page 39 on the bottom yeah they have to reach uh to receive credit for the positive parent contact they have to reach 80 percent of that specific class that they're working with um now in the replacement category they don't have to reach that 80 percent to be credited with effort and attempt they just have to turn in the paperwork that shows that they made the efforts to contact those families we're not penalizing that would be penalizing them twice but instead we're rewarding their effort to show that they documented their and honestly i can tell you we've had very few people not meet these criteria this year that we put out i think we have three staff members who haven't turned anything in yet this year but everyone almost everyone else has met almost everybody that was eligible okay so the only difference between part one and for the eligibility and what we're voting on now is what we're voting on now they don't have to get in touch with 80 they have to make a good effort to exactly okay and there's the other one they do have to get in touch with that money correct is there a reason that they don't have to get in touch with the parent what we're trying what we're trying to do is we're trying to encourage them to reach out because there are a number of families that simply won't respond no matter how many times that our teachers are reaching out to them via email via phone calls sending letters i mean we've even got teachers that are sending certified letters um trying to show that they've documented you know because if they continually show effort to contact these families we give them credit for us if uh if a family chooses not to respond after three four or five attempts that's i don't know how we think we'll blame the teacher for not making their worries you think they're giving their due diligence on it exactly we want to reward that due diligence there are three buckets of money on the 301 plan mr guthrie the first bucket of money we don't put on the salary schedule because 301 moneys all come from sales tax 600 sales tax was passed by the voters in about 2 000 that expired this year and during the red fred demonstrations three years ago the legislature got a little apprehensive they passed it until 2040 something so it'll be around the rest of our careers i believe and so um we depends on the sales tax we'll give people that money the second bucket the money is for performance pay the third bucket there's a there's a menu of things we use it has to go basically to help with teaching staff they have they have given information for uh some other parts of staff we've always kept for teachers they have to be certified in the classroom so even a certified like an instructional coach out of the classroom if they can't yeah and we pay for those too but we paid out mmo because we have teacher x getting five thousand dollars in future y not getting any it creates a little stress and disarmament that we don't need can i just have one more thing there were two primary parts teacher pay but it's also for increased student achievement so they're very clear increase student achievement that was the hope and the next one is um a donation of a scholarship by uh john burns to state yeah those of you who have been around more than five years or three years i remember john burns mr burns this his whole teaching career was spent here in oahu high school he lived in the north part of the town unfortunately passed away in december of 19.
did we do an increase last year no it was been like a year ago about two years and i think to annie's point when you look at the the cost over 20 days that's less than eight dollars a day yeah yeah for some for after school care which is i think pretty affordable definitely why we have to go up is because of the minimum wage increase so that would be that's really the reason why so you're saying that you're increasing about 15 a month it's 130 right now yeah so that increase if it goes to 155 is actually 25 right yes okay and our parents are on board as well we let them know that we're gonna need we didn't know how much and then i was important i will let them know what do you think you'll get much feedback yeah are they increasing are these are negative feedback no no i already have parents signing up that are willing to pay that because they know their kids are on campus we're right there and in the cost a motion on the floor second place all in favor with discussion questions all right all in favor all right thank you item 11a our copa 19 instructional model i think i jinxed myself when i wrote this we had no positive cases of students or staff on campus i found that today we had one student at heritage that tested positive for covid and we've had i think the last i heard was 10 students is it more than that yes 19 students that are currently quarantined and two staff members two staff members because of close contacts it doesn't mean that they have it all it means is that they were within six feet of the person that tested positive for 15 minutes or longer in the 24 hour period it's just to be safe that and the fortunate thing that happened with this quarantine is the timing because they only have to be out of school really for four days rather than two um eight days which would be the two weeks um unfortunately for them they have to spend their spring break and quarantine um but um it's it's something that this will not be the last one that we'll have to do this with but i think that we're pretty lucky that we've made it this far in the uh in all in-person instruction and only had one person on campus on test positive it's been helpful to have our nurse in the district office she can take the time to do the contact tracing and things like that so that's been helpful otherwise she'd be doing that job and the health aide at territorial so that's that's really been working out um but um with the success of the current instructional model even with that one case uh what we're recommending is that we continue with all in person instruction with a distance learning option with which means basically we are requesting no changes to the current um instructional model and um and i i reached out to you over the last week the governor issued an executive order and changed the benchmarks and so on this sheet which is on the back of it is the new benchmarks format that they want to use instead of three there's four bet four different levels now for just two benchmarks where we were three before they took out the hospitalizations and we are just cases per hundred thousand and percent positivity and the four um categories are high transmission substantial transmission moderate and then load transmission right now for um for two weeks ago we were in substantial transmission which is the second highest or the third from the bottom for our cases per hundred thousand and we our percent positivity was in the moderate transmission and so overall we are in what's considered the substantial transmission cumulative total um benchmark i'm happy to say that the benchmarks come out tomorrow and that i'm sorry wednesday i anticipate that our cases will be in the moderate range and that our percent positivity has a really good chance of being in the low transmission range anyhow [Music] we're doing really well and especially at chino valley and holden are doing really well um the county as a whole is doing okay i didn't include that the numbers coming out of the county are we've actually are they're doing a lot of data correction and so they don't really make sense and so i didn't want to include that this is much more accurate i think and a fair representation of what's going on in the county so these are strictly just counting numbers but and again i'm knocking on wood hopefully we'll continue we've seen a steady decline in the number of cases in the percent projectivity and then hoping that continues we are still wearing masks that's why executive order uh we'll still do the the social distancing when we can but when you have 35 kids in a 900 square foot classroom you cannot social distance we have um the hand sanitizing stations and and each loop in in heavy locations and also in each classroom so we're doing what our what we can to keep our kids safe and so far it's been i'd say working fairly well we our teachers are getting vaccinated on our second vaccination and some of you are also getting your second vaccination on thursday as am i and what i'm my understanding is once you are fully vaccinated two weeks after your second vaccination you're not subject to quarantine if there's a close contact so that will be helpful for a good number of our staff members that if there is a case that they would not have to be quarantined if they were in a close contact so any questions so this does say it's an action item is there something it is an action item if you chose to act on it but my my recommendation is no action at this time just leave him place what we did last month instructional model guidelines update this is just a a there's a few tweaks the original model which is what we're in now was approved all the way back in july and we've learned some things and so i wanted to make some modifications to reflect how things how we think things should be now and so you on the on the um the actual model there is what's lined out is what used to be there and what's bold is the new verbiage and so the things to look at is um in under building procedures i added and visitors when it comes to temperature check because i i'm asking that we allow volunteers to be on campus beginning at 3 22 of 21.
40.5 of students are in remote and this was as of last week it changes daily we do have people kind of going back and forth a little bit so but we're right almost at 60 40. this is just a kind of uh for you to see like this what we've done this year uh and we've bounced around a little bit we went if you just to recall we went seven weeks to start the school year at a full remote um i will i will own up to that to mistakes and i would say that if i made a mistake this year it was it was starting in full remote i wish we hadn't done that that that's caused us some issues with our structures but um but that's what that's the date we you know the guidance we were kind of given at the beginning by the lake county health department and we just uh until we had more data to know how serious this pandemic was for our staff and our kids we had to go to full road once we opened up in october you remember we were only in for two weeks and then the data just went crazy in the area uh spiked all over they closed everything down again and we were out for eight weeks we came back january 19th we've now been in for 11 weeks and i can say very positively that we've been in for 11 weeks and been very successful 11 weeks so have we had cases on campus yes we have to my knowledge we've had no transmissions on campus cases kids have kids or staff have come to campus uh sick and we've had to quarantine people but to my knowledge we've not had anyone get sick here on campus so that's been 11 weeks uh it will be 11 weeks as of april 5th uh which will be a week after spring break which any changes that we would possibly make i wouldn't recommend we make until april 5th some districts are holding off to make changes to april 12th to give two weeks after spring break kind of a quarantine time but as you can see we only have eight weeks after school or after the spring break we only have eight weeks of school left so i show you this to kind of uh just see what we've done to break up this year which has been a little disruptive to our families um august or may 27th last day of school august 23rd is the first day for next year and i think we need to fully plan for a full return of students at this time so we have three options that were kind of the administrative staff's been working through in the last probably six weeks um option one is do we just do we stay with what we're doing it's working right now we'll have eight weeks of school left by the time we can make a change uh and just do we steer our attention toward a full return in august so that's an option option two would be implementing i'll kind of summarize this but option two would be implementing an early release schedule every day at least monday through thursday we looked at this option i'm gonna be honest with you it just doesn't work well we tried it we've looked at it and it could work okay at primary elementary but it would not work well at the middle school for many reasons but that i don't want to i can go into if you if you want but it just doesn't work real well and it uh if we're going to do it we might as well just be here all day because kind of where it ends up happening so option three is we we would bring all kids back for full days uh returning back to the pre-pandemic school schedules all families would still have an option for full remote learning so we still want to make sure we have 40 of our families in full remote we want to make sure that we would offer them so that's an option as well um i sent out surveys to staff i sent out surveys to parents we had 173 staff complete the survey we had 786 parent responses which was great um 67 of the respondents are currently choosing blended hybrid uh 33 are choosing remote right now remember we are at a 60 40 split but with the survey we had 67.33 for staff 131 were certified teachers and 42 were support staff to complete the survey uh when i send you this document and i will i'll send this out to all of our parents as well this there's links here to see the staff survey results to see the parent survey results for those that are in remote and we also have parent survey results for those are in blended hybrid i split them out so you can kind of see how the two answer the questions so i'll summarize that data in the next few slides so you you will see it uh option so the staff survey an option was do we remain in the uh current blended hybrid schedule for the rain of school year uh 70 of all staff said yes to this option 73 were certified 60 were support staff option two that for the staff was do we go to a shortened schedule for four days a week but bringing all kids back in a regular short school school day schedule 51 of the staff said yes to this option were teachers 71 were sports staff option three was do we bring everybody back returning to our pre pandemic school schedules 22 percent of staff said yes to this option and uh and they had a chance to say yes to all three options so it wasn't like they had to pick one they had a chance to say yes yes i'm good with any one of these whatever they wanted so and we did take comments too so we took their comments and we use those to help us with some data we're going to show you a little bit so for the family survey the question the first question was as a summary that question what that means is if the guidance if we go and basically set aside the cdc guidance and ignore the uh social the six feet this social distancing rule would you still send your child to school under this option 85 percent of the parents who are currently sending their kids said they would so of the parents who are currently sending their kids in blended hybrid 85 said they would 15 said they would go back to they would switch to remote um obviously the parents who are currently remote uh most of them would not they're not comfortable sending them now so they wouldn't obviously be comfortable sending them if we if we went to less than six feet question two uh was uh would you prefer big hollow continue with the current blended hybrid model for maynard school year regardless of the guidelines um i think that uh so that in summary 62 percent of parents supported this again they could have said yes to both options many of them did uh they were good with the first option but they're also good with this option so 62 percent of parents said they were good with this option 56 of those parents were parents of students in the blended hybrid learning right now 81 percent are parents of students in remote learning so um so that's the family data i'm going to click this link here so uh our administrators put together some data on i'm going to i'm going to discuss a little bit here you know i had asked for i'd asked to to kind of pull together some pros and cons of what would happen if we brought kids back uh 100 and let's go with some pros and cons let's really dive into the weeds on this obviously there are the benefits of having kids here all day are pretty obvious you know we get them back to a regular schedule there's more instructional time uh we've listed some things on this page but it's it's really uh you know transportation's easier we've got we're not having buses on the road all day long um there'll be in more in-person minutes for kids so the the benefits of being in person are you know obviously it's where we all want to be um at some point um so the benefits are pretty are pretty obvious on that piece of it what i was what i want to do is spend some time talking about some of the challenges that we face and again i apologize if you can't read this well i'm going to try to highlight some so some of the health challenges there will be 15 percent of our families that don't feel comfortable if we come back right now that will that are currently in blended hybrid that will move back to remote i will say that i know some families that we have just recently got to come they're finally feeling safe i know that they would probably back right back out if we made changes right now we would have a challenge with isolation space i know that sounds weird but we only have so much space in these buildings and right now like this room in here is used as an isolation space when kids come to the office and they're sick we send them down here they we space them out and then we wait for their parents to come get them and we so that's the in each building we have these spaces if we bring everybody back we're going to need these spaces for other things and so we're there's a challenge with isolation space not adhering to six feet social distancing is what one thing that happens with that is that if a student if a student is beco is a close contact the uh if we are in a six feet social distancing environment they have a 10-day quarantine if we're not they have an automatic 14-day quarantine so i just found that out a week ago i didn't know that was the case i'm gonna i have a slide in a minute that will show you kind of the impact of that but we give you a situation last week we had a student that came to campus that uh that was sick we didn't know about it until the next week so our staff had to go back and contact trace for that student and since we are in a six feet social distancing in the classroom we didn't have to quarantine any students we did have a quarantine as a teacher but we didn't have to quarantine any students because we're in a social distancing environment where we're six feet had we been in a classroom with 15 to 20 kids excuse me and uh three to three feet social distancing we would have had many families we'd been calling and saying your son or daughter's gonna be home for 14 days because they were in close contact so so that's that's going to be a challenge if we put more kids in the classroom and the time it takes to do that contact tracing i know we haven't had to do a lot of it yet but that's that situation the one situation we dealt with last week took our school nurse four hours to get to navigate to call people to go to each classroom figure out so it just takes a lot of time and we don't have a large number of staff to deal with that so instructional delivery challenges is this next slide i i need to i need to mention something first i'm not talking about these challenges i don't want you to think that we can't overcome these because we can't these are just things that we had to think about uh as we're making this decision are they are they all insurmountable no we can we can overcome these it's just these are things that we need to think about before making a decision instruction delivery challenges uh service to remote learners and k4 will suffer i i say that not in a lack of confidence in our teachers they're doing they're doing a great job and to make a change with eight weeks to go and require serving kids at home and kids in the classroom with the when we with the structures that we have in place in the k4 i personally feel like it's going to be a challenge for our remote learners to get the the same level of instruction and attention they're getting now that's that's i don't know any other way to state that but um i'm not saying it can't be done but that's uh that's something that's concerning we have a shortage of subs we've been trying right now i have uh roughly one substitute teacher per grade level we've been hiring every day they're on the staff whether we need them or not usually they're used somewhere we've the last week and a half we've been reaching out to all of our other subs to see if we could get in because we know that if there's a change and we are doing uh if we bring more kids on in april we're going to need more subs because there's going to be more quarantine