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um given the public discussion or the public participation at our last meeting um we brought um to review the um policies mentioned where the um visits to school um maybe not at the at our regular meeting but definitely at the city-wide pto meeting there was some discussion about that so just like to review that and um also we have the essential visitor form just to look over and review if you haven't seen that um that's the i guess that would be considered a regulation not not a policy but just for us to kind of know what's going on um and then the emergency suspension of um policy during pandemic and discussion and update regarding um the certified non-certified uh coven vaccinations for for staff so um kevin with that i will turn it over to you okay thank you give me one second i will see if i can't figure out how to share the screen here so as part of the agenda as you just heard um one some of the things that came up in our citywide pto meeting on monday evening in addition to just previous meetings where we developed our covert response policies there's a kind of provision at the end of all the policies this opportunity for the board to repeal on the policies at at the appropriate time i mean so it was suggested in those policies uh that the policies would expire the covet policies would expire um at the end of the 2021 school year um that was extended just kind of given the timeline and time when we came back in school uh we thought now would be kind of an appropriate time to review kind of where we are as a district so in terms of a repeal this would be the opportunity for the board um to repeal the policies um you know from from our from our collection of policies from our policy guidebook i mean we kind of go back to the status quo if you will of those four policies these two are available for review this evening and as rachel mentioned previously policy 1250 visits to schools um and policy six one one four point eight one and that's the emergency suspension of policies during the pandemic um so just kind of staying and keeping in order here i will open up the visits to schools see if there's anything specifically that the board might have an interest in discussing reviewing etc currently right now um visits the schools are limited to what we had deemed as non-essential i'm sorry essential essential staff or visit or visitors and so there's essential visitors right now or folks who are um could be supporting school operations and so for example um i think one that i think many of our parents can identify with and that's um the folks coming in to take pictures for kids whether it's for schools at 9 12 at the high school or you know in our k5 or 6 8 for picture day so i believe during the 1920 school year when a pandemic first hit you know no one no one was allowed when we first came back started mixing up my school years of 2021 school year at the beginning because we were not even back in school and even when we came back in hybrid we were hesitant to allow folks in the building just kind of a better understanding of how covert has spread and that diseases spread we've relaxed those rules a little bit obviously there are essential employees that need to enter our buildings just in terms of contracted services and so those certainly those folks have certainly been deemed essential um but but but the policy has been relaxed even more um this school year this school year and so as way of our essential visitor form we've had groups like boys and girl scouts come to support support provide extracurricular activity support and particularly in our k5 schools across the district we've had uh mentoring and tutoring programs um those those programs were allowed to enter the schools and work with students and again given the governor's order as long as they demonstrated evidence um a vaccination status to be in our schools they were also allowed to come in to work with us students if not they continue to work with our students remotely just just some examples uh for the committee and for the for the community to better understand i think some of the questions that are on the table now is if number one should this be relaxed even more um and or two um does a policy still need to be in place and i think those are some questions certainly that we heard come on the evening of citywide pto i mean i think the question that sits with the with the committee this evening so i'll stop there and leave it up for loop it up for questions and discussion so are we still under any executive orders from the governor for our restrictions in schools yes i mean certainly masking is uh part of those restrictions i'm just asking because i think that would drive our decision i'm sure so masking are certainly part of those uh restrictions uh vaccinations are certainly part of those restrictions to star catholic absolutely two major ones in terms of building availability i think that varies from district to district building availability in terms of access varies from district to district right that's my understanding as well so and i know you know the the policy says to the greatest extent possible parents and staff are encouraged to arrange you know electronic means to conduct conferences and meetings um which some parents you know favor and others feel you know there's there's something missing there there's a connection you know missing there's you know they can't really see um the classroom or you know seeing their counselor in person so um so you have you have a mixed bag i think of of feelings about about you know having virtual conferences and virtual open house um things like that um and then i but i also think it's hard to have you know since our elementary kids are still not um vaccinated that vaccination is not available for them they are still quite vulnerable um and so i mean we can't really have a policy you know that varies from level to level i wouldn't think i i i i am the idea of well dependent on the