that's our goal and we're going to have like a little rubbing cutting and tours of the we tried to figure out what we should call them should we call them like the cottages at Del Rio should we call them like the Casitas day whatever them but anyway so we'll have some kind of a little ribbon cutting and tours there and Heidi took everybody who had expressed an interest in them she took them on a tour so they could see and feel the size to see if they were had decided that you know a fancy walk-in closet might be too small for them or whatever but nobody weeded themselves out from her list so they all thought it was okey-dokey how many do we have on the way of us now we had 10 certified staff and 10 certified I meant 10 homes so it worked out 10 Cottages yes that's great yes so and then um we have the gas line project which you may have seen Thursday afternoons they come roaring into the high school and you know rip it up like a bunch of gophers and then by Monday it all is padded back down and looks like it's ready for students again with some you know yellow tape and and barricades we have the fire reconstruction in the building the the eight Plex the fancy Tin Shed and the gym lights I understand are all up and I did you check to see if there were cages on them I didn't I didn't walk in there today over the lights no I forgot to do we forgot we were going to look to see ghosts like if the balls like so ball doesn't hit them and like knock him off so hopefully we'll be able to start practicing volleyball again in there we have a game going I I know but I just want to make sure that because they're practicing at Heritage has been around pain well and it's it is just super crazy anyway too plus we've had lots and lots we've had PE in here yeah like most days and I love having kids here but it's also like if they're playing badminton it's a very silent sport but not everything is um Del Rio we are in the process of um Lake Del Rio removal and pave in the parking lot there and of course you can see if you've been over at Del Rio Heritage some modulars are dropped the paving's done around them and the HVAC project is like amazingly underway so other things that cbhs HVAC and Jim and drs's fire alarm plant now the strategic planning meeting the next one is a week from Thursday here at three with the Community Coalition that core team our October board meeting just a reminder is out in paulden at the community center on Wednesday the 4th so not our normal day of the week it's Wednesday the 4th at five and then just a reminder that fall break will be occurring October 9-12 and that not all of the buildings have people in them to help with questions or things like that is there any other questions three to seven a parent who has new student in our district long time Community member who asked today if they could just come and sit on it and see what it's about so I had tried um accessing our strategic plan online found out that the link isn't valid as the plan is being revised so that was so I thought that was pretty neat [Music] anything else before October 1st or yep it'll be before October 1st because we don't want to be going intern and after they've moved in okay that's true okay nice update thank you item 6v1 Financial reports for activity for August 31st 2023 Mr Livingston great thank you president members of the board Administrations look at the financial situation of the district at the end of the end of August it's month two out of 12 months in the fiscal year 2324 we're on course for expenditures we're doing the best we can to to limit or make expenditures for those critical projects we know we've got some folks coming back into the district from some covet funds next year everything we do we're tripled between superintendent Cindy and myself are triple scrutinizing and just really trying to make that a nice transition I don't have a lot of information on our Capital funds or our operating fund but I'd like to call out two funds in particular if you go to it's about the fourth page in my report you'll see cash balances and there's two in particular that I'd like to discuss ones and I'm not here to put Randy Cox on the spot I'm just here to say what a tremendous job she's been doing she's got this Des Grant in the past two and a half years we spent 490 000 on that bringing extra services to her preschool students that is competitive in nature that very few districts have a five-star rating for the preschool that we have the three star right now three star but it's it's still really in my book we have been a four-star but we're getting assessed again right now right now we're in the window is open so very high ranking from the state to look at everything from the size and and composition of the wood chips on the playground everything you could think of in the teacher quality so that 490 000 has been tracked to the penny to the person I think at one time you had between addendums and salary almost 16 people in there so it's almost like another building and she's doing such a tremendous job so if you look at fund 322 you see from my cash report uh we ended last year with 27 267.74 almost like 27 300 and she spent on herself because she's so careful with her money uh exactly that last Thursday so now there's not one penny left in that account and like 490 000 Sarah to not be a penny office just tremendous that was just tremendous a good job there and the other one in fund 691 that's the school facilities Board of which now we've got 26 million still encumbered and the way we run that is on page two of my cash for the current year the 23-24 Year you see 700 000 cash there at the end the way we got this this company I kind of joke with our maintenance director Chris Sheriff uh it's almost like he had the Australian bolo in his hand where you've got the 20-foot long rope with the little rocks on the end and you toss it at someone's ankles and then it wraps around so quick they can't really move that's really kind of what he did to Millennium gas they were up here doing an inspection report July 17th he was able to keep them here with whatever persuasion school facility support funded that project the very next day so and it was three hundred thousand dollars and then it was done we needed to be open for a session wasn't it Wednesday August 3rd when we opened so it was done I think Monday like the 31st of July something like that so so the day before Tuesday the second so they did it knocked it out in about eight business days but they did weekend and work it's a way to go Millennium well then we had another gas pressure test at the high school and some problems there so we got out another bolo on the other hand and kept him here to do that and the way that one started was 1.3 million then they had to increase the percentage of the four inch line because of these new high efficiency gas packing as we're putting on so that project went from 1.3 to 1.6 million twenty thousand one million six twenty and what you see here is well they had payroll costs so what we did is we borrowed some money from another fund pushed it into 691 paid the bill there so you see that seven hundred thousand so for just a minute and we got this cleared with our Auditors we can borrow to pay because we want to have that come from the right fund then as soon as the sfb comes along and pays us that then the expense moves where it belongs and we're back to zero and now they're down to I think they're projected date at the high school maybe someone could directly I think is fall break about October 8th 9th in there so another month in the high school is about 11 times harder than Del Rio yeah longer longer lines and everything so that's why you see that expense there and I've cleared this with our Auditors it's not necessarily a cash fund so we can move expense and cash in and out of there and keep them happy so they they finished Del Rio and got paid the next Wednesday but they finished I think on a Tuesday and got paid for Wednesday that might have even been Wednesday the third when I opened school because they had all these extra costs Hotel extra people and they had to actually trench through through cement and all these things so they stayed so great great job for our maintenance director and then now they're they've been paid 400 000 on the high school that's why you see the 700 almost 1 million to go for the high school and they were considerably more economical than the other two bids that we got on these products and they're doing great work any questions on the financial report for the month of August thank you moving right along Student Activity fund report an activity things have been look at the page the page the clear winner and activity and encumbrances is the high school student council 8 300 worth of activity plan and this is really common we've got six thousand ninety dollars in revenue and commerce is about 17 000 and they've had their meetings they're compliant with policy they're compliant with the raising funds and then spending those funds the next one I guess is probably High School boys soccer at almost four thousand so we've got a really good procedure and tremendous support from the community my understanding is just about every one of these is based on fundraisers every one of these students they're doing things so it Compares I guess you could say 134 000 is about half of what we have in our front 526 tax credit which is over 250 000 so the community gets the tax credit break and it's it's tremendous to me that they also support things because they don't get the tax credit that's all I have any other questions all right item seven eight through eight I'm sorry a through e is tonight's consent agenda if we can get a motion to approve tonight's consent agenda I will make a motion for the approval of tonight's consent agenda in a second please and all in favor all right number eight a our Personnel report Miss Wilson is Daniels so with our Personnel report and supplement we have two new certified staff members one new classified a new classified sub three resignations one termination one certified change nine classified changes three coaches 18 extra Duty and 152 timesheets [Music] um [Laughter] I have a question um and I don't know if you'll be able to answer this but um 13 and 14 it says the replacing of that teacher is she's still going to be with us she's just not going to be doing that position anymore that's the Middle School correct that's correct yes you still yeah they're just taking the um and then I have another question on 15 um at the high school um why are we approving an assistant coach right now because they've always had an assistant coach I know but we've approved all of the coaches already like prior to this yeah it was dismissed yeah okay sorry the other questions or concerns all right seeing none if we can have a motion to approve tonight's Personnel report and supplement I will make a motion to approve tonight [Music] a second please thank you Peter all in favor um I thank you thank you item 8B extra Duty stipend for construction project manager Ms Daniels great um over the course of the last six months as we have consistently increased projects and what's our total of SNB projects we're up to right now just Paul Park number 30 31 30 million in projects so typically even with one project um especially at the size of our HVAC for example a school district would hire PM just for the project and Peter's very familiar with that from his line of work because it is just so much extra work above and beyond to supervise that and not only that because our projects our school facilities boards you heard a little bit just in the financial report trying to figure out how to keep paying the bills while waiting on us at the reimbursements and the phenomenal load of paperwork that goes with this stuff if you want to talk about death by paperwork this is definitely one of those situations so um at my request Mr Shull and I met to talk about compensating the employee because this is really above and beyond and outside the normal contract work for this employee to compensate this employee for taking on many many hours every week of extra PM duties and so we had had some conversations about that when we finally had an HR person we looped her in and then we asked him to go ahead and find out how tell us what all you're doing and find out how much that costs everywhere else so what we have decided was after John and Heidi and I Joshua and Heidi and I had a chance to beat we would like to recommend an extra extra Duty stipend for the employee who's overseen all of these things as PM because 30 million dollars and then a PM cost of 20 000 is a drop in the bucket compared to what we're paying out so respectfully we're asking for that one time and I talked about it at the airport I'll tell you if anybody's working a private and public sector the paperwork or public sector projects is 10 times what it is for private sector projects and so what Cindy is saying is absolutely true it's a huge amount of construction that's going on right now I'm a major being able to survive this long without having the this extra Duty it's going to pay well well needed all right yeah make a motion to offers an extra Duty segment for John Livingston to be paid during the school year 2020 produce related to management or construction projects the second place last second thank you Marsha all in favor [Applause] item 8C approval of position and business office for a secretary to Mr Livingston so this this position came up from a review and I and I have to just just describe I don't know if there's a word to describe what city does in the district but it's it's she sees everything and she saw gaps in our office where there were things that were needing to be done that people were doing I guess you just kind of heard about one of them but it was kind of the first person Opera the last person to leave that was doing them so what I see and and I have to say I didn't see it quite the same way I'm one of these that finds a hat and puts it on and goes but when you get down to it it comes down to there's a few of the folks in the office were talking about that consistently or just going over time with their hours consistently going over time with their duties and some of these things were looking up for this position to do would be an assistant to float between positions would really nicely fit in the what you mentioned earlier the overload of paperwork or compliance because I hate to say it quite the simply but the truth is Mesa Unified District 59 000 students in our district with 2300 students a lot of the paperwork has the same burden I hate to say it that way because you you think once report is done it's done at least four times bigger well it's not necessarily the case a tremendous load of paperwork I think would be I don't think you'd see this person once this person's in position uh telling anyone that there's not much want to do I don't think you'd see that it's just uh we we have a tremendous I think group of dedicated people in our business office that work till the job is done and I think this would be a great time to bring in someone else to share some of that way something important that I wanted to share is we have one payroll Clerk she can't ever get sick it's hard to take time off and it payroll is one of the most crucial things that we do in the district right because about 85 percent of our budget is spent on people and to not have somebody who is a hundred percent cross-trained in the ability to do payroll is not sparred on our part and so that was one of the things that we had talked about is we really really need somebody who is also cross-trained and completely and picks up some of the payroll for them do you guys have somebody in mind no no okay has it been opened no yeah okay I mean I'm up or things that make our district run smoother you know and definitely if you guys think that it's a needed position then I definitely aim for it all right I'll make a motion for the approval of the secretary to in the business office in the second case thank you thank you Peter all in favor hi thank you thank you all right item 9A there's nothing in your music library music [Laughter] so I'm here to tell um we are at the end of our grant we've had it since whenever 2020 it ended actually June of 2023.
