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That's why he has progressed so much in school. If I send him to school, how much security would I have? Will there be help for him? Another teacher? How many assistants will be available? If there aren't supposed to be any, he shouldn't touch, or will they go? to be independent my kindergarten children Carlos thank you ma'am I'm going to ask that question in English and when you give the answer I'm going to translate it ok the storm of questions and you know that with this action to focus on speech reigned in the edition environment I'm leaving now they finish watching the debut we will suspend gmail it is seen in pension regime Jorge Valdés Aller adjacent to its water drive guarantee watch yesterday before I provide internal well they are urgent and I live because someone is the law the one who has margins and be constant finance and how will be providing ring services James Stein show will be king has opinion web of the service what I have to special education services like speech will continue in different ways one way is like before really during the day when they are in class in Salem Salem the classroom for a little while to receive those types of services will also continue and distance services too so right now the plan is that those special education services for the support and success of our students will be working and they will be doing how many people will be helping per classroom how many helpers will there be apart From the teacher and how much interaction they will have with the students in my son's case, how much would I trust that they will help him in the class, not the next class, within the class because I've supposedly had meetings with the teachers, he should have someone helping him, but I understand right now with the situation that there won't be many people in the classrooms and so I want to trust the school that they will help him, but I need to know to what extent.

There are two issues, Jamenei 2 in education, helping by Charles, we were also at the Wansee Center child conference, the article is serious, people behave, genes, YouTube, sexism, to their situation, not the Kinder Forum Uruguay, Agua Caliente, that portal, to help the MLS on this occasion, right now, since we don't know exactly the truth about his situation or the class or the school, none of that, but the assistants who help a student, those types of support, can be in the classroom too, and also my son has many allergies It's very common in this type of person, they're always sneezing, sneezing, sneezing. All of that can affect things. Thank you for that question. Mr. Rocchio will answer that. Yes, thank you for the question. And I think I read a question about how it is in the [unclear - possibly "the betrayals of the [unclear - possibly "dia" - meaning "diabetic" - possibly ...] "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" "diabetic" " And as they say, can they work with it?

Because from what I know, they're going to have this program, so it depends on whether they stay home. So, this is my concern: if he stays home, will he continue with the program or not? Another thing about him is that right now, at the academic level, the teacher has tried to keep them at the level they're at now, which is like a regular class. So, my concern is that even if he's only in class two days a week, which is very little, and seeing three hours a day on those two days, and then what they're going to give them virtually, he'll feel like he's falling behind a lot. Or is there a way you're going to work with them so they reach the educational level that this school year should determine? Thank you for your questions. The goal is for the students to continue in their programs, like the program you're talking about right now, the double immersion program.

As we've communicated, the best person to answer these questions is the principal. I don't know if it's valid to... Hatch, but at any school, the principals will have these types of meetings where they can answer in more detail. The goal is for them to continue with their dual immersion programs. The only point is that, although the students will only be attending school in person two days a week, on Wednesdays they will be with their teachers remotely. On the other two days, depending on the student—whether they are learning English or not—they will also have time with their teacher. Thank you very much for your questions. That's all the time we have tonight. But as a reminder, we will take all the questions from this meeting and all the questions from the English meetings and turn them into a frequently asked questions document, which we will share with you all in the coming weeks.

All our schools will have meetings similar to tonight's, but they will be adapted to their specific locations and will be provided with much more detail. We also invite you to our meeting. The board meeting will be held next Tuesday, March 16th, at 5:30 p.m., where we will be dedicating that evening to our April reopening plans. Finally, a reminder that we have a website with all the things we've taught today and many more resources. We want to thank our staff who have been working so hard to ensure that our students' return is a safe one. We are excited to welcome our students back to our schools. We want to thank you for your questions today and for joining us tonight. Have a good night.

you must cut you know it's going to be horrific we all do and you'll vote on this plan and go home acknowledging you know regrettably bad things are for the school but knowing you've done your job as a board no doing your jobs award needs holdings dr julian's administration speak is a fire in this time of crisis because you hired him and after 250 000 his administration was hoping for an increased enrollment hoping for increased enrollment hoping he used the term half a dozen times yet not one board member bothered to ask him what he plans to do or is doing besides hoping ms burns told you mr casey and the staff to complete a comprehensive and determine that 50 of the parents who have unenrolled their kids are unlikely to re-enroll them but did that analysis determine why those parents were choosing not to enroll their kids i don't have an answer and neither do you because nobody on this board asks the question it matters because if you know why if the administration knows why then maybe something could be done in the last meeting mr guthrie asked about the high rate of attrition and custodial staff but what this board should be asking for are exit interviews so you know why custodians after leaving you know why teachers are leaving because right now you don't know i think attrition is unacceptably high in this district our kids deserve as much staff continuity as possible the sport should be doing more to learn from this administration what changes we need to help them have real leadership in this district would have leveraged aqua's uniqueness and small size to mitigate the problems we're facing dr julie is not does not do this in the face of those facts that were going for a six-figure contract to maintain business as usual our kids and teachers deserve better none of you are paid to be sitting up here giving your time and it's appreciated that you signed up to serve your community please meet and talk as a body to determine what information you should have that you don't have come up with a plan to acquire the information you don't have and demand accountability because that's what functioning effective boards do coming together once a month to vote on items put them for you is not enough it's just part of why you're here you're a governing body and if there's ever a time to govern it says personal attacks upon board members staff personnel and other persons in attendance um the lord are discouraged and upon the conclusion of open call to public individual members of the board may respond to any criticism made by an individual who has addressed the board um mr hopkins i request that i have three minutes as a response mr robinson and i am going to include mrs robinson because i it goes right along with it even though your speech is yours alone there are other things that are involved in this monday night and i am paraphrasing you said that you and mrs robinson had explored places to settle one of the main requirements was a good school district after being here for a while you realize that our schools did not measure up to your expectations is this correct i'm speaking in defense of the school the board the staff and all the children that attend and highlight we are not perfect no school is but we are open to suggestions that will make us a better school i am stating this is my own opinion though i hope upon hearing that some of the good members will agree with me being negative and at times bordering on slanderous does not make a good school district recalls do not make a good school district nasty letters do not make the school good students constantly finding fault does not make a good school district i believe the primary goal of any school district is to provide the children of that district with the best environment and tools for learning how does all this negativity look to our students the staff works hard to instill kindness honesty and positivity into them what kind of examples are we to them and the children of aho who are arguing all the time i challenge you mr robinson to come back again and speak to us again both you and mrs robinson at what have the ability to make positive changes what are your ideas that would help learning and further the education of all students we need to work together on common goals what you are doing now does not do that so i look forward to hearing you from you again soon marcia thank you also on monday when we had our work meeting we did ask the question of what was a plan to address the shortfall and um dr lilly assured us that he would have a budget or plan um for us in our next next month in our board meeting so it's not like we go like we are not interested in what happens there we're just giving administration a chance to present to us what they need to do in order to address the budget it's a very difficult time for everybody right as i said on monday after one time i'm almost losing eighty thousand dollars a month because i voted right and so every business in town i'm sure your magazine also everybody is having to adjust the lower budgets and you know it's just a tough time so um not like we're just blindly rather than goals all right i am uh changing agenda just a little bit and if you would go to student business number two approval of the scholarship donation of the state of the world mr farmer is here to make the [Music] mr farmer called me about a week or two ago and we all knew john burns john burns taught in honolulu high school his whole career he was an avid golf coach and probably a couple other sports that i've forgotten he was an outstanding statewide an outstanding student council executive i ran the student council program here for years he retired from teaching beginning the school year i remember when i was here and became a board member at that time he served two terms on the board um he invited our kids our primary kids high school kids private gifts because throughout this he had his avid trains collection and santa's shop that he sent us village thank you good work that he built in his house he built special room for that so kids would come up there on field trips i took my granddaughter there um john was into this town i used to say if you scratch john or mrs cameron they bleed red but we all would but they were really auto regulators from the word go mr burns unfortunately passed away in december of 19 and then been a few years before board members and um mr farmer was his executor am i correct kenny and he and kenny were dear friends and golf together and coached together and told crazy stories and because i heard john's version of it and then kenny had advised me that mr burns and his estate left the proceeds from the sale of his house to the district and i asked mr farmer if he'd come in and talk about that a little bit nobody's stealing your thundercam oh no you're fine you're fine i appreciate you taking the time to come out this first time i've seen you support me in 20 years i know my name is ken farmer and i am the professional representative for john burns and i'm here to fulfill my friends and fellow teachers to ask wishes john came here in 1975 and started in he taught business type and computer science he was a student council sponsor for over 20 years he did coach villa very important he was a sport he and i were scored for football games until i became an official basketball volleyball he was a school board member for several years and i would like to read through you from his will and testament item 4 section f my residential home and the lock there under is to be sold in the net proceeds which i'll go to a scholarship plan for the ottawa high school students specifically for students going to a business school only with such scholarship funds to be administered by migrants and farmer and aids department local arizona so he did specify that these report suits going into business computer science and the lights and so the home has been sold and i would like to present to the board a check for 133 thousand dollars for the john the john burns memorial scholarship i rose between two thorns thank you so you guys scholarships oh number two the acceptance of um this appearance donation to the iraq school district to the amount of 135 000.

at this time i'd like to call the meeting to order and will stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right and first up we have the uh recognitions and celebrations dr kellis um thank you madam president uh members of the board if you wouldn't mind just doing a quick roll call of attendance let the record reflect that all board members are present with the exception of miss pritchard thank you uh madam president members of the board members of cabinet this evening we have an amazing recognition recognition to present and renee ryan will present this information madam president members of the board superintendent kellis and cabinet it is my pleasure to share with you that our very own melanie coron vlasic has been recognized with a 2021 lifetime achievement in school social work award the honor recognizes her exemplary service to children and families and mentorship to other school social workers melanie please join us at the front left of the room to receive your certificate and then proceed to the backdrop at the east side of the room for a photo melanie is a social worker at ashton ranch elementary school and was recently recognized for the award at the school social work association of arizona's march 5th annual conference march is school social worker month and this week is actually school social worker week please join me in congratulating melanie carone vlasic on this achievement next we have audience with individuals i'll read this statement this is the time for the public to comment members of the board may not discuss items that are not specifically identified on the agenda pursuant to ers 3843101 action taken as a result of public comment will be limited to directing staff to study the matter responding to any criticism or scheduling the matter for further further consideration and decision at a later date in order to facilitate accomplishing the business of the district in a timely manner a time limit of three minutes will be imposed for each individual or group addressing the board when you approach the podium please state your name for the record first up we have angela bernhardt dear madam president members of the governing board dr kellis and cannabis canada our cabinet my name is angela bernhardt and i'm a member of the school social worker association of america march is designated as social work month this week we pay honor to the extraordinary social workers that serve dysart unified school district i'm going to read each person's name delilah riverview jackie west point mary freedom andrea in kingswood brenda sonoran heights mel ashton ranch megan sunset hills samantha western peaks sarah will canyon tawanda valley vista tammy dysart high school tammy with a y marley park kenny shadow ridge hannah countryside tracy luke soli cimarron springs kayla canyon ridge rebecca dysart elementary monica surprise anna thompson ranch amanda asante and julie martinview these ladies are truly extraordinary women in the dysart unified school district thank you so much for your comment next we have the student update dr kellis thank you madame president members of the board and members of cabinet this evening we have two of our extraordinary students who will provide a report to the board okay um hi there my name is dominique and i go to dysart high school just yesterday our student leadership council met to discuss quite a few things as always we get an update from each school and celebrate the extraordinary things they are all doing this meetings top this meetings topic item was to find a way to include all clubs and sports on each campus by doing an advertisement campaign to highlight them we also took the time to talk about opportunities of growth for our high school sites many of the items that came up were in regards to school culture and spirit as a result of this next month's meeting will be to look for ways to improve both culture and spirit at our schools my name is luis payan i am a senior at valley vista we also want to take the time to say thank you to our amazing community for supporting us with the covet relief drive we have many school sites with tons of donations from the community um some schools have told us that they have over 15 to 20 boxes and bins full of donations to to give you some reference these are big trash bins these are not small little containers um in fact it became a challenge for valley view food bank to be collecting them so they have rented a moving truck to collect them on friday and on friday we're going to do a final count and a picture here at the district office at around 11 30.

good evening we're going to go ahead and call this meeting to order dr foley roll call president reece members of the board please let the record show that all members are present thank you we're going to go ahead and have the pledge of allegiance after our moment of silence of the united states liberty all right on to our agenda i move that we approve the agenda as it's presented second any questions or comments all those in favor aye all right dr foley the superintendent's report president reece members of the board we begin the superintendence report with our favorite part of the night which is the honoring and celebration of our amazing students and employees and volunteers and tonight we're so excited because we have our littlest learners and those who support them in the house so tonight we're going to have the joy of inviting the fabulous mrs gleason and the wonderful wonderful stay see mrs stacy utley up to join us and they are going to celebrate and what will happen is that they will call one of one recognited time and we'll have them come up here and stand here for pictures so that way that we can carefully socially distance while still celebrating each and every one of you so tonight we will turn it over to mrs gleason to honor her special people here tonight thank you so much dr foley good evening president reece members of the board and our cabinet oh my gosh so excited and our community is so excited that it's our turn tonight to share our special nominations with you so we're going to begin with cooley because c comes before us so um and i'm a little i'm sorry but our amy scott jones who is our teacher um point of pride is not here today she had surgery and she is home resting where she should be so she could be back in school on the 29th so i did want to share a little bit about her with you though so amy scott jones is an early childhood teacher in our brilliant beginnings classroom at cooley preschool and she's been there for eight years she loves the littles and continually connects with our youngest learners building a foundation for all future education experiences i'm so excited i take my breath she is always willing and always helpful and can always find the humor and the laughs in situations that arise and mind you there are plenty in a brilliant beginnings classroom every day she is joyful and a positive model for her students she is a lifelong learner and continues to elevate her practice and share her knowledge equally and without hesitation focusing on safety and the best developmentally appropriate practices she stimulates and encourages curiosity engagement and creative play her upbeat attitude inspires her class and school family and we are so happy and proud to honor her today so for our classified point of pride michelle brennan would you please come [Applause] forward all right so michelle joined the front office team at coulee back in 2019 she has been a blessing right from the start she quickly learned the ins and outs of the position has been and has been a true asset to our cooley school family her smile and sunny attitude brighten every day and she has a wonderful sense of humor she loves all the children and has made a special effort to get to the know the names of our stars and our best students to greet them by name every day she's part of our social committee treating our staff to special birthday greetings and treats she is very organized and very creative but i knew she was going to be during our interview she told us she has 10 children and so we immediately knew how organized this lady would be and that's right and she did not disappoint in fact almost all of them are here today to congratulate their [Music] [Applause] let me get a mother [Applause] and next we have our volunteer from coulee brandy krause johnson will you please come forward please [Applause] okay so we're very excited and very proud that brandy cross johnson stepped into the position a pto president just this past november and she rescued us and she's actually helping to keep our wonderful ecdc ptos afloat during this school year so brandi has been a wonderful breath of fresh air offering idea after idea to inspire and take care of my teaching staff and bring joy to the children since this is her last year in preschool she has been very busy recruiting other parents to volunteer for open board board positions and committees so she wants to make sure that we're not in the position that we find ourselves in this year she's a lot like the energizer bunny so full of energy and ready to get the job done i barely have the idea figured out in my head and she's asking how she can make it happen which is so refreshing and wonderful she's always focused on the positive and yes we can do that seems to be her motto we are very proud and excited to honor her with our points of pride this year and then we would like to recognize our student nico will you come forward please let me go come on up [Applause] oh my goodness this is nico patel and he is a student in mrs campazano's pm class this year and mrs c was very excited to nominate him for points of pride nico is a very kind friend building relationships with his peers daily nico's smile is so bright it shines right through his mask as he connects with his class and school family see you can tell right now he is always willing to wait take a turn and share with his friends he continuously seeks out new learning opportunities and shares his interests with his teachers and his friends some of his interests include fish the sea and rainbows nico has a love for math numbers construction and engineering it has truly been a pleasure watching niko play learn and grow this school year and the other years he's been with us too because this will be niko's final year at coulee preschool off to kindergarten he will go and what a gift he will be thank you mr mrs patel for sharing nico with us [Applause] can we hold that yes and then over here we're gonna do one more is that okay yes [Applause] okay all right next it's sassamin all right so our certified oh and i got my speeches too all right i wrote them down this year because i was afraid yet yes so our certified um staff member that we're honoring today is sarah splickel sarah come on up so sarah is our speech therapist at saseman ecdc she has worked in our district for 12 years and opened sussman preschool with us in 2013.

