever you want without having to worry about creating the corn without notice scholarship night is May 17th we'll have an update to what Mr web presented if you saw that 4.2 almost 4.3 million dollars for a school of District of our size it's pretty amazing our guidance counselors administrators and teachers write a lot of letters of recommendation and do a lot of work to help out our kids and we're very proud of those results graduation is on May 19th at palmoral Stadium at 7 pm and then I also want to just take a little more time to recognize Miss Carey vest a National Merit scholar is no small thing that would you could have a school of 2500 and 3 500 students and not have one not have and certainly not have a finalist but to have one of a school of 650s is pretty remarkable and so if you know her parents she's she's got a great family she's worked hard she's a great kid and we're very proud of her I believe she's the one going to University of Kentucky so congratulations Miss Kerry for that our lock-in event 2023 if anybody is watching this feed wants to donate time product food prizes Talent anything please get in touch with the front officer Mr Webb indicate that you're willing to help and we would be glad to take that on I think it starts at about 10 p.m graduation Night 10 or 11 and they stay the entire time that that's for the I think this is my ninth lock-in that I've gone to I've never made it the entire time Mr Webb made it every time and so it's it's a fun event it's a great event for kids on our facilities side briefly the weatherproof weather proofing project is a mouthful it's more than just painting the school it's caulking it's it's doing a lot of other exterior and interior work to the walls that begins May 1st that's taken five years of the facilities team financing everybody and a lot of trips to the sfb to get this done so we're very thankful that's happening and that's we've got a lot of issues at that building the first step is to get it waterproofed that'll be done by the middle of June no later than the end of June and then we have the flooring the roofs a number of things that we're going to stay on a long and growing list I think we've we've submitted over and have achieved in Grants over 3.2 million dollars The Last Five Years and we're going to still keep pushing we got the full court press on that still have a number of AC units need to be replaced a couple of boilers roofing issues that res on top of everything else and so we'll stay after that the teacher teach contracts will be issued before close of business this Friday and they'll be issued to everybody that is committed to coming back if they're not certain they won't get a contract yet and they'll have 10 days to return it 15 days to sign and return those contracts and that is concludes my report unless there are any questions from the board Mr President I don't think he he's keeping this up to date on what's going on next item on the agenda is call to the public and we would open up this uh this time period for anybody that would like to come and address the board we'd ask you to kind of keep it to three minutes not be personal and not seed it to anybody else your time so we would offer that right now we'd ask you to um state your name your address South America could put that on the record Mary Ford can put that on record so anybody that would like to address the word right now we're happy to hear it guess not okay the next next item on the agenda is announcements and we've already heard that we're going to have a work study on April 17th at 5 pm at this building and this location and the items that will be on that for that work study for the public and for the board next regularly scheduled board meeting will be May 9th at 5 pm at this location we now [Music] will excuse and to uh executive session um discuss the possible action regarding the annual performance review of superintendent's contract the governing Barney may vote to condemn convenient executive session which shall not be open to the public is extremely confidential so do I have a motion to um move to Executive session I have a motion from Chuck second from Diane all in favor all right we will now go into executive session and that is private we'll go into this reference room the conference room right behind those windows right there and once executive session over we'll come back in here and state the results of that that executive session so thank you [Applause]
so it's gone up a little bit and about how long is that funded for in the future um it was just recently passed by the legislature so I believe I don't believe it has a sunset on it since it was renewed by the legislature I have to I'd have to double check into it but I don't think there's a Sunset date okay great so we'll bring back a revised and then the second read of the amended more policy so we presented this policy last month and we had since received more information and clarification from our attorney on what um the suggestion was so we added at the end here that last sentence on each request for such a league of absence shall be in written applications stated the purpose about um this is the one before that a request for Diva Baptist shall not be denied by the district if the employee is entitled to believe under the family medical leave act all other applications for leave of absence may be granted or denied by The District in its sole discretion was there another part that was that I was in blue can you go down to the other people oh okay and so here we go so we can see where we eliminated and it says the district if the leap of absence the district shall not guarantee the placement of an employee to the same position held before the leave convinced and then there's the final sentence that was added for longer than the 12-week period right right okay and you think that'll come back this final next meeting yes and on to the Autumn report financial statement all right so we got our audit finally completed we got it done on time and uploaded Everybody by the March 31st deadline um this was a good audit we had a it was a better object in the previous years um just to kind of give you a high level overview there were 170 questions on the shares of it of which we had 24 findings three of those findings are duplicate findings meaning that they were in there more than once and two of the findings were corrections to the previous years of it so if you remember in the