so I didn't know if that made you available to do it cuz it also changed to 9 to 12 12 this they're both on Saturday right no one is on Sunday South is on Sunday from noon to 3 and North is now on Saturday from 9 to 12 oh wow what South okay let me see to do it so we're do North is I'm sorry open houses right here cuz you had said you could do Sunday one but then I wasn't sure because North completely changed fine I'm perfect I'm good I'm both so you can do both now you were working so I just wanted to make no I got it definitely so it's kind of like a double check since yeah impressive thank you I was down there watching both them and my son run put my name the Finish had like standing out of this tree area and then you saw like three downers purple all together like in the top were they in Poria last week yeah okay and then literally yeah they do a they do a weird I mean there was definitely a lot of I'm just following him are you going to Poria this week can choose which one um but man it was so crazy like they had they had six Runners it's unreal I don't even know where that is and they're amazing I didn't either I saw two weekends ago our girls this weekend on our phone student no but yeah I would I would say the girls were out at LT invb weekend we got see [Music] them bring all your deves to make sure everything yeah it was impressive yeah it was definitely impressive know that I'm I don't know how to sign out I don't even know how to sign I mean I got my password and stuff I don't use it except when like I on my iPad every once in a while it KS me out then I have to go around and find it and that's the only time I ever deal with that's why I don't log in here because real fast yeah because I'm pay attention just and if anything like with so prefer Scott are you going to F this weekend I was there last weekend oh cuz I'm going this weekend oh are you cuz it's the Morton Pumpkin Festival problem you know because that's the pumpkin Capital oh is it Illinois really all of the libes uh you know can Illinois yeah you can go and watch them put the pumpkins into the oh my God I got to remember this so it's is it always the like um it's always second weekend prob yeah and it's a huge festival with a parade and liby is it right in puia like right down no it's in Morton is Morton right outside of Poria yeah it's on4 you get to I don't know how to sign out you go down you staying down there yeah my daughter lives in Morton and I and I grew up how far is Morton from Washington you know oh they're just right next door we stayed in this amazing hotel we down and it's right downtown on the little circle oh yeah and oh my gosh it was like a probably like maybe 12 rooms maybe yeah but not expensive well I mean it wasn't too expensive but I mean the room we had was like a I mean it was sweet probably it was like rers already got hurton rers and we were there for a soccer yeah yeah took some pictures of his bner up there thank wait did you make cookies yes happy birthday delicious yeah okay so now's several different kinds there Julie how do you turn it you got to tell me what to do I you know nothing I know nothing col and then hit manager account love it I loved Hogan's Heroes honestly it was one of the best shows but I haven't made one yet always wanted to see the na definitely doing a tutorial right now we scattered you guys through the go any yeah but you know what I did I erased my own broke we broke everybody got it oh do they want me to put in the one you gave me the reset yeah once we get to three it becomes a board meeting is it in the it's in the cafeteria just resync everything so here yeah so the one you just did was good and then we have one more thing to do one more step Matt what's the group name isn't it B okay I'll be surprised if we have so they are how many yes you do saiding at some point and 11 said that they'll be do did you keep my shirts in your car if you lose your pH backup option asking for uh I forgot all about it sitting at home if you wanted to add something else if you wanted to add another one you could add another one and you can just hit I guess I'll run by whenever or I'll bring them by I just it's going to be your CSD one so it should be CD guess I need you're in the perfect spot where do I and then that's good just I see that on my phone but I don't see it on what now if you go back it's already there ohow you have to sign in first oh with my current password yeah okay did you change it changed I I know nothing you sounds let let me get the instru should be see where I need to start you're creating your own and what did you suggest characters just make it a phrase whatever phras okay oh you got both of your tablets with you yes excellent so um I think Trav is ready to start with you yep Trav ready to start with you all right this it actually I have nothing okay yeah I'm fine you ever watched the hard KNX yeah well I didn't watch been really good this it actually it made me like him oh really I hated him and now I'm like oh he's actually a pretty good guy okay so all right so open up here no that's just [Music] signed at the to mhm it's okay got it there we go R bottom oh to the okay my my original one how many you say 12 oh I was going to say I can put in my old one changed it you snuck in there and changed it and I didn't that's why I didn't even know it okay all right and then we're going to no sir oh we still need to adjourn so I'm waiting for all I'm waiting for all these people to get their passwords Chang hurry up people I'm trying I just started put in your new one and then my new one my new one you already or just the number just number left meeting you know this gu at 8:30 all right next y get started but I won't turn on did I do turn on now you got to your regular password in right now we need so Terry's covering for me tomorrow night for Community session yes can you send me what date she was otherwise scheduled so that I can switch and cover for her is go over here right yeah all right phone numberone number your phone awesome thank you my real phone it wasn't that bad right they didn't match this side of the room is doing their job over here we're working we're working we're working oh cuz I can't we're going to do is we're turn on doation so you can do um I don't expect yeah it will you want to explain the the multiactor so what it what it does is it it's not to do it every time says okay is this really so it's called a twep verification so click on get started so go ahead and enter in your password doesn't watch he used to make sure you get you know watch that's more of a cultural not me Terry for her birthday good birthday know I like I know what no I I I left something out down so you want to get ITA text message text message you so last Monday was Labor Day enter thate wow oh damn to catch No No it should be in your text it be and that goes right there we have one other stuff to do and we done have to do it on three other things all you have to do is log in she's at the University of florid probably PR very good was that was that I didn't remember we talk about that like yeah I mean it was she was really what do I hit my Gmail account couldn't have done it without you bro it's prompted us to do it so we follow instru follow all right she's done she's just done so well called me like I didn't realiz fing W warm wedding on the 23rd so she will come back I and then after that we will see her and weekend and then Thanksgiving and then Christmas like it's like three weeks now will it remember it oh yeah now she does she's okay a junior but amazing we do one more stop so yeah I mean once this is the longest then honestly after that it's now we don't need to let's see if it does it shouldn't be linked you could go try it 39 the same so one more thing to do we have to do two factors for you now am I going to have to do this every time I go to you have to sign in whenever you sign in not every time CR start doing really well well I have to do it once we change the passwords on the other ones probably verify and I was tell scota on this guy Prospect rank number 10 in the country and York was like 25 and we just beat both of them this weekend Oh No Country not move us forward on this guy York is a perennial they perennial cross country actually beat theity R but like I me the first I remember that's a six digigit versus four digigit so how all right you guys are just trying to drive I already am she's your new password that you just created okay you know they're a team and team total solid performance and they they're so good about cheering each other Audrey's one of the top I would say top four rers on our cross country team what see I don't know she she's been pretty consistent for two years's add I have let's make sure we add we can do two different things okay so it's a good it is Bally a number that it's going to give you next so we have put in your cell phone number do one free state meat in pure which is fun I think for all the schools wow it I I don't quite understand who comes to what meat but it's it's a big one I think yeah that's perfect yeah I went last year now after two years I send you the numbers that it gives you in that here it is done how it all works so fire those guys you don't need the G we just need the digits awesome yeah we have to be back in a routine at least it's how are you Trad Joe's well well I have a one of our down okay now then will I have to have my phone with me all the time depending on where you're signing in if I'm signing in if you're here on this Chromebook it's I have to bring my phone you definitely need to bring your phone cuz sometimes I forget it this is not my entire life I hate to tell you that what who says this I am not I am not so now this is done so now what do I do with this should we yes we can move to adjournment okay yes a motion so moved so mov second Jenny second uh all in favor all favor of adjourning i i i i i motion carries we are adjourned thank you everybody we're back next week
we stand with our Muslim Community in solidarity recognizing that the acts of individuals do not of those individuals do not represent an entire community we remind our families staff and students that in every religion communion and culture there are individuals who intentionally undermine the purposes the faith and the values and should not be considered representatives for their broader community Switching gears there's no easy segue from that but I want to just say that over the last few weeks I've had the great honor of celebrating with our athletic teams golf to football there are some great wins and some tough losses already I want to thank our staff and coaches and our athletic directors for their investment these are all important life lessons for our students and it's great to be in the community that recognizes and committed to increasingly investing in those efforts I also had the opportunity to learn from our bionic team if you don't know what bionic is maybe thinking it's a robot dance but it's really believe it or not I care and it's such an important framework and umbrella for really elevating student voice in our community and I had a chance to sit with their board they're actually interested Mary Jo actually joined me that day and they're they're hopeful to come and present to the board some of their efforts so stay tuned for that um this past few weeks our students have now actually started to wrap up the fall a fast Bridge assessment this is a tool where we get to know and do our due diligence our teachers do their due diligence and really understand where our students are as we start the school year across the whole system our school leaders and District Improvement team are going to be drawing upon this data and information to help lead and guide future instruction and also to monitor progress after all as you know in sports we don't know how far to without a scoreboard you don't know where to go and similarly in academics we need to know what the scoreboard says in order to plan and effectively think about the decisions that we are making in supporting our students last week we had our continuous Improvement Institute day we want to thank our staff who participated in that and tomorrow our school leaders will be engaging in their own professional learning around continuous Improvement part of that will include a workshop led by Dr Waller around diversity and Equity as that is important and is at the core of our values that we are pursuing in this District we are pleased I am pleased thrilled to share that our district has been awarded a teacher of vacancy Grant pilot program for four hundred thousand dollars [Music] [Applause] I thank Dr Kincaid and Dr zwemke for their leadership it's work development for this and this will jump start our efforts to invest in our Educators both present and in the future last but not least um two more things actually I wanted to highlight number one we recognize and I want to thank uh Mr obafemi for coming right in and start to address some of the major challenges we've gotten to to see around our tracks we recognize that this has been a long protracted process I want to thank Dr petsky for collaborating with Mr obafemi and really figuring out what are some solutions I understand that on the 25th at our board meeting we'll have a more robust presentation about the status of this along with our director of buildings and grounds Bill Queen we'll have a chance to hear a little bit about the status and also what are some updates and what are some potential short-term Solutions if we're not able to get to a viable solution for one or one of our tracks we are I am launching so over the last since I've landed I've had the great Fortune of getting to know this community um and it is as you have said to me a community full of heart when I first met the board and members of the hiring committee it was very clear that that was a huge priority that we recognized of the heart and the passion that exists in this community for the work of serving our children meeting engaging in the meeting meet and greets and even this past Saturday I had the fortune of attending the BiPAP um bpac picnic here at Will's Crossings uh picnic area and really just uh such as tremendous interest and thinking about the Excellence of our education programs and access to learning for our students I was really appreciative of the welcome and I felt that welcomed throughout every meet and greet um and as I've listened what emerged for me is that there are many priorities there are many ways to start to think about this the challenges but also the opportunities and so for that reason as you heard in my latest update I'm launching a superintendent's Advisory Group the purpose of this group will be to bring representatives from every single school to engage in some really discourse and discussion to really highlight what are the what are the things that are really percolating to the top and have we understood what the community is saying I have heard the board has surveyed the board engaged in the superintendent's search survey this past spring there were there have been multiple surveys over the last two years the question becomes what do we understand and what are we gleaning from these reports we don't want to just receive data and then jump right into Solutions and so the purpose of this and one of our board members earlier mentioned root cause analysis is to bring constituents from a variety of communities to engage in root cause and Out start to think are we affirming does it make sense and how far do we want to go what's the first priority what's the last part how do we take what really our limited funds and then use those funds wisely in the execution of our efforts we don't want to be in a position where we run too quickly to serve one urgent need and then ignore what may be a greater need down the road we know the impact of such mistakes when we move too quickly to serve one loudspoken need versus those silent voices who may also have needs that we need to be able to assess and so for that reason the superintendent's Advisory Group is not a voting body but really A consultative experience that we will then I will use them as part of the information that I gather and bring back to this board I want to thank everybody for their support um and I also want to thank the board for its uh continued support of this effort and with that thank you all right 6.2 board committee reports question before we move on how are you determining who will be on I don't know how many people are You're Expecting or what have you but we'll be on that committee uh when World up first meeting be and is there any transition or carryover from our from either Dr sparland or our community advisory committee great questions thank you for raising those topics um so the so the first question is we're going to be working with our school leaders to determine who is invited to participate that's number one number two we know that there are those who have offered their service and may not be selected there are two ways that I'm going to invite well there's lots of ways people can get involved but I'm going to highlight three the first is that if you are selected welcome number two if you are not selected after every session the following week I will host a call it a midday reflection meeting where we will follow up with the presentation about what came up in that session there are no secrets here it's not an exclusive closed group this is an open session right so we'll bring that data and I'll share what were the lessons learned and so anybody who's not selected will be welcomed and invited to participate everybody will be welcome but it'll be a a Google meet a virtual space gives people flexibility to join and to hear them the third thing is that we have board committees we have board finance committee we have a board Equity teaching and learning committee we have a board um policy and legislation committee I want to invite any and everybody to participate so if you've offered your support please if you think about where your interest which is part of the survey that we put out there we want to know what your interests are we'll invite you to come to those sessions so you can hear and participate and in those meetings there will be a point for public comment where you can speak to your passions and your interests and give reflection um and then the second part of your question which was those the community council work that existed in reviewing that what I heard pretty clearly from a number of individuals was that there was an operation for that group becoming much more involved in a consult consultative process that had some influence right and so what I opted in speaking with our board presidents and reflecting on the work from the years past was to invite those individuals to be essentially um automatically on the superintendent Advisory Group so they will be additional individuals who will be participating in the experience um and so that they won't be they'll have an opportunity to give voice in that space and then schools that they are coming from will either have an opportunity to say that that's fine or they'll be a second person from those particular schools um I've been asked also about students and we have us uh Advisory Group for students as well I felt that in this instance I wanted to protect the voices of our students when you have a large group of 100 plus adults to have a small group so it can be a little intimidating and so I felt like to have a genuine voice of students that suffice um the last thing and I will say that the superintendent superintendents advisor group allows me to do is to bring principals Educators and community members parents into the same space so often those groups are kept separate and then there's some kind of caring of the message the goal is to create opportunities where we can engage in community building thank you so much okay so board committee reports we these are the first meetings of the year we had our equity and teaching and learning committee which we combined and we also had our policy and legislative so for our community within the board docs you have an opportunity to have to find a summary of the of the Committees and what they worked on that particular session they talk about what was discussed and what were their takeaways and their action items and so for their first meeting this is these are the kinds of things that they um addressed regarding like creating a submission statement for their committee defining the roles and responsibilities reviewing the process for determining agenda topics and the likes is there anything that anyone would like to add to to that I'll add one thing for the equity teaching and learning meeting we had a very exciting and remote robust discussion um it was very collaborative however um I want to make sure that going forward that those conversations are very comprehensive so our next meeting is October 4th at the district office at five o'clock and so just to Echo Dr kilgotty I invite you know all community members to please be in attendance because it gives an opportunity for input I just add one thing that um you know I I think being on both of those committees the one thing that um I was encouraged but kind of new going in is as we combined committees it was it was definitely interesting to see how we navigated um that that both of those pieces and those committees I think for teaching and learning and Equity it's a natural fit I don't think that was so much the navigation piece as it was trying to figure out what um what we wanted to kind of what was the actionable things that we wanted to do I think that's kind of where um them together was was really where uh the heart of the discussion was as far as policy and legislative committee that was I think a little bit more um strenuous I'll go that way um as far as trying to mold the legislative and the the policy piece but one thing that um I wanted to bring up that came out of there was that how these go hand in hand the the policy you know I've heard this and listen I don't I don't mean to say anything I've heard the comment come up with well heavy lift when it comes to the policy committee and the reason you have a heavy lift and the reason you will have a heavy lift in the future or you won't is because those policies tend to revolve around legislation right and and what comes out of out of the state and legislation so if you have heavy legislation you can probably bet you're going to have heavy heavy load on on the policy end and so where I think the these two come together is we have an opportunity to flex some muscle if you will based off of our location um and you know one of the things that I keep talking about is um how is it that we can help those of us who are are all of our citizens that are in 308 connect with all of these taxing bodies right and you know I know we had the the topic come up with transportation and you know I I'm a teacher also and I work in Bolingbrook and I've I've quizzed the people who are driving from here and um and and the word nightmare has come up and there's like a five minute window and if you don't get in that five minute window good luck to you um some of these are the conversations that I've had talking to them and I'll remind everybody that um if if that's really the case if that if it's really a nightmare out there getting around um that our buses are out there and there is in that as well and so um I think there's an opportunity that's been missed in the previous years where it's um yes we might have a heavy lift on the policy end but let's take a proactive approach when it comes to the legislative end so that we're not surprised right um so that doesn't come down necessarily to um always having to reactively educate because we are much more proactive in these conversations so I was definitely encouraged from that piece and I wanted to share that because I think that shows kind of the natural progression so if we ignore the legislative aspect of this then we can um you know we get what we get right um and so I'm encouraged that we will be more proactive through and I I just wanted to mention sorry if for anyone that does want to get involved there is another committee meeting a week from today Monday the 18th which is the building and finance committee that's a I think six o'clock at the district office so if anyone's interested come on down finance and Facilities Finance facilities um I just want to uh Joe I look forward to um serving on that committee with you I just want to touch base on like what Jared said um and what Dr Calgary said I I think we definitely I think that uh community action or Community advisory committee was a step in the right direction where I think that we fell a little short is looking for a recommendation from a broader uh group of the community and bringing that recommendation up to the board and I look forward to using our communities to have that voice brought to the board table and I love that we have combined some of these committees because last year we started making sure that if we were talking about a subject matter in a committee and it had some connection to another committee we would step back and we would send that information to another committee for feedback and I think that's something that we need to be very cognizant of before it gets to the board people that we have had the appropriate administrator and board members have a chance with their committee to weigh in so when it comes to the board it feels more holistic so I I'm excited about bringing these committees together and I appreciate all the work that's been done on this um Dr Calgary on your end to really make these committees work for us versus just a committee that's there in name and it's like yes we're doing it but actually making it work for the board so I appreciate it I will say this the the I encourage us as board members to kind of self-reflect on um if either a um we are trying to put too much on the committees or B we need we need more meetings right either one is is is viable but what I don't want is one of these pieces to be lost because of the agenda of of the other half if you will eventually it won't look that way like hopefully and it'll be smoother but I I hope we will encourage us to do some stuff well I'm glad we got Dr Kincaid and Ursula on last year before you said that because we definitely put a huge burden and workload on them to update the policy manual so thank you for that yeah and again that's part of I think that legislative piece that goes hand in hand with this which is if you um are on the proactive and and you you're you're more ready for that and you know when the heavy lifting is going to happen I mean we've done heavy lifting on policy committees in the past too so you know when you're when you see them busy in Springfield you know we're going to get busy at the policy for sure okay thank you 6.3 board member comments any comments from our board members well I can go over a few things that I've that have been going on um so in the past three weeks I just want to recognize uh some of the people that are that have been participating some of the students some of the staff Etc that have been participating in in some of the things that that I've had the privilege of witnessing um just real quick the meet and greets continue we did have one at the park district we had one at Hunt Club we had we had some people turn out there those were very productive and I would invite the public to to the extent that there are any that you continue to come by and if you'd like to host one you're welcome to do that as well uh also did some tours at Prairie point and trauber uh at trauber I really want to recognize Crystal Rutherford Crystal has put together the best resource center um it is welcoming it's it's comfortable uh the kids want to attend the kids the kids want to read what a concept the kids want to read and they want to participate in and she's put in a lot of hard work so I'd like to thank her for that bionic Dr Calgary's already mentioned they do want to do a presentation they're also looking to get their graduation cords added to uh added to the collection they want to be recognized at graduation I also went to the robotics open house on a Saturday I like those people those those students just like blew me away I mean they're just incredible the things that they're doing they also want to do a presentation for us for the board and I think that's a great idea but those are those are some really talented students we have out there and then finally as as Dr Calgary mentioned there was brunch with bpac on Saturday there were about as many bees as there were people and there were a lot of bees yeah here so uh but yeah I mean that was that was well received um they are looking for a couple more people to be on their committee they're looking for um a couple more English learner families to their committee is not full they have three positions open so if anyone's interested please let them know and then finally not necessarily School related but last Friday I was participating at the food pantry at Old trauber I just encourage any family that has a need again the next one at Old Travelers October 6 but they do occur they do occur on a weekly basis please stop by we really don't want to see anyone any student any family in our school district going hungry that's it for me for me um I just want to touch base really quickly that 22 years ago as Dr Calgary said we all experience the devastation of 9 11.
