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Not the education, not the teaching, not the other part of it, but the business of the district. And part of that business is an employer employee relationship. There's an employee issues, employee laws that we need to follow. We can't be making decisions or even considering or discussing anything based on rumor or speculation that might be out there. There's obviously a lot of that going on around there. Uh, everybody last night wanted full transparency on everything. We know what it's like to make decisions or to at least be accused of making decisions based on rumor. We just went through several months of lawsuits against the district and an individual committee member based on rumors. So when we're discussing things tonight, please keep that in mind. The other update I want to talk about is uh some budget guidance that was released. Uh the state desi released some budget guidance.
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And I'm thankful to continue to support future students of this town. and I don't want to see, you know, any major restrictions change that. I want to continue to support the students as I support it. Why I'm here to talk about my experiences. Thank you, De. Well said. Thank you. Anyone else like to speak for public comment in the audience? If not, then we'll close out public comment. Thank you for all those uh comments and those kind words about the uh supporting the budget. All right, so we'll move right into the agenda. We'll go right to uh chairman's uh corner. Um just a couple things for the board. I want to remind the board the town budget meeting is April 28th. Um and that would be a good time for us all to be together to support the budget. It'll be a time of questions with the public.
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And so it can create some difficulties what can lead to some just difficult process-wise um you know in in in some discussions there. Uh so it's it's something that we're still working on and we're working on trying to make it something that does work well uh going forward but it can create some difficulties for the the planners for instance because they want to include things like that but they can't require things like that and it can sometimes cause things to be held up slightly or not. Um that's one of the bigger ones. The other it's it's kind of mentioned in here, but again like we we do work on um you know different state and more broad coalitions on working to uh get the building codes um you know approved quickly um and you know trying to advocate for some of those different you know higher requirements that are in there.
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So we gave them millions of dollars for the next 10 years. And that's the example. I don't need to go over that. So now Clifton this year, this is our state aid. Although last year they said we were fully funded, our state aid increased. You want to know why our state aid increased? Because our number of special education students has increased a lot. Our multilanguage learner students have doubled in five years. That's not that's not an exaggeration. Our MLS have doubled in five years. So, we have extra students. You get more money for those students. So, we did get an increase in aid. Wasn't a gift. It was what the formula says we should have received. But the reality is even with an additional 5 million almost 6 million in state aid there are increases in the fixed costs that we have and I just want to point out two of them.
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I would say just in correlary to that is uh Like in the worst way it felt confirming to hear that number because we've been saying the number 16 million which is directly off of the DOE website taxpayer guide to education spending. Anyone can go on there and check it out. There's a couple dozen indicators and they break down spending in districts according to these indicators. So the first one is budgetary cost per pupil, which is kind of a macro indicator, and then it gets more micro as you work your way through. And you can see things like for a district that's fourth leanest statewide in the K8s, you can see where we're on the worst end of so many ratios within that those indicators, right? uh students to teacher, students to administrator, teachers to administrator, budgetary cost per pupil, classroom spending, dot dot dot, all the way down.
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Once again, congratulations to a special Olympics team for the outstanding achievements and thank you for um thank you to everyone involved for their dedication and commitment. Sincerely, Ruendas. Let's give him a big round of applause. [Applause] So, our first athlete we want to recognize is Jacob Walken. Our next athlete is Anazora. Our next athlete is Ethan Raone. Our next athlete is Elen Thomas. Next athlete is Laya Liz [Applause] Buckner, Anna Jim [Applause] Jones, Mary Hildo Valdez, [Applause] Eagle Bear [Applause] Toro, Alice [Applause] Lopez, Payton Payton Condi. [Applause] We also want to recognize our volunteers and coaches that have been so great, so helpful in training our athletes during this time. And that would be Mr. [Applause] Kenton, Mr. Kenny Wilson, and Mrs. Wood. Please join me and give him a big warm and hard applause for all of our amazing athletes here today and all of our volunteers.
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Um and then you can just see the special ed population overall in the state of Arizona is 14%, ours is 13%. Um and you can see the English language um population, ours is 5%. Um it's hard to see on this slide. Uh, I wish you could see it, but they talk our graduation rate is under that and our graduation rate is 82%. I just want to quickly explain it to you. It's very complicated. It's not simple at all. So, that number has to do with cohorts of students. And if we have a student, I'm going to give you an example. If we have a student that gets arrested and goes to the Apache County Jail, they are considered a dropout. Even though they're in jail and they're arrested and they can't physically attend school, if that jail does not have an education program and they don't withdraw him from our district, they are counted as a withdrawal.