[Music] hi everyone i'm alicia anglin and welcome to my master class today we're here at madison center for the arts first a little bit about myself i'm originally from long island new york i moved out here to phoenix about 12 years ago and i've been here ever since i'm inspired by jackson pollock and pablo picasso which are two famous abstract artists and they have art all over the world including many museums in new york and paris we're going to actually be painting in the style of jackson pollock today which is action and drip painting or guest oral painting which basically means we're going to be moving around the canvas and a lot of arm movement and shoulder movement so we're going to have a lot of fun today so i want to go ahead and explain what abstract looks like and kind of show you some examples here so over here we have mercurial which means sudden change of mind or mood and as you could see it's got a couple of different colors here we have some red and brown black and also some yellow and green and there's a lot of action painting on here a lot of movement and a lot of definitely a lot of dripping as well this actually was one of my paintings i just did recently probably about a month ago and uh yeah so that's and that's on a 30 by 40 inch canvas which is what i'm going to be working on today and then over here i have my very first professional painting with my with my art career here and this is motley eye this is my first motley eye of the series there are six in the series and this is this is abstract as well and you can see a little bit of paint splashing on here and that's a little bit of jackson pollock style on there as well very abstract as you can see there are different colors blending in with the other colors a lot of different movement and brush strokes so that's definitely it's definitely a cool painting there and i did this one about 10 years ago so first before we get started i want to let everyone know you'll want to have the right surface to put your canvas on make sure that it's covered with either a drop cloth or a newspaper or paper bag something that's going to cover you can even put it on the floor as well so it's up to you jackson pollock actually used to paint most of his abstracts on the floor so we're going to go ahead and use the table today this is just a little bit easier for me for the master class so you guys can see everything and and i want to go ahead and talk about the types of canvas so we have the 16 by 20 canvas which is the size that you guys should have at home that should be the size roughly what you're using and then i have my 30 by 40 inch canvas here and this is a gallery wrap canvas this is for professionals it's a little bit thicker and it's definitely heavier but it's it'll we're all going to do the same thing on it it's just the surface that i'm going to be using i'd like to go into the tools that we're going to be using today you should have a brush a small paintbrush a regular paint brush that small like that maybe a shorter handle i'm not sure but something along those lines and then i have multiple brushes i wanted to show you my collection today i have many brushes here so we have all different shapes and sizes and that's to do different strokes on the canvas these are all acrylic brushes very good to use when when painting this way as well or doing something along the lines of motley eye this would be what we would want to use for a motley eye type of painting but today we're just going to be using this one paint brush because we're going to actually be making the paint more thinner that way it sprays and drips right onto the canvas i also wanted to show you what painting knives are in case you ever want to add to your collection to your paintbrush we have different sized painting knives here which are size one through five and as you can see they're definitely really cool to use and i'll show you actually a little tutorial in a little bit on how to use those for the future and then we have something funny here something you probably have in your kitchen right now it's a turkey baster and this is something that jackson pollock actually used when he would action paint sometimes he would use a turkey baster back in the 50s and 60s and this was definitely something really cool that that we that i use sometimes and then i just have some regular household brushes i actually got these from the dollar store really long time ago but they work just as good as other brushes if you want those bigger strokes so definitely something that's also really cool and these are between one and three inches as well i also have a sponge looks like a like a little loofah sponge this is good for texturing so if you're making a painting that you want to add some texture or some more thicker paint that would look really cool with it kind of makes some holes in the paint it looks really it's pretty awesome to use this as well so that's that's really fun so moving on to our paint so a lot of artists we use different paints as an abstract artist i like to use acrylic paints which are somewhat water-based and these are the vibrant colors that we're going to be using today there are other other types of paints oil paints and watercolors oil paints are usually used for more of a portrait type of painting maybe of a face or something a little more detailed and within the lines but for abstract i like to use acrylic paint so i'm going to go ahead and use these we do have a lot of different colors here i know you guys only have maybe about four colors but you can always add to your collection so i have kind of the colors of the rainbow here we got a lot of different stuff going on so the first thing you'll want to do is you'll want to dilute the paint the paint is very thick when you have it right out of the tube and in order to splash it with your brush you'll definitely need it to be able to drip and throw onto the canvas so you want to start off with just a tiny bit of water so just maybe just a couple of drops like that and i'm just going to just drop just a little bit of water in each one of these because this is where my colors are going and i do this the same way at home so this is a really fun and cool way to dilute your paint and even blend colors as well you can use these little cups so first i'm going to be doing a metallic type of purple that's going to go in there mix this up with the water and you'll know if you need to add more water if it doesn't drip off the brush so as you can see it's not dripping yet so we'll want to add a little bit more water i might add it a little too much but that's okay next i'm going to use ultramarine blue which is a really really cool looking blue so i'm going to splash that in there and in between mixing colors if you don't want to mix them together then you'll definitely want to rinse off your brush in the water so you'll want a clean cup of water next to you that way you can definitely rinse that off in between changing colors unless you want to mix the colors that's totally up to you it's fun to do that as well and remember i'm here to help you express yourself in a fun crea and creative way through art today so that's something that we're going to be doing and you're definitely some of you may have already been an artist maybe you already paint and this is just an extra fun thing to do this next one's neon orange as you could that looks like a highlighter but that's a pretty cool color i like bright colors usually when i'm painting like a jackson pollock action style i do like to use brighter colors that red is a little bit dark but a lot of my other ones that are in that style the action style are pretty bright but you could do whatever whatever your preference is if you want to do all just one color you can do that as well so now we're going to go ahead and create our own masterpiece using action painting method so i'm going to go ahead and get started you want to take your brush and pick the color that you want to start with i'm going to roll my sleeves up i know paint's going to get everywhere i'm going to start with this light blue here this is a nice color blue and you're just going to take your paint brush i'll try not to you're just going to start just moving your arm and kind of throwing the paint onto the canvas you can let it drip as well but i personally like to use my arms and my shoulders and kind of move around almost like i'm dancing or directing a choir kind of looks like that to me this is a really nice you can also kind of hit the end of your canvas and kind of just do that you'll also need i'm almost done with my glue here and i get paint everywhere when i paint so just keep that in mind i usually wind up having paint in my hair on my clothes my shoes on my face it's definitely washable so you can wash it off with soap and water so don't worry if you get a little splash on something you can definitely wash if you use a good soap and water you'll be perfectly fine and i hope you guys are enjoying yourselves doing this this is a really great way to express yourselves and put yourself onto the canvas that's kind of how i see it i'm going to go ahead and move on to my next color i think i'm going to go with red this time this is like a really nice red make sure you have some paper towels too because if you want to get that other color off there if your water is not really working and you don't want to blend your colors just make sure your you can use a paper towel and just clean it like that going into the red and sometimes i like to walk around my painting and kind of see what it looks like at other angles see if i see anything that that i like or don't like and remember and remember if you see too much color on one side of the painting and you're and you don't it's it's okay because it's abstract it's not supposed to be perfect this piece of art is of you so it's going to be your own little masterpiece and sometimes i like when i put one color on one specific area instead of them all kind of meshed together there it goes there goes the first i'm gonna go with this pearly green it's like an emerald green but it's kind of curly i like this nice color too i think it'll go good with everything save this color because i want to show you guys another tool in just a few minutes of how to use the painting knives as well as the turkey baster so i do want to keep some paint so that i can show you guys that now we're going to use this really cool purple same method action drip painting and sometimes you could do these pretty quickly and then sometimes you might want to just go back to it the next day or two days later jackson pollock was big about that he would sometimes leave a painting for a couple of weeks and then go back to it and say you know i want to add this color to it and you can do that if you feel like you really want to add a different color or change something on it remember this is your your painting and your creativity on the canvas so i'm going to stop for just a second here and i just want to show you my palette so i use this palette a lot of the times to paint abstract paintings like motley eye or any type of painting where i want to keep the colors separated and i want to keep them thick i'll use this so i just want to show you what a painting knife can do which is really cool as well so i'm going to go ahead and use one of my painting knives here i think i'm going to use this one this is a number three painting knife and i'm actually going to put some new paint on here i think i'm going to use this yellow this is lemon yellow so we're going to use that and as you can see it's thick but i want to put enough on there and then to use the painting knife you'll just you see how it won't really come off well it does come off but it's a lot thicker than putting water in there so we want it to be like that because right now it's going to be a different bit of a method so now we're just going to take this and just this is where it gets messy sorry because of the pink being so thick it does tend to go a little farther because it has a little weight to it so just definitely be careful when using a painting knife this fluorescent yellow it's kind of like a highlighter yellow and we're going to put that in there too so i am going this is going to brighten up the painting even more kind of looks like a glow-in-the-dark yellow it doesn't i don't think it glows in the dark it doesn't and sometimes i do that i just go right off of my canvas right onto my canvas from my palette okay the next thing the next tool i want to show you guys is actually the turkey baster so this is something that a lot of people have in their homes in their kitchen you'll want to buy a different one not the one that you know you definitely already use so what we're going to do is take off the top and this is something again jackson pollock used as well you're going to take off the top and you're going to hold your finger right at the bottom here to make sure it covers the hole on the bottom and then we're going to take one of these colors i'm going to use this plum color and we're just going to pour this in here make sure to keep your finger on the end or it'll all come out and then what i'm also going to do is i'm going to take this other color this couldn't get that top open but we're just going to toss that and i'm going to take this because you can mix the colors as well you can even put like one color up to here and then another one you can kind of just you can put as many colors as you want to fill it up and then what you'll want to do is put your cover back on remember to keep your hand tight around this because it'll put some pressure once i put this back on and then for once i release i could start really making some movement here so as you can see all this paint is being dripped onto the canvas this is one of my favorite tools actually over the paint brushes and my painting knives and it does make kind of a farting noise so i know that's really funny you guys are might be laughing at home i don't know if you can hear it but it just means that i'm out of pain but yeah that's something really cool that you can maybe use and get one of these tools and i'm actually going to fill it up with another color now i just really like this method so i'm gonna use this neon i know orange sorry i hope i didn't get anything on you guys okay so i put a little black in there as well with the neon orange like a fluorescent highlighter color and we're just going to do this again as you can see the color is coming out through the other ones okay so that's turkey baster method now we can go i want to show you how you can take this sponge and make a little bit of texture i'm not going to go too crazy with it but probably around the edges i really like the way the this part here in the middle looks it's very colorful it's not too blended but it's definitely i definitely want to keep it i think it looks to me i think it looks pretty pretty cool so what we're going to do is i'm going to take this blue that we haven't really used yet you're going to dip your sponge whenever you get these tools i know you guys are working with a with the brush right now but that's you can add to your collection and we're just gonna lightly very lightly just kind of go over some of this area here around the edges you don't want to push too hard because then it's going to make like a blobbing type of thing which is kind of lightly you can kind of see some of these colors are blending really nicely there's some purples with greens blue what a weird thing nobody would have ever thought to maybe use a sponge but i can you can use spoons there's there's a lot of different tools even household items that you can use i know a couple of artists that sometimes will use even a cup like this and put paint under it and make designs with that they can use their fingers there's some artists out there that use their toes to paint just get creative with it it'll be something you'll definitely enjoy so i like i like the way that looks for now so i'm going to go ahead and put the sponge down and then what you can do is take your brush our original brush you wipe this down a little bit and you can just kind of hold it very lightly and even just very lightly you don't want to you don't want to make too much movement you don't want to blend too much because you do want that action style but just lightly just to kind of throw in some different areas there now i'm not sure if you guys have a squeeze bottle at home or if it's just a pot of paint if you do have a squeeze bottle i just want to show you something else that sometimes i do instead of using any of these tools i just squeeze it right out of the bottle so that's actually another thing that jackson pollock did he would squeeze the tube all the way down to the end i'm not going to do that but i do want to show you guys how how cool this kind of is you just want to keep moving your arm around while you do this remember this is the artwork that you're doing right now and this is a an abstract expressionism piece of art it's it's definitely expressing yourself so don't worry if you don't like it at first you can go back and change things or just leave it as is it's not supposed to be perfect abstract art is beyond the lines so keep that keep that in mind because i'm a little hard on myself sometimes i don't like some of my pieces but this is one of those that i actually it looks pretty pretty good i'm going to use this red as my final color go ahead and mix this up this is something else you can do too this does make a lot of mess too but if you just tap your brush it'll make almost like a airbrush effect to it or a spray paint effect i should say and that looks kind of cool on the painting it kind of fills in a little bit of the areas and sometimes when you're painting if you want to put a little music on the background that's usually a lot of the times i do that it depends what mood i'm in because music sometimes moves me to paint as well so it's really a preference with that and i listen to all music all fun music you know i think i'm gonna stop right here i like the way this looks i like the colors i think i'm done okay so here you have it i'm going to lift this up you'll want to make sure that when you're lifting your painting to take a picture you could usually take a picture like this but when you're at home this is my painting i know i got quite a few colors on there but that's what it looks like right now as you can see there's a lot of different colors on there you don't want to hold it up like that for too long because the paint will drip it might drip where you don't want it and i like the results of this right now so i want to leave this down like this so what you'll want to do next is you will want to make sure that you do allow this painting to dry for about a day or two there is a lot of extra paint on it there should be a lot of like extra wet paint on there you'll want to put it in an area where there's no pets or any hazards where something can be stepped on or the paint can be messed up just put it somewhere where it's a little safer and away from everything even if it's outside in a backyard that's completely fine as well now for our final thing every artist has to sign their painting so you'll want to sign your painting with your paintbrush i have a paint pen that i use i just like the way my signature comes out with it so i'm going to go ahead and do that and you never know you usually sign it in the bottom right hand corner of your painting so i'm going to walk around it and kind of see which way i want to hang this painting so that's what i'm going to do right now and i think it's facing me i think i think this way i'm gonna paint it down here because i feel like this is definitely definitely fit when it's hanging i think this will look nice the way it is i also want to note before i sign the sides of the canvas don't worry if that gets paint on it that's the fun part about action painting you're supposed to get paint on the sides so sometimes it'll drip off the sides sometimes it'll stay you know and you'll have one little area but it's supposed to be like that so don't worry so i'm going to go ahead and sign my name alicia anglin and then 2021 because it's the year that i finished my painting and then so i hope everyone had a great time painting today maybe one day you'll want to paint with a friend or have your own little painting class or help your family member and teach them how to pee i showed you a lot of different tools you can use so that's going to be really fun in the future when you do want to paint again and i hope you enjoyed yourselves today and remember the world is your canvas so until next time guys thanks for coming thanks for watching me pete and i'll see you next time bye