and it's just they're full I mean and then you have a family you know that has another sibling come in so they take that spot so it's just it's space we could honestly probably have two or three classrooms and fill it all up so and not to give a segue but I see Dr Bozeman all the way to the back is this split was covered under if you can just give a thumbs up on the long range facility planning I'm assuming yeah hey well thank you for your time tonight I appreciate it okay we will now move into School Board member reports I will give a brief update on our Public Work session that we just held just prior to this so again this is the process I think that was our second meeting that we've held as a board as we started work through policies we recognized an ability to be able to talk with one another to try to land on what we thought was an optimized solution and so we held one of those meetings at five o'clock today it ended at six first on the agenda was to review four policies that had been previously reviewed by us but still had outstanding questions you'll you'll hear about some of those on the agenda later today that took up about 50 minutes of the of the hour the last 10 minutes we talked about the policies pertaining to curriculum material a lot of the book topics that we've been hearing about so you know we couldn't dive deep it was just 10 10 minutes but Dr Roberts took us over what those documents were I'm looking at them in front of me now we're going to go off and study those and then we've talked as a team about what we want to do kind of going forward our next meeting will be September 25th the next board meeting and we will likely hold another Public Work session ahead of that to continue the conversation so that's a high level summary anybody catch anything I missed there okay great and then we'll start with Pat Mr Bryant do you have anything from a school board member report Mr major yeah the Redevelopment commission has not met since the last time we met I think we're gonna have probably a meeting next week the Health Trust has had several meetings uh scheduled for the next uh about a month what a there's like three or four meetings scheduled we're going to be looking uh in in particular to teachers that are really going to be concerned with premium pricing we're also looking at the bylaws we do have a consultant that's assisted us with some data collection and so this will help us Benchmark ourselves regionally and nationally within the school bracket so that looks like that's going to be a huge help for us where we've probably not had as much data analysis capability in the past so more to come on that again several meetings coming up so hopefully sometime about a month and a half from now I can give a better update is where we're at thank you the district and Facilities committee met at the end of August we did a review of the current projects at Parkside and Schmidt Renovations of both those schools got updates for the members of the committee most of whom are community members folks outside the school corporation um Dr Phillips and Dr Boseman also um LED discussions informational presentations not only on the buildings and the status of our facilities but then also the Financial possibilities for providing the funding to do some of the needed improvements at our buildings so it's a good meeting four more meetings planned during the school year I'm actually going to add ahead of this meeting today at four o'clock until five o'clock there is a public input session for our upcoming bargaining which was well attended mostly by teachers and there was a lot of great input provided by then so just visibility that's kind of information gathering and then we enter into formal negotiations next Wednesday on the 20th all right yes yes yep it's good Instagrams the school Foundation met a couple weeks ago in just a couple of pertinent items to share from the executive director Nicole Cunningham wanted me to mention that a big thank you to Centric Credit Union for Their donation recent donation and sponsorship the employee campaign for the school foundation will begin later this week with the theme of schools are launch pads for learning and lastly and I might argue most importantly congratulations to student Eileen Carver of Taylorsville for being selected the school Foundation student of the month for August the ccic committee met last week between the cea appointed members and the ones from the administration as well mostly talked about very similar topics Dr Phillips and Dr Bozeman gave an update on the long range facility update which I assume will be what Leads Here we also discussed the timeline for collective bargaining and how it'll roll out from today's public hearing through hopefully I'm not up to November 15th and then the final piece of action that was discussed was looking at alignment of senior projects to make sure that it's easy for those that are transferring between schools to not put an undue burden on those students the council for Youth Development met in August for their quarterly meeting they have many ongoing workshops and activities to help the Youth of our community directly and to improve skills of people that work with the youth including parents teachers counselors and others and I want to highlight one of their activities we are actually in the in the middle of the midst of spark week which began last Friday through this Friday their definition of a spark is it's what someone is really passionate about doing an activity that unleashes their energy and joy one that may allow them to express themselves and to make their own unique contributions to the world there are special events in our schools and evening events at different sites including a special family night on Thursday at the high school design team installation on Washington Street that's from 6 to 8 PM Thursday and you can check out all the other activities around spark week at Cyd bartholomew.org thank you Mr L okay cabinet reports Dr Phillips and Dr Boseman thank you up next long range facility good evening thanks for making a few minutes my information will be will be brief um and thanks to Mrs Marshall for putting the ball on the tee for me with some facility opportunities to discuss um board members you had you may recall over the course of the past several months we have come to you with information regarding facility needs and upgrades most recently on July the end of July in strategic planning we had brought information to you about um basically a culmination of all those all those items that are limitations we that we have currently so those limitations are threefold really the need to renovate our elementary buildings uh the need to address demographic changes on the west side of town and then the need to address academic limitations that we have such as Dr hack has 170 kids that ask for welding and we can accommodate 60.
by the end of that time period it would appear that if our tax base remains strong we could be adding financing on top of that at the end without any increase to our taxpayers so we could add further bonds near the end without any increase or taxpayers sure yeah right the two colored bars there were showing we're showing today right so as the shape of that we'll be overlaying the school corporations identified needs right in terms of what you need from a facilities perspective they're laying that with the the post Debt Service schedule and if we hear from the school oh we actually have another project that we need to incorporate here because of the off the way these have been authorized we'll be able to Pivot and change to make sure that we're maintaining what's being shared with the public in terms so we're basically funding these the way that we funded the renovations of our schools in the last 10 years with debt that's falling off the books okay all right what we're doing is really kind of some ways yes if you're kind of looking at it from that perspective that's really just because of conservativeness thank you it's the board before well I invite public comment does the board have any other questions um yes I just had a couple clarifying questions on slide two on the project costs so line three is the lecc phase two Craig Academy transformation is that some the total of building the new building while upgrading the current LEC okay I just wanted to clarify yes that price will be for the phase two of this uh building turned it back into the school okay okay just to remind the board you've already approved the new building okay thank you okay okay it's a point of clarification okay and then the second question was on number five on the bus purchases is that part of our 12-year um cycle of purchasing new buses so that that number would Encompass all of the buses that have aged out of and that we need to purchase in that time frame from 24 to 27.
for this year we had 3059 only but we have he gave us 42 000 I think it was or what yes correct so whatever was not spent so we have see the remaining amount of 32 000. so that 32 000 and some other monies that were not spent under this breakdown will be rolled over does it make sense but that's not until November right that won't be till November and that's why and just know that we're for fiscal year 23 we can't revise anymore because it's closing but we can revise 24. let's go get money for budget and we they really need some monies for the two big events that they're planning and that's why we're going to revise it to temporarily lower down the allocation for the salaries and benefits but then once they're all over money is available then you can add more back to it plus more items that they want out of there okay so how many kids are involved in this yeah we have I think about 86 or 70.
we're just here to ask for approval of closing off the Grant and spinning it down to the last it was a total of I John kind of did the whole spill already um it was a DES Child Care stabilization Grant which was really to stabilize our preschool to um to pay employees to give them buffers and so all of it 90 of it went to pay wages and give bonuses for different things that they were doing in the previous is going away um but we spend it and they got their bonuses what are we gonna do with the last bit of it we're gonna bonus it out and give it to the teachers so all all not just the teacher all staff working in preschool so everybody got a portion of it so is there any possibility of a few not right now um the state said not right now they're closing it all out and I think once everything's closed out they'll see if there's any money left because if we didn't spin it down to the penny um we had to Res we had to send that back or Payback s good at spending money asking for approval of spending it and closing it out as this is an action item go through are there any questions with it or anything I guess I trust you with the money yeah I'll make a motion for the approval of proposed spending of the DES Child Care stabilization Grant at territorial early childhood entered to close out the Grant and the second house second thank you all in favor all right item a at om an academic impacts Ms Daniels so I'm going to talk about something that I wish we didn't have to talk about um it's actually pretty sad when you think about it and one of the things I wanted to draw your attention to is in your packet there is an article from District administration which is a national publication and starting on page two of that article it has comparisons of chronic absenteeism which are described of missing defined by missing 10 percent or more of days is considered chronic absenteeism according to this report and it has rates from the year that the school year that was in my word BC so before covered right and then it has raisin 2122 which I would tell you we saw [Music] um exact Trend through 22-23 school year as well so that's nothing different some of the things and so this is listed out by state in the article Arizona had one of the most significant gains Nationwide in chronic absenteeism so not only is it just here with us it's here with us in Arizona and it's here with us Nationwide and it's not just affecting students it's affecting staff so on the back side of your agenda item is a chart like a sideways chart and the sideways chart has The Chronic percents it has The Chronic persons by school year and by campus so one of the things that I would like to point out is for example at territorial last year and remember this the article was from 2122 school year so like I you know two schools years ago at Tech that during that 21-22 school year 50 57 percent of the students Miss 10 or more days last year 44 missed so it was moving in the right direction at Del Rio 2122 44 were chronically absent last year 36 percent moving in the right direction at HMS 47 to 44.
over 2 600 Americans never went home to their loved ones that day among them was one of the first volleyball players I ever coached Katie who had an incredibly bright future I will never forget her and it certainly is a sobering reminder that tomorrow's not guaranteed um uh transitioning to something also very serious September is recognized as Suicide Prevention month suicide is the second leading cause of death among people aged 10 to 14. the third leading cause of death among those aged 15 to 24 and the 12th leading cause of death overall in the United States and unfortunately has intimately touched uh School District 308 if you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis please call or text 988 immediately if you are uncomfortable talking on the phone you can also chat with the suicide in crisis Lifeline at lifeline.org you can also text Nami to 741-741 to be connected to a free trained crisis counselor on the crisis text line and remember you matter on a lighter note Welcome to our new CFO Mr Rafael of obafemi I look forward to working with you on the finance and Facilities committee and finally bringing some transparency to sd308 finances forward to getting a true variance report up and running and also so honored and look forward to working with our new student ambassadors who will help center student voice at our board table and please please do not hesitate to jump in when you have something to say you do not need an invitation your seat at this table is just the same as ours [Music] it'll be quick um I always love to brag about my my other role if you will in our community which is the one of the Commissioners the gar and it allows me I was invited uh Wednesday night so when this coming Wednesday we are the Commissioners from the various uh commissions for the city of Aurora have been invited to um conduct new members into the Aurora education commission so I am looking forward to uh a uh yeah the gar commission uh commissioner pays off again number one I'm always happy to serve that in that capacity as well but looking forward to them uh also welcoming you you in as well so I'll try and get in the front row if I can we'll see we'll see just out quick uh welcome to Isabelle and Luke welcome to the team look forward to working with you all and uh had the opportunity for another one of the other meet and greets with um the city of Aurora Dr kilgotti uh Latonya um and some of the administrative staff we went over to the city of of Aurora and met with uh mayor Richard Irving and his staff and as Jared was stating um legislation in order to be proactive in legislation you have to start with relationships and so I just appreciated the opportunity to start building the relationships because we have five different cities that feed into our school district and that's just one of the many meet and greets that Dr kilgotti has been engaged in so just looking forward to continue to do that other quick thing simultane myself Dr Phil Gowdy Dr zwemke this weekend opportunity to meet with a local University to think about different ways we can partner on several things and so I just look forward to more robust conversations with them and with others in the community about partnering on a variety of initiatives so all those things um I Echo them I ditto them welcome to to Mr obafemi and also to our student ambassadors Bell Gershon and Luke Lockwood and now we have an opportunity to hear from our students and so 6.4 is our student ambassador report um hi my name is Isabel Gershon and I'm a junior at Oswego East I am just so honored to have been selected for this position I first like to thank the board for having faith in me and giving me such an amazing opportunity to represent my peers I wanted to share a little bit about how I got involved and the reasons why I chose to pursue this position I got involved with sd308 policy when Mrs simultan now our board president saw me speak at an event on the importance of diversity and racial equity in our community from there I was lucky enough to join a student diversity committee and later the SD 308 Coalition where I was able to share my unique experience of being a Jewish and female student in our district being on that committee was such a transformative experience especially being able to hear everyone's unique perspective and work together to create solutions to some challenges we face in sd308 but I worried that our all our work in difficult conversations would not be taken seriously by leaders in our district when I first heard about the creation of the student ambassador program I felt hopeful that we would be heard and that is exactly what happened through amplifying student voices our district has been able to highlight issues that truly matter to students such as combating sexual harassment and mental health challenges these are issues I hope to Champion as well as work to make our schools a more inclusive space for students of all identities and backgrounds including members of the lgbtq plus community and anyone holding a marginalized identity I'm so grateful to the student ambassadors before me any Caitlin for building such a great foundation for Luke and I to continue to build on I am just so excited to be a voice for my fellow students and to get to work thank you so much for your time you hello my name is Luke Lockwood and I am a senior at Oswego High School I am truly humbled and honored to have the opportunity to serve and represent the great students of OHS and sv308 throughout my time as student ambassador I plan to highlight the importance of coming together as a student body district and Community as a whole it is imperative to ensure that every student is hurt I want to encourage students to be honest and use their voices whether through surveys emails or speaking at the board meetings I want the students to take pride and ownership in their schools as I know this will make our schools and our district better as result I want to stress the importance of listening to each other no matter the views each student has their own story and journey it's important that we acknowledge and validate those experiences if this starts among the students of our schools we will set the foundation for future students and generations to come overall if we come together and find common ground building a community of listeners there is nothing we can't do as students and as a community all students deserve a place where they can learn and grow and I am committed to ensure that every student research receives that right I would like to thank the board members and Dr Calgary for this amazing opportunity to serve and work for the students school and District that I love finally I would also like to take a moment to acknowledge the 22nd anniversary of the 9 11 attacks though our generation of students were not born to witness this tragic day it is important for us as young people to never forget the heroes who risk their lives to save others and the innocent lives lost we honor you today thank you [Music] we're cutting it up for both of them come on our we are in very good hands right right we are in yes the future is bright I love it thank you so much to you both we are so excited to have you we have no doubt that you will fill the shoes of Anna and Caitlyn and everyone who's come before you and you'll do great things so we're excited to have you thank you okay 7.1 consent agenda make motion to approve all items under consent including 7.1 minutes from the Board of Education meeting on August 21st 2023 open and closed session 7.2 to acknowledge the foia requests received by the district and 7.3 to approve a one-time only addendum to policy 7 colon 100 Health eye and dental examinations changing the exclusion date from September 15 to October 15 2023.