situations and uh we are just not getting them we we've got one new person we actually called her in today because we've got other subs that we currently have that are now covering maternity leave so uh so we do have a sub shortage that's a problem um another schedule change for families and staff and students we've heard kind of uh i've heard through you know loud and clear through some communications that i've had that people are just kind of like no more changes we've in a group finally we're in uh we just don't need another change and so i have heard that um a change now will be difficult for our related services el and bilingual populations um we have some long-range initiatives i i'm not sure where we're at here on the slide up there let me look scroll here a little bit okay we have uh some long-range initiatives that we're really working hard on right now and we just wanted to they the administrators wanted me to know that any significant change right now is going to put a pause on some of that because our attention is going to be focused to serving in the buildings in a different way shift to sel challenges social emotional learning we know that our families have dealt with a lot of trauma this year uh had some some stability i think would be welcome students with high anxiety are on the spectrum are also having trouble with all the change that we bounce back in and out of and so that's been something we're a little concerned about there's some transportation challenges a little concerned about traffic control on campus if we bring everybody back at the same time because we will have a large number that won't be riding buses still even though we can we can work out we'll go back to regular bus routes we're a little concerned about traffic there um we are low on bus drivers we're running very very low on bus drivers and those subs are not out there uh right now we've been fortunate we haven't had uh to quarantine uh bus drivers but i just wanted to know we're pretty low i'm going to jump to food service we are again we're a little short staffed we have some people on furlough right now with the situation they're in a little short staff and food service but we again we can make it work it's not something that that is gonna keep us keep us from making big changes but but it is a challenge for us technology challenges we have some we have some challenges with technology right now in that if we were to bring everybody back we purchased some neat bars for some of the classrooms those worked really well uh we've tried to get our hands on more but they're just not available um so we can't offer some of the teachers that are at the primary elementary right now they're teaching kids both in person and remote each have one of the neat bars in the room it's made that a lot easier and it's been successful but we can't get our hands on more of those everybody across the country is trying to do the same thing um so i i will send this i will send this document out to you uh as a board so you can read through the rest of i think i've spent enough time on on some of the challenges that we're facing on this i'm gonna shift back to uh okay i'm gonna shift to this this screen right here this is a this is a typical six foot social distance classroom and if i click it uh so this would be what it looked like if we do three to four feet and i just you'll see like here's a coveted happens in the middle and when you do sit when you do contact tracing nobody gets uh quarantined in that situation so this is a situation we had last week here we didn't have to quarantine anybody in this situation over here covet happens we have to we have to quarantine all these individuals and uh that's that's that's something that is concerned so in in the first case one student the student who is ill quarantined for 10 days in the second case eight additional for 14 days so recommendation so i'm hopeful that the pros and cons information that was shared presents a clear picture of just some of the issues we're facing i don't want you to think that i'm just saying that we can't do it we can we can overcome these things and that's what you pay us for and uh we we can problem solve um but i i want you to want to be very clear there's it's not just a matter of opening doors there's a lot there's a lot that impacts as i look at the data there's one piece that sticks out 70 percent of staff 62 of our parents support the idea of remaining in our current model from the main of the year to me that what's been expressed to me through emails uh talk in conversations phone calls with many people uh the the three and also in some discussions with our cac uh the three things that midcited the most were families feel like they finally have a consistent schedule we're in a groove they don't really want us to disrupt it uh it's not necessarily welcomed right now a big disruption that's been told to me this is not everybody obviously some people want us to come all the way back right now that's been a common theme even from some people who who i think wish we were back but know that right now they don't feel like that's a great decision uh there's the increased quarantine issues that i mentioned to you i think that's a big issue that worries me right now and then uh i i don't want to lose sight of the fact that 40 of our population right now is remote and uh a decision to to negatively impact that population would be uh would be a tough decision so so i focused tonight on survey data pros and cons and the current cdc guidance those are three things i focused on based on that i i would recommend that we continue with the blended hybrid model for the rest of the year and just turn our attentions towards the the three bullets i have there just to offer a robust in-person summer school options for all students at no cost appearance which we are working on and we'll have a proposal to you for april plan for a full five day per week regular schedule starting begins next school year i think that's got to be something that [Music] you know i think it's it's it's something that we we have to do unless we are told we absolutely can't do it i think we have to do it and uh i also uh and dr hetzerbeitz and i have been working on this uh we also think that it's important that we we plan for some sort of full remote option for paris next year and one that wouldn't impact our classroom teachers trying to do both but just have a remote school option and i'm actually talking to a couple local school districts to see if we can combine forces on that so those are three things that i feel like to go along with my recommendation is that i just feel like we would be best served for our kids right now to not disrupt their lives again we're in a good groove and so my recommendation to stay in the schedule that we're in finish out the school year and start focusing on what we can do to make sure if that's if the board doesn't feel that's a good direction i would say that the early release option is not a good one and we would just have to go full back we tried to explore the early lease but just doesn't work very well so so i'm up for questions concerns yeah julia um i have a question so on the i was looking at the survey results and you couldn't see any comments i don't want you to read all the comments but what were was there anything different than what you put on there for the comments in the comments yeah a lot of the comments we took the comments and uh um i have to give dr fitment dr hedgevitz christine hart and uh dr king some uh credit for that they took that pros cons list came from a lot of comments that were received they took the comments from the parents comments from staff and we just kind of they tagged them and kind of took common themes and put to pull those together why are the numbers so different on that one so it says 94 that it did mathematically i'm just not sure how it works because how can the incident rate be so high but yet the positivity rate is so low i don't know yeah right and then why why the shift from the focus the health department seems like it's picking whatever the highest number is instead like before when we sat through this however many months ago it was always the positivity right positivity positivity rate that's what we were drilled into our heads um it well why was your own incidence rate for the whole time and then in december we just i think we all kind of said or at least i know i did was just we just felt like we had to get back and so we kind of ignored the incidence rate at that point i thought that was the positivity rate we ignored because that was that that incidence rate was through the roof but so was the positivity right at that point right it was high yeah the health of our health department now the governor has shut things down based on positivity rate for sure he's he dave illinois is focused on positivity rate more than the incidence rate but uh um we our health department was really focused that was that 14 number i kept going off of 14 was their number and that was that incidence rate number and uh but i can't i don't know why the positivity rate's so low and our incidence rate still higher i it seems unusual to me too and i i don't know why that is and i agree with you it's the i'm as frustrated as any i feel like we are being bounced around to different data sources for a long time the health department's local health department's data wasn't even being updated and so the positivity rate was showing like a 25 and they said ignore it because it's not accurate so we just kind of quit looking at it and then so then then they pointed us to the cdc website and said just go by this so that's what i've been doing and then now they're starting to update their site so uh and it's a little it's a little lower than cdc one so looking at the one of the um there was on the chart i thought i remember there being like 90 kids in second grade for example that are hybrid okay we currently have nine teachers so does that mean that each class has like 10 kids in it so that would mean on on average so they so if they're split up between day and night there's five in the morning and five in the afternoon they would have uh so they would have uh if they had 90 and hybrid they would have an average of 10 in their classroom in the morning and in the afternoon they would be serving their remote kids so the other the kids that are remote but then when they're are the right but then so we have two sessions not all 90 are coming in the morning so there'll be 45 divided by nine no i've actually pushed them all we pushed them all to uh so in most of the grade levels with the exception of like two teachers in in elementary and two in kindergarten with the exception of them what we've done is we've taken all those classes and if they've got 20 kids in their class and 12 of them are hybrid and eight of them are remote we're putting 12 of them in the classroom in the morning together all of them together so the teachers teaching those 12 students and the remote kids are home doing asynchronous learning and then the kids who are in class go home and the teacher focuses their attention on the students that are remote for the afternoon while the kids that were in person in the morning are doing asynchronous work okay so that's how they're serving them it worked out number wise we were able to do that with the exception of one third grade one fourth grade and two kindergarten and that's where we put neat bars in those rooms and we put extra adults in there to help with to help those teachers serve those kit both groups that's what we're doing now one of the things you talked about was like the quarantining and it's you said if we're at six feet kids are supposed to quarantine for 10 days but we're not at least you just but then before that was said like we just had the incident at school we didn't have to quarantine any kids so if if we as a school are doing six feet social distancing but somebody comes sick and like they were on a bus together or something we had to quarantine a kid they only have quarantine for 10 days because when they come back here they're still six feet from everybody does that make sense if so in the areas where they're not they don't we don't have to quarantine them if they were in a classroom and a kid's sitting six feet away we don't have to quarantine them uh okay so the 10 days only applies for the kids that are on the bus it only applies if for some reason these two kids were not six feet apart even though we've set it up that way that they were if johnny says hey i was with jimmy uh last night in my house and we were doing this so we got a quarantine jimmy we only have to quarantine jimmy for 10 days because when he comes back here he's still six feet from everybody so that's what that means are there any can the kids go get tested or rapid tested and if they prove negative do they get to come back earlier or is it ten days no matter what or time automatic yeah automatic 10.
paths is still at this point the elementary level um there is support at the middle in the high school they're they're not they don't go by path they're not necessarily built as a continuum of our recently adopted therapeutic classroom but um you know i i know the step-up program the middle schools had wonderful successes and great things happening and bridget taylor here at the high school and the work she's doing um kind of in through the step-up model um really meeting some some great needs and students are finding great success and um they are building wonderful rapport um but to say that that's path that that part has not been brought up through that at this time yep that's yeah we do what we can do and we keep pushing forward that's all that i have i know that you might have at the top of our head we will be having a um parents rights training the special advisory council our middle of april it will be april 12th um six to seven it'll be a zoom yeah um and so we will do our basic rights our annual basic rights workshop through the cpac thank you thank you that's it i know that was a lot but no not at all absolutely well thank you first of all for your thoughtful presentation as always it was very informative and very helpful to kind of get the big picture of what's happening in student services this year um pretty much all of my questions that i had have kind of been answered and by or actually asked by one of my colleagues i'll just say i'll just ask you this kind of echoing a little bit of what they've been speaking a few of them have spoken about is with the with covet going on this year do you do you anticipate or a need for or have those conversations taken place already at the district level about some more staffing more services for to help those students that have maybe regressed our high needs students that maybe have regressed a little bit because i know that while we have the you know the staff wish list of the items the positions that are not being included in next year's budget um there's only uh i i as i look at the slide here i see you know some social workers um that'll be added but besides that do you do you feel there would be a need for any other positions or anything else that's really that's not being targeted right now so what i would say is one of the key ways that we're able to get a sense of that all the way through this year and not have to wait till june is through those team meetings where we talk about clover compensatory because what cover compensatory is about is about during either a shutdown or a school-based you know time where you're kind of separated from your learning for one way or another have you regressed so there are conversations that are really authentic and so at this point um the amount that has been needed we've been able to you know it's not been to the point where we've had to extensively overstaff but if those you know again where i don't i can't predict what the next few months would be so it would be really an analysis of the information that's coming down so right now if you know particular student had a co-op of compensatory uh for example through you know um an ela or a math goal that they had regressed on you know those are those are being those gaps are being filled through our existing staff and again outside of the school day it's typically not during the day because they have their other services but um so we're able to do that we've been able to kind of keep up with that budgetarily um if that were to if those discussions were really to be found that there were some significant large numbers that we are not predicting or expecting then yes we would have to staff that and we'd have to find staffing for that so um as of right now we've not needed it and students are making progress towards their goals um even students you know in the hybrid model just it's really rewarding to see some of the the n1s which is the summaries of the meetings that i get i read all of them and to just see you know what the team is is discussing is that the student has met their goals and almost all their benchmarks even in a remote setting half the time and so that's you know really uh inspiring and exciting but yes if the kova compensatory were to require significantly larger than it's been all right then we would have to staff that accordingly definitely yeah and to your point one of the things you spoke about earlier i believe was contractual services and trying to find contractual service providers to offer actually have a a person you know a professional that can actually help us out so do you find that becoming it sounds like you do more and more difficult uh as time goes by that we're trying to you're having a more difficult time trying to find whether it's an slp or an aba therapist so at what point in your mind do you say you know looking at the your caseload that you have here in the district and saying you know what it may be beneficial and you know this this isn't my special layer this is my colleague special area but um you know at what point do you find it beneficial to say all right maybe we instead of looking to the contractual pool for maybe just one or two students do we try to bring it in-house well like tell me i'm just trying to help help me understand when when when you um make that decision yeah so um as so again i think this is a difficult year because like i said a lot of the reason i've been calling contractual is because the group sizes have been so much smaller than they ever have been before because of coped right so the copa 19 as it relates to that i think you know if some of those restrictions were lightened if it was not six feet if if things you know somewhat went back to a new normal of sorts some of that might be mitigated right off the bat sure um as far as actual staffing i know our speech language department did we did post for an slpa that is a hired position so that's a nut so we're at 9.0 um up from 5.0 when i started seven years ago so that was a 5.0 department up to nine so um we're certainly you know adjusting and so we meet um and at the end of the year we typically do that at the end of the year where everyone kind of gets their caseloads and numbers together in june and we just kind of reallocate i think some of it also is looking at kind of what grades everyone is doing what numbers everybody looks like what buildings make the most sense and doing a lot of shuffling which we didn't do a lot of this year because there was so much other shuffling for other so many other reasons so i think really taking um a hard look at where we are like i said kind of taking the bricks down to the ground and rebuilding um i would have a much better handle i think in june for sure yeah yeah well that's all i have thank you for your time thank you thank you so much thank you have a good night thank you take care all right next up on the agenda under old business uh continuing discussion on the fy 22 budget uh dr gifford or mr kiley do you have any updates for us first or sure just um you know obviously want to thank you for the opportunity to present last meeting i know it was at the end of the meeting and it was a lengthy meeting you know we didn't really have a chance to get into it at all but um you know tonight is certainly a good opportunity to discuss any questions you might have on the budget we our intent according to our budget timeline would be to continue this discussion at our next meeting have the budget hearing also at our next meeting on the 22nd um with a vote in april hopefully so there's there's still a lot we don't know i'm i'm meeting tomorrow with uh actually on wednesday with mr barnes at town hall talk a little bit about this he and i have not actually sat down in person together we've talked on the phone um about it but you know i'm looking forward to that so there's there's a lot still going on with this so obviously our timeline it can be flexible and if you need more time to discuss this along the way we can adjust accordingly so but tonight's a great opportunity to talk about it and um you know if there's any questions that you folks might have dr gifford and i are here to to help you with those awesome thank you mr kylee welcome does anyone like to