policy i mean if we released the policy all together i would have probably the most concern about k5 um just given the quarantine cases that we have had um have i would say that the majority of them come from the community um we are learning that because the mitigation strategies that we have in place we are not spreading covet within the schools but it's coming into the community and then we quarantine from there um and so given our parent involvement at the k5 level and knowing that those doors are open um for everyone i would be very concerned about our most vulnerable grade level um you know and particularly in that respect and you know i and when i say involvement you know our families whether they're walking their kids to school every day whether they're dropping off lunch um you know whether they forgot lunch whether they want to go in and speak to the teacher in the morning i think these are all the experiences that we enjoyed prior to the pandemic that i i'd be concerned about right now just kind of given where we are with the vaccination and it's not it's not even available at the k5 level yet right hopefully soon i did want to ask him you know how you um translate or interpret the last sentence that these temporary restrictions shall remain in effect for the duration of last school year or until repealed by the board so is that something we should change if if we would want this to be extended throughout the school year right i i think you know part of what is your struggle here is that um i sometimes think you know particularly in the pandemic situation that we're now where everything is so unexpected and it's changing so quickly um you're trying to kind of create the road map with the sands constantly shifting under you and so you know my recommendation has always been um over time that um you know if you want to do regulations or guidelines that are easily kind of put in place taken apart that's far preferable to having to go through the the required machination of passing a policy repealing a policy so that's kind of my first overarching and thought and as i'm listening to you speak i can kind of hear it revealed exactly there because as you're talking i'm thinking gee you know the governor is now about to change his guidance on um children and quarantining and and that will be any day now and that's something that's very different than what we had 10 days ago um so that said i think you know as a policy this is a i consider policies to be forever written in stone and am not always comfortable with their automatic expiration um because i do think that probably the pro proper legal way to do it is to say until affirmatively repealed or to say nothing and to have the board make a motion to affirmatively repeal so sometimes you know when you put that automatic expiration i think there is an argument to be made that you're going to have something slip out of being um protocol and and past policy maybe inadvertently to some members of your board who aren't thinking about you know the expiration of timeline so um kind of as an overarching legal matter i would always advise either to stick with regulations or if you're going to do a policy like this to leave it you know in place set in stone forever or until such time as you decide to vote to remove it um so that last that's a long way of saying rachel that last sentence makes me a little bit uncomfortable not you know it's not it's not like it's illegal but i think it creates some obstacles that you don't necessarily want to have to deal with and confusion yeah for me it's confusing for sure um for sure and this was this was the cave recommendation last year you know they they um they they gave a ton of recommendations you know when the world shut down in march of 2020 all of our policies were affected right um so to to cover ourselves they you know they recommended you know the four four coveted policies that we adopted um so with that last sentence is this is this should you know do you recommend any action be to be taken on this well i would i would recommend that you strike out that last sentence because it doesn't contain whichever sooner or whichever's later so i'm not really sure when that policy it's in effect for the duration or until it's repealed so at the end of 2021 did it expire or i think it's vague um and you often will see you know whichever is earlier whichever is later or something like that some kind of a marker so i would recommend probably that you strike that out even just the paragraph above about symptom screening i don't even think we're doing that now with symptom screening people that come um the one other thing that i do want to say though is that that's okay to the extent that if there are executive orders that issue those orders will always control whether this policy is controversial to it or not the executive order is always going to control regardless and you don't really need to go back and amend to comply with an executive order because you don't really by the time you do it it'll be expired again so yeah yeah but i don't believe that there is um you know an executive order to to set to visitors to school visitors no i don't believe there is either so it's just this it's just our policy yep so um but i consider taking that last sentence out or or writing whichever's later you know language that says or until repo repealed by the school board whichever should be later or whichever should be first i don't know what you prefer yeah i think yeah or until repealed by the school board yep is that what i'm hearing or just strike the whole thing i think i heard yep either one and then and kim to your point this is really not although the screening um after after this week well something that will be introduced but i i don't know if this makes sense because this is going to continue to change and i don't know if it makes sense for policy um to your point that you made earlier so let's strike that out as well any thoughts from committee members no okay and would we