so we've we've brought those items to you and and you told us in July great thank you now go ask stakeholders and the community what their opinions are on all these items and um and the financing options that we have therein so we've met I think Dr Roberts we might have a slide of some upcoming public meetings maybe it's not there I'll just tell them to you um but we um Dr Roberts Dr Phillips myself have begun meeting with Community groups I think we have 44 or so on the entire list and they end with um some public sessions that we have here at if you don't find it I'll just look at my phone and do it that way I can tell you what they are we have opportunities for the public thank you we have opportunities for the public at these sites to hear the same presentation where we're getting we're giving to others and most importantly give us feedback on their priorities and appetites for the funding so sources and strategies and limitations with that so we will go through those sessions and then by our next strategic planning session in October October 30th the evening of Monday the October 30th we'll we'll bring some recommendations back to you at that time so happy to answer any questions that you may have at this point or Dr Phillips or Dr Roberts I can just say for those in the room this offer of a tour of the Parkside facility I know everybody here is a vested interest in our kids it's a really great space so if anybody has an opportunity to do that I would recommend it highly it's a great project if I'm a resident of Shadow Creek and I feel like I haven't been invited yet what what steps should I take if I want to be part of one of these public sessions great thank you great question we have not we will we will publicize these uh through social media and parent Square to our stakeholders so we have not yet so we have not publicized this or marketed it but we will as soon as this this meeting is over here today so um and those are just um you may have you may be wondering there's two sessions for the public at South Side it doesn't really matter which one you go to it's the same presentation but we'll be conducting those in the cafeteria the auditorium is large and less personable I suppose you could say so that's the reason that they're split up into two groups in salsa Elementary so we'll start marketing those uh to the public this week thank you okay thank you Dr Bozeman up next 2024 budget work session Dr Phillips this is the first time I've had to do one of these with these things I think they make your eyes weaker the longer you use them that's what it is so good evening and thank you for the opportunity to to share the outlines of the 2024 calendar year budget with you tonight is a work session we just talk about the budget in a very high level and all the assumptions that went into building the budget that you'll see tonight in the detail that actually is scheduled an email scheduled to go out to you later this evening with um 80 some pages of line by line budget detail for you that's tonight two weeks from tonight there'll be a public hearing so this week later this week the budget will be advertised on the in the Gateway system and on the dlgf for the public to view and we'll hold a public hearing on the 25th going over the any updates to tonight's presentation any changes to it and then at the 23rd meeting in October that is for your vote there won't be a detailed presentation just an overview tax rate maximum budgets and that's the the vote in uh in October there'll be a uh several votes that night with different resolutions required for the budget but we'll go over those in detail at that time and then before January 1st we hope to have the final tax rate issued to us by the dlgf there's no further action on your part required after the the vote before November 1st is the deadline that we have to approve a budget so this is a summary of the budget at a very high level and the five tax supported funds that were required to pass a budget for um from the board overall the budget reflects a 4.7 percent increase over the 2023 calendar year budget and some of the things that this budget allows us to accomplish salary and benefit expenditures between all three of the funds that cover salaries and benefits education fund operation fund and operating referendum funds is 5.4 percent more in expenditures for 2024 compared to 23 that's not a 5.4 percent raise that includes additional expenditures for added positions across those funds as well um this eliminates textbook or curricular material fees for families it includes a one-time eight percent inflation inflation adjustment to school classroom and Department Supply budgets the first time I've done that since I've been doing the budget for bcse with inflation as as everyone in the room knows at the level that it has been over the last couple of years I thought it was appropriate if possible to increase those budgets at this time so there's an eight percent increase there we continue to invest in facility maintenance and um and improvements and we'll get in some detail on that and we do not anticipate that there would be any increase to the tax rate in 2024.
good question this is actually as we're going to talk about here in just a bit with our budget this is on top of our normal bus replacement tons what we've seen uh over the years is that our buses have aged beyond the the recommended 12-year Rec uh replacement plan so this would be a plan to help us get us back on track okay thank you board members any other comments yes thank you so much for this information I am trying to understand also slide two so thank you for your questions I was wondering if you could explain a little bit about the curricular materials acquisition um and line four absolutely so as you may be aware the public may be aware uh the doe there's been a legislation change with how we fund our curricular resources our curriculum material this year we are no longer able to charge for that um so a gift to to our families and to our taxpayers but still needs to be funded some way so this is a mechanism that will allow us to maintain the high level of curricular material that we currently expect and and still be able to cash flow those things and then could you explain a little bit about the custodial equipment acquisition because I understand that we Outsource our custodians so could you explain a little bit um why the district is having to acquire that equipment yes it's Outsourcing happy to do so and then this would also the maintenance equipment on the next line item are similar um although we outsourced um the the labor that goes along with our custodians and our maintenance staff we the district still owns the equipment um so whether that be um trucks cleaning equipment lifts other things other major purchases those belong those are our assets that we wanted to maintain control and ownership of um for down the road security for the district out of an abundance of caution so that we having ownership of those if there were to be some transition um we wouldn't have to go out and replace all those materials in those supplies thank you yeah good questions great questions um I would open I would open the floor for public comment at this time if anyone would like to comment on the project project costs seeing no one needing to comment you can close this meeting this hearing second public hearing VR budget hearing again Mr miles thank you once again Madam president Dr Smith members of the board at this time I bring before you our first public hearing for our 2024 budget uh per state statute the budget has been advertised as required and I just remind the board and the public this budget also includes our bus replacement plan and our capital projects plan that also must be approved by the state with that said as in years past we want to make sure we advertise our budget uh with uh I will say an overestimation of our costs and likewise an overestimation of where we would anticipate local property tax rates to be noting that once the state does their calculations and comes back to us later in the year they will reduce that we don't want to get too close to where we think actual expenses would be and potentially risk losing funds and leaving them uh leaving us in a deficit spending or in a shortfall so the board has had the proposed budget um in front of them and it again has been advertised as required uh I would welcome any questions at this time seeing no one here to comment at this time we'll close the budget hearing thank you very much Mr miles thank you now we will open our work session and this is going so fast we'll go to the Blue Ribbon committee Please Mr Smith thank you madam president Dr Smith members of the board just to mention last couple weeks of good weather has really accelerated some of our site work so we continue to make it Dusty around our district site where continues at LC on the North End actually this new parking lot was paved they finished it up today one half of it nice Elsie Poole the Dig has started so we continue to move dirt and soon we'll have a pool there the weight room uh continues on Ln baseball Turf is in they will be moving to softball uh the next slide shows you um that field is being prepped finalized and we'll start this week the first of next baseball soccer parking they started stoning that area and we'll soon to have asphalt there we're hoping this week new weight room upgrades continues on Ellen pool tiles the big one so they're moving very quickly trying to get that done and water yet to come they're hoping here within the week Belzer Auditorium uh they're almost done raising trusses there I think we have four to remain and then all the sub brace goes in and Roofing on that new addition uh roof on the existing building continues and special needs turn around uh also hopefully we'll have asphalt there in the next couple weeks Fall Creek Valley new Clinic area and exceptional learner area space continues on uh all likewise the project lead to Rooms there's about six rooms that they're working on right now soccer field continues the underground is almost completed and then uh the base and final dirt will go in LACC you've seen a lot of uh pipe out there the storm water goes in once that's in they'll be ready to start asphalting both the North End and the West End the track uh I believe will be finished this week with paint providing the weather holds out tomorrow and Tennis Courts continue on exciting day on Friday that was uh getting ready for the event there and just so excited moving forward with the new lecc Ward are there questions for Mr Smith Miss Dunn first of all uh Mr Smith I felt like I was watching you on uh Christmas morning on Friday morning Your Enthusiasm um was contagious and so thank you for all the incredible work that you continue to do around our district to ensure that we have such incredible facilities um I did this is super exciting Project Lead the Way thinking about technology and Innovation can you just explain a little bit how those rooms might differ from a traditional classroom and what makes them projectally the way rooms number one being a quick properly to house all the different types of equipment going in there you'll see the electric and the air from the ceiling just gives them so much more flexibility the new type of furniture that will go in there to help them accommodate what they do with Project Lead the Way super super exciting to have such a dedicated space so again thank you for all that you continue to do comments on the side of the board questions thank you very very much Friday it was very exciting well I'll leave that for comments okay okay great so we will move on to early enrollment window updates um that would be good evening Madam president Dr Smith members of the board whether or not it is already time to start planning for next school year so the current window is still open for our current school year where all the way up to the last day of school on May 23rd we allow on new applications and enrollments we want to bring to your attention tonight that starting on March 1st of 2024 the non-resident application window will open running all the way through the last day of school of that school year and then registration for all grades for the 24 25 school year will begin on Tuesday January 9 2024.
um to answer that question like students for them to be electricity eligible we need to fill out five or six calls and submit to optimization for affiliation with their trust um we have something like in between 75 and 80 students qualifying in that criteria but we have more than 100 students who could be eligible 20 plus students is that number going up every year down stays the same okay for the money gets going down but the number of students are going up is that what I'm hearing so will the money increase if those students complete those forms needed to establish tribal affiliation foreign if the funds received will increase if we get those families to complete their tribal affiliation documents yes but I don't think it's emphatic function of the number of students that is okay so it's not dependent on the number of students enrolled yes it will increase if we have more students higher share but it is not directly like the money is changing from 7900 3 000 something that is not just based on the number of students but if you have more students that will increase our money slightly not by thousands of dollars from a few hundreds of dollars and so this budget is made with you guys and the Dom committee and collaborating yes what usually happens is they're the one that gives us the line items then you'll be the one to add whatever they they want other there yes it is a collaboration how many kids do we have taking advantage of the children last last year it was about 35 students okay well Monday Tuesday and Thursday but we don't know how many are enrolled this year um I know Miss Griselda will continue to do that I'm always excited about what you guys do you know that I'm not being critical you're just really trying to get this in my mind where this money comes from how much money it is how to fix the kids how can we increase it right how we can increase it right yes and um so I mean I had a little family of the day Mom told me hey I'm going to pull my kids out of San someone I'm gonna put and I said well make sure you find out about the Judson O'Malley program because it'll affect your kids you know and um so and these kids get supplies school supplies all those good stuff and other activities foreign so this is just a little bit about the stuff we have going on just this year um we have the Native American day that's November 4th that's the awful Plaza I have a fire here I only have one too you guys want to share them okay okay so with this event a natural Community it's not just the Johnson O'Malley student program it's in for the whole Community to be invited um we have dance groups coming out of the sunset mode along with the high school classes from Santi mall and we even invited our class here to come raise funds um we have um The Band Southern country that's going to play chicken scratch throughout the throughout the event um we have a drum group that's four wins which is more for our kids to see what the tradition is really is about um the drummers are they really open about having kids come and talk to them and they even get to you know not really play the Drone but you know they get to see it up close um but that's some of our what our budget is going to um the next thing we have is our Christmas party and this takes place in the school cafeteria and what we do with this we provide a meal for them and and we invite their families the students and their families we interact with kids play games at the end of the event the children get a toilet paper as well as the adults the adults kind of get like a sometimes like home supplies or like you know little watches and stuff that um we get our toys from Toys for cuts and the mill is will be from our budget also um the reason why we do our meals kind of a bigger thing because some of our Native American homes are kind of poverty and um something so they don't always get a good meal you know during the holidays or something so this has been what we like to offer but you know and then um most importantly is the tutoring and the mentor program about to be starting in October we're looking forward to having kids be mentored by the upperclassmen who may love to think who they love um I've experienced myself or my children and my nephew they I they think they're the coolest kids walking around knowing these high school kids that Mentor them but they get their homework done um they have the help there they learn how to share they're learning how to you know send an orderly line to get their snacks and everybody like snacks so they're there and then some of our some of our budget also um I feel like uh this is um I think all of this is good for them just to influence them in positive ways because not a lot of kids don't do positivity or they don't have the courage to come out and talk as you know to their parents brothers sisters whatever um it just I just feel like it all reflects on how they participate in the classroom if they're more comfortable with a mentor or you know however they want to express themselves it's once they get it off their mind they are more focused on their schoolwork more focused on other things and other than going home um how we how we recognize our mentors is what we do we ordered T-shirts and they'll have a white shirt with our jom logo and not totally pointed out at either our events or during school they can wear it anytime usually um but that's what we have the biggest things coming right now we're already thinking about the budget for next year to get these things going because we do have a big graduation thing we like to get for the graduates and we hope to have 100 of our Native American students graduating Junior High and High School how are the mentors picked the mentors aren't volunteers okay um so they volunteer um and last year I think we had about 19 kids volunteer at first and I think by the end of it there was probably only about 10 that actually came you know and put work in and came to after school program and stuff so with those 10 those are the ones we absolutely want to recognize you know because everyone wants to join something the ones that actually put in the work for the children is what is what yeah but thank you guys for having us yeah [Applause] they're sellers yes I'm sorry there's a couple questions real thanks so the first question is on a scale one to ten what bang are we getting for our money with these kids um well last year wasn't much you know but this year I think herself I want to say a 10.