start or i can certainly ask a couple of questions go ahead we started down here last time [Laughter] yeah thank you i actually i had the opportunity i reached out to mr kylie earlier today to answer a couple of questions that i had just looking so i guess from my point of view let's look at staffing let's start with staffing right um it's just i do have some concerns and i mentioned these to mr kylie on the phone when i was discussing about the fact that we have been down a um you know one maintenance position for for well over a year now or about a year now um and i know um you know mr kylie was comfortable waiting waiting this out um but i do think that our buildings are in you know the fact that we are filming that is a concern not just from the you know specifically a plumber but just the maintenance having another body in the maintenance department to to do those types of things so so that is certainly a concern from a uh from a um facility point of view and i think it's great that we're able to bring in some more outreach social workers one of the things i do want to talk about just briefly is we've been hearing a lot some of us have gotten emails regarding teaching assistants at quinn elementary school and i know that right now we have looks like we have one tentatively um right uh if i'm looking at here uh just one uh ft we're scheduled for uh for quinn for an additional one for next year is that the way i'm reading this correctly um so that's right yeah yeah right okay so with that should should we be looking for more teaching assistants help me understand or help the committee understand where we're at because i know that's that's always been a struggle it's a big it's a big school but it's also has all the specialized programs in it so uh are you comfortable with that number right now well well a couple of them are people that have been on a full year leave that we expect to come back okay so those positions are in the budget the those are are still in there if those particular folks you know they've been on sick leave all year because of kovid okay um if those couple of folks come back we would be able to add back to our um staff that we have so that those numbers are have nothing to do with the budget here because they're already built into the box right they're built in the ones that just like i said you know one in particular took the whole year off but fully intends on coming back but we have a couple of those so would you do you know is it two or three i'm just out of curiosity this year see i don't know hold you to it i'm let's see i'm thinking of one and uh two there's two i see i think there's two there's two so i think there's two and also we just had a couple of retirements which okay so with that said those would be refilled but we've also been posting here and there for some even a sub for the rest of the year for some of these that are out okay and we haven't been able to find any um except just now we just recently got another one a sub for the rest of the year um which mr gramfield told um kate he was going to be sending up that recommendation today but it's been a real struggle um part of it yeah i'm happy that you're sharing that with us because it's really important that the public knows that it's not that these positions are not just we're not doing anything about them it's like you said there's there was two that were on sick leave or without for the year exactly yeah we just have had a hard time filling i can't imagine that for some of these positions for the subpay that people are jumping through hoops wanting to come in exactly and work for the dartmouth public schools for ta subpad right so our intent is to fill in the positions the retirements etc and again hoping those folks that are on leave come back okay so that would increase the number of folks and um if i recall correctly even we had had one uh months ago and then actually it was one we got at demela when we were doing for the library they were going to supervise the library and then our intent was because of everything that happened at quinn to transfer that person to quinn instead she had just been hired and then she quit so we've it's it's been a struggle it really has so from so everyone that's watching everyone that's here so from your perspective you have every intention the district has every intention of filling those either retirements or those people that are on leave coming back coming back they choose not to come back the position is not going away right it's in the budget it's in the budget all right yep well that may that certainly makes me and i also have to say we like this is a list of tas in all the various schools who goes out on leave who we fill it with etc we sit with the administration in the buildings quite frequently on this issue especially at quinn because of the number of programs they have and the shifting of students and you know wanting to make sure um some of those students are really high needs as well in the program so we want to make sure we have enough adults in that in that class so we do sit with beth um and and the administration as well as i said pretty frequently going over this list to the point i've sometimes seen polka dots i don't even know what we're looking at after josh well because there's so much movement there's yeah especially this year exactly exactly no that that makes sense yeah my other concern would be i i had pushed for it last year then because of covet yet and with the uncertainty i think you know i'm i will i'm going to take a phrase from dr jenkins i'm going to sound like a broken record um that i really believe that mr galashaw could use another technician the reliance on technology in the district especially this year this year more than any other i think it's important that we make an investment and you know i know it can't be this year but i hope when we come around next year at this time that all the time we can have a positive discussion with that uh the couple of other questions that i have is on the under the fy slide 9 of the or page of the 68 page budget uh that uh pdf that mr kylie sent us graciously just under the administration just so um i can understand i had a brief conversation with mr kylie earlier but so everyone that's that may be looking at this can understand so we're looking at the administration line there's a a change a savings of 4.3 percent because you're looking at reducing the um curricular director of curriculum instruction and assessment and moving uh and bringing back the assistant superintendent position can you talk a little bit about why i only see or why we only see a forty two thousand dollar savings versus the full salary there i think it's important for everyone right here to understand the optics behind it yeah i'd be happy to speak to that mr oliver so that um restructuring involves two positions according to the department of ed classification of those positions the assistant superintendent position clearly is a administrative position it is a not to be technical but it is a 1000 account which means it's grouped with other administrative district expenses the director of teaching and learning is um classified as a 2000 account which means it's in the category of instruction kind of makes sense it's you know but even the title itself is you know shows that um you know it clearly is more instruction intensive than um the assistant superintendent position so what happens is the the savings is actually in that 2000 category so the savings is over on the instruction side of the budget because the proposal as it currently stands is that we would eliminate the director of teaching and learning position and we would fill the assistant superintendent position so um so there's not a lot of savings on the administration side because the savings is over on instruction and because of that the instruction line just gets absorbed like that because of well because it's instructions you're dealing with a 35 million dollar budget right i mean all of our most of our money isn't is right in instruction obviously so yes it doesn't stick out as much and the other thing one of the other things that i brought up to and i should and i do know this from previous budget years is that when you're looking at the line item budget and you see some of these um these percentage changes we have to remember and maybe some of you already know this um i did i i was pretty sure on it but just to confirm that does have to do with the fact that we had it was last year's was a a negotiation year and all the and the salaries were put into the um the holding line so that's why i was like wait a minute jim why why am i seeing these types of increases but um right yeah at the time last year we had not settled negotiations we had a amount of money reserved in those contract holding accounts which you'll see are now zero in that budget so and those monies are now allocated to the individual budget lines i hate it from a numbers guy because it looks very messy and the percentages don't don't stick out as as being obvious you also have step schedule changes longevity increases other things in those salary lines that make the percentage a little different than the you know the average salary increase which was two and a half percent for most in um in in 22.
again the playground came in at sixty one seven eighty one we have a fence expense of about 31.087 and then we have that concrete expense of about seventy three hundred and sixty dollars for burlington construction the total of that amount so is 72 249.07 for the total playground so again that difference is 22 22 249.07 that we can either again we can use districts industry capital outlay to help offset that additional cost again we turn down the pro the playground project to get to that 70 well is 70 72 to 49.07 or we can use the the grant money that we have again if it's a shared facility that was the one thing i kind of wanted to try to you know kind of i guess emphasize it would be a shared facility for the elementary school to be able to use it for their three and four-year-olds and we are adding an additional hopefully if we get our grant an additional section of canada the kpp preschool so we'll have three-year-olds in the morning four-year-olds in the afternoon or vice versa so it'll be an additional hopefully an additional additional preschool section there and that could create a strain on the playground that sets to the north west corner of the elementary school so anyway question any thoughts and again feel free to share and real quick i don't know why that was on consent um it should not have been on that's this is not an action item it's showing that you guys voted that yeah shouldn't be there i wonder yeah it is not on action and still we just talked about this last time about the northwest playground i thought that was not we're not talking about the northwest playground okay so so the northwest playground there is is used quite a bit at the elementary level again so again that that area there is a kind of a shared playground the north playground has the playground and it has it's a very small area yeah because the last week they don't have a density and that has been an item that has come up over again the five years that since we've been here since i've been here about trying to improve that playground area we just haven't gotten to that yet it's not i say it's not in horrible terrible shape but that playground at some point in time is it needs some repairs or it it may it emissions it's not an horrible time it's not in the best of shape let's let's say that it may need repairs or at some point time it may end up needing to be replaced so anyway um again i'm hopeful that it'll be quite some time before it needs to be replaced and hopefully it just needs some repairs thoughts other thoughts so i shared in our special meeting that uh wolf creek has donated 25 000 for this early learning center and that they would have no issues at all with their donation going toward covering the difference between the jones trust grant to whatever the 73 thousand dollars would come out a couple of thousand dollars by the time you put the two of them together totally cover that that's something that they i mean they would have no stipulations about it they don't mind if they sign up or they would really pursue putting a sign up but i think that donation was there to cover this cost and i don't we talk about the use between school and the daycare and making sure that there's some input from the school district side with capital outlay money put into this playground but i think that's something we can manage even with this playground that's just wholly funded with grant i think that's something that i don't think that just your early learning center is going to say this is my grant money playground you can't come on i think we can manage do you have a pla do you think you're going to need that 25 000 from wolf creek for operational thought is that what you're thinking so that we can make sure that i will tell you this again until we get until we get the plumbing did and that comes tomorrow guys i don't know i'm hopeful i mean we i i need a operational forum yeah it could be operational and again it depends on again how many kids are you know signed up right you know we have the ability to go up to 72 children in the daycare because of a reconfiguration originally we thought it was 59 well because of the configuration again we're truly with the daycare in some aspects we're kind of building the plane as we fly it because with the re with the the adjustment of some of the rooms and the spaces and sizes they have allowed us to go up to 72.
um mr burns has served on the school board for i can't remember when i was eight years of 12 years after retiring from teaching um i was contacted by an executor of his estate about a week and a half ago that sale of his house he wants to have donated to scholarship fund we have three scholarship funds two of them are getting used up a little bit walter's did loud war visitors that loud was an engineer i believe for the mining company for years um a lady named may hall she was a teacher here had no children and now mr burns has no children and he uh mr farmer who was a friend of his uh will be here wednesday night to do the presentation and uh we will i believe he will give us the outline for the guidelines for the uh for the the the scholarship one of the things we've done when we're able when rotary club is they we didn't do it last year because of codeword but when military club was able to have the scholarship banquet there's a lot of excitement because it's fun to get together and celebrate kids success and we some people give someone x amount of money patty spencer's brother and i did for patty i didn't help some of the people for joyce uh but we have a limited amount of money we basically cover one here help with one year put down these more sizeable scholarships is have it be for about four years but the person has to have a c average take at least 12 hours of college and then we pay the funds directly to the the purchaser's office at this college or university so the student's not walking out here with ten thousand dollar check or five thousand dollar check so they can use the money poorly they go straight to their college so i appreciate mr burns foresight doing that and then a discussion of the principal search the board to know and get some input from you folks as you see from from the insert we've already started advertising we have received a couple of applications i would my goal would be to hire the person no later than the may board meeting may even perhaps it may even be necessary to call the special board because the board will be involved in the interview process i believe they should be they have been in the past um to uh we may want to do this in a special meeting sometime perhaps even later in april that's up to you folks um i'd like to have a staff selection committee uh when the last principal search we had three or four staff members that went over the applications with me i presented them with interview questions i don't think anybody added a question but if they had a question they want to change somewhat or maybe change the focus of we did that in that setting those staff members were involved in the initial interview mr edmund was hired we had i think six or eight that we interviewed with two finalists and brought those finalists and finalists to the board and then i put down april 14th as a deadline i'd love to have it done by them because um mr president's been he's had a unique year in some several ways but kobe has been the most um unique about what he's gone through i believe but he has even only been here a year i think has a feel for staff and where we are and so on and so the last several principalships have changed i've brought the new principal in perhaps two weeks or three weeks before the first july so that they could work with the existing principal and kind of again understanding the climate of our school district our needs our strengths and so on and so forth so plus if we wait too much after april 14th the strongest candidates are going to be gone and so uh that's just some ideas and open suggestions from you folks it's one i wanted to be aware that i was probably aware of this board agenda i am coming tonight than prior to though i was where before the board was and so we want to get a head start as much as we could so we've already started wasn't to try ignoring this agenda and but we started the advertisement about three weeks ago so questions or comments or ideas i just think april 14th is too early not that i would love to have a principal but you know we're almost at the 10th of march we're not leaving a lot of times five weeks away yeah maybe first of may just a little extra so again the board hires the principal of the superintendent and hires the principal uh the board does i recommend you folks hire okay and because i'm saying this respectfully right i'm not saying it not respectfully it just seems to me that if you narrow it down to two people you've almost hired them because you're just giving us a very little pull right correct and so if we're hiring them i know myself i would like to have more more options than than that now that may not be traditionally right or wrong or whatever and i i'm more than happy to stand corrected but um i could throw something in there on i'm fantastic i've been to this principal search stuff before marcia has also um so though i i'm gonna also i'll kind of lay it out how we did this this previous time i can recall we had the board dr dooley and we had i believe it was two teacher representatives in their wishes during the executive session when we interviewed each applicant um we did that the same i like that that format the one thing i'm a stickler on and i made it vocal then we have to stick with the time because there was everybody took about an hour and a half to meet all the questions there was one candidate had almost two hours i thought that wasn't fair to the other ones right so they're asked if we're going to do this i want to take you here we'll pick up time frame this is how long you're going to respond and we stick to that [Music] when we did brian mckenzie we had more than two people though yeah there were a lot we had a lot of candidates out there i was gonna say one of the reasons i'm sorry all this kid that maybe there are a lot of candidates that come in that sometimes you just say that doesn't really meet the minimum requirements or experience or things like that so you kind of cut some of the candidates along the way so could you and again i'm just throwing this out here in ignorance could you have these qualifications and they have and put that out in your search and if they don't meet those qualifications they don't apply they will apply they will apply experience whether we require experience or not it depends depends on the skilled person we also talk about obviously qualifying for certification arizona et cetera without naming anybody the committee the teachers and i when we did the interviews um there was a significant difference in our opinion between the two that we brought the board and everybody else and one person wasn't even in the room this person was it was just it was not not a candidate i the one reason i'm hesitant to have the board totally involved it could take a couple days and that kind of camera you know and you don't know people people sometimes write a resume people look for jobs the most are the best interview yeah certainly so it's not necessarily limited to two candidates because we started the process later last time yeah i mean i mean i would love to have a candidate in place that april 14th but i think that's getting kind of tight right now and i think if we have these individuals putting their application i understand they would probably apply to five or six other places also so um i i kind of like going to the end of april but trying to get it done as soon as possible any other suggestions and you said you already had two okay math where you advertised we advertised through asa uh the hairdresser department of education arizona