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president members of the board mr moore has spent a great deal of time on the mno budget as you know it's the largest one we have and um he will be presenting to you this powerpoint i think we're in wonderful shape we're giving a salary increase that's more than anybody i know of we're so we're rewarding staff a lot through trying to use the money in the best way we know how and mr moore will present to you uh what our what our expenditures are and what our balance is and what the salary increase recommendation is that we've told you about in the past and i just wanted to compliment him publicly he's done a really good job with it new to the district had to learn fast but you know he's done a really good job but excellent job thank you tyler it's all yours you put me on a high pedestal there mr ghetto good evening president reese members of the board um this is i believe is the fourth time uh we'll be bringing this to you guys as information then as you see later in the agenda we'll be asking you for an action uh for approval um so we'll go to the mno highlights um as mr gatt just went over our covered relief funding we have a little more clarity on some of the amounts that we're receiving as we mentioned esr1 has been fully expended and reflected in this mno budget that we are recommending for tentative approval sr2 we are working on moving that into our capital budget so that will not be reflected in the numbers that you're presented here and then sr3 while we have an estimated amount that amount is still being determined and we have not received any funding for that currently but and like mr gad mentioned we'll determine where that greatest need is whether that is our mno budget for next year or a capital budget second bullet there we've recognized a 117 adm loss which is less than one percent of our total student population um if you've read the newspaper or seen other districts they're experiencing a lot larger losses so we're grateful in that um we're not in that position and you'll see that reflected in our budget um that we're going to be presenting here and our revision and then our projected 22 budget we are estimating that we are not going to we're not going to budget for an increase in student enrollment nor a decrease we're going to keep it flat and like i've mentioned before any increase in student enrollment will go directly to benefit our budget for fiscal year 22.
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and what we've done is we publicized that list of teachers and we've told parents we've uh we call them a lot when we find out they're going and the teachers also tutor on other days but that's the day we have the transportation and we've said if you need a ride and you can't get there even if you have even if you have jane and jane's not tutoring that day you can go to any english teacher and that english teacher will help you and we've asked those english teachers to work together because we have to have the idea that they're not my kids they're our kids and how can we help that but do the students understand that they can go like that english teacher isn't my english teacher and so i don't i don't know yeah i don't think it's any great practice yet i i really don't i'm going to be perfectly transparent with that i think we need to work to the part where it is um and that's a cultural shift for some high school teachers it really is because so for so long it was i walk in i work in my classroom these are my classrooms my kids and we've been working with the plc process but i think we have a ways to go and i think it's a culture shift cultural shift for students as well because they think oh i have to go to that particular instructor versus oh my gosh i can go over here i can go to anyone and get help right and that's really where we'll see i think some more growth and that power in it is we're doing all of it jane mentioned something i couldn't hear her um the comments so um for instance willow canyon the common area after school is open so the common area is open usually with instructors in there so okay there are those high school teachers or online teachers and that period after school is also open so kids are always welcome in there for any kind of help with instruction even if they're not high school yes oh uh something else that one of our school campuses is doing is saturday school and they're publicizing that so kids can come in and get help on saturdays from eight to ten there's a variety of teachers there and sometimes administration does assign it um if there's tardies and they see a kid's failing but it's also open to any kid and so some of our teachers have really done a nice job of coming in and filling those roles and then my final question and you don't i know you don't have an answer to this but so we we're looking at these numbers and parents are seeing these numbers and they're i'm sure summer schools the big chatter out there we've got to have enough teachers to do this otherwise we're going to be telling them oh yeah but so is there a plan b for if we don't get enough are they just going to be larger class sizes uh i would be hesitant to make larger class sizes with kids that are making up credits we know that contrary to some studies that say class size doesn't matter class size matters absolutely if i have 15 kids in a class i can get to them a heck of a lot easier than i can with 30.
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uh we are still reflecting in this budget the three million dollar reduction in funding for online learning um as we mentioned that was not a a board decision made based on funding but this is the reality of how the state is funded those online sessions so we are looking at an update in may they have asked for an updated numbers in terms of what students we have online versus what we have in district and they're going to take an overall average of our yearly totals and determine that reduction so working with student information services i think we're going to look at roughly like a one million dollar reduction we're looking at about 20 online for the total year and that's an average and again that's an estimate but so we're expecting this number to come down it's not reflected in our budget we're still recognizing the three million dollar loss so keep that in mind as we move through this presentation the state state senate has passed senate bill 1433 this still has a way to go through the house and then to the governor's office a lot of this bill would fund fiscal year 21 at 100 what we've heard though is is with these cova dollars that schools are receiving there's a lot of pushback on to whether districts need this funding or this one-time funding at 100 if it was up to me we need this um this is estimated 268 million for all districts uh this is a huge loss that all districts are receiving and again this is not based on uh you know decisions we're not based on on budgetary these were based on student needs and safety and so i think you know it's a little unfair to see districts punished so to speak for for this kind of choices they've made so we're hoping that moves through um the house and and passes but we're still monitoring that second bolt there we're implementing again a phased plan to reduce mno transfer to capital mr gad touched on that on the capital budget currently we're we're budgeting in this current year 6 million we're going to be bringing that down to 4.4 in our may revision and you'll see that reflected in this next slide and then again we're not going to project any increase to the employee and to their benefits rate for next year the district will be picking up all the the increase and i believe we're looking at if ms martin's give me a number four percent increase in medical in this next year so i've reduced the uh formula to two three lines that was a little easier to follow and it makes the math really simple so we got the first bullet here is our estimated 22 general budget limit so this is considering the faith reduction that mr gad mentioned in the capital budget of 2.9 million taking into consideration the base support level for next year that we know the inflation that we've talked about we're looking at a jbl of 104 million and then we look at bullet point two there this is going to be our may revision so this is our current year budget remember school districts are funded on current year so we have to do a revision in may to adjust our adopted budget our may revision is going to include the reduction from the mno transfer where a budget be budgeted 6 million we're going to bring that down to 4.4 it's going to include right now currently we're including the distance learning adjustment of a 3 million loss we're hoping that changes so then this will increase this jbl difference hopefully by may we'll hope we'll hope those numbers are reflected by may uh but currently this is our loss so we've included it in there and then bullet point free three it doesn't include sr2 which we've we've talked about moving to capital and it doesn't include potential s or three relief funds that we may recognize in this year but more than likely will receive funding going into next school year so you take two those two numbers and the difference is 8.6 million that is our general budget general budget limit difference that is excess budget that we have to use for next year the next slide you'll see this slide here this is what we've recommended that we utilize this excess budget for in the action item you'll see preceding this information item the district will be recommending a five percent increase and so we'll look at that five percent column there you'll see the five percent the total cost of the district with benefits is roughly 3.5 million you'll see the 8.6 million dollar that's our jb that's our budget difference so if you reduce the the cost for the five percent and then you take into the consideration the fixed costs that we've talked about the increased medical benefits um the reclassification of some ftes and additional ftes that we're looking at for next year you take those two numbers minus the jbl difference and that will give you a budget balance of 3.6 million so that number right there is a conservative number that we're looking at maintaining as our budget balance difference our budget balance carry forward for next year that's a conservative number of roughly you know 3.5 percent and again that's considering [Music] the full learning loss adjustment no s or 3 funding or contributions to the budget so this this 3.6 would allow for any unknowns next year any sort of budgetary items that we have not projected this is what this remaining balance would be used for excuse me and then some highlights that we've talked about tonight ms martin has mentioned dr foley has mentioned this five percent increase to employees would really go a long way in showing our support as a district especially this year it also maintains competitive salaries with our neighboring districts in order to retain and attract teachers a lot of districts are having a hard time fulfilling or filling teacher positions thankfully here we are we're fully staffed as ms martin just said but this reiterates that importance that higley has put on staff and teachers with this increase again this regulator this recognizes no additional employee benefit costs maintains the current benefits benefit amount i should say and then it provides a contingency like i just mentioned of 3.5 again that's not considering um the as the distance learning adjustment or sr3 funds 3.5 is a very conservative number and we believe it provides enough budget contingency for any unknowns that we may face next year and again it also allocates for the additional fte and reclassifications that we are looking at doing and then another highlight again it projects a flat enrollment for next year so again any increase in student enrollment that goes directly to benefit or increase our budget balance carry forward so with that do we have any questions i just have one and i'm whether miss martens or mr moore can answer with what we've been presented for our new salary schedules has that been factored in with all of our new uh our new hires the change of our salary schedules that was presented tonight that we'll look at um on april 7th i'll a natural uh answer initially and i'll let ms martin's request so what we budgeted in this five percent here is a five percent increase not only to all current employees um but to the salary schedule but due to some equity and um the change of the the salary um the base rate we're only ms martin's only recognized a 2.5 percent increase to the base so any new hire would come on at 2.5 which again prioritizes any current employees um and not kind of puts an equity in there but it also is a budget savior because we're not budgeting the full five percent to our base rate only to encourage employees eleven smartened to elaborate well and just to kind of clarify because i mean mr moore's been really great he's spent some time with me and going through explanations and um because of our contracts we do have to um make a decision on the projected salary increases and part of my conversation with mr moore has been my concern of being able to sustain and for our future budget and we've been planning so my concern has can we sustain those increases and we've talked about our future budgets and everything and now we've seen a new salary schedule and and i i do understand the difference between our new salary schedules for new hires and um this is for our current employees um but i have to look at the future to determine current to make sure again that if we're making this decision we can sustain those and i know you've done a great job on the budget and i know you're not looking at just now we've had lots of conversations of looking at the future so have we have we talked about how the new salary scale plays into our budget going forward again just from my standpoint is to ensure we can sustain these types of increases because i would love to do them but the last thing i want is in two years going now we don't have it certainly president reese members of the board as mr moore mentioned you know we've had dialogue both in finance cabinet and in regular cabinet about this five percent and the confidence that we have in terms of our budget and being able to sustain it as we move forward um something that we mentioned i think quite a while ago in terms of our status report is that we had quite a bit of vacancy savings or what i term vacancy value um you know as mr moore finance department mr gad myself and others members of cabinet you know they've set aside a separate five hundred thousand dollars for new fte so any positions that we're having that are going to start in this new schedule is current fte that we already have in place and some of that as we talked about is going to be a repurposing of certain fte that we have not filled with in the district for a long period of time on positions that actually it was like oh i didn't know we had this position but for some reason or another with previous leadership and finance continued to roll over the budget of those dollars in the last three four years which created this large vacancy savings um and allowed us to reassess and kind of take an a bigger picture a bigger picture in how we move forward with this so it's not that we've created all this new positions and which then could be concerning to you guys as board members and or to our community but looking at what we have and as mr moore mentioned um looking at that at an increase at five percent but when it really came down to discussion and equity and value um as well as some extent being a little conservative we said 2.5 made the most sense to see where it goes and then we'll we'll move forward from there and the president reads the the formula that we're budgeting off of is a continuing formula from the state you know unless the state changes that formula that will you know our budget will not change um so we're budgeting to that formula which is our student our student population currently um the current budget that we have and then the increasing base rate which is a per student formula or pursuit number excuse me so unless that number changes which historically that has always gone up with inflation or adjustments by the state we are budgeted and budgeted for future to maintain this increase going forward i just wanted to be sure that we were also and i have no doubt you were because you guys have worked really well together having the conversation as we increase our new ones coming in um that that we're taking that into account as well and so um i mean we're not voting on the salary schedule until april but we're looking at some major changes to our budget some large increases both for the future of new employees coming in because that our salary schedule is changing and what we will be offering for our current employees so i just wanted to double check that my concern is i don't want to be sent spending the same pot of money when we're increasing different things and going oh well that was a soul in separate conversation this was our budget left after that and now we're increasing this and that was a soul in separate conversation but it's still impacting the same bottom line and so i know like i said you guys have been great on communication i just wanted to verify that that those conversations are happening as we're increasing our salary schedules for the future as well as our our increases because that has been my largest concern is just the sustainability of it so thank you president madam president if i could just add a couple of things to your concern about that sustainability you have to remember as mr moore said that's a continuing formula that's got a base amount of a little over four thousand dollars per student this state with it with a 200 plus million dollar rainy state fund it's not going to be anywhere uh close to wanting to alter that and even when we were in a recession they chose to alter capital outlay and not emmano so you know they will put a priority there the only thing down the road that could affect the district in a negative way is a massive loss of students because that's the key of what you multiply that base support level by we're benefited because we only had 117 laws you know we're we're talking districts in there for three and four thousand loss range so we're you know we're in good shape and the state will help i'm sure sustain m o uh especially driven by those districts that have been so heavily impacted they will want legislation to fix this 95 percent and all the rest of it plus we've got an added 12 million dollars of covert really helps reinforce the use of some of the balance because it's being replaced by covin so i mean i i think for the foreseeable future you know i i think it's really solid you might find down the road that the five has to become three or four in a given year assuming the five is already in the base just because you know the state's not allocating their inflation factors you know is 1.2 percent you know that's you know it's a lot smaller uh and and if the economy picks up which i think it will uh you know it's going to get larger if you look at the sales tax revenue which i thought for sure was going to be down it's up dramatically and it's up because people stayed home and bought things off of amazon and ebay literally i mean it's it's enormous i mean you would think with the pandemic and all of that people staying home not buying anything well you're wrong they use their computer to buy a whole lot and and so you know even the sales tax subject which was gloomy to start with because of anticipation has turned out to be a lot more than they ever anticipated uh so that helps with their rainy day fund and all the rest of it so i have every confidence that you're fine and you know you now have the advantage of because of your demographics you have an advantage of giving the staff more than others do and take advantage of that thank you and again mr moore thank you for spending quite a bit of time with me and going through some some different things i have to say it's definitely um made me more comfortable with this request for sure president reece mrs wilson i just want to thank our teachers staff and the cabinet even on the adm number of 117.
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um you know i'm continuing to beg teachers um i promised a few extra coffee outside there uh they're 23 an hour um you know i wish i had a magic pot of money and could say hey i'm going to give you more than 23.
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i think we gloss over that sometimes but it is a big deal 117 where people have lost thousands and i think our teachers staff and cabinet all the district together has made that number and just give yourselves a pat on the back because i appreciate you and i appreciate all the work that you've put in to only lose 117.
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what's your magic number uh because it is time away from their families in the summer and things like that our ischool is unlimited and we do have the collaborative commons open so some kids will go that way and they can come into the collaborative commons and work with teachers i think you know it would be hooves to look into some peer tutoring you know can our nhs kids and things like that come in and uh work with our high school students because we know that peer support is also a research-based method that works other than that it would be when they return in fall really focusing on you know are there credits we need to make up what do we have to do and what does that look like but that's a very reactive stance and not proactive stance and madam president remember grant i would add as well that we are working on and looking at um some pieces uh that that would provide additional incentives for our teachers um to to be involved in summer school this summer as well can the retirement community help with some of that madam president remember grant um we'll actually talk about that in two presentations from now oh okay look at that that's just like always i have a problem jim dean has an answer i know oh no thank you um quick question so just for instance if a student is failing more than one class maybe two or three classes maybe four or five classes what does that look like for summer school um yeah so first theoretically for summer school kids can retap cap two full credits okay a kid could go to english nine in the morning english ten in the afternoon english eleven and twelve so face to face there's the opportunity for two full credits which in a scheme of 22 i think is it 22 to graduate as i'm really bad with numbers that way off the top of my head in the scheme of 22 credits you know that's uh that's 10 i think um so they have the opportunity to get that they could also take an additional high school class um so depending on i guess as a parent how much i want to stand over them uh they could actually get probably between two to four credits done i mean if they were really really working uh that parent would need a lot of coffee and maybe some wine yeah i wasn't asking for a friend [Laughter] and then the other question i had was just about the curriculum being used so i know that you know we did the switch over to the florida virtual do we think that that's been impacting any of these numbers you know it's really hard to say because we there's so many other variables out there um we do feel um and this is a feeling i want to make it this is a shelly aside feeling not research based i've watched my own kids on florida virtual um get so freaked out over is the answer right or wrong and to me that's not what education should be about i want my babies to test well but i want them to love the process of learning um so next year in most of our high school classes we will be we've done curriculum focus groups with some teachers and i think jen and kami are going to integrate some student voice and what is it you like about florida virtual what do you want to get rid of um this this semester of the high school we told teachers all you have to give is the unit test and the rest you can do on your own because we saw a lot of loss of teacher autonomy and as long as teachers are aligning curriculum and teaching the standards level they should have that autonomy as long as we're seeing results we're not seeing great results right now but there's other things going on we do believe we were on a really good path prior to this and outside our english our scores in high school english have gone up every year we use pearson our teachers prefer that um it's not as cut and dry it's um so we are going to go to a mix next year we will use the great things from florida virtual there was a great poetry unit in 11th grade so we might hang on to that because it's free and we will and we will integrate it with our pearson another thing we're doing is with our unit test we've made sure to align three questions to every standard so it'll give us really good standards reads between our benchmarks to help overlay that data thank you you have anything no okay thank you very much thank you so much next we have item g3 dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet continuing with our department reports we will be bringing in our next apartment introduced by mr dean good evening madam president members of the governing board dr kelson members of cabinet this evening it's my pleasure to present to our director of community education john williams and he's going to provide the board information related to the community education department and what they're all about good evening i've narrowed this down to 90 minutes so we can get to the next presentation so we'll go we'll go quickly through here um yes again uh thank you madam chair members of the board dr kellis cabinet um pleasure to be here this evening talk about community education and the great things that we're doing i want to preface all of this by saying everything that i present to you tonight there's not one single general fund dollar that gets dumped into it everything that we do in community education is self-sustaining so the services that we provide to students families in the larger community the fees that you approve this evening those those are what sustains our department our salaries and all of the operations that go into it so where we operate like an enterprise fund so i want to preface that as we go through some of these things and keep that in mind um all right let's go to the next slide okay so these are the key program areas uh and i have um our management team here so as i go through this i'm just gonna introduce them because i do nothing and they do all the work and and i appreciate all the credits so um growing minds preschool we have emily lopez um she is our preschool program manager if you have not been to growing minds check it out i'm just an amazing place it gives you a lot of perspective when you're walking around with one to five year olds with just big old smiles from from ear to ear and emily and her team do an amazing job enrichment activities and facility use management both of those bullets my court right is our program manager that manages all of those things um and we'll get to explaining a lot of those uh those the the the uh potluck dinner that that that maya deals with with within all of those different areas um the vista center for the arts louis is gone um luis is one of our theater interns i was hoping to shine some light on him he's a rock star and we have a theater tech uh maya is also heavily involved in that as our box office and front of house manager show nights um and that's it's been an amazing experience and i'll talk more about that den club and our childcare our licensed child care program christy martinez in the back there she is our program manager as well wave christy give a little wave there you go um and uh and then we have a new program with the advent of you adopting middle school programs are middle school rec programs so i'll get to that so growing minds just a quick recap we are a quality first program so um quality first we're currently three star in kind of a probationary period because we're looking to be a four-star um and higher out of five star um and uh emily's doing an amazing job and one of the ways that we're gonna get to a higher rating is providing cda credentials and that's child development associate credentials qualityfirst provides grant funding that will pay for our employees to continue that education and and that will get us to a four-star rating which just does wonders for our program um from grant funding and providing additional resources um when we look at our numbers pre-covered before you know before march 2020 we're at about 225 active accounts active students today we're at 267. that is through a pandemic and and that credit goes to emily and her team and the amazing services that they're providing we've expanded services through her vision of adding one-year-olds we started with three we were gonna start with four-year-olds um and we've slowly gotten younger and younger and younger because the demand is there the demand is there we follow um arizona department health services licensing um ratios and uh emily's doing an amazing job and that program continues to grow the goal is to fill up we have the capacity licensing capacity of about 300 students on the main campus and then expand to all of our elementary schools right now we're at marley park we have two classes at marley park and we have a class at freedom traditional academy so we look to continue to grow those programs and i'm gonna say this about um our den club team as well but when the world shut down the only individuals that were dealing with kids and providing services to students with the people at growing minds and our child care team they never stopped they didn't work from home they continued to provide services to kids for essential workers that needed it the nurses the doctors folks that were working at luke air force public safety officials we continue to provide services so so um i just i can't speak enough about the people that that work at growing minds and for den club enrichment programs um maya has done an amazing job growing this you see a lot of fun pictures on there of soccer a new k-4 six-week soccer program exploded we had 275 kids out at countryside this past saturday in conjunction with a partnership that maya has developed with arizona soccer association so all of our enrichment programs are activities that aren't otherwise provided by schools to our students and to the greater community um we we share these opportunities through a lot of different marketing strategies uh we started an in-motion dance program uh maya and our our dance teacher rachel guest um side story rachel was a product of covid the dance studio shut down and we scooped her up and she is providing that service out of growing minds preschool through k-8 for competitive non-competitive dancers and the program is blowing up we provide middle school enrichment and recreational opportunities driver's education we we have one driver's ed vehicle so that limits our capacity a little bit but it continues to fill up every time we have a class it fills up the demand is there um and we will be um providing uh cpr services we have in the past through a vendor but we're taking that in-house and we're going to provide that service to our our teachers that need it our coaches that need it and the greater community facility use and so you have all of these resources throughout the district um and they're open to the greater community you can come in and you can rent a facility um these uh include faith-based organizations private businesses personal reasons um special interest groups youth sports a city of surprise through the iga utilizes our facilities and so there are a lot of different um from from athletics to to hoas that that come and walk through the doors of our schools it's a great way to create community partnerships um again maya manages this area um she utilizes site specialists as hosts for for certain events and then we have field technicians you have three field technicians um that uh open and shut and make sure everything's safe and make sure they're following all of our district policies and um and and that the users feel welcome uh facility rentals and again this is this is credit to cabinet and and you our our school board um they blew up over the past year and the reason being is is dysart came back last june and opened up its doors to churches to other users where other districts did not and so um what we've seen is about a 25 increase in facility use over the last year and so we are confident we're going to hold on to these people because we're good hosts and we're going to grow this number all right the vista we've had three shows in a year we're doing good um it's been it's been an incredible experience to to be a part of this and i thank uh dr kellis uh mr dean cabinet the board um this has just been just been it's it's one of the perks of my job is is to work with some amazing people and have this opportunity to bring what will be and what is currently um a regional destination right here within your school district with with what we're doing with this um this past uh february 27th we had bill enville and he rolled up gets out of the car and um he gets out and i'm here i'm there with one of our our theater techs and one of our interns and he says i'm really nervous i haven't done this in a year and i said no problem we haven't done any here either so don't worry about it um so it it's and he had an amazing experience when he left he he said let's stay in touch and i want to come back and we'll fill the house we had two shows with him that were at full capacity socially distanced um so we couldn't sell you know the 1300 seats that that are there but uh just an amazing experience and we have some great shows as you can see up there um and and there's a lot of potential for that to really become a regional destination so we're excited of what's to come uh with the vista den club this is the bread and butter of community ad this is what we do we we provide services that we want i.e the vista driver's education but then we provide services that are needed and and child care from 6 a.m to p.m very often is a needed service to working families especially in a community like surprise a lot of people don't work here they drive out of town and sometimes very long distances and so this is a very much needed service um christie mans this operation you can see from enrollment we dropped we were on the incline we were going we were moving we were providing a service that people wanted um and then uh right around sometime around last march um things shut down however we continue to provide that service to essential workers and we're slowly seeing this number grow over the past month it's grown about 100 students from 470 to about 574 um and they just do an amazing job what i what i will say is that 35 of the students that attend den club are des qualified families these are families that that have to work that need the service so i can't say enough about this program um i will point out sixth through eighth grade and this is going to be um germaine to the next slide i wanted to use that word uh there's only 49 6th through 8th graders in den club so when we look at this program for next year we want to pilot a middle school program for before and after school called wreck recreation education and community it has to be something that isn't just needed because obviously you saw from the preceding slide that sixth through eighth graders don't really need those child care services but it's got to be something they want and after meeting with those four middle school principals we found out that these are areas that they want to promote that sometimes they can't provide that community education will fill in that gap that includes recreational opportunities open gym open library time study hall tutoring and and then supporting other signature programs collaborating with cte and then providing some um community connectivity leadership opportunities for those kids as they prepare for high school so we're excited about this we we think this has good promise and after the pilot year um this this coming year we hope that we can expand it to those other k-8 schools so this this is more of kind of a visual i'm a picture person there was a lot of data on the last presentation and you lost me but pictures tell a thousand words and and if you look at the our graphic image of what is going on financially with community ed we are on the uptick for 2021.