previous years on it there's a finding in here for overstating expenditures on our bond well that is because the previous year we had the understatement to make that right you know so we knew that that was coming um I don't know if you've all had a chance to look at it but I will go ahead and kind of open it up to any questions that you may have um some of the findings that we had um so we incorrectly coded 626 dollars to transfer out in within a Federal Grant and we've miscoded the revenue from Title One into title two so that's one of the findings that we received um so we every month we reconcile our cash with the County Treasurer's Office at the end of the year I missed one account so we gotta finding that one as well uh let's see what else is on here Craig is here sir I think it's a major and minor findings are all findings are considered equal so there are there you come to a point where findings where if you remember last year with some of the cash that we had that were trying to get fixed where we had um one I forget what they're called I'm trying to think of it I can't remember the term but we didn't have any of those this year the major things yeah yeah yeah none of those that's why none of the big stuff you know we had a couple minor things that we had to put together corrective action plan for and that's because we hadn't corrected 100 of something that was done on the previous audit and that and we knew that was going to happen because you know the audit takes place Midway through the year so we know that it's probably going to follow us in a different spot into the upcoming year so those findings are actually downgraded from those major ones to minor and then the ones that we have here on this Swiss report are all very very minor so you either make the corrections immediately or have a protocol to make that happen that's sufficient um the finance that you're going to find in here are are findings that you're going to find in just about any District um for example um for all the auxiliary operations receipts that they reviewed we have one that wasn't deposited to the bank on a timely basis so we've got seven days from the time ever to receive a check most likely that it's one of the ones where it didn't get a stamp put on under a date received on it so that's one of those ones that you're going to find in every District um we'll find that every year it's just because we have humans dealing with processes sure um uh from one of five cash receipts received the district did not prepare a daily sales summary to reconcile sales to actual cash collected so I don't she didn't get into specifics of what the item was so if it was a snack bar we didn't have the beginning and ending inventory with it if it was tickets that we were selling we didn't have a beginning and an ending you know number of our tickets it was one of those ones that's just going to be found everywhere um yeah there's really there's to be honest there's really nothing major in this audit I mean I'd be more than happy if you haven't had the opportunity to go through it I'd be more than happy to answer any questions that you may have are they going to come in this year like they did last year we can discuss it or that's on my own reports we did it last year because we knew that we had those major and we wanted to have them there to be able to just have that discussion with you but this year there was nothing major so good work I don't think you're right thank you sir it's not me it's everybody else all right everyone else good work okay this is an action item to approve it which doesn't just mean we have to approve it so it can go back to this to the Auditors doesn't mean approval it's an acceptance yeah streets so I'll make a motion to accept the audit as provided by the second okay any more discussion this is Mr Mr McKinnon yes can you take us to the employee benefit proposal um we'll probably need a little uh clarification around I heard it a couple times I still need to hear it again okay so pretty much everything that you heard is already out the window we were trying to get our rates reduced by trying to buy down some of our deficit um with at the January uh Financial reports with the with our insurance statements we were underfunding our health insurance by seventy eight thousand dollars um part of that is we we got rid of the gold plan coming into this school year and we still have run out costs with the gold plan of over 74 000 so that that helped go into our our rate increase so we tried to buy down um 80 000 worth of our deficit and it came back I can't remember it was either late last night or earlier this morning that we couldn't do that so we are looking at a 15 increase in our health care benefits um the district is still looking at taking care of Everybody's Health Care this year as well it is going to add about seventy thousand dollars in expenses just with the increase in itself based solely on how everybody is enrolled today so once we actually have open enrollment that number could go up it could go down based upon how people you know sign up for their benefits so out of the three plans you know the hike it up will helpline is still the lowest we will still fund um into everybody's health savings accounts the difference between the highest premium and the lowest price so but that will still move forward with that but you know we aren't going to look at 50 percent increase in our health care costs completely this is objective okay and this is an action item you need a motion to recruit well there's two recommendations right this is so we we put together when we put the packet together we put together two different types of recommendations one being that we just approved a 15 in percent increase and if we were able to to get the a lower rate that that would also be approved and then the other one was to have you guys to approve up to a 15 increase is nothing higher both of those recommendations do the same um my suggestion is if you are looking to approve this proposals are just approved the 15 increase up to yes captain yeah because the way it's dated is two separate it was a four and since he had the information on um whoever makes the commission it will give which option you'd like well I think it seems I will make the motion to uh approve a not to exceed 15 is that fair that's fair increase in our pictures like a second discussion so this means if we come back and it's 18 it's already set at 15.