need to um approve this with the strikeouts yes yep because it's a change to the content of the policy okay which is why it's kim's recommendations to make it as broad as possible so we have to keep doing this right right or make it a regulation that supports an underlying policy then you can theoretically you can work with the superintendent to change them or tweak them however you choose without bringing it back around because it's an implementing regulation i don't want to repeal the whole thing though and because then that looks that would appear that we're saying all buildings are open right yeah the other thing you could do honestly is you could um approve these changes which really kind of make it a little bit more generic and then if you feel that as time goes on you want something in writing that says you know something that you're talking about either you know more detailed access to building or something you could put that together as a regulation that sits behind this policy right and then you can change it and tweak it however you want to and as often as you want to mm-hmm okay um are committee members okay with that i do i need a motion to um bring this to the full board as as presented yes i think i'll make a motion thank you kate thank you kathy all in favor aye aye okay could we just review then the essential visitor form i you know i kind of viewed that as the regulation that's set by the superintendent right so just [Music] and one of the one of the issues is it's uh you know it's um i think there's confusion about what's acceptable and what's not and just to make sure that you know there's there's a level playing field for for whatever or whoever wants to come and have a pto meeting or or an event what have you right and i i think the events vary from event to event and the pto meetings um rachel you might recall you know i had acc citywide pto to submit something on behalf of all the ptos um and i i did speak with speak with them again last monday but requests have come in from individual schools and well in the meantime but i i feel like just kind of given how we've what we've learned again about the pandemic we can do this safely because these meetings occur after school when school is over and you know the principal can hold these in spaces where there's you know plenty of installation and staff and i'm sorry families and the principal um can meet and make sure everyone is safe so we have approved these as these requests have come in and what is the the proper avenue for like a pto say um do they go through the principle first and then the principal submits it to you or right so the it's it's easiest and this is why i was recommending um and not this meeting but i believe the october meeting that citywide pto doing it on behalf of all of them so that we don't have to continue to get different requests because just it just makes it easy for everyone um and then we can just you know make the principles aware that it's okay and just give them the check um so but what they would do is it would be the pto themselves and they would submit it um to this address right here and that's to deb stanton [Music] on behalf of the assistant superintendent's office it will come to me um in absence of assistant superintendent i sign off and then you know we continue to keep it moving so folks can have the access that they need and then you know custodial staff and whoever is made aware so folks folks have access to the building great thank you okay any questions from committee members as to the form have a quick question please um mr wilson i just want to clarify that um obviously for the ptos to have one group handing it to you all at once is great would this be the process for every person who's who's submitting the essential visitors form you know even on like a just a single visit um no so if it's so let's just say i want to speak to my child's principal and i wanted to visit and you know it was a very important meeting for an example it felt like it was necessary to meet in person that request would go directly to the principal um the principals you know are more than capable of setting up meetings to ensure everyone's safety the majority of their meetings take place outside and the majority of those meetings take place remotely if for some reason it rises to the level where it's necessary to be in person um you know we've had some situations but that has happened but the majority but the majority of the cases have been the meetings that have been revolved have been remote it just just as an example we know how formal as an example our iep meetings are for students and families the majority of those meetings have been held remotely and you know since there are some cases where they might have to be in person and we've made exceptions in in those cases so whether it's a you know iep meeting individual education plan meeting or a meeting that just rises to the level that requires people to be in person our i would by by policy our principals have have that authority um if it's a really big deal they'll give my office a call um but if it's bigger groups then that that definitely requires a call and they've in those instances we definitely would be encouraged people uh to fill out the form if this is a reoccurring visit um you know that that that kind of situation okay thanks for clarifying yeah thank you any other questions or comments thoughts okay great thank you i just wanted to you know the chance for the committee to see that form absolutely absolutely and then the that was the form the last item is the emergency suspension of policies during the pandemic at the time um this was very necessary i believe when these policies were passed the boards um were the meetings uh were not happening in the beginning if they were they were not happening consistently they certainly were not happening in person you know there was significant latitude on how many days of school would actually occur there was there's a rigorous comprehensive bidding