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I just wanted to share that with you because what's been reported is that Gilbert Public School's average salary is $6,000 less than the average in our peer group. We just don't believe it. we just don't believe it. So, and so we believe that the data at this point in time is not clean. And so, I just wanted to share with you to just to be careful about how the uh classroom spending report is being used. And that really when it comes to average teacher salary, there's more validity in what all the school districts are reporting than in what the data is showing at at least at this point in time. another indicator of the importance of the how how clean the data is, how accurate the data is because you can draw erroneous conclusions if you're just taking a number. So, just wanted to share that.
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So that so we um I asked her do we have a policy and originally I was told we do have a policy but then when she looked further oh she being Dr. Yeah, not not to disrespect you. Um, when we look fur when she looked further, it was we did not have a policy. So, my I asked her to bring it up because we there are staff members who would like to bring their kids here and they do play on the sports and but the policy has to affect all kids which makes sense and and it's no problem. Um, so that's where the where the this came from. How does the funding differential between from other students like we have talked about before we came up with was if there's a spare student and the way it works is if there's a spare student who we have to who has a disability and they have to go outside that I guess we get a certain money from that which is different than um if we have a student that's housed in within our system and they are self-contained um is my understanding.
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I like it. Oh, yeah. A little more creative than mine would be like Scott or Yeah. You know, I'm not very creative. Yeah, I'm with you. So, anyway, right now we're we're trailing a little bit. get trying to get back control of the point. And we're watching Eli, who's playing Arisa, who's our tank character. We can absorb quite a bit of damage here. Norwell's all kind of bunched up right here. Not good. Not good. We got to get control here soon. Yeah, they're getting close to 100. Yep. So, what could they do, Scott? What could our team do to maybe even this out a little bit right now? Looks like they're we're just not able to get anyone off, which they're healers. The healers are kind of the weaker characters. Right now, we're doing a lot of attacking of the big guy right there, the tank.
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If you want to put that up, Joe. Um about specifically about regional school district budgets. Um if you can scroll down a little bit, Joe, keep going. Keep going. Right there. Right there. That last paragraph is kind of what I want to focus on. if you could highlight that starting with the clear language. All right. So, the clear language of the legislation, they're talking about mass legislation and how to create a district budget. Uh the clear language of the legislation gives the authority to consider and act on the approval of a regional school committee's adopted budget. So, that's what we've done. We've adopted a budget. So, we now have an adopted budget. Gives regional school committees adopted budget to the appropriating authorities of the member municipalities. They go on to say such authority was not provided in law to select boards or finance committees. So we received a lot of questions and comments about what does it mean the select board does this?
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That meeting will adjourn to our referendum. Um just so you know, next week Friday starts uh I'm sure the superintendent mentioned it starts spring break. As I mentioned, there'll be no meetings for the next uh two weeks for the board of education. Although Juliana and Lucas, we're going to have special meetings for you. I want to see you both there. We're going to meet Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Um so that's uh that's it. We did form an insurance committee. Actually, we did not form it. The board of selectment formed an insurance committee. Um that was something that we used to have. It kind of got away from the board of selected, so they appointed a new one. There are two um two from each board is on that committee. It's uh Jordan Tusant and myself and um the selectman have two representatives as do the board of uh finance have two representatives.
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um you know, we're we're in the process and it looks like they're they're getting ready to finally um be adopting the 2021 codes here in 2025. Um which is a whole another story. Uh but it is something we are working on. You know, again, we're not as active as as as some or potentially as we could be um due to, you know, capacity, expertise, things like that. But it is something that we are we are working on. Um you know, as many folks can say, there there is room for improvement on this as well. um you know there we were hoping to have some of those zero code appendices in there. Um it's not looking likely that that that'll necessarily be the case. Um and again this is primarily looking at new buildings. This does not touch um existing buildings which is something that um is a large part of our market because while we are getting new buildings we are we have many many existing buildings and we need to be doing things with them as well.