however at cvhs from 2021 from 20 that 2122 school year to the 22-23 school year we increased from 50 50 of the students being chronically absent to 60 two percent can you define chronically absent they missed 10 percent or more of a school year so in our case that would be 14 and a half days or more okay yeah but Cindy I had a similar question does that mean unexcused absences as absences you're not learning okay so if your parents said the kid was sick makes no difference if they were simply not there it's in these numbers gone is gone so the child's out with having to have surgery or something or playing basketball yeah but I mean your benign class you're not in class so but if you think about that 62 of the student body was chronically absent would it be any surprise That We're Not Making academic gains [Music] people that own businesses well don't show up to work anymore either amen sister because that's on the next page for some reason and it's it was interesting because the you know there was sort of that Collective grumbling about it across the United States right like nobody shows up for anything anymore you can't get anybody do anything social organizations or Civic clubs and groups nobody wants to be members anymore people just all kind of did the big shrug right you know and now they don't want to be involved well we did we ran the same data but we didn't run percents we just ran hard numbers so you can see um where we were so across the top of the chart this is teacher only so teacher quarterly vacant stated from last school year this is just from last year so cvhs has 39 teachers Heritage is 26 Del Rio is 26 and Tech has 30.
second are there any questions on the consent agenda I just want to make policy piece I know that typically we don't like to bring things and and vote on them at the same time and with this one there there was definitely a obviously today is the 11th so so time here and a lot of districts have have done this where this isn't unique to our district so I just wanted to make sure it was acknowledging that and for the sake of transparency thank you okay what huh hi motion passes seven zero financial statements any questions about that all right um next item can I just ask a question I'm going to defer most of my questions to our our finance committee meeting but and I don't think you'll be able to answer this maybe Faith or Heather can answer this I just noticed that we had an overage for fast bridge for so much use why it was like eleven thousand dollars what does that mean like why are we going over on Fast Bridge borrow that microphone sorry we have started testing additional grade levels for fast bridge where we had used had been doing second grade through eighth we're now starting with our first graders as well so there's a whole other group of students so next year we will just have we'll buy a bigger I guess I'm trying to figure out we'll just buy a bigger package next year okay other questions no okay uh agreement with Kendall County food pantry questions okay uh this is a in terms of the on the agenda we had on here information on new High School courses I did put in a request to delay this discussion item yeah I'd make a motion on 8.3 to postpone uh discussion on the new High School courses so that they can go through the teaching and learning and Equity committee prior to coming to the full Board second second aye Dr Maria hi hi motion passes 7-0 9.1 action item approval of bills for payment can I have a motion please make a motion to authorize excuse me I apologize make a motion to authorize the payment of bills in the amount of six million five hundred sixty one thousand seven hundred sixty five dollars and 47 cents as presented aye motion passes seven zero action item 9.2 approval a board member travel request can I have a motion please make a motion to approve the board member travel request as presented second Dr Mario aye Milton hi Mr aye aye Mr Gatewood hi hi motion passes 7-0 action item 9.3 approval of personnel report can I have a motion please make a motion to approve the Personnel report as presented Dr Maria I I hi motion passes seven zero I have to I'm sorry 10.1 can I have a motion to adjourn make a motion to adjourn all in favor all right most
so this budget as as all are all budgets are built on a assumptions some of them strong some of them weaker this uh the revenue assumptions for the education fund so first I'll go in the education fund detail and then I'll stop and ask for questions on the education fund so um the assumption is that we will have about 93.7 million dollars in Revenue into the education Fund in 2024 it's an increase of 7.2 percent that is pretty simply a function of the per pupil amount that the state provides and the number of students that we have on our ADM account that's that's pretty simple there are there are some smaller parts that add to that in special ed and career and tech ed and um and nesp which I'll get into in a minute but for the most part that's what how many kids you have times how much the state allocates this is not a property tax supported fund this is entirely supported by the the state legislature through the state's general fund and you can see that there's an increase in both this fiscal year and next next fiscal year 5.7 percent per pupil increase this year that was a as of July one and then as of July 1 next year a 1.4 percent increase next year in per pupil expenditures so ADM estimates this is this is one of those weaker estimates unfortunately the state moved back the timeline for the student official student count data October this last year um but we still have to build a budget Budget prior to that so every I think it feels like every day I'm running a report from our student management system to see how many students were at at the moment and trying to make sure that I'm I'm accurately um estimating our revenues for the education fund so as of right now we we're at about 11 330 students um and that's down 101 students from last year at the same time um not unexpected and about where the demography study said we would be primarily as a function of the very large senior class that graduated last year and a really normal sized kindergarten class for us our kindergarten classes have been between 815 and 860 for the last several years and so it was a normal income in kindergarten there was just a massive graduating class going out last year and then it reflects about 330 students currently enrolled in the CVP program for which we receive only 85 percent of State support and then because I'm advertising and working on a budget for calendar year 2024 I have to look at this Falls ADM which we don't know exactly but we have a pretty good estimate we have to estimate next Springs and next Falls to know where we're going to be from a budget standpoint and so I always estimate that we will lose 150 students in the spring compared to the fall some of those are made up by early graduates somewhere between 30 and 60 early graduates they graduated in December and then the rest of them transfers out transfers to homeschool all of those kinds of things that happen during the course of the Year sometimes we have we've had years where we only lose about 50 students in that semester but we have had a time we were close to 150.
we bring this information to you tonight asking for approval later this month at the board meeting later this month board members do we have any questions about these windows um you all have been doing this successfully for several years so you have our trust we know we know you understand those windows and and why they are um why they are the way they are so yes please uh-huh so one question that I have is um this I love we're already thinking about the 24 25 school year do you keep any reserve seats for individuals that might be coming into the district later so let's say that I am moving here to work at DFAS and part of the reason I've moved to Lawrence is because it's a district of destination um are there seats that are held back for any people that move in after the enrollment window starts Elementary there's no need to hold back we will find room okay I mean we will work with families and give tours based on east or west or programming that they might have attended somewhere else okay so we accommodate families every day all year long awesome thank you and those are the families that choose to live in Lawrence Township there may not be seats held for families that want to come here from outside the township all right these windows right thank you that's so important thank you any other questions we will look forward to revisiting this later in the month um we're to our action items already board should I believe it or not um our personnel report Miss Johnson greetings Madam president Dr Smith and members of the board um we present the Personnel report as submitted for your approval so moved properly moved and seconded is there any discussion all in favor of approving the Personnel report aye any opposed and we are we're approved um we board are already to our board comments isn't that exciting I see a smile from the page okay I'm gonna let you raise your hand first who wants to go first okay then I choose it's done I don't really have much to say other than what I've already said uh to Mr Smith also want to extend just gratitude to the entire cabinet it is always a great day in Lawrence when you hear about these wonderful reports that we have so thank you for your continued leadership superintendent Smith that's all I have all right I um I believe we have a birthday yes that's part of our boardwork yes um I want to wish Miss Dunn our fellow board member a happy birthday and um I believe she even brought Miss Gabby with her in the crowd we always love having kids in the crowd um so I just wanted to do that and then um just the past two weeks have spoke for themselves all the great things going on in the district um so I'll just leave it at that thanks to everybody for all the work that's being done I know you know I will say I thank you Laurence just reminds me even for the game we know Lucas Oil was awesome I think Lawrence for my family even getting together my kids came home from school as just another reminder of just that connecting piece so I thank you all it's a good time for just my family and just to see all of you all so I'm grateful for that so I thank you so I thought I had no comments sorry that's always yeah uh Lawrence Lucas was spectacular from the the musical arts and the the the Gladiators I mean the football players they you know they just gave it their all and I think everybody had a good time and as it's unfortunate that maybe one team should win and another team should lose uh Lawrence Township was winners at every game so um it was terrific thank you so much Dr Nesbitt Mr Smith it was terrific um I would also like to um highlight a Gala that we went to sponsored by the Indiana Department of Education in which two of our schools received um really top-notch honors of the thousands of schools in Indiana there were maybe 23 schools maybe 30 schools that received these kinds of honors and um Forest Glen was recognized for early literacy and Mackenzie was recognized for College and Career pathways and we couldn't have been more proud so um they represent the rest of our schools as well we're all doing they're all all who are doing such a great job and who knows I might have a couple more next year you never know Mr Smith Madam president board they not only received Awards it took away a half million dollars of recognition so we got the money also so we're ecstatic about that and I board I will bring those two schools to be recognized before you with their Hardware at our September 25th meeting so we are excited about that and that's all the comments I have Madam president we're going to make record time tonight if you so choose I'm gonna call Miss helmets [Laughter] um with that our next monthly board meeting will be held on Monday September 25th and it will begin at seven o'clock is there a motion to adjourn second probably moved in seconded we are adjourned
so I hope I hope it all works out the way if you wanted to what would you want changed if anything would be changed what changed um just the funds to be available we've already had help so Mr Casey they're pretty fantastic yeah just just that little bit of participation went along we were just us and you know our Treasurer and vice president we're having big sales we're having Fry Bread sales you know trying to hold these things together and you know it sometimes it's not easy on us we have kids at home we have no we don't have work we got workable time so it's kind of harder but I mean we get it done I mean the kids deserve it so so how many kids we have in school and so 100 of them are Native American for what 400 kids and did you guys say that a hundred kids a Native American in the school just about it so one-fourth of the kids that we have in the school are Native American I don't think anybody would ever known that whatever against it that one-fourth of the kids in this coordinative Americans .3 percent it's about thank you very good any other questions or discussion okay then our next item then is the student school and state data report Mr President members of the board uh data analyst Robin Casey we'll make a report to the governing board on the status of the districts reports there's no board action necessary at this time this is an informational item on Mr Casey thank you thank you I mean we are a member it's not going to look uh flights are not going to look as ready as the previous presentation because most of the information is directly copied screenshots from the Stateside website information yes letter grade for Elementary and high school as the level grade 3 it is same preliminary data pending final grade so the state has given us a lot of information but the final grade is not yet decided cut scores will be like a recommendation for cut scores will be submitted to State governing board in September and the state will go over that in October and by November 1st we are expecting official grades which is in the meantime they have given points this is preliminary so there are there could be slight errors but we are not expecting any major changes at this point but there will be fine tuning happening with some of the some of these numbers so these are not viral but the final numbers should be pretty close to this for proficiency out of 30 we have 8.91 growth we got 50 out of 50.