schools association um arizona's uh association of administrators and then you advertise that's what we get a lot of our job fairs and stuff to help you really close your ohio you put the job out there and then you go through the different colleges and the colleges decide whether or not they're gonna accept that um so there's different qualifications so it's different schools without having to go to every single school's website and advertise on their career you know posting job work so i like handshake a lot of content does a lot of good things for us and where i went to nau asu uva all the ohio schools um arizona state so all of the ones that we go to for um onu all the ones um what's the new paloma one that we just went to last year uh in california yeah for seven year universities in one town kansas michigan um now we try to do with many postcards as possible um because that's where we're gonna get the candidates uncomfortably probably never gotten a candidate a teacher or otherwise from any of the arizona schools they don't want to come down here that's always the first question i get is like you guys have a walmart like no and then our movie theater or what is there to do and you can't hear shoulder shrugging on the phone there are challenges we all like it here let's just talk about some other day i like the clean air except for the clouds today and i like the fact that i don't live in traffic but not everybody does and i don't know if i've been here when it's 25 years old or not but it's tough to when i was hired um one candidate walked in i was told i didn't meet this person walked in and told the panel there's no way i get my wife lived here and walked out i don't know why they didn't do some research beforehand that was a story i've told that could be a a rural myth but that's kind of some of the things you do but we all have those same yeah yeah it's just not the school everybody has those those sort of issues getting people to move on and work and we understand that thank you you know well and i'll say it again if you were to recruit at uh prescott college right away you'd find a lot of people in the education department wouldn't be put off they'd actually be drawn by the remote let's set the town i will do that as long as we don't advertise at asu i don't care [Music] um will there be an article not an advertisement but an article in the copper news about the announcement and the job search i'm just thinking maybe maybe there's family of local people that are you know off being educators that might hear about it any other questions or ideas i'll write myself so on the board then we will have a executive session with the candidates then okay do you want to see you want any no clarify then you want any kind of screening before you folks start talking i think just the screening of making sure they meet the qualifications because if someone isn't because you're gonna have people that are certified to do it that doesn't necessarily make sure that make them qualify for it so here's what i can do um we do reference checks before the interviews now most people are not going to pay on the reference anyone on their reference is not going to make them look good but i always try to call them be the supervisor whether they list or not do some research and use that and bring that maybe the board and i could need an executive station to talk about that say okay who do you want who do you want last time there was a set uh list of questions that we used for each tradition and the board had an opportunity to add their own questions um to the standards that is that something that will yes and i think and here's the reason what mr uh courage touched on this was the length of the interview it's important to have the same set of questions because if you were not successful you could say well uh the questions are different than the successful candidate an hour later so we want to make sure we ask the same set of questions you have to be but you can use your own yeah you did last time yeah we came up with questions yes now um how would y'all feel about reviewing those previous questions and maybe changing if the board sees fit beforehand because i know there's some questions i like to ask and i want to get the board just put on those questions i may ask or i may ask to meet with you folks next week to look at stuff like that and if anybody has questions they'd like to email them to me and we can consolidate them all then we can go over and see how we're going to go with it angelina you got something to throw in no no you're like email them and then they said to me then i'll shoot them over to you yeah let us say the usual point of contact thank you coach appreciate it and please don't be shy this is a big decision and it impacts our kids and if you think of things i wake up about two o'clock every morning until i think i go back to sleep and sometimes i don't make it so i'm really ready to have a phone call around five but i'm available five till 9 30 every night for phone calls so don't be shy that i'm in the book and you also have my cell number if you have an idea or text me and i will be glad to put that down so i have files from previous candidates we had over the years uh and uh angelina's has everything online so we can work on that thank you very much folks thank you i might have missed it on the audio but are we talking about getting doing away with the teacher portion of the selection no no no okay good good i think that's important i think i think yes they need to have buy-in and there's communication then from that committee to their colleagues saying you know this person is really looking strong this person don't know why the board hired him or her yes when we hired mr edelman the teachers were here and they let us know their thoughts and we let them know our thoughts and we pulled them all together and yeah it was very good okay okay all right the next d is the presentation of the budget we're going to put 20 20 morning leon burns as was alluded to earlier this evening there are budget challenges um and as you all know from the summer board meeting we had significant uh budget cuts for their division and that's continuing so you have in front of you and angela try to put it on my screen uh questions or comments i appreciate you talking about leanne for a little bit she's not a slouch um she's not from ajo sparky she has been an auditor for the state uh she's worked with many districts on a consulting basis she's been a district business manager for medium science districts in the phoenix area and so uh we've had some of our best audits on the last two years and i give her credit for that and appreciate it even though sometimes we debate so almost almost always madam president members of the board dr dooley thank you for the opportunity to present to you tonight um i'm not gonna try to kid you it's not good news and what's on the screen you have in front of you it's not good news honestly anywhere just about other than there's a few probably charter schools that have actually increased their enrollment this year almost everybody's statewide has decreased so but it doesn't make it it doesn't make the challenges any less real just because there's a lot of us with the same challenges so what i'd like to do is i'd like to give you the presentation overview i'm going to give you an overview of funding for arizona school districts just very simple simplified um because some of you may not know the different parts of money or the different silos of money uh the errors of the oho unified school district budget where do we spend our money i want you to know that are challenges and then discussion next slide you know major sources of funding maintenance and operations or what we call eminem it's used primarily for our day-to-day expenses such as salaries employer paid benefits that's fica ficomid it's our airborne state retirement it's our health insurance utilities consumer consumable supplies maintenance agreements etc it is our biggest source of funding in our schools the second major source of funding is what they call the district's additional assistance or daa we all refer to it as capital funds or fund 610 it's used for textbooks instructional aids computers tablets instructional software in the classroom it is our only dedicated source of capital in the district this is a district that we don't have uh any type of override you don't have a demo override we don't have a capital override and we don't have any bond funding so what we get based on enrollment is that much more critical it's also our own company we have grant funds expenditures are limited to a specific purpose for groups of students grant friends also have a supplement not a plan requirement this means that grant funds must be used for the extras rather than the day-to-day expenses of school for example title one we get title one funding because of poverty and it's used for either english language arts reading and or math supplementary instruction to help our students that come from poverty or from lower socioeconomics to increase their student achievement so could that be used for salaries if you had a teacher stay over to help math we can like for tutoring and primarily on our title one because it's it's about 120 000 a year and again it's all reliant upon enrollment from prior years but we use it for our intercession tutoring we use it for um for both breaks we use it for that and we use it for summer schools and then our jump start for our k-8 we use it for that thank you we also have other funds such as the prop 301 which we just discussed earlier instructional improvement instructional it's improvements the indian gaming money um etc and they can only be used for specific so for the purpose of tonight's conversation we're going to really talk about mno funding but we'll talk just for a moment about this ea also go ahead i know what i want to hear i want to make sure i'm right title one when i came the district was probably twice what it is today i've been told that it's because of the growth of charter schools and savers or they're bleeding out funds because some of them do low-income children as well so that hurts that's a part of it also what it is is it comes to us based on what we're seeing as in our community for example i was telling dr dooley before our meeting um i worked for another superintendent ultra valley which was a team account outside of tucson they're considered a rural district and they're a little bit larger than we are but we're considered a town so that also puts the socioeconomics in a whole different so when they're starting to look at all of this data i believe being a town because as we get into some of these grants the most recent grant we got i mean he's got 50 more kids than we do but he got almost a million two he got 440 000 based upon allocation it's not significantly different other than he's k-8 and k-8 students normally are their families have been more readily willing to turn in free of reduced price applications that's not true for high schools you see a statewide probably nationwide that high school kids they want number one they don't want school lunch they want like to go in and get pizza and fries or something else if you have those offerings but they're not interested in they don't want to turn in that application i know that we don't do that anymore but all of those factors don't help and that's how we got our position through the elementary was 84 82 84 82 and the and the high school's always in below 60 because of the high school and the elementary school holds the high school so that's what the entire district is provisioned to live now you're gonna have free breakfast and free lunch for all of our students can i take this down so you can continue mnl funding i just want to in general emino is what we have current year funding for we have our current year 100 day atm which occurred january january 25th times what they call the base of ground or the per student amount then we also get funding for transportation it's a fixed amount for us in our district since we're declining in total mileage so it's a fixed amount and it won't go down unless there's totally different uh legislation that changes that go ahead to the next one so this is where we get the current year and this is the full beginning of funding next month daa capital funding calculations prior year 100th day adm they did not make this current year times the curse it's not this is not the only piece that they that's still prior it's like kind of like a maze of you know whack-a-mole um it's times a per student funding amount and again this funding is our only dedicated source for capital like if we needed to buy a bus or have bus leases or this year we needed to buy two copiers because we had copiers with so many copies on them it doesn't serve our teaching staff well so we put these brand new machines where they were needed the most in 2021 we get 240 000 worth of capital money now in a year we'll be using this year's atm and so i expect it to drop at least 20 percent so that's going to be and again and that's our only dedicated source so if we wanted to do the textbook adoption if we wanted to go through and refresh computers maybe for staff laptops or other things unless we can get it into a grant and we have those monies it makes it real hard to meet all of our needs dr dooley has been um we have many discussions frugal is the kind word he's been frugal with the district money and so the district has good reserves coming into this year but those reserves are savings take years and years to build up little piece it's like it's like at home you know we put a little a little away every paycheck or whatever and before you know it you've got a chunk of change but it didn't come overnight so go to the next slide please i just wanted to kind of give you a history of the base support level and that's our per adm funding amount let's start from the bottom fiscal year 1516 it was 3 645 per 1.0 atm 8 am is basically from day 1 through day 100 a student enrolls and then you have 100 a day that they were here the whole 100 days you have 1.0 adm average daily membership if a student comes in day 10 and then you go through the day 100 you'd have like a point actually night one now student starts with this day one and then drops because we've already geared up to have all those expenses to educate that child maybe it's going to be all of a sudden day 15 they're gone that's only 0.15 so all that data for 100 days that's what average daily membership is and they have to be in school at a certain time in the in the school day that course well you have to have instructional hours and they used to penalize you and this is very odd about arizona because we have a lot of rules that don't make sense or that are the long way from point a to point b and we seem to be really good at that but then they used to have these rules that if your attendance or your absence rate were too high and this is pre pre-coded they would penalize you because we if seek time or being in school isn't important what are we doing we're not doing something right and then they took that out of the law about maybe three or four years ago so there's no more you're not penalized but still we know that attendance is important kids in school is important you know the same way that getting breakfast in their bellies is important for learning all of those kind of things the only thing that i ever see with my dealings with the legislature is they are really good at legislating a problem into existence and they have a lot of make work and then they tell us where to administratively um so i just wanted to give you a history like for example then it kept going up each year the last three years counting 2021 1920 and 1819 those have been what most of us refer to as the red for ed increase it is a result of our teachers they can't strike that's illegal back in i think may of 2018 where they basically weren't in their classrooms and schools had canceled school and there was additional um monies committed by our governor so but we are done with that now again that is times our adm go to the next like is that from kids that are enrolled or the number of days those kids are enrolled are going to school they have to be there's all these rules it can never be simple for example if a kid is enrolled but they don't show up what they call for 10 days unexcused absences you've got to draw them you dub your forum that's the type of withdrawal it is and withdrawal withdraw them back to the first the last day of attendance or the first day of non-attendance so there's all these rules and you have some kids because coming to school their attendance is so varied and maybe not wonderful that you have some kids that get enrolled and they don't show up and you withdraw them and then eventually they show up again you put them back in and maybe they come of course then that also causes issues in the classroom where you've got students that aren't in the teacher's classroom for all continually for that period of time so thank you you're welcome this is our average daily membership and i just pulled reports before i sent this to dr dooley last week and we are now down 85.506 students from last year if you look at from fiscal year 1516 through fiscal year 1920 we have been pretty consistent actually in 1819 we had a nice little jump um i would have normally would have included another jump when i did the budget the 1920 budget was my first budget that i planned for i didn't i held at the 425 we actually went down to the 416 so we decreased a little bit but then all of a sudden came the pandemic and we are down significantly it's always simplistic to find one cause for this pandemic is what everybody's saying we are not alone i feel like it's important to fend off over here we are not alone 55 000 was a number a year ago today were in school in the state of arizona not the school not the public tucson unified one remember they this doesn't help off but i want you to know the reason it's not just because of some person tucson unified is losing 13.5 million of course they've got a huge budget they probably have 78 000 students but this is something that we hope there's no guarantee we hope that we will recover some of these students uh maybe once school starts again with a hybrid model or maybe which is too late to help us financially this year but we hope that maybe hopefully please this pandemic is manual by august so we can have a regular start of the school year and that will help my my role in a school district is i am your financial expert for your certified so my job is to give you the best advice i can the best guidance i can i want you to look at this 85.506 that is significant it is over 20 a little bit over next slide please we'll come back back to it in a few more slides so you're saying we lost 20 almost 20 percent of our enrollment and here are the dollars for this year so far and and dr julie gets frustrated with me he's like what do you mean so far that's 100 there's a whole process because everything with department of ed's not easy either every 20 days casey and his staff have to upload their data their adm their attendance data so it's basically enrollment and it's it's um absences and all that data it's what was uploaded then there's an integrity that the data has to clear checks and balances on the ape side then if there's problems with integrity then the data is kind of like in limbo so it's not finalized and now remember to department events to their defense the legislature will not give them totally all the dollars they need to to fund their new software systems so they kind of have this kind of new software with old software bubble gum together duct tape together now this is a billion dollar system you'd think it would be priorities for funding so department of ed is doing the best it can with what it has also um fiscal year 2021 the revenue loss in mno is currently projected at 477 and this amount may change as the atm data for the current year continues to be processed by ade and district staff then for fiscal year 2021 again the current we have the revenue loss due to distance learning there was no other model and the legislature and our governor were not willing to implement anything else for all of this this distance learning so we have what they call aoi or basically arizona online instruction your adm for full-time students is reduced by five percent so we have an additional five percent reduction so that's 123 035 right now total fiscal year 2021 mno reduction 793 512 and that is out of the total budget or what uh 3.3 so you lost about 30 of your funding yes no about about 20 20 20 25 we have other things outside our funding like carryover and stuff that also add to it but i want us just to stick to what we get from the kids the really frustrating part of this is 98 of last year's funding or that's coming yeah now remember school districts the way the process works normally is you adopt a school calendar in january or february go to the gym go here go to the things i go to because i work at home mostly and i was very women let's go to the next step so we're down 793 000.