joe britton nope present rachel chaleski trying to get on having trouble getting on yep kate canetta here gladys cooper lauren daly here joe da silva here uh catherine hodgson here rich gianelli here kathy molinaro here al russo amy spolino 10 percent at this time we have uh all present until one is trying to get on right yes okay okay uh doctor say uh do you want to do the recognitions at this time yes please thank you very much um you all know that we received notice last week from the governor to vaccinate our teachers and um i i needed to bring the folks here tonight to recognize the um yeoman work that they they did over the weekend prepared in order for us to be loaded up on monday morning um i'll let them talk a little bit about the actual specifics with kelly but just to let you know that i think they're with me that was um gina and susan germain kathy o'dowd melissa in personnel tatiana kelly's shop and jen gonzalez worked uh feverishly to load up names kelly got on in fact sunday night double checked the appointments for us um and the feedback that i got the emails that i got that when folks went there not only was it well organized but it it ran as smooth as um they've seen those things run we had i guess our explorers that volunteered to be there and they kind of directed traffic but um it's just a job that's beyond john well done so kelly can you or kathy maybe just update the board in the actual numbers and if i've missed anyone and kim thank you as well for spearheading it from your office very much appreciate it cathy o'dowd are you here with me yeah i'm here yes um thank you dr sal good evening everyone this was truly a team effort um i also want to thank gina jasmine kim thompson um everyone behind the scenes who who made this happen um it was a tremendous undertaking uh getting all of our staff loaded into vans and then uh kelly was tremendously helpful in creating the google document um because this was a closed clinic just for for our teachers and other staff to get everybody signed up to get them scheduled for appointment slots and then i also have to extend a great thank you to our school nurses we have had some of our nurses who have been working per diem for the health department all along since december but again with this big undertaking of trying to vaccinate um it was close to a thousand people in two days many of our school nurses volunteered their time and they were at those clinics on friday and saturday and they were a huge part of making that flow so smoothly i too have received nothing but positive feedback and appreciation from everyone it was certainly our pleasure to make this happen for our staff you know we're one step closer to to getting over over the hill here um and just a thank you to all team members who are involved if i didn't mention carapanti yes cara absolutely there cara cara worked with the state to get everything lined up with kathy and and then um just hit the pedal and didn't stop so cara thank you thank you thank you for having just making that um get that thing done for us someone else exactly yeah um i think kelly and i just would like to say a few words you know we've been here a long time and it's rare that we ask people to come to this meeting um to share with you what they accomplished um and i think that you know i speak for kelly and myself that it was nothing short of moving a mountain in a very very short period of time and i just wanted to take a second to give you all some perspective just about the sheer volume and the time we really uploaded um almost 2000 employees on monday when when the moment came 1201 sunday night into monday we were ready to go and we had gathered all of our um all of our forces and and got all of those folks entered into vans really in a collaborative effort with susan germain one of our nurses who um really just took the bull by the horns and and learned the vam system worked closely with gina who helped her to upload the huge batches of information and just that process alone just the the fielding the emails and the responses i didn't get an email i didn't hear anything from you why didn't i get included on the list how do i get enrolled just the troubleshooting we set up a dedicated email a hotline basically for troubleshooting which crashed so we dealt with kind of volumes and volumes of information to get everybody in and just registered in the system um but and the handoff with kelly kind of came on sunday evening i think as she was showing her parents out of her dining room and saying i need to move over um but we needed to make the transition into how we were then going to get everyone appointments we didn't use any agency we didn't we didn't want to put it all on the department of health they were already so overwhelmed so kelly if you just want to take a couple minutes just to describe what sunday night was and monday getting our teams together so what we did is we created a google form which people could go in and uh indicate yes they were interested in being vaccinated in district no they were not and if they were interested what we did is we gave them a choice or a menu of designated times um and that email um rolled out on monday afternoon and so when we when we hit go you know i'm texting kim and team saying all right i'm sending it no sooner did i click send and there was 49 responses we got 500 responses in under under seven minutes um so people were waiting you know people this was something that they wanted um i was worried that the form wasn't going to keep up with the system so then what happened of course is you know the time slots at people we said it was a request you know just give us what you'd like um we then had to go through um and make sure that we could confirm all the appointments this was simply a request and we had to make confirmations um so um you know kim kathy and i gina worked together and said okay we need to pull in some additional people and that's um really where uh melissa bang tatiann reiner um and jennifer gonzalez who are the admin assistants um to both kim and myself um really came in and um you know i i can't say enough things about them i think monday evening we did a 10 p.m call i was in my pj's with my glasses on um so i apologize for that but they just really uh helped in trouble you know troubleshooting everything so um truly uh people just were very i think the message here is they could not wait to sign up um you know we um as soon as i called karapunti and said you know i'm almost running out of appointments on friday and saturday she's like add two more to every single time slot we'll get them in i'll find additional volunteers our nurses stepped up to the plate um you know and volunteered their time and we were so appreciative of that um you know local um you know doctors and nurses from the area also volunteered we could not have done this without everyone so we were able to offer 12 appointments every 10 minutes for a window of about six hours on friday evening and then about eight hours on saturday and during that time we were able to vaccinate over 900 danbury public schools teachers um and nearly a thousand people during those windows um really big kudos to uh christy zelita we i think took over her school uh and she's done it with a smile on her face um you know we had um the police explorers there um you know i laughed i i walked in like i was just gonna walk in they're like where's your appointment they had to show my ticket and they you know walked us down and made sure that the traffic was flowing in one way it was really nice to see them in action um and just everyone that the sense that we got was everyone just had smiles the thank yous the pictures um the sense of relief from everyone so uh truly no it was uh i think a pleasure of all it was a lot of work but i think all of our pleasure to kind of engage in it and make sure we were able to do this everyone is scheduled for their second vaccine so if you've got your birthday with us just for your second this week we're running some additional appointments tuesday wednesday thursday afternoon um as well as some appointments on saturday um and we just sent out the final all call to say we believe we've gotten everyone if we've missed you please reach out to us um we will have been able to offer the vaccine before the end of this by the end of the day saturday to all of our employees with a couple of exceptions um for people that need to wait for various different situations till next week um so i just you know big big thank you to the team it was um truly a a great effort and i was proud to be part of it i i hope you are all you know can join us in being just proud of the community effort that these teams all put in i think it was it was really something it was magic so maybe we could thank you maybe we can come off from you can everybody come off from you and we can give them a round of applause great job thank you thank you thank you and do you have to do the same thing for the second round yes yes well we're going to cut and paste the date whatever you had last time this time date and time you stop and think about it guys that's that's that's going to put us in better stead in order to bring back folks and we've always said right along since september went safely so i um you know i bow to you guys and i just we're just so appreciative thanks again and thank you cara too i know you pulled up i'm not i won't say paul strings but you managed to to tell them that we were able to run our own clinic and the result of that um caused us to be in this position so thank you very much thank you madam chair uh next on the agenda uh is uh other participation uh kate would you read the public participation strip the board welcomes public participation and asks the comments be limited to three minutes the public may offer objective comments of school operations and programs that concern them the board will not permit any expression of personal complaints or defamatory comments about board of education personnel and students nor against any person connected with the danbury public school system due to the unique nature of the covet 19 crisis and the limitations of technology members of the public who are danbury residents are invited to send brief comments and questions via email in advance to dps underscore public comment underscore b-o-e at danbury.k12.ct.us thank you kate uh sandy uh would you go through the comments or read the comments for us please sure uh jose pimental parent of two dps students martin luther king said that injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere there is a severe injustice happening to our community as who late as a few legislators block an entire school there is injustice as many of our teachers and administrators have had to commute long hours and work in other cities i will say it bluntly the open choice was nothing but a political ploy by our danbury delegation to ensure that the mostly black and brown parents in danbury did not get the school that they have been desperately fighting for you cannot sit idly by and allow smoke and mirror programs like open choice that will only serve about 50 students to keep us from the real work to be done the time for courage from our board is now we have asked for lead to be included as an independent community committee to recruit and develop latin teachers and administrators some of our members have applied and made themselves available to help ensure a more equitable society they have been that has been ignored this is not the 1940s we cannot continue to ignore and deny the largest demographic the representation and equity they demand we demand respect and ask that we are no longer ignored in danbury the overwhelming majority of our students are of latin descent this demographic continues to be ignored and under-represented the status quo seems to be just fine with our elected officials we the leaders of this community have grown sick and tired of begging for the scraps of the table when it is our table as the board begins the process of seeking a superintendent we will strongly suggest that the board considers an aggressive search for a qualified latin superintendent that can relate and represent our student population we are opposed to the open choice program and are advocating for a latin educational leader and the ability to expand our educational options gabriella ramon as a mother of three my biggest dream is to provide my children with a very good education and to make sure they grow in a safe environment as a member of the danbury community i am here to ask this committee for their support and opening danbury prospect this school will ensure that our kids of our community have all the tools they need to achieve their full potential as a parent i would like my children to achieve a prosperous future where they develop a lifelong love of education and it can become a very important part of their lives unfortunately as a negative impact of the overcrowded classrooms in our danbury public schools i had the opportunity to discuss this matter with many parents who are concerned and uncertain of what the future holds for our children if there is no solution given immediately the danbury prospect charter school is willing to provide a tuition-free and wonderful world-class program which also helped dramatically with the overcrowded schools i definitely support this initiative it will benefit our children with a great world-class class learning program excellent teaching and diversity it will also be an important addition to of our growing city of danbury i also believe that the minority community especially latinos do not have adequate educational options for their children many of our parents face the dilemma of having to pay for a private school they can't afford or send their kids to school that are either too big or severely overcrowded danbury prospect is another option that is ready to open this year and can give our community a much needed option we believe as parents that we should have the option to choose the best of our interests in the education of our kids and prospect charter school is a school that we support and believe in i ask that you please help us convince our own legislators to support this school and include it in this year's budget maria matos resident of danbury parent leader and member of latinos for educational advocacy in danbury latinos in danbury need a school that strives to create a safe place in which staff and students reflect our community and every student can feel represented and cared for when students are taught by educators who look like and sound like them they blossom into leaders i cannot think of anything this city needs more desperately than a school that will serve our our most vulnerable danbury families are unified in their support of educational choice thousands of supporters have met with called and emailed their elected officials we've had rallies we've been to the capitol and we have been fighting to open a charter school for years our community has spoken loud and clear so i ask you to please give danbury families the gift of a new tuition-free public charter school with a culturally relevant curriculum and a commitment towards a diverse and inclusive teaching staff our community members have shown so much support and now it's time for our elected leaders to act i sincerely hope danbury families will be able to read the benefits of a charter school and be able to take pride in our children's school system uh the last one was sent in spanish so i'm going to read it um translated i'm hoping it makes complete sense um gloria castillo she has lived in danbury in the city of danbury for 20 three years today i bear witness to the inequality of in the education system of this city with the hispanic community since we do not have enough representation at the school level and at the state level especially when our children need guidance support and academic help our children do not receive it because the schools are overcrowded and there are not enough resources to solve the problem the answer for us and for which we have been fighting for years is danbury prospect let our voices have yet our voices have fallen on deaf ears i see that our community is the one that always comes last as well as our children when it comes to educational options and help for this reason i ask our representatives to please no matter what party they are to work for our city and for our children they are an integral part of our state of connecticut and deserve to be supported equally at the state level please finally fund danbury prospect school so that it can open and provide a high quality education for children like my children who desperately need it i look forward to your endorsement in this legislative session and ms cooper i'm just hitting refresh really quick okay okay um that is it for public participation but i just wanted to say that tonight will be my final night uh doing the board minutes unfortunately um with personal circumstances that have happened this past year i will no longer be able to continue doing the minutes it has been a pleasure um i appreciate everything that everybody has done and the bonds that i have built here um and i just wanted to say thank you to you all and i hope to still keep in touch sandy let me just before i i i did want to make sure that the board um knew that and thank you for doing it um you've taken over uh in in in so many ways for us and we're going to miss you um one for your talent and your skills and also for the ease of working with us it hasn't been easy uh you know we've asked for things to be translated things to be put on air we heard the parents writing tonight you know reaching out to the hispanic community you've been uh integral in doing that and we will miss you greatly um as a person as a skillful secretary of the board also as a as a an assistant to us as reaching out to our community so thank you thank you thank you and um if i need a sub i'll be calling you i'll be here i'm not going anywhere i'm sorry i don't know if any other board member may want to comment thank you doctor thank you uh on behalf of the board dr sarah i certainly would like to say thank you to cindy uh she reads beautifully she speaks eloquent and you know we all have talents that uh each one of us is different from the other and uh you know she brings a smile when she comes and does her work for us and she has never complained since the time that i've known her so on behalf of the board sandy we hope to keep in touch with you and we hope that you will continue to keep in touch with us and we're going to miss you but thank you so very much sandy thank you miss cooper i will definitely still be in touch with everybody so thank you all so so standing in the minutes if you could just record for me uh it's a board appreciation month i want to say thank you to the board members here um you know it's a lot of hours a lot of behind the scenes people don't realize um i know you take a lot of emails and mindfully get back to folks and try to follow up and um work for the benefit of our youngsters ever in any way you can whether it's building um getting a building built or working on some new curriculum being present for interviews working on the budget um negotiating long hours with contracts you've always stepped up you've helped us and um i just really want to say thank you and very much appreciate it to all of you for doing that [Music] we're gonna move on down the agenda uh kate would you do the consent calendar of course i'll make a motion that the board of education approves the items on this consent calendar exhibit 21-29 through exhibit 21-32 as recommended second let's show the silver okay could you do the roll call sure i just want to make sure that nobody has any um comments no no i think there's a motion the emotion was made i need a second and then we're going to do the roll call and then at that particular time they will ask questions do the roll call okay uh joe britton hi rachel celeski aye keith canetta aye gladys cooper i lauren daly aye joe da silva aye catherine hodgson aye rich jannelli aye cathy molinaro aye al russo aye ms felina hi okay so we have um 11 in favor okay and emotion is self-care could we go down to uh item in 12 i will education of staff representation do we have anyone from the uh nea you do good evening miss cooper how are you fine nice to see you nice to see you nice to see you anne um good evening everyone let's start out by seconding that that kudos for the vaccine roll out whoa um thank you kim for um your ease of communication that your office put out i received nothing but positive feedback about the communication the rollout the process and many many teachers told me they were brought to tears upon receiving their vaccines when have you ever heard about people crying in a good way getting shots so it was a positive wonderful experience and we're moving forward and the positive energy that was felt at rogers park when i personally went for my vaccine it was like a celebration so i wanted to thank you all for your effort because we know we use the word in the past year herculean very very loosely because we've all done herculean work but we know that that rollout was truly an amazing and very successful feat that you took on so we thank you for that nea thanks you for that and we are so thrilled that the majority of teachers are now vaccinated so always always always start off on a positive and have nothing but wonderful things to say about that thank you um dr sal um i know i privately congratulated you but i wanted to publicly congratulate you on your retirement in the on so they're on the board minutes and just thank you um you've been a pleasure to work with um while we may not always agree on everything or our mission it you know we don't always go about it in the same way i think um we have this one thing in common and that's that we always put the care of the staff and the kids first and i think you've been a teacher advocate and i think you've been an advocate for danbury and i'm personally proud at the job that you've done for our district over the years so i just wanted to kind of publicly um thank you for all of your hard work for us as a community and now we'll get to now we'll get to my my complaints they're not much don't worry i wanted to talk a little bit about um the ecs issues and governor lamont's um kind of freezing of the ecs formula and um dr sal i saw your letter that um you put forward to the committees regarding the ecs funding and i wanted to kind of draw this back to some of the the letters that we just heard from the prospect charter schools and um nea danbury takes great objection to some of the things that we're hearing from the prospect charter group and while i know the board can't speak out upon these issues i can and i just want to go on record with saying you know some of the letters indicated that danbury does not have a world-class education system disagree 100 um danbury does not give diverse opportunities to their students that is completely inaccurate in fact it's an out and out lie we do provide those opportunities to our students every day um teachers that are not representative of our community we have teachers that represent our community we pride ourselves in making sure we're connected with our our diverse population um that we do not serve our most vulnerable students my goodness that's what we're the best at we do that so darn well and we do it on a shoestring budget you all know that we do so much with so little and i think for goodness sakes we need to get props for that because um to hear a community saying that we're underserving a group of people that we work so hard to make sure that we're we're including and um serving their needs the only issue at hand really is we need more money to do it even better we need more money we all know that we need more money we need the ecs formula adjusted and danbury given its proper due you've already heard us sing our 169 song for many years and quite frankly that's what we should all be embarrassed of as a community that danbury is 169 out of all of our communities in the state that's appalling that's embarrassing we can do better the fact that we're only spending 13 or so thousand dollars per pupil when we have other communities spending upwards of 35 000 per pupil that's where we need to work together we don't need to bring in uh uh outside charter school to do that we need to fund the current system that we have the right way and that means investing in education here in our public schools so i just wanted to put that on record and thank you dr self for your work and continuing to push forward um the the uh the hard work to make everybody outside of danbury know why that ecs formula being adjusted in the proper way is so important um bringing it back locally um i wanted to just thank courtney and kevin um i've been meeting with them about issues with regarding health and safety in our schools and we're working on a bunch of things um as courtney mentioned at the last board meeting you know we put out a survey to our members and um some of the things that came back were really positive like courtney reported on math squaring that that's been a very positive some of our mitigation has been wonderful um we still have work to do is making sure our cleaning is done adequately we're still getting lots of reports with cleaning issues so i want to bring that to the attention of everyone here tonight to know that we need to do better in those areas cleaning making sure rooms are cleaned desks are clean daily making sure bathrooms are clean and making sure basic things like paper towels and soap are available and that teachers aren't having to you know beg for it during the school day so that's that's one area we can get better so i continue i hope we can continue to improve in that area the other thing that um has come up and you may or may not know that um on most wednesdays we have uh our teacher meetings with all of our members uh around four o'clock right before your meeting here so i often time get a lot of information that i didn't have the week before and one thing that's been coming up for the past few weeks is um the technology issues that teachers are facing so i know as we're going to be asked to be doing increased live streaming or increased synchronous instruction live instruction with our students at home and our hybrid students in front of us one of the issues that's come forward is the technology inadequacies let me give you an example many of our teachers have macbooks and many of our teachers also have been issued a chromebook chromebooks are woefully inadequate to run a lot of the software and the programs and the high-tech apps that we are now so accustomed to use they they don't do it they crash they can't handle it our macbooks can when they're updated and a lot of our macbooks as they've been coming becoming older are kind of being phased out and they're not being replaced so we have a lot of teachers that are reporting having to do in having to try and piece together instruction without sound without video um with different tools not working and a lot of the feedback when they've reported some of these incidents has been well yeah you know we're working on it that's great that's great we're working on it but we have to make sure that we put the technology in the hands of teachers so they can do their job and and do it well so good use of the esser money discussion that's going to be coming up um maybe that is a good place for us to put our investment in um spending money on appropriate technology that can handle the usage that and the demands that we're now putting out there for our instruction um the other thing that i wanted to talk about is kind of goes along with that technology issue we continue to have a sub sub shortage which we knew we were going to have um that's really not what i'm here to discuss um when we do get sub coverage in our classrooms when we do have people covering um in our virtual classrooms the devices that they've been issued don't connect with the devices that teachers are working with so a lot of times we have people when we do have a body or a human being to cover a class they can't access someone else's google classroom because the technology isn't connecting or they don't have the ability because of the infrastructure so these are huge issues that we really need to work on to kind of build our infrastructure moving forward and there are things that are going to cause roadblocks as we progress with opening and moving forward in that process which brings me to the final thing that i wanted to talk about and that's our class sizes so i've talked to dr sal and kevin about this um back in january when uh members brought to our attention that we have many many many classes in danbury that are over our contractual limit of the amount of pupils per class so um that is a current concern and in order to move forward we really need to make sure that one that we're adhering to our contract language so elementary classes there should be no roster bigger than 25 students in a class if we're going to adhere to contract language and 30 at the high school in middle school those are important things that if we don't have that in check right now moving to additional or future phases of opening um is going to be a real roadblock for us as well and it certainly will um be a roadblock for space issues for mitigation and social distancing so i just wanted to bring a few of those things that we still have work to do in the coming weeks if we're going to move forward but i also wanted to just you know bring kudos and um accolades to the hard work that has taken place in the past few weeks and i thank you all and again um thank you uh kim for all the work that your work your office has done in the past few weeks so air high five to you as i do with my students and i'll say good night to y'all good night aaron and thank you again thank you okay um cooper could i just address one piece of aaron's comment yes uh comments we have some good news to announce aaron um that we do have additional custodial support that will be starting in the schools on monday for each school they're getting an additional custodial support um that will be helping out in the cleaning mitigation partly as a result of our conversation and conversations with the principals and so we look forward to working with you sure that you know things are moving in a positive trajectory and thanks for bringing that feedback to us wonderful thank you courtney thank you thank you board as long as what up um i got to thank uh kim too um and the uh union because these are i'm gonna use the word purchase services we cannot we have been looking for hiring and we've been not been able to so we did uh talk to our union kim has talked to the union the teamsters and our local and uh told them the predicament and um they're permitting us to do this so i i need to thank them all publicly you don't find a lot of employee groups saying okay go out and hire folks and bring them in they realized the need that aaron just you know um talked about and we want to make sure that the place is clean and safe and they'll be dedicated to all of that so i need to publicly thank all of them for doing that and thank you kim for getting the negotiation thank you thank you dr sarah is doctors the leader here i'm right here okay thank you good to see you video she tells him so thank you first to the team for working so hard to make the vaccine clinics such a success it really is a true testament to the fabric of who we are as a district and on behalf of the saa we just want to express our sincerest gratitude and appreciation and and i agree aaron um people were just overjoyed with the relief and and that feeling of there's hope out there so thank you all for all the ridiculous amount of work that it took to do that so thank you um moving on with my tell me something good um with the last six schools south street principal vargas uh guevara she shared with me that south street is doing some amazing things our students in fourth and fifth grade attend school daily even if they are home or full dl as those are our two grades that continue to departmentalize and the teachers started live streaming five days a week since we came back in january those students are are all in five days a week the teachers love it and while it's not the i'm sorry and feel while not the best instructional model for our students in this platform it's the best we can offer offer for our students to have consistency both to meet their academic and emotional needs principal bradley at morris street school shared with me that they're finding new ways to do things and stepping out of their comfort zones we have learned a whole new way to teach and growth is something to be grateful for they've learned better or more efficient ways to do things like virtual parent teacher conferences and staff meetings they're building relationships with parents in ways that they've never had before and many families and more hands-on are excuse me are more hands-on with their children's learning even though it's been a tough road they've learned that they can all bounce back and learn new things they rely on each other and are growing in knowledge of technology stretching our creative thinking and expanding our flexibility and patience our school community has become even stronger we have all been in this together for one year and have worked together through plans schedules sickness and more we are a team our students are amazing and persevere with their learning as one fourth grade student so aptly stated when analyzing a character dog is a survivor he accepts life's hardships and realizes life goes on and he will make the most of it our students make us proud in all learning environments from haitian avenue school principal furman shared with me that they participated in many exciting events at haystown on january 26th they had a pto literacy night students could choose their favorite teacher or principal to read them a bedtime story on google me this was very well attended and a great time was had by all last week they celebrated read across america and all teachers were provided as with a slideshow of administrators teachers and dhs students reading books they had a read my t-shirt day and a half day many teachers have reported extraordinary efforts on par on the part of their students second graders reading over an hour on epic the kids are really pushing hard and so are the teams they also did a fundraiser for frank a charity near and dear to their hearts the charity raised over three thousand dollars keep up the great work haystown students and staff go dragons from principal smith at great plain school thanking members of the board for allowing great plain and other schools the opportunity to share things that are happening at school great plains sent out a video to the parents and community on what i am great plane is pleased to announce that we will be gearing up for the spring assessments star testing is coming no problem sba is coming no problem the students and community members participated in read across america the video was created by the staff posted on the site and shared with students in an effort to make the left happy great green theme is in constant communication with parents about how to support the child and community needs we could not do anything without the love and dedication of our great plains staff and parents again thank you and ais principal roche shared our social worker noted mother teresa said we cannot we can do no great things only small things with great love during the pandemic staff purchased refrigerators collaborated with our amazing pto to create to create ais families helping families which delivered grocery gift cards one parent who always donated food and gift card said during a pto meeting i have never seen anything like this where do you find staff like this teachers drove computers to homes and some drove gifts to all their students an ais and pto food toy drive filled our media lab and conference rooms the staff member said people people who work here and our families care for one another and we truly are an ais family special events included science presentations recycling programs history lessons taught by the director of the danbury museum and a wescon theater department collaborative a theater arts event art club theater club greg tang math lessons and a viewing of mars landing we had our third annual spelling bee virtually at ais sophie and arna were 20 went 28 rounds before crowning a champion arnold will go on to the connecticut state spelling bee along with our 2020 champion eva balco a parent told me a few years back where i work if someone spends five minutes at school after the bell they want an extra duty pay and at ais it's the way you all operate i'm grateful to our amazing parents students and staff for their resiliency during the most challenging time and i'm going to close with ellsworth avenue principal durkin she shared with me a video that i'd like to share with you of two students working together while one is at home and one is at school so i'm gonna attempt to try to do this share screen oh it should work thank you kara p for letting do you all see that little video give me a thumbs up just so i know i'll hit play is it you see it yes okay thank you courtney peter while he's at home tiago yes tell me why because uh i helped him upgrade his book he helped me upgrade my book at first i only had this page and until he helped me i had this much pizza wow this is how big my table of contents is wow adnan did you like it yeah yeah why did you like it working with a partner who's at school because it is so fun to help each other and then we get more better and then left out alone if you're left out alone like that's not good like if you work with the partners that's more like nice to work and then you can not fall behind and you can be better yes that's wonderful okay but let's tell on that time for dismissal sorry but it's time for dismissal okay maybe maybe next week when i come back when i come back to school maybe we can go into a breakout room again and then you can upgrade my writing again or on tuesday if it's going to be school it's going to be higher i thought that was a really apt way to close and um i just want to say i appreciate so much that we're able to share these awesome things that are happening our teachers and administrators are working really hard and i'm happy to share the share it with you next week i'm going to get pictures and i'm looking for a show from around the school so thank you so much hope you all have a great night and thank you again next turn our agenda um before i move on i'm sorry uh do any board members have any question for dr zelita okay moving on our student representatives good evening board of ed members cabinet and community members thank you for allowing me to represent and speak on behalf of the alternative center for excellence eighth students are participating in the 53rd annual jamberry cultural commission poetry contest students from the entire school will have the opportunity to submit their original works submissions are due march 29th ace is recognizing women's history month as a community by engaging in learning activities and projects designed to celebrate and honor the accomplishments and contributions that women have made in our society works of art to celebrate women's month will be added to the ace creativity showcase website ace guidance counselor diana dinardo is organizing a march into a wellness day that will include virtual meets with the community members who perform duties in their careers related to serving the community as well as promoting physical and emotional well-being ace will be holding our sat day for 11th graders on march 24th a special thanks to our s.a.t administrator kyle truccola and our pro lake zlara no laura blake anthony hellman and melissa laskey for providing this opportunity to our students ace would like to announce our cave awards winners lyla fridas and ryan gallarza for consistently demonstrating strong leadership skills ace would like to publicly acknowledge and congratulate our february students of the month kaylee cottrell and josh lastly ace would like to congratulate our most recent student of the week award winners jalen batista and serena song congratulations to the both of you and keep up the great work during the rest of semester two thank you for all thank you for thank you all for allowing us to share the great things happening at our ace family this spring uh with our ace family in the spring stay safe everyone and remain a strong thank you nicole okay so does any board members have any questions for any of our students seeing none we're going to move on down the agenda to action item a joe britton will you ma do the uh action item a please sure thing i would like to make a motion that the board of education approve a four thousand five hundred dollar payment from the building rental fund for the repair of the jv baseball field backstop in accordance with policy 3-150 i need a second second and and who was that joe yes any questions concerning action item a yes just a statement about the building rental fund um a few years ago i had asked joe martino about some auditorium fixes um there's like you know painting on the ceiling um there's something going on with the brick on on the side of the auditorium some seats need to be repaired um so and we had a conversation you know that we would like to eventually you know build up that fund for for some big ticket items the auditorium is um seen not just by the high school but other schools and also the community um i realize we're not you know raking it in right now but um just some food for thought thank you thank you rachel any other comments or questions concerning the action item eight seeing 9k good to do the roll call please uh joe britton hi rachel celesti gladys cooper i lauren daley hi joe da silva aye catherine hodgson aye rich genelli cathy molinero hi al russo amy spolino hi okay so we the motion has been carried we have 11 people in favor of action item a rachel would you do action item b uh sorry i move that the board of education except for first reading policy 9125 attorney as recommended by the policy committee in accordance with 21-34 thank you stacking it by kathy jumped in okay sorry about that i'm sorry who who seconded it i did i did gladys okay okay okay thank you okay uh any questions concerning action item b seeing none uh kate would you do the roll call your britain aye rachel scholeski hi kate canetta aye gladys cooper aye lauren daly aye joe da silva hey catherine hodgeson aye richie janelly aye cathy molinaro hi al russo hi amy spelino hi okay so we have 11 in favor motion so care catherine hutchison would you do yes i'd like to make a motion that the board of education accept the first reading policy 9140 board representatives as recommended by the policy committee 21-35 thank you captain motion made by catherine seconded by seven seconds amy okay okay are there any questions concerning that policy in the discussion cnn okay could you do the roll call please do britain rachel celeski hi kate canetta aye gladys cooper aye lauren daly aye joe da silva hi catherine hodgson hi rich genelli i cathy molinero hi al russo hi amy spelino hi okay thank you all the motionless care we have 11 in favor of the action item c uh lauren daley could you do action item d lauren madam chair i have it up on the screen if you're allowed okay go ahead okay i'm good okay go ahead lauren i make a motion that the board of education accepts the first reading policy renumeration and reimbursement as recommended by the policy committee in accordance with 21-36 thank you lauren promotion made by lauren seconded by a second this is king okay okay thank you any questions okay okay saying no questions um kate could you do the roll call joe britton hi rachel celestine hi kate caneva aye gladys cooper aye lauren daly aye joe da silva aye catherine hodgson hi rich janelli hi kathy molinero hi al russo aye amy spelino hi okay we have 11 in favor motion so carrot action d has been accepted uh joseph uh the civil would you do action item e joe the silver or whoever has it up on the screen al you have it up on the screen i do action item e time and place and notice of meeting i'd like to make a motion at the board of education except for the first reading policy 9321 time place and notice of meetings is recommended by the policy committee exhibit 2137 thank you a motion made by al who's could i hear a second by katherine catherine thank you in discussion concerning action item uh e cn9 uh kate could you do the roll paul please joe britton hi rachel celestine hi kate canetta aye gladys cooper aye lauren daly aye jojo silva catherine hodgson aye rich genelli let me just check your comments kathy molinaro hi no because what about russo and then amy now you know okay so we have all 11 in favor action id motion so carried we'll move down to action item f i make a motion that the board of education except for second reading and adoption policy 1342.2 community relations and appeals as recommended by the policy committee 21-38 thank you second second instructions by kathy seconded by joe silva any questions discussions concerning action item f seeing none cake could you do the roll call joe britton aye rachel celeski hi kate canetta i gladys cooper i lauren daly hi joe da silva joe can't hear you can i get no no no i'm not sure he can hear us okay um sorry uh catherine hodgson aye rich janelli hi kathy molinero hi al russo amy spolino aye kate i may have frozen up there for a minute i was uh i'm voting in favor aye thank you okay thank you joe okay so we have 11 in favor motion so caring okay hey miss milina could you do action item the next ice actually yes yes yes uh i make a motion at the board of education except for second reading and adoption policy six six one five nine instruction special education as recommended by the policy committee uh exhibit 21-39 motion made by amy can i hear a second second a second about l any question concerning motion see you now kate could you do roll call joe britton aye rachel celeski i kate caneva aye gladys cooper i learn daily aye joe da silva hi catherine hodgson hi rich gianelli aye cathy molinaro aye al russo aye amy spolino hi okay we have 11 in favor of the most emotional care uh mr dinali would you do the final uh action item please yes thank you i'll make a motion that the board of education except for the second reading and adopt policy number six one seven one as recommended by the policy committee janelli seconded by mr de silva any question cnn kate could you do the roll call yo britton hi rachel chaleski hi kate canetta i gladys cooper i lauren daly aye joe da silva aye catherine hodgson aye rich genelli aye cathy molinero aye al russo aye amy smolino aye we have 11 in favor emotion so care thank you all for participating in our era consent calendar and exhibits that we have to take care of tonight next on the agenda dr south superintendent's report dr sarah i was on i was just testing i was on mute okay so um number one on is about the academy um kara and her leadership group dan at the high school and with others dave melissa and they do been working with the academy folks in nashville looking at options and the types of academies that they were able to institute there and lining this up with the portrait of the graduate corollary what's going on is that we're starting to collect information regarding ed specs so as we do that i'll be contacting joe braden i you know facilities community so we can kind of talk about that we're trying to get so when we get some draft stuff together um and then we'll start talking about it so that that is an uh in motion actually last week on wednesday maybe a group went back up to the matrix or the summit i'm sorry to put some more eyes on the buildings and kind of walk now through there a little more of a vision based on the understanding of some of the activities and um learning communities that we were challenged with intellectually by the people from nashville so with that lens the group went there and and looked around went with their uh so we could talk with architects so that's all exciting work connect moving along so as soon as some things come together with where you could we could look at and then you can take a look at some med specs um we'll be calling for a meeting for you guys to look at um i think i have my computer keeps going on it next thing that i have on there is the senate bill 948 i think i sent you a copy of my testimony i mean you know this is probably own news to you but i thank aaron i have been going around the state and i've been talking about the inequities in funding for the urban setting and one of the criteria is that concentrated poverty index you may recall a few years ago um cities were given money and danbury keeps getting knocked out of because they consider us wealthy right or wrong different but if you look at the number of poverty students we have i think that's in just just not justifiable at this point so many of the schools that in the urbans need to be into that mix when funding comes available governor malloy you mean we all supported in 2017 um was give us a 10-year payout on our money our money money to the city you know up to don't know 52 million more to get us up to 52 million and now the current governor has put a pause on it um this bill which comes from the finance group project accelerates that and says you know infuse the money now they give them a proposal for it um and it mainly does impact as you can see uh minor the we call it bypac the indigenous minority students of color uh those cities are the ones that suffer and getting that money back into the mix really have you know happens um to be used in a way that's going to be uh fruitful i know people talk about essa money and they're talking about that that money has not come yet it's going to have limitation and the thing that this board has always talked about thank you for the money but what about sustainability right now you know the cities are spending around 2 300 less on average than many of the non-urban settings and that totally isn't just whether it's for bilingual students specialist students regular ed students students advancing in ap you know we do need some equity to come to bear and i think going to hartford and talking about this um um even in this economy whether or not it happens this year but people are beginning to listen and looking at disparity so if you have a chance to talk about it that's why i put the testimony in there for you um you know i welcome you to uh to talk to folks about it um i appreciate it if you would the vaccine is my next thing i um let me just ask my team um either kara or uh kathy or kelly or kim do you have anything to update the board relative other than what we talked about in the recognition anybody hearing none i guess not they did talk to you about um you know what they've done and we should pretty well be on our way this coming weekend as kelly pointed out uh with with um you know vaccinating our folks quite quite an effort on the part of many of us so i'd like you to now i want to talk about the hybrid extension i'm calling it and uh today i got some calls about rumors and let me just go on the record by saying you know the the the work that has to happen has to happen with others and they timing is is everything and it does take a lot of time we've been looking for a few months at how we can do things but certain things have to come together um and certainly the vaccine rate and infection ability of the being vaccinated has now come into the picture these things really are saying to us what next and uh i've talked about last meeting and i do want to talk a little bit tonight about what we're doing next week i've been mindful of trying to phase in um our our in-person learning and um you know we we are targeting sometime soon in april um we talked with principals about some possibilities but to do our due diligence there are staff issues that need to be reconciled you heard from aaron um some issues with class sizes these are all things that we have to be mindful about when we make our next move so i think i'll start with if you don't mind with we have some display but kelly maybe you could refresh with the board first the things that you have been doing relative to bringing students in then we'll move to what we're doing next week and then kevin if you would bring up the one source that we have to talk a little more specifically about some of the parameters that we're looking at if we are to increase our in-person learning can we start kelly sure thank you dr sal um so i just want to update the board uh this past monday we did resume uh four days a week in person instruction for all of our preschool students so any students in our special education our typical role model peers um that chose to come in person were able to return to our preschool um full-time they they attend a half-day program most of the students um so it's an am and pm session um and the number of students whose parents had opted to keep them on distance learning um provided us with the opportunity to um you know maintain social distancing safely within our space and resume in-person instruction for the rest of the kids that wanted to come in so we are very excited to see them four days a week that is their typical schedule a four day a week program during a traditional school year so they are back attending school as they would prior to covid the other things we've done within the special education department are return what we've referred to as our high needs special ed students and this is our students that have the most significant needs uh primarily students that attend self-contained programming they have also began coming in four days a week um so they're a part of both cohorts and it truly has been an effort on behalf of our building administrators nurses bus company to pull this effort off to get them in so i'm happy to report that it has went smoothly so far and i think we have made a step in the right direction to have our youngest and some of our most needy uh students back in school more often so kelly we saw a little vignette regarding uh kind of i call it the um you know a blended approach you've been doing that in your classes sure so um within the special education department um you know many of our schools have one or two special ed teachers at the elementary level some more um so we have had to uh have our teachers teach both the students that are coming to school as well as the students that are distance learners um and so saw in the video from ellsworth just made me smile um is what we see examples of every single day our special education teachers as well as our related services staff members are teaching students in front of them with students beaming in on the computers and tutors supporting those students as well um since the start of our return to in-person instruction um and i think in the beginning i certainly should acknowledge um you know some of uh you know tech glitches they happen um certainly um you know it is an adjustment for teachers to get used to um you know being in front of the screen front and center when they're teaching and instructing making sure to monitor what's going on in the classroom as well as what's going on in the homes but i think once they're doing it for a few few weeks what i've seen is it really does become almost like second nature not the quite the same as being in person but they have done a tremendous job with it so in partnering um you know our secondary students have been doing it all students 612 um the the majority of the school year um and so one of the things that uh dr carol samaro and i have spoken about is you know really reaching out to some of the special education teachers or the esl teachers at the elementary level that have had more practice and experience doing this um so that when uh the rest of our k-5 uh classroom teachers uh go go to this model um that they'll be more familiar with it if they need to um kathy or doubt i know you're here um the board has asked before okay you know we we've now instituted the hybrid we've now over two weeks have introduced the um horizon our new needy special ed students are coming in um you know how's it going relative to the um student health and contact racing and all of the mitigation strategies can you comment on that for us for them sure dr sal um it has been going very well uh with having our students return we are still continuing to identify positive cases and there have been quarantines um the dashboard has been updated as of five o'clock today to date we have seen no in-school transmission which is very good news shows our mitigation strategies are working um but we are continuing to see positive cases spread in the community um so we you know we're we're hoping that you know although the numbers are better in the community we still are seeing a lot of community spread we need to continue highly encouraging people in the community to social distance wear their masks you know maintain all those public health measures to help us get these numbers down but overall nothing transmitting in school which is good gabby i see the care of prenties here i don't know if karen has any comments relative to the community spread no just that um our numbers are consistent with the state um we are down in our numbers we're at 27 per 100 000 over the last 14 days our positivity rate remains around 4 um so we are pretty consistent with the rest of the state in our numbers uh where we used to be the highest and the number one in the pack we're now in the middle of the pack so that's some positive news so so um thank you very much karen always thank you for your collaboration so you know for the board you know since the beginning um we applied for the hybrid and the reason why we applied for the hybrid was plain and simple our class sizes are too large for us to be able to safely socially distance so the hybrid was our standard in order to return so that's what we want to talk a little bit about tonight the um the next step in a roll out um is the goal is to increase face time with our teachers and that is we have an opportunity that carol speak about the day and also about the wednesday and then about some next steps that we're going so cara are you ready sure yeah um so um you know along the lines that uh kelly mentioned um you know we are increasing in-person learning um the letters as you're familiar with has gone home to indicate that we'll be returning back on on using utilizing wednesdays which is great at the elementary level that that gives us really the greatest gains while we can in conjunction with the fact that we're extending the school day and so um in the the model previous to this shift on the 15th um students were coming in at the elementary level 10 hours weekly or 20 hours over two weeks but when we add in the wednesday rotation for the cohorts um that leaves us with 13.2 hours and for week one and then 18.2 hours for week two for a total of um over 31 hours over two weeks so we do have a nice gain in person contact time for students um and so we thought that that was a great way to phase in some additional contact time for the students who did choose the hybrid learning at the secondary level the gains are not as much however they are coming in a full day on wednesday for the day on wednesday um there's a net gain of five hours of in-person contact time over two weeks um and so uh we're very happy to be to be bringing students in at all levels on wednesdays um it still is an early dismissal as indicated in the letter that was sent home um and we are on our rotation schedule which will take a little bit of adjustment to get used to for for everybody um but we're excited to be to be welcoming our students in on on wednesdays and also as an extension on on the uh at the k5 level for monday tuesday thursday and friday um with that comes um some adjustments with some of the instructional components so we are going to be seeing more synchronous instruction and as the day is lengthened some additional synchronous experiences will be included in the course of the school day there will still be some asynchronous components that students will be responsible for as they as they are now um but that will be more balanced in a sense and so um while uh you know we welcome some of these changes and opportunities it um definitely is going to be some adjusting on both ends the day again becomes a little bit more structured our distance learning students who are at home um also have some blocks that are scheduled and backed into what is happening in the grade levels at the schools with the children who are in hybrid and so in in essence it does extend the day a little bit longer um for students and so i will be working with teachers to help them find ways to balance out the instruction across the day so that we're not keeping students on too long unnecessarily and that we're striking that balance between the contact time and and independent practice off off screen as well so um we are excited about that um and um we you know looking forward to continuing to explore additional ways that we can increase the in-person learning for students who choose that so um over to the next step and and so you know that will begin next week which i'm excited about all of this by the way you know uh you take a little set because we did extend the day we need to look at as there's supervision issues there's um substitute issues there's cafeteria issues many things that they're able to familiarize themselves returning back to the full day with the social distancing it is a different situation so that gives us time to experience that and i think it's just smart for us to do some of that piloting and move move slowly to move fast in some respects so so what's next and i i think uh you know i did get some calls today about oh this is happening this well as i tried to say when i started there's no way you can start on a monday and decide that on next wednesday or final week you're going to do something it takes time it takes dialogue and rumors will spread no doubt but the goal that i have had since day one was to bring our youngsters back safely and we have some opportunities you've heard about the what we're doing with the vaccine that's going to give us a certainly a great standard regarding safety it also allows us to keep our teachers in front of our students because they will not have to be quarantined that is that is huge for us to to be able to rely on that so kevin i asked kevin to put together a slide for us kevin you want to bring that up do you have it you could take us through it i i it's hard to see you might have to make it a little larger those of us that are under 40 are having a problem i'm trying to do that hold on one second can you see your computer all right uh kevin you want to do is that good sure sure dr so good good thank you cara so good evening everyone so as as dr sal um cathy o'dowd and cara punty alluded to previously my overall health conditions continue to improve vaccines are being conducted across the community and schools continue to demonstrate that in-person instruction could be done safely and as a result we're excited to welcome more students back into our schools for more in-person learning however you know we we are learning and dr cell has is kind of alluded to some of these um considerations challenges uh that we're going to be faced with to realize these goals like we're gonna have to work through some considerations as we try to get our kids back in school um and so uh one um physical space is still a challenge for us throughout the district uh particularly with three foot social social distance guidelines in place and so another another consideration for us is possible redis redistribution of students and so we could have some teacher changes particularly in our k-5 grades just also want to share with the board in the community in-person learning capacity could result in some students waiting for an available seat so you know we we walked through we had conversations with our with with our principals this week in reassessing um what their true capacity is uh with three foot distancing at the minimum and so you know in some of our schools we can accept as many as 20 students in some of our schools we can accept as low as 16 or 17 students in the classroom and then you know some as high as 22 23 and so it varies from school to school classroom to classroom and that that's what we are continuing to learn as we speak with our principals and and walk through these classrooms with them however it it will shrink the availability um uh and of the available seats uh for students and families um another thing that we've learned and it's become very clear we're going we're going to need to purchase additional furniture and ppe um to maintain our social distancing guidelines um and so it's been a it's been a goal of the districts to purchase furniture to promote group work and and be face to face and so now of course in this environment we need our kids to be separated um and so almost all of our k-5 schools and appropriately so uh we had furniture to promote good work group work cooperative learning um and now we are looking to purchase furniture in many of our schools uh that's going to be desks that kids will be separated um to to maintain our social distancing guidelines um and and then another consideration um in this this is mostly for our new families who come into the district it's you know it's very likely that a lot of our new registrants that come in they could be moved to distance learning without any parent choice at all and so we just wanted to share these realities with the board and with the community as we continue to on this road to reopening our buildings so um you know for the board and and for for for us personally when we opened up um you know we had a um a teacher assigned that the parents um had anticipated and then we went into hybrid we had to make a change those that wanted to be on dl and those that were going to be in the hybrid and that was a change and i think that's hard um our next uh our next phasing in our iteration is going to require some of that as well to happen in order to balance some of these classrooms um where where it's going to be somewhat difficult for the board and and and i want to reiterate this is that um the only way this will work at all the only way it would work at all for us to think about some re-entry to a five-day week for our youngsters to um maintain the current level of distance learning students and the current level of the hybrid students um even with the maximum of six feet as a gold three feet as a minimum having these tabletop dividers for safety and full masking and vaccination all of that coming into play unless the three-foot guideline is mitigated which i don't see anywhere anywhere how that that's happening we have to create the conditions that those that are home remain at home and as there's an opportunity to bring students in that building by building we discussed it they know families they know situations we can then re-enter students so that that's the only way that we can operate and start planning mindfully about opening up five days a week i think the question is well when are you going to do it well that is that is a monumental task we are finding secondary uh challenges are not as great the k-5 challenges are much greater and um and they range from the spacing issue to personnel issues much greater than the secondary you know if you would ask me what am i targeting i am targeting um you know sometime here in april um you know certainly um i we need to re-meet with our medical folks to review um ken kim is on i don't know if she was talk a little bit about personnel but we have many challenges there uh so you know we it's it's the it's almost like a kaleidoscope all of you remember the kaleidoscope getting all that blending well you've got vaccination you've got space you've got um technology you've got union issues all of that needs to come together it's not as simple as saying tomorrow we start so um you know we are looking at that we started studying that for a while we're drilling down with our principles now the principles will be talking to teachers more actively because they're directly involved and then we think we're going to gain all of this information and then make a decision um that or recommendation to think through uh when we could possibly return but it would have to take place in the two big standards one social distancing at three feet and the those families that are on dl now currently are going to have to remain in there until there's an opportunity in space to return um before i end and open up the questions i think um kim you're on any comments you wish to make no i mean i i just would underscore that um you know it's it's complicated to we don't generally just flip the switch with the number of people we have out so just to give you kind of a bird's eye view we've gone back through probably about a hundred folks and we're looking at them in different categories um some are are people who are out on health accommodations for whom the vaccine is magic and they're ready to come back some of whom you know have health care providers that do not recommend that they get the vaccine for different very personal medical reasons and then we have categories of other and then we have a lot of teachers at the k5 level who have been teaching dl classes exclusively and while our preference was for them to do so from the school building we did have many who asked for different accommodations to be able to teach those dl kids from a work from home model because their own kids may have been in a hybrid model there were other reasons and we needed the space in the schools so that we could spread out the kids that were coming in so that's a long way of saying um it's a pretty good long list and my team is in the process now of um of going through that list and really confirming with folks who's planning to be and available to be in um and then what we'll have to do is kind of overlay that list over what the building principles think that they can accommodate and what they what they absolutely need to adjust to this new model so it's going to be um it's going to be yet another administrative feat um but as you heard before my team's getting pretty good at this so we'll figure it out but it is going to take a little while to get through them all um you know kim to the board um i know your shirt tails are getting tugged well why is danbury not in and they can in neighboring uh this community well right now the way things are are um are rolling out our numbers uh given the number of folks that are at home um are better reflective of that which gives us this opportunity to return and along with cara talked about we are in the middle in terms of thank god of the infection rate being much all those things now put us in this position to look at this for uh you know targeting the goldenness of the city the goal of the state has been um conditions improved somewhat knowing they can dip but generally in a good trend um you know you look at increasing um in in person time so next week we're increasing wednesday we're increasing the day uh and we're still studying uh the rest for us to see if there's an opportunity uh sometime in april here to um return the group so i'm gonna keep quiet unless courtney has something i know i'm not sure if you do or kathy just to say that uh dr we're just purchasing um additional desks and additional desk guards um for the safe reentry for the i'm sorry elementary schools um and and that's all that i wanted to say i just wanted to um you know thank kara wanzer for um i you know setting out what the spaces were in the buildings related to the enrollment so that we could then zero in on what the desk needs would be and so we should be able to have that in place um before a potential april um entry for all the students at the elementary schools it does change uh weekly and that's why we have to keep updating that so uh with that um madam chairman i'm um you know i'm i'm done um but obviously if we get closer to a decision we'll be informing the board and and working with the medical folks and start doing our due diligence thank you um mr de silva had a question dr sal yes go ahead thank you i actually have a couple um but first let me preface this with thanking dr sal and kevin and everybody else in the cabinet whenever i email the question we're i get responses immediately at all hours of the day and night and that's a that's above and beyond the call sometimes when when you're responding to emails at 10 and 11 o'clock at night thank you very much it is appreciated um question on there's a lot a lot to unpack here about the the grid that kevin was kind enough to put up on the screen and i'm not sure where this goes in terms of the dl students first of all i'm really disconcerted to know that to to learn that we may not be letting them come back a lot of people made decisions to have kids on dl be or keep their children on dl as my as we did in my family for a little bit because of the teaching model because it was a teacher four days a week and wednesday instead of a teacher wednesday thursday and asynchronous monday tuesday that obviously is defeated if we're not letting them come back in a five-day week i understand obviously the the the space challenges is this even legal because i it wasn't it the state didn't when when the state promulgated their plan over the summer wasn't the implication to that plan that kids could come back from dl um it's still it still is but i think i had indicated last week if i haven't i i you know they're revisiting issues as well and my understanding now it's a local decision i uh you know go one of the things i kept doing for months because i was sitting and i'd quote different districts what are you doing what are you doing and one would do at the end of the quarter everybody was doing something different so i did write them last week and one of their um miguel was on up there one of the assistants wrote back and said it's an indiv it's a district decision local decision um so that's so the word legal yes to have them come back all i'm saying um uh the only shot we have to bring youngsters back is because of that without understood and that kind of leads me to my second question probably to kevin the cdc says six feet to the greatest extent possible it looks like we're using three feet as the primary measure as opposed to the fallback measure which really should be the fallback measure since the cdc guidance is six feet to the greatest extent possible to what degree are we able to maintain six feet anywhere much where are we on that i mean can we do i mean it seems like it seems like a lot of kids in a lot of a lot of very small classrooms i think what i'm finding out joe as they go around remember we had the architect engineer give us a template and our we started at six feet some of the small schools but many a school already operating at three um and um at this point the um the barrier for teachers is six feet that will not change okay as we talked today with that but that will remain uh i think kevin kind of hinted to keep the three feet every school has been different some the standard is like only 16 kids and you know we we will not give on the three feet that is we will not do that but some schools can do do it larger and and kathy maybe you could respond in terms of medically um you know how that will play out kathy down is kathy still weird yeah i'm here dr south thank you um so in terms of the distancing um you know as dr salas said uh six feet is the is the goal um but we can go to three feet and we have done so when necessary um we are not looking to go anything closer than that um you know we will continue to follow the guidelines and keep our mitigation strategies in place thank you the man though i forgive the desktop right thank you very much i i'll close on this uh and and we made the decision in our house to keep my kids on distance learning a little longer when we went back in january and we sent them back a few weeks ago and we're very happy we sent them back it's been wonderful doing that with my son who's in elementary school required him to switch teachers we knew that going in we voluntarily made that choice to go from his classroom teacher to the distance learning teacher back to his classroom teacher actually and we were lucky he had two wonderful teachers to involuntarily do that to someone in an elementary grade in april is astoundingly a bad idea i cannot imagine how angry i would be as a parent for that to happen i understand the challenges i understand we're trying to figure out how many angels dance on the head of a pin but i i would be i know as a parent i would be mortified if that happened to my child after nine months or seven months or however many months it's been since september when they met this teacher on dl and and came back in january to meet them in person i can't even imagine how disruptive that would be to learning i i understand we may not have a choice but i think that's something we really need to avoid that's all i got exactly thank you dr sal if i i can just interject quickly um jill thank i i appreciate the concern the frustration um i and and i get it we all get it um and more importantly um so do our teachers and so do our principles um and so the principles um as they did before will will do everything that they can to make sure that the kids and i'm not trying to make light of this but given that some of our students have had two teachers already the principals will make every effort to make sure that the kids at the very least don't have any more than one of those two teachers it really then becomes it comes about becomes about the numbers and again i'm talking about k5 classrooms and so you know if we have two sections and you know there's only two sections in your building it's a very good chance you'll end up back with your teacher if there are three sections you know it really depends but our principle is going to make it a priority to make to limit the movement and the transitions for our kids uh to close out this school year um but it was important also for us to show it that it is a possibility because we could have places where you know kim talked about staffing earlier and so if we have a case where a child or family wants their kid to come in but that staff member is not going to be in the building for whatever reason of their assignment does not allow them to be um it is possible um and so we just felt like it was important um that we showed it um but in in i would say in most cases um our children are going to remain with either the teacher they're with now or the teacher they had at the beginning of the school year so this isn't really a situation where if a child is going and attending third grade at pembroke and we go back five days a week we need to reallocate third graders we're moving them to another third grade class this is more a matter of kids that are returning from dl well it i wish it was that simple um because it can change from school to school classroom to class from grade to grade great degree right right because the conditions are all different because the requests across the system are different um but i everyone should just be assured on this call in the community the principal is going to do everything they can to maintain uh those relationships that kids have the beginning of the year and and again given that they did in some cases they did have at least two teachers so between one of those two two teachers the parents are going to try to maintain those relationships okay thank you that's this the hardest part of this it really is the hardest part for us and i think um i'm i'm i'm hoping as kevin says and and the principals have your exact thought in mind that the switch is not good and try to keep as best they can the same teacher with uh with the youngster that's our goal so but anyway thank you those comments much appreciated thank you very uh much don't know if i care i have a a question yes is this just an issue of um dl kids at the at the elementary level or at all levels yeah because the model is a little bit different at the secondary you know yes you're right rachel it's the k5 in in doing this work as i tried to say before right the challenges 6 through 12 are not as great as the k5 really um the only challenge by the way i might as well the only challenge that we had and we spent a lot of time thinking so is the lunch and most secondary folks are doing the grab and go and we're going to have to stay with that we can't supervise and we just can't do that so once we decided look this might not happen the rest of the work has not has been um much more much more capable of overcoming the obstacles but the lunch was a tremendous obstacle for the middle both the middle and the high scope actually thank you are there any other questions from board numbers so as rumors come in guy just let us know and we'll try to follow up you're going to hear more because um the principles that i told them to wait don't you know don't get everybody excited but they need to start talking to their staff because they might have some great ideas for instead of teacher switches ways to to do things and we need to involve our teachers in that conversation and uh you heard aaron in the beginning um you know we work with our unions and we do have to look at balancing so that will play into this uh so um you know i i thank everybody for their uh their patience but um as soon as we have some definitive i'll alert the board and we'll start obviously talking to parents so thank you very much and thank you team okay thank you dr sal uh we're gonna move on down the agenda uh you have uh in your package uh information on the open george program and uh there's a question selection in there so i'm just asking board members to please uh read the information uh that was given to you are there any committees report at this time yes i do i have some yes rachel um just to i mean there's nothing really to recap about the policy except that we took a lot of time out of the board meeting and i apologize for that we met on march 3rd and our next meeting should be april 7th but we have a regular board meeting at 7 at that date um so i just want to make sure it's okay to meet at six on that april 7th yes everyone's going to be on time yes okay okay if there's a change with your committee members and can't get there and uh get started on time and keep it within a time frame before we start the meeting let's look at another date okay but if not then we'll go with that date okay thank you thank you and i want to say just a quick shout out to um mill ridge primary um i want to thank them for inviting me to their read across america day i had a great time reading to um several classrooms and received some nice thank you notes so um just thanks again for inviting me i had you know i enjoyed myself the kids were great so thank you thank you no thank you for participating richard uh board chairperson communication and comments my only thing i would like to say is um again thanks sandy uh for working with us and being super ported uh doing our comment section of the board meeting and making our minutes very easy to uh adjust and read and and and always uh had a very friendly attitude and we certainly as a board wish her the best uh if there's no other questions uh madam chair are we in the comment portion of our meeting yes if if i may yes a couple of things on my mind first of all i got my second covet shot and met karen prunte's team at 3 20 this afternoon he was on time administered well and i am here tonight and i want to thank uh i got my second one today too the two of us guy all right i want to thank karen and her team once again for doing a great job um i envisioned some sort of a zoo and it was well ordered i walked in and a few minutes later i i they administered a shot it was very very well organized and i want to thank her and thank you kara and i also i also want to recognize our our educators for the herculean effort and dedication that they've done to get the job done with our with our program with our with our children and it knows small thank the cabinet and and the superintendent schools for getting it done and squeezing the buffalo off the nickel to get it done and you have my certainly have my respect um i i want to thank dr sale for his aggressive support of 948 and reading that and looking at the high number of challenged citizens in the city of danbury and i'm my conscience i have to regretfully withdraw my support for this the 2122 budget a lot of my support was hinged on the 10 million dollar grant money how much could be braided into the mix and today this hasn't been reconciled to my satisfaction shame on governor lemon for freezing the increases that the city of danbury so sorely needs and deserves and has coming again 9 48.

