Are they out of there? And how do we address these needs? that is just a wealth of choices and collaboration and committees and thought processes and having these types of interactions because we value um what the board brings to us. You're out in the community and you can hear and and see what's going on out there. Um so just you know going back to some of those mitigation strategies that transportation when when an electric bus drives by you might be interested if that's in your neighborhood. Wow, that's interesting. Look at that shiny electric bus. Wow, what's great about, you know, um uh we have u advertising campaigns on billboards. Um we are actively working with our meet and confer groups to recruit and retain strong teachers and um in alignment with our guard rails. So, uh marketing, something that's been coming up and that we're exploring and investigating is central enrollment.
Um, central enrollment gives us an ability to market ourselves in a very strategic way. >> And what is central enrollment? >> Central enrollment means that parents have one-stop shop to get into our schools and then we have the ability to really cater that marketing as opposed to showing up to a school and saying, "Well, this is the school closest to me, so this is the one I'm going to go to." Um, it gives us the ability to lean in as we were talking about in layered strategies. Let's work on retaining what we have now, but then as we're moving forward, let's start looking at LCK, perfect example. It's an outdoor learning school. Who who knows that? Um, who knows that it's an outdoor learning school. We we get it out on our social media. We have projects. Martha's doing a fantastic job. But when you when you walk into a central enrollment, we have the ability with an expanded transportation model to get kids to whatever school is going to fit their needs.
as a kid to get them excited about learning. We have a um a giant professional grade soccer field at Lum Linda. If I walk in and I say, "Well, I want to send my kid to school. This is the school that's here, but I don't know. He's not excited." Well, Lomol Linda is your kid into sports. Lolinda has this sports program. Um it's supported by community partners. You get the kid into the school that they're excited about, right? um dual language, all of these different things and strategies. But with open enrollment, sometimes we have challenges for parents to be able to get their kids to those schools. So, how do I how do we help our in district families get to the school and make the choice that's best for them? So, the expanded transportation gives us it just opens up this whole world. Central enrollment allows us to talk to those parents and actually deep dive into the needs of the individual student and then go put them on an electric bus and go take a field trip in our district.
>> We can format that from that central enrollment place. I love all those ideas and actually thank you for sharing all those comments because uh a lot of the times is I want to hear not necessarily what we're doing to the demographic aging declined but what are we doing to remain competitive and I think sometimes focusing on how we remain competitive to maybe the students that we are losing to the charter or the private school will bring that in. So, thank you for saying that because just sometimes when we have plain reports like that, it makes it seem like we're just focusing on this demographic declining issue, which we already know we are, but obviously we need to come out with other strategies that remains us in the competitive field versus the losing enrollment because if we just >> do things to make sure that we're keeping kids like that's not even going to grow us, right?
So, thank you for sharing all those because that's exactly what I was hoping I would hear out of all these conversations. >> Let me get to the other slide. Um, and part of this is is again alignment with SOFG. So, if we keep doing things the same way we've been doing them, we are going to keep having the same outcome. A lot of this is is not what other schools are doing. Uh, the expanded transportation, that's not what other schools are doing. Uh, they're pulling in uh because of declining enrollment. And I'm like, that's fine. I'll come get your kids. >> I love that. >> Uh so, um you know, a lot of these and then, you know, when we were talking about LCK, >> that's a part of spreading that that message. When people drive by that school, they go, "Wow, what is that?" So, creating spaces that are exciting and that people want to be at and people say, "Wow, this is an amazing place." I mean, we're about to do a rebuild for Builtmore.
Um and and we're we're moving that along through the path. We're doing facility studies. We're trying to figure out what our next plan's going to be. Um, our family resource center, that's another innovative project that other districts are not necessarily in the same uh position to support it. We're very lucky that our community supports us through uh the bond initiative. And through that and through passing that bond, we were able to get dollars to put specifically towards our family resource center. it's not as much or that we would want to have. So, we're continuing to look to expand that project to be bigger than just a, you know, remodel few buildings. Uh, we want something exciting. We want to support our community that supports us. We want to provide um medical services, dental services, uh, uh, behavioral health services in a one-stop shop. Again, transportation expansion is going to allow our community to take advantage of these resources if we have an ongoing shuttle type service within our district.