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We negotiated collective bargaining agreements in good faith with our with our unions and we still have a couple more that have to be done. We have $5 million in salary increases next year. Our staff deserve more than that. But that's not a number we can change. We owe that much. And here's something that is completely out of any of our control. The cost of health benefits will increase next year $7.5 million. Just those two things wipes out the additional state aid we got. We do have some one-time credits you'll see there. You see our number of PCTI students has gone down each year. If you're going to PCTI for a vocational education, I wish you all the best and thank God you'll make more money than we'll ever make. Go. But there's they're taking less of our most academically um motivated students because our students are starting to see our families are starting to see the value of an education at Clifton High School.
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To me, however they're calculating the adequacy, it's the fact that it lines up, it dovtales so well with another number that they're providing from other data that is accessible to us tells me that adequate and average are probably in the same ballpark if that makes sense. So basically what you're telling me is the state has a fixed number of how much it costs to educate a kid as far as how much it costs to educate a kid in EUM township. And so they come to us and say based on how much we think it costs to educate a kid, this is the figure that you should be at. Right? Because the only thing that I'm kind of struggling with is is previously speaking, right, our boards have managed to live within a certain means. Obviously, the state took away seven plus billion dollars in funding.
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Congratulations. Well, thank you all so much again and on behalf of the Barber Kai School District governing board, I want to say thank you so much to all of our parents, guardians, and those of you who have have provided support to our students and to our students continue to achieve reach far. Uh it is truly an honor to be able to take a minute of our meeting to be able to honor you. So, blessings to each of you in this good evening. We're going to continue our meeting. You're welcome to join us, but otherwise have a very nice evening. You want to get another Appreciate you. Miss Stevens, are you still online? Yes, I am. Okay, just confirming. Uh we'll go ahead and continue our meeting. Number three this evening is our CBIS benefits renewal presentation. Mr. Diaz. Whenever you're ready. Or we can take a break if you guys need a break because Silia wants snacks.
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So, or as a dropout. So, that's just one example of what a dropout is. Um, Mr. Grace and Lauren and Megan, they can explain and um Mr. Johnson can explain this intricacies of the dropout rate to you in depth, but it's very complicated. So, I just wanted you to know that and we are actively working on that and we have done a lot of work this year to find the students that would be classified as dropouts and try to get them reclassified as another co another code in our attendance system so that we can get that graduation rate or that graduation rate higher. All right. So when you look at this report, you would think that our peer groups are our peer groups on the mountain. They are not. The auditor general's office puts us in a peer group. The districts that are listed on the as I know it's hard to see, but the districts that are listed on here are our peer groups.
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So, in 2024, um we felt like this was a really good indicator for Gilbert. So, if you look on our average teacher salary that we reported on the annual financial report, we reported 67,000. But if you take out the stipens and just have our base salary, it's 64,000. When you look at the district spending report, it's 63. We're within $1,000, which we think is probably closer to being accurate because when we also defined average teacher salary, we use the classroom site fund definition. Classroom site fund definition indicates that you can you would use your instructional specialists, you would use your teachers, you would use librarians, you would use counselors, all of them would be included in that average teacher salary. So that's what we adopted when we started reporting on our annual financial report in our on our budget. But in the district spending report, it's clearly only the teachers that are in the classroom.
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If they're self-contained, we're all we're going to get there. There are number that accounted for within our district is my understanding. So So there's two things. One private school, you can do that. So for example for our our district 2015 Prince was a wonderful player and they do it because they're private they're private school they're not public they're not a public school right so for me personally if you want to do that that's a private school thing so I think if you want to go to a school I just think public school is public school. That's where that's at. The second part of that is we worked hard on the residency. And then we just had a section of that's been going on for a long time and and we closed that by allowing them to be here until they're kids. that no more new kids from that area are going to come in because their tax hours go to another school or even from their own family.
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Um, which right now, if you're if you're not doing if you're letting the healers heal the tank, you're not going to ever kill him because he has a lot more hit points. And got 99%. It's uh Yeah, right now it's close. So, we got to control back. So, if we can hold it all the way up to 100 here, we'll be good. That'd be the thing to do. We pushed him back. So, right now, this character we're seeing Jaden here, right here, it's a character that can heal and do some damage at the same time. So, Blue J. Yes, now has Jaden. We're watching again. He's at he's a healer. Does a little bit of damage, a little bit of healing. Just kind of staying back right now, providing some heals right there. And so, we're This is We're watching through Blue J. Correct. Yep.
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