a mr burns was a fantastic coach teacher here sure i graduated 75 that's when he came and so he he was fantastic my son played golf for him and he still tells stories about mr burns and so thank you kenny you're welcome thank you mr president um again thank you very much uh i wish mr burns is here to take the accolades uh it's really great um just to keep your data arrested on some update on some uh calendar events coming up for our school district uh next week 17th 18th and 19th our parent conferences our second series of current conferences they're different than what we're all used to 99 percent of this on zoom or a telephone or something of that effect we still expect a good turnout we want teachers to part of our 301 plan to have a high percentage of their students involved in conferences we think it's important we hear about the frustrations that competitors are having with the shutdown because of coping 19 the students aren't producing as well we all know that i'll say this over and over again this is not unique to offa high school elementary school or aho children's students this is happening nationwide and it's unfortunate but i want parents to be aware as much as we can so also that we can perhaps help students with some programs we have during spring break and the summer session uh fourth quarter starts monday it's hard to imagine this year's three quarters over time flies when you're having fun i don't mean that sarcastically i mean being into school is important spring break week will be the 22nd or 26th tonight we have an agenda to employ some teachers to help us with programs that help students may need some extra help or feel like we need to play catch up a little bit one of the things i'm always worried about right now nationwide we're seeing a bit of a coveted plateau that means the numbers have dropped since january january it was unheard of just online but the numbers are still still i've heard two figures i i quoted this staff today so the teachers and everyone have to hear this twice i've heard between 60 and 70 000 a day and we're between 50 and 70 000 a day so my worry is this for our country that even though we're hitting a plateau the plateau is still much higher than it was last march april may in june probably i can't remember what it was in july but i think it may have been higher than that so we still have to be cautious and keep social distancing and be safe um it's not just me worried about that doctors that i trust on the news like anthony fauci uh he talks about the fact that he's worried that we're on the verge of another surge i don't always think about spring break that's what i'm thinking about when spring break happens i see u of a and asu driving through this town to go to the beach good time good place to have fun it's also a place to spread the virus today mr edlund and i modeled our expectations for teachers staff development on how we want them to distribute hand sanitizer take temperatures clean surfaces and so on and so forth we spent an hour to an hour and 15 minutes talking about what we expect what we think is safe for children and staff and responding to questions and what's frustrating i've said this 100 times before i'm sorry to repeat myself but none of us their employees are experts on coca-19 i've learned a million times more than what i knew a year ago today because reading the articles watching the news looking on the internet but we were trained to help kids become leaders and writers and learn how to get along with stressful times we weren't trained to become co-good experts and so we've had to learn a lot of that stuff so that's part of the frustration i think that you'll hear from all educators in our business i have a daughter i love dearly it's a teacher in las vegas and where every once in a while i have to kind of remind her honey this is the way it's going to be because she's so frustrated because she can't have her kids sometimes she can't be on campus so it's it's something we're all having learned to deal with just because i had only when the board voted the last board meeting to open up in the 29th of march i appreciate the fact sincerely that the board pushed it back that far because mr hill and i talked we were worried about staff getting the second covert shot that wouldn't have time to take effect i think that i think that this ample time we're also worried about the fact that we may see some uh issues with spring break we didn't want to start and have spring break and start again so i appreciate the border picking this the 29th i think that was a reasonable choice just because i am worried that mr edwin's worried about having kids back doesn't mean we don't want him around uh the best part of my day today was you all know ronald gotee she's an amazing teacher and i was over in the primary camp doing something i was coming back i saw these five little not seven little three four five seven and they're all excited because they had new masks and the masks came from arizona schools and and they had a clear plastic insert so she could see their lips move and they talk to help them develop proper language and they i don't know who's working site where they're no longer the kids but at no offense anybody that was the best part of my day until right now i'm sure this is very good but that's what we want to see we want to see these kids back we want to see them at the end of the year still healthy so i appreciate the board's support so far we have been very conservative on this and uh and the only reason because we want our kids to be safe and thank you for putting us up we were a little bit the governor frustrated a lot of educators last week when he came out and said schools will open the 15th he didn't ask any high level educator now not the paho ajo unified school district super gender principal high level educators we think are pretty important but that doesn't mean that we're important to state level he didn't talk to state superintendent public instruction's office he just did it but i sent an attestation actually monday i believe it was saying that we're testing which is making a basically a sworn statement that we're supporting by his executive order because he did say that exactly where or the monday after uh spring break which is what the 29th so that was good luck on our part so anyhow we're trying to comply the best we can uh one of the things i hope the staff heard from us today was we don't know how to fix something unless you tell us we don't know if what we think what we're playing is going to work but it's going to be some trial and error i'm sure but we don't have much room for error if we want to keep our staff safe so anyway thank you thank you may i hear the motion to accept the consent agenda [Music] the personnel so here i am maybe after yesterday and then i'm after monday and i come tonight let me ask questions tonight but so the hiring of these two teachers you're going to have to have a plan that you're going to present to us next month that i am sure is going to cut somebody from the staff there will be a rift there'll be a rip so we're hiring new teachers knowing that we're going to rip other teachers it right you know these are existing teachers we just didn't know we did the initial hiring a month ago if these people are going to be available and one of the math teachers alone said teacher spanish and esl correct yeah they're they're they're here right now they are here there are two others that are core subject area teachers that we need to replace and that we have to fill those core subject areas as well so they're certified to teach in the specific areas that we need to hire math english things like that we have to have them that's why we're suggesting that yes i'm sorry i thought you were just talking about the next the next the first agenda on personnel um talking about the hiring of the math teacher the english teacher and you know i just i know that we're future they're going to be cut yeah we're hiring two new teachers you know i just our worry is that we haven't met this time of year that we have a math and an english vacancy that we can't fill we have to have those positions so you have other slots that are less important but we have that's what we're working on right now sometimes the teacher that's being ripped can't qualify to teach them correct i understand [Music] i understand your question and it's a good question but um it's hard if i'm going to riff if a few folks represent the high school spirit of high school staff and i riff rodney but higher higher two of the people in the audience like well whatever it means well the state legislature passed a law several years ago that changed the whole rift schedule in arizona rift used to be first in last outpost last year versus i apologize and that worked easily with the ka program until we came up with a designated certification for k3 and they changed the secondary certification to 612.