process that has to take place typically um where in the pandemic you may want your superintendent to be authorized to make decisions without going through that process and so the emergency suspension of policies allowed and authorize your superintendent to make those moves without going through those processes so we thought it would be appropriate to make sure this was available for review this evening and see if it's still necessary so that's what this is about just make this bigger so you can right and with or without this policy i think i've said this before but um you know the the changes in learning models would have always been you know the decision of the superintendent you know i saw this as a way to interject you know the board in that decision-making process when it says you know that it the decisions would be made in consultation with the board um but you know with or without it the the you know the superintendent had had the power to make those decisions um and so my feeling is that this this could be repealed i don't know what that process is that's why you know i put i i requested that beyond the agenda so we could you know talk about what that process looks like um and so i i think it's it's time to retire this um but i will open the floor for for your thoughts comments questions can you hear me yes go ahead i agree i think it's time to repeal it i have no objection to it either to to you know to some setting it um this also has the that clause right at the bottom kevin it says or am i mistaken no oh yeah there it is it will remain in fact for the duration of the 2021 school year or until repealed by the board well it doesn't matter what it says if we're going to repeal the whole thing right right so kim how do we do that how do you repeal it yeah i think you would probably make a you would make a motion to the you bring it to the full board and you would make a motion simply that to repeal policy number one six one one four point eight one okay and you'd have a discussion and your group would recommend the reasons why and then you'd have to vote okay so i will ask for um a motion to recommend that this be repealed motion to kathy was that sorry yes oh catherine thank you sorry and i can quicken it for her second did it by kathy all in favor aye okeydoke right thank you and so the last one is a discussion update regarding certified and non-certified required uh vaccinations i i know kim has um shared some of these expectations a couple of times at the board meeting at least the last time at the board meeting but we thought it was necessary to speak to this in policy number one speak to why we don't think it should live in policy but to just remind the board and the committee right now um what's required of us per the executive order sure so um let me start with why i'm not sure it should live in policy and and we can walk through kind of what we have it's really a protocol and the executive order and it's implementing regulations advise us to establish protocols for how we're going to handle compliance with the executive order so that's exactly what we did in crafting our protocols and again i think to my earlier comment um the more that you embed these in granite the more difficult it is for you to tweak them in keeping with changes to the executive order or any of the instructions about how to comply or even how to tweak those rules to accommodate the best interests of our employees and and so and we have done actually all of those things since the time the executive order came in so that's why i think um it really is a protocol by whoever it is in our organization that administers these um vaccination rules and and compliance with the executive order um and you know right now that's come out of my office so um the protocols are without regard or distinguishing between certified or non-certified staff it's everybody and if anything if there are any groups to be distinguished it's really those who are employees and employees means every single person across the district who works for us or who volunteers for us in some cases and the only group kind of outside of that are employees that come to us through vendors so the vendors piece is the easiest one to deal with we have had an outreach to as many of the vendors as we could think of the obvious ones are people like the bus drivers and what the order required us to do or the implementing rules required us to do was for to us to ask those vendors to certify to us or to affirm that they are in compliance with the executive order so super easy i wrote the letter i attached everything you know all the rules and everything to it sent it out to um some of our temporary staffing agencies the bus companies um people in sodexo and simply said please affirm for us that anybody that you are sending to the danbury public schools is in compliance with the executive order and they have all done that i think save one i'm still waiting on one um so those are the easy folks um those people who are in our organization um and those number about 2 000 i think we did 19 something about 2 000 are all on a master sheet and um we did a couple of things to enroll them basically one is we opened up the tyler technologies portal the employee portal and we got everyone who collects a paycheck from us to set up their own individual page in their portal and eventually we're going to use that for things like payroll stubs insurance benefits information all that kind of stuff that our employees can access in that one portal but we also used it to everyone complete a form to document for us at that moment what their vaccination status was and what we needed to do prior to september 27th was anybody that worked for us prior to september 27th either need to produce needed to produce to us proof of full vaccination status which is two weeks after your second dose or your terminal dose and um they needed to either produce affirmative evidence of that in the form of a vaccine card or in the alternative they needed to have