These are some of the innovative ideas that are coming up in our committees. And so then it comes back to me to say, oh, how do we how do we make that happen? How do we make that a reality? Um, so we've been piloting uh certain ideas to see is this going to be something we can we can afford? Is this something that we can uh put in place with the resources we already existingly have and just kind of alter them a little bit? Um we had a situation just recently that really speaks to how we can target this transportation model in innovative ways. Um so one of the ideas that had come up was what if we have attendance problems and somebody is truining and we just they're you know they need to walk to school but parents don't get up in time to walk them and they don't want to walk them by themselves.
It's not safe. Uh, one of the targeted ideas was if we have a good van pool non CDL driver population, we can based on support measures with the school site, target those students, go pick them up right at their door, get them to school, right? We know that attendance is affecting us. We just recently had a situation uh with everything that's been going on where several of our families did not feel safe to walk their kids to school. Um, what they expressed to the school was, "We're just going to keep our kids home. We know that that's going to be so detrimental to those students and their learning loss. Uh but this the parents didn't know what to do, they were afraid. So we set it up to send a van driver to pick up about six families. We have that ongoing right now. Uh those families are able to get onto a van and get to school and bring their students and feel safe and not have to go into that walking situation that they felt uncomfortable with.
We want to expand that. we can't we don't have the resources right now. But we saw that it was effective and it immediately got those six families to get their kids to school. >> And I love that innovative thinking because that even goes into our guard rails right of safety and that creates safety in the community and safety looks different for every community and I feel that that really holds on to the value of what safety means in Kraton. Also with that innovative thinking, I love that idea because we've been having a lot of issues in the district where kids are being walking by themselves and people are approaching them on the streets and that's another sense of safety, right? And I love that innovative thinking. So, thank you for that because that ties in directly to our outcomes and our guard rails and this is how everything starts, you know, coming in in together.
And I don't think if we would have been on this journey, it would have given us that space or that ability to be like, what are we going to do differently to make sure that we're meeting all these poor um portions of thinking? It's also been beneficial if the board supported both of our assistant superintendents being part of an SFG cohort because I don't think there's there may not be any other districts in the country that have that level of expertise with the two district experts who are most directly impacting operations and instruction within the district. And so that's been really a powerful lens for them to be able to bring back and you know implement at our schools. So, we're fortunate both for the individuals and we're fortunate for that opportunity. Um, and the other thing I will say, there are a lot of districts that when enrollment starts to decline, like their first reaction is, I know how we can save money.
Let's cut these assistant superintendent positions, >> but I can guarantee you is all these innovative strategies you're hearing, we would not have the ability to implement them without the team members that we have. And so sometimes it's it's like that old expression, you're cutting off your nose to spite your face, right? Like do we want to give up our ability to innovate and grow and develop and reverse the course of events that are occurring? Um and you can't do that like if if all you're doing is self harm to the district by cutting away critical resources that you need. >> Yeah, I agree. And that's one of the things that I would not want to happen is that all of a sudden we're saying, "Hey, we're in this hole and now we have to go cut xy amount of whatever that is. To me, that's not a solid solution." So, I appreciate all this work being put into it.
Miss Marquez. >> Yeah. Um, also to echo what you're saying, like I love that um, you know, this this innovative thinking and you're talking about like the a district shuttle because I remember a few years ago thinking I'm like, man, our district's small enough like if we had some kind of a shuttle system like I know in Tempe they have like this thing called the orbit. It's like set routes that run consistently and like it gets you anywhere in the city pretty quick. Um, but something like that, you know, could be beneficial to families, to kids, even if for like, you know, getting them to community council or after school sports or something. Um, and then I wanted to put this out here because this conversation took me back to something my daughter said cuz I remember asking her like, "What would make you want to go to school more?" She goes, "Well, of course, lunch.
That's always been her big thing, like we need better food." Um, but also she goes, "If they would let us pick our classes and I, you know, so it got me thinking about like, okay, well, what are like the main things they have to have?" Like, so yeah, English, math, and then what are kind of like the extras? And so I mean this is way out of the box, but I'm going to throw it out here since we're on the topic. But like I was imagining like you know how when you go to like community college or whatever and they've got the big schedule and you can pick your classes and it's going to be here here. But like so yeah. So it's like you know schedule of like these are like ELA intro ELA1 and the times and the dates and and shoot. I I don't know.