so yeah that's our update we'd love to see it thank you next we have the superintendent update dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet i just first of all want to um give huge accommodations to the leadership of our student council our district our dysert student leadership council this is not just a simple task that they are pulling off to to bring in this much relief for our community but they are also engaged in many other things and so congratulations to to you and to everybody who's participating on behalf of administration i would like to extend um also congratulations to all of our social workers for the work that they are doing i again want to thank melanie for the work that she's done and is doing to be recognized with a lifetime achievement award is significant and to have one of our own counselors in dicer be the recipient of that award is extraordinary and so it is um she represents all of the social workers but she represents them with with such um great leadership and with the skill and the all the attributes that a a social worker should have our students are fortunate to have her and all of our social workers in the places where they are especially right now during this covert time we're hearing a lot more about the side effects of kovid we've gone through probably i hope the worst of it as far as cases and the medical part but now we're doing and we'll we will be dealing with a lot of the social emotional fallout of coveton so we're fortunate that we have the social workers who have the contacts with the families and the students individually and will be there for them as they need those services so thank you to you and to all the social workers that you represent um we are having an enjoyable week this week doing the the prize patrol for dysart heroes we've been out to about half of the school so far and we're again fortunate that we're able to do things a little bit more traditionally this year rather than not being able to bring anybody together we're actually able to recognize people at their work sites and so we will be continuing that during this week and a little bit when we get back from spring break and speaking of spring break everybody's been looking forward to it with great anticipation but i would hope that everybody enjoys their spring break responsibly and we want everybody to come back healthy and safe and relaxed and ready to finish out the year with a with a strong finish that's all i have to report thank you next we have the governing board update um i had the privilege of volunteering for read across america visiting countryside elementary and reading to mrs carlovich's class as well as ms billman's class and that was really fun for me and i just really want to thank countryside for having me i also volunteered for the valley vista marching band doing concessions at the surprise stadium again this weekend so that was exhausting but but good and that's all i have i also got to park i also got to participate and read across america i got to hang out with miss fallon and miss grier's class over countryside and it was great to see them i love their students they're great teachers um i also in response to read across america got to read several classes this week i read to a second grade class at canyon ridge and to two kindergarten classes at countryside and those kindergarten classes oh my gosh those kids i asked a question and every one of them it was don't ask a question to a kindergartner learn my lesson um i attended a guys and dolls musical oh my gosh that was so enjoyable those kids are so talented and the music i hadn't heard frank sinatra in a very long time so that was fun i've been visiting school so this last couple of weeks i visited western peaks in the growing mines preschool and willow canyon and then i've also had enjoyed participating in the dysart hero squad and going out to all the schools and watching you know how surprised everybody is when they won the award and so congratulations to all the heroes that got the award and to those that will be getting their awards in the next couple of days so um thanks to them for all they do for the district i could say ditto did oditto but uh um also had the opportunity to read across america uh let's see i visited miss great excuse me miss race third grade class at canyon ridge missy's fifth grade class at riverview and then miss divers third grade at countryside and mr dumont's fourth grade at countryside and i brought my own book um it was one of the newer ones and it says if i ran a dog show so of course since i have several dogs at home there were loads of questions so it's not just the kindergartners okay it's even right up until the fifth graders they have lots of questions about dogs but each one was enjoyable and i love the questions and the love the curiosity of all of our students also visited guys and dolls and i will have to apologize for anybody that was sitting near me because those toe tapping songs i actually sing out loud when that is going on so um luck be a lady tonight was a real bang up uh also um have been participating in the hero's uh dysart hero squad uh yesterday and today and uh there were tears and of course there was excitement and there's one even starting to back up because he really didn't know what it was but it was lots of fun and if of course when the kids get into it they are really excited that their teacher or their principal won so it's awesomeness next week spring break please be a safe have fun um and we expect to see everybody back here on that following monday so that's it oh and also i'm sorry social workers are are some of the best that are out there and i cannot speak for miss uh pritchard but i know since she is a social worker this is one of the dear things for her as well so um putting in a plug for miss pritchard there so but uh thank you social workers for everything you do that's it all right moving on to item e1 consent agenda item i will make a motion to approve the consent agenda items as presented seconded by ms grant motion passes next moving on to item g1 dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet as part of our monthly monitoring of board policies that has been a regular scheduled feature of every of each month we present the first part of section 10 and the board has had access to these revisions and be happy to answer any questions that you might have since this is just the first read there is no action to take tonight i didn't have any questions on these we will be bringing back the second part of this next weekend if there are no changes between now and the next time we meet this will appear under the consent agenda for the second read okay moving to item g2 information on 2020 2021 academic data dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board of members of cabinet i will let dr pulling introduce this item good evening madam president members of the board dr kels cabinet and audience uh it's our pleasure to give updates on academic data of course our top priority is student achievement and the learning of students in class every day and so we will give this update and tell you what we're doing to improve student learning and and work on our student learning data so i would like to introduce dr wiefrich our director of research good evening madam president densmore board members dr callus cabinet and community thank you for allowing us to present tonight we are here with the data update for march so tonight we are going to begin with the k8 ela listed in the blue is the benchmark overall school percentage proficient in the pink is the breakdown of the person versus the remote learning on the right of that we did give you the number tested and the percent proficient of that number tested just as a reminder we do expect some drops to our third quarter 1920 and the beginnings of 2021 from our covid situations you will see a drop from last year's benchmark three to this year's benchmark three overall district our ela is at 33 percent proficient we utilize the same color coordination system although it seems like a little difficult to see up there but your overall district math benchmark is at 35 percent so sometimes i think it's very misleading to only compare yearly benchmark to yearly benchmark achievement is a measurement by students performance at a single point in time and how well those students perform against a standard progress is measured by how much gain or growth students make over that time i wanted to give you a closer look at an example of a math and ela in a grade level for this year only this would be from benchmark one to benchmark two within this school year this demonstrates our student growth within the system we expected this is fourth grade ela we expected to see a 23 percent gain we got a two okay these are last year's third graders that are fourth graders now as we look at the four quadrants and i don't have a pointer with me i'm sorry about that when you see the red dashed line everyone to the right of the line is performing there are four quadrants there you have a quadrant that is lower growth higher achievement a quadrant that is lower achievement lower growth a higher growth a higher achievement in a quadrant that is higher growth lower achievement the bottom right our students have a lower achievement but they are presenting growth and it's important to point that out that bottom right because those students may not be at benchmark but they are growing so it's very important to pay attention to those students because they may be our students that are behind but they are exhibiting growth so we just keep working with them to make sure they get to that proficiency level then when you look at the bottom left this is our biggest area of concern on the quadrant these are low growth students with low achievement these are our target students for tier one and tier two and i'm sorry tier two and tier three instruction and with this we are able to identify each student individually and utilize their data for tier two and tier three instruction i went ahead and utilized fourth grade math just so you could see the same present presentation here for math the expected growth from benchmark 1 to benchmark 2 is 41.

sarah is considered a communications specialist around preschool she is the ultimate professional as she interacts with students and staff and she was truly born to teach preschool at any time in the classroom you'll see her singing and playing with her students as she works on speech and communication goals and everyone loves the way she tells a story using all kinds of different voices for the characters and reading with such expression everyone is captivated and even you dr foley you'd really enjoy it too i know so um when we had um excuse me um when we had to close last march and begin online instruction sarah immediately was starting to research the best ways to reach and teach our students when we started the new school year she was ready she had created a green screen in her office to make her lessons interactive and fun for the children she is one in a million and we are proud to recognize her tonight so our classified um points of pride is amy kimball amy come on up so amy was a substitute teacher for us for many years before she decided and came to me and said i'd love a full-time position in preschool this is where i want to be so we actually had her start this year as the paraprofessional in our spanish classroom over at saseman well our spanish teacher left suddenly back in october and without a teacher we had to move all of amy's children into the other kinder prep classrooms well she responded so quickly helping those children to adjust to their new classrooms she developed a schedule to help support the full-day kinder teachers with her students in those classrooms and then she even created a schedule and found time to pull them from those classes to do their spanish lessons with them so they got to continue to do that which has been such a blessing she has spread joy and positivity in every situation and every classroom and she has enjoyed seeing all the different teaching styles and has learned so much from being able to observe everyone she is loved by the entire staff and all the students she truly deserves the points of pride recognition tonight [Applause] and next we get to honor patty lamb for our volunteer of points of pride for this school year okay so patty lamb is currently our pto vice president she gives endlessly of her time and talent for our ecdc staff and students she is willing to do anything we ask of her and happily works behind the scenes to get everything accomplished sometimes she's in and out so quickly that i think she operates in stealth mode because we hardly ever see her but everything is done she loves our school so much and is so dedicated to our students and her own students on her own children and and our staff that she travels from gold canyon to saseman because her son is in our think gifted program over there so every day oh hello yes so she does all of this with amazing kindness and humbleness and she is very deserving of this award [Applause] and then last but not least hannah will you come on up please she is our student point of pride from sasebo preschool [Applause] [Music] so hannah vander linden is a student in mrs stahl's think highly gifted academy at sussman preschool and an absolute joy she approaches each day with a smile and an eagerness to learn she's only four and a half but don't let her size fool you she has maturity level that is well beyond her age she is kind and helpful to and needs to be she's kind and helpful to everyone and puts the needs of others before her own she is sensitive to her classmates feelings and finds ways to include others hannah stands out as a role model for the other students in the classroom always showing patience and looking for the best in others she brightens the days of her friends and her teachers with her warm personality and smile that shines through her eyes she is truly one of a kind thank you mr mr mr and mrs von der linden for the gift of your daughter this year um [Applause] thank you so much for this opportunity to share today thank you mrs gleason and mrs utley we always like to let the audience know at this time that wow we would love for you to stay for the meeting we don't want you to feel obligated to do so so if you need to leave feel free to do so at this time foreign president reese members of the board our as our preschool our peaceful friends leave so quietly we'll continue um they're so quiet um i have some upcoming events and we're actually excited about a couple of these upcoming events we want to make you aware of so the first thing obviously is we have we are on the verge of spring break and we are happy to share that we are on a verge of a very different spring break than we were last year as you know communication will go to families encouraging them to enjoy their break but also to help us keep our schools safe and mitigation strategies stay strong because we look forward to returning and finishing this year very strong and we're real proud of our community our students our employees for everything they've done together during this time so that's that's one of the things we are happy about the other one is something kind of something cool that has come up so this past saturday we have had this on our agenda for a while uh this march 31st there's this good governance event and this past friday uh mrs reach and i had an opportunity to work with sarah watts to plan this event and we're actually very excited about this event because on this day we're going to be hosting with the gilbert chamber of commerce with a group of business individuals a good governance event and it will be hosted through a zoom platform but what we're excited about is in developing this agenda with sarah and the business chamber businesses that will be part of this we're literally going to have rooms where we're going to set um says two it will go two by two including myself so for instance myself and mrs anderson might be setting up up as a group and we'll have a zoom room each of you would have a zoom room you'll have also cabinet members in there but we're going to have conversations with our business community one of the things we've been talking about is our strategic plan we've been talking about portrait of a graduate we're talking about what what are the desired skills and abilities that we want our graduates to have this is going to be the conversation that that we as governing board engage our local businesses in in these zoom rooms so each of you will have a set of questions and an agenda again we just talked with sarah on friday she is on spring break but sent us the agenda this morning and it will be at 8 00 a.m and we will provide more information to you but the setup of this is going to be a really great opportunity for the higley district leadership to work with our business community as we go into other events coming up in the month because you'll notice the month of april we've got lots of meetings we've got two regular meetings and we also have a retreat in which we talk about our goals and plans and those kind of things so we'll have had an opportunity to talk with our business community and their thoughts and feelings about those things as we as we engage in that conversation next so some exciting things to look forward to uh for the next month here and that concludes the superintendent's report um president reese asked a question real quick yes mrs anderson i apologize if you if you said this um will there be any um teachers or a part of this i didn't hear good question so this is we work and this is one of the very first um first school districts to do this this way in a zoom session normally this is like a running board having a conversation or leadership with business and community members so this will be something we have lots of dialogue and conversation about but those who are member of the chamber who come to these conversations and we're just happening to be hosting it with them and this will be the first zoom one like this they've had normally they have breakfast where we come and we highlight and we do a presentation the structure of this one the agenda that we started with looks more like there will be a message from srp there's some business people who are part of the chamber and those who can attend we'll learn a little bit about our new board members yeah your new board you know your new district leadership and the fact that we are working on an agenda with them to have a dialogue with that audience we'll obviously have multiple audiences in groups that would be part of hearing this but this allows us to talk to the town of gilbert's business commerce group around this topic and it's a really good event attended by a lot of just local businesses as well as larger corporations and it's a good way for us to share where we're at what we're doing um and kind of what our vision is and it's a good way for businesses to help us um stay on top of what they're looking for from a workforce so at that point that information is gathered and then we see what we can do to take back so president reese members of the board in fact one of the questions that allow us to do is what kind of opportunities do they have in their businesses that we may not know about that we should be aware of so that we can bring it back to our leadership to our teachers when we're looking at how do we build and grow these partnerships so the chamber is is a city group that is business leaders and this is a bridge to talk from leadership to leadership and then build upon so you all right then we will go on to board comments anyone have any board comments not a lot happening i did have the opportunity williamsfield wintergarden drumline hosted a higley only event for their winter lines their winter guards drum lines winter winds things like that so they did host a higley district only event so that the kids could have the opportunity to perform and that was it was really neat to go and see again since the entire season last year was canceled so it was nice to see those kids really work and they enjoyed performing so um i did actually um via zoom for some form of live stream skip parts of the higley choir performance and if anybody knows the history of choir within our district the program has just busted out and the whole stage was full of children and it was great to see even in masks you could hear and understand them um it was very well done and what is kind of neat again there's not a lot of great things coming out of covid but i could sit home in my jammies and watch it and so it was really great mrs wilson uh i actually did see the orchestra concert for the littles i got to go to one and it was kind of nice to you know there was just families and they were on their own benches in their mass and they did a good job i want to applaud our families for listening and just really taking it to heart that this is the only way they're going to get these events um and they did they listened and i just want to thank all the families who decided to come out in this scary time to watch their kiddos and our orchestra program at the elementaries they are doing so well and i can't even imagine that these kids some of them have only had really two core two quarters to perform one quarter was online but then two real quarters to work on that these songs and they play so well um it was just it was very fun to see these littles work so hard on music and just to see the program grow from where it started because this is only a four three or four year old program and it was really nice to see seeing and listening and hearing all of these performances and that we're we're moving not to normal yet but moving in a direction but i think the biggest part for me is even with the masks and everything else these kids are lighting up performing i mean it's so important to them and they are just thrilled and are willing to do and sing with the masks on and do whatever they can so that they can perform and so it was it's really nice to hear about our performing arts and that we're we're getting concerts and assemblies and everything going again so because you can see it in their face that you can that it means so much to them so thank you for everyone following what we're asking them to so we can continue to do this i know we will continue to do more and add more all those conversations are happening so thank you for following the guidance and suggestions and and the requirements on our campuses so all right mrs reach do we have any requests to speak okay then we'll go on to our consent agenda and i move that we approve our consent agenda as it's presented second questions or comments on consent all right all those in favor aye aye aye motion five zero and just a little note um president reese um thanking again for the gifts and the donations i see that it was a preschool pto donating balance beams and again maricopa donating that's a little stretch of a gift but still we we appreciate our pto so much that do so much for our schools thank you for pointing that out all right we're going to go on to our informational items and so we are on 7.1 for our summer school update all right president reece members of the board cabinet community we're excited to give you an update this evening on summer school and somebody just said a lot of good things didn't come out of covid but i'm going to say we got some funding here and we're going to use it so next slide tonight we're going to share some information with you about credit recovery pe boost courses and of course elementary my favorite all right credit recovery our main focus is for these kids that have failed one or more courses to recover that credit get them back on track to graduate on time and fill in those gaps like i just mentioned we're going to use sr3 funds to cover the cost of summer school these are all in person and we strongly believe in person is the way to go some of these kids have been online and it's been tough so we know smaller groups of kids feedback from teachers and intentional targeted focus on areas of struggle make that difference so you'll see these classes are free they're held at higley high school there's two sessions monday through thursday 7 30 to 11 30 each day these are the courses that are offered they're for ninth tenth and eleventh graders sometimes kids might be in algebra one past semester one and not past semester two so they will have an opportunity in session two to recover that credit um i think that's important because maybe i was a lot of cases it might have been reversed because i wasn't in person that first quarter i had some gaps i didn't do so well but then i caught up so we're going to get them in shape to move forward i think this is an amazing program because it is free and we're going to get very highly qualified teachers to support our kids mrs richards is it just for fs or if somebody um maybe in ninth grade got a c second semester of their world history and they wanted to up that grade for possible scholarship opportunities are they allowed to do that dr foley yes that's a very good question so i'm glad you asked that because other people would have had the same one all right next slide all right we do offer pe and this is for credit and that's why we charge for this course a lot of our kids are planning ahead they want to get this credit out of the way so that they have more opportunities during the school year it costs 250 dollars it's also in person at higley high school it's a three-week session the dates are the 7th through the 24th the hours are 7 30 to 11 30.