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that's a big deal so thank you president reese vice president wilson we are so proud of our employees i think one of the things higley can be very proud of is that through a pandemic of un un uh unknown unprecedented all the words we've used what's been one of the most important foundations of this is how our team in this district has come together from every corner from every department from as a collective group of employees to do what we can for our students and for our community and i think that's something we are super proud of um and again um has really made us stand out in something we're real proud of so our our employees are truly a reflection of the quality and caliber what we're doing one of the things we're only continuing to do is is celebrate that success but also grow from what we've learned in this process so i appreciate that any other questions all right thank you mr moore president reese members of the board the other thing i wanted to to kind of piggyback on one of the things you heard and you've read in your status reports is when we're looking at uh tight position control instead of we really know now what do we have how are we staffing what are our what is our standard so that we always at any given time know where we are with what that staffing need is which is a nice another nice thing that we have worked through through this process so again working collaboratively to truly give you what we know and we'll maintain that moving forward will online teachers be paid differently or will they be on a different scale than the right the in-class teachers if that's the right time to ask i'm sorry okay president reece board member anderson so at this time you know we're still identifying and discussing the components of the higley virtual academy and what that looks like um later this week there'll be information sent out to families about next year and what higley virtual academy is and um clarifying and hopefully answering questions that they might have as a result we have actually done some communication to some employees that are currently teaching online and what we anticipate as we issue contracts out tomorrow what that would look like and that is that right now any position in which they are teaching online their continuing teacher they will receive a contract that's anticipated for in person at the site that they are at prior to moving online or prior to moving to remote work as we continue to assess we have to really look at what our enrollment numbers are you know we anticipate that there's going to be some level that's going to be different next year for hva because of the fact that kovit is still in existence although listening to the radio the other day i heard the cdc is now saying you could have um functions at your home where you don't have to wear a mask and you don't have to social distance so that's a positive and the bigger picture especially if you've been vaccinated somebody outside of your household so who knows what next year is going to look like so we'll have to see what those enrollment numbers are but we anticipate at the elementary level that we will need full-time positions whether it be a full-time for each grade level or a full-time position that might share grade levels is going to be based on that enrollment and then at the secondary level we anticipate the model in which prior to covid all of this occurring in the secondary level that it really is going to be asynchronous learning and as a result of that and our curriculum that we have with florida virtual academy looking at a per student basis in terms of compensation um again not knowing what our numbers are going to look like we'll have to see what that is going to be in the larger capacity but it's unlikely that we'll have full-time positions at the secondary level because of that i would be surprised i've not heard anything new coming from other districts that have had long time virtual academies if they're looking to do some things different i do know that there were some districts that when we looked to move to creating our online virtual academy they talked about the fact that they would look to they would want to look to do some things differently but financially in so many ways it probably wouldn't make sense and we already as mr moore mentioned and mr gad receive less funding for students that are online so we know that traditionally virtual academies are not financially successful but yet it's an important need that our community is interested in and a need that we need to look to offer as a result but how do we do it in the best way we can president reece board member wilson to piggyback on that so today actually i think at 2 30 correct the communication as we shared today at 2 30 communication went out to those families who are currently online the website is now updated the same communication that says we need to let you need to let us know what it is you want us what you want if you're wanting to learn more if you're wanting to be online that way as we know numbers numbers will drive what those staffing needs are so whether or not and again elementary looks a little different than secondary but again depending upon what those numbers are it helps us identify how many online teachers do we need all of our current continuing teachers as miss martin said will receive a contract but it will be for in person so if they want to do online they can apply for online but they will receive a contract and our numbers will continue to drive how many full-time elementary do we need and how many per student secondary placements will be providing for compensation so again the good news is today that communication went out at 2 30 i got an email it's out it's live for those who are currently online and our website is up so that we can begin to gauge that interest so that we can also then begin to determine how many teachers we need i know that would a great explanation but i think um and maybe we're not there yet assuming the um hba a teacher's going to be a teacher going to be a teacher whether they're hba or in person so their contracts or offer if you will would look very similar to a regular teacher contract like you said everyone's going to receive a contract or anyone who is receiving a contract would receive a contract with the expectation it be in person but we won't have a different job description for hba teacher will we president reece no we don't anticipate there'll be a different job description there just could be potentially different compensation as we said at that secondary level because again based on enrollment looking at what models other places have done it's unlikely that we could look at a it's unlikely that we'll need a full-time secondary instructor because of the the course offerings as well as the type of courses somebody needs because then you'll have somebody who's teaching potentially they could be teaching four different levels of english as a result and does that make sense um to where maybe instead of a teacher taking on a six-fifth static site they might decide or doing something else at a site they might decide hey i want to take an online class and i'm willing to teach you know 10 students that i'm just throwing a number out there 60 per student right along those lines so in general taking secondary out of it because that's going to look different but in general an hba teacher is going to receive the same type of contract as a regular teacher so they'll fall in the same salary scales everything it for a full-time teacher correct secondary like like you said that's gonna have to be looked at differently um because we're not anticipating it being a full-time full day it's a there's a few in this class there's a few in that class somebody a different compensation strategy correct okay does that help i wanted to make sure that we're not going to be getting a different teacher job description for hva it's going to be a teacher job description that we currently have okay uh president reece is this going to be a board h are we gonna have like an hba presentation coming up sometime maybe summer or before it fully launches because these these discussions i think are probably more important or more appropriate then because we have so many unknowns so i'm just wondering if that was in the plan president president race board member taylor i don't see us having any problem coming back to you with all with our staffing looks like what are we offering what do those numbers look like we just literally today sent out the so who you tell us you want to do online so we can begin to get a sense of who truly wants to go online for next year so we can staff appropriately and then once we have those numbers we'll have a better idea of what our staffing looks like and what we can offer or not off what we can and can't do and what it will or won't look like and those numbers will drive that substantially as you know on our last meeting you approved the the hiring of the administration for that and we're working on helping to begin that transition and getting that all set up so i would envision that and very near future we will have more details to be able to bring to you and present uh the state of the state of our hva um and where we're at and what we're offering and and the number of students we have who are interested in pursuing the full online experience this will be the true unique year though because remember this year we paralleled we didn't really unenroll you from this school you were still kind of uh connected with your home school this is the year the hva goes truly live and we actually enroll you in the virtual academy and we support you uh as a full-time virtual student in our in our new online academy so this will be a first for higley because we prior to this year did not have that and we now do that's an important addition for us because what we do know is is that we do have families who want this we've had families who wanted this prior to covet and i can envision that we will have more families who may want it next year then then maybe hitting regularly inquired about this but in any case we'll be able to keep our higley students which is important dr foley if i may add to that um so president reese like you said if it's a full-time teacher and they're doing it it's on that scale we have not decided and discussed um you know we will we've discussed but we've not decided on what kind of scale that secondary number would be so we would certainly bring that back to you if it doesn't model anything that we currently have and have that discussion but going back to board member taylor's comments that there is just so many unknowns so we kind of have to see how this plays out with information that we get uh miss kayla thank you for asking that question to make sure it comes forward and to answer your question uh yeah i was just asking for budgetary purposes if we're rolling an administrator over to a new position i just curious how that would affect our budget if there was going to be a change that's all so looks like we're soon soon to know not yet we don't know for sure yet and and as as discussed too one of the things that we included in that allocation is when we reprioritize those funds we already had the money for that so we brought that in as those positions that had been ruled over so we know we could fund it and continue to fund it and that that role is versatile so you may be picking up multiple parts and pieces and facilitation of that so truly um we we have there are some unknowns but then there are some knowns that we are putting into place to finalize the the the launching of our new school um and sustainable sustainability for for the future perfect thank you all right then we'll go on to our action items 8.1 i move that the governing board tentatively approved the 2021-2022 mno providing a five percent salary increase for all staff second any other comments i think questions we've heard a lot about our budget and i just again appreciate that this was not the first time we've seen it you've brought it to us over and over again which i don't think there can be too much and giving us the chance to ask questions and understand so i appreciate that and again mr moore thank you for working with me and reassuring me we are good on this increase president reece this is kaler um i was just thinking sr4 could be monies from canceling state assessments and i'm pleased as punch for this five percent and i am really grateful to our staff who since september 8th has stepped up and done a fabulous job with our students i truly believe that our intentions back opening our schools was putting our students first and still trying to keep everyone safe as possible and were their cases yes but now we're seeing a huge drop and we know that having our kids in class was so so crucial and i'm just thankful to our teachers that and all the staff i mean it took the whole village to step up and step in and they did a great job but um i just want my my statement to be known i would love to see state assessment cancelled in the 1.6 billion dollars that the feds are spending could be used for s or iv but that's just my personal opinion any other questions or comments all right well i would just like to add and um forgive me for sounding brash but very appreciative of the um recommendation for the five percent it will matter and people will be very excited but i just want to also make it clear that um there there still needs to be value given in other ways there still needs to be acknowledgement of their value in other ways this raise won't keep some teachers here unfortunately and and that's i'm not saying that's okay but we tried and it was our intention to it's our intention to show that we truly are grateful that they showed up some reluctantly with schools open i'm so grateful the schools are open and i i wish i could just hug and hold everybody that stayed despite their feelings for being open and this is a great way to to say thank you but i just want to stress again let's not stop there let's do let's go above and beyond this to show that we value them let's let's have some changes in our attitude towards some to some staff um let's just make sure that um we keep them for the right reasons and that they truly want to stay and that um i'm sorry i'm rambling but um i just i just want to put that on the table as well thank you mrs anderson that's a great point we value them but our increase is not the only way we value them so thank you all right any other questions or comments all right all those in favor aye aye that motion carries five zero all right now we will go on to 8.2 and i move that we approve the issuance of certificated educational professionals and administrative contracts with the increase listed below to the base salary for the 2021-2022 school year second any questions comments all right all those in favor aye aye that motion carries five zero all right i know we talked about um mrs kaler had asked that we have um a presentation on hva so there is a lot of unknowns um talking about um and just throwing this out there from an hva standpoint talking with some people about like no this is going to be a completely different new school like you were saying a few minutes ago it's not staying with your school and just doing online classes it will be that is your school and um it was recommended by a staff member that potentially we hold some town halls if we can and give the community the opportunity to come and ask questions and safely hold them with space or virtually something but to get some town halls out there and and that we hold some town halls to give them the opportunity i know as board members that would be great for us too um but for our community to really understand the difference between this year and what hba is because it's different remote learning is not higley virtual academy even though we've heard some of the same terms and everything so potentially with our presentation that we can look at doing some town halls i think that was an excellent idea do we have any other future agenda items that we want covered president reece assistant do we know when the demographic study is going to be complete did i miss that in an update somewhere uh president reese vice president wilson actually it's going to be we're going to include some of that information into our updates with you when we talk in april about what we've learned and what have we learned in the background information we also will be able to probably provide those in status for you updates and if so desired we could invite um rick bremer to come back and do it although i think we spent there was we spent an awful lot of time in a work study and i think what we can do is provide the highlight updates and if more information is desired we can provide it but it's coming it's coming as part of our so what now what where are we and what do we need to consider when we think about next decisions for those budget conversations thank you i just didn't know if i missed it somewhere along the way and if we needed to put it on but thank you for knowing we literally received just a draft of it just today actually a green ass cabinet with updates so we're we're compiling all of these things as part of background information to help us answer questions and provide you information thank you anything else all right with that then i move that we adjourn second all those in favor aye aye meeting is adjourned have a great spring break you
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
the pandemic hit everybody very hard and and for a self-sustaining program we had some challenges but we did have support we had support from the arizona department of economic securities grant funding we had support by continuing thanks to you to stay open provide facility rentals run summer camp participating in learning labs um all of those things helped us kind of sustain our programs and uh we we continue to uh to grow we were on a great path in 1920 as you look at that but then when you look at march the bottom dropped out and that's when uh everything kind of shut down so we're trending in the right direction we're excited i have an amazing team of people um we've got 91 employees in community yet from child care services to everything and that doesn't include our site specialists so it exceeds that those site specialists traditionally are other support staff and teachers looking for a little extra pay and we're excited of what's to come so that is my presentation thank you to the board any questions i do have a question um as far as the wreck for the middle schools um are teachers going to be doing that after school or do we have separate is it going to be community ed staff who's providing these services so great question so um we we will be the the point of contact for all services so christy already has staff at those sites and so those will be the facilitators of the pro these programs we do want to work in conjunction with teachers and support staff at that site so for example that academic prep hour that support we want an ela teacher we'll pay a math teacher to come in after hours and support students in that program so um it it's a combination of folks but we're always the point of contact so we absorb the responsibility of running and facilitating and making it easier for everybody else my turn i was very excited to hear when you you were going to call the six through eight wreck instead of dens club i think you'll get more kids because if i'm in sixth or seventh grade and you're telling me i gotta go to den's club it's like oh i gotta be at those little kids and so this will be their program so that the dens club kids will think oh wow i'm going to the wreck program next year so that would be exciting when when groups rent the facility like religious groups or sports groups or whatever are they responsible for cleaning it when they're done and with covid now do they have to sanitize it or do you have to go in after that and clean and sanitize great question so um part of the rental agreement is leave it how you found it so so that that is part of when when any third party comes in but our site specialists our field techs are also responsible for maintaining the facility making sure it's safe and it's locked up and it's left the way that that classroom cafeteria um what was when they got there um we obviously partnered with abm and they they do some extensive cleaning and sanitizing after every use even the sunday groups correct so i got a couple of questions all right all right so as far as drivers said um we have one car currently yes currently and are we how can we get some more cars yes but besides seeing the business guy you know how can we excite seeing him hey what can we what can we do to get more vehicles and i think that's par that's part of our business model is to grow that and and our hope was this year we were going to purchase another vehicle um and that didn't happen part of the reason was we limited some of the classes because we didn't want we didn't want three kids in the car we dropped it to two to spread them out for obvious reasons um so so the goal is over the next 12 to 18 months to to have another vehicle maybe sooner than that but it's all part of that self-sustaining program when the money's there we we go and we continue to grow that program um we did um and i thank you for uh adopting those driver's ed fees this evening that is certainly going to help pave the way to getting a second vehicle okay all right um so excited about the rec middle you know for the middle schoolers and especially the um community connectivity leadership growing them from straight out of sixth seventh and eighth on the way up to high school so that's that's a very comforting piece and also the quality first grant funding um i like money and i like the fact that i know you do um but uh the fact of that funding and um providing you know the credentials and everything for the teachers and every that's that's awesome that is awesome uh do we have anybody that's ready for it or has they've taken part in it as far as like the funding the the the scholarships yes yes okay yes and that scholarship started last july we had we had started accepting students into growing minds through the scholarships um and emily's working right now on the grant funding for um for those those teachers are facilitators we don't have certified teachers in our preschool but those facilitators to continue their their education um as well as it allowed us to purchase an entire classroom set of furniture to expand programming so it's been a great resource for sure awesome awesome and madam president remember sorry since i might add in closing that um john was also instrumental in working with ottawa university along with with our hr department to provide opportunities for our employees at a discounted rate to start working to get their degrees and so through through john's work and through hr's work we have opportunities pathways for our employees to continue their education and the hope would be that we have we hire preschool aides who then go to school through ottawa and come back and teach for us as well well i happen to like ottawa so yes there you go and uh back to drivers that you do accept donations always okay gotcha but but the vehicle has to run [Laughter] yes the vehicle would have to run no i mean you know if there there could be somebody that's out there listening right now that has a vehicle yeah just go to dysart.org backslash community education and there you go you'll find my contact info on there free advertising right there so thank you very much thank you quick question um so for the growing minds preschool when you talk about moving from a three-star reading to a four-star reading um who does those ratings uh first things first so it's first things first program yep um and uh it's it's quite an extensive process that we went through last spring um it started last fall and fall 2019 and um obviously kovid slowed some things down but we were able to get that temporary rating with the hopes that we're going to increase that over the next 12 months okay and so what would it take to get to the five star five stars and um five star really requires certified teachers running the programs okay um and right now i mean you can see from our mantra that's not something that um is sustainable for the services that we're offering so understood okay but we can always try all right thank you all right thanks moving to information item g4 dr cullis thank you madam president um based on recent conversations with the board we are bringing this item forward and mr dean will introduce it good evening madam president members of the governing board dr kellis and members of cabinet this evening i'm happy to provide information to you on some potential protocol updates as it relates to kova that we'd like to discuss with the board i'm joining me this evening in the presentation we'll be karen winterstein our director of student service so we're going to tag team this um presentation so um karen will speak to you from the stand-up spot and i will speak to you from the sit down spot over here so with that um we have four items that we'd like to discuss this evening as it relates to covid protocol the first being volunteers in the classroom um in this um remember grant this gets back to your question earlier and so currently our protocol has been that we have not allowed volunteers in our schools this year we've kept our schools pretty closed down to outside folks coming in what we would like to do is we would like to recommend a change to that protocol to allow up to 15 volunteers per day in each school not per classroom but per day total to assist teachers with learning loss efforts so this would be one of our first steps to really begin to attack the learning loss pieces that we're seeing based or depending upon our conversation this evening the plan would be that that uh dana k our k-8 director of curriculum would work with our elementary principals um to uh put a protocol or process in place um and then that would be rolled out so that we could begin this process the very first week of april um and so rather than waiting until the very end of the com of the conversation um if you'd like as a board