This is way out there, but like you know, yeah, she's going to take her ELA and her math at TCA, but she really likes the music and arts at LCK, >> right? >> And I know so again, I don't know, but I'm, you know, planting little seeds, but >> there has been some some discussions around that, Nicole. That's not uh I again because we are trying to say what are all the things you know brainstorming um and and it's fun to do this but it getting it put in place is where you know boots meet the ground and so expanding transportation comes from uh a lot of different levels there's a lot of different pieces in place to try to we have to take it to meet and confer we have to develop a new schedule for nonCDL drivers we have to increase our um bus driver rate to pay up to a level that's better than those around us so that we can bring in those drivers.
Um we're looking at that van driver solution because one of the things that we were thinking about when it comes to the math goal is kids who are excited about math and who want to be into those um uh advanced classes. Maybe that class isn't available at their site because they're over at the sports one and the focus is this. I mean, obviously there's math in every school, uh, but there are different classes available and advanced classes and so there could be some opportunity. I would say that there's a lot of steps between here and there. Nothing's off the plate or off the table. Um, but it starts with the basic. How do we make it happen? How do we take it from all of this brainstorming thought process and start making it happen? And that's what we've been working on in the background uh with the committees and then we're actually taking a piece for the transportation expansion to meet for this year.
Um but also I want to make sure we understand just because we want to do things we could take all of our resources and put them in these areas but our resources are getting smaller. So in addition to planning those resources effectively and supporting our our SFOG lens, we need to figure out ways to generate more revenue. And so um and we're trying to do it in every area at every level. We're looking at facilities use. We're very outdated on some of those things. Um we're looking at our prepaid medical process. I'm wanting to bring something new to the board uh uh during the next budget cycle, not this one. Um the commerce bank where just we're going to get money to do our job like we we cut checks, but now we're going to get money because we cut checks in a different way.
Uh so we're looking for those opportunities to generate non- studentent driven revenues uh so that we can support some of the innovative things that we're wanting to do. And then looking at some of those partnerships, I can't stress how partnerships really do move us along. Um they are critical and valuable and they allow us to offer more to our community than we could ever do on our own. So um those are some of our mitigation strategies. Um let's see. Okay. So I think we talked a lot about enrollment. I think I'm hoping that um we've got some good understanding about what the enrollment looks like over the next 10 years. If anyone wants to kind of give me their thought about what they think enrollment looks like over the next 10 years, >> the interactive this is hard for me. I'm usually just talk talk.
So would like to share their thoughts about that. Unless things in the state change, then it's going to keep declining. >> Yeah. >> I feel like I feel like public education. So, >> I I don't think it's going away entirely. I think we're just looking at declining population as far as >> Birth rates overall. >> I will be happy. I watch it every year and I and I see did it bump and guess what? We got a little slight bump in the um demographic of 30-year-olds. all of a sudden 30 year olds are having a slight increase in birth rates. So I'm very excited to watch to see what happens. So it might just be that um you know our kids are saying hey we want to wait till later to have our kids but as soon as we start seeing that then we know in five years well my kids sorry my kids >> they said no that's later 30 is later to have a kid.
Okay. >> Well I was 19 I don't know there's definitely that the clock gets louder at 30. Yeah, >> I was talking from having my kids after 30, but I'm just saying that seems to be the norm for people my age is to have kids after. >> It is. People are waiting till later to to have kids and it's and it's safer than it has ever been. Um, and then some of the things I'm hoping that we talked about today were the things that are impacting student enrollment in public schools. And we know that's those vouchers, it's housing rates, it's our performance. >> And I think Sophia gets behind that. Like the reason that we have goals is because we need to improve our performance. >> So if we do nothing else, that's going to make us attractive. So focusing in and that laser focus on our goals, we can't go wrong because that is what we're here to do is to educate kids.
All of this other stuff is great. That's what you have operational staff to do. uh it's for us to have these thought processes and try to be innovative and try to put the dollars to it, but really keeping our eyes on the ball of student outcomes is focusing on those goals because when we we keep improving and making that happen, people are going to want to come to Kraton honestly for more than any of the things that we had on that list. So, I'm going to try to do this um oops, go back. >> I'm going to try to do this uh mentometer activity for you guys. If you have your phone, it's one of those where um I'll launch this and then you get to get a QR code. Uh there'll be two items. So, one is just putting in a wondering that you have about declining enrollment.