you know uh a year of pandemic when so many of our our citizens are struggling to make ends meet and i come up with a number of 34 that are above the line above the poverty line percent it just i put this on my shoulders my conscience will not allow cannot allow myself to to support a 14 million dollar increase i know what the needs are i know what the past was i know back in some 2010 up we dug our way out of a recession we had a few good years but my conscience just and it's my opinion as a school board member and that's all and thank you for allowing me to present it to this committee i'm done thank you thank you al for your comments okay uh seeing no other unless uh are there any other comments from board members i was reminded um sorry gladys um that several board members also submitted testimony in support of the senate bill 948 as well as um some of our community members our parents so i just want to um thank them publicly as well thank you okay thank you all for doing that too thanks for bringing it up rachel thank you honestly yes um i just wanted to say that several parents had been expressing concerns about the school lunch program and what was being delivered um i saw firsthand today at um a friend's house what was delivered today and the difference is night and day so i just wanted to say thank you it's amazing um fresh fruit fresh milk um it's just it was great so um i hope parents are happy so i'm just sending thanks from parents um so it was it was great to see so thank you for that thank you thank you okay we'll send that that on to barrett because that was dr saul really um asked us to do that based on your feedback and the community feedback so thank you courtney madam chair can i make a uh one comment please yes um i know we had a discussion uh last meeting about the return of the board to live meetings and um i am certainly interested in seeing that happen i am hoping that we can hold off until everybody is eligible to at least schedule the vaccine and have the opportunity to have the vaccine i myself am not eligible until april 12th and you know i have certainly no problem being inside of a room with folks wearing a mask but my concern is that folks who may be watching uh the streaming coverage of our meetings may not be able to hear us as clearly or be able to see you know our mouths moving in our facial expressions which may make it difficult for that information to to be heard and understood so i just wanted to make that comment quickly thank thank you any other comments i entertain a motion at 8 40 i think it's 8 49 to adjourn the meeting motion to adjourn second second good night everybody good night happy board month okay thank you good night

but for the most part at elementary you could still go at that time years before that law last in first out they specifically changed that they said you cannot risk someone based on seniority you riff them based on performance and so high school is a whole different kind of fish a whole different situation kelly fisher's not a professional term um so if we have if our student population requires two math teachers and we have three mr edward and i would work and say okay this is seven's horrible folks but which ones which one's the least successful students that would be the one creating that last legislation and again it's probably three years ago i'm not sure and i can't voice your statutes but that would mean that would be the person to go even if they were the um the first one hired even if they had seniority because the legislature doesn't deal with that they don't want that and same way with special i'm sorry special education uh math english we test for science we have to have social studies let's say those are the five or six key areas that we have to have we just can't came down from ourselves i understand the importance of bringing the teachers in that small position to get what that means that's when you get to this category [Music] that's in the contract that statements in the contract says there won't be something to this effect this is not a direct quote but there will not be any reduction in pay unless it's done uniformly across the certified statute so we couldn't say for example a teacher guthrie loses a thousand dollars and the other three of you don't get uh uh reduction in salary it has to be across the board to make sure that that was made clear to the teachers and most of the contracts and i can't give you the exact number i should have prepared for this but most of the contracts that the board approves at the last quarter have been signed and turned in already so we've got a couple that we want to pursue a little bit but it's always nerve-wracking at this time because as i've said the board before the last two years i don't know where this number comes from comes the state part of education on where they get they've said that the beginning of school now every district may have a different starting date that's the big part year before the last there were 2700 vacancies in the state of arizona this past year was close to that i came from an exact number and one of the reasons is dollar we are paying according their u.s news and world report and we figure in cost of living arizona teachers are paid 50th in the nation we're only we we're 48 in the exact amount following oklahoma and mississippi but we figured the cost of living we're 50th we're funding kids the 49th nation only state funding lessons utah per child so that's been happening since mid 90s we can go into this boat with the assurance of the administration at the hiring of these two teachers is in your overall plan financially for next year yes liam burns and i've already talked about that okay okay that's a good question the first daughter is administrative resignation of princeton principal leonard edwin and i think we all feel very bad resolutions [Music] all right i want to thank mr edlund we met last april and uh we've worked well together and uh just for the record i don't think he's leaving because of me he and i talked about some things that he has worried about for several months so i wish him well appreciate your support the next item is approval of teacher contracts for the year 2012 school year the administration's requesting board approval of the issuance contracts to the following teachers kevin and joseph all right [Music] is approval of a 21 22 uh 2021 2022 certified resignation of a spent teacher gretchen graham the wretched engineering has completed the initial journalism for j-1 and she has decided to return to her family at the end of the contract period may i hear a recommendation to accept rich international presentations um the is of the third grade teacher has completed the initial three years of his day one work visa he has decided i [Music] number five is a 2021-2022 certified upon cheetah chanter [Music] zucchinita chanted has been interviewed for vacant english language arts position for the year 2021 2023 students reference checks are in practice were they completed they're still in process so that's what [Music] as a teacher for the 2021-2012 school year glad your hmm number six is another personnel certified employment for the year 2021 2020 april joy caballero april jo joy caballero was hired by the district in june 2020 but because of the covered travel restrictions were able to get out of the philippines to come to iowa she has been re-interviewing her an upcoming position for the 2021-2022 school year and once the superintendent recommends the employment of [Music] um the barriers are much lower than they were a year ago the problem is the us embassy has to be involved in this process as they're coming from a foreign country and they take a minimal number of appointments a day and so it takes a while so we're hoping i know last year when i heard this lady she was impressive but i had i suggested the motion i assume the coordinates that we offer the job through the first of october she's [Music] employment spring intercession will be completed online spring in the session will be march 22nd to 20th to 22nd to the 26th the administration is recommending the following staff for online teaching and tutoring carolyn rodriguez came to richard riverdale year five six kevin comments high school math alice cadez grades three and four rayleigh vernon peter grades five and six tamara's small english language arts not potentiate three and four and eminent rosales middle school superintendent recommends the hiring of the above teachers to work during the interception with the commercial [Music] a day for four days so that's 20 hours at 25 an hour is about a thousand bucks so that comes out to tell you a lot hopefully we'll have some students veteran conferences you'll see the value and being able to participate in this there's no way they can come to school the people we're having in school right now and that won't happen during spring break because the calendar shows the close our special education students and children of uh central workers okay so we probably have 40 45 students we're not let's say 40 students today right now let me hear a motion please the next is the personal classified resignation of a custodian alex uh guymez herrera alex gonzalez herrera has submitted his resignation from his custodial position with the district the resignation is affected immediately superintendent recommends that we accept his resignation join their motion the next is an abandonment of a position by a paraprofessional valeria chavez valeria chavez who is hired by the board as a teacher aide at the november 10th board meeting will not return after the break mr ellen had talked to miss chavez and her new appointment and she does not plan to return no letter email or card was submitted for resignation miss chavez abandoned in the position was too late to include in the january board agenda and inadvertently left off in february and so now we recommend that a paraprofessional position abandoned by administrative be declared may i hear a motion i make a mission uh next is classified employment of a maintenance custodian daniel cotton daniel cotton has been interviewed and referenced checks completed for the position on custodial maintenance work uh superintendent recommends the acceptance of daniel cotton's appointment as a custodial all right and the last is a classified employment maintenance consultant for axel uh gonzalez excellent gonzalez has been interviewed and reference checks completed for the position of a custodian maintenance worker and the superintendent recommends the acceptance of alex gonzalez as employment as a custodian maintenance all right moving on to business the first order of business is uh the approval of the 2020 2021 301 plan payout amendment in response to the ade announcement the school grade will be postponed for the 2020-2021 school years the administration proposes an amendment to the 301 plan to the certified teachers the plan proposes six monitored categories as a replacement to school grade teachers have approved this amendment 28-0 with two teachers not responding to the survey in question here and the six categories are first semester conferences second quarter physician positive parent contacts smart goals submission achievement third quarter positive parent context second semester conferences and the fourth quarter positive parent country 100 of the 301 will go to those who have at least five to six of the categories eighty percent will be to explore the six of the categories sixty percent will of the documented effort will be for three to six categories at least three to six and less than three to six years okay because it's five out of the six categories four of the six the three episodes that it says far at least five or six yeah it sounded like it was three times emotions that you recommend the approved amendment to the 301 plan which we have already done the last is just a um governing broad request to add agenda to future views okay i would like to do the um can you get it done because of the opening in school probably what i would like to add to it is in fact there's a survey i'm working on right now that has several components and one of them is administration one of the safety ones knowledge materials uh also one of his board relations i'd like to put that on there too it's one of the things we've never done we've never done a board evaluation and policy talks about that and this might just give a quick 35 right and i can have i have a couple in the works that would go from these green assemblies i don't want to do it online i want to do it in person because it shouldn't be a collaborative thing it should be a person's true input so i find that in person but we can't be [Music] eric's usually they go through i have one as well okay in january an employee submitted complaints to the board since then we've heard multiple pleas from this employee the most recent meaning by email over a week ago the board has not offered a response of any sort this can no longer be ignored at least some of these complaints require by law a response from the board itself therefore i am requesting an executive session be scheduled as soon as possible for the purpose of addressing these complaints before [Music] all right um [Music]

we had an overall growth achievement of 42. we still have students in the 4th quadrant area that is our tier 2 and tier 3 instruction that we want to move forward and we still have plenty of students that are moving forward and growing however they may not be at benchmark yet but we are moving them with progression to that we're going to take a look at our k3 acadian stibbles information so this gets a little bit confusing benchmarks for dibbles are indicators of grade level measures based on a student's progression through the early literacy skill set dibble's benchmark 2 is accumulative of all literacy skills taught in grade level during the first semester first grade the benchmark 1 data reflects the loss of in-person instruction fourth quarter of kindergarten this would be the focus on phonological skills and you're going to see that it's much lower than the previous year's benchmark 1 data second grade the benchmark 1 data reflects the loss of in-person instruction fourth quarter of first grade focus on phonics is much lower than your previous year's benchmark one data so i didn't get this slide in but i did want to address it the next steps for k3 the dibbles intervention is supplementing tier 1 florida virtual with hmh instruction and other resources including authentic text high frequency words and 95 group these are whole lesson groups providing tier 2 small group instruction for 30 minutes focused on skill need areas and also providing tier 3 small group instruction for at least 30 minutes with an interventionist and this is your k2 math slide and i have to share with you that we have kindergarten and first grade schools that are still in progress with these so it still hadn't closed as of tonight and time for me to get this to you so i did want you to see what was in progress and let you know that they were still testing so this is a very interesting slide what you see here is our quarter two midterm compared to the quarter two end the goal would be to identify the failures in the midterm make sure that you reduce them by quarter n our schools have done a really great job at this green is our reductions and we have a few pink wherein they didn't reduce and i believe we have one that increased but the goal is always taking that midterm point failure data and providing instructional strategies to reduce these failures by quarter n this also demonstrates the higher overall failure rate of our remote learning students so if you look your in-person failure rate compared to your remote failure rate most generally your remote students are have a higher level of failure so for k8 we have a lot of supports and action steps in place very recently third quarter coming into fourth quarter now there was a change in the remote teaching staffing classroom teachers no longer are holding simultaneous instruction they're dedicated schools to remote are dedicated teachers to remote learning we are back on the monday pd plan uh covet has impacted everything so tls and data specialists are back identifying tier two um we are getting stronger again with our small group instruction again coven intervened with our six feet those kinds of things so we're back at a lot of that and then one of the good things also that it was i felt was really important to me mentioned to you tonight was 95 produced a progression guide for us um with instruction that implements all of the missed instruction from quarter four last year and wove it back into our teaching in 95 this year working to help catch our students up in that so that's something that 95 percent has provided for us most importantly i think it's important that we review that k-8 had to utilize the schoology platform this year build their classes learn florida virtual use the online resource to deliver instruction this was all new for k-8 along with remote learning where our high schools were embedded in florida virtual embedded in using online resources embedded in losing and using schoology arcades had never had to do that before so along with covid they implemented all of those issues and continued their instruction so at this time i'm going to bring up dr sai and she's going to take you through some high school yes please good evening thank you so much um as i was sitting listening to jane's presentation i actually asked ken for his pen because i think we really always need to put data in a context and we need to think of what is our initial reaction to data you know and looking at the ela benchmarks for those of you who know me for a while you know i'm very competitive and you know i looked at the data and i freaked out then we have to think about what is the context of this data i stood before you last year and i told you i thought ela benchmark 2 was high that i would have loved to claim we had a gain of 42 to 57 but that's not factual it's what the numbers say but it really wasn't in the context i do feel that the adjustment of going if you look at the 1819 data for benchmark in ela 9 at 42 and being presently in 39 is fairly reflective of where our kids probably are with the loss of school that they had we've also had some kids that have been quarantined 20 to 30 days we have other kids that have other outside issues but the most important part of the data is the so what what are we going to do with this and i really try and emphasize uh to the teachers at my side in district wide when i'm able to get out that these are it's like having a cough when you go the doctor and that cough tells us that something's wrong with the way benchmarks are drilled down we can say okay tracy needs to work on rl1 joe needs to work on rl5 and we can do student by student skill by skill it would be my belief and my hope that the 38 average you see for ela 10 is up in the 40s by the times our kids test one concern that i do have is the high school testers the ones we got in i think are probably are pretty good testers i think our kids that are failing high school probably didn't get in to take benchmarks that could be for campuses as well so we'll see how that plays out with the next set of data with math benchmarks i will tell you dr weifer did i disagree on the on the algebra and that's okay she's very scientific i'm not a scientific but you can see the average of a 19 for algebra as an outlier with any other year i do see when i walk around on at least valley's campus where i currently am i don't think that's reflective of our teaching it may come out i tried to better a coffee on it but our kids will not be taking azm2 for that i would expect to see when they test as 10th graders that they are in the 40s you will see our geometry when in 1819 from 49 down to 40.