we can talk about these one by one there's four total slides um so we'd love to hear your thoughts on changing the protocol to begin to allow visitors or volunteers in our schools i would thousand percent support this change thank you i just have one question so in the past what in the past um a volunteer would show up at the school and say i'm volunteering in mr dean's class and then you'd sign in and you'd go back to mr dean's class walk in they'd give you your box or your whatever so with this they would go in whoever the principal whoever would say you're going to go to mrs smith's class today and help them with reading so it could be a different class each day madam president remember grant it could be um what we would likely envision um and and typically we get the majority of our volunteers in younger grades i'm not saying that we don't get them in in all grades but um what we would likely envision is that our teachers would set up a rotation with their with their parents their volunteers um members of our of our senior community who are regular volunteers and that they would come in and they would work with smaller groups of students one-on-one or very small groups of students to assist with that learning loss but that would be part of the process that would be planned with with miss and i'm sorry i used her her former name dana noble miss noble and our elementary principals in the next week or so and how will the word get out to these folks that because i mean up until now it's nope we're not taking any volunteers so how will these not just parents but some of the senior communities like with some of the churches and stuff they're just they love to do this kind of absolutely so how are they all going to be we would use our utilize our pr department um in that plan to provide information to our general community that we are accepting volunteers again we also have a very large volunteer bank um currently in place one of the great benefits we have as a school district is to have three large retirement communities um in our um in our school district and many many of them volunteer in our schools and so we would look to to start activating that as well just go back yes okay thank you very good any other thoughts just to clarify the 15 volunteers per day is that at one time that's just the thought would be that 15 is a manageable number in a day it could be at one time it could be throughout the course of the day um you know 15 people in in our the size of our buildings is not a large amount of people to add to our population i was just thinking i mean if we had like 15 in the morning 15 late afternoon and and what we would do is we would monitor this as we move forward and we would love to be able to expand this quickly you know because again as you saw earlier and anticipated we have a learning loss that needs to be attacked and this is one of the strategies to begin to attack that okay great thank you the next piece and ms winterstein we'll talk about this is a recommended change to our student quarantine process yes so currently uh the quarantine process that we have in place is for 10 school days as you heard earlier from dr wifritch her grandson has had two of those episodes in which there's two weeks each of lost learning and so what we are would like to move to is the both the cdc and the maricopa county department of public health have enabled an option to reduce quarantine to instead of seven days to ten uh from ten days to seven days uh with a caveat of um that with they can provide a negative test that has been taken on either day six or day seven to return on that eighth day that way it would reduce that quarantine by um by those three days i know that this uh is very much needed and has been asked for in by both our students and our parents because they want to return to school i can also assure you that the data that we have been collecting my department manages all the numbers of the students that are positive and our health office staff collects all the information on those students that are in quarantine very very few if any students rarely get the are become symptomatic or test positive after day seven and usually those are connected with outside and are not connected to being transferred within a school setting any questions thoughts comments as it relates to a recommended change to our quarantine process for students and these students while they're quarantining they're still going to have access to learning online from home yes absolutely thank you anything else all right let's move to our third piece and that is student and staff temperature checks and both ms winterstein and i can address this issue currently our protocol is that temperature checks for students occur throughout the school day and temperature checks for staff occur at the beginning of each day we are not currently recommending a change to this protocol however the maricopa county department of health services in conjunction with the cdc have indicated that temperature checks are not doing a lot of things to assist in this process however at this time of the school year with one quarter to go as a matter of fact i believe it's 45 days of school remaining we are not recommending a change to this protocol however we will revisit the protocol at the end of the school year as it relates to next school year any questions if i can add please um right now this process and procedure is so embedded into the routines of normal day that it is just the expectation and it our staff and students don't even think about it so for us to complete the year in this way um i think is a it's a very natural process and then of course seeking guidance uh for whatever might um be among the community or uh guidance uh from other entities then we would definitely take a look to see if that procedure needs to remain in place or no longer be required thoughts questions comments i just have one question um you said that this would be addressed we're going to leave it in place throughout till the end of the school year and it'd be addressed for next school year what about summer school will it be addressed prior to summer school or will it remain in place for summer school madam president member grant we would have the conversation before summer school begins okay thank you the only question that i have is not really related to the protocol um starting or stopping but i know that there have been some inconsistencies as far as how the temperature checks are performed whether it's done on the forehead or wrist whether it is an option whether it's mandatory so can you speak a little bit to that i know that initially we are always doing it on the forehead there are some parents who have asked us to not do the forehead and they prefer the wrist the important piece is the consistency so i know the thermometer in my office when i do it every day it's always within a couple of um tents if it's up for a reason i'll wait a few minutes and and do it again so again it's the the staff members who would be taking it on the wrist uh they become very familiar with the um the normal temperature range for that student and then that's that's where you would track um uh what would be a normal or within range temperature because as we all know if you take the temperature on your wrist it is much cooler than your than your than your forehead area um but as long as the numbers are consistent that's uh where we know that the the student does not have a fever okay madame president just to take that one step further yes there's flexibility and we can make sure that we communicate to all of our staff that they should be flexible based on the request of the person whose temperature is being checked thank you very good and the last item that we would like to discuss with the board this evening relates to masks and ma and wearing masks during exercise and yesterday during our weekly quick huddle meeting with our school administrators we reminded all of them that masks may be removed during strenuous exercise such as recess or you know strenuous exercise times such as pe um the the aia recently has relaxed its mask mandate for athletes during competition time so you know certainly as students are in non-strenuous situations they should have masks on that if they're playing at recess or or physically actively participating during pe time those would be times that masks could could be removed questions or thoughts or comments as it relates to the mask piece thank you very much for for your consideration in that um i think it's so important um at all times that we allow our children to play freely and breathe freely um you know especially when um it's warming up and i'm a big fan of breathing yeah [Laughter] but i can't even imagine as you know we start hitting and you know in the 90s and 100s sure it's it's going to be really tough for our little kids agreed uh for all of us but especially our little kids and uh so i am just so grateful to see that thank you i do have a question do we anticipate requiring masks next year also madam president member chaffin certainly that those conversations would be held but those are also dependent on other entities um we're currently under um under orders from cities and counties that require mass um wearing and and so uh we don't have full control in that conversation any other questions well that will do it for us this evening so thank you very much thank you next we have item h1 dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet we are thrilled this evening to have this item and mr croto will introduce it thank you dr kyles madam president members of the board superintendent kelly's cabinet and guest administration is proud to recommend mr joseph martinez for the position of assistant principal at valley vista high school for the 2021-2022 school year mr martinez received a master's degree in education administration from grand canyon he has eight years experience as a high school teacher and last two years as a teaching and learning specialist at willow canyon high school and so i will introduce mr martinez to you after you vote and we'll go from there so we are very proud to have mr martinez join us in administration so any questions i'll stand for any questions well you can sit for the questions that's okay that's okay uh mr martinez did you bring that uh report the three page or no i think it said 24-page report you have it right there okay so i see you're sporting the the purple tonight all right you learned your lesson um one thing i did want to say is that uh um you know you've been a great asset to dysart and um the fact that you've taken uh some or some certification in fema and um which is to me that's a great feather in your cap so thank you very much for everything you've done congrats with that i will make a motion to approve the appointment of joseph martinez as high school assistant principal second seconded by tracy sawyer sink bell oh there it is oh hold on there it goes congratulations and uh welcome i'd like to welcome our new assistant principal now officially welcome mr martinez glad to have you next we have item h2 dr kello thank you madam president this item is bringing is being brought back as a second read there were some minor changes based on board feedback at the last board meeting as we made those corrections it is presented for your approval i do have a question i don't know if i caught it the first time around but in policy 9.46 um it states that each student in grades four through six shall recite the following passages from the declaration of independence you can see that right there i'm not quite sure that our teachers our classes in grades 4 through 6 are doing this as you know i taught at one of our dysart elementary schools for several years and then i subbed for a year and i don't know that this is being implemented do our teachers even know that this is policy madam president staffon this is an interesting one because it's currently there's a bill in the legislature to modify the statute relating to to this particular item and saying the pledge of allegiance but this was based on statute initially and that's why this is in here i would agree with you that over the many years since that was first adopted it has had that creep effect of time and it would be something that we'll probably wait and see what happens in the legislature but if nothing changes we do need to be compliant i'll make a motion to approve the revisions to policies within section 9 instruction 9.25 through 9.50 as presented seconded by ms grant motion passes next we have item h3 dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet mr hicks will introduce this item thank you very much madam president members of the board superintendent dr kellis colleagues and community members thank you very much for allowing me to present tonight and tonight is a request that we're making to the board for a recalculation a 915 ade 15 915 request to recalculate dysart state aid this was caused by the arizona department of revenue who is their responsibility for transwestern pipeline which has property that runs throughout the state that they are to provide a property valuation that property evaluation obviously incurs taxes and a tax rate applied to it transwestern believed that they were too high valuation assigned to their property as it went through they went through the court system litigated it and transwestern won and so part of the resulting was that districts had districts and all municipalities all taxation jurisdictions had to refund the money and with interest so this is for years 2016 17 18 and 19 and 20 for uh that refund so that has already happened so the county um takes the money out of our account um so there's uh some people say there's a disconnect there's a little bit so we can spend money by budget authority whether we have money or not is a different thing so we've lost the cash out of it this is a recalculation that will allow ade to pay us for the majority of that fund that's been taken out we've reimbursed us for a majority of that fund now the other fund the other portion of it hasn't been restored yet and there's a bill in legislature right now that the legislature will backfill all that other funding and so we would be made whole with that legislation but at this point we're really just asking ade to recalculate our state aid as if it was out and then pay us the money that they would have paid us if this valuation would have done appropriately the first time and i will stand for any questions mr hicks and you and i have talked about this um is there the possibility that the legislation will not pass um madam president members of the board so this does happen although it is very unique to us it's um unusual this does happen from time to time they have backfilled it there's been other bills and those have passed um i believe wow um well now i'm going off to my head the bill is 12 million 10 million 12 million um technically they have three billion of cash sitting down at the legislature so i don't think financially there's a reason not to to pass it so i have not heard any opposition to it so i guess technically anytime a bill could be voted down and not pass i think it's going to pass there's no this isn't a one district this isn't a one city this one one municipality transwestern pipeline runs around i-40 down i-17 around some of the 303 so it touches many counties many taxation jurisdictions and so i do see them approving this okay okay i mean you had answered my other questions and everything but i that for some reason that still just lingers out there that name somebody might not want to see it past so but i will make a motion to approve the authorization and certification of requests for recalculation of state aid as applies to the transwestern pipeline litigation second seconded by tracy sawyer singapore motion passes moving to item i1 request for future agenda items any requests okay motion to adjourn the meeting second [Laughter] last week
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[Music] shoot [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] do [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] me [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] do [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] i'd like to call to order this meeting of the yesham township board of education pursuant to the open public meetings act adequate public notice has been given by the secretary of the eastern township board of education in the following manner posting written notice on the official bulletin board at the board of education office emailing written notice to the berlin county times in the carrier post filing written notice with the municipal clerk of yvesham township may i have a roll call please this is cappella here this is everhart here mr fizzicaro here miss fleming here mr catherine here mrs knoll mr lancelot here mr megan here mrs ryan here we have a quorum thank you at this point in time i ask that we please rise for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance indivisible with liberty today is the this is a special meeting in terms of the preliminary budget of the tentative budget i should say for the 2021-2022 school year um dr smith in momentarily will be giving his presentation on that tentative budget i want to just explain for everybody uh the board and the audience uh in general the how this is going to work um dr smith will will give we'll give his uh give us presentation uh there'll be points and times obviously because of the position we're all in right now and the state of how everything is we're all kind of heightened and tense right now we're gonna have a lot of questions a lot of comments uh i ref i would please ask and urge that you refrain from that while the presentation is happening after dr smith has done his presentation the board will then have a chance to have comments and questions as soon as the board has done their dialogue at that point we will allow the audience to have their chance to have their uh their comments and uh and and their questions all right um when we go go to that it is one comment per per person or one one time up per person all right just please uh please remember that um and we there's a three-minute time mark there but we're not my plan is not to completely hold you exactly at three but we ask that you be respectful of that of that time period if i have to in any way shape or form interrupt you i don't like to use the phrase cut off because that's not what i want to do i will ask you politely if you could please just just wrap up your your final points when i do that please indicate that i absolutely 100 do not mean any disrespect to that all right i i don't want you to feel that in any way shape or form i'm trying to stop you from saying what you need to say or what you feel you need to say okay but we we do have a constraint that we want to stay within i thank you all for for uh in advance for respecting respecting those uh those requests at this point in time i will leave the floor to dr smith on the tentative budget presentation thank you for the extra pay on my pay scale by being a doctor to me you are so we have the opportunity tonight to go over our tentative budget it is um a wonderful thing actually that this is the second time we're seeing the budget so we saw the preliminary budget two weeks ago and in our district unlike a lot of districts we have that extra step and the purpose of that extra step is exactly what we've had over the last two weeks which is opportunity for conversation for voices to be shared heard listen to all towards trying to walk together and have the best understanding together of the choices that we have to make for our district for our kids every year and this year um this is only the tentative budget not the final budget and you know that's um a really important distinction so the final budget presentation is early may and so we have about two months between now and then so also lots of time for conversation reflection and sharing some of these slides are the same as last time but i do want to go through them again just since it's only been two weeks since the last one and there are probably a few additional people watching tonight that didn't see it last time and the storyline is really important here because um it's taken years to get to this point right and we we're here this evening but this evening is actually years in the making on multiple levels so this shows how our budget this year is actually less than it was in 2018-19 our enrollment has fallen eleven hundred students since its peak it's a huge drop right um we're all hopeful collectibly hopeful that the um you know the new building that's going on in town will um bring new families in and children and help sustain and grow our enrollment in the years moving forward of course that remains to be seen that we'll see in time how that may affect things but as it stands right now we're down we're projected to be 1100 students less next year than we were about 20 years ago the this slide shows the drop in state aid over time and then this slide connects back to that previous slide about drops in enrollment so why is our state aid dropping why are we actually in year four of a seven year sequence of state aid reductions and the reason is that our population's dropped our municipal wealth has gone up and our personal wealth of residence has gone up and those are the three factors that the state uses when determining stated distribution so what that leads for us is this year our state aid is dropping one million seven hundred and sixty three 000 which is actually forty thousand dollars more than it was projected to be that is the largest percentage drop among all nine lenape region districts it's the 49th largest state reduction by percentage out of the 577 districts who receive state aid and next year again because it's taken years to get to this evening but there will be years beyond this evening that are with us tonight and and are part of the con must be part of the context and what we consider is that next year this data reduction isn't a whole lot less projected to be a whole lot less than this year and the year after that another million and then lastly about 325 000 in 2024-25 other impacts we saw this year that chapter 44 loss started on january 1st in fact and it was due to the new jersey employer healthcare plan that was offered which many districts have seen a negative effect of that personnel costs increased due to covid which if anybody you know sees my weekly updates that i send out you've seen just in the area of saves of substitute pay how we started the year at 90 and then now we're up to 140 a day for a daily substitute and that's been very necessary because with it being a pandemic it's been very hard a lot some districts even had to shut down not due to covet but due to lack of staff in the building that was not the case for us but um but one of our remedies for that along the way was to increase our our sub rates um we were also a full day we we've been a full day district since the first day of school other than we went to a shortened day during the height of winter and you know so right from the get-go you could um you know work in a neighboring many neighboring districts for a partial day for the same amount that you would have worked in our district for a full day but the full day you know was good for kids it's worked we're back to it it's working again and that's why we did it miscellaneous revenue loss so we have a number of miscellaneous revenue generating programs in our district which in a typical year bring in positive revenue teddy bear academy full-day kindergarten before and after care this year remote learning care but in the pandemic our numbers dropped and we suffered a loss the projected lawsuit increased free reduced lunch enrollment that is um all districts are seeing that basically um you know the u.s department of agriculture offered a program this year where all children regardless of free and produced lunch status can receive a free breakfast and a free lunch it's at no cost to the districts it's supported by the department of agriculture but it did sort of remove some of the motivation for applying for free and reduced lunch and so a pre-reduced lunch enrollment is down and then s2 that's our stated reduction that we talked about before primary driving question how can our district maintain the effectiveness of our educational services while costing less money and that question has a certain aspirational seed in it because it's hard to cut over four million dollars and maintain maintain implies equivalency right but it's not equivalent we're you know we're cutting four and a half million dollars so we have tried to maintain to the greatest extent possible the effectiveness of our educational services and that drives hard choices very hard choices i'm going to pass it off to mr ashinti to talk a bit about the numbers on this slide uh good evening everyone and uh tonight this is the first news slide that that we put into the presentation and basically it's showing what's changed in our budget since the first preliminary budget presentation that we did two weeks ago the top half of the slide we're looking at changes to our revenue and we've increased our revenue by putting some capital reserve into our budget 215 500 so that way we can remove the rice fire alarm project from our operating budget and fund it through capital reserve um also our state aid was decreased and we talked about a little bit about that we had gotten our state aid numbers uh right before the board meeting and we have to adjust for that so we lost an additional 41 in state aid and then the last piece there we have to reduce our miscellaneous revenue because of the change in the transportation things that we were going to do since we're not going to move forward with the subscription busing and the uh that program we won't get those revenues so we have to remove them from the budget so it's at a total of 83 616 in changes to revenue on the appropriation side we had some adjustments made to uh staffing which resulted in a decrease of four thousand eight hundred and two dollars we finally got our uh final premiums on our health insurance and it came in a little bit higher than what we projected 37 500.