so we have 121 certified teachers who did include counselors or anything like that just classroom classroom New Jersey um and in here you can see how many vacancies there were by quarter and then you can see the total by by building for throughout the course of the school year uh-huh that's almost each teacher teacher they should take the time off but like a lot of time well I guess most of us would argue that's what we have Fridays for right you know people can't help getting sick or if you know having surgeries or death in the family or things like that but we had 1038 vacancies in the district which you're on 140 . so but a couple things I want to point out the camp the campus with the most the two most vacancies of course also have Athletics so teachers are gone because then also field trips or things like that other reasons that somebody may be gone or a professional day or something but high school has by far the most athletic events and you can note on there that the quarter with the lowest number of vacancies is the quarter in which we have the fewest Sports so that makes sense right and so and then we also have um you know vacancies at the middle school and remember some of the vacancies aren't whole day they're partial days because that doesn't mean that we had 1038 whole days but these were vacancies for at least half a day so some of those are for coaching um but like in third quarter there's only wrestling in basketball so also if that accounts for a much a dip but the dip also was it was interesting to me that um like I think we ought to give like the big Collective Round of Applause for Del Rio where apparently people don't miss much school but um you also can kind of do the that campus if you compare it to the one next to it on your list they have the same amount of teachers and the vacancy discrepancy is astronomical [Music] so I think I wanted to share the data with you and share the article with you because not only is it indicative of what we're stationwide every employer I've ever known complains that people just don't buy their shop to work anymore because it's like that's you know why and um everywhere you go there are signs hanging up like you know we're sorry if it's slow because we didn't have X Y and Z show up to work today or we closed early that's my favorite we closed early because we didn't have enough people to cover whatever shift and so you could see that everywhere you go in the broader Community but I wanted to share it with you for a big reason was because the next thing I'm going to share with you is our academic data and there is no way I mean we can talk A Million Ways to Sunday about um the number of teachers we have who are currently in the process of obtaining their certification we can talk every which way to Sunday about the experience level of our teachers but the fact of the matter is if if kids aren't coming to school we could have the world's best teachers and if kids aren't coming to school they're not going to learn stuff that's just the way it is and one of the things that I have really really struggled with and have talked with Employers in every kind of field is because everybody's talking about it right is how do you get people to show up to work how do you get people to show up to school and you know in the olden days we would say well your paycheck is a great carrot right you know shop to work so you get a paycheck but we have employees who are like eh you can dock me for the day I don't care or we have kids who don't see a reason to be in school and parents who don't see a reason to make their kids come to school so like I guess if I was sitting in your chair the thing I'd be asking is so what are people going to do about this and you know one of the things that we are doing about is stepping up our involvement with juvenile probation and truancy but because we have State security officers on all our campuses now we have a way to make some home visits so we have two uniformed officers who will be picking that up here pretty quick with our chronic absentees because we can run chronic absentee just from first quarter right how many kids missed 10 percent of first quarter or how many kids are in danger of a 10-day drop at the high school for example and those bowls are the very first people our safety and Personnel will be visiting at home starting in October these are absences of any kind of anything so we will go through and run an audit like if a kid was sick or in the hospital or something like that you know we're gonna give the parent a call and I know that our schools are already calling those parents and chatting with them and we have parents who argue that if their kid if they don't if their kid doesn't feel like coming they shouldn't have to parents have the same attitude towards their jobs they do so so I mean if we decide whatever we know the magic wand is I'm sure we could bend that to like every employer in the nation you know to get people to show up to work but this is something in the past like offering incentives like um the foundation there's a group of retired pilots in the community that refurbishes bicycles and they look like brand new and they deliver them to us and we give them to the schools to use for attendance drawings um Chino Valley Education Foundation supports attendance incentives for students honor and every campus but it's interesting because we are not in an era where a carrot or a stick make the difference so punitive measures aren't helping positive measures aren't helping so what helps one of the things we've talked with our campus security folk about our kids with chronic absenteeism at the high school level or for discipline things like demerits or absenteeism that our sros or other school Personnel will use some of the our Friday school time for kids to be able to come in make up their attendance make up some demerits so now I don't know most kids don't want to come to school on Friday and so we're going to try another tactic right that's going to be one of our tactics like hey if you want to knock this down then we'll see on Friday so we're we're trying to come up with stuff but I wanted to talk about it with you I wanted to talk about it um on camera I wanted to talk about it you know with people in the room who report to broader audiences that this is something we are standing in front of you and saying it's a problem and we need help because I know that we have Collective brain power not only in our room and our district in our community but somebody's going it's something we need to all as a community join together and decide it's something that we want to create a level of importance and and that school is an important thing and it's an important place to be but we talked earlier about the like the bump in homeschooling the bump and empowerment scholarship accounts there's also a bit of a pervasive attitude cultural wide that maybe other people know just as much about how to do a teacher's job as a teacher and so those are things that are hard to combat in a society but I wanted you to be aware I wanted you to understand because honestly every administrator in this room is going to stand up and talk about goals is embarrassed by the academic results on their campus but I'm also not going to let them put their neck in the news right when it's like if the problem belongs to all of us I would like to tell you about I'm really not by these unfortunately like I said it just seems to be a thing in our society right now whether it's people you know employees or employers are seeing employees not show up I mean I'm not really surprised Cindy if a child nurses so many days in the school year are they on the verge of not going to the next grade are you graduating it can be yeah definitely not graduating because almost 10th days they are in danger being dropped and losing their credit so we have a lot of attendance appeals and processes for students to do credit recovery to make up those you know absences and things like that but it's it still isn't enough for incentive for for some parents even especially is there any correlation between the absenteeism rate and the kids performance levels High versus low oh absolutely 100 100 correlation like I was guessing that but I wanted to if you're not in school How You Gonna Learn that was information but certainly we are open to ideas a few years back there was a group that came in and I can't remember if it was the health department uh State education someone came in and talked about the importance of being in school reaching out to parents and do you remember who that was I don't but one of the things that so juvenile probation we work consistently with but the other thing is to on Thursday morning um Julie Bryce and I are um there's been something that I've been sitting on for about 10 years that I've really wanted to roll out in the district and just just timings everything and there's a national organization called Katka but it's really focused on school safety and healthy communities and so because we have campus security officer I mean campus now it's a it's a better time for us to start pursuing things that require more Personnel but we're going to have an initial meeting with um cadka to learn about establishing Community coalitions for safe and healthy schools and safe and healthy communities and a tennis is certainly part of one of that so I've just been sitting on it and waiting until the time was right but that's a step we're taking to see um what other people are doing and what we can learn from that and how we can involve the broader community in problem solving Cindy one other question if I could are we doing any direct communication with the parents or the most chronically absent kids yep absolutely every single time a kid's missing school parents hear from us [Music] the email phone email Auto -person calls yes I'm glad to hear that it's not obviously had to solve the problem but I I guess we have at least established that line of communication with the parents because their kids have a serious problem and it's fun and you know Peter I would say it's interesting too because it's not just like not attending at all it's like in one of my favorite stories is Brandi had a parent a year or two ago who showed up at like two o'clock to drop her kid off for school and Brady's like you can't drive your kid off it's two o'clock in the afternoon the lady is like well I have a meeting in town what am I going to do with my kid I don't know if you sent your kid to school in the morning she'd have been here all day and you could have gone to your meeting you know and so there's like a weird perception that we're just here for people's convenience like no like we're really here to help give your kid a better future sure so that leads into our type testing yes please so here we are so in your in your package you have the chart the lots and lots of charts um and I'm just going to say on the K8 data we should have changed the label to aasa from azm2 because you know we've had like three incarnations of test names and we just forgot to change the label up above um we have I've met individually with all the administrators um they've all reviewed the data some of them have shed some ugly tears um we had there were some places where I would tell you language arts wise we were do we're doing like better than the state at the third and fourth grade level with the rates not so much but plus or minus three percent is within the margin really is within a margin of error for that kind of thing um where we did see the most significant dips in student performance was at the sixth grade level both in English language arts and in math and one of the things that and it's an excuse I'm so far beyond even like I don't even like to say it but there's a bit of reasoning to it and it's I'm just gonna say it's the rolling covet effect and the reason I want to say it's the rolling covet effect is I'll put it to you in the simplest terms whatsoever when um let's say a kid does kindergarten and they don't make all of the kindergarten expectations say they make 90 or 95 of them so they're going into first grade Maybe few weeks in learning behind let's say in first grade they do the same thing maybe they make accomplish 85 percent of the goals or 90 percent of the goals now they're leaving first grade and entering second grade even further behind it's The Compound Effect and so what happens is that rolling effect of learning loss is something that we're seeing and we we saw the hardest at the middle level because some of the most crucial learning for a kid to be successful in the Middle grades happens in grades three four and five and so as those kids have been rolling into middle school and we saw it through grades six seven and eight all across the board last year they had had massive gaps in their learning during grades three four and five like K2 you're learning a lot about like the basic building blocks right how to read basic computation number sense learning that you know this symbol means three which is this which is a word which is represents three items but when you third grade multiplication and division fourth grade longer and double triple digit division fifth grade applied skills so when you start seeing that rolling and compounded effect what you're seeing that's exactly what you saw at the middle school because in middle school you're supposed to take all that stuff that you learn in grades three four and five and now apply it to much more difficult and challenging work and so it wasn't a surprise to me that that's where we really saw the dip so that's what we're seeing at that level and then when you look at the science table results we don't have Arizona data but I would tell you when you look at um at our science results overall we're fairly consistently um I look especially at the red column because the red column tells me which kids aren't getting it at all like they're it's just like they're just not getting it but when you look at it from the biology level we're fairly consistent we're where we've been in the past when you look at at the eighth grade level the learning loss is there if you compare 22 and 23 to the pride to 18 and 19 and then because it rolled to fifth grade some of the data isn't as reliable as when it was just a fourth grade test but we definitely saw that dip now one of the things that I wanted to remind you of science wise remember we approved brand new science curriculum in the spring all of the curriculum materials were on site all the kits were on site and then tonight you approve stipends for three people to manage all of our science materials for all the labs at our campuses and and I've received email from teachers who are using the materials and they're like we just want to let you know we're using it the kids are super excited we cannot believe how much learning explosion and growth explosions have had where to use with science experiments but like how much growth we're experiencing in science because the kids and the teachers are excited with the materials is the new materials for um Ka well all the way KH oh super right yeah and maybe child is excited about learning and having fun learning yeah hard to learn and so our and sort of the teachers yeah because it's fun too because they finally feel like they have things to do their job so when we look at the ACT results for spring I did want to point out to you that we are as always we are sitting extremely close to the state's composite averages so we're sitting very very close so when you look at those um for that you you really did that those those ideas and those results so and why we did not have 2023 results until after we had prepared the report so we're still sitting pretty close so ninth grade is the Aspire test which is like pre-act test and so it um this is a state mandated test for ninth grade and it gives as an act is the state test for 11th grade so it does give us some predictability but I also wanted to remind you that Horizons is a test that we do at the high school for our Benchmark testing which is based on act style questions so students become comfortable and familiar with the testing format so we're consistently using that at the high school so I expect that our test results this year are going to show a bump just because kids are more familiar even with the format so all that to say now it's time for us to hear from the buildings unless you guys have questions okie dokie do you want to play your phone for us again sure let's see if I can do that twice [Music] so I get to start off with having all this data we are not a testable school with all that State Testing but we play a part of it because we're I mean we're unified we're foundational school where we work into it so moving on we're gonna flip over what we have oh do I click let's see oh we're gonna Advance it for you oh Lawrence I thought I got that again or not you can make it go away well your question oh there we go I don't know if I did it um so kindergarten we assess in all three areas and our real focus is Ela and math but in kindergarten and you guys have this up there 85 of our students this is our end of the year goal so that's where we're headed we have our data and you guys have the data in there also our scores but what we want at the end is 85 of our students and this is all students we don't exclude anybody so it doesn't matter if they're in special ed or not will be able to know and apply Benchmark phonological awareness skills and decoding work so that's their attack skills how they sound them out how they do all of their it's all embedded in there um for first grade 85 of our students will be able to know and apply Benchmark phonics and word analysis skills in decoding word reading with accuracy and fluency so we're just progressing forward now they're using what they have and again um and then in second grade eighty percent of our students will be able to read read with accuracy and fluency which according to our scores tells us 128 words per minute to support comprehension so that we can they are using it and they're not sounding it out if they're not at the phonics or the um where they're sounding out every sound now they can actually apply it and use it to gain comprehension from what they're reading at their level with a reading at 128 words per minute so we want them to be able to do it and be successful um those for math we did 85 of our students will be able to recognize and represent this is kindergarten again 0 to 20 that not just that they know the numbers that they can actually if I say hand at me five items they can count five so it's that one-to-one correspondence but they really understand those numbers in first grade we're adding and subtracting within 10 fluently um 50 Edition and 50 subtraction math facts in second grade eighty percent can accurately add subtract 50 Edition or subtraction problems within 20.
so I estimate that we'll lose 150 between now and the spring just so that we're conservative from a revenue standpoint and then we usually pick up some students in CVP during the course of the year or two and so the estimate there is that we would have 350 in the spring and then and next fall I estimate that we will be flat from this fall to next fall from an enrollment standpoint so then those are the revenue assumptions on the education fund the expenditure assumptions are that we would have 11.5 11 and a half FTE more in certified teachers than what we had last year and that is where we are right now today but this is interesting because some of these things were not in our control particularly that first one so the state used to operate a separate grant that was separate from all other state Support called the non-english speaking Grant and it had pretty much no parameters on it you could spend it just like you spent you spend from your education fund you could spend on supplies or people salaries and benefits this last legislative session the legislature said you know what why do we continue to do that separately let's just make it part of the education fund and so starting this school year when this nesp grant that we have that runs I think through the end of September right now when that runs out all of the teachers and staff that were on the nesp grant are now part of the education fund and so for that reason actually either at the next board meeting or the one after that I will have an additional appropriation for you to approve for the expenditures that we did not expect when we passed this budget last year it's about six hundred thousand dollars per year so in this this year it would not be nearly that much because all we have is basically the second half of September through December for the the staff it's and it's 100 staff three certified folks and uh about 10 classified staff teachers assistants interpreters and so on the other additions as we we talked about um extensively during the course of this year there were six additional certified staff added for the high school team structures all academic coaches and one counselor so one out of a counselor and five additional academic coaches and then we also added some C4 positions due to enrollment increases we budgeted for no additional non-certified or classified staff positions but that's pretty fluid considering the number that we have edition of four administrators as discussed earlier this year for the high school team structure that are in place now so it's an increase of uh just under four million dollars in salaries we made an assumption of Health premium increase of two percent in the budget and I mentioned that Supply budget increase of eight percent and then the the last part there is another thing that was outside of our control so um there is a 250 000 built into the expenditure side of the education fund for curricular material fees these are the fees that were collected that aren't textbook fees and so if you were in a biology course and you paid your the family paid will say eleven dollars for the consumables for that course that did not go into the textbook fund it had to be paid for from somewhere some somewhere else we collected those fees from families and then purchased the materials for those courses as the legislature passed a ban on schools billing for curricular materials this year they somewhat funded the textbook portion of the um the money that it was needed for those curriculum materials but did not in our case fund any of the course fees and the average of over the last three years of those course fees was about two hundred fifty thousand dollars and so that's budgeted in the um in the education fund which is the appropriate fund to budget where to spend it from I'll get into where that money's coming from later on in the budget so here's a line by line by category for the education fund budget the largest portion of of our budget State support up seven percent from a revenue standpoint um also on the revenues there the other revenues uh reflect um a pretty big increase in interest earned over what we budgeted for from last year I don't expect it to go up a lot from what we actually will experience in 2023 but when we advertise we have advertised pretty low number for interest earned and then an additional 250 000 to cover the curricular materials that I mentioned earlier that are a transfer in to the education fund budget so from a salary uh standpoint salary increases reflect the new positions um that and increases for this school year as well as next school year because we'll hey basically the uh the first um 17 pays of next school year on this contract for teachers and staff and then the following the the last nine the first nine of next year's contract are on this calendar year budget again bridging noses somewhat difficult to wrap your head around when we operate on a calendar year from a budget standpoint but a school year for from every other standpoint um the decrease in the professional service line that you can see there is pretty it's a large percentage decrease but it's only uh only about fifty thousand dollars there so not a huge amount of money but it is a significant decrease mainly that's for the CVP platform they adopted a new platform you actually approved that earlier I think this calendar year and it also eliminated the K-5 portion of that since we did didn't offer CVP in grades K through five this year so that was a savings there on that budget line item I mentioned the increase in the supply line there being pretty significant between the eight percent increase due to inflation as well as the two hundred fifty thousand dollars for curriculum materials you see that increase reflected reflected there the increase in the transfers to Ops I dug into this one a lot the transfers to operations sorry for the abbreviations without thinking I sometimes revert back to those transfers to operations we'll get into the detail of those later but it's almost entirely due to the fact that we passed significant increase for classified staff you know a good year and a half two years ago and just continue to fill positions at a greater rate than we ever have before and so being fully staffed and paying the salaries and benefits related to that has really been a positive thing for for operations Department bus drivers custodians technology staff so forth I do like to point out what percentage the salaries and benefits make up of the education fund budget it's right at 95 percent so 95 percent of the education fund budget goes to salaries and benefits um and the education fund is restricted to those employees that work with students in the schools in the classrooms so that's excludes central office administration even technology that's related to Corporation level activities that are excluded from this and those are reflecting the operations fund so this is the last slide on the education fund budget happy to answer any questions you have about that portion of the budget at this time I've got a couple Dr Phil one of my questions goes back to the estimated enrollment slide and forgive me if I I thought one of the changes in the law this year you mentioned early graduates and I and maybe this was just kicked around and I slept through it and I apologize if I did but I thought as graduates as we lost them the first semester there was a change in the law so as to not be penalized for kids graduating early and they could still be counted second semester yes we're getting the Weeds now I'll just no it's a good thing it's a good thing so I mentioned one of the other the other lines of the part the education Revenue there's the number of students times the number of kids are the state tuition that's the biggest portion and then there are four other lines in there one of them is the honors Grant or now it's called academic performance Grant I believe and the the Department of Education is still working out the details of how that's all going to work but essentially a student earns a specific amount of money for one of a long list of items that they can achieve um they could they earn back to the corporation money a different amount of money depending on what they what they do from this long list that can be everything from earning dual credit to graduating with an Associates to graduating early at December and to graduating with a common core 30 Indiana Common Core 30 certificate and there are probably a couple of more but they can only earn one of those dollar amounts and we all assume that that will be the greatest dollar amount on that list I believe early graduate earns three thousand dollars but I could be wrong I don't have the I don't remember all the list of the details there but that will come on a different line item as part of the revenues and from a revenue standpoint I only budgeted for that honors Grant the same amount that we earned last year because there's no past performance for me to go back and say okay if we Project based on this new set of honors Grant dollar amounts we can project what we're going to do this year the state's estimates had us a little bit higher but really nobody knows how it's going to work at this point so I kept that line item flat from last year's budget but it is it is good to acknowledge that the state did say we understand that you're losing funds for students that graduate early when you're doing your job and getting these kids across the finish line and they may be going to college early or going into the workforce or going into the service and you're being punished because you you aren't going to eliminate any teaching positions for the second semester when those students graduate early so they did make up for it in this new model but we just don't have a good good picture of how much that's going to be one question I had was in the transfer to operations you mentioned it is it gonna be touched on in the next slide that am I getting ahead of you yeah there's a slide of detail about okay so this is the transfers between operations and education detail slide and essentially takes the money that moves moves from the expenditures that would normally have been in operations before would have been funded from the education fund so all of that money moves that was almost 13 million dollars in this next year and it's utilities and insurance property and liability insurance was another large increase for this year as the natural disaster just continue to hammer our property and liability insurance and everyone else's across the industry but anyway all of those expenditures move to the operations fund and then coming back the other directions any technology that's related to the classroom and the technology employee software hardware and so on so forth that comes back the net difference between that is that 8.6 just under 8.6 million which is just over nine percent of the education fund budget we're limited by law to transfer no more than 15 percent we have yet to ever hit the 10 Mark in our budgets for the five or six years that that law has been in place and you mentioned bus drivers and I see school resource officers weren't those also qualified under the operating referendum as well for those two categories that were acceptable there or is this just an addition to what's already in that referendum fund so the operating referendum fund pays for sros up to a certain amount the amount we have budgeted and then everything else comes over the operations fine represents about half of what we spend and then bus drivers we pay an additional two dollars per hour out of the operating referendum fund so the rest of their salaries all come from the operations fund thank you you're welcome um the drop in enrollment projected rough enrollment I think was 150 students can you translate that real quick just dollars funding formula of thirty five hundred who's got it Logan's got out his his about 3 500 times 150.