and then our boost classes are for kids that need possibly some front loading is what i would call it or maybe a little remediation going into seventh grade or going into their freshman year of algebra this is specifically related to math and they selected math because sometimes those foundational concepts are where our kids struggle so if we have gaps in math we're in trouble you know ela spans across the globe in my opinion k-12 that math if they have some concepts they didn't get or they learned it incorrectly we've got to get in there and help them be successful in middle school and high school heather jones is our administrator for these courses being offered at higley high school one thing elementary's doing is we're going over data very closely and putting it in some excel spreadsheets which will help these recommendations that will go forward for kids to help them qualify or know about these courses so i'm excited about that there's no cost no credit um i like their name boost but i like our elementary name wait till you hear that anyway it's a three week session same hours we are going to be able to offer transportation for kids that need it and breakfast and lunch so that's good there are some benefits to this crazy pandemic all right when you think about elementary traditionally we've offered summer school for our title one campuses and those are gateway chaparral and power ranch we're going to continue to do that but this year we get to expand it and i'm really excited because i know we have some learning loss due to this pandemic go all the way back to a year ago this time when everything blew up all the way through september 8th so miss felicia malloy is going to help hire these teachers and it's scheduled for the two weeks in june of the 7th through the 18th our hours are 7 45 till noon transportations available for elementary kids as well as breakfast and lunch lunch is going to look like when you're done learning grab your lunch and you can go we're going to have to teach them not to eat on the bus so anyway matthew's crossing is going to help provide snacks staffing at elementary will include a health aide secretary somebody that's trained so we don't lose the ground we've covered this year with all of these safe practices and then a lead teacher to assist with administrative duties advertising for this will begin in april all right just like i said we're extending this to all campuses this year we worked this year this year this week it's been a long week [Laughter] we worked yesterday to start drilling down on our data to see which of our kids are going to benefit from this opportunity we're going to use chaparral power and probably gateway but we're going to have to see the numbers of kiddos we have one of the biggest challenges is to make sure we have teachers so thank goodness i think we have an opportunity for our teachers that have worked so hard this year not only will they get an hourly rate they're going to get a stipend on top of that so hopefully well i have more than enough teachers because i don't want to turn around children miss amanda day the dean of chaparral is helping us with all the paperwork and communication and curtis helped design the logo and the name of the elementary summer school is schools in for summer and we have a really cute logo for that [Music] pretty much the same information there we're going to focus on ela and math and like i said those stipends probably are going to hopefully make our teachers know how valued they are thank you mrs richards i know that this um the boost classes are excellent my own daughter took it and um so i just want to make sure that everybody understands that it is really helpful to those struggling in mathematics making those jumps from especially i thought for her my daughter middle school to high school was a big jump and it was a great program so i'm glad we've kept boost president race board member taylor thank you for sharing that one of the things we're excited about is one of the things we're learning is that sr3 is going to require that a percentage of this go toward learning loss i expect you know last year if you remember the governor and in the budget there was an incentive for summer school um and that isn't there this year but the expectation is that you use esther for this and so what's really nice is that we will have if if there is k-12 or if you've got a need for remediation recovery enrichment support you will have a free opportunity with transportation to take something this summer to support you and we will use our esther funds to do that and this one time we have this additional funding we will use it as an incentive to encourage our wonderful teachers to for their time for providing this opportunity because our hope is that we have more participate in this than we have historically had so we're excited to be able to provide this opportunity and get the information out there so that those who are interested we can get it staffed we can get transportation ready to go and and and have something great for our our community and our students this summer can i ask a question is that okay um is there a plan in place just in case i hope not but if a student needs to quarantine will they be able to do watch anything online to get keep on task and maybe finish either the programs credit recovery boost whatever it is or just so that they can have the opportunity so they have that opportunity we can work on that because we have canvas but we weren't going to go both ways with it if it makes sense i think it's i'm going to hope that's not happening because i know they need that interaction that we can definitely work on and plan if they're out so just i mean if they make it so far and it's just like a week left or you know a few days left it'd be great yeah you don't want to punish them yeah okay thank you every day we have about 15 new questions so it's like okay we forgot or we didn't think of that so president reece board member anderson and i think there's a difference too when we're talking about credit recovery there's multiple platforms that we could we could modify and work with the student on when it's enrichment to support what it may look like is a communication with the parent and and resources it will won't have the same interaction opportunity but certainly certainly we're being very intentional to work look at our data to identify students who would benefit from that so we'll make sure that we do whatever we can because following those mitigation plans and if you're not feeling well we would not want you to come to summer school so we we would want to everything that we have learned about how to mitigate during the school year will be alive and well in our protocols and expectations in our summer classrooms reece mrs wilson quick question i'm sorry i did not send this prior um elementary will they get the same opportunity if let's say the kid is getting a c in a class and they want to come in the parent wants them to come in are they going to be able to or is it just going to be failing kids just like mrs kaler said for the high school will it be open for elementary or we're going to do everything we can to support all kids okay i'm just going to be honest i got to get teachers first that's my yes first and the applications actually went out today so we're asking that the teachers get their applications in by the monday after spring break so the answer is i don't want to turn any kid away thank you like the kid with the c yeah i mean if the parent feels that the kid could we'll do everything we can that's how i'm going to answer it that sounds like a great answer thank you well considering we're looking at this as a learning loss i mean the grade doesn't always reflect everything that right they haven't learned so they may be passing but that they did have a loss of learning there and mrs anderson thank you for that question i think that i think that will be difficult because it's a three week time frame and the time you would have to quarantine and with it being the purpose of trying to to catch them up but i think looking into our different options is a good idea and reiterating more so the importance of following social distancing masks and not just when you're at school because we have found and we know that the kids that are the majority of the kids that are contracting covid is not happening on our campuses so um you know keep our fingers crossed we're here to try and help kids catch up make up a deficit something that um they missed and it's three weeks but it's like keep our fingers crossed and please help us get through three weeks to try and help the these kids catch up a little bit thank you for making us think ahead though all right any other questions regarding our summer school update all right then we will move on to our salary schedules good evening i think i have to move that a little closer good evening president reese members of the board my fellow colleagues as well as our community tonight i'm here to discuss our salary schedules and our pay rates for our different employee groups next slide please so um in addition to the salary schedules we're also going to be talking about supplementals and we're going to be looking at them at all of our employee areas so our certified our administrators are classified supplementals and substitute pay one area we are not addressing tonight is our educational professionals and that includes our psychologists our ots occupational therapist our speech language pathologist or speech speech language therapist i have to make sure that i spell out those alphabetical words alphabet soup and the reason for that is because of the fact that they were our most recent group of employees that went through our reclassification and compensation projects which i'll talk a little bit more about in which we were able to really look at a competitive increase for them as well as competitive changes into their salaries and the salary bases that we had so to give you a little bit of history and context because we do have two members of the board who weren't here at the time that we looked to do this in the fall of 2018 the district joined with seven other school districts in the east valley to compromise and go out not compromise pardon me to come together and go out for a rfp in regards to our request for proposal related to a classification and compensation study so these are common within organizations particularly in education and human resources because at some point when you look at your job classifications and your salary schedule sometimes you have to address are we paying equitably have we addressed any paid compression that might be going on and the impotence for this was because of prop 206 that had occurred and passed in november of 2016 which not only had a piece in relation to sick leave for employees but also in terms of minimum wage where the state of arizona was going to see an almost four dollar increase within a four-year period of time so not only districts but certainly private employers were going to have to look and address this challenge for higley a large component of that for us was prior to my arrival our pay schedule particularly for our classified most of our employees were making under 12 an hour so if you were going to look at addressing in four years going up to 12 an hour with approximately at the time 700 and some employees you were going to hit salary compression to where you probably had employees who'd been here at the district four five plus years who weren't making twelve dollars an hour to individuals right off the bat needing to address that twelve dollars an hour and that wasn't something that we could look to do on our own um in terms of manpower as well as the fact really needing to find somebody who could look at the scope of other labor markets within the state of arizona and additionally expertise in other areas within our region too and through that we interviewed three different organizations jb rewards was the organization that rised to the top and had done work within education on the west coast as well as in health care in terms of cost and scope of project had experience in which all of us pulling our resources together and the different dollars that we had that made sense in the bigger picture and so some of the things i already talked about and the main reason why we did this was to look at our in equities our pay compression and really the structures in which that existed and the like i said the impetus of it was our hourly employees however as we took advantage of it we also knew we had to take a look at our administrators our educational professionals and our supplementals we did not specifically look at our other certified in regards to our teachers because of the fact of governor ducey's 20 by 20 plan we had done a lot of work in moving the base rate of our teacher salaries and the time that i've been here and what you're about to see later tonight in today's presentation you'll see that it's our third if not fourth time in about five years that the teacher-based salary has increased so next slide please so looking at our certified um as i said we did not have it as part of our larger project in relation to this class and compensation area however we did know that if we were going to stay competitive particularly around the fact of the governor's 20 by 20 plan we also had to take a look at these areas so just recently within the last year we did increase our teacher certified from 40 to 41 000 so tonight you're seeing that we're looking at increasing our teacher our school counselors and our district coaches by 2.5 percent which will then be those recommended changes that you're noticing and the reason for this is because of the fact that again if we're going to look to recommend which is coming up later today in action a five percent increase based on the conversations that mr moore as well as mr gad has presented in our mno budget over the course of the last few board meetings we do need to take a look at these areas so that way we could look at again distinguishing that pay compression from our first individuals and coming on board with us to individuals who have some time with us and some people refer to it as also kind of a loyalty tax i tend to say internal equity because of the fact that we want to view the individuals that have been with us and their time and value the time that they have spent their tenure and have chosen us you see differences some of this is because it's been modeled within higley certainly before my time here i'm on my fourth school year i can't identify how far back it goes but i certainly understand that goes back at least a couple years before i arrived where there were different base rates for these different groups so we just continued in that area our school counselor and our district instructional coaches actually have not been addressed as part of the governor's 20 by 20 plan because they did not fall within that area but historically because they had higher rates we didn't address them also but it is time to look at that as we look at other components related to our certified other items i want to note is that our school counselors they do have the opportunity to get an additional 15 days of pay at their daily rate particularly at the high schools we utilize our school counselors for our master schedule there's some dynamic of that at the middle school too so they do come on board help with various things and we pay them their daily rate as a result our teachers our continuing teachers our school counselors and our district coaches let me rephrase that our continuing teachers our school counselors if they're returning they're on 186 day contracts our district coaches and our new employees are 190-day contracts and the reason why our district coaches are always on 190 is because of the fact that they are heavily involved with new employee orientation in that first week prior to starting the school year and we utilize them to really help support our new teachers and modeling good practices best practices procedures practices within the district and we need them for that and that's why they're on longer contracts as a result also next slide please so modeling our 2.5 recommendation you'll see that not only here but in the other schedules that we present in terms of the classified we looked at our administrators and professional exempt and again when we did this and we implemented it it all seems like a long time ago but really it was actually only a year ago um for formal implementation this past july one um when you take a look at it at the time when we embarked on this project we had a number of meetings and for some of you that were on the board remember that we did multiple updates in relation to the project where we're at where we're going and what we're doing a lot of you may or may not recall that i shared that based on budget in terms of planned capacity we looked at a 40 to 45 percentile increase for our different employee groups because that's what we could afford um so we implemented our our project as a result of that 40-45 costing for us with our current employees and so um our schedules and everything else reflected that what we've learned and what has been great with mr moore and mr gad is that we have additional budget capacity as they have mentioned in our previous presentations with their mno in which we have the ability to look to increase these and we need to stay competitive something that i learned as we were looking to address these schedules mr vance jacobson who is the project team lead for our jb reward system has actually been brought back to the east valley because there's some other school districts within the seven um the seven that participated and then we're in addition to that which makes eight felt as though they went conservative on their salary schedules and what they implemented so he's actually been back reassessing some of those other districts and the salary schedules they have for some of their positions and then shared with me as a result that if we want to stay competitive we're going to have to address our schedules a little bit more too we certainly know and understand in terms of size for our comparable districts we were larger and we're growing with some and others we're never going to match up to in terms of who surrounds us so budget capacity always has to be taken into consideration in what we have and the dollars that we get per student however the reality is they are still our competitives because they are next door to us and although we may not be able to hit their percentiles or hit their rates we have to do our best to make sure we stay as competitive as we can in addition to pay i'm also looking at what other benefits or what other things can we offer in terms of value to keep our employees with us or to attract individuals to come to higley and in the time period that i've been here i think we've we've done a great job in terms of what we've done and what we've put out there and how we've handled things to where i think higley's being recognized as a district of choice or a district that individuals want to come and work for and i'm hearing that in lots of different levels certainly in the searches that we've done but also um as individuals have shared with us through colleagues that they've working with at other places and other committees outside of higley um you know like higley's doing great things and you know we're keeping our eyes on that so that's wonderful to hear next slide please miss martins real quick can i just ask um on our on the previous slide we also determined that people pretty much were coming in at the midpoint no matter what and that kind of threw off this the salary schedule and this kind of addresses that does it not yes it does not so much at the midpoint what we discovered um was that there uh for lack of a better word the practices weren't consistent um so we discovered to no fault of any of us currently um and there had been people who brought in at ranges and salaries that we couldn't explain when you then looked at internal individuals who'd been with the district longer maybe had more experience so that was something that was confusing as well as the fact that we did have people who were brought in um at the midpoint of the salary schedule but then when you looked at again why compared to other individuals it didn't make sense and then when i came on board and the practice that i was using based on the salary schedules that existed looking at experience looking in other areas not knowing um not having gone back to research the history of some of our current employees and their experiences and what they were brought in at discovered that there was a large discrepancy in terms of what i had offered based on what i could tell is experience degree impact versus what had been previously done so that is correct thank you next slide please president reese members of the boardwalk one of the things i think is important that we also talk about is that tonight when we're talking you know this is an information item and this is addressing salary schedule so obviously we're talking talking about a budget we're talking about increases potential increases that is for for this year this is looking at the salary schedules and you will be looking at these and voting on them on april 7th so this is an information item but one of the things is when you address the salary for right now you also have to look at what the schedules look like to to align with to be part of whatever you do for a salary decision and and i think the mum is kind when she says we we we coined the term coopetation we're in coopetation with other districts because we cooperate and we collaborate but we're looking for the same we're going after the same high quality employees so it's important to within our range stay competitive and keep our salary schedules updated as whatever we do with any any salary decision we make our salary schedules have to be part of that piece so we kind of do one and then the other no thank you dr foley that is very important um to note in this bigger picture that this is an information item for you guys to process and that we will come back um you know we listened and heard from previous meetings that you like an opportunity to hear the information process and reflect on it and then be able to vote at a different time so we understand the importance of it and it is different in the sense that tonight later you'll be voting on continuing employees where this is for anybody new coming to the district that'll take effect july 1 of 2021 for our fiscal 2021-2022 school year so in regards to our classified non-exempt we also did look at them too in terms of that 2.5 starting percent to all of our starting rates that we have and all of our classifications and our grades you know we're looking at just the schedule of pay right now we do post on our website and you have seen drafts of what we have in terms of what grades and positions match and online so you can see where they would fall if looking at for example a bus driver or classified administrative assistant or anything along those lines and if we were to go back and talk about the administrators and the exempt positions you'll see where those fall within those grades also so one thing i do want to note um which is unfortunate but something we might need to consider and i would like to give the board a heads up is that you know we did a lot of good work in regards to what we did moving this direction and creating a new salary schedule that provided competitive in my opinion competitive rates in terms of grades and steps and this year our employees which is wonderful we are looking at five percent for our classified too even though you are recommending for our administrators and our certified and our educational professionals tonight will come back in that april meeting that first april 7th meeting to make a recommendation for our classified that would also recommend that 5 which i do have to say is wonderful because in the 10 that i have been here our classified has not seen the same percentage as our other employee groups and certainly five percent for them is different than five percent for our other employee groups but to be able to see that the same numbers being used consistently across the board is is actually huge and i think they'll see that and value that in the bigger picture but going back to what i wanted to say was that we may have to reassess whether or not we can continue to operate on a grade and step system or we may need to look at whether we go to ranges or quartiles for our classified because it's quite likely beyond this year we're unlikely to provide certain percentages that were built within the step and grade system based on budget so i don't want to be surprised if we look to change that a little bit up more in the future so our next slide is our supplementals and this is an interesting area i certainly know right when i arrived i was approached by a number of people in terms of our supplementals and what we offer and what we do and understanding that as well as the fact that dr fowler through having previously been the athletic director trying to work with my predecessor and looking at this and seeing whether or not we could change processes and systems up unfortunately at the times even though certainly not from us not trying to champion it we just when it came to the bigger picture in terms of our budget and spending weren't able to be successful at changing or increasing any of these so it's been a minimum of five years since these have been addressed potentially more again i can't speak to that since that was prior to my tenure so really kind of changing our models completely so this is not just a 2.5 percent this is actually looking beyond what we had previously had in regards to what we had was formulaic based on an old base salary of thirty six thousand dollars um so like i said it had been at least five plus years as when i started here the district salary for teachers was thirty eight thousand dollars um and getting comments of people not understanding well why is it not based on 38 000 um and it's 36 although it says it's based on a base salary so we had to look at changing language to help people understand you know yes at one point it was a base salary but now what we're saying is based on a factor um from 36 000 and addressing that but through the work again i can't say enough about mr gad and mr moore in regards to what they've helped us do and what they've been able to realize for the district we understand that we can model this differently and this model of these levels and steps um actually are comparable to three other districts around us um i think i shared this before uh through a status report but i'd like to share again too mr jacobson as part of his class and comp study actually was requested to do this for two of the larger districts in our area because they had had models that had not been reviewed and looked at and or models that really were going to need to shift because of growth that they were anticipating so he was kind enough to share this data with all of us even though we didn't specifically asked for this so i was able to work with him to identify levels in which we being what i would describe a midsize school district and what could be competitive for us and then shifting our different groups like our coaches our spirit line areas again athletics as well as activities student council yearbook robotics etc to where they could align with this we are going to have to do some more work and there's going to be other layers here as most of what we've offered um i'm not changing that model yet because there could be other budgetary impacts that we don't know about i know some questions had come up in regards to are we interested in expanding the number of items that we have and again that's a larger conversation which will have to involve finance as well as mr lutzenheiser in terms of the director of secondary and our athletic directors at the sites so that way they can be part of the conversation in terms of where our priorities need to be but i think it's great that we're able to look at a different model that i think those that have been with us for a long time coaching whether it's our current teachers and or other individuals who've come to higley interested in coaching for us to help us be competitive will value in this process so the next slide please leadership and department chair um i did specifically put this separate because it had been done separately back in 2016.

it was comparable to last year um and it's still the 40s guys uh we don't want to be in the 40s we're a district we want to get to the 60s the 70s the 80s eventually the 90s but we know that's a slow process and we know we have some things that have worked against us this year um so that's where our schools are and i'll come back and talk a little bit more about other data points but what schools should be doing at this point and what i believe they are doing is starting to overlay their data lots of schools gave their geometry and their english to teachers time via monday plc's to really look and say which students need those specific skills i know shadow continues to do intervention mondays kind of like a march to math or a walk to reading to fill specific skills and have kids interacting with their data and we know that one of hattie's high leverage strategies is kids self-reporting their progress so we're hoping to see some good games and get our kids back on track where they need to be jaden's going to talk to you about the really technical part and then i'll be back so it's important to note as shelley shared with you we we don't have a 10 uh we're not going to have a 9th grade test this year next year we won't have a 10th grade test we're going to have a ninth grade test next year and 11th grade test next year and then the following year we're going to have all new tests again so with the state of arizona we're getting no baseline going on so it's a little bit confusing to try and keep up with where they're going and and get an actual baseline going for our kids but i did want to discuss the algebra learning loss just a little bit so from benchmark one to benchmark two we cover the align standards and the difficulty of the questions differ in each standard area is from benchmark one to benchmark two the average expectation on this last algebra test was a 21-point growth cut scores are moved higher on benchmark two because of the expected growth although the same standards are covered it is just like a bell curve and when you look at it we're at the middle of the standard deviation when you move to one two three you are looking at a harder question when you move to negative 1 negative 2 negative 3 you're looking at a very easier question much easier question so it's just how we look at it so when we looked at the two tests when i when i saw the algebra scores and we pulled the parametrics on the test i'm giving you example discrimination is how well an item is covered a standard is covered getting at all points of that item and the difficulty is the level of difficulty of the problem i gave you a sample standard here this is a very sample standard in the list of standards that we use they are all like this they're multifaceted create equations and inequalities in one variable and use them to solve problems include problem solving solving opportunities utilizing real word context focus on linear quadratic exponential and piecewise defined functions that is a multi-level question so in benchmark one the area of discrimination how well it was covered and i'm sorry when they put the slide up it looks like it bumped over so i will read it to you had a .06 difficulty that same standard was tested in benchmark two with a two two-point discrimination and a 3.5 above the standard difficulty meaning that standard was covered on that second benchmark in all areas of those points you see in there in three points higher above the standard deviation in difficulty so the reason they do this is because they're testing the same standards but they're wanting students to show growth and some of these standards require substantial growth i took a scatter plot for you of 10th grade ela and again i just pick a grade level we i did 10th grade ela and then 10th grade geometry for you to see so um we don't we want to the bad with the good so we have some really great things and then we have some things we have to work on so uh the expected growth on our ela in 10th grade was 16.