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okay you're ready to roll whenever you are miss hall okay seeing the presence of a quorum i'll call to order this meeting of the pelham school committee at 6 30 and we'll start with roll call attendance brenda in the present your best is our best present margaret margaret present ron money no present and hall present okay um all right first up is the approval of the minutes so we have the minutes from january 14th and the and february 11th um so we can start with january 14th any questions comments edits on those minutes okay i i move to approve the minutes of january 14th 2021 is there a second second all right roll call vote brenda brenda i sarah best i'm going to abstain because i wasn't there okay margaret margaret i ron ron i and hall i um okay then next up are the february 11th minutes um i just had one um change to those in 5d there's references to eliminating the preschool mr menino thought we were planning on eliminating because of the expense ms hall thought we were eliminating i wouldn't we never there was no talk about eliminating it i think if you just maybe update that to uh you know not opening it for that year because i don't think ron that's what you were asking and i certainly was not that's right okay all right that was my only change did anyone else have yeah sarah best um i just have uh so in 5a i think it's just a spelling typo i think it says queen but i think it's supposed to say queer um under the let's talk so focus of let's talk curriculum and the anti-racist perspective so i think it's supposed to be queer and then um meera's last name is spelled correctly the first time but then i think it's misspelled again oh misspelled in the second paragraph somewhere yes yeah the fourth line of that second paragraph yeah yep and then um in f we were talking about the capital plan um it says miss kenny asked about the changing of the infrastructure for the wi-fi the changing circumstances are depending on the infrastructure in the building which will continue to go on openly um but that it was about um that changes had to happen in amherst first before changes can happen in poem oh yes um okay yeah and uh sorry i'm just noting noticing another thing as we talk just the letters are out of order a b c f d e g h so if we could just update the letters too anything else that's all i had all right excellent catches um all right is there a motion on the february 11th minutes i move to approve them you muted sorry i moved to approve the minutes of february 11th all right second um all right we'll do a roll call vote brenda brenda i sarah best kenny i margaret margaret i ron ron i and hall i okay um next up is public comment we had one public comment that mike will bring up you all right thank you um and that uh that individual also wrote to clarify that the um preschool she referenced that was closing actually decided to stay open for another year i forget i forget the name of it now um is it called the gorge child care center it's on mongolia college okay there we go so they did decide to stay open for another year she just wanted that corrected for the record yeah ron i'd just like to say i love this format because i can enlarge the comments and actually read them uh i can't read them on the other platform but this one you can make it so it's totally readable i appreciate that yeah all right good um and sarah best you pointed out that that we might have skipped minutes oh okay yeah i think i think they're just mistaken because if you read down them there's the they're actually from march 1st they are from that okay all right um sorry no no don't apologize okay well we'll just go over those next time i saw the heading and i just didn't even read them so we okay we can approve them next month okay thank you for catching that um okay next up is fy 22 budget vote and so i'm going to bring doug in here i'm going to share just a couple pieces of information i think we omitted to have superintendent principal updates tonight but actually a lot of it weaves into this topic um so i'll preview just a couple of things and dr slow talk about primarily just one change uh positive change in our budget we're and then we'll be available for questions since we already had a budget hearing we're not going to belabor the parts but some things got a little bit better and we want to speak to those but one of the things that we want to share that is also good news is that we now have 18 new school choice applications for the next school year so that's really important we have 12 in kindergarten one in second grade two and fourth grade two and fifth grade and one for sixth grade for next year uh again we don't know how many kindergartens we'll get so we don't know if we'll be able to accept all 12 of the folks who applied for that um but at the same time that's really good news and kudos to principal wedding jones who's at a pto meeting which is why she's not here tonight for facilitating and doing a lot of outreach so that's really important and you know when they continue generally to come throughout the springs hopefully that number increases particularly the non-kindergarten number because at some point we can't have a full kindergarten of just choice students uh as nice as that would be for our budget it's we do actually have pelham students who attend the school as well so we want to make sure that they're they get dibs on the seats but that's a really good piece of budget news another good piece of budget news that well it's about this year's budget it certainly has an impact because these things are related is that the rental of the gym was highly successful this spring um so it was rented since december and particularly since january uh pretty much five afternoons and evenings a week and and our estimate i think dr slaughter will correct me but i think is roughly in the neighborhood of twelve thousand dollars that eventually when all bills will are paid will come in so that was uh really helping us out in this fiscal year and that obviously because of our choice fund will help us out in the next fiscal year so that's how i'm justifying that in terms of meeting law that we're able to talk about that because otherwise we're talking about pulling more from choice which would influence next year's budget um so you know i think was there one other uh no i think that our that's the two budget good news pieces that i have and doug's gonna share a third good news budget piece and then i will of course end with a less good news budget piece um about grants and federal government and things that are gonna be voted into to um in tomorrow uh probably uh or signed into law tomorrow by our president so uh doug do you want to do the third piece of good news and and uh about what's different in this year's budget particularly the ads cuts as it relates to the last time we were here at the budget hearing right so i'm going to uh do i have the option to share i do yeah yeah it works the same way as google me okay screen oh i have to select which one all right uh [Music] yes sorry i took a moment to select the right thing so i'm going to zoom in on this a little bit hopefully that'll make it a little bit more readable um the short story is that we we've got some some good news relative to um our health insurance uh and so uh we're going to have a what is called a premium holiday which basically means we don't pay uh nor do our employees pay for their health insurance premiums uh for one month and what that allows us to do is is to uh essentially bring back about twenty five thousand dollars of of of cuts we would have to make it's a one-time savings but it does provide relief to our budget uh and that then results in in fewer reductions that you see in the lower part of the screen and so uh previously we were looking at one more uh reduction of of a significant uh uh you know amount uh you know a personnel kind of uh reduction and so we we were able to eliminate that and and while we still have to make reductions here uh that's about a much better uh circumstance relative to to what we were thinking we're going to be uh dealing with so that that bit of good news is is the uh the reduction due to health insurance um sometimes we ask you know why is it a premium holiday as opposed to just a reduction in rates that they spread out over the whole year um that's a bit of a you know an odd quest it's an odd question for that we ask the uh the health insurance folks they they think of the rates as being one thing it's a structural thing and then they think of the premium holiday uh as a correction to their their balance they carry a balance of funds and when it gets too high they will offer a premium holiday to to reduce our burden so we've had lower claims than expected and so that allows us to to get this premium holiday which will which will help our budget in the coming year um so i think that's the that's the bit of good news there and and so it it means the the amount of cuts we have to make is as you see here about 46 000 relative to our total increase in in our budget and and so that will uh keep us on track with the guidance we got from from the um from your finance committee relative to the tax support that's available um we've got uh you know our the rural reap grant which has been one we've had over the years it was missing for a couple years it's come back to help us out those are all positive bits of news that help support the budget as we move forward so i think i'll pause there and see if there's questions um and just to be succinct you know about it you know it was able to restore you know the para educator position that was originally on here there used to be three positions cut there was these two part-time positions than a full-time position and so our number of fte that we would be reducing by uh went from 1.47 to 0.47 so uh that's been that's going to be really helpful for the school and supporting our students particularly in a time period uh that's particularly challenging next year um as students um and they'll get in the spring uh most of them will get in the spring but you know they've been out of school for a full year and having more adults and more support for students who may not have been a successful accessing distance learning was really critical so that that's the restoration that you don't see on this cuts list that you did the last time around um doug would you mind not sharing for just a sec so i can see if anyone has questions all right um any questions yeah ron i'm a little confused uh i thought the last time you showed this there was a forty six thousand dollar cut now is this a forty six thousand dollar cut or a twenty one thousand dollars so it's a little bit of both in some respects you can present and i can get a view using this where sarah can still see everybody but the majority of the screen is this is your oh okay yeah so i didn't do that before just to make it a little easier to read but i think at this point that way you can reference it so if you're able to share your screen again there you are and then yeah at least everyone should be able to see each other a bit on the left side yep okay thanks so what happens is because um it's what we have is a is a reduction here in the in the uh in the top part of the screen so so it it reduces our costs which lowers our overall operating budget by that 25 000.
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uh tonight is thursday march march 11th hope this finds you in good spirits and good health uh before we kick this off uh to the meeting this can we have a roll call for quorum please yeah i'll i'll take care of that mr paragini i used to carol thank you vincent okay that's all right i've been called worse than kevin northwest mr perezini is harrigan here pam here mr martelly here and mr white is it thank you vincent uh so we stand for the pledge okay so the flag is destroyed i pledge of allegiance thank you welcome everyone uh before i turn over to meeting to andrew because this is a planning committee meeting of the whole meaning that not only is the planning committee meeting here tonight of the board of ed but the full board of it uh primarily this across the great efforts by school modernization uh again upgrade on what they've been working on some of the options and other information but a chance for the full board to talk about the plan being drafted and share some feedback that being said andrew i'm going to turn it over to you and and uh i'm sure you do the same but uh for folks that may be watching i hope you are you can send questions and comments during the meeting just keep your october 19 a check should.k12.ctus and we'll address as the meeting moves on andrew it's all yours thank you all right well thank you everybody thank you to our invited guests just for those who are with us here and those watching at home we have a few folks with us who are not um either board of ed staff or on the board of education we have mr chuck warrington who is a consultant from coliers international as well as well as john copeland who is our consultant who have been retained by the smc to help with our help guide some of the discussions and to work through some of the different scenarios we also have michael zuba from slr who did the enrollment study and the redistricting survey for us and then chuck north who is the chairman for the school modernization committee so welcome to our invited guests um the way that i'd like to kind of go through this is there's a lot of information we have some folks here who's going to who are going to share some information with the group and those listening at home um but i want to touch on a couple items and then i'm going to turn it over to various individuals to share their screens if they could do to walk through and then open it up for questions and comments which i know there'll be quite a few of um so with that being said the first thing i'm going to talk about is our last modernization committee meeting which was held back on march the 8th main topics that were covered there was the survey that was sent out to the community so i'm sure that some of you have had a chance to take a look at that survey i kind of pulled out some of the high level things that i thought were important from that and i would be happy to answer any questions about the community survey um so basically a survey a group was hired in order to conduct a survey of the community um there were 400 random phone calls that were made to individuals across the town as well as 903 individuals who were able to access an online survey which mirrored the survey that was done by the 400 random calls to individuals in the community of those surveyed um of the of those surveyed 132 identified as either business owners in cheshire or managers of businesses located here in town um the survey focused on not only school modernization but also on life and cheshire in general so i'm not going to get into that but i thought it was important to know that 98.5 of those surveyed reported that their quality of life in gesture was either good or very good so i thought that was important to know school modernization um three quarters or 78.5 percent of those asked were either interested or somewhat interested in school modernization 86.5 percent indicated they consider modernization of chelsea public schools is either very at 54 or somewhat at 32 percent important um so we have 86.5 of everyone surveyed things that modernization is the right process that we're following right now um interestingly i thought this was interesting just like pulled this out that of all the modernization initiatives that could be done in cheshire public schools the top was it technology upgrades at 38 um give me one second air quality at 29 um and renovations of the cheshire of the school buildings at 27 um 4.3 percent of all those asked thought that there was no need for modernization of the cheshire public school buildings um let's see and moving forward with school modernization 93.8 percent of those believed that the public communication for modernization needs to distinguish between what is required and what is desired for upgrades to the public schools which i thought was an interesting point um and 90 of those asked could be convinced to support funding for school modernization um if they were clearly understood what the project needs and objectives were so the reason why i thought that that was important was is that the survey did not ask or did not present any costs associated with school modernization so still 90 of those ass thought that they could be convinced that it was depending on what the funding levels were for the projects um again 11 of those asked totally opposed modernization so survey went out there was a lot of information in there i know that all board members have been um have received the full packet of what all the questions were there's about eight to a thousand different comments that were received um both verbally through the um phone the people on the phone taking going through the survey as well as those that submitted online so that's the survey um i don't think that there's any question that we have pretty large support in the community if you're one of those that believe that the numbers are going to tell the tale if people are going to vote in favor of school modernization that was not asked as part of the survey so that was one issue that was left that was left out of it because at the time the survey was being put together um all the calls were made during the month of february and when the calls were being made and have numbers associated hard numbers associated with the different options or the scenarios developed which we're actually still going through that process now so any questions on the survey that um that i could address before we go into the actual options andrew this is adam yeah um are we gonna have access to the actual comments that you referenced is that part of the the packet that we got i don't know if it's part of the packet that you received but we could definitely make that um available then yeah like you know i don't see any reason that we can't share that at this point um but it's not what we in the package what we did include was the presentation that was made but i will um attend to that i know it sounded like there were a lot of comments but um usually there's a lot of interesting detail in there so for sure i mean they really run the gamut of uh there's there's a lot of interesting information in there yeah all right thanks andrew i have a question um are we gonna once we do have cost estimates um are we gonna go back out and uh get a sense of the community i know that there are some members on the modern modernization committee who have raised that point you know and there's a poll forever but yeah i mean i'm not saying that we're opposed to doing that um there hasn't been a plan that we're going to re-engage the center for research and public policy to do that once again but i i don't see the harm in doing that um so that's definitely something that's up for discussion isn't it isn't it true though that we we may not have more funding to do that that is a question i don't know the answer to then now we'll be checking it out i'm sure yeah i i think ultimately it's up to the committee to decide if there is an additional investment to be made and i think there is still a balance available but i don't know what else to say beyond that oh it's a committee decision yeah that would be a full committee decision faith could bring it up at the next meeting on the 17th of school modernization you thanks sure questions or comments by anybody who uh is on smc chuck do you want to add anything chuck north no i was uh you'd pretty much given the answer i was going to say we can talk about it it's not currently planned but it could be um it kind of depends on what happens uh following presentation of the time all right can i ask one more question i'm sorry andrew sure faith this is for um john and chuck from colliers um how do these numbers compare with other projects that you've worked on um when you've gone out and pulled the communities are we running ahead are we comparable to what you've seen um did you do the other districts when they pulled neighborhoods did they actually include costs um to get a better sense a realistic sense of what the community wants and is willing to bear yeah so um you know so we most of the district we've worked with we haven't done the survey um mike zuba um with slr mike has uh he's the one i think they brought the surveyor to us i know mike has done some surveys um you know for we've had referendums that have succeeded but not any formal surveys that i could give you answers to i don't know if mike's available to maybe share i think he was trying to get in with his cell phone well if he's talking his microphone's muted yeah mike just said i don't know that we're yeah uh he said that uh when he's presenting you unmute his mic i don't know then if you have control of that i don't have control of that i'm trying to do it right now since i can't mute someone else yeah it's not i mean i have the mute icon but it's not letting me unmute let me try this i you know i can respond because i asked that same question though and um i will you know not be able to give the verbatim response and i'm hopeful that you know mike could fill in any blanks but uh these numbers are very favorable and generally you don't see numbers this high in the survey supporting a change you know supporting work being done in the schools i mean i i asked that at monday's meeting and i know some of you were there so i mean um but if i missed anything no and the um the surveyor from the center for research in public policy stated that in the communities that he's surveyed this is overwhelmingly high for um for a positive for a project faith so if i can add i don't think the board's met since the last smc meeting but it's just a heads up that town council gave smc april 1st to deliver the report and then you know what happens what that some see after the fact they'll figure out so they're made an opportunity to another survey but i think we need to get through the plan first uh figure out where that lands and see where it goes but it's certainly open for discussion down the road anything else in the survey before we move on to the um scenarios seeing none okay chuck can i ask you or john to go through the two scenarios that were discussed the last smc meeting yeah i think john's prepared to share that walk us through it hey johnny there buddies i think he's on mute here we go so i was on mute trying to get my screens figured out here okay can everybody see that see that screen we got it okay so um as andrew had touched on um at the meeting on monday uh we had a presentation from uh slr uh formerly maloney mcbroom where they went through uh the scenario 1a and two-way which essentially were the two finalists uh from the initial uh 13 or so uh scenarios that we had been addressing over the last several months uh with the smc group hey john all right i'm i'm seeing uh the google screen it says you're presenting do you guys see the actual presentation yet no no yeah we don't see the actual application that it's bringing up okay um all right mine's indicating that the uh my screen's showing the snap okay for some reason then hey john you've done this before maybe you want to just stop presenting and start over okay okay try it again is that working now so when it when it comes up the um it says present entire screen you gotta click on the icon of the screen and then just go to the tab or worksheet that you're presenting okay i thought i had done that but let me try that again it's okay john i'm bad at it too that's it i didn't have any problem previously pressure's on could i just ask who's on the uh the call-in line that's mike suba oh okay yeah he's trying to get his his mic to work i'm trying to present it here to see if it'll pop up all right guys can you see the spreadsheet here andrew yes i can yep does everyone got that yeah yeah hey john you want once you're going to walk it through i'll just uh just maggie and you don't know what happened on my end sorry about that so uh again what we looked at were the scenarios 1a and 2a um and ultimately uh scenario 1a was um essentially voted down if you will by the smc so i don't want to spend too much time on that but what this was showing is um scenario 1a consisted of a new k-6 elementary school um i guess challenge an issue associated with that however was the 858 enrollment number and in addition to that the uh size of that school not only for the students but then also the square footage was a was a concern uh for the smc the other uh detriment of scenario 1a was that the percentage of the redistricting which was presented from the slr report earlier that evening resulted in 39 percent of the student population for the k-6 elementary schools would be impacted by a redistricting plan so ultimately the size of the proposed new six elementary school and the fact that of the student population for the k through 6 would be affected by redistricting uh this one a scenario was not uh voted through or in favor to proceed so um just uh bottom line while we do have this still up as far as the budget is concerned uh the costs associated with this again a new k-6 elementary school renovations to dodd uh doolittle highland and norton and then um ultimately renovations to the high school which would likely be towards one of the latter phases would be a budget figure of 408 to 515 million dollars total of which the district share which would be the percentage um after the oc oscg and our assistance from the state the reimbursement would be a value of 242 million to about 305 million so um not only the cost but then also ultimately the size of the proposed new elementary school and the impact of 39 for redistricting uh to the k through 6 student enrollment numbers were the reasons for this one not being voted through the second scenario is scenario 2a and this one entails a new 6 to 8 middle school and in doing so the elementary schools are then changed to a k through 5 program and set up so uh the numbers in those uh elementary schools then are slightly reduced again because the sixth grade has now moved into the middle school and the new middle school would have a high eight year enrollment figure of 117 students and then the new elementary school in this scenario or in this case the assumption is that this would be a figure of 515 students roughly and the intent with the redistricting in this scenario 2a helps to more equally divide the students between the four elementary schools the impact to the redistricting was much lower and that was at roughly 15 percent so there was less of an impact to the redistricting for the town of cheshire and ultimately the costs also you will see at the lower right are also much much lower so um the new middle school the new chapman elementary school uh results uh in a um bottom line figure of 431 million to roughly 535 million dollars with a ultimate district share of 263 million to 326 million dollars so it is much cheaper and ultimately it does not have as much of an impact on the redistricting to the town and as a result of further discussions monday night what we are now pursuing is actually a scenario six we are calling it which is a modification to the scenario 1a tweaking that version there and what we are looking to do for scenario six is to construct uh two new elementary schools uh roughly between 600 to 650 at the most most likely students in each of those and that would help to alleviate some of that pressure with the existing schools chapman again would be closed and then the other elementary schools would equally share in those in those numbers and the redistricting impact would be much less uh than even the 15 percent uh that was uh from scenario 2a so that is something that we are looking into now um slr is uh reviewing uh the ultimate impact to the enrollment numbers as well as any potential redistricting that may be impacted from this scenario six as we're calling it and then uh based on their findings uh colliers we will then uh do another one of these uh uh charts here to show the potential cost impacts uh with uh the proposed new uh elementary schools so that in a nutshell is um what we have from our uh cost analyses for the uh two scenarios from monday night's meeting and as i said we're about to get into the scenario six uh cost associated with those uh once we get some more information from slr okay thank you john um catherine you have a question um yeah and i just may not be understanding on scenario 2a the square footage for the new middle school seems significantly higher than what was estimated um in our last go-around i'm in the facility master plan so is that i'm just curious as to why there is such a because i think i thought it was like 180 000 square feet but maybe vin has a better recollection of that um so that's one question and i don't know if it's because of an increase in enrollment over time that we're planning for but second i don't know that i understood the uh john when you said that the costs of scenario 2a are lower than 1a doesn't seem right to me you know based on what but maybe i missed something that you i maybe i didn't follow exactly what you were saying um because 1a seems to be cheaper overall than 2a i just want to make sure i'm following on i'm sorry i i did misspeak there the the assumption is uh the scenario 6 is going to be cheaper than the 2a so i'm sorry i oh okay okay misspeak there but um as far as your first question i believe had to do with the square footage yeah of the middle school of the middle school the the square footage for the middle school is based on a couple of factors mainly the space standard calculations that the state uses as a guideline and that in turn is based on the number of students there's a square footage cost allocation that is put towards uh each student and then with respect to the ed spec educational specifications there's another factor that comes into play with determining the square footage for the the school size itself so um a lot of that is based on the number of students enrolled and then um that helps to determine uh the square footage the factored it's a 1.05 uh factor and multiplying uh the um the net square footage and the high number is a 1.15 which accounts for the exterior envelope or thickness of the building exterior if you will so that that is the difference between the low and the high gross square foot numbers right but so i don't know vin or jeff if you or tony if anyone remembers whether i mean is it our is the enrollment that we used for the last middle school analysis uh significantly lower than what is being used today i don't recall i i got a in fact as you were talking i was trying to go back and find uh on our website that uh that study but what's significant this time is the elementary spike enrollment but i'm not sure yeah that contributed to the middle school size i do know that uh this middle school six to rate and 2a i believe based on the space standards i think john talked about is accommodate approximately 1 176 students which i think is higher than what we saw in 2017 which i think is around 900 that may be yeah i have um i'm looking at the uh tskp information that was prepared yeah and so in so this was from 2017.