for real proficiency and growth we have a 7 out of 10 for acceleration and Readiness we have a 10 out of 10. we have thought of 75.91 points plus we have two bonus points so that adds up to 77.91 and the leather grade is better what are the bonus points for special education inclusion that's only what we qualified for how does it compare with the last year's data so in proficiency we have 7.68 last year now it is 8.91 growth from 38.2 to 50. yeah proficiency and growth is seven points acceleration and readiness let us take the same total points last year 62.88 plus two bonus points 64.88 compared to this year's total of 77.91 so close to 13 points and this is all for what testing this is kindergarten through eighth grade so the proficiency we are talking about is aasa so this is the English and math test for students in grades three to each one was it done April and April yes and some of the calculations will involve like a SLR test for email proficiency that is English patterns taking the asset address and science testers and qualifies for Morris points and so on additional criteria for proficiency the points came this way like third grade 27.86 and math 25.88 so the Proficiency in Ela and math combined and the person percentage of all professions is 29.7 converting that into out of 30 points we get 8.91 out of 30.
so that's the the factor goes up to 20 at that level so we have we're doing this mad minutes every day we're really killing and Drilling and we moved that a little bit higher so we could help third or support third grade going into third grade that they will be able to do it fluently and they're not thinking about it anymore fluency piece really kicks in so we have we have assigned minutes to ours state standard says that they can do it fluently but they don't give us a time frame so we kind of broke it down and have a time frame with that and how to get them to get them where we want them to be to be successful Amanda can I ask you a quick question second grade reading because that mean the child can see a book and read what he's seeing by reading out loud um yes the way we test it is literally read the words uh for the page absolutely that's great yeah thank you um at their level of course at the second grade level I can't give them well we can do kindergarten if you want I don't know I just read your second grade I just want to make sure I understood uh what your expectation was and all of these goals are for Kinder or for students who have been in attendance at least half of the school year we do get a I mean as you know we get a flex of kids that are constantly a revolving door if they have left us and come back we still count those as ours for the most part I'll be honest but the kids that come to us in April and May it's hard to get them where we want them to be at that point they're ready to roll but some or but I don't hold the teachers accountable for that we still push through a week we invest in them but they're not in our number first questions on the goals that we've set so how did you come about these goals no on the next page look at this so we took our data from the beginning of the year and we looked at where they test out and we are using a new program this year so our numbers are a little bit wonky this year we moved to a mirror which is an AI learning Avatar who does one-to-one correspondence but it's also a testing platform so what what we do is the kids read into the computer they have a screen when we do our testing we want the teacher sits with them and so it's one to one and the teacher is doing it but they read it to the computer it yeah there's all the information they're tested in all five area or six areas actually and then they give us a cut score for them and they call it their arm score which is a mirrors Mastery reading score so this is all when we take that 15 of our 2100 21 kiddos 15 of our kids are in the red according to what Amira says at this point um 87 are approaching the Benchmark and that's again the end of the year benchmarks so our kindergartners are doing pretty well right now we're pretty excited and 30 are at Benchmark does that mean we let them stay there no we keep pushing forward and we keep moving it um up but those are our numbers for kindergarten so that's where we took that data that we had and built off um actual these actual scores so we have first grade in there and then second grade is all in there and those are our students that we have tested now since we've done the initial testing these are beginning of the year testing we've had kids move in we've also had kids leave so the numbers are already a little bit wonky in there but for the most part it's pretty true usually we see a little bit higher at Benchmark but our cut scores are much higher in a mirror than what we were using in the original platform that's okay we're taking the challenge we're ready for it and then any questions on those before I flip to the map the math is scary math is scary but this is banked off of we increase we put time factors in there so when I throw that time in there everything goes up this is end of the year where I want them to be so I'm okay with the red right now because we're going to push them forward so you know I understand you just started the year but they're end of the year goal so it shows you your challenge is in this District as usual math and that's um our kids are able to do the adding and subtracting putting that time Factor so it's that fluency piece that they're just rapid fire or they can get them out it's a challenge and they're little and they're not ready for it yet and we know that but by the end of the year our goal is to have on there so questions on that all right so what are we gonna do all of our decisions are targeted off of data we have been focused our math and we have enhanced focus on our math instruction knowing that we want to really work on that we've done our mirror benchmark assessments we progress monitor every two weeks on our targeted skills so we're collecting data all the time we have esgi assessments which is a kindergarten platform that we use it's an educational software platform to collect data on that um all of our kindergarten assessment is done one to one so a teacher has to sit with them or we also train some parents who are regulars in there that can test our kiddos um monthly data meetings with in-depth data analysis so we're constantly looking at the data where our kids at why aren't they moving and we talk as a team as a grade level team what we can do making sure we're making meeting their needs we have quarterly assessments monitoring these exact goals that we're working on and then we have weekly and bi-weekly grade level meetings that we can talk about and discuss concerns or worries or successes we also get to celebrate a lot of successes in those so professional development instructional coach meets regularly with teachers we have wonders and Wonder Works reading for ELA we have on-site reading interventions intervention strategies by a reading endorsed by all reading endorsed teachers and that's we have pushing services and pull out Services we have a daily co-teaching with our sped teacher that's something new this year we're actually doing more pushing Services into the classroom which has been huge this year um Kagan active engagement strategies which all of our teachers are kagenaders we could call them and they're constantly and that's just getting the kids up and engaged in it not just paper and pencil so they're actually utilizing it and um moving around and not just sitting there we have our curriculum pacing guide with targeted skills we call our each grade level has their grade level Bible that is very targeted to what they need to what the goals are what assessments we're giving where they need to be it's a pacing guide what's a scope and sequence and we have daily phonological drills in all classrooms we use hegarty which is a chronological based program that isn't an enhancement to our curriculum that every teacher does the same thing and it's a constant kill and drill with them so that is some of the stuff that we're using in the classrooms [Music] and then we have our school-wide interventions which core instruction with active engagement school-wide we do daily instruction with our sped co-teachers daily Title One pull push in and pull out and what I mean by pushing is we go into the classroom a staff member goes into the classroom and then we pull out to do more targeted intervention where they come and just meet um in the title one room we have a dyslexic interventionist we have daily El services this year provided by a certified teacher which is super exciting daily cup time intervention that is our focus on our Target skills that we do every day for 40 minutes 45 minutes everybody breaks down and does something we have our mirror reading character education with the certified counselor our monthly positive action focus and assemblies and we are starting Friday school and after school tutoring tutoring and we also have that's cut off our parent engagement we have two big parent engagement nights which is our ABC Bonanza and our Games Galore where we work with parents the kids come in and play games and we provide parents with things to work on at home with the kiddos that are games lots of fun Ela stuff questions you have for me and territorial [Music] Randy I think you're doing an awesome job trying to raise the kids methods and the reading skills from the very beginning because there are children that really struggle with this and just taking the time to work one-on-one with them as thank you we have a we have an amazing staff that is dedicated to our kiddos itself I'm very blessed to get to work with the staff I get to work with it is dedicated for these little ones that are with us thank you so I have a question so just to start maybe instead of killing and drilling you start with drilling first right we have fun okay we don't drill we don't kill any one some of them might think it's a dreaded thing but we have fun with it it's a game seriously um these interventions um do those change from year to year do you think have they been is this a uh We've added to so our daily push in with the co-ed teacher we've never had a sped co-ed teacher who actually go in and goes into the classroom and co-teaches with the Jeanette teacher and so some of those kids aren't they're not getting pulled out of any Core Curriculum the teacher actually goes in she's another teacher in the room and the kids filter through her which actually gives the kids all of the kids even if they're not identified special ed they get extra time with another interventionist in the in the room so that's been fun um the El teacher we've had a para doing that previously this year we have a certified teacher doing that the Amira reading is brand new with us so with those are some of the new ones that we've had in our dyslexic interventionist she is um fully certified PD and we have all of our staff is not all we have 10 staff members getting letters trained right now which is another um foundational career yeah learning for mainly Ela but our one of our instructional coach actually is getting certified so she can be an in-house letters facilitator and trained all staff and we don't have to send people out for training so that is another one that's happening right now so we keep the ones that are working and we massage and move on with the others thank you we appreciate it did that answer yeah so do you have any opinion as to why we seem to have uh district-wide more issues with imprficiency in math [Music] no at my level it's pretty much the same where we're at at this level at the level I have I mean they're all learning their numbers they're learning to add and subtract we haven't ever targeted that that they have to get it done in a specific amount of time so that's that's the new thing for us is will that help out our scores if it's a little bit more fluent they're not having to think about it anymore so just to let you know it's not just the school district it's basically across the country so it's just you know and we have to make some changes for our children to learn so I I agree with you Brandy you know what you're doing is awesome so we're gonna see we're gonna play with it and keep moving forward if this doesn't work we'll try something different but the data right now teachers are excited they know they have their work cut out for them for sure but they're under the challenge thank you all right Dr Moody okay I won't even try the click it works it worked yeah um Madam president members of the board Ms Daniels esteemed to Miss Dixon um uh thanks for your time um and I think I might be able to answer or at least espouse some concept um towards Mr fogle's Question uh obviously Del Rio we're a testable School um for better for worse we're a testable School the aasa or whatever Incarnation or name it will take next year as as tends to be the the way we go but obviously we you've seen these numbers um Ela you can fast forward thanks sir and there's our math scores we're particularly lagging at the fifth grade level let's move beyond that because I don't like looking at it um so um with that said I'm going to break this down into three sections number one what are our overall goals number two how are we going to test those goals and number three what are we doing to get there uh first off our Universal goal obviously is to meet the state standard but that's a floating Target and that's not necessarily something we know what we're looking for and I've always been um partial to the old proverbial notion that my grandfather beat into me how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time and so our one byte is we're looking obviously on an individual goal for every kid our goal at Del Rio is to learn to learn and that is to say we take the kid wherever they are whether they're coming in halfway through the year full year um and and we got a kid two weeks before the end of the school year last year wherever they show up with us we're going to take them and and Advance them obviously in ela and Matt those are our two biggest Notions universally I'd like to see us have a five percent bump on our overall test scores obviously at the ELA level that would put us well above the these state standards and at the math level we'd still be below um below the state average if the state averages continue to be where they are though we're going to focus our attention on math that is a minimal goal and looking at the third fourth and fifth grade State tests as well as I'll mention some of these here in just a moment as well as some in-house assessments and and what we do at Del Rio looking at um what we've Fallen at specifically our biggest issue is number one operations that is to say doing the work the actual calculations and on longer term and larger problems be they were problems or multi-digit problems our biggest issue is just they didn't do the multiplication well they didn't do the division well and if they slowed down and took some time to do that that's operations um at the third grade level we're having problems with fractions um five-thirds of them are having a problem with fractions thanks I appreciate that and um and then at the fourth and fifth grade level it's a measurement whether it be specifically using rulers um or devices for the measurement or or measurement of kilometers to miles and things of that notion and so we're focusing our attention especially um later in the year that is to say February and March when we have multiplication tables under our belt when we have some experiential learning on the computers under our belt we're focusing our attention there so that when they do get to the state test they have a little bit of a a running start into it and so that's our that's our overall and our individual goals there you go there you go okay um how are we measuring that well there's a variety of ways we're we're doing this obviously um I'll start at the bottom and work our way back just as a side note in the background of this um I was told many many years ago never put backgrounds on slides so I always do um this is our new on-site armed security guard officer gronick playing football in the afternoon with a few kids while we're waiting for the buses just as uh a side note he's got a pretty good arm in comparison to Fourth Graders so um we're working our at the bottom and work our way back obviously the state assessment that's our that's our Our Big Goal um but then looking at both Ela and math AR scores are our most consistent gold AR is Accelerated Reader then that is how we measure um proficiency of students in the books they're reading so Mr Antonio referred to okay what are they reading we're measuring their reading levels on a consistent and continuing basis and then as they read books in those levels they're testing for competency and understanding of those books and then the more they read the higher their level goes and they set though they set goals both personally and we do it programmatically so that they can achieve those goals and progress through um so you know we have fifth graders right now reading at a ninth and 10th grade level and so that's a and we have one third grader who's reading a seventh grade level so um so we're continuously measuring their AR scores uh but then map and and Ela we um we look at um we there's some contention on our campus as to what to call them but collectively we call them daps and and um that's District assessment programs I like draps because it's Del Rio assessment programs but I'm the only one so um um we are measuring a variety of things at math we're using my math uh we're using uh the assessments uh within the curriculum once a quarter we're using I Steep and we're using classroom and they have to have at least four of those assessments per quarter at which we're looking at at grade level meetings for ELA we're using ice deep program again we're using wonders we're using star reading and again um just as as a notion if you don't know this kids universally dread this but then when we get to the state assessment they universally go wow that was great every quarter we have a day-long writing assessment where they spend the entire day mapping out the topic the concept doing the Reading Writing a rough draft and typing out their answer so that when they get to the state assessment that's what they're supposed to do and they have a day to do it we give them the same parameters and we use different texts every quarter so it's informational or or whatever scientific whatever it may be and so we're um I I say all that to say this we're not basing it