the board had approved on only the number of leadership and department share stipends that could be handed out they also approved rates you can see what those rates are because they have not changed since that time period and putting these off of that other supplemental will have a larger budgetary impact so looking at it and looking at a 2.5 percent increase so then again we're not going outside of what we we think we can handle but yet showing that we do understand and need to address there needs to be an increase because four to five years of not seeing that certainly can raise questions i also put on there as miss richards mentioned you know we are looking for s or three money um looking at getting s or three money and since that is one time money looking to do that for the supplementals for a one-time loss um you know we're still working on i know we've identified a potential number that we think that we will attract those teachers who may want a long break but this might attract them to want to come our way and maybe instead of picking up something for the summer somewhere else they'd be willing to teach a little bit more for us so wanting to make sure that we we do our best for our students but also making sure that we do what's right for our employees in that process and then our last slide um it has been an interesting year uh an interesting year yeah a little a year um i wanted to say a year and a half but here um in regards to our substitutes and our teacher coverage you know something great that we implemented this year and certainly something that we wish to continue next year but we know has a large budgetary impact is the fact that we identified what we called these rescue subs so at every school site we had one or two or more our secondary schools have more rescue subs to help they're full-time positions so if individuals needed to be out because of quarantine or other reasons they were able to be placed in classrooms to assist right on the spot additionally we always still have our just subs in general that come in daily but we needed to let our sites know not only in terms of our employees and our teachers but also our administration that we're here to support you but what we've learned in terms of the daily component is that um we're all going back to this the term that you had dr foley which uh i can't remember but co-co-petition yes that is a great term competition we learned that large school districts again understanding they have larger budget capacity raised their substitute daily rate as well as their long-term rate by 50 this year to attract substitutes to head their way because they were struggling and much larger districts do struggle differently than we struggle right but again going back to that coopetition they are going to leave us and go elsewhere so i do think it's time we also address our sub our long term rate and something new that we have not done at higley but other school districts do is that those employees that are their retirees they offer the higher rate from the beginning and not just offer them the the flat dollar rate for any other area so i think that will attract potential husd retirees to pick up subpositions for us if they know that their daily rate will be that 145 right away versus building from whether it's the 100 currently or the 125 which ultimately would be the recommendation so that will be helpful as well as teacher coverage teacher coverage for those of you who don't understand what that term means so when at the secondary level only we try to find a substitute and we were unsuccessful in finding a substitute to cover a course or section we then reach out to our current employees to see whether or not they'd be willing to give up their prep time to then cover that course we have historically been paying 18 per session i don't want to say per hour but per class per session um and looking to address that to be more competitive and i did take a look at other comparable school districts around us and see that they did increase some of theirs too some of them are still around 17 18 per section some of them have recently increased them again this year to reflect the other challenges that we've had this year and so that 25 rate reflects a more competitive component for that um and something again that we have not addressed in my tenure here with the district and then questions that you might have that i can address i just want to say thank you for for doing all the hard work for this looking at the budget and possibly depending on what goes really motivating and showing value to the staff especially after this year um so this is great this is good to see i've i've been there with the 18 coverage and might as well just give me a nickel that stinks so it's nice to see that there's a potential to increase that um so i appreciate everything seriously um one question um on the teacher coverage you said that's just for secondary so if an elementary teacher covers them there's not any compensation for them correct that is correct and um i'll explain what i understand and miss richards can certainly elaborate on that so at the secondary level they teach five courses and have a prep time at the elementary level because they don't have different sections you're with your course the whole time you don't your prep time is typically their specials which is class goes to that separate and the teacher then works while their student is in specials and so um when a teacher doesn't show up and we don't have coverage what ended up happening prior to covid is that we would split the class and so then if there's four sections of fourth grade and one teacher was unable to make it then we take that fourth grade classroom that might house 25 to 30 students and distribute them amongst the other grade levels and miss richards if there's something else to add to that this year that's been a little challenging that's why the rescue subs have come to the rescue and they've been good about sharing because if coronado needed one then sometimes gateway would send theirs the other thing we have and we don't like doing this but if we have to we have lit coaches that can cover in our gifted coaches um and we've sent our district coaches to support this year so it wasn't a good year for us to divide kids up and mix them in so we've improvised so it's worked out so in a normal year then the teachers in elementary school are still getting a break than what you're saying correct okay so that's why yes they don't have that five courses in a prep time they are all day with the classroom however they get a break during when they're going to specials and you can't divide you can't have them be pulled in a different area like you can at the secondary level and just so i could really understand rescue subs there always are rescue subs well this year was the first year that we implemented them but we are going to advise that we continue them for next year and then we'll have to continue to assess from there because certainly um as you've noticed and paid attention to our quarterly reports with esi um you know our sub budget and our cost for them has you know risen quite extremely thank you uh i'm sorry are you is there still the school budget like site budget that they only have so much so many dollars for subuse is that still in place no miss anderson so it all runs together but i believe my second year with the district so 1819 through the meet and confer process we decided to look at subs as a big picture across the district and not per site so you are correct that previously for lack of a better word that sub budget was kind of divided by sight and they were told they have x number of dollars that they could utilize for subs unfortunately right or wrong each site then implemented that in their own way which came to become challenges in a bigger picture so through long discussions we said you know our our teachers are professionals they'll make decisions that are best and what's needed as a district when we looked at our total budget expenditure we weren't spending it total you know some sites certainly needed the subs more than other sites um and so let's look at a bigger picture we would still behind the scenes keep an idea of how much we we would quote unquote allocate per site um but really looking at the larger picture of the budget so if one school let's say a secondary school started to run up a little bit we would then call them up and say hey just so you know you're you know you're spending this much money in sub areas and just wanted to give you a heads up because it's a lot more than you typically have spent and or what might have been traditionally allocated to you um in that same process what we did was we actually revisited our quote-unquote blackout calendar and we really changed that to where we were only focused on areas that we felt really needed to have all of our employees here in other areas that had previously been you know i think before each holiday every wednesday to where there was probably a good chunk of blackouts each month we went to a model in which we're only doing blackouts during the month of july november and may um and that's it um on april depending on the site in terms of uh testing that occurs so the site would have to make that decision in terms of additional areas that was needed for their area and so through a combination of doing both of that we said okay we're going to look at a hole and not divide it up so then one site doesn't tell their teams that you only get to use two days and another site's not telling their teams that so and i check in every year and it's been successful and we've not seen any large concerns so mrs martins i too want to echo what ms anderson said even reading from our strategic plan of our goal number two 2.1 recruit hiring retained quality educators 2.3 ensure staff feels valued and supported and i think there's no better way than to somebody to feel valued and supported other than words of affirmation if that's your love language but also financially and so i appreciate all the hard work that the whole team has done on behalf of higley and i hope that our our community too is hearing all the good things coming from their support as well supporting our staff so again thank you thank you miss kayla but it's been the work as you said of the whole team cabinet other district administration our collaborative processes with our certified and i would be remiss if i did not say the work of the human resources and payroll department too absolutely any other questions thank you for essentially it's a follow-up and continuation with um looking at our salary schedules to ensure that we are where we're supposed to be and we can remain competitive so thank you for being able to follow up now that covid has allowed us to to go back to that so i appreciate it all right then we're going to move on to 7.3 which is the second review of our 2021-2022 capital outlay budget and president members of the board you have seen this capital outlay budget on one previous occasion this is the second round of showing you this budget it is the budget that's ongoing from the state the state funds about per student it's an annual capital budget um and sometimes it funds less than that because the state has had a budget problem and this is the first place that they'll go in which to balance their budget so it's an easier one to to do that rather than mno so um the increase is significant from that where the current budget level is it adds about 15 20 percent of additional funding that was removed from the formula back a few years ago when the state needed during the recession when the state needed to balance its budget the budget balance carry forward um was significant and and i we believe that was very uh significant and is kind of indicative of if you don't have a long-range plan and you just keep collecting this money and not allocating it to something then you know we we have a lesser effect on the students program so we have taken the 16 million and reduced it to 8.6 with the budget that's shown here when we think that given that we only get we get about 6 million a year we think 8.6 is probably an okay number to have it's more than 100 percent of what we get annually from the state is new money i would think most people would think that that's a much it's a much more defensible number than 16 million it does offer a significant emphasis on technology a one-to-one ratio of devices and you heard that when robert presented to you at the last meeting the technology plan it reduces the mmo transfer from 4.4 million to 2.9 million so we're trying to restore to mno as much funding as we can this is in general kind of capital items that we felt could be a transfer so that we would stop that transfer and use it directly to balance our m o budget for next year and we think with the dollar amounts here we think that's reasonable to do for the first time it does decentralize the furniture and equipment budget directly to schools so this this decentralization is the administrative staff and the teachers at each school receives monies to buy whatever their program requires it's ten dollars a student so it does provide um some additional funds for library books it's up to forty dollars a student for furniture and equipment it's got two or three items in it that were not previously there and i think generally speaking it it takes the decision making process directly to the school rather than us deciding well i think we should buy telescopes or i think we should buy microscope or whatever it allows the individual campus to decide whether they need computers whether they need whatever it is and that i i think will be a more effective way in which to allocate that money mr gad on that same note i know that one of the areas that some of our teachers that i've heard may be struggling for items is our labs our our science department i know that many of our teachers have bought their own you know oreo cookies for their science project and whatnot and you know i just don't want to ever nickel and dime our teachers in that area so having this now i just hope that we get that information out to the schools and especially our science departments that i know teachers were buying their own lab experiments when we weren't providing for it so thank you for that thank you and and i know that sherry and david both have been active with the schools and telling them that they have this money on the way yeah dr foley have our admin been receptive of the idea of having their own budgets president reece vice president wilson one of the things i'd happy to share with you is that we had a general administrator meeting several weeks ago where we had an opportunity to to talk with him about the work we've been doing with with you as a governing board and talk about again more details for the presentations we've been doing here and i will tell you that our administrative team was very pleased about that um feels that that'll be a very important thing and we also talked about the fact that obviously there are still the things that the district is supposed to fund is still going to continue to fund the curriculum the resources but this allows them to have a budget to address those specific needs that may not have been there before so there was a very positive reception to this and i thought that sounded great the question was how soon can that start okay in addition to this capital budget the board will be applying as it has in the past for school facility board funding of various projects and also using e-rate as it has in the past to enhance the technology program so those two funds will supplement what you see here so hopefully to the extent that this fb has gotten more money in the last couple of years that's the reason they can approve as many projects as they have as the state is restoring money to them so you know the district should fare well with this one because of that restoration okay oh and i wanted to mention one more thing there's a there's a dollar amount in here for curriculum adoption it's fairly large it's about three million dollars so now the district has the ability to start implementing a plan deal with whatever textbook whatever form that takes for future years and that money hopefully will stay there then every year as a as an allocation amount to make sure that our curriculum is up to date in terms of its age and mr gatt if we didn't buy curriculum that year would that be part of our rollover money yes thank you okay moving on to the next page this is the summary that we've created from the detail and you received a packet earlier at our first review with those page numbers in a larger document they explain to you and what those allocation amounts are intending to purchase and we've covered i think a pretty adequate list of things in addition to providing some contingency if we need it for an example as i come down this list about the third second item in is we've run out we've not allocated 1.5 million okay so that's that's again a cushion for us to do whatever we need to do and find out whatever changes are coming about we have enough money there to probably assign whatever amount we need the building leases you're familiar with those for the two middle schools the technology plan was presented to you by robert um and so was the 729 000 was in that plan we do have a safety and security budget set aside of 65 000 it's primarily for cameras uh so that's you know that's just to try to keep up with the needs that we have in that area major maintenance mr fowler dr fowler and others will be administering that 1.7 million along with the major project amounts that are that are also listed there in the million and 1.5 million so we're in the neighborhood of over well over three million dollars of this budget being assigned to maintenance and major projects that we think need to be done so we've allocated quite a bit of money to that side we have to remember that without bond funding then this budget will be the only support that they have and so we want to be sure that the district annually includes enough maintenance money uh especially to i've had questions from voters before as i spent all this money on the bond and you tell me you don't have any money to maintain it that's not the answer that you want to give so this hopefully avoids that the forty dollars a student i mentioned that earlier that f e allocation to the schools that's almost half a million dollars so they will be you know they they have quite a little sum of money in which to um do some enhancing on their campus the upkeep on equipment that's again maintenance buses there's 350 000 set aside in the current bond to keep the fleet up to date that's over in the third column the white fleet we're beginning just now to have a an ongoing allocation we set aside 108 that's basically for trucks and you know vans and things like that that don't seem to get a lot of attention over time we have a 10 uh per student budget for library books it's intended that that that each librarian would have you know basically a list of books they believe that should be added to the collection at their school they have this amount of money in which to work with fine arts we've we put a line in here for primarily musical instruments they're in bad shape and we want to start a program to get them replaced so we've set an allocation it's at the district level so we will review what the needs are at each school and and we we think i think rightfully so we did not sign it on a per student basis because my suspicion is some schools have adequacy and other schools have none so we need to assign this based on need and that's what it's here for moving on down athletic equipment an allocation for achievement and assessment that's primarily software uh i mentioned the curriculum adoption earlier 2.9 million online academy we've got 55 000 set aside for equipping that uh carry forward we're still pushing even though we've got a lot of items in here where we are hopefully and and the math indicates that we will be pushing forward um eight million dollars uh to um next year so we've built in a carry forward it's not just hoping that everybody doesn't spend their budget and there's money left this one forces a carry forward so again a conservative view of what we need to do to be sure that the district doesn't get into difficulty the budget capacity amount is 6 million that is only the new that's the new money that you could probably expect to receive each year so when you try to get some sense of of size this is an important budget but it doesn't have on an ongoing basis a lot of money so budget balance carry forward becomes important now we're talking to you in a minute about covid ways in which we can enhance this lower amount and and the good thing about it is the state is kind of guaranteed it's not totally but it's but it's a lot firmer than some other funds and then we just need to find ways to direct other funds toward this budget so that we can continue to do in the amounts indicated here those kinds of things on a more multi-year basis [Music] and then um the total that we have here then for um we're bringing in we're projecting to bring in 16 million from this year it's not over yet but that will figure into then our total balance for next year um and that's the part of the revenue that supports this 24 million dollar budget adjacent ways is 2.6 million and and i believe the board is aware that we should proceed in allocating that money to those projects that need that help and and move on i think it's adequate for a while you'll remember that if you have new construction and or building additions or things like that you tend to involve this fund because it's infrastructure and it has to be approved as eligible by the sfb they're not passing judgment on what the need is they're just you know passing judgment on what the statute says in terms of what you can spend the money for and then at some point you're going to need to levy add a small amount to the tax rate in which to replenish this fund because it's a hundred percent property tax and the only way it gets there is for you when you adopt a budget you have a larger budget than you have in cash and then the county will levy that different so that you have that amount of money to use and i and i think you're fine because i don't think there's a plan to spend a lot of money on new construction although there is some and so at some point as that depletes itself you may need to add a little bit of money to the tax rate so that you can replenish it and the current bond is 3.5 3.6 million that we're assigning out to major projects and to equipment upkeep and to um the um basically the the school capital projects i kind of skipped over that one it's on page eight it says capital project schools and district that schools have requested um monies to do some improvements at each of their schools we gave them that opportunity the the request of course came in fairly heavy as you would expect and um sherry and david went out looked and decided what the highest priority items were that's what this amount represents so it's another effort toward allowing a voice on the part of school staff and school administration to not just not just furniture and equipment but i need to do this and it doesn't get lost in the process and if it makes it to the list i think there's a strong commitment on the district's part that it will do the projects that are listed here you don't need to worry about that it's funded it'll get done and all we need to do is after your approval develop a schedule to make it happen okay the last slide is the calendar same calendar that you have seen before tonight march 10th you'll see a part of that item is your second review of the capital budget and then i'll be talking to you shortly about covet after um and then on april 7th we will be asking you to give tenant approval to this capital budget so that we can move ahead with planning projects and doing actually some purchasing that will be dated july 1st so that the the obligation for payment occurs in the in the next year that will help everybody especially campuses who have some real desires to try to get some things done before school starts and and your earlier approval will help us get underway with that okay then um on april 21st we will talk to you about the potential bond we may even talk to you on april 7th depends on our schedule but beginning at least on the 21st and then extending to may 12th we will be talking to you about a possible bond and what that might consist of we've studied the alternatives for the last probably three or four months so we spent a lot of time trying to take a fairly reasonable unlimited amount and stretch it into what we think were the highest district priorities and then on june 9th and that's the date that's pretty important because if you if you don't take action to approve a resolution for a bond we don't have the we will not have the the latitude of calling that election later nor will we be able to do a november election it's the lead time required in the statute so you know that's coming and and so i wanted you to be aware with no surprises and there are a couple of meetings that we'll be talking about those projects at a fairly extensive list uh totals 95 million dollars so it's a significant budget over the next five years that we'll be talking to you about and and it comes from bond if you choose to make to make a decision to have an election so remember the board that summarizes the capital budget and any questions that you might have any questions okay president reese members of the board one of the things i'll share with you is that we started talking in october about what you've asked for we had to approve uh looking at our democrat an updated demographic study we also did a facilities indexed and as you've read in your status reports there have been walking our all of our facilities to figure out where is our space where is our growth the wonderful thing is we now have this information that we are compiling so that starting in april and may up leading up to june we're going to be able to provide we've done a lot of background information so that we can help make informed decisions about what is our future growth look like what are our priorities and needs what are our greatest maintenance projects and plans um what would be i what would it look like if we were to pass a bond what would it look like if we if we did not and what are some different options and you've also read about looking at things like uh is the potential for paying off one of the middle schools and saving a substantial amount of money and so we have a lot of information that will be coming to you for you to help make those decisions so that when we go in uh to call that we would know what we would what we would be looking at what it would look like if we did what it would look like if we didn't um and again a lot of work that's literally been compiled throughout this whole year to get us to this place where we have a real clear well we'll have the information to help make the most informed decision as possible all right thank you with that we'll go to 7.4 which is our overview of covid grant funding thank you mr president members of the board all three essers are here um sr-1 the first round the districts allocated 3.2 million dollars we have chosen to assign that to mno and how do we do that is we simply pick up expenditures that we've already made from mno that applied to covet and moved those expenditures to a fund for sr1 then what that does is it allows the district to have more balance at the end of the year in mno we've made a transfer okay so it's a way to another way to describe it it's a way to bank money for future use and you know and probably have that occasion so that's and it's one time money but also it's being used i think wisely in making sure that it's it's banked in the right place with the right um emphasis so that's that's sr1 and we've already transferred all of the 3.2 from mno to sr1 sr2 is 2.7 million that was passed by congress a few months back that has been assigned generally to capital you saw earlier just a few minutes ago the the use we were making a budget balance carry forward this re reinforces the net amount by 2.7 million so it brings back into the budget balance carry forward for capital a cushion is something that your district can use later on uh for capital purposes um and um and so again it's banking 2.7 in this case it's we're choosing to bank it into capital where the first one we chose to bank it into mno and then the last one the one that just passed congress today i believe um is uh from sr3 and that is estimated at 6.7 million it's a big one and that sr3 along with the other two brings the total over 12 million dollars so that's the district's benefit from the cobit legislation you see on the far right hand side that there are there's a time frame we'll easily you know meet that and then some i mean we've already started sr2 and we intend to get that done by june 30th so that only we'll leave outstanding sr3 and the likelihood is probably by the time that money funnels to us and we get it in the bank we're probably talking summer or fall and and as you can see from the footnote of that amount needs to be used for regression and and mrs richards talked to you already about some of those subjects with summer school so sr3 has some flexibility we know that we have a quarter of it that we need to set aside for regression we have some money that we will use for indirect costs that's permitted an indirect cost remember offsets mno directly and then whatever amount remains i'm guessing three to four somewhere in that range million that's going to be a district decision at the time decision from you about where do you want to assign it what do you want to assign it to uh you know and it's it's fairly large sum of money and we've i think we've covered well uh the m1 capital budgets already so it's it's really money is that more discretionary as to how what the board feels the district's needs are so that's an update madam president members of the board on covet funding and remember it's one time but if you strategize making sure that you're building your bank account i think that's a good way to go and have the federal government pay for things that we needed to do and had to do in order to comply with the health department we might as well get the maximum benefit from that by transferring all of the and get creative in that transfer at times uh all the items we can into a federal grant so mr gatt is there an sr4 i'm sorry is there an sr4 according to the newspaper they are going to propose i the one i read we still don't have enough and there's going to be an sr4 and everybody the businesses and everybody said oh yeah we need an sr4 so it could be could be we're going to run out of numbers here pretty soon and keep sending more money you know any other questions nope all right so we'll go on to 7.5 which is the presentation for the tentative approval of the mno budget for fiscal year 2021 and 2022.

we had a negative 11 so there was a loss of learning there many many factors are going to play into that again we go back to teaching and learning we you know we go back to timeless listed time off we know that we have kids at every grade level at every high school at every elementary school who have had coveted time off i actually have my own grandson here and he's had two sessions of 10 days each off due to covet factors so there's there's just not any way around attendance can't factor into this so it makes it very difficult on the other end showing you the geometry and we have always done very very well in in geometry we have a very strong integrated math team so the average growth here expectation was 23 and our average growth was 23 for the district so we met that growth expectation in the geometry i'm going to give you back to dr assai and an interesting point there that i don't have the answer to is we had the negative growth in ela but if you look at the percent of kids predicted to be proficient it looks the same so there's some interesting i mean we really need to dig through this data and use it but use it student by student skill by skill again what's up next is our 11th grade act and the act compared to last year you'll actually see some gains except for act english which is more like the grammar and things like that which is currently mapped into our standards one of the reasons is that one of the reasons that accounts for that is that this year we're using chalk talk or method test prep so it's the first time we've had an act prep a specific program at each campus we did ask each campus to decide between the two what fit their needs because we know not every campus is the same we are going to be partnering with our research side of the house to do program evaluations next year to find out which is the most effective but we know teachers need time to get comfortable with a product before we start making those big decisions we are excited to see some modest gains there and we hope that it plays out when our kids take the act this is ultimately very important to us because for so many of our kids that are going to college this is one of their gateways in and regardless if they're going to work or college we want them to have that opportunity with the next slide you will see great distributions um our ultimate goal would our ultimate goal would be a zero percent failure rate uh but we would be happy with between a three to five percent failure rate uh two of our schools are almost there shadow ridge and willow if you look at them had a 5.5 valley was at an 8.5 and dicert high was at a 12.4 our schools are doing tons of good things to help with this next year we will be resuming our standards-based grading pilot which really promotes that grading equity kids can see with the standards where they fall and how that equates to their grades so we're excited for that we're also really working with our schools to work on multiple means of proficiency and i want to be very clear with that that is not just hey i want to come in and retake the test we know that that didn't play out very well for us that i sit down and say oh i just want to retake it again before i do this one that's not multiple means of proficiency but it is saying okay can you explain this to me a little more or two weeks later saying okay i'm going to retest you on this now that you've had some time to do it and see how that plays out so it's very different i think that's an important clarification with this slide you should just look at it and say wow bobby lockhart that's what i did with this one when you see the failure rate for quarter one compared to quarter two it was cut from a 19 failure rate to an eight percent failure rate and that's a phenomenal job in a very very short time uh so things that bobby's doing over there it would be worth finding out about more later because uh wow that's impressive going into high school high school grades are pulled from our schoology system right now and schoology has some limitations with being able to pull grades in terms of knowing where kids are and their percentage so we are working through that as we look at our lms to decide how we pull what's valid to pull and how it works we do continue to have concerns about some of our learners that are in high school that don't make a lot of progress we've encouraged lots of them to come back to campuses if they're not doing well by all means we want to respect parents rights to keep their kids at home if they don't feel safe but we also know if they're at home and failing that we can probably do better in thinking of ways to service those kids huh my credits oh i'm so sorry there's credits at the bottom i went to basketball it gave me it last night and i left my glasses so i apologize the girls did one though um you will see credit uh credits down down at the bottom too so supports and action steps and this is the most important thing so that's our data what are we doing how is it going to change for the positive how are more of our kids going to succeed um dedicated additional monday to grade level team interventions and really working with our our teachers especially the high school level what do those interventions look like it doesn't mean that i'm slowing down and saying it louder to you and doing it the same way we really have a lot to learn from our elementary counterparts in terms of solid interventions and our teachers are working to do that working to support students in high school who are not successful we have one really promising model where a teacher is actually pulling small group i saw it the other day working with about six kids on high school who volunteered to come to the office hours and i saw great things from that there was actually a lot of discussion for an online class i was amazed our comments are open at daily and hourly for high school students and there's office hours addressing the needs for more direct instructional contact for high school class times which i got they can come in documentation of instructional changes based on the most current data that's for example we had a school that pulled their geometry team and their english 3-4 team each for half a day and the principal really worked with them because not all of our english teachers learned how to dissect data like that you know in supporting our teachers because they only have so many hours a day and saying here you go here's package data for you so now we can focus on the so what instead of having our teachers put their time in there a tls and data specialist with identified assignments and strategies um also two things i didn't put on there that i think are really important is we're working on aligning our math and ela for next year the specialists are actually putting data pull dates saying we expect unit one test to be done by september 23rd we're going to pull the data on september 30th so we can look at it as a leadership plc and figure out how to provide more supports to our teachers in our schools on an individual basis the other thing is to work with schools on overlaying data so like we said the benchmark is one point in time but what really matters it's what's next amy harchen has a very promising model of this at dysart high her teachers every two weeks will test on two specific standards like we didn't do well on rl1 and rl5 so they'll teach that where it's really fits in their curriculum map but then they'll meet with amy and her admin team to really say okay now we see these kids are moving student by student skill by skill and i've really seen promise with that administrative support for that because as principles we should be the best instructional leaders at the very end we have summer programs we are running so many summer programs at this time dysart is going to be full uh kh summer programs located on designated campus campuses and we have our 7th to 8th grade bridge program at dhs which we traditionally run each high school is going to be housing their own program which is phenomenal we just need teachers who want to teach in june and july we're working on that um see uh the summer senior summer senior that didn't sound right uh the sundown summer program for seniors our seniors who fell a creditor too short are going to be housed at sundown able to graduate in the summer so we're really excited for that and ischool is running their traditional pro high school traditional that's also an oxymoron there but our ischool is running online for kids who want to work ahead or make up credits and the high school expanding summer programming for arts and sports and our incoming freshmen and i think we're very fortunate because there are some federal relief funds coming that we're very grateful for that we're going to be looking at additional interventions and supports to provide for for our students and now jane will stand for the really hard questions and i will take in the easy ones actually the whole team is here um dana noble and adriel grishaver everyone's here tonight to answer any questions that you might have okay good no questions thank you very much an easy question when you're gonna get your glasses back i think i called my husband and they're laying on my counter okay i should be good when i get home all right okay um i did have a question and you just said something regarding the relief the federal relief do we know what is actually going to be coming in that would be mr head that's right uh madam president members of the board we're actually looking at state funding for this as in the governor's proposals and other legislative initiatives are for interventions and for summer school right now although that hasn't been approved our backdrop our contingency plan is the esser funds um that we would commit to our summer school and our interventions and we believe it's not just a one year summer school intervention that's going to take it might take two years but so state and or federal oh okay okay all right um disappointing on some of the the percentages but we we knew that and then we know that um school districts across the entire nation are dealing with this you know these issues um not being quite connected with everything so i'm just curious is there and i know i've heard the words before is there a silver bullet that is going to draw it all together and somehow make us a little bit more successful in the quarters coming up i i think member sawyers think well the more we can support our our teachers in packaging some data for them and allowing them to do what they do i i do want to say our teachers have been amazing through this oh yes um and they're they are the real heroes in this story that our scores aren't lower than they are um and we're very fortunate that our kids have had the ability to go to school so much more than others but i think the silver bullet is always student by student skill by skill and i don't think that's traditionally been done especially at our high school level that it's been let me reteach the whole class and then the kid that god is like why am i here having to learn this again and they tune out so i think the more we can small group kids and really individual address their needs i think that's going to be the silver bullet it's not going to be like a look at that it's going to be slow and steady over time we know our group that had the half day kindergarten it's taken them years and years to kind of get those scores up little by little so you know we know that the learning loss is real and not having that instructional time with the standards at the level they are but i would say that's the closest thing that comes and also continuing to support our teachers with professional development and the board's always supported that with our monday early release and using that time very judiciously and making sure that it's very focused that it's not about field trips but it's about standards and kids okay so regarding the summer school programs i am so glad we do have um a variety different programs and everything um are we possibly going to have some students kicking and screaming not to go to summer school they'll probably do that in their house [Laughter] i just wanted to tack on what dr assai said it's interesting to me because i do more of the analytics of it and i've been working with ati and we fit the mold in that the conversations i'm having with him they're actually working on a couple white papers and they're seeing across the united states that the learning loss for reading is going to really be the k3 group and then the math group is going to be the eighth ninth grade group so they're they're doing white papers that really across the united states we fit right into that mold um that's what where they believe that most of it will exist wow okay all right uh congrats and sundown i don't think she's here but uh um that's totally bobby lockhart that's totally bobby locker and um those those are great percentages uh but yeah my my main thing was the relief as far as uh what would be coming in or where we can use it and stuff like that so thank you ladies very much thank you thank you oh did you oh i thought you were going to ask a question oh i have my whole list here wait you're not off the hook yet no no seriously okay now you're just playing with us no i'm not i thought you i i'm sorry you're fine we need rules could you and i'm i'm everybody out here they know the answer to this but i don't could you please explain to me more what tier 2 and tier 3 instruction looks like i think that that's a great question member grant and we're working to really define that as a district throughout tier two would really look like i'm doing intervention and specific skills uh dana at the k8 that would look like a march to math when i think of i'm doing something outside my general ed curriculum and just pulling the small group within the classroom um we're talking tier two tier three would be more resource and going up that route would that be correct should have tier two as well as tier one so we say there's tier one going on every day tier two is going on every day it's usually about 30 to 40 minutes and then the tier three would those kids that attend that would be 30 to 40 minutes as well on top of the tier one and two okay um and then thank you as we see these numbers and as parents start hearing about their students and their numbers i'm sure they're going to be saying you're going to summer school but between now and then what does intervention begin to look like especially on the high school level um that's a great question because the challenge to the teachers is you know at my campus i told them i don't care what these are not that i don't care but i want raw data right i want it to be the cleanest data it can be so the kids do poorly they do poorly but the question is what do we do between now and easy merit and what do we do now and even after i see merit in the end of the year because we don't stop teaching at merit so they have actually gone through they've analyzed each kid they've told them hey here's your data in the cases for my sophomore classes or they will be doing that they've each group has had to figure out a plan because it's a cohesive plc plan as a teacher i can't be expected to address all that by myself so we want to also give teachers some autonomy in that with what it'll look like you know will it be a monday intervention um a story that i can think of that would paint that a paint a picture of what it looks like as i was walking across at shadow ridge one day i walked in and the kids were paying abnormal attention to the teachers class they were and i go what's going on like i never see you guys disengaged he goes oh that's not my teacher and i go what do you mean that's not your teacher he goes oh i'm here because i don't know g5 he goes and i need to know g5 it's a geometry standard because it's going to be on azmerit and i can get a grade bump if i pass um so that's an example that the kids for that standard one to one teacher a kids for another one went to another place one of the teams at valley they've designed an intervention board that kids can raise their score on the benchmark by showing proficiency so they designed where kids will have time to address their specific standards that they need remediation on and they'll be able to go and click on that uh they will watch a video or small group with the teacher and then they'll take a quiz to show that they're proficient does that how does that plan a clear picture much better but so what about like after school like tutoring so you have a student that is struggling in we'll just pick math and science and the to the the teacher says i do this on tuesdays and then the other teacher says i do it on tuesdays as well now how do i pick and choose as a student i need help and so on every other i pick math on this tuesday and science the following tuesday or is there a way for them i i don't know i mean i know everybody's overworked i get that but and i think that's something that high schools can probably in general do a better job of right now at my current location we have started a wednesday after school bus we were one of the last high schools to pick that up and we just did that leaves at 4 30.