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did you did that allow you to get in here for today no it doesn't i had to use a link from my email so that's the one is the one that i won webinar is life the webinar is live okay welcome i know that we're having technical issues i do see 68 participants i know some of the board members had issues um uh we'll go ahead and begin today's meeting welcome marie can you help us with the roll call today is the regular board meeting of march 11 2021 at 5 30 pm members of the boarding attendant president corina president vice president in andres quintero clerk ernesto he's raising his head okay he is raising his hand so we cannot bring him on to be here and um yeah clerk here uh member linda chavez president member min pham president members of administration superintendent dr bauer president thank you uh so today i'd like to uh acknowledge um as an indigenous woman of the wedarica nation um and member of i want to first acknowledge that we are guests here on the ancestral homeland of the maloney and pledge my solidarity to them in their ongoing fight for federal recognition as a tribe and i want to also acknowledge that tonight our meshica community will be celebrating tonight friday morning at 12 45 a.m uh march 12th we'll be celebrating our new year so we're on the eve you know our second uh board meeting in a row um celebrating on the eve of our new year our aztec mishika new year and i do want to honor and tell you a little bit about our new year and what we're celebrating today we are celebrating which means nawi is nine in the nawa language and kali means house so nine represents the wind the rain with which both help flourish life and it represents balance and is a center and beginning of the development of experiences in life which is a time of constant learning those born on this day are very centered and creative dali means house or a building kali is something that protects those born on the sign on the day of kali are creative protectors and enjoy spending time with their families they are people who study work plan ahead enjoy being at home and are known being the person who gathers and prepares to have all the basic necessities this meshika new year we ask everybody to join us in celebrating and celebrating the protection of our home of our communities and uh we encourage everybody to just join us with the thought you know honoring our indigenous people of of this land of the americas um as as we come together typically there's about 10 000 of us that gather at the emma bridge park this year it will look very different uh but there will be an opportunity to um join online for those who would like um but we we are entering our ceremony so just want to honor um our ancestors you know again i i like that quote from maya angelou i stand as one but represent ten thousand um and so just honoring all those that came before me thank you for that and with that we're going to move on on our agenda but before we do that um can you please explain to us uh about translation okay uh now we'll move on to item 102 discussion and or modification of the agenda any changes from any of the trustees uh trustee chavez uh you're muted if we can mute her or you can meet yourself uh oh okay thank you for putting that up there um can i please move 602 before 601 so 602 before 601 yeah um i would like to move uh 504 uh the um the resolution denouncing api hate crimes earlier in the agenda and um i i think that um it would be right you know right around the 3.01 either before or after whatever you deem is most appropriate so [Music] and if we bring that up to three oh um let's bring it to three you said before after yeah either or before or after let's bring it after okay so after 301 so we're moving 504 after madam president on that item the trustee quintero moved i just want to let the board know that we're gonna have uh a special reader in vietnamese and we're checking to make sure he's here because you know the item came a little so if you're okay yeah we will check if he's ready but that's what we're doing right now to make sure that he's here oh okay yeah if um the translator's not available then we can just delay hold off thank you okay thank you any other changes on the agenda uh trustee i i'm not sure if you were just gonna do this after but i know we have the pledge of allegiance to do also i believe so no changes to the agenda but just that thank you for the reminder thank you thank you so we before we vote on the um on this item we'll go ahead and do our pledge of allegiance uh trustee chavez was there any other changes to the agenda i don't think i heard you say we have quorum did you uh when we um went through roll call but i'll go ahead and do that before we do our pledge of allegiance any other changes to the agenda otherwise we'll vote as soon as we're done with our pledge of allegiance okay see none we'll go ahead and do our pledge of allegiance if you can join me in standing up and doing our pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states the united states of america and to their to the republic for which it stands one nation one nation under god under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you and as uh trustee chavez pointed out we do have quorum we have all of our trustees present here today thank you uh so we'll go ahead and uh move into the vote for our changes i'm going to go i'm going to review them we moved 602 before 601 we moved item 301 i'm sorry 504.
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we received our bill for our prs contribution for the um people that belong to the pension system that aren't in the teacher's pension we have to make a contribution every year for that um our our bill came in higher than what i projected so i know next year it's going to come in was going to come in higher than what i had budgeted for so we had to increase that line by 29 two forty two the next uh change was to um other uh district costs and that that is the additional money that we needed to put into the budget 12 500 to fund our share of the sros for the school year we already had i think it was 187 000 we had to put a few more dollars in to fund our portion of the sros and then the last thing was special on tuition we had to make a minor adjustment to that based on uh students moving into the district moving out of the district over the last couple of weeks so the budget has actually gone up by uh 83 616 dollars okay this slide is the same as this this slide that we had shown two weeks ago it looks at our appropriations or that the expense side of our budget for next year the first line is staffing second line is employee benefits those two numbers together equal 82.41 of our budget then you have the prs contribution our um insurances other district costs which are mainly um other things that are district-wide that part of that is is the sros it's one of the items in there then our curriculum technology and personnel budget and of course to the right of that is all the percentages of the budget that these items are special ed 4 million and change the elementary middle school budgets operation transportation four million seven hundred and seven thousand and there'll be another slide to break that out to give you more detailed information on that particular line item clubs and activities because we anticipate that come september we will be providing clubs and sports to students again so we have to budget for that then we have our interest on our capital reserve account and then the 215 500 that we're including into the budget to fund the fire alarm replacement at rice school okay so now this slide here is looking at our appropriations the the first column is the our current budget appropriations the 2021 budget numbers for each category the next column is the uh our tentative budget that we're proposing tonight the cost associated with each category the next column gives you the differentials whether it's up or down and then the last column is the percentage change so for staffing we're down 1.3 million which is a minus 2.8 uh next line is the the benefits line that's down 725 000 which represents a decrease of 3.82 the curriculum technology and personnel budget the third line down 72 985 which represents five percent special ed is up 580 000 which represents 15.54 percent uh the elementary middle school uh budgets um are down a hundred and eight thousand which represents a decrease of almost twenty percent in that budget area and the operation and transportation up 000 which is an 8.84 increase in that area clubs and activities are up 12 000 which represents a 2.8 increase then the last line which is the house skip over the interest line was that there's no change there the capital projects in the current budget we had used 671 500.
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um that helps the overall sort of uh expense line to be smaller which is what we needed what we have in in this lower section with with this uh reductions are actual that's the actual cuts that you think of as as far as um personnel changes that sort of thing um the the the uh the premium holiday is is a reduction in our cost uh but it's not a cut in the in the same way there's no loss of service or change in in in what's being uh made available to the students with that or it doesn't add to what the students get but it does reduce our our our cost um whereas the the lower you know the actual changes in staffing do change what what and how we interact with our students a little bit okay let me ask the question another way if for so i'm optimistic if for some reason a pot of money dropped from the sky over the next few months how much extra revenue would we have to be able to offer the same services next year as we did this year at the pelham school uh in that circumstance if you know some lottery winner wanted to give us some money uh the 21 the 21 000 would restore all of the staffing and service levels that we have currently that would be a truly level services from the standpoint of what's happening in the classroom and in in the building that was my question okay thank you yeah sarah best um just to follow up on that but that wouldn't do anything for next year next year we'll still be looking at that 25 000 reduction correct because that holiday is a one-time day for this year only so for next year we would need a magic pot of gold that had 46 thousand dollars in it that's right if if if we received 21 000 this year it would meaning fiscal 22 the coming school year um we'd beat level services and then uh for fiscal 23 so when we're a year from now and we're talking about the budget for fiscal 23 uh yeah that 25 000 is going to be a uh an issue for us uh you know next year for our future right future doug can work on that problem you know we have changes in our health insurance coverage that save us money there may be other things that happen in a similar way where we have a cost reduction but it may also require us to to make smart choices but if we get you know 18 school choice students to the group that we have now that school choice may fill that 25 000.
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this estimate was 1140 students so it's only about 32 students higher right now in what we're looking at um and the building size was 185 000 square feet right um so this one's about 15 000 square feet um bigger so i think it's it's in the ballpark and i'm not sure if the calculation um now has to do with the years in which that enrollment peaks but you know john and chuck would be able to speak to that better yeah yeah i mean i think part of it is enrollment and and the other part that we i don't know not having seen i know perkins i think perkinson put together some of those two is ensuring they they factored the building by the five percent for the exterior walls um we've seen where some teams have not done that and they just took the space stand and then what it does it shorts your budget down the road by um quite a bit in in your ended up with uh a shortage that you'd have to deal with so that could be part of it i'd have to look at the calculations and see what they come up with okay thanks adam thank you um so we've talked about 2a a lot and it's been talked about since you know like i said 2017 um so i guess i'll i'll ask my questions about this new scenario 6a um i think that uh our last planning meeting we had discussed something very similar to this uh just as a pie in the sky idea and so it's interesting to see it kind of come to some more reality i guess um so and i know it sounds like it's very preliminary but i guess the thought is to to have like new elementary schools north and north and south correct that would be a new chapman and essentially for lack of a better term new norton um where then if just by just doing a little napkin math that would allow us to i guess at some point shutter norton shutter chapman and shutter um uh darcy darcy i'm sorry yes darcy so there's at least three buildings there um that and then we would have two brand new buildings um and so i'm guessing that the the population would then be split between those two new schools because 660 is quite a bit larger than what norton is because i think it's functional capacity somewhere around 450 or something like that so i'm guessing that's sort of the idea yeah yes the the intent is that the new middle or assuming the new elementary schools would be uh positioned on the north and south end of pressure to try to um you know balance out the the enrollment numbers and then to minimize uh any potential redistricting that may occur um that's something that slr is going to be looking at in further detail and uh you know we'll be you know getting back to colliers with that information so then we can look at generating um another cost analysis for for that scenario if that answers your question uh yes and so so i guess so so with a larger norton i'm guessing that would also reduce the population stress on highland which would perhaps make it easier to incorporate the pre-k and the perhaps the other special education programs into wow so that could really be something bobby hall look forward to see what the results are on that yeah thank you you're welcome thanks thanks adam all right tim thanks thank you andrew um yeah uh so i the i know this is very preliminary but you you came out with a new norton rather than say something in the north end of town is there any reason for that and i'm not talking about chapman i'm just thinking another property where it's an entirely different school reserve is there um why did we go there instead of just like a whole new elementary school is there a reason for that or no what we're looking to do is two new elementary schools for scenario six so um as far as the site locations uh to be honest we we've just started looking into that um as far as what properties may or may not be available either town properties or potentially you know private properties that um you know would be positioned or situated in such a point uh to provide as minimal redistricting as possible for the town so um you know we are not specifically saying you know this school or that school will be impacted although you know the the consensus or feeling is that the cheshire um assuming the chapman uh school would be you know one of the two that would be impacted um you know by having a new school uh in the southern end of cheshire okay so so yeah you're right the question is about site location and there really hasn't been much of any discussion about that at this point oh no no not at all that's that's too premature first right and one of the and tim one of the resolutions that was uh voted in favor of at the smc meeting was to have coliers take a look at both public and private land in town as possible school locations so that's another task that's been added to their to their workload okay yeah and to be honest we actually just started working on that today so we're starting to look into parcels within the town that you know may be um you know sufficient or adequately sized to accommodate you your proposed new elementary school which is you know typically about 12 15 acres minimum yeah okay so i i appreciate that and i have two little ones so i could directly benefit we're in the norton district right now but i don't want to just go toward that because we have the property and we're using it i don't think that's a good reason to necessarily land there as the option that's that's my only point um excuse me tim yeah the the question of of why norton and admin i mean it is facility based but also making equally sized school districts across the uh across the board and getting them as close to the same as you can for the number of students that you have there so if we're talking like in that six to six fifty range for those two new schools and then if you look at scenario 1a i mean highland was like 777 and doolittle was 576.
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um after 301 so after that and those are the only changes we have any uh anyone opposed to the changes no okay um you do trust each other is there any way that i can move six so two before we vote on the one that uh trustee quinteto asked form we're just working on all the changes together so are you changing now your thought are you changing your no no i i actually should have said which i didn't was because it deals with fiscal responsibility that i thought that maybe we should do that before we vote anything in today um i'm not sure what you're recommending so i have your change at 602 601 are you changing that recommendation uh if that's okay with you guys uh we haven't built it on so just let me know are there any other changes that's it okay uh what changes what what change would you like right now the one that i heard was you want to change 602 before 601 uh i believe if the board allows uh 602 before 601 but also before so are you saying to hear 602 after our public after i'm sorry item 302 which would be correct okay did everybody get that i wanna i know uh mariewell you're getting notes is anybody in opposition of hearing item 602 before item or 504 after thank you yes i just want to make sure i have it hang on i i think i have my hand up there uh okay i'm sorry mr uh i you know i'm not so you know i think i i would be opposed to it only because uh i believe resolution 602 has to do with items you know item 6.01 so i think that you know they should be heard in in the same general vicinity here you know i mean personally i would think that you know it should be attached to you know the relevant financial information here so i you know i would i would oppose you know i would oppose placing item 6.02 you know even before 5.04 in this case i would not mind it i would not i mean i would be in favor of it before item 6.01 but you know i think it's uh you know it wouldn't it would disjoint the uh budgetary discussion if it were moved you know earlier then you know it's a lot of time on the board agenda thank you mr femme anybody else okay uh seeing none i guess we'll go ahead and um break it down to each uh recommendation i'm seeing that there is somebody in opposition so we'll do the first change um if you can vote if you're in agreement to move 504 after 301 if you can i'm going to go down the list chavez 504 after 301 but not before we're doing item before item by item so we're going to start with that one 504 before 301 okay i'm sorry and you say 504 after 301 okay so where does that mean so if you also mention uh a little bit further before 602 or after 602 it's birth clarification we're not looking at 602 yet we're only looking at 504 i'm going to take each one by one okay so we're just looking at bible okay so are you in agreement to that sure okay uh trustee vajrano that's fine with me uh trusty kingdom trusty king dead muted oh all right i'm having trouble with my new button yes okay uh trusty fam hi okay so we'll move 50431 now we'll move on to 602 um linda suggested to put it and make sure i get this right trust each other to put it before item 504 before item 601 and before item correct which would be okay so trustee chavez is recommending for item 602 to go before item uh so we'll go down the list trustee chavez yes and i by the way i i i wasn't i i yes for the first time i don't think i voted sorry about that so trustee chavez yes on that change trustee bajarano i mean i'm kind of indifferent but i'll just say um yes i guess trusty fam no board vice president quintero uh no and myself no so leave 602 um okay seeing no other changes we'll go ahead and move on to item three oh i'm sorry my computer here by the way i'm trying something different to save people we'll go ahead and we'll go ahead and go to item 201 uh the local control accountability accountability plan update information only dr bauer is there somebody to present on that yes i think sandra garcia is ready to do that okay welcome ms garcia you're gonna do her there welcome we can hear you now we speak hi um would you like me to share my documents i'm not sure how to do that on this new format um your presentation is there a way to share my screen i think sharing yeah now you can start sharing um do you see it not even um she is a penalist um yes i i don't see it i don't see it but i i i'll give you access so you can okay okay thank you you should be able to share your screen um yeah i don't i don't have a share screen option [Music] there we go thank you okay all right you see it now yes okay good okay good evening uh president lloyd herrera superintendent dr bauer board members and community um sandra garcia i'm the director of state federal programs and i just wanted to provide an update for you on where we are on the development of the local control accountability plan and i'm going to share some information on stakeholder input this evening so my objectives for this presentation are just to review some of the cd requirements for our lcap process this year share some of the progress with our lcap share the process that we are using to gather the stakeholder input and where we are so far some of the work that we are doing with the lcap advisory committee and then the next steps in the elk cap adoption process just as a reminder these are the eight priority areas that much must be touched on in the lcap um and two the two at the top nine and 10 are for county office of ed only and the rest are required in every lease lcap okay so for this year as you remember last year there was a pause on the development of the new three-year lcap due to the pandemic and we were asked to replace the three-year lcap with a one-year plan which was called the learning continuity plan and now we are back to back on schedule to develop the three-year lcap and that will go for years 2021-2024 and required in the lcap are the same requirements that have been in the lcap involved in the lcap process in the past which is the annual update the goals actions and services are required to be written into the lcap a plan summary uh a budget overview for parents which is i did share um i'm losing track of time and i think we shared that in december with the budget the with the final budget and um but we will be sharing it in june along with the three-year lcap and then it requires to have stakeholder engagement and um a presentation on the local indicators as part of this process this is our our timeline for this school year uh at this time we are in the middle of our input forums with our community with our staff and students we are also gathering input with our advisory groups our dac our dlac our we have one scheduled with our union groups as well as the survey that is in process at the moment with our parents staff and students in april i'll provide another board update and in anime i will bring a lcap draft to the board for review then i will take it to our advisory groups for their final input and then in june i will we will have a public hearing to gather more stakeholder feedback to the plan and we have a board meeting set on june 24th for approval of the lcap once the lcap is approved by the board we'll take it to the santa clara county office of ed for approval and that needs to be done by july 1st so this is uh the process very similar to what we've used in the past we the stakeholders that we gather input from our parents and community our staff members and our students this is the way that we gather input we have input sessions for our advisory groups including the groups listed here our dac or dlac our lcap advisory committee we have community forums which we just had the last one this week we have every site has their own input session for their community and for their staff and we have added lcap sessions for middle school students this is the second year that we will be doing that with our students we also have the surveys that i mentioned earlier for parents staff and students the content that we share during the forum the input forums are information on the lcap the purpose of the lcap uh and the purpose of the input sessions we review some priority areas um that are already written in the current um lcap the goals and the actions uh we share information on funding so that stakeholders understand how lcap funding is generated we share some data on student progress key initiatives that support our lcap goals and then we have an input session for those that are present to share their input into the process the surveys um these are the three surveys that we um give and this is the fourth year that we've been giving this survey to students staff and parents and the only part that i wanted to add on was that this year we've added a cultural awareness and action survey for students and for staff these um just want to share a little bit on the surveys that we've been able to do over the past year fall of 2019 [Music] we had 26 a little over 2 600 parents take part in the survey last spring which is not surprising you know there was a drop in participation and that was like right in the middle of a pandemic and we were having a lot of surveys going out as well um in terms of the pandemic itself and and then this fall we had about 2 000 parents take the survey we are now in the middle of our spring 2020 survey and we are pushing to have even more participation for the spring survey it's still a little challenging though due to the you know everyone being at home and students having to take the survey at home and as staff as well so we're pushing and we're trying to get more participation a little bit on the lcap advisory committee we meet three times this year we met in february discussed a little bit about the process and how to make some adjustments due to the fact that we will be having our um our input sessions um virtual work and um also to get some input from the group on um the survey and the the um outreach that we do to our stakeholders in april we will meet again so that i can review the new outcap template with the group and give them an update on the progress um on our lcap development and then again as i mentioned earlier in our timeline on may 27th we will meet for the last time so that i could share the copy of the lcap draft for their input so next steps in this process are um to provide opportunity for stakeholder feedback during our input sessions and survey um hopefully by the end of this month we'll be done gathering that input and then um i'll bring another update to you in april on the initial lcap findings thank you so much do we have any questions from the board for miss garcia and um please raise your hand because i cannot see you there are any use a raised hand function okay now i see most of you okay um uh trusty with an o yeah i just i wonder if um maybe we could take public comment and then maybe have another opportunity for uh board com questions or discussion i'd like to hear the public and and you know my comments or questions may be reflective of some of that comment so it's just a just sure sure i don't see anybody else's hand up so we'll go ahead and go from trustees uh i know we have god rules more than helping us today with the comments uh carlos thank you so much do we have anybody who's raised their hand from the public carlos uh yes board president we have anna robles if we can cue her in and unmute her mrs robles welcome and as soon as you begin speaking well the timer will begin buenos hey you can hear her okay okay i share the language now can you hear me i put in english is to add it sounds like she speaks pretty good english and i think to speed up time um why don't we try and hear this just not be okay pardon okay my question won't be too long okay my question won't be too long it could be please foreign okay a foreign ah is temple yes thank you it worked out so now we've got a system done for spanish speakers este uh regardless do we have anybody else yes we have two more the next person is julio calderon welcome before you begin speaking well you need translation by necessity hello i will not need translation now thank you can you hear me okay thank you yes welcome as soon as you begin speaking your minute your time will begin okay great well let's start now good evening superintendent bauer president herrera and board of trustees my name is julio calderon i'm a senior systems engineer at dell technologies i'm excited to share with you that dell technologies has partnered with alpha public schools to develop a mentoring program for students in east san jose why while latinos make up 26 of the population in silicon valley i'm also saddened by the fact that only four percent of the working latinos in the area work in high tech as a long-time member of this community i want to do more to ensure that students from east san jose are exposed to experiences and opportunities that will inspire them to attend college and seek careers in high tech in the coming months students from alpha will be assigned a mentor who will check in with them and their families on the regular basis and as soon as it is safe to do so students will be spending time at dell headquarters visiting with their mentors and engaging in stem experiences that will build their skills and hopefully inspire them to pursue a career in high tech finally we are also working on making sure that those relationships and skills lead to a paid internship to help these students pay for college and thank you so much for your attention appreciate that thank you mr moran do we have anybody else yes we do we have uh someone by the initial a carlos have you um i can hear you i'm wondering if you went back to spanish okay okay okay i'm sorry uh mr moran anybody else yes we have uh someone by initials a u um a u if you can please state your name in the beginning of your statement and as soon as you begin speaking your timer will begin welcome hi good afternoon my name is anna i'm a parent in the district and i would like to ask miss towers would you care to explain us to parents how it is that our district is in a deficit of 9 million dollars thank you for your attention thank you anna anybody else mr murdon yes we have one more uh janeth padilla okay welcome ms padilla as soon as you begin speaking your timer will begin see [Music] gracias okay yeah was that it we have one more that just popped up name is melissa okay thank you so much gracias mr moran do we have any others yes we have someone named melissa okay welcome melissa as soon as you begin speaking the timer will begin all right yeah i just want to go off of the last question um as well as where will the students go um there's also other things that come with that if you shut down those schools then kids would probably have to go to maybe a further school and how would you guys address that where is the transportation coming from how are the parents gonna be able you know that just puts a burden more on parents so i just want you guys to take a note on that as well thank you and i just want to remind the community that we're currently on the elta oh item um we're not in oakland comments so anything related to the l cup that miss uh garcia just presented um mr moran any other members of the public here to speak on the el cap or what yes i have i have two more uh currently uh brenda zendejas great welcome brenda as soon as you begin speaking the timer will begin i'm sorry i accidentally hit it i didn't mean to comment i apologize thank you mr moran any other members of the public um there was no they removed their hand okay thank you so much um with that we'll go ahead and move on to trustees any questions comments from ms garcia okay seeing none we'll go ahead and move on thank you ms garcia for uh presenting the information and then being here tonight um so we'll go ahead and move on to the next item on the agenda uh we'll go ahead and move on to uh 301 any requests to address the board any members of the public uh who have the opportunity to speak to the board about any matter under the jurisdiction of the board and not otherwise on the agenda those who wish to address specific agenda items will have the opportunity to do so when that agenda item is introduced and presented during this meeting individuals wishing to speak are requested to submit a comment and at this point um raise your hand use a raised hand function and we'll make sure that you all have the opportunity to speak mr moran do we have any members of the public who have raised their hand at this time at this time we have none okay i'm gonna go ahead and count to five because i know that you know sometimes it takes a little while um to raise their hand yes we do we have miss tanner okay welcome miss tanner as soon as you begin speaking the timer will begin miss tanner i'm gonna mute her i'm here can you hear me yes you can thank you i already said what i was going to say and you didn't hear me it's really quick oh no when you guys do the translation from spanish to english we cannot hear it and i wanted to let you know that the rest of us out here can't hear the translation comprende anything that's it that's all i wanted to say thank you miss tenner unfortunately we're not able to have a dialogue with the community but i i'm duly noting that and communicating with us maybe they maybe they can fix maybe they can fix it before the next translation is necessary thank you thank you thank you uh mr vajrano before we continue the comment do you have something to say uh yes again just a clarifying comment on the last comment um if you i'm not sure if that person had their thing translated or the button pushed on english but i have mine on english and i can hear it perfectly fine so don't know if that makes a difference i know it's you know people i forget sometimes too but that may make the difference so if you can't hear you may check your settings on the bottom of your screen and put it on english and it might help sorry thank you trustee gerano um i could also hear it so it's a good i think time and a reminder um for those who maybe entered the meeting late if you're here to speak or listen in english if you can click the world button there on the bottom right and click on english if you're here to listen to the meeting in english si habla espanol yes gracias okay yes please go ahead it's okay thank you mr bully okay we'll go ahead and thank you we'll go going to go back to a public comment mr moran is there anybody else here on public comment to speak yes board president we have four people the next person is yasmine guerrero espanol is yes thank you so much and uh mr moran anybody else yes next person is barrett fisher thank you uh barrett fischer welcome as we've been seeing the timer will begin uh hello uh good afternoon can you guys hear me yes welcome thank you um i just wanted to ask someone to the last person who asked um if the uh the plan in uh to to repurpose up to from we've heard ten schools and to try to rush it in a week in order to make savings of seven million dollars based on the last repurposing facilities meeting you guys that you would save 10 to 12 000 per children by moving them and merging them into already small schools during corona where we're planning on overpopulating these schools that already can't handle the capacity it's currently at so i'm just asking if this is kind of a rushed plan to erase the deficit of nine million dollars and in doing so are you not harming the future of this community thank you mr moroni yes we have a you welcome i believe anna as soon as you begin the timer will begin um again i wanted to know um good afternoon um i wanted to know if they can explain you how our district get a deficit of nine million dollars um i think that's the parents um we deserve an explanation and while we're we're spending this this kind of money thank you yeah any others mr moran yes we have uh three more we have anna robles welcome as soon as you begin speaking a timer will be begin i can hear you i can't hear miss robles uh foreign okay yes um is she done will she please see okay see again any others mr moran yes we have two more uh next speaker is brenda sindejas welcome mrs as soon as you begin speaking the timer will begin we can mute her is she here otherwise we can move on to the next speaker and come back to her when she's ready yes okay we can go on to the uh are you here miss antegas well uh i suggest we go back to her the next person is emma dekbah okay welcome as soon as you begin speaking yes is uh one second carmelina carlos okay thank you melina i think he said to go ahead and translate thank you okay foreign [Music] thank you mr moran any others i know we were trying to get miss and dickhouse to connect was she able to connect uh we had uh brenda cinderella's next uh okay let's try it again as soon as you begin speaking the timer will begin is i'm not sure if it's her can you hear me hello yes we can hear you now welcome hi board members uh trustee president uh today i just want to remind the board and superintendent that we continue to keep our students safe in schools in the pods and that we ensure that they have sanitizer mask and water bottles at all times because i am hearing from parents that this isn't happening and this is a concern of mine that we ensure that this is always accessible every single day when they come into these pods and that we are providing them even for the programs that are coming in and hosting these pods for our students that are doing this for free so i just want to remind you guys to please ensure that these pods have sanitizing gloves water and wipes or spray to clean after each pod um that is all for today thank you thank you mr anybody else the public wanting to speak board president that's everybody great thank you so much we'll go ahead and move on to item 504.