and so they would be temperature checked just like anyone else they'd be wearing masks just like anyone else and so volunteers are an important part of our how we operate and we'd like to see limited volunteers it doesn't mean anyone can come on campus but volunteers that help us get things done we want to have them on campus we have volunteers that do some tutoring at some of the schools and things like that that help out help teachers out and we want to be able to accommodate those that are willing to to be on campus with our kids um in a safe manner we wanted to be able to come on and so that's that's um part of it is um volunteers allowed beginning 322.
okay automatic 10. is that because they can show symptoms yeah yeah in that range they can show symptoms up to those and i didn't know about the automatic 14 until last week but i don't know for me it seems like just just my thoughts the proposals i understand them it just seems that we either take the one that we currently have or we're hurting students and the other two and i i that's i guess that's my biggest concern is i i don't ever want to hurt a student and it's kind of sad that it's come to this honestly um i don't know why i mean i just for me that just it doesn't sit well i mean i think for myself it seems that we put believing in higher standards in everything that we do for this one thing i think that we didn't do that for the kids we just got by and i don't know that's that's my reading this today and that was my biggest thought coming out of it i mean i get it is what it is but i don't know that was my honest feeling i appreciate being honest i feel like there's no good decision um i'm in favor of just keeping it how it is now with the blended and hybrid but maybe we can do better with some things in supporting the needs of our specific student groups i know some people are concerned their students don't have enough work to do so can we do something i i and i hear you because i've heard it too and and then on the same token like last week i get an email from a student who's just overwhelmed because he's got too much you know like the student was really really upset eighth grade student he goes i go all i'm doing is homework all night i i can't keep up you guys are killing me and you know the middle school administrators immediately addressed it and kind of tried to get students some help and and i so it's hard because this you're right there's no i've never been at a point where i don't you know where i feel so helpless with some of this because i do have some families that say we need more and i've got some kids that are dying on the vine and i think students parents and teachers are overwhelmed yeah very i overwhelmed i don't disagree and it's it's there's a lot of anxiety in developing this even recommendation because i i just wish we could just hit a reset button and just not even be dealing with this right now but fully planned on being able to tell you i think we're good to go come back but i just the more i look into it i just don't i don't i don't think it's a good thing for our kids but even though i know that sounds crazy but true but i want to reiterate all those things i shared that are challenges i'm not telling you we can't overcome that we can we can we can make it happen it's just don't know if it's uh if we're gaining enough in eight weeks just to put kids in class if we're getting if it's if i don't know if we're gaining enough to uh say that it's worth the disruption for those kids and their families but well you said like schedules would change like bus schedules would change yeah my concern is buses if they're in the lunchroom yeah they might take them off while they eat maybe they'll forget and start talking to someone next to them we just have right now they have a good feeling for persuaders kids have been great they've been great they come here they uh behavior's been great they follow the procedures they've been you know so that's what's uh so it's hard to disrupt because it really is working well that piece of it and so the more we dive into it that's just kind of where we all landed but i mean it's a hard decision good is there anything we can do to make it better for like how julia said that can we make it better for the rest of this year that if we stay at the schedule yeah yeah i mean yes yes we can um i think the issue that uh it's something you know we have administrators meeting wednesday and based on what was happening tonight it's going to drive a lot of our conversation and we can just really start talking about that what what are we seeing that where are we seeing that we can get better and uh because i know i know we can um but i think i'm going to need to kind of you know have put our all of our measures around the table and just talk about that and see where we think that we can improve in the last in the last two months is there any way to increase the size of safe school for the parents that need extra help like they're at their wits end i do think that's an option yeah for for middle school i don't know about primary elementary uh we've got a lot of kids over there right now so that one's pretty full okay i i think that there's probably probably some room for middle school that we can maybe do something though i think some parents are just really struggling okay primary elementary yes okay really struggling with what i couldn't hear you it just it just support the support this is just getting primarily entrepreneurial especially if you have multiple kids at home so i had to just jot some things down and write some down because i was a little bit of everywhere and i know this is a hard hard thing so i just i wrote it down so i don't forget anything so i feel that staying in the blended hybrid is the best option for the big hollow community right now i just think everyone is exhausted from everything that has happened this year if we can provide some consistency to everyone that that's what we should do to disrupt the students families and staff's lives once again would not be beneficial enough especially for only eight weeks the students i've talked to like the way things are because they have a system in place they don't want to have their schedules changed again and then possibly back again i think we need to provide students families and staff with some stability there are too many factors to consider if we went back full day such as increased quarantine issues alone would cause many challenges not to mention the negative impact to all our remote learners which makes up of the student population and that's just to name two big ones we need to listen to the data from our survey because that's a large voice from our community i understand that all families will be happy with this decision and they feel their frustration i wish there was a solution that would encompass all the situation is not perfect for anyone i just hope everyone realizes that we're doing our best to find the balance let's finish the school year with consistency and a unified common goal for full day in the fall you should have done a presentation [Laughter] so if we can't do this now say we didn't say we just took out the fact that we had eight weeks left how we're gonna do this in the fall if it's the same so one of the that's i'm glad you brought that up like i mentioned at the very beginning if if i i feel like i made one big mistake this year it was the beginning year i wish we would have been hybrid because we did have some structures in place for primary elementary where we had remote teachers uh already in place because uh at the beginning then when we when we decided to go full remote we decided not to have the remote teacher because everybody was wrong that was a mistake and i acknowledged that and so does this shift right now to to full in person would be easier if i had remote teachers over there k4 it'd be easier and if i if i make remote teachers now i got to take all the kids schedules and jumble them up and kids are going to switch teachers and i just don't know if that's i i said we could do it but it'd be messy and so to answer your question in the fall we will do it because we will start the year i mean if things are there as they are right now we start the year full go and we just go and uh even with the six feet social i think we have to and we just have to uh i think we have to and we have to just we have to create some sort of online learning option for parents that want to stay home but it will be a longer commitment for them it won't be one where they can be in it for a little while and choose to come back and then maybe go back there'll be two completely different schools there's a way i kind of see it right now but i don't know how to end up but but um you know we have i want to give those parents that option but i need my teachers here to focus on those kids in front of them because i think i'm wearing people out right now with you know i know the stress levels are high and for our families and our teachers but so yeah lauren that's i hope i answer your question there the survey was sent out to all the families yeah which is 1700 or yeah it goes out to uh over 4 000 email addresses so by the time you look at multiple parents and uh so we had you know almost 800 responses it was actually a pretty good response yeah yeah yeah definitely i think it went out on social media right away because it was those responses coming in in a hurry so any other questions okay nope all right can i please have a motion to approve the recommendation for mr gold regarding our options for the instructional scheduling for the remainder of the 20-21-21 school year yes yes no yes yes yes yes all right uh did anybody have any questions on the february employment recommendations no can i please have a motion to approve the february employment recommendations motion second julian lauren yes yes yes yes does anybody have any questions on the resolution regarding the dismissal of the fourth year non-tenured certified personnel for school year 2021 2022.
so okay thank you i have two more things i have one um request and one i think recommendation here so my feeling with the fact that the assistant superintendent is such or a an assistant superintendent is such a high level administrative position are you redoing is there going to be any changes to the job description from miss roy to the current recommendation are you changing the job description because it would have to include if you recall that list we brought right right a few months ago um all those additional um duties because if we're absorbing that position and we've been doing them now between we've split them up between kind of the three of us really um so can i just ask that you share with us the um yeah well the job what the actual job description would be uh moving forward for that position yeah i guess we must have an old one i hope if you could do that that would be great and my only other recommendation would be is i i'd like to consider i'd like you to consider um in more alignment with mr kylie having you know not just assistant superintendent but assistant superintendent of like uh like uh yeah jim's is of what finance and operations right of assistant superintendent of so it's clearly what their what their responsibility that's that would be the intent because of course with with eliminating the position itself the director of teaching and learning so we would like either to be assistant superintendent for teaching and learning or curriculum instrument but i like the teaching and learning because it absorbs so much more for that puts that title it you know it really it really speaks to everything that that role is doing which is pretty big right and the last thing i'll just say is and correct me if i'm wrong any any of my colleagues is that i just want to make sure is that before we go it if we're going to move forward with this budget and your recommendations i think it's important that because if correct me if i'm wrong if we hire we we appoint the assistant superintendents based on your recommendation doctor giffords is that correct that's correct so wouldn't it i believe that i believe i don't think i don't think we know that i thought that the assistant superintendent was the superintendent's hire uh you may want to revisit mass general law because i've been i'm pretty sure that it's based it specifically states which which would be the case i think yeah but what i'm going to what i was saying was i think that i apologize i think that should be done in conjunction with the budget the budget because if we're going to be eliminating positions that's exactly right yeah i think that should be done at the same time that's exactly right right because if we didn't do that then we would not propose eliminating the position correct so correct so that's why whenever we when it's time to do that i think we need to do make that make that appointment out of it part of it that sounds good okay thank you that's all i have yep yeah i really i don't want to be a uh um i really don't have anything else to add because you kind of summed up a couple of you had more points than i did but um yeah i was just concerned about the the ta uh you know the equity among the tas positions but um from what you described it sound reasonable yeah you know that those folks had sort of you know not in a couple positions at least um so that makes a little bit more sense um because i was thinking if you're counting in those one-to-ones right like my son needs they're not doing much else no no being a one to one so um so that answered my question and then i did also have some questions around the the absorbing the position into the uh the recommended assistant super position so yeah i concur with you so i will move it along to my company thank you yeah one of the things i had a question on was you know again hiring the uh the plumber slash maintenance person type of deal i'm just wondering at some point in time of having to use an outside plumber is that going to you know uh are we spending more with an outside plumbing company you know than if we had our own plumber on on staff or maintenance person able to do that type of deal but that's that one of the things and chris usually talks about this but he didn't so i will and you talk about a a 40 plus million dollar budget and let's not lose sight of the fact that there's 597 000 in items that that weren't funded i mean you know it's another 1.3 percent in the budget okay i mean we've had discussions tonight about social workers and special needs and you know some of those were uh you know are in are out you know that that type of deal sped teachers you know behavioral specialists you know you know athletic and music is looking for additional supply money and you know things of that nature your technology technician you know is in there i mean and again i realize that there isn't enough money to go around one of the things i always talk about is where we are in per pupil spending versus you know the state and everything else well this year would be you know eight point almost 8.6 million dollars and i know that gets the finance committee and the board of selectmen upset when i mention it but so be it this our job is to advocate for students and administration and teaching and that's what i'm doing here and i know we're not going to get it don't get me wrong i totally understand that but a lot of these discussions that we have if we had that eight and a half million or if we even had half of it we wouldn't have to have because we'd be golden we'd be able to do a lot of these things okay but it's the sign of the times and i know where it is but i just want people to know that in my opinion our administration you know central office and the uh building administrators and you know athletics and music directors and everybody else i mean you know they they get blood out of a rock because of what they're able to do and stretch you know they can they can you know they can get they can get a dollar 10 out of a dollar so i i appreciate that i've got some other things that i've got to go over i've started going over it but i'll make an appointment with mr kylie and come down and bug him someday he's got nothing else to do i know he's back with his feet i'm good mr chairman at the moment thank you thank you mr news oh i do have one more thing i have want to nope go ahead i'll let shanna go so thank you um i i don't know if we pointed this out last time but i know we talked about it in the subcommittee meeting um that this assumes that we have a normal year and i know we're all having our fingers crossed here but i think it's really important to point that out that this year we had to fund five teachers for their virtual learning classes we had to fund techa we had to fund a genuity i hope we don't have to do that but you know it depends on how say the vaccine is approved for small children we do have some kids who are medically fragile who if the vaccine is you know not an option for them we're going to have to figure some things out for them him and so we i just want to make that aware sort of to the viewing public that there there may be some cost in the fall that that we have not planned for um because we just don't know um how that's going um i also said this in our subcommittee meeting and i'll say it again i think the social workers are of the utmost priority um i can see it all around me how these kids are struggling mentally and socially and i generally speaking since my time on the finance committee have been opposed to using one-time revenues for for ongoing expenses but i feel so strongly about these social workers that we have to find a way to fund them even if it's only for a year to bridge through and to reach these kids they're just i mean we're all hitting a pandemic wall and but these are kids they don't have the coping abilities that we do and they are going to need extra support this year our social workers do really important work and we need to make sure we have enough of them to meet all the needs of these kids so if the town can't do it through the regular budget i know mr kiley i agree with you we're going to get a different group of people if we say this is only we only guarantee funding for one year but we've got we've got to find figure out a way to fund those um the last thing i want to say just sort of um and this is sort of in conjunction with mr oliver's questions about the change right now we have we don't have an assistant superintendent we're talking about like we're saving right that salary but of course if we continued with the current status quo we would have an empty superintendent and a director right instead if we didn't make that change so the move from a director to a superintendent has costs right because one position is a higher position and pays more and so it's not entirely clear to me even though we're saving money overall what the difference in the cost of those two positions are and so what the actual cost is of making that change within this larger budget number if that makes sense and if you don't have it right now that's okay i know mr mr oliver has asked to you know bring the job description in we could talk about it next time but i do think we have to evaluate that right that if we continue on the path that we're on this will be the cost if we make that change that's the cost because that difference can fund other things um and and the question that we have to ask is the committee is is that the priority for that amount of money okay so i i understand what you're saying so um you're talking about approximately twelve thousand dollars okay that's all i wanted it's just not that number is not available because we that we don't have that detail and that's not directly the difference between the two salaries but we also have some stipends that we there is work that needs there's work that needs to be done so if you know we have a plan in place in the proposal to get the work done based on what you know what this proposal asks for um so if that were to change we'd have to think about how we would address the work i just want to understand what the cost the ultimate cost is overall of making that change that's it thank you anything else um i just have one more thing i want to circle back to for the social workers actually dr jenkins kind of made me think about it because when i look here it looks like we're looking at 1.0 district ftes for the for a social worker and then a 0.5 of cushman correct now if i look down here budget requests not funded outreach social worker partially built at the high school partially built into this budget so you're referring to the district that will kind of cover the high school right as well as the middle school right because they both asked for one so we said well if we could get one okay and split it so i think to my call to dr jenkins point is you know if there's a strong need amongst administration central office as well as building administration that you know based on what we're seeing towards the the end the end of this year and what we've seen in the past if if you feel the arctic giver there's a case that needs to be made to to increasing that number to really fulfill their their social worker needs that i think that conversation should happen um and i think the committee would i think the committee would certainly add things yeah yeah that specifically that's specifically the social worker piece up i think that the committee you know i think the case could be made that it should it's absolutely worth looking at the one-time