just on state assessments though that's what the public sees obviously but that's not all we're using collectively as teachers we're meeting as a third grade level a fourth grade level a fifth grade level what's working what's not working oh look at the striving that they're doing here let's add this in let's progress faster let's progress slower so that we can still meet the goals and obviously Curriculum maps are part of that so okay they're progressing faster they're progressing slower what are we going to do to kind of help them along thank you um first off I've put those on every email to my entire staff there in the bottom left Semper Gumby always flexible um they'll have my staff doesn't know who Gumby is yeah um but um a lot of this is focused on what we're doing collectively academically some of this is focused on obviously absenteeism is an issue we want them to come to school I want a kid who's absent to come back the next day and go man I really missed being here I want a kid to wake up in the morning and go I want to go to school and and that's something we work really hard on so we have a variety of things a tutoring and I just think collectively and this is the way I speak on campus so it's the way I'm going to speak here um when I think tutoring I think anything after school um that includes math tutoring by their math teacher or at grade level that includes Ela and writing and reading tutoring um at their grade level by their teachers or teachers at their grade level it includes clubs that include student council um we're going to be starting a uh we have a gardening club that's literally meeting right this very second we have a chess club that's starting tomorrow that I'm looking forward to getting beat by fourth graders um you know we have uh yearbook and student council and ukulele and quilting and all these things that there's actually a waiting list for our quilting club which I really enjoy um and so we we have all these things going on that make kids want to be in school so they can stay longer at school as Bradley mentioned we have Friday school it's actually starting this Friday we have 60 of our kids who are going to be in that and if we need to expand it we need to expand it we have Friday school starting this Friday um we're using computers universally and ubiquitously in classes or any number of things a um getting into the curriculum and B obviously practicing those skills in computer class and in regular class that they're going to need to be doing at um at aasa testing time and there's been a variety of studies that have come out from any number of different places um I just jotted down two here from the world bank and then um from Brown University are the two most recent ones that show you can be well proficient at grade level and this is a study across the United States um you can be well proficient at grade level for Math and or science some states test that more universally than we do and fail the test because you have no idea how to approach it on the computer because you didn't know how to scroll because you didn't know to click and so we're teaching those skills specifically obviously we're focusing on operational computation in mathematics which is something that we're doing um I'm also this this is like that brings me the biggest smile every day I went in and was stretching with our PE class this morning and they laughed me when I tried to do jumping jacks it is what it is um but there's a variety of studies as well the most recent from Naperville Illinois and the CDC who show that there's a 14 to 23 percent increase in academic performance for schools that have PE and and I wish we had it every day but um we we've reinstituted PE kids are loving it they want to come to school for PE we're having a variety of contests between classes to for their not necessarily they're running the fastest but that they're they're participating the most um so we're hoping obviously and we'll never I think be able to fully say our test Rising our test scores Rising is because of PE but I certainly think it's going to be part of it um we're also introducing and and Ms Cox mentioned this as well we have a fully certified full-time um El teacher and aide at Del Rio and there's a variety of interventions and in fact we've even added a class for El kids at the end of the day that we're pretty excited about and I'll talk at subsequent board meetings about um but it's for kids who show up on our campus who speak literally no English um and at the end of the day we're having a just a conversational day to kind of teach them to be social and be part of the the community and maybe they won't pass the aasa but they'll be they'll be progressing and learning to learn and and be part of our community and Kids come out of that class giggling every day it's on my way to the buses in the afternoon and it's actually kind of a cool thing to see them come out excited um there's any number of different things Title One grade level meetings things I've mentioned um we celebrate every month with popsicles those kids that have met math and AR goals we're having kid you know teachers co-teach and we have any number of things I'd like to point out that this is all occurring on our campus in the midst of our front office being closed because our parking lot renovation the HVAC the the fire watch the fire panels I just wrote down a few of them um weatherizing the gas lines though that actually got done with one day it's it's a pretty big deal um but but kids are are jumping over things and and just they're they're happy to be at school it's good to see Smiles on their faces and so far um we we've noted growth of and let me just look at my notes Here if we're just looking at our internal data right now um 90 of third graders has grown Ela um 92 percent of fourth graders 92 percent of fifth graders have all grown Ela and for math um that is to say just um internal math scores we haven't done our quarter assessments yet um we've got 81 percent at third grade we've got 83 at fourth grade and 87 at fifth grade and so those are just our internal trackings tracking Apples to Apples so that's a lot I know we're all you know standing up here tonight but if there's any questions I can quick questions the Friday is cool is that voluntary or the teacher will tell the kid you were coming to Friday school right so Friday school is for students who are kind of on the bubble and need just a little bit of assistance to kind of make it to that next level they are invited by teachers to um be part of it and then it's voluntary as to whether the we provide transportation we provide breakfast we provide lunches from eight to twelve um but as voluntary as to whether or not the the parents want them to come parents can opt out I was a little worried about that because sometimes the kids who need the most are the kids who want it the least and uh yeah um and that's true um but kids are kids are jazzed about Friday School actually um we we um 60 our capacity is 60 right now and um of all 60 we asked 62 kids to come and 60 of them were like yep coming awesome great and and we have kids asking their teachers can I get a Friday school packet that's great thank you yep I just I just have a quick comment um so I understand that last week you guys had your um election for your student council president yes we do so my third grader this is his first time ever really dealing with student council and he came home and he was so excited because he's voting for this kid because he said he's gonna get an hour-long recess I couldn't shoot him down and let him know that that's not how it works but it was really hysterical that he had it so he's like okay that's fine yeah if he didn't win it's funny there was a lot of Tears on Thursday when we announced today [Music] yes so my question is going to be the same for every building leader that's here and that is uh um what's your theory around why we seem to have a persistent problem with uh Proficiency in math learning and if I heard what you said I think your answer is uh gave me a few ideas that you've already pondered one of them is that PE it's going to make a difference one of them is that they'll become more familiar with the actual tool at uh assessment time and I think those are great and the other one was and lots of students who essentially don't know any English and uh so so they're not English speakers at this point in time so if we attack you know those things and one by it at a time one bite at a time and one building at a time this might help yeah absolutely and I think I think another large part of it Ms Daniels spoke to it earlier is kids being in school it's hard for us to to test and I don't have the numbers literally right here in front of me but in the 30s for for Del Rio it's it's hard to test them on things that they're not there to learn and that's a that's kind of a difficult pill to swallow um so we're doing everything we can to to get them there okay yeah great thanks thank you anything else thank you thank you all right Miss McGill I'm here at HMS I am hello okay let me go the principal at Heritage Middle School I would like to say my daughter came home from Garden Club with a plant this big and a huge smile on her face um uh ditto and can I sit down no Okay so I had the remote I promise it works um so I'm at the middle school which had atrocious numbers which as you guys know you just hired me that was I don't want to say tears but a little bit but okay so the goals that we have so the Galileo Benchmark testing that's how we we test them out the goal is going to be 80 for um each grade level for sixth seventh and eighth grade that they will be proficient or higher as you guys can see on the picture right there in the green this is our pre-test scores so similar to what Brandi did is pre-test we can see the opportunity for growth positively important and the remote does work thank you and you can see a little bit better for the ELA our same same type of goal I'm just picking up what I was given and seeing what we can do here so it's similar to like this before so the goal is for students to have attended HMS for the whole Academic Year 80 their score proficient or higher I think this is a very attainable goal so my appreciation is a little shorter than Dr Moody so uh how do we know where to focus essential standards have been identifying and goals have been developed by each content team based on the beginning of the year benchmarks and these benchmarks with the Galileo benchmarks a professional development that I did have did hold we went through in each content area since went through this and we identified standards and where they needed to grow how will we know students learn the material the utilization of the assessments from the curriculum pertaining to those essential standards weekly formative assessments um to place in student and bi-weekly reteach extension class so we call that our interview of children and it's called the cat class uh it's amazing that the teachers do it's like a logistical nightmare but every two weeks they go in and moving things around and the students if they're weak in that area they're put in a specific remediation type of class and they're taught maybe that standard that they dip down in over those two weeks so we're catching them faster it's not the end of the quarter oh no what do we do it's catching them every two weeks which is really great the kids who are achieving already they have I want to say extension classes that are a little bit more fun but they still have the undertone of ela and math summative assessments are done three times per year in August November and March we do the star reading school-wide quarterly writing assessments Galileo benchmarks the digital and the eyes implemented this digital individual student data trackers to assess progress toward Mastery so we will be rolling out the digital version be rolling out quarter two last year uh from what I saw the problem was papers were lost middle so there's three of things blah blah so we will waiting that why are we waiting till second quarter just because there's a little bit of a computer are coming else just sit with that uh attend school on a regular basis in partnership with juvenile probation they touched on that so I've already met met with them we've already started this process we're reaching out they are driving to kids home them up and bringing them if that's something that needs to be done and of course there's this state assessment in the spring to achieve this goal the essential standards are identified in each contact area that's broken down a specific learning targets tied to the skills and it's been mapped up for each year as I mentioned earlier there's the cougar academic time that's the daily retouch classes based on formative assessment I'm going to be trying to start the cougar Academy for fright School individual tutoring tutoring the teachers are offering that before school um during during lunch time or after school we progress monitoring on the essential standards as you right there um we do data walk results based on leadership that'll be something I'm implementing a little bit more um data is as a teacher you have to come in and explain your data to me as we go a little bit more in that Weekly professional Learning Community meetings to review student data that is a big one that is on Wednesday There's No IEPs that day I've already told the staff and they're very rep they're very they love it it's if you need to bring your children sit there fine but don't be scheduling your appointments and stuff that day you need to be participating in that and they are and when I walk around and even talking to the academic coach we're seeing a lot of um PLC thing professional development on culture building and data and data analysis with solution tree that is coming up you guys approved a September 22nd PD and that we're gonna be working on that I was just talking to solution Tree on Friday about implementing more of that smaller advisory classes to assist with students support and goal setting that's already in place right now and we're doing quarterly celebrations in weekly character education with the certified accounts what is an advisory class okay sorry homeroom the easiest way to put that would be it's like a home room but I'm going to call it advisory because we're building in uh like in two weeks we have an entire a week of character and Community Building or they set um individ they build relationships with those students be like where are you at how do we help your grades and boost that themes during the year during this time period right and I've actually I was just talking miss Ann knows about this I wanted to start implement this just came to mind before after I made the slideshow um building in into that advisory period a little bit of the CTE a little bit of learning about different careers and stuff so they know what they're going to be getting more in high school but also you guys may be familiar something like 85 percent of women or girls have decided by the end of eighth grade if they're going to be in a stem field or not so why not start introducing them into those things and just that during that time no thanks that's my Anthony oh I guess I have your question I mean so what do you think any theories on persistent math prop issues alerting math yeah about that since July when I went so attend Ed them to want to come to school but if their parents don't want them become more is unable to come that's something different but um I would just like to say Dental on what those what they said but I really feel attendance is huge I'm coming from a background where um though Across the Nation we do see the large dip I I wasn't you know the probation officer wasn't needed as much so I do see the big difference being school to learn it that's my thing I'm new at this role so please ask me in a couple years I appreciate that so I have a suggestion there maybe um take away the attendance issues that seem to be a postcovid yes phenomena um these issues of having problems becoming proficient at math I've always been there so what do we do yeah I mean as a parent I'm over there like having my kids you know supplementing at home with the multiplication right a woman there are those engaging those engaging apps that get her on you know giving the quick recall I mean there's just those little those little things that I guess the teachers do during the especially during that cat time I would love to have you guys come look at a cat time I think it's amazing it's that really like intense and they're smaller classes and that times they can put for that but getting them to want to come to school wanting them to be excited to be there participate in the sports trying to build the clubs up a little bit but anything else thank you we appreciate it all right thank you all right Miss Crawford let's hear from the high school hello you save the best for last Madam president members of the board thank you um so a lot of this kind of been similar to Caitlyn is that I came in and had talked to Heidi a lot and my team to figure out okay where are we at where do we want to be and how do we get there um I kind of want to start with your question first but I'll wait to the very end Mr Bubble um we do use a system it's called Horizons it tests all it tests nine ten and eleventh graders only um on act based questions so in math English science and reading and so when we go over some of those results you'll see like big picture by grade level then I had my departments look at Horizon did a great thing this year where we could drill it down to the class so we worked with our it team and we were able to upload kids by class so that we could start looking at data at the classroom level before it was only at grade level now we can actually do targeted uh interventions within the class because teachers know exactly what their kids scored and and it's not just this big flyover data set that they're looking at so the purpose of it is to help kids prepare so at the high school level ACT scores are kind of The Benchmark of proficiency in those areas and so kids take that test officially their junior year and they have to they have to take the ACT whether they pass it or not is is not the issue but it's a requirement for graduation a lot of schools right now don't use ACT scores a lot of colleges have moved away from it but it's still at least a way for us to assess the four core areas so we're still going to continue testing in that in those areas so I went backwards because 11th graders this is where we're at right now these kids um the their average score right now as a grade level is a 13.