you know it's it's tough kids don't want to sit next to each other and be squished but will all of these be addressed and I don't mean just like from a communication standpoint but how is this helping first of all I understand manual to technology is is right but are we solving and is this the best solution for solving all the issues that we find you're always going to find there's always a better solution out there but what how much do you want to pay for it I guess you know that's what's your Roi as far as the question sorry back up what your first question was how are our how is the staff going to be trained on this how is it going to be rolled out how is it going to be how are you building buy-in and so I've been I've been talking about this to my staff for two years I was talking about this before I was the director of Transportation so my my my drivers know it's coming knowing it's coming it's a 12-month rollout from from hopefully from whenever we agreed you know the board if the board approves it it's a 12-month rollout so you're talking uh you know essentially 12 months for the tablet portion we can probably roll in uh the the parent app I think might be able to roll it out quicker we might be able to get that before by november-ish November December when the weather starts getting cold we might have it down to where we can use it effectively but as far as the tablet portion that's they it's at least 12 months out what was your second question um just is it addressing all of the um and we have documented what all of the issues that we've run so so the overloading yeah I mean this would allow us to because like say you get the phone calls and um you know oh there was everybody was sitting on the floor kids were standing kids were you know stacked 3D you know high up all the way to the ceiling um and so the only way to verify is really to pull the video count the kids as they get on the bus or kind of as they get off well if we have a system like this we can actually you know I get the phone call I can pull it up and I can go okay yeah I see yeah we had you know it's a 70 72 passenger bus and we had 76 kids on there today so yeah we need to look at and then I can look at the stops and see which stops are heavy Wednesdays are always heavy going home because of early dismissal not as many kids stay after school no school after school activities but you know there's yeah it it makes it quicker I mean there's still we still have to make changes we still have to adjust buses adjust bus routes but it helps us to respond quicker that's the so it's agility it's and um and it's safety yeah you say yeah and and I'm I'm thinking there's probably some staffing benefits um maybe not in in the form of a full-time employment type of situation but you can utilize the Staffing in different ways and more be more productive maybe yeah um I'm just so that's not a question that I I posed to you but I just um with the reimbursement aspect of it um it seems like it's a it's a worthwhile a thousand dollar request for Outsourcing some services that we had to pay for last time I think it was because well that was for routing that was for a different that's a different okay explain explain how it it does impact or doesn't impact this so why it doesn't impact the routing no why well what you're asking for we might see another request like that even if uh right because this isn't this is this is this yeah I mean somewhat attendance and Communications I mean that's in track being able to track our buses again and the routing was about making sure that we had efficiencies in routing right right that's why we paid thirty thousand or forty thousand whatever it was and so you're saying that this system isn't going to help with deficiencies in routing well it sounds like it does a little bit uh I mean it can help our dispatchers make decisions on the fly a little bit easier and communicate with their drivers more quickly but yeah that's this basically this system takes that routing information it pulls from that routing information so so the routing the routing system is a different system and this communicates to that it moves that information out of there to give us this information as well more quickly responding to what our our needs are as far as the actual routing that's a that's a different yeah I heard that when Jen was talking in alley too I wanted to make sure that we understood this is we're not replacing our transportation system Tyler Tech is versatrans which is our routing system uh routes and planning but this is just an app to help us mine the data and make use of the data we still need we still need routing services to take every year it changes with the the kids that we have and where they live and what the routes what routes translate to the most efficient use we still need that efficiency in routing um so you know 11 about 11 500 kids all the buses and routes we run we still need a human aspect to lay out those routes and say what is the most efficient but now that we've got ridership data an attendance data we can say hey maybe we can consolidate these routes this app won't it's not like uh it's not like artificial intelligence and it'll make new routes based on who's writing who's not that's the job of the router or in this case the routing company to look at those data points and eat those fish so did we explore any uh grant opportunities to cover any portion of this I looked into I mean we asked I mean the only thing we kind of missed the Esther vote I mean because we couldn't put extra funds towards this I know a lot of Statistics did because they could use it for sort of tracking uh it's a really unique grants up here but again like you said a good share of it is reimbursable by the state uh Michael do you know what that share is it's uh reimbursable by the state is it I understand that number can fluctuate from from year to year so what are the you know guidelines is it 50 to 65 percent what is it 365 to 80.