revenue for that okay and that is all i have right now yeah listen just one other thing uh and i'm just wondering if we go the conversation that we can have if we go forward with the budget hearing and additional budget discussions on the 22nd usually you know there's people here that can ask comments and everything else we're going to need their comments ahead of time or something while we've got the hearing ongoing it's going to be it's going to be a little different yeah right you know what you actually bring up a good point and i do know and i'm not sure if mr peratti behind the scenes or mr galish are over there i can can answer my question but i do know that there have been some other districts that have done either public comment or especially for a public budget hearing in which people are able to come in live to ask the question i know um that it's kind of a toss up and it makes me nervous as a tech director myself but i'm just wondering if there's anything that maybe mr parotti knows the way of just the dial-in number or i don't know what about pre-recorded pretty well you know i mean that would i think that would be speaking of as a tech director i can imagine what you're thinking that we could have somebody coming in on video we witnessed it let me just say um at our faculty senate meeting we witnessed it and it was it was it was pretty horrible so i'm i'm really reluctant to have um any live ungated i it's important to have the public comment um but the things that happened in some of our campus meetings are horrifying so would it be because good point you know i agree with you and i wasn't talking and i wasn't talking about per se having the public you know come on television or you know come here six feet apart say this and leave the next one i wasn't talking about that i was mainly making sure that they understood that if they've got a comment about the budget because we don't comment on things of that nature but they get it to to kate before five before five o'clock next monday so that way we have a chance at least to look at it and see what's going on if you know what i'm saying that's that's mainly what i was talking about okay and was my concern father and i'm just throwing this out there for the public budget hearing though is it worthwhile having if we asked to keep statements to so many words is it worthwhile having them read aloud i mean i think there might be something if they're in no disrespect if they're half a dozen dozen sentences that's fine but i mean with all due respect if somebody sends you a dissertation send it to us we'll read it but not you know it'll be part of the minutes but not part of you know the budget hearing type of deal we can take it into consideration that's my thoughts yeah i mean i'm following along what mr nunes is saying we've normally said you know we're taking public comment when the meeting's on but we might make an exception in these times for the budget and to just say now you know if you're going to send it send a message to kate have it say budget you know and that way we know we can collect all those they should be under a certain number of words to your point um and and we can read those budget comments again so long as they're concise right yeah um i just think it's important for this for the budget but the year that we're in that it would give people that opportunity to be heard heard aloud yeah yeah good mr kyle and as you know we have an advertising requirement for the budget hearing so we can make that clear in the you know in the ad that um yeah you know they can need to be forwarded by a certain time and the length um you know in order to be read at the meeting the length uh you know we could figure out yeah what whatever works for you folks but i agree you know if it's keep it under so many words they'll be read aloud if it's over that you can you can send us a book right a chapterized book but it won't be read aloud in the air mm-hmm okay is everyone in agreement that's fine i'm good with that i just yeah i had that and i wanted to no thank you mr names appreciate that next up on the agenda uh turn it over to dr gifford for the superintendent's update sure i'm i'm glad we had a student rep tonight because i had a number of the items for the high school but um he was able to go over some of those so a few things that are going on you may have seen mcas is still on but uh there was an updated calendar that was sent out so right now we have um grades three four and five the window of may 10th through june 11th which might almost be out of school by then and middle school has been um a tbd right now so maybe there's still hope that they're just gonna get rid of it at all i don't know so we got that um just a nice little note that a parent sent over to cushman and justine shared it that they had joined up with the feinstein junior scholar club and it was about this particular theme they were using whole class in kindness week but she just received a nice note from one of the parents that a student is in one of the virtual classes and how they had been um included and you know i guess not virtual but um home and then made sure that she was included and that kind of thing so it was just nice to have one of the comments with you spread a lot of joy so it was really nice kindergarten registration is open so people should be looking on the district website for that information and may 19th they're looking at possibly uh orientation uh for those students well i know it's a little ways off but just to having people in the back of their minds and preschool registration for new students has been ongoing and it's open only through um 311 march 11.
so again again if we get if we get 48 kids it could be you know a little tougher the first year to to make it a budget neutral scenario we may have to use some of that grant money or write other additional brands which we've already talked about write other additional grants to help support it again if we get 55 60 65 kids it becomes more sustainable easily budget neutral we feel like again we don't know exactly how many kids that we're going to have signed up so having said that yes it could it could be the case um again it's it's it's your decision though um in regards to the direction so back to our our spreadsheet of you know what we're gonna get done this year you know so if the money goes to this then what are we gonna have to kick off that list and push down the road we would have to adjust something you're right yeah but it does benefit not only it does benefit the the three the elementary kids in the pre-k and it's it's a again it doesn't it's not like we're asking to split this 50 50.
how we made it what are we doing because this is serious now that doesn't even count what we've been spending to deal with all this we'll get to that the district has a healthy level of reserves of carryover which is similar to savings we've also gotten additional code related grants or cares from the basically from the federal government we have what they're calling um cares sr1 you've got 112 445 i use that to offset job loss because i could use it we could either use it to buy things which then i have to submit that to department of ed and then you have to go through and if you're buying things like oh i bought 12 ppe this i bought six of those you have to go through every single thing with more trouble than it's worth so i put positions in and i said because of our enrollment our decrease in funding we would have had to let these these staff members go and that was allowable then we had enrollment stabilization grant of 169 524.50 that is the one that mr edlund is saying that was supposed to be initially the government thought the governor thought he would keep any decrease or loss of enrollment would be limited to two percent he kept telling us that now that's not what happened we got 169 000 instead of like 725 000.
um we had masks optional we're going to change obviously face coverings required for governor's executive order and it's this the department of health services that will tell us when we no longer are required to wear masks that's not a decision that the board makes that's not a decision that the administration makes that's the governor's this um delegating that authority to the department the arizona department of health services uh limited assemblies and we'll talk a little bit about that what that means socially distance when possible we also that is pretty much the extent of the significant changes we already had follow ai guidelines and that kind of stuff so when it comes to some of these assemblies um because of the you know there's things like um we're talking about graduation and we're working with findlay toyota to hold graduation at the finley toyota center and socially distance they're going to have assigned seats in groups of 10 which is what each graduate's going to get 10 tickets they're going to sit together and we are going to have to wear masks but that's just part of and so when they cross the stage they can take their mask off we may be doing other things we will be up on the stage we may be doing elbows or fists or something else with graduates we'll have to work that out and see what things are like but we want to have we want to honor our graduates in a safe manner we're also we met today about the prom and we'd like to hold the prom as well again somewhere ideally outside wearing masks and have in a safe manner have these activities so that we can get to some semblance of normal normalcy as we in a safe manner as we approach as as the numbers are going down hopefully by may maybe we don't have to wear matches maybe we do we don't know but if things continue as is we can have some of these activities okay and then also normally we have one big assembly for awards we'll do the seniors awards separately which is normal but we have we'll each do a grade level at the high school things like that and then at the middle school we'll do grade levels so we'll kind of break things up instead of big large groups we'll try to break it up and and and smaller chunks to be able to kind of spread out a little bit more in some of these venues i really appreciate that i really appreciate everybody that's trying to make i've had a lot of people text me to ask me if we're going to do graduation and i'm like i don't know so i really think i know it's going to be a lot of extra work for you guys but i really think it's important that we get these kids into some little we're going to do the senior blast um that's going to go up tomorrow i think that yvette said that with that information about um about graduation because we want people our parents to be able to plan if they want grandma grandpa to be there if they can be there so yeah awesome well good job that's great um again this is an action item regarding face coverings are accommodations being made for students who are asthmatic or like can wear a mask with doctors well masks it doesn't have to be a cloth face mask some people in the room are wearing shields face shields and so face shields were specifically called you know allowed in the executive order and so um it's face coverings in general which include masks or shields is what we allow i think we have only one person that's a staff member that had a doctor's note saying they couldn't wear either and we're making those accommodations but otherwise if people can't wear masks typically shields um seem to be okay for for most everyone a else to approve the revised and instructional model guidelines i'll move we approve your revised in-person instructional model guidelines second please any discussion or questions all in favor thank you item 7a i'm sorry 12a revised policy c uh uh so this is the policy i was referring to earlier uh i believe this is our lead bank policy that we wanted to revise a lot of us felt that in its current state believe bank is kind of useless and i don't think a lot of people use it the way it's set and so we decided that we really needed to fix it or get rid of it so we decided to try to fix it and make it so it's something that our staff can take advantage of to help people out who for those individuals that want to invest into the league bank and uh so the superintendent shows part of that that crew found some areas that had some really good ideas and so we feel that this is going to help make this uh the leap bank something that our employees can utilize it would involve them donating leave into the bank at the beginning of the year kind of an open enrollment type model where you have to commit depending on if you're i believe year one you cannot be eligible because this is based on the family medical leave act if you're not eligible for fmla uh on your first year but two to five years it would be one of your days uh per year and then it uh anything over that would be two days uh it's the value of the individual's leave that goes into the bank so it's not just the hours it's a monetary value that goes in there and then if employees are eligible for family medical leave act emergencies or whatnot something that qualifies with that or maternal or paternal leave they can uh submit well we'll make a kind of a subcommittee that will look at these applications uh to determine if they've met the requirements and then it would be a matching kind of a would be a match so if you needed a week and you had a week you would put in you know you'd put in half of that the bank would match the other half and it would go up to i believe 12 weeks is the maximum that you can uh get on fmla so if you had six weeks and you needed those 12 you would put in six the bank would put in six and that would that way um you'd be covered however if you needed 12 and you only had two then you're only getting your two plus the matching two so this is something that would we would hope would encourage some of our staff to save their leave and then utilize the bank so if they do hit situations just as a superintendent shoal did last year that they would be able to uh have that at that extra leave at their disposal as it currently sits now the only time you're eligible to even look at the lead bank is if you're completely depleted with this case you wouldn't be able to and then shortly after had another one still have some leave left over to take advantage of that so we feel that this is this is kind of a step in the right direction we know there may be some tweaks once we get rolling with this to uh to fine-tune it if you will but i believe it's it's a step in the right direction to make this something usable again staff would have to put in up front if they don't put in they're not eligible it's not something you could just jump right into later on and then take advantage of so you kind of have to commit to it um in the beginning kind of in that early open enrollment and that lead would just come out right out of your initial yearly allocation but either the one day or two days if the bank gets too high i know there's verbiage in there that maybe those uh five-year plus employees may only have to put one in if it gets too low that committee can request all participants to uh add some more in if if that elite bank gets too low and then that would become a choice whether you want to commit more of your leave into the bank to stay in the bank for the year or if you just kind of you don't and then you kind of opting yourself out for the remainder of that year larry this is a i could say gently fairly complex program do we have a simple fact sheet that we handle and to all the employees so they understand the opportunities as well as the rules for participation i don't believe we have anything i mean i think there were a lot of people that weren't even aware as it stands now that there was a leaf bank or no well yeah and you know i think we all took time to read this yes but i would certainly hope if you don't that some you know one-page fact sheet of you know what it takes what benefits are at least to get people interested might get more participation i would imagine that our all-staff orientation at the beginning of the year we include that yeah that's one of the whole days full of stuff yeah that's true we had talked about including it so we we go out to um shelly our human resources coordinator and i go out to the schools to go over the open enrollment for health insurance and that would be the time that we would likely do this as well to give that information out while we have the staff focusing on health insurance activities say to let them know what this new you know that's the time that they would basically opt in it has to be before um july 1 whether they opt in or not at that time so john all i'm suggesting is just like a one-page handout that's given to the staff so as soon as they're done with the meeting they can go back and look at it where they're trying to remember the details of it yep and we can get that done thank you penny so yeah couple questions um so on the first page you have in the event of a member declined to contribute and they would lose their membership so what if they don't have any days left to contribute too bad well in the beginning that's why we would this would be done more toward when everybody earns their leave so you kind of you know it's payday leave payday so you need to commit basically when you have leave to get into this and everyone gets their leave for example um teachers get eight hours a month so they would get 80 hours of leave that's all given to them at the beginning of the year so they would have to opt in and then one day which for them would be nine and a half hours would come out of their leave allocation when they have 80 in there so they have leave when they have when they decide to um at a minimum they have 80 uh when they decide whether they want to opt in or not okay yeah i was referring to the part where it says if the balance falls below ten thousand dollars then if they don't have leave then they they're just out until the next open enrollment period will be out yeah if they were out by that point and then secondly um 24 consecutive days is that consecutive work days or or every day of the week that's 24 days is the and actually it's it's 24 days or the equivalent hours is what fmla is the maximum period of time for family medical leave act work days it's 48 starting 48 48 days so they can um somebody can match up to 24 days they put in 24 they get 24 for the 48 which is the six weeks or 12 weeks 12 weeks work days okay yeah or days not calendar days and if there's holidays in there you don't count the holidays um that kind of stuff okay i'll just cure you yeah thank you questions this is just a first reading so we will readdress this all right item 12 the policy [Music] this is another first reading so there will be no action possible on it it will come back at the april board meeting but with everything that's happened over the last year we felt it was appropriately included some teleporting guidelines that we can share with staff if we ever get in a similar situation in the future this is the standard aspa policy on telecommuting again first reading we do have executive session tonight so we do need to have a motion made to go into whatever so as we've been doing all night any discussion or questions even though we can't answer any of the executives like a 10 minute break so that people can use the facilities if needed and then also our cameraman can kind of clear out his equipment sounds good all in favor all right yeah we'll do it in here you
can i please have a motion to approve the resolution regarding the dismissal of fourth year non-tenured certified personnel for school year 2021-2022 second joe and julia yes yes yes yes uh anybody we accepted a resignation from madeleine reading a second grade teacher effective may 28th we accepted a resignation of mary disney middle school 12 month secretary effective march 4th and we expected a resignation of shauna muirts third grade teacher effective may 28th uh anybody have any questions on foia requests no no no anybody have any questions on the administrator meeting agendas no no no the next regularly scheduled boarding will take place on monday april 2021 with closed session beginning at 6 pm we need to schedule a special board meeting preferably on april 27th or the 28th to close any business before this current board and to seat new members of the board after the april 6 2021 election so can we look at our calendars and see what we got i'm fine either dude either one it would be easier for me the 28th because i'm off work okay that's one yeah uh what time do we want to do do you want to start at 6 00 p.m yes what time six six all right um the iasb will be offering a starting right board self-evaluation workshop for all board members on june 9 2021 uh the time is to be determined and does anybody have anything else instead please have a motion to adjourn motion second tiffany and vivian all in favor aye aye any oppose i