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towards our out of our capital reserve towards capital projects in this budget we're proposing to use 215 500 which is a decrease of 456 000 representing a 67.91 percent decrease okay so this slide here is what i was talking about a little bit earlier where i wanted to show some more numbers on specific lines in the budget the special ed line is the first one going across then we have the current budget that we started with in the first column the second column is the adjusted budget so we make adjustments to our budget throughout the year and that through through transfers between line items and that gives you where the actual budget is currently now and then the last column is showing the tentative budget that we're proposing for next year in that line and then the increased decrease in the percentage so as far as special ed um there hasn't been much change in our current budget the the the um the increase is really due to additional students that we're going to have next year um so right that's what's going on in that line now then the the next line where it was grouped together the operations the technology operations i'm sorry in transportation i split those two apart the uh the first one you see the operations budget at 2.338 million in the uh 2021 budget where the adjusted budget is up a little bit at 2.393 million and the tentative budget originally was 2.6 once we removed the fire alarm project from the operations budget and move it to the capital reserve that budget is actually 2.4 million which represents a 56 558 increase over the uh adjusted budget that we're at right now uh which equates to a 2.36 actual increase in that budget line the the bigger one that that gives you more information about you know why the big increase when the the numbers were lumped together is the transportation uh line and the original budget and transportation for the 2021 budget was 1.986 million however when we had put our contract out to bid for our um contracted bus routes the bid came in quite a bit higher and we had to adjust that budget uh to 2.290 million and then you compare that number our adjusted budget after we adjusted for the increase in costs that occurred during this budget cycle to what we're proposing in the tentative budget of 2.257 it's actually a decrease of 32 874 which is a 1.44 decrease in that budget line i'll turn it back over to dr smith thank you mr shinty this slide um so we're going to go through some of the projected reductions these slides are similar to last time first one this one was developed through reductions in departments department funds um significant reductions that took a lot a lot of work to get to a relatively small number but at the same time every every number and that is an enduring understanding of this evening every number is big as we try to get to the reductions we need to make this also included elimination of outside media services and so any media service needs we have our inside media services we provide them for ourselves this relates back to my update from today so and it's it's such a nice thing to be able to share something so positive the township is going to provide our district with 250 000 to fund the seven sros our school resource officers for the portion of the year that we were going to have to go out through a separate ballot question to ask the public for so this is wonderful on many levels for one thing it guarantees we'll have the school resource officers for the full year and it's seven so we currently have eight our ballot question was for seven so that means that um dimacey was one a shift from one per school to one per school building considering demacia as a duplex one building middle and elementary together so we are grateful to mayor vesey deputy mayor cooper our whole town council town manager corrales and others for that news provided to us and again it is greatly appreciated another wonderful update the township is going to purchase two of our properties um there's one in cambridge park and another in country farms for park space and this is a win on so many levels i don't even know how to count them all but we've been trying to sell these properties for years and so this help is resolves that part provides open space gives us a tremendous financial assistance that exceeds the transportation changes that we had in the preliminary budget presentation which would themselves have represented some cost to the township in terms of safety measures so that's another win and it means that we can remove those transportation changes from about from our budget for this year the details are still being worked out through discussion with the township and i'm sure we'll have more information to share in the time ahead but um you know one of the kind of phrases that um has come up in my uh newsletters is points of light you know because we it's been a rather dark year in a lot of ways i mean we're approaching the one year anniversary from when um a national emergency was declared march 13th last year due to the pandemic and um so to get so much wattage of points of light in the same week um is is you know wonderful and again we're grateful to the our town leadership for this amazing support salaries and benefits so as when mr ishinti was showing the slide that showed the apportionments of the budget you could see that over 82 percent of our budget goes to salaries and benefits so that is um with that amount you know over four fifths of the budget in that area it is an area we must look at and we have looked at for savings the um the positions here 45 positions total each one of them through long discussion over weeks and months at all levels of administration to do it going back to that driving question from an earlier slide trying to maintain the quality and excellence of our educational program while costing less money so each one of those numbers represents answering that question and as a i know uh you know we talk about this a lot but it bears saying as our north star that our district exists to serve kids first last and foremost professional staff so this is a slide that was not in the presentation two weeks ago eight elementary teaching positions due to class size increases and you know this brings our class sizes just on par with other districts we have benefited for years from having a lower class size you saw that enrollment drop right 1100 students we've lost so now through some staffing reductions to save money our class sizes will will be what they all have been um in our surrounding districts the um that you know and again i'm very deliberately saying the word positions here because there have been so far 11 retirements and vacancies that each one of those represents one less person who is currently in a position that could lose their position and we still have some year left and every district has seen an above average number of retirements and vacancies this year so we anticipate that number 11 in the far right column will change will increase it's not possible to say you know which which schools which grades um that is always an evolving factor due to enrollment by grade and by school and enrollments always changing six positions within related arts again due to class size increases and scheduling efficiencies six positions within special education mostly due to merging programs housed in multiple schools into single schools and this is one of the ones that i think you know as we go through this entire process trying to do it in a way where we're not in some cases can we do something potentially even better for less money you know because that word maintain i mean that's that's the ballpark we want to be in but every once in a while you can actually improve right and that's that's the the goal above the goal and um among other improvements embedded in that bullet item of merging programs is it it allows for example more consistency within a single school and more communication among staff who are involved and among other things more single grade classes where if it's distributed in multiple schools programs in multiple schools you might have more multi-grade classes so and there are other benefits too but um the and then uh one elementary instrumental music position due to retirement two math positions due to middle school detracting this slide was also not in the presentation last time it talks about our reductions within the realm of uh our support staff which includes paraprofessionals who are our largest support staff group 22 fewer positions 21 retirements and vacancies so better than the professional slide in terms of those two numbers being almost the same this includes two custodial positions three secretarial bookkeeping positions five lunch aid positions 12 paraprofessional positions and the biggest part of it is the paraprofessional health benefits which are projected to save three-quarters of a million dollars this coming year and then each year they're after a million and a half and the reason that those benefits end on january 1st of 2022 is because eligibility is based on the six months prior so the hours worked from january 1st 2021 through june 30th 2021 determine eligibility for july 1st 2021 through december 31st 2021.
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great we'll have to see how that plays out okay thank you brenda go ahead um could school choice dollars fill the 21 000 for the library para educator and the music staff for next year uh technically yes although i don't think we would want to suggest that as a as an appropriate action um the balance we have actually with 225 given the estimates we were making at the time um would be uh utilizing money that we would be receiving during next fiscal year so the the state of our balance is for school choice or such that uh 225 is just a little more than than uh essentially what we have in the bank uh and so we're we we tend to try to um you know sort of use fully savings to fund the budget and then we have new revenue during the year that we use for the following year um next year there's a very small amount of the the money that will come in during the year for school choice that will will support next year's budget um and so you know technically we have the 21 000 i think that puts us in a very very precarious spot relative to uh you know future years and and future circumstances that we might need that money to help support so if we had an extreme emergency of some sort um you know we wouldn't have school choices as a resource for us to help mitigate something like that okay thank you other questions before doug goes on um can i just ask one i guess this probably is for you mike has the staff person has that person been notified that their job is available yep and we've actually presented this slide uh or a version of this having an oral rendition of this slide i don't know if we actually showed it or not i can't remember doug um but last week uh at uh pelham this has already been shared with the staff okay it was sent to you i think a week ago and part of the reason to send it out is we wanted to give the staff a heads up that there was a change and there was lots of um warm feelings about uh that position remaining in the budget because they know how important it is um and a lot of kids to have that um extra support for students particularly as we look to next year so they're aware of that yep okay great thank you um okay doug do you want to keep going so i you know as far as um other things to share with you i mean that's the primary thing i'm gonna actually pardon the scrolling here i'm gonna go back to a a previous slide in the deck i believe um i'm going to zoom out a little bit so it'll be a little hard to read this is a little busy uh but this is is kind of a snapshot of of both the expenses here at the top that we're we're expecting to have and then some of the funding sources at the bottom and i'm sorry that it's it's a you know it's it's difficult to show the whole thing let's see if i can get a [Music] a view that's a little bit more visible to you um but the the reason i show this is that it it does show on this upper portion sort of what our expenses are there's a number of things if you look at this difference column or this change column there's a lot of these expenses that aren't changing at all uh or very very modestly um this 6900 we've spoken about before is is a shift of cap what was things we're purchasing through capital we're moving them into the operating budget that's a that's an additional amount of of tax support that the finance committee is going to support they know that they're not going to spend capital in order to to fund these uh this equipment uh in inside the regular operating budget um uh you see the you know the sort of dis distribution of schools uh amongst different accounts uh you know some of it's for classroom teachers some for some of the special education sports some of its uh health insurance because that helps uh defray the cost there 25 000 is the um [Music] the uh the rural reef grant that we that is returning to help support uh some of our counseling services in the building um and then um there's the what i'll also point out is this 12 000 right here that's the uh that's the rental um you know that's in the bottom section there i keep thinking that when i move my mouse on my screen you'll see that but you won't um sorry we the rental fees are are about five from the bottom there and so there's a 12 000 number and maybe i'll zoom in a bit more so we can show that a little bit better under the sources of revenue here that one more zoom so now i think you can kind of see that 12 000 showing right uh in that in that second column um and that's that's a new source of revenue for us and hopefully that'll be something that we can uh we can potentially have you know year to year to help support our budget in in the way it's going to be necessary for this coming year to help help support our budget um so i think at that point you know the overall budget is going to go up about 1.3 percent in the whole um you know we have uh you know strong tax support here from from the community this 46 thousand dollars of increase includes the 6900 uh if you take that 6900 out the amount that is increasing is about 2.5 which is typically what uh pelham can uh gives us guidance for for an increase in the tax support from from the community uh but there's a little bit higher than that this year because of the of the switch from uh capital operate capital budgets operating budget for some some chromebook purchases so that's a little bit of a difference there um so i think at this point i'll stop i think i pointed out the things that are most uh interesting perhaps or or different a little bit this year as far as sources of revenue um and and see if there are any other questions that you might have uh relative to the budget any questions for doug no i don't see any hands okay um all right and so mike you wanted to yeah so so maybe not wonderful uh news at the end of this is that um our standing from odessa conference call the other day that about the federal stimulus package that passed the house and the senate in washington dc um the concern i heard from desi is that the distribution will be based uh and it's a lot of money uh the distribution will be based on title one funding uh pelham is not a title one school so um does he express some concern that some districts will get an awful lot of money and then title one school non-title one schools under the federal formula will get absolutely nothing um so they said they're trying to work on some fix on that so i will update you when i receive it but um you know for folks who are seeing that saying oh great the schools will get a lot more funding right now uh non-title one schools technically uh would not get anything hopefully there's some shifting in that uh but i did want to communicate that because i'm getting a lot of questions about that federal stimulus package i will try to answer those questions on that i am not an expert yet it's you know i don't read the legislation i just have other people describe what's in it to me okay well we have some who are going to try to stump you let's go ron and then it's their best what is the title one school title one school is a school that has a certain percentage of low-income students in it there was a year or two that pelham did qualify um you know in a small school like pelham a couple students can swing that number uh considerably but last couple years pelham has not been a title one school the student population has not uh met the qualification criteria thank you sorry about that service same super easy questions margaret did i see your hand up or was that i had the same question thank you okay all right um oh okay well good news bad news situation then any any other questions on the fy 22 budget okay well it being a budget vote i will entertain a motion i think if someone wants to make a motion it could be to vote on the pelham fy 22 budget as presented um the region has very specific language about the motion one has to get so if you've been on a region you know that's like you know dr slaughter writes a very paragraph on it the municipal budget's a little bit easier i move that we accept the budget as presented second all right any further discussion all right uh brenda brenda i sarah bess kenny aye margaret margaret i ron ron all right thanks doug for all your work on this i know that was not the only thing in your professional life so appreciate the attention you paid to that thank you okay thanks doug have a good night all right good night okay next up in person return update sure so i have some some information i like to share some from uh uh lee um just that um the lee and jastha council will be giving optional small group tours to students to preview the building during the last few weeks of march uh and over the next several weeks all classrooms are planning to lead reflective dialogue help students generate questions or areas of concern and engage students in the planning process you know kind of like the hopes and dreams work for in-person learning uh to make sure students there are ready and acculturated who are who are returning so speaking of that um pelham there's one or two students that we're looking for a little more clarity uh in their responses but as it stands right now 88 of pelham students are returning to in-person learning uh on april 5th as such i know there was some conversation in the joint meeting about could pelham upper grade students start at the same time and some staff have asked that i don't think that's going to be possible because some of the remote students would need to be transitioning at the same time as their amherst counterparts because there's you know there's some reshuffling that's going to happen and you know could we literally have students come in on april 5th all fifth i think we could but and i know some families would be really disappointed to hear this but i do think it would be really disorienting for students in the who are choosing remote and many of them choosing it for really good reasons you know that's the family choice they made they may have health conditions themselves or in their families to have basically a week in limbo where there wouldn't really be a remote assignment for them yet because the amherst upper grades wouldn't have reorganized so they sort of wouldn't have school for a week and we can't do that you know or you know to put them in a remote classroom five days before the remote classroom ends because the teacher in amherst is going into person right and the classroom community is shifting it just doesn't feel right so i know that there's a strong interest and i've heard that from fellow families of everyone starting at once but i do think well it's a small number of remote families it would really be um they're already you know i'm already hearing concerns about you know cause anecdotally right tell them a small people chat right and people know that a lot of their friends uh kids friends are going in person so one more disorienting experience is just one more than we should we should do uh in my opinion for families who are have chosen the remote options so you know my recommendation is just stay with what we planned it will involve a waiver from desi uh which i plan to fill out with the permission of this group i technically don't need a school committee vote which is why it's not on the agenda of course i wouldn't have known that until they told us that a couple days ago so it would have been under 48 hours but but i don't you know it doesn't it seems like it needs to you know be discussed but not a vote of the school committee um i do i did have a conversation with someone at desi and they felt like this is when you're going from full remote to full in person with no hybrid you know some acknowledgement that we would want to do it with a weak gap of the younger kids coming in first seemed very reasonable to them they didn't commit to approving a waiver they hadn't been hadn't received but this is the type of waiver that desi seems to be immediately um towards um but i just for the remote kids it would be a really hard experience for five days and you know it doesn't feel right to me um you know because it would actually be a really awkward experience for that week plus the break week and then they sort of you know it would be a real jumble for them so i'd like to go forward with the plan as voted by the school committee of um the younger grades on the fifth and the intermediate grades um on you know grades uh three to six uh on april 12th you know our building's ready to go um you know one of the things we were trying out i think i mentioned um some streaming capabilities it wasn't great it wasn't great in some ways because it really pushed in the bandwidth at pelham school as you may know it's not the internet pelham is not high speed in the way that you'd like it to be but it also felt very awkward you know um you know talking to the is director worked for a teacher and i want to thank ms quinlan for being willing to come in and try it out you know it the technology is not great right and and it would force some a teacher to really stand in front of the room and do a lot of lecture and that's not the way we teach elementary school students and i don't think that's the way you all want certainly not the way i want our elementary school students learning so we did have a lot of concerns about it we tried it out it wasn't it wasn't a hit so to speak for us and so you know i think that's sort of our update um in terms of bus we will run two buses um they will both be far from full um but we will run two buses uh and we're working now with this number on a transportation plan of drivers and how to orient uh that so that'll come out over the next couple weeks about how to um how to do that so that's you know sorry it's a little scattered but that's sort of our update on in person i will say that 80 is higher than any of my other schools so uh whether you think that's good or bad is up to you but you know it is a notable thing that it's the vast majority of students in pelham chosen person and are excited to come back in so that's i think my update on in person but i'm sure there's probably questions because this is no small deal okay margaret go ahead um so it can you reiterate what's happening to the other 12 percent how are they going to go yep so uh districts wide so plural apostrophe at the end of the s between the amherst and pelham districts we will be working we spend a lot of time today to it looks like we'll have two classes at every grade level um between the emerson pelham schools who are going to form new remote classrooms for students who chose remote everything else will stay the same in terms of the structure of the day how much like they're still using google classroom or seesaw all those features will remain the same but with the majority of students in both districts returning to in person it it looks like we're going to have almost a remote remote academy as a way to think about it with two classes per grade level k to six okay okay thank you yeah and trying to keep the column kids together which is another thing i should mention that you know if there were two or four pelham kids at a grade level um unless there was a reason that they didn't want to be together which is possible but our intention is to keep the pelham students uh in one of the class one of those two classes at every grade level so that they always have pelham kids with them if there was one student who chose remote then that's obviously not possible when possible to do that other questions for mike brenda yes so when we started to go into in-person education in october there was an issue with the grades that second grade was gonna be with the kindergarten first grade and then they weren't because of a special ed teacher assignment and i wonder if that's going to take place um you know this this this spring in april yeah it's a little easier this time because that one the the problem was that kn1 right were uh there was idea to bring in two because our special education programming covers all three of those primary grades and it wasn't perfect doing just k one but it just it just didn't work out well um but now that we're doing k2 all together this is actually what we sort of wanted to do originally and we just there were reasons why we weren't able to pull it off that weren't about the special ed but we're much happier to have that kind of early childhood team come in as a unit for the first week and then bring everybody back then the following week it's gonna be a lot easier because what was happening when kids were in was uh some special education staff were seeing kids in person and then getting on their computer and seeing second grade students and then going back in person and uh you know i think during covert times focusing on the thing that's in front of you whether it's a screen or whether it's kids uh one thing is it's going to be much better for our staff thank you any other questions okay all right um next up is future agenda planning um my gosh i have not thought about the next meeting i think we should probably do an update on how it's going being in person well assuming we're not meeting the first week in april um that would be something that we'd want to do i think we'd want to do some work probably to prepare for town meeting i guess the question is does anyone know the date of town meeting oh i do um it's the typical date right like yeah early may probably the first weekend or maybe they've changed it since the first week the second week in may something like that right it's like it's not pride parade day but that's what was in my head yeah here i i have it right here it is um annual town meeting saturday may 8th okay um right so we probably have one meeting before then so maybe some preparation for town meeting um might be on the agenda um and you know i think probably getting a sense of school choice um like a more formal item since it's so critical for the operations those are the things that three things on my head in terms of um putting on there i don't know if there's other things that people want to share just related to school choice i think because it's such a focus especially these days it also seems like having a little better sense of like timeline so just school choice for next year but also school choice generally like when do we do these things i do sometimes get questions on like where can i find a school choice application you know that procedural stuff would be helpful ron i saw your hand sometime before the end of the year i'd like us to discuss the uh the sixth grade school choice students being automatically be able to go with their peers to the middle school again i know that an old topic and there are more pressing issues but maybe we should revisit that before the end of the year the statutory interpretation okay yeah um maybe mr mcgregor miss hall and i can have an offline conversation on that because i think i'd prefer to maybe start that way if we could i'll make sure we'll try to set that up before we have a public conversation um on the topic um it we might i might be able to resolve some of your concerns mr me know if we were able to talk offline [Music] okay um yeah brenda i guess i'll just bring this up because um i've been getting a few questions for families about the potential of aftercare programming happening in the fall and i thought i brought it up it's also also you know small potatoes comparatively to what we're dealing with but for next fall some of the prospective school choice families that's important to them and with uh talking about the budget and about continually considering to continue renting out the gym how might that impact that i don't know if it's a school board issue but i thought i'd just raise it since since it's in some parents minds yeah yeah i mean maybe we can have a topic just starting to have even if the topic is itemizing fall discussions that we should be having before fall you know because i think that's one i bet this group could come up with other things um so it might be i don't know how the group feels but just having sort of an open-ended conversation about fall and what that might look like and um i think that's a really good point brenda and i imagine there's there's other topics that people are on people's minds about what fall might look like great yeah sarah best and along those same lines since uh we're switching the times uh if there will be before school or what that will look like um and then i don't know it was it was brought up you know in the public comment talking about preschool for next year if there's going to be you know i wouldn't be surprised if jesse says that everything has to be in person in the fall if have it right like given how the last what three days have been with jessie um that uh if they're already going to be you know all the kids in in the building do we want to talk about the preschool again especially given the public comment we received today i don't know if it's too late or like we it already happened and we're all done but you know anything else okay well you know where to find me if you think of another agenda idea um all right next up warrant report i have two tonight i authorized by my signature to payables and the amount of forty thousand seven hundred seventy five thousand dollars and sixty seven cents for the warrant dated uh march third twenty twenty one this was general all general fund expenses and i signed that on march ninth and i authorized by my signature uh to payroll in the amount of 57 638.98 that was for a warrant dated march 10th 2021 and i signed it also on march 10th those are all my warts tonight no gifts to accept so i will take a motion to adjourn or i'll just move to adjourn i move that school community meeting is there a second second oh no everybody wants in friend just seconded okay um all right there's no discussion so we'll do a roll call vote brenda brenda sarah best kitty i margaret margaret i ron ron i and hawley we are adjourned all right thank you you