a request for an exemption from showing us proof of vaccination status and the exemptions at that time were three-fold one was a health care related exemption signed by a healthcare professional who validated that the employee could not get the vaccine for medical reasons we saw that with some people who were severely immunocompromised or who were going through chemo who needed to wait to get that vaccination the second category was religious exemptions and i got a lot of those for some things that i just never thought of um so we got many of those and the third was the what i kind of snarkily called the just because exemption um it was kind of a third category or other and it was for those people who simply refused for whatever reason personal liberty or any other reason to get the vaccine and show the status that was prior to september 27th and we collected all of those we didn't have a whole lot of exemption requests we had a lot of others and we were in the process of whittling down what started as about 600 people down to a couple hundred those people who did not prove provide proof of vaccine status needed to engage in weekly testing and um there's a couple of guidelines that came out under the regulations one was that um it was not required that the district pay for it didn't kind of come out and say that but what it said was the employee must submit proof of a negative test and secondly that that test must be taken within 72 hours of reporting to work for the week um so we set that protocol up and originally you might remember we had um a testing window we picked wednesday as our day zero so wednesday was the day that people were going to report to work and we went back 72 hours so day one was tuesday day two was monday day three was sunday and we picked wednesdays um in order to pick a day when we did not have a heavy strain with subs um or as heavy of a strain and it would also afford everyone one weekend day in order to be tested we went through the first three weeks or so with that model and then as the list of folks who were being tested continues to decline it's now about 140 and i felt comfortable at that point of opening up the testing window to either your day zero was tuesday or your day zero was wednesday if your day zero is tuesday you have to test saturday sunday or monday submit results um by monday at four or if you wanted to test them during the original scheme you could also do that as well the reason why that was significant and that was one of the places where it was nice to have the latitude to tweak without going through any other more official process was that we had a lot of people who wanted to engage in the saliva test and there's very very few places that do that and they do it on thursdays and saturdays primarily so that took kind of the remaining folks that were really concerned about the testing window and it gave them that extra day that saturday to be able to go ahead and go through the process what we set up in order to be able to monitor everyone was a google form system tyler did not have the capacity to do that which was kind of one of our frustrations with the system but we set up a google form basically and so folks complete the google form and they put their name their location the date that they took the test um the date that the results came back and just whether it was positive negative or negative or inconclusive we asked them to verify the validity to swear the validity and then to upload the test results all of that comes into a google doc and the beauty of that is it formats into an excel sheet and we can just look down the list and see if we have missing test results we compare it to a master sheet to see if anybody has not communicated with us what we've done now is anyone who does not have test results by the deadline so it's four o'clock on either monday or tuesday who does not have test results by the deadline they are placed for the next day on an administrative leave without pay um pending testing we had a lot of people who didn't go to test um and and mind you you can also do a rapid test so you can you know you can do a quick turnaround test anyone that forgot um didn't want to go those folks received notice and there's a series of emails that go out like gee we haven't heard from you yet um gee we still haven't heard from you and now tomorrow you're going to be on an administrative leave with with no test results those people can cure by providing a test result within 72 hours in order to go back the next day but right now we've got a team in my office that from four until about 7 30 at night are just reviewing to make sure they've got everybody's information in um and then they post absences into aesop send out an email to admin council reminding them to check their daily reports in their buildings because they may have some vacancies that need to be filled with subs um we've really gotten that list down the place where we're still seeing kind of persistent problems are with elp and we're really working with those people we've got a couple in school lunch but it's mostly the elp folks that we continue to kind of shepherd through um and i will tell you our administrative our administrators were great um sodexo was has been excellent they are literally for those folks having trouble either remembering or getting to a test or getting the results submitted they're really hand-holding and walking them through it so that the system's running pretty well now um the only change to that system that will likely happen now is um the executive order says or the regulations say paid testing results from a test provider are not a reason to suspend this you know you can still come to work pending test results they say if if it's a test result delay that's no in fault of the employee sorry you can't come to work um so one of the things that i negotiated um just this week with aaron daley with the teachers is that and i think we'll roll it out across the district is for those folks um where they can