so that's coming to a close new students there's different arrangements with students that are already peer partners in the school and how they move forward and much to what evan was speaking about schools are continuing to implement as many events as possible there's a couple of samples i know potter was having a virtual parent night is coming up soon they're going to do a virtual bingo game i think the schools are just trying really hard to make things as normal as possible at least continue to create relationships and involvement there's been sports and sparkle days and wear dartmouth logo days and mismatch days so the elementaries have been continuing that a little bit more on the music program i know um kathleen you had sent some information a while back and ian did provide some updates that i'll just go over this quickly with some of the space limitations at the elementary they weren't able to provide and you know there's new updates now the new guidance with the singing and whatever can't provide the 10-foot distancing for wind and recorders so that was one thing um the guidelines in singing were just changed so they're moving to transition the person the choral groups the rehearsals at the middle in high school and vocalizing at the elementary general music classes so and of course weather's getting nicer hopefully they'll be getting outside where they can really let loose if you will he mentioned that they're planning on rolling out the fifth grade band and string programs in early april and lessons will be once a week at night and there'll be six sessions preparing students for the sixth grade program he feels that they'll be able to do that safely especially with the vaccines coming up and evan mentioned the indoor ensemble so i won't mention anything about that but one thing that is important that he is trying to think about getting some fans in if you will or spectators coming up soon following the protocol that the athletic departments have used so we'll be listening in for that he's hopeful that that will be able to happen at some of the indoor percussion and preliminary planning has begun for high school concerts in the month of may not sure if they they will be virtual or in person with small groups being able to attend so they're working on that and they've done a phenomenal job as we all know just a very important announcement and i know it went out with the high school s'mores that ross puts out but year-end activities are being planned the discussions have been going on for a long time now with the class pres officers and the school student um advisors have met many times with the administration and also he mentions that during advisory all the seniors were able to jot down some ideas that they had for end of year so they've been collecting those ideas matter of fact as i said i was in one of the meetings with mr tebow last week and he happened to be consuming with the kids and we kind of chatted through that and they were coming up with a lot of good year-end ideas they're really trying to plan for as many in-person things that they can with the hope that with the guidance the public health guidance that we'll still be able to do some things of course they the the real plan is to have an in-person graduation ceremony we're not sure what it might look like but obviously we have to continue to follow health and safety so i talked to dr bromage this weekend and he volunteered to help with that planning he's he's planning our own graduation at umass um and he said he would love to help the dartmouth schools help plan he's also planning the academy awards right now so i think he's he knows what he's doing um and he offered his services to help the district out with planning that i think you have his contact information i i do i have an email feel free to contact him and he will help the district with awesome i'll let you i'll let ross know to your comments dr gifford where are we at right now and you know i apologize for not knowing this but where are we at with the um with the guidance from the state as far as large gatherings has any of that change in regards to logic like i don't know i honestly i haven't i i can say what aaron has told me um and this is all this is not official but um you know we are moving and playing moving ahead we're probably not going to do one graduation at ums dartmouth we're looking at doing groups or pods of graduation which is a little easier for us but um he because we do ours in may right the usually around the beginning to mid-may a couple weeks after that in the beginning of june um he thinks that we will be in a better place i'm not sure really able to be able to do one graduation but i do think that he suspects that we will be able to do an in-person graduation most likely outdoors so we have to do some contingency planning it may require sort of multiple groups right across the day but he believes he told me that we can do in-person graduation where we they are projecting we will be at that time based on right what we know right right so fingers crossed but i'll let ross know that um he's willing to help out so anyway i think that's important that people know that it is in the works and things are being planned and um a calendar events would come out a menu of events will come out as soon as they kind of have things firmed up i guess knowing anything could change if health guidelines shift in the wrong direction but it doesn't look likely we're hopeful another thing for the second year in a row we're going to be offering students a chance to earn the seal of bi-literacy so um if case you don't know the mast deci looks at that as an official designation from massachusetts so it recognizes graduates who are proficient obviously in english in another language and they get to take an exam and we started last year with we get a seal and it goes on their diploma so deadlines and i know the high school students obviously have this information but the registration deadline is wednesday march 31st if that exam isn't is here in our language lab and the district we do pay for the students exams i think it's like 20 each so would they say they might have 150 this year or something yeah kids taking the taking the exam so it's a nice designation and that they have and then finally uh one of the two things um just to piggyback on what uh miss townsend said before and and to kathleen i know you mentioned every week and so we did we do continue to circle back with the schools and they are through the team process they have identified and i think it's around 39 at each of the schools those students that are not what we really determine as high needs according to the real definition but struggling kids that for academic needs or else we also have some ell students that come every day so it is happening you know maybe not everyone but i think it's a good effort and they do um consider every whatever is brought up through the team process and i think finally just um you know we're continuing to plan for our opening well opening expanded learning and we expect well you probably all saw the board of education they did vote in favor of commissioner riley's plan or proposal so that it's an emergency um approval right now he's i'm laughing though he's and then he's going to go out for public comment but come back for a real approval in may but by that point we're moving along you know but i he we're expecting i just saw an email tonight come through from desi that expecting the new guidance um sometime tomorrow with the commissioner meeting on wednesday so we'll look forward to that but as you know we're continuing our work mr kiley's been busy with the schools working desks have been purchased to get us going and what we need to get all the elementary students in and still working on how to best serve lunch make sure the distancing for the six feet is maintained etc so um we're moving right along are there any major hiccups right now with other than lunch yeah just lunch is and it's a challenge but yeah we're working we'll get it done yeah we'll get it done especially if we can get some warmer weather yeah just the yeah the fact that it kids need to be six feet apart right obviously that can't happen in the classroom where everybody's three feet apart under this you know reopening yeah so it's um it's it's challenging we're gonna make it work how about transportation's in pretty good shape now that said it's going to look very different than what it looked like with our right coveted protocols in place i mean we'll still have the sanitizing protocols in place but the distancing the physical distancing is going away you know that went away in the guidance i find it a little i disagree with it but that's my opinion yeah uh you know that you can sit two kids together yeah not from the same household um but and that's gonna happen i mean that's we have to do that in order to get the kids to school so that's that's part of our plan and uh yeah we're in the bus company is expecting that yep yep we're in we're in good shape transportation wise considering you know in terms of the plan yes and then along that lines i am we are concerned obviously what's going to happen next with middle and high school that's a bigger bigger bigger challenge for us if we don't know but one thing i will say at the middle school i've asked them to come up with more synchronous learning for students so i even when we're in the hybrid method right now what they're going to be doing and mr doane's been meeting with his staff they're planning to unveil this soon as soon as he has the details to the parents that are in the hybrid model but um teachers will be offering for the four academics every day one live lesson so so students will be able to just similar to the high school but no specials we just you know it's just timing and scheduling and we can't but um they've done a nice job even up until this point to offer scheduled times that teachers have been available for students to pop in ask questions get extra help even um the virtual students have had that opportunity but this is going to be more of a scheduled kind of you know so i think every day we just try to expand learning more and more and get kids more involved but we'll see what the commission ends up saying you know he hasn't put any restrictions in on the middle in high school yet and as we said that's that'll be a big problem for us space-wise a big problem so we'll see okay we'll see mr news thank you mr chairman uh dr gifford mr kylie two questions uh number one how's the and i apologize i should have given you the heads up i didn't get a chance the numbers the applications for school choice how did those go oh i would say around 50ish okay probably has the exact number but around there okay around there okay okay good come in uh lastly just going piggybacking on what you were talking about middle and high school i mean is there any chance that those students we're going to have you know everybody in the middle and high school in in the not too near distant future or is that who knows are we still hoping for against hope well i think it'd have to be a big conversation the middle school has worked really hard on assessing it and it i never want to use the word impossible but um whether it's feasible in the disruption to the schedule that we have now in order to make it work the spacing we can't fit or we cannot fit all the kids in in the classroom we just cannot do it even at three feet we just can't okay so if they were to use you know the cafeteria the auditorium some kids let's just say they'd be half a class in the auditorium streaming into the live class that's down the hall then you have to disrupt staffing to monitor them it's you know it's just it's a it's a big challenge it would really be a big challenge um nothing's impossible i suppose but difficult and to what end you know the proposal is almost like it'd be a half day of live so then kids would go home so that just to accommodate all the scheduling the prep times the supervising of classes um i think what did he say one of the class 100 eighth grade students pretty much wouldn't fit in classrooms given the parameters that we have to abide by right yeah so thank you we continue to look at it we continue to plan sure yeah i know understood thank you ma'am welcome to the channel dr jenkins so i just want to go back to um you know the end of the year events and i know some of my colleagues saw this on facebook you know some well-meaning parents are starting to say understand i mean i'm a parent of a high school senior too i'm super sad for all they've missed but they're starting to plan their own events and you know we all sort of stepped in and said you know please just hold on so i think it's really important for all of us to say here that we are committed to trying to figure out ways to do this and i think we need to be better about communicating on this because rumors are starting to go out and so the message needs to keep going out that we are committed to figuring this out it may not look the same but like one very well-meaning parent right was you know had like a a place and a dj and this lined up and my my worst nightmare is that what ends up happening is some kids get a prom and some kids don't or some kids get multiple problems and some kids don't so i really just want to state that we are committed to trying to make it happen for these kids and i really want people to just be patient with us because these guidelines are continually changing i would hope that even if we had to figure out putting on again four small that the school would do it so that we ensure that every child has an opportunity to experience these things i do not want us to end up in a situation where we say we can't do it and then they all go private and the cool kids are getting something and some kids are not that's my worst fear both as a parent and a school committee member and so i really want to say how committed we are um to making it may not be the same problem right let's be clear it's not going to look like a normal prom but we are committed to figuring out ways to make these things happen and for them to be special to these kids and i would just ask people to be patient with us and i would also ask the administration to you know particularly at the high school and the middle school where these events can really do take out size importance to be very frequently communicating with parents they haven't been canceled yet we're still working on it because people are understandably nervous about you know what this is going to look like for their kids so we have to reiterate to them our commitment to this and let them know that we are trying to figure this out and we will we will figure something out thank you right that's something i think that's important that you know i mean it's all going to depend on all seriousness what on the guidance on the guidance that we get from yeah the governor and the people up there is that you know right but i would also very strongly right i mean understand if they sit there and they say you're gonna have 50 people at an outdoor event i mean we're in trouble right but here's what i would here's what i would say so now we've got to sit here and say okay we're going to have and i'm just off the top of my head so please don't take this as gospel but so now we've got to sit here and say okay we're going to the prom is going to be on this date and it's going to be at six different venues because that's how we can get 300 students into a prompt if you know what i'm saying no i like it i i understand what you're saying mr news i certainly understand what dr jenkins is saying um my daughter was a senior last year you know while she didn't live through the whole pandemic of her senior year she did lose out in her last three three months of her senior year and it was it sorry it's it's tough it's especially as a parent seeing seeing your child lose out on all that so that being said i agree that i think that there should be some kind of middle ground that the school department can come to that we we've got to do some try to do something to the best of our abilities right for our high school seniors yeah and and to be honest the seniors that are working on this are really what i was listening in they're even looking at little small events too something special um like an ice cream truck day just for the seniors just little things as well so do you throughout the month beneficial worthwhile maybe not next meeting but you know in the near future um that we could get a report on on the senior class the senior activities as we have some ideas this way it'll get it out there because shannon's right that a lot of parents are getting concerned and um this we're we talk about this all the time for those of you at home watching dr giffords always briefing us but um yeah we are committed to this take yours one step further maybe right after april vacation as things really wind start to wind up we could have the four senior class officers here at a meeting socially distanced to explain what's going on and and talk to us that would be nice time with me yeah i would love i think that would be great yeah i would agree i would just say as a parent of a teenage boy information doesn't always come home to me through my child which is why i think it's really important that that we communicate via email via newsletters with parents i know like i've seen pictures i hear what what ross is doing and the students are very involved right but sometimes i think students are not communicating that to their parents or i mean those student planning only involved maybe 20 or 30 students and so not everyone knows what's going on um and so parents don't hear things and they hear rumors right and that that just goes off like wildfire so i think we need to be very you know in a normal year you don't need to have a communication plan about end a year because things happen like normal but this year we have to be very conscious about communicating to the parents what's happening in the planning where we are and all of that because lots of misinformation is out there and and again i understand your point mr nunes my concern is and and i've i saw it um not here thankfully but like pro homecomings and proms and other communities where parents were putting on private events and then kids are posting pictures like in their prom or their homecoming clothes and other kids aren't invited to that and that i don't want to happen right if if we have to do like three events or four events in different places i would rather that than not do it because then some kids aren't going to have access to that and to me that's the worst possible outcome i want every kid to it's not going to be the same but to have something um that they can go to so it's all the same that's my my most uh sort of important thing that i really want for these kids thank you that's all i have thank you dr gifford uh report of the chair so i really don't have anything other than just to let everyone know watching and you know that uh we we get your emails we we read them we listen to them after our last meeting everyone has their own opinions lots of opinions and lots of ideas lots of suggestions um at the end of the day the committee you know we get briefed all the time from dr gifford the administration as to where we're at as we you know we're well informed with the public health side of it and you know chris and mr miesha our public health director joined the meeting last week it was very helpful and all i can say at the end of the day is we we understand you know not everyone's going to be happy but we got a job to do and we're going to do it to the best of our ability with with students the number one priority and safety the number one priority um so thank you for your emails um and you know just know that we do the best job we can with the information we have at the time dr jenkins i'd also like to say something along that line um you know i will be honest i've actually quit many of the local facebook groups people are entitled to their opinion but this year has been really hard on everyone here um but i would say particularly our our administrators and our teachers um and some of the things that have been said have been very unkind and i would hope that people would stop before they say those things um i know we see it how hard everyone is working our teachers are have reinvented their entire jobs they're teaching multiple classes a day basically not just the kids in front of them but the kids at home you know people will say well why don't we have these plans because we didn't get anything from the state right we can't make plans what if the state says a b and c or d e and f or h j k like we don't know we can't plan until we have the parameters we also know for those of us sitting here that our administrators are working tirelessly they're doing their normal job they're preparing for a pandemic their contact tracing there's literally not enough time in the day to do all this and so people are entitled to say their own to have their own opinions and to say what they want but i would just ask people to show a little kindness right a little bit of kindness goes the wrong way we can disagree a lot of us up here disagree but i respect my fellow committee members for the time that they give and i would hope that people would respect our staff our teachers and all of the people who are working to put on school this year and make it safe well said well well said dr jenkins thank you and with that i would actually like to just thank the baker polito administration following our meeting uh to to finally vaccinate educators let's be honest it was only a pres after president biden made the move first so i said here thank you thank you to our federal government um yeah but you can't register till tomorrow right you can you can through the pharmacy you can't through the pharmacy no you know what i know but thank you that was i just couldn't believe it took as much lobbying months and months of the most logical thing that could have happened right exactly with that the next meeting of the dartmouth school committee is march 22nd at 6 30.