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all the schools would be similarly sized what and what's the benefit to that i don't know if that's for chuck or for jeff of going with two schools versus a larger school no not the not the one large not a thousand kids in one school i don't like that idea but um if you did another school say chapman redo chapman and call it 600 and then you do another school not norton different site north end of town north west corner of town 400 students what's the what's the relevance of a 600 chapman in a 400 new school you i thought chuck i thought you were saying a second ago it's beneficial to have the schools like the same size yeah i'm just saying in terms of the numbers that are at the school so which what you would be saying is to have another let's say it wasn't norton and it was a school in the northwest of town the numbers wouldn't work out like those students would have to end up going to doolittle which already has the students i mean if you're just playing a numbers game you wouldn't move around more students than you would need to so right now yeah i guess norton's this the second smallest school so that would be the candidate to to make larger first highland is already 777.
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and i i believe uh dr brower you mentioned we may have a speaker on this item we do have a translator on the resolution as the author of the resolution i would like to speak to this and then afterwards it can be translated perfect welcome aboard vice president quintero so uh uh colleagues uh and members of the public thank you for the opportunity to bring forward this item on the unfortunate reality that we've been observing is that there's been an increase in hate crimes against the api community as uh has been observed throughout social media um this is in particular something that's very uh painful to observe i've seen many times when a rash of of of crimes against certain groups for example we have a lot of of members of our latino community that happen to sell products on the street to make a living and time and time again we see a rash of attacks against them uh their their products are being thrown over and they're being told to go back to their country while they're being robbed and so it becomes very personal when you see it happening that way to your community and if and now we see it you know taking place again and again against the api community and so it is for that reason that i've um uh found it important that because if one of one group in our community is unsafe then we're all unsafe and it's not it's not um right to simply stand by and and see it happen and so um i do i appreciate my colleague uh board member min pham for agreeing to co-sponsor this item i do want to go ahead and give credit where credit is due and that is to the uh asian pacific islander legislative caucus in the california state assembly that provided the template for the uh the document that we have before us today i also want to thank uh someone remember los aleko who actually sent it over to me and provided the template to myself directly so i appreciate those individuals who have been involved in the process at this point i think it merits the item is significant enough that it merits a reading of the whereas is as well as the result of the resolved language and so if you'll indulge me and allow me to read it um i'll go ahead and do that at this point uh whereas the asian pacific policy and planning uh council in the chinese uh for affirmative action launched a hate incident reporting entering a website stop api hate at the beginning of covet 19 outbreak in march of 2020 whereas the stop aapi hate reporting center reported over 2800 hate incidents against asian pacific islanders americans in 2020 whereas discrimination and racism towards apis has always existed such as 19th century skateboard scapegoating of apis also known as yellow peril whereas racism hate hate crimes and negative rhetoric towards apis has been exacerbated by kobit 19 pandemic and whereas politically charged and culturally insensitive language referring to covet 19 as the chinese virus or the kung flu further encourage racism prejudice and hate crimes towards apis whereas a promotion of such language by former president donald trump during his term further propagated anti-api sentiment in light of kobit 19 and whereas on january 31st 2021 three elderly asian americans were assaulted in the city of oakland's chinatown district including 91 year old asian man who sustained serious injuries such as lacerations abrasions and contusions to the left thumb in what is deemed a hate crime whereas on january 30th 2021 84 year old visha a nearly blind and gentle elderly thai man died from injuries resulting from an attack while he was walking in the city of san francisco in what is deemed a hate crime whereas 31 percent of asian americans reported having been subject to discrimination since the beginning of covet 19 pandemic according to a pew research center report whereas asian americans in the city of california are increasingly concerned about their safety and well-being given the rise of hate crimes and other racially motivated attacks whereas asian americans in the state of california are more concerned about the safety of themselves and their family that are current that are currently a high risk of being targeted and whereas in 2020 the california state legislature's api legislative caucus spoke out against anti-api hate crimes in an effort to stand up for immigrant and refugee individuals and now therefore being resolved that the alum rock union school district on behalf of the district all residents thereof denounce anti-denials hate crimes hateful rhetoric and hateful acts against asian american and pacific islanders and reaffirm our commitment to ensure that api americans feel safe and welcome both during this covid19 pandemic and beyond further be resolved that the clerk of the board of elon rock school district transmit copy this resolution to governor gavin newsom u.s senators palia and dianne feinstein congress member zoe lofgren state senator dave cortezzi and state assembly member ashkara thank you for indulging me in that and i would ask for my colleague's support in this item when the vote comes wrong thank you board vice president before we go to trustee's comments um or questions miss uh dr bauer did you say you had somebody that was gonna present it in vietnamese yes he's here mr tien pham our wonderful community liaison at shepherd always ready to support the district and our families good evening welcome to my screens know how i look like sorry go ahead and uh begin thank you uh we didn't research foreign um thank you mr fan linda i uh move to approved uh anti-api hate crime 504 okay trustee chavez mr pham second okay um before we um go to the vote um i'd like to open it up for public comment and then um trustee's comments or questions uh i'll go ahead and open up for public comment at this time mr moran do we have anybody from the public would like to speak on this item this time there are no hands raised okay i'll count to five okay anybody raise our hat yes we have uh two now uh first speaker is ana robles robles welcome back to history hey espanol foreign wow foreign i need your answers for all of you you are in charge or you are not anymore in the meeting okay gracias senora robles [Music] and uh dr bauer do we have rogelio on the line today yes he is okay um rogelio would you like to just to remind everybody here today about um public comment or this time if you can uh just explain how we're not um allowed to answer questions at this time yes i'm happy to do that and i apologize i'm also having problems with my camera um it's not letting me show my face but um if the the agenda always is required to have a section for public comment so that members of the public can comment on anything within the districts or the board's jurisdiction however if if an issue is raised during public comment that is not already on the agenda then the board cannot respond because the only the board can only discuss those matters that have been properly agendized if a person is making a comment during the public comment portion even though something is on the agenda later on in the evening then the board can wait until that agenda item is called to address those questions that might arise in that way it's properly discussed at the time it's noted in the agenda thank you mr rogelio if we can go back to public comment uh carlos i think you mentioned there was other people in the public to speak yes we have uh someone by uh two names now we have carrie welcome carrie as soon as you begin speaking the timer will begin dna us that okay thank you and i just want to remind the public that we are on item 504 and we are talking about the anti-api hate crime resolution presented by board vice president quintero um and co-sponsored by mr pham um so uh carlos do we have any other uh public members wanting to speak to us in regards to this item yes we have emma welcome uh okay one second i sit down with his hand up i don't know if it's yes just very quickly and i know you mentioned that we're on this particular item but i do just want to remind people maybe they don't know and so when we're on the item that's the item that the public comment is for um for this item or any other item i just wanted to make sure because thank you for mentioning that we're on this item i just wasn't sure that it was clear to the public that any item that we're on that's what the public comment for that item should be on thank you yeah thank you for reiterating that yes just want to repeat that we are on item 504 approve anti api hate crime resolution that was just read uh so just reminding the community that this is the uh item that we are giving public comment on okay welcome mr siga and if she is if she come back please let her know uh mr muran do we have any other members okay is okay so okay thank you so much mr carlos do we have um dr bauer do you have your hand up i did okay in case um i i am i'm gonna invite all of those parents to reach out to me directly and i'll be happy to have a socially distance or a virtual meeting with them i just need to know a little bit more about who they are so that i can answer all of their questions um obviously we cannot have a big group and we can host this also virtually i just need their names and so i have a couple of them i will see i don't know their schools so i will follow up with um some stuff to find out thank you thank you dr bauer and maybe if you want to say your email out loud that might help them also connect with you i just want to make sure we provide all areas in order to connect with our district i'm going to say my extension so that everybody can take uh it's 408 and my email is my name as you see it on the screen all lowercases ilaria.bower at arusd.org thank you dr bauer okay mr moran do we have any other members of the public wishing to speak on this item no board president that's all okay thank you so much with that trustees um i see mr fam you have your hand up would you like to speak at this time yes yes thank you board president uh and first of all i want to thank my my colleague board vice president quintero for you know this you know discussing this with me and you know uh helping to to you know get this item on the agenda here you know it you know it's a sad you know it is a sad state of affair you know a couple days ago i just heard about a you know a vietnamese man walking in the park being assaulted uh with serious injuries on the vietnamese radio also so you know i i think that this is a you know a timely teachable moment you know given that you know one out of five of alum rock students are of the asian american and pacific descent you know you know we are a diverse community and you know it you know for for us to succeed you know we we all have to learn to work together play together and grow together and i you know and you know in in that spirit you know it is important as a board of education to you know let our children know and families know that you know acts of racial violence is not acceptable in any form and towards any group so you know with that i i uh again uh thank mr kin fan for pro you know in vietnamese we say come on thank you for translating that into vietnamese and i urge a uh yes belt from my colleagues thank you very much thank you mr from uh trustee yes thank you um i was gonna say more things but in the interest of time i'll just point out this part that i think first of all i want to thank trustee quintero mr pham who is a good friend of mine from for many years with my daughters in school and i i want to thank mr quintero for bringing this to us because it's important um that we point this out not only i mean primarily because of what's going on but to think back about what we worked on several months ago in terms of our vision and mission it's right there our vision is all alum rock students will be ready for the future in a diverse and competitive world and the mission part of the mission says that we're preparing students for 21st century learning that builds upon our culturally diverse community to prepare our students to be lifelong learner learners and other things so i think this is important number one because it's important to talk about what's happening now and to do our best to protect those members of our community number two because we need to be models as best as we can for for you know our students and and our school community and number three um i think it's important because if we create a vision and a mission and we just had our strategy our retreat um recently to kind of continue this work it's important that we actually are utilizing vision and mission as part of how we do things and and not just have them as pieces of paper filed off somewhere so so again thank you um everyone for your work on this and i will be supporting this tonight thank you any other members of the board um i sing none i'll go ahead and say my piece and we'll go to a vote um just want to echo what mr vegeta just mentioned it's important to stand with our community especially when uh there's violence happening and so thank you so much board vice president quintero and uh trustee phem for bringing this item to the board and bringing it to light um we uh as uh as at the ellen rock school district do not condone any type of violence um towards anybody and so um at this time i will also be supporting this um and with that we'll call the vote i'll go ahead and start with uh trustee chavez yes hi trustee thank you trustee pham aye trustee veterano aye board vice president quintero hi and myself i passes unanimously thank you so much now moving back to item uh six no hold on one second that didn't pass so we're gonna go back to item five actually i believe it's 4.01 common yes okay yes thank you 401 so we'll go ahead and start with uh the teamsters um comments anybody here in the audience from the teamster uh please raise your hand and we will on you you at that time welcome mr do we have anybody in the audience from teamsters i have uh [Music] someone under the name teamsters great welcome teamsters uh this is your time uh good evening board members and uh superintendent this is uh tom foo from the teamster just want to chime in tonight just to you know say say some uh some comments on uh you know we're we're uh i know we're going through some rough water at the moment uh but you know what we're on board with with supporting the district as far as you know reopening as soon as possible and we're we're here to support the district in in any way possible to uh to get our student back uh to our schools and even with the uh the you know hybrid model if if that's going to happen i know that will be uh because of this uh pandemic situation we're in but i just want to let you know that the teamsters are on board and will support the district in any way possible going you know forward and hopefully we'll we'll get there to the end of the tunnel with the with the brighter light thank you very much thank you uh do we have um anybody here from california school employees association csea um looking i don't see um cca please raise your hand over here on behalf of csea and if there isn't any we'll go ahead and move on to alum alumrock administrators association uh yes we have maria martinez welcome ms martinez as soon as you begin speaking oh you don't get a timer sorry uh that's what happens when you repeat things over and over welcome uh director martinez hi good evening alan rock school board and superintendent bower believe it or not our schools are busier than ever the vapa section on the alum rock website is ready to go and is currently showcasing the contributions of the black history month expressions contest as well as the legend of sleepy hollows performance from joseph george middle school it can be found under the department's tabs so please check it out i guarantee that you will be amazed by our students work also february seems to be full of fun science activities throughout the district at ryan's steam academy they continue to work with the first and second grade families through weekly parent academy and this is a partnership with evergreen valley college ryan's teachers continue to share valuable strategies with families to implement at home and as well as a preview of what students learn the following week at adelante dual language academy they are currently working with small science a non-profit that delivers science workshops to all classrooms from tk through 8th grade and these are fun hands-on activities that are done online small dropped off all of the materials for students to be able to use during these interactive science lessons and they are very engaging and on march 2nd san antonio elementary had its second epic build design challenge called get in the game and this was a year where san antonio hawks and their families took on the role of game designer in this role the san antonio hawks tk through fifth grade engaged in the engineering design process to develop a new game and they were super impressed with the amount of effort and creativity that hawks put into designing their games during during the epic bill night the school community came together and schools shared with others their design process the ways they i iterated and how to play and as a school san antonio has a focus on coding and engineering design and they recognize the importance of providing students opportunities that prepare them for the careers in silicon valley and of course we are still working in collaboration with nasa to virtually take our students to space in february we launched the perseverance rover and now in march we are learning all about getting ready to head to the moon in 2024 all schools are able to interact and engage with the work that nasa is doing in a kid-friendly way with lots of activities and presentations and in other news 8th grade students at fisher are participating in a global exchange project with students from singapore this project is an opportunity to learn about life across the world and different cultures and it is a an experience that students will remember for a lifetime um they partner with international schools and they present their work to multiple audiences and the partners in this initiative are scowy the santa clara county office of ed uh school to home silicon valley education foundation and canadian international school and what would school be without movie nights and family nights adelante two and its pta are hosting zoo movie nights and students can come by the school to pick up their popcorn and drink to enjoy before the show safely at home also lucha recently hosted a magic night with a magician and that was done virtually as well and we continued to do great things on our campuses at meijer there was recently a little lending library book donated by access books bay area and students can pick books from it when they go to do their uh materials pick up so there are a lot of great things happening in our schools here in alum rock and lastly this evening we want to thank academic services for all of their amazing work in making sure our english learners are tested this year for the elpac in a safe and meaningful way thank you very much thank you miss martinez do we have anybody here from uh area yes we have area president jocelyn merse welcome miss merce good evening well i would like to at least acknowledge the significance of today being the one-year anniversary of the beginning of a life-changing historical pandemic who would have thought we would find ourselves where we are today and what we have been through in the meantime there have been many days when i personally felt like i'm falling into quicksand on a deserted island well my immediate family and i have been extremely fortunate to not have contracted kovid i am very much aware that the alum rock community has been severely affected either by the disease itself or by the impact it's had to the economic social emotional or educational well-being on our students and families we have all experienced the uncertainties and rapidly changing information that we receive now we find ourselves shifting gears again to begin the process of some sort of reopening of our schools when i try to wrap my head around it i'm reminded of one of those toys that my kids used to play with i think it's called the whack-a-mole you know where you hit one of the objects back down into its hole only to have another one pop up elsewhere it can never be done fast enough to get all the moles in their holes at the same time that's how i feel right now about the rush we are in to create a workable plan that best meets the needs of our students while at the same time prioritizes the health and safety of our students staff and community i want to thank dr bauer and others of you who are responsible for making the vaccines available to our teachers the rollout came much faster and more widespread than i certainly had expected providing more opportunity for our teachers to take advantage of it i am also grateful for dr bauer's commitment to not force any of our teachers to return to on-site instruction for this year while flexibility is a life skill i tried to teach my own kids and my students i think our teachers have demonstrated a high level of flexibility in the way they embraced and ran with implementing a solid distance learning program for our students i also want to thank all those in academic services who supported the teachers by sharing their expertise and resources for distance learning we have shown our flexibility but i think right now we are stretched to the max we need some stability some plans that we can count on for the rest of the school year so let's do our best to come up with a plan that will work for those students who may need that on stripe on-site instruction for a portion of their day or their week while allowing the rest to continue with distance learning area is ready to craft an mou with the district that will do so while at the same