establish that you know for whatever reason the test facility was swamped they lost the test whatever it is we would allow them to put a sick day in rather than have an unpaid day out they can't come to work for sure um but they have they would have a basically a paid day while they waited for that test result to come in i was asked as of last friday all districts were asked by the state department to submit data which we did it asked how many of our folks certified and non-certified how many are vaccinated how many are partially vaccinated and how many are in a testing protocol so we submitted that data on friday i haven't seen any collation of the data across the districts but um i think i reported to you all that our vaccination rate is really high it's in the it's in the low 90s um percentile so we're really really comfortable with that um an email went out today from cathy o'dowd to all hands because we were starting to get some inquiries about the booster and would we be running clinics for the booster um we're not running clinics for the booster so she put out an email today that i worked with her on that points people back to their primary care doctors who now are getting shots they have some supplies in their primary care doctors offices or to other providers there are a series of no cost test centers that are no cost by designation of the state where people can go to get the boosters and to get testing so we've been kind of pushing that information out to people as well so they would have it the other thing i learned from kathy today is that i think that the attention on boosters in the health department is going to be a little bit um waylaid because they are really going to focus on the elementary kid clinics now um so they are now that the approval has been made for the vaccine they're going to really work on making sure um i know cara prenti is working on making sure they get the doses and that they're made available to our families so they're going to really focus on running the student clinics now so we'll continue from you know from my office working with kathy to try to point people in the direction of where they can get a booster um and where they can get testing so it's a lot of information that's why i think it doesn't live in policy so much because it just changes literally it changes in reaction to the governor's order it changes the reaction to just the health care system and the health department and it also changes you know there was there was a lot of really loud people with the saliva testing and that was really what motivated the opening of the window a little bit more when we were comfortable we could monitor it all so i think we're running really smoothly now the trick now is just to keep people complying with the testing by that four o'clock window so that we're not chasing people down at nine o'clock at night or you know that's the other piece we're just trying to keep a handle on that's great thank you kim i had no idea there was a saliva test yeah yeah there's a saliva test you spit in a tube um i know one just anecdotally because i know my son had one where you um you ordered the kit the test tube came to your house and then you got on a zoom meeting with a nurse and the nurse watched you spit in the tube and then you put the top on and you twisted it and blue dye went into it and you put it in a box and you fedex it back and they had the results overnight um yeah there's a lab out of brantford that's doing them now and you know for people who don't i mean don't want to have things stuck up there as it's been great i i'm hoping it'll be a little more widespread and i think there's also an inside of your cheek one as well now the only thing we can't take are the home tests because they can't verify that you're the one who took it yeah yeah great any um anything from committee members on this no okay great thank you so much you're welcome um so with that is there anything more kevin that you asked so so just a reminder for the committee this seems like ages ago uh we partnered with with cape um during the beginning of the 2021 school year to fold in our policies in the in in the platform uh so it's managed a little bit more efficiently for our families the majority of our policies have been updated and they are indeed reflected um in the new platform on the website however there are policies that were approved um and during the 19 to 18 19 and 19 20 school year that are not reflected there so we we just have a little bit of scrubbing left to do just to make sure they're all updated um and actually in in the platform um i i believe there's only maybe a handful less than 10 but i think more than five policies that are still outstanding so we just want to confirm that with cape um and then you know we have a a number of policies that have been uh whether it be required recommended or you know recommended slash something a policies board should consider um you know it's been a while since we've revisited those policies um you know given these last 18 months so it will be an opportunity to number one i can kind of give the board an update on um if the cape policies on our website have all actually all been updated so i can provide that verification at our next meeting um and then um just kind of share it as per the audit uh from cape some time ago um just kind of where we are in that audit process um and just kind of you know catch catch the committee up of you know where we were you know prior to the audit and kind of the gains we've made and you know kind of like with what's kind of outstanding um you might recall rachel uh you know the majority of our required policies those boxes were checked um however we did have you know a couple policies that are recommended that the board really should consider um you know one of them you know my favorite one is on the board you know being able to participate participate in meetings remotely um you know those are the kind of policies that were recommended um and you know certainly