it's a small number but again again it's it's 22 000 and change so how much will the elementary kids as a preschool kids use it right now like the am preschoolers take a 20 years well actually four times because we got two different sections so to do that there has to be some coordination with the daycare i assume yourself because you don't want to intermix those kids is that right yeah because of the space of the playground it's not that we wouldn't want the kids to be together there's a certain square footage like classes i mean i like that this idea that you know it would be like okay our money or whatever whatever money goes for certain things and it is kind of nice to be like yeah the playground was helping for by whatever grant doesn't look specific and i definitely see the point that if we're going to need it for operational funds and then we can use this capital like but like celina said i agree with that like where's that gonna so you won't be able to use if you don't use this for a capital outlay for the program you won't be able to use capital outlay to fund something else for operations right property two thousand dollars respectively yes it is if you choose to go if you choose to go away from the capital outlay option it just means that haley and i we're going to have to make sure that we you know like i said well first of all the point the plumbing bid comes in tomorrow guys and if it's if that's 95 000 that's going to be a big world of hurt if it's under 50 000 that's going to make us feel a lot better who knows if it's 30 000 if it's 60 000 if it's 90 000 that building's 100 years old so so what you're saying is the plumbing bed comes in high then we need more capital that money no we just we we're well we're going to be we're going to have to we're going to have to beat the bushes for additional grant funding and we're going to have is that as a board and as being transparent as possible with our public we've levied our capital outlet funds for k-12 education those capital outlay funds were levied at the time four meals for the school one male four just renovations like moving forward if that's the direction of the board and the district that we need capital outlay to sustain the daycare or the early learning program i just i feel like we may be crossing a line with being open and honest with our public on how we're spending our funding currently and i will say this and i'll say this time with what tracy has said i agree with what she said if there was no connection with elementary school play kids using that playground i would not be saying we need to do this but there is 80 minutes a day where they're going to have a much better playground set up than they currently do now to be a shared facility if you will and i don't think anyone's saying if it's just holy grail funded it can't be shared is that going to be how this works no i think what here i i mean it gets the buy-in from the district i guess but well i if i understand it right what you're saying is if we don't spend this capital outlay at 22 on the playground equipment we don't have any money out there to fund operational side of the daycare and that's what you want to use correct this money from and uh but on the other side of that we told the public that this is going to be budget neutral so now i want to emphasize again budget neutral to the general fund because that was the concern that some staff members had we were going to be taking money out of the general fund and we said yeah that that you're exactly neutral that it was going to be taken away from so-and-so getting carpet in their classroom i mean you know correct if there was no connection with the elementary school and then being able to use this playground for 80 minutes a day then you're right i'm not asking to do this but there is that connection that could exist and to kind of answer your question lucas well we say hey listen if the district doesn't kick in any money here will that does that mean that the the elementary school can't use the playground well that's going to be up to haley and her staff and organizing and scheduling if if we do this what i'm going to do is make that directive to haley this needs to happen where the schedule is need to mesh so that not only elementary school can use it but also the daycare if the funding isn't there i mean it's again i i if you as a board tell me that needs to happen so be it but um we don't have any support financially into this program the kids at the elementary school are getting a benefit out of this but we don't necessarily have a skin in the game as a board so again if you guys tell me that we need to get to not use capital outlay and we need to have the elementary kids be involved in that playground we'll make we'll make it work that's where i'm falling on is use the grant money there's going to be a lot of checks written for that day here between now and the first playground check and already dipping into kappa outlay which i mean like as selena said that somebody's carpet or walls or something in their room and if you know if we think this is something we want to hold on to that one meal for that expires this year then we take that to the public and talk about it for the four meals and then one actually for the science foreign but as it started it was a budget neutral and we're going to get a bunch of grants okay that's that's where i thought did anybody else have [Music] i kind of feel like we should use the way we're not voting anyway it's just great i like i'd like to save that grant money back for operational just because running a daycare is so expensive and we don't really we have a ton of unknowns we don't know how many kids we're going to have we know that everybody's going to use that playground and it takes a lot of money take care all right i supported kevin and this is i'm going to throw this out as another idea you could table this until i have a board meeting and then we will have a better idea when the plumbing bids come in because they come in tomorrow that is an option or you can decide what you want to do today that's an option too we can't so the plumbing um couldn't be paid paid i'm just talking about should we pay for um with some capital outlay funds since it's a building we maintain anyone well we are renovating it for the for the daycare purposes so to me that doesn't benefit that doesn't benefit the elementary kids that's where my difference is with the playground i think we should take a look i think saying well i don't really like the idea of taking it from capital lottery to be honest even if we could get that number smaller maybe i pay for half that 22 000 with that and a half from calculating a little better but i prefer to table it because i don't want to take it from capital l unless it's absolutely necessary okay okay i think that sounds like where we're going we'll get some bids in for the plumbing that'll have a better idea going forward with capital or what the infrastructure build of the daycare will be and then we'll see how much early learning centers that'll see how much operational money we'll need are supposed to open those tomorrow tomorrow yes when does the one build retire or whatever 2022 okay it's more so yeah next item is personnel i shouldn't accept the retirement request of susie baby fair professional effective february 26 2021.
he has made it clear he does not plan to fund any more npcs he's made it he kind of got cranky about all that we have now what they're calling the crrsa sr2 and that's going to be 440 720 and 17 cents that can be used similar to the sr1 the five initials i forgot to bring it over the cover page of the grant paperwork it's basically like um the covid recovery it's for recovery and care getting kids that safety student safety act but it's similar to cares federal grant one one should assume one time only um if i add those three things up that grant the sr2 can be spent this year and black next year and you can go back to march of 2020 which is a problem with fiscal years but that's just a different problem total of these grants is 722 000 we still we're down we're down for funding the hundred and ninety three thousand five hundred and twelve so we're still down with even with all these grants we've still lost seventy thousand dollars and next year is going to be bad because now here's the question next slide um the grant funding receives is less than the m o reduction this year so we still are short 70 000.
mr chairman any more public comments uh miss gentler anything nothing no no public comment thank you very much thank you mr nunes for the reminder no problem my pleasure with that chair we'll entertain a motion to adjourn so move second motion by mr noon second by mrs amaral on the motion any other discussion you're hearing now all in favor aye opposed motion carries unanimously this meeting is jumped go big green friday night [Music] things
have motion second number one vote on your computers and mike are you still there hi election passes 6-0 next time is a bunch of time for uh a local option state average increase correct so for a number of years as it stated there that the state went average for local auction budget has been 30 30 ksde has informed us that they anticipate the statewide average to increase to approximately 31. so with that right and that's for the during the 2020 2021 school year so the final actual percentage it won't be known until june it just says again this increase will allow school boards to adopt and it will be as high as 31 for the 2021-2022 school year again without publishing a resolution subject to petition or protest so again you have that option basically because that state average is going from 30 to 31.
in addition we've spent approximately another 225 000 it's approximately because we've got open pos waiting for chromebooks that are taking now suddenly four or five months to get here um and that is a statewide probably nationwide problem because of supply and demand um another 000 in an expenses so we are still down about 300 000 after all of this next slide please and that's just this year so how do we spend our money and i just took this from each year we get um just as simplified we get dollars in the classroom reports in the legislature the auditor general has to issue it i just used they're required to issue it and the last um data we have is 1920 because we haven't finished this year yet we put 64.8 percent of our mno money it's in classroom spending so directly in the classroom that also includes student support things such as the attendance office um a lot of the special ed services speech um psychology the psychological test all those things it also is instruction support which is our teachers like pd and stuff again only in mno so that's almost 65 percent of our whole m o budget administration is another 16.6 administration is often viewed as a dirty word but you've got to remember what administration is it's the school administration it's the principal's office it's the secretaries it is the district office superintendent's office your business office it's i.t it's eric actually we have half of eric in 2500 the other half of him more in student support plant operations are 12.4 even without kids in these buildings there is a base level cost we can close some wings i've been trying to get dr dooley to look at things even if we close some wings you still have to go through at least weekly you have to flush toilets turn on water do other things because you don't want it to go into dry rot or other issues but there's a base level we basically have room if you look at the school facility board data we have room for about 900 students we only have now less than 400 so we're cooling heating cleaning a lot of space for not a lot of kids food service is 5.6 that's for all of our meals and then transportation is um less than one percent that's because mr yan is only in there a few hours a day so and we have split him at one time he was in like all transportation where he should be next slide fiscal 21 22 next year you know we're already looking at hiring and doing a lot of other things our challenges these 85 students how many will come back now when we were looking at the data and mr i call them mr casey because it's easier it took me a long time to realize is his name the left the big word i can't pronounce or is it baboo because i kept calling them different things every time i heard like i'm confused so mr k i called him mr casey um we were look he was looking at data and when i asked him to start looking at things for me probably in the in late fall he's very thorough he actually went through there was like 75 kids we were down he went through and he pinpointed where the kids who they were where they came from i think they also made efforts to follow up where they were what they were doing the schools will also get requests for records so if there's a record for example one of our families moved and the students in tallison union so they'll have requests for records of records are sent there but he had gone through student by student his best feel knowing his community looking at his data now again this is just his best estimate is that he thinks that we will recoup if we have school in person about half of these kids now here is where it gets tough if we make changes i.e budget cuts and and we're talking about most of our budget that can be cut our people because you can't get rid of your electric bill you can't get rid of your water certainly you can go around and you can put controls on the ac instead of using i don't know how many buildings we are we have but instead of using all of them you can put more i don't want kids too crowded but we don't necessarily have to spread out over all of our buildings because we don't have that kind of enrollment you can make some changes and and make sure that we're we're being responsible good stewards of them of public money but you can't get rid of a lot of that we still have to get our our liability insurance we have to pay for our health insurance which is another thing that'll probably go up yes yes yes so uh with payroll and utilities it's probably 85 80 85 utilities and payroll so what's your gift i'm just a 75-80 yes just on payroll and then the related employee benefits yes yes so people we're always talking about people we've taken i haven't done this here because we haven't had to in my previous district we would spend all this time three administrators trying to save a hundred thousand dollars or five hundred thousand dollars pick a figure and we would always take a look at xerox paper construction paper it's chump change we in that district it was 92 percent of our mno was salaries so that's the that's and that's what yeah leon's saying it's it's it boils down to people unfortunately my preference is always that we we don't hire and fill vacancies before we start going through that's always my preference if you can do that and i think most school administrators it doesn't make anybody happy or governing boards because we recommend to you where this dr dooley does but you're the ones that hire fire and set salary those kind of things um but the question is a tough one because if those kids don't come back or we lose more i've asked dr dooley to cut at least 250 worth of expenses next year and he told me but you told me the cuts are a lot bigger i said they are we're behind more but i can't get you to 250 because he's been kicking and screaming you think and he asked me so many times like the answer is going to change it's just getting that's true like he forgets like it's like you dr julie we talked about this we talked about this again you talked what about this i said no he said why don't you ask me to cut like 750 000 in a perfect world i wish you would that's my best advice as your accountant well with our cuts you can't get weight i can't get you to 250 000.
if we were to before if it was a set of 30 we want to go 31 32 or 33 it would be subject to protest with that being said um board's desire to look at the lld authority to go to 31 for next year if it was based on this year's numbers like our current lob in general fund it would have brought in an additional 75 to the llb um it would only increase in the levy about 0.15 of the male and only cost taxpayers about 1.73 a year so it will depend next year on what our general fund ends up being that it could be fairly similar is there a driving reason i guess that it's going into a state average of 31 i think a lot of other school districts are having to use 31 32 or 33 to make it through you know and they do that by resolution that can be petitioned right and then since that average jumps up with that average jumping up with other districts going to 31 32 or 33 that increases the state-wide average yeah you got it right gas alone okay i mean you just passed 100 miles no no you just have to we will officially approve the lmp later in the year but we have a report we have to submit to the state where we have to at least we can tell them what our number could be it doesn't lock us in so that's why we were discussing it so if we if i do need to put in 31 in case we do plan to go to that um it doesn't make any sense not to do it it's exactly right it gives us that authority and we may or may not depending upon how you know the budget configures in the summer that's how other questions anybody okay uh negotiations do we need 20 minutes i [Music] executive session for negotiations um he just sent you on your way he just sent you on your way come back this way uh okay yes if just make sure it's not it's not streaming it is [Music] i appreciate the haley kane i'm just thanking for time anything else thank you dr thorpe