time keep the safety and health of our students staff and community as top priority thank you thank you uh dr bauer i'm gonna have a brief comment um i wanna echo what jocelyn said i think that all of us who have been leading this district under these unprecedented times cannot forget that a year ago i um i received that at midnight the order for our schools to be put under shelter in place and i will never forget because that night um it was non-stop for all of us that were leading a district in one way or the other i remember having a superintendent's council at 12 midnight where dr dawan had called all of us in the county and told us you know we're gonna have to shut our schools for the next three weeks and here we are 52 weeks later um we're still not where we where we were and i don't think that any of us will disagree that our lives all of our lives have changed considerably due to the pandemic and when i hear the frustration in the uh audience comments and and the anger i totally honor all of those feelings because it is part of all of these terrible things that have happened all around us i just want to reassure you that if you really want answers please reach out to me because i'm totally willing to respond to your questions and i just want to echo you and not remind you about that um i also want to make sure that everybody hears that there is a committee that made out of all stakes holders that as it's considering repurposing sites in november the board was we brought up to the board a demographic study and a lot of you have questions around the why and i will urge you the demographic study is online and we it's anybody can go to the last page of the demographic study to be able to understand the situation of the district our schools are designed to teach students that's the number one goal when trustee vegerano reminded us of our vision you know that's what we are supposed to be doing and when we don't have the number of students that are that are needed to sustain a school we gotta repurpose it and i'm being very deliberate with a term we have a fantastic committee that is made out of all stakeholders that committee was formed publicly and every major group of parents in our district selected their own representative and each of the unions selected their own representative in the the community there were two community members who applied and were selected all of these was done in public everybody was witness of that so uh parents those are some of the questions the beginning of the questions to the beginning of the answers to your questions let's all work on being united for our sake for the sake of our students we as adults may disagree in many things and i totally honor a diverse way of of opinions in our district that's what makes our district strong but we all need to focus on working together respecting each other and moving forward because the the the reality in our district will never be the way it was and so we are creating totally understand jocelyn's comment about the way the flexibility that the system has had to have to be able to transform our instruction from one medium to the next and i do honor every staff member from custodians to admins to paris to our cnn staff to our teachers principals every single 1100 staff members in alum rock i want to thank you for your commitment to our kids for your commitment for your commitment thank you thank you dr bauer and we'll go ahead and move on to trustee reports comments at this raise your time you'd like to speak at this time trustee by karano yes yes thank you so um a couple of things first of all um in it dr bauer mentioned as part of the questions that that came up you know thank you mr ruiz for for confirming that unfortunately for those who may not be aware due to the laws specifically the brown act we are not able to have like question and answer in this meeting with the public we listen to what you say and depending on you know where the conversation goes we may incorporate some of your um questions or thoughts or opinions into our discussion so that's kind of how it works but you can contact any of us individually or dr bauer and you know that's another way of communication but in this meeting we we just that's not the way by law that we're able to do it um so i but thank you for the questions and so in addition to dr bauer mentioning the geographic study uh or i'm sorry the the study that we had done that looked at you know the geographic realities of our area and and um the things that we need to consider in terms of the future of the district i also would encourage community members with questions we've had several um special meet budget meetings that also um our our fiscal person mr chang has gone over the budget and and why you know the budget is the way it is and how monies are spent where monies are dedicated to and kind of some of those questions that came up so i would also encourage looking on the website for the special board meetings that were budget meetings and you'll be able to i think find information there that will answer a lot of your questions um in the past month i know several of us all of us i think as board members have have been fairly active um with with regards to some of the things um that will be discussed later on on our agenda including reopening of schools we've met you know we've talked to and met with other board members and and a bigger meetings um with city officials and and there's been a lot of things going on that we as board members have been working in the interest of our district to try to preserve um you know our basically our sovereignty as a district to make decisions that that reflect what we think is best for for the community so that has been actively happening i also want to recognize and and commend our the repurposing committee that dr bauer uh mentioned you know we as board members don't attend those meetings because that's really a process for stakeholders and community to to be able to you know work out to talk through the process to get to a recommendation and i've seen after the fact i'm able to you know go on youtube and watch those meetings and so i appreciate the hard work that everyone there is doing and you know the difficult decision that ideally they would make to bring us a recommendation and so i look forward to getting um a recommendation because you know i empathize with that difficulty of that because as a board member we know that how hard it is to make a decision and and kind of you know be decisive and so i appreciate the difficulty that that has presented but um also the work that comes along with it by that committee um and then i think the just the last thing i wanted to respond to um i've had a request from a media outlet um i guess there's been some questions from the community about our as a board our positions president vice president clerk and all those things and just so i i just want to be transparent and let everyone who may not know that every december we do have elections to vote you know whoever we as a board will be in those positions and that is actually by um california law by ed code so that is a mandate if i mean if i'm incorrect mr ruiz can can correct me but that is something that we have to do every year so i just want to be transparent about the process of how these positions happen president vice president et cetera um as a response to a direct community question um but other than that i appreciate everyone's time and thank you very much thank you trustee um i see mr fama miss travis's hand up we'll go ahead and go with mr pham and then trustee travis okay uh first of all uh i wanna wish uh trustee herrera lower a happy aztec new year am i getting i'm getting it right so okay you know last month we were celebrating lunar new year and this month we're celebrating the aztec new year so you know you know uh may may your year be prosperous happy and healthy uh sec uh you know uh second of all i i wanted to you know like trustee bejarano mentioned i too have had defused some questions from local media outlets in recent days and you know i i want to remind you know members of our community that you know before jumping the conclusions based upon information put out on social media please take take the time to you know write to write to any of the members of the board and contact the superintendent's office because you know uh as we as we are entering into a time where we are making critical decisions you know alum rock is one big family here and you know i you know i i hope that you know uh you know our our community stays united so that we can get to the light at the end of this pandemic tunnel and not you know just like uh jocelyn mers mentioned this has been quite a year uh lastly uh you know i know if you know all the staff teachers and administrators have done great work you know as mentioned by the uh represented from the araa but i wanted to you know give a special thanks to child nutrition services for for doing weekend family meals new distribution every friday through the month of march you know i i wanted to point that you know point this this is this is your community school district stepping up in times of need so you know i i want to thank the the cns staff for you know stretching themselves and you know providing this crucial service to our families in need at this time thank you very much thank you mr from trustee tubbists would you like to trust each other uh you can mute yourself at this time and speak a few words um no action i'll go ahead and uh uh say a few words um just to god i can't echo enough everything that's been said um jocelyn put it well no in regards to feeling like you have one thing under control something else pop you know goes up and uh everything is is urgent everything is urgent and so um i am happy and i am proud of our lmroc staff uh teachers doing their job day in day out uh the cafeteria stuff staff feeding our community for so long um as jocelyn put it one year as of today i remember my uh 12 year old at the time was 11 in fifth grade um getting her stuff and saying mom they told us to get everything and leave and i don't know we're gonna come back and so you know the trauma that that causes to our children you know um the trauma that that causes to an adult it's it it's real and so our community has been heavily impacted by cobalt 19 as jocelyn mentioned we've lost many of our community members due to this pandemic and it hasn't been easy and it's time you know now some of us have gotten our vaccine some of our teachers have been vaccinated it feels like the light at the end of the tunnel but we're not at the end of the tunnel yet um and so it's really really hard um but yet you know i know it's a time that as leaders that were elected by you you know those of you who voted us to be here um that you count on us in order to continue to do our job to reopen our school safely for your children for the staff for the teachers um to continue to advocate on behalf our alumni community and know that we're doing that as uh mr fam mentioned mentioned we are busy we're continuing to advocate and as one um item comes up you know the other one comes up and they're all as important and we will continue to um to advocate on your behalf and i'm happy to report that we had a board retreat this past saturday where as a board we sat down we talked and we talked about the work ahead the strategic planning that we will be doing as a district that will continue to push our district forward uh we are doing um a lot better than we were many years ago which is great again you know that light at the end of the tunnel we're not there yet but we are moving forward um and i do see that sun rising right and and our district um in a better place even though it's it's hard times um if if you can even believe that right or feel that i know it's hard what we're going through as dr bauer put it is not easy as a community it's really hard um when some of us are have lost our loved ones um when some of us don't know if we're gonna have a job um some of us have had to move out of the district which i've also you know brought our numbers down so a lot of our children from alan rock who were with us a year ago are no longer with us and all those things have an impact um on us you know not just do we lose them physically but you know that that also um leads a space um behind and so anyways i i want to echo all the things that were said i know the committee um who was formed to uh to to do a tough job of recommending right um some hard recommendations to us i know they're doing their best i know it's not easy uh believe me as the leader right signing up for some of these things um it doesn't feel good all the time but it's things that we have to do in order to to push through and so um thank you all i also look forward to hearing from the recommendations based on your uh discussions as leaders from your specific relationship on that committee and also gathering information from the community as to what we should do and how we should do it and what schools um you know we should we should move forward in not easy definitely not easy but things that that we get to do um any leader can come up and and say yes and i when it's easy when we have extra money but it's the hardest times right that um at uh [Music] it's not easy and it's easier to just say i'm not gonna do it but we get to and so i look forward to having those hard conversations because that will push us forward and once we get through that hard time you know i i feel it'll it'll get easier so thank you again thank you to all the parents especially the new parents that have joined us tonight uh welcome and i'm glad that you're involved um here at least at the board level i know that you are involved in your child's life and you want the best for your children and so welcome and i look forward to continuing to hearing from you and i hope that you are able to connect with dr bauer um in order to make sure that you get your questions answered because it's very important that we all feel connected um listened to and heard so um thank you and with that i did see president yeah thank you i do apologize on my internet connection was cutting in and out when you were calling on me and i was trying to talk and i think i wasn't able to get through so i do apologize for the technical issues i just have some brief comments uh that i wanted to share and um you know these last few this last month has been incredibly trying uh due to things that uh many many things that are completely out of our control as a district we've had to take on uh the task of having to go and and step up for the the the the authority that is granted to us in the constitution the state of california and that's unfortunate um mayor le cardo has unleashed his his guerras on on school districts in san jose in the middle of attempting to reopen our schools and that is unconscionable it is unconscionable the fact that for uh the purposes of uh political gain there's been this all-out war on school districts and different fronts uh and with the use of a 501c4 a very very nebulous type of organization that are susceptible to dark money we've seen that in the past where arizona money has snuck in to affect the issues that are going on in california and the things that affect us here in our state and he's using that to to gain influence and to push his agenda and so it's very unfortunate it's very unfortunate um that we have we have the district are attempting to go ahead negotiate with our bargaining units to strategize on the best direction to move forward and we're having to watch our backs uh for this power grab from an individual that should be looking out to work in our best interests he's attempting to expand his authority which the the constitution state of california does not even expressly forbids mayors from getting involved in the governance of uh of local school districts and all the while we have uh a lot of things that are that are impacting our city that the mayor has direct authority and the direct ability to impact and to positively impact and yet they're going unaddressed and while we're attempting to open up our schools we see syringes all over the street because individuals have decided to go and uh set up in encampments right next to our schools they're uh you know we have we unfortunately have been receiving reports of constant break-ins from folks who've decided to make a certain part of our of our of our schools their their the place where they're residing and i completely understand times are difficult and tough um but our school should be a safe zone a location where our children shouldn't have to worry about those type of things they're walking to school and getting stuck by a needle on the floor we're talking about massive amounts uh and so with that i just wanted to express that to my colleagues i know that you've all been actively engaged in this broader conversation with other school board members i appreciate that for for not all of you but for the ones that who have stood up um my colleague with ranano corrina minfam um and our different times of course we've been engaged and um and so thank you for those who have stepped who stepped up um hello to the parents who've come into the meetings i really want to thank you this is a testament to democracy at work the structure of our government our local elected school boards here in open meetings that are agendas that are held usually around the second thursday of the month open to the public for people to come and engage and speak and participate something that you don't necessarily see at the charter schools that are all over the place even though they are required to abide by the brown act now but very rarely do they i've gone to their websites it's incredibly difficult to get access and you know try to get a hold of their board members here you have our contact information on our website and we are at your disposal because that's the way the system is set up so that we are available we are accountable and we're here for you something that we don't see in these privately operated publicly funded schools that are cropping up and have cropped up all over our district and uh and so just want to say thank you for being here and just wanted to make sure to remind everybody that this is a beautiful structure we have in place democracy you know the the worst except for the the rest of what whatever winston churchill said i love it because it uh it has uh the people's voice through your elected representatives here at work so thank you very much uh for being engaged thank you trustee uh trusty chalice i see your hand up i'm not sure from if it's from earlier and now you said you didn't want to speak you want to speak i never said i didn't want to speak i couldn't unmute myself but i i'm a mutant now can i speak now sure i'm glad okay so my trusty uh ernesto my colleague ernesto mentioned in the of the budget committee and if we i would like to ask if we can put something together uh say april first and get that going because a lot of people have a lot of questions from what i heard from the audience uh about the what's being spent what is it and maybe we can give them a little bit more information there um and if the cbo is not available maybe we can have the assistant or or send us some more information so that we can anybody who wants to inquire we can disseminate that information to them and also if trustee beran was willing to do april first if not we can talk after but um like i said before that i was waiting for the march uh figures to come in and to possibly have one april first uh if dr bauer can maybe schedule something going on zoom if not you know maybe i could do it uh we'll we'll see um and also i did want to ask one question because since everybody's mentioning um i guess money um i had i think i read somewhere and maybe this question could be directed to mr rogerio that we now have lower than 10 000 students should the trustees be getting a lower stipend and if so adjust and lower that stipend amount and if that could do be done as soon as possible because we're around the 8 000 range as far as ada uh go and should we be reducing that as well or should we wait till we're told to reduce it um if i can have him answer that please thank you just to tell us before he answers i know i know you asked dr brower something so we'll wait for dr bauer to answer at the end of your comment um but mr ruiz actually it'd probably be better if mr reese answered first because the other one yes so we're going to have mr ruiz we're going to have mr reece answer i just want to i don't want to miss any of your questions because they're very good questions so thank you for asking them just want to have dr bauer note there that we'll come back to her when you're done uh when we're done here mr royce can you please answer that for trustee chavez yes so the the education code does um it the the amount of board member compensation the monthly stipend is based on uh total ada of the district it's not a very straightforward calculation because it also has to take into account absences from a base year in years past so what i can do is i can prepare a summary of this and i can look at that very issue we did look at it about a year and a half or two years ago um but we can look we can look at that again and we can agendize it for the next board meeting and bring it back as well thank you thank you mr reese thank you trustee chavis any other comments before dr bauer responds thank you mr rogelio any other comments trustee thomas uh no i'm just looking forward to what dr bauer has to say and then i'll comment thank you uh she is what was your question can you repeat it because i know we went on to miss dr bauer so one of them was that if i had asked before during the uh budget meeting and that people were asking to have another budget meeting and and i didn't really want to have it and because the figures hadn't come in and mr covera the cbo of the district said that they were waiting on the march revisions and stuff so i said okay let's have it in april first so i'm asking if we can set up a zoom if that's okay with the other um board member because uh i i had asked at that meeting but uh didn't get confirmation so if dr bauer can tell me if the zoom meeting can be available through the district if not um if a trustee could just go ahead and have it and if she can have the cbo there to answer questions and all the uh information on some of the financials is and if mr povera cannot be there because he's very busy uh have his assistant or uh another staff member in the cbo's office attend before you answer dr bauer is this something that you checked with uh trustee carano about in schedule we spoke out about it at the last budget meeting okay i just uh i know that we typically schedule and i don't think dr bauer has ever said no we can't use a zoom but if you can answer that dr brown absolutely no we will work with trustee chavez as the chair of the committee to schedule the best time trustee chavez just to remind you that there is a local holiday uh the day before and i think it will be that's why i would like for you let me talk to you about the calendar uh you did ask uh to have a follow-up budget committee meeting in april so we were very aware of that and we will be ready but if if it's okay with you let's go ahead and just check calendars to be able to address and make sure that all the parents are available because that following week is spring break so just kind of you know to be on uh favor for everybody right that everybody is able to attend i know people say you know we're in a virtual world uh everybody's available all the time but out of respect to our families and their calendars i think it would be a good idea just to kind of check out the calendar we can do it as soon as we return from spring break and that way it allows for everybody to be you know to be here including teachers right in including other staff so with all due respect uh trustee um uh chavez the week of the 12th we can let the audience know that the week of the 12th we will be looking for a day and then that we will inform everybody about that meeting that would be perfect thank you all right and so uh trustee herrera i do wanna i forgot dr bauer before you continue i'm sorry i don't know trusty chavez had anything else to say in her were you done trustee chavez you are okay thank you i just want to make sure that you had all the time you needed okay okay thank you dr bauer i apologize for interrupting so i'm gonna ask the rest of the board we're gonna do this a little bit ahead of time because somebody's birthday is on monday and that's trusty herrera lo era has a birthday and we wanna wish her as a alum wrong family we want to wish you a fantastic birthday we hope that you have a fantastic time with your family and we are a family and you know i just want to celebrate that and and have have a great time i was about to start singing happy birthday but i got shocked thank you no i appreciate that thank you i appreciate the thought um and with that and a smile on my face and thinking of my mother martha herrera who gave me life i will go ahead and move on to item let me i thank you for uh i don't have a paper in me in front of me i'm trying to save paper so i'm using the computer so we'll go ahead and go on to item approve unrepresented management supervisory confidential employees one time off schedule for 2019 2020 and 2021 school years so for purposes of conversation and moving this item forward i will move to approve oh a second vice president can no seconds um we'll go ahead and open it up for public comment and then we'll come to uh trustee comments of questions uh mr moran [Music] um i know i just announced it so i know we have people who are going to be raising their hand do we have anybody from the audience who or the public who's raised their hand to give comment on this item yes we have at this time we have two people first one is anna robles okay welcome miss robles foreign are you available to translate i just want to make sure that she understands what item wrong okay so i'm going to go ahead and repeat it so she can hear so we're on item 501 approve unrepresented management supervisory confidential employees one time off schedule payments for 2019 2020 and 2021 school years uh i'm repeating it for miss robles and any other public uh members of the public wishing to address the board um that is the item that um we will be focusing on at this time okay it india is oh just a reminder thank you just a reminder um these meetings are posted ahead of time with the detachments um and i i'm happy to also meet as dr brower mentioned and i look forward to um sitting down with miss robles uh to answer her questions uh mr moran anybody else um from the public wanting to speak on this item yes we have brenda sandejas welcome back miss anders as soon as you begin speaking the timer will begin i just want to say today that i'm really disappointed to hear that uh teacher staff and unrepresentative employees will not be getting a raise in 2019 to 2020.
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