boys had the options but they were not required so there's a lot a lot of those type of policies that are out there i think that the board might want to consider moving forward so no no um required did i hear that correctly there are no additional required right right so when we had that audit done the required policies you know we placed we placed up at the front of that process so if there are any outstanding policies that are still required that we haven't done i'll make sure that's made available for the committee for our next meeting okay great which is on november 30th because our annual meeting is on december 1st that is correct does anybody know when new board members will be sworn in because i thought it was around that time start it was january i think it's earlier because we have our no it's in the summer december yeah right because you do your board elections right officer elections at that december meeting first yep december 1st before you let anybody eat anything [Laughter] anyway okay so um is there if there's nothing else i'll entertain a motion to adjourn so moved moved by kathy a second second kate all in favor hi hi hi thank you all thank you
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
must try to not hear good evening everyone thank you guys for coming to our regular board meeting today's the today is november 2nd and um welcome to everyone who is here in person and online our mission the isuzu unified school district equips every student with the knowledge and skills for college and career readiness to fulfill their purpose and positively impact society when the public wishes to address the board of education of an agenda item they may fill a blue card and at the podium or raise their hand while they're in zoom attendance the board of education will take the blue cards request first followed in order by speakers at the podium and then those in the zoom attendance board members are not permitted to respond to public comment remember the staff will contact you if more information is needed thank you all for your participation and translation services are available to the public thank you all for being here we'll go ahead and start our open session with 4.1 our black salute do we have melody galastia from least full here hello we're ready when you are you can go ahead and start whenever you're ready pledge of allegiance gradually i pledge of allegiance to the flag of the united states of america to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all you may be seated thank you so much melody for leading us in our flags today what grade are you in melody i'm in fourth grade fourth grade awesome and who's your teacher miss lopez awesome awesome well thank you so much for joining us tonight and thank your parents for logging you on we really appreciate you being involved in our school board meetings have a great evening make sure to do your homework okay bye next we'll go ahead and move on to 4.2 row call we have board member who's gonzales present we have board member career here board member beau yeah board member yolanda uh rodriguez pena here and borden varianas i am here there's five of us we can go and can i please get a motion to approve 4.1 approval of the agenda second heavy first by board member career we have a second by board member rodriguez pena we can go ahead and ask for both let's go ahead and move to a hand vote we'll go ahead and start with board member grier yes board member cruz gonzalez yes board member beau yes and board member rodriguez pena and board member ariana's that is five zero and it moved we'll go ahead and move to 5.0 uh report action of closed session matters there is none which leads us to our 6.1 public comment on agenda or non-agenda items miss hope near is do we have any blue card actually do we have anybody in the audience that would like to pull those are got it thank you for that we'll go ahead and start with terry monharas thank you esteemed board members superintendent ortega cabinet and student board member for allowing me to speak tonight on behalf of teachers at ellington tk8 there are a lot of our people and even a student night my name is terry monteraz and i'm the resource teacher at ellington your task to determine the future of our district is almost overwhelmed and after listening to the prior board meeting a task that requires countless hours especially i appreciate that you are taking the time to delve into the many components of your imminent decision and are asking questions gain clarification when i saw the models presented at the last board meeting it was heartbreaking to not see ellington as one of the schools listed to remain open although i did hear later in the meeting that the schools listed were not necessarily the actual schools to stay open i would like to share thoughts on why ellington is essential to azusa unified ellington was the first school to become a tk8 school with the leadership from our principal at the time and the support of our district our school moved over the next three years to become a tk the eighth grade school the district spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a new middle school wing so that students from tk-6 would not mix with the older students our staff experienced first hand the bumps in the road adjustments that had to happen and the learning curve that went along with this major thing we were able to recruit willing teachers who were open to and came to support our vision and our community welcomed the chain one of our main goals was to keep students appropriately young why begin the entire process again at another site when ellington is already drawing students if ellington is closed we believe that many of our students would be drawn to covina's pool ellington and the surrounding neighborhood are located very near los palmas middle school and merwin elementary school in covina having ellington as a choice for these students who technically live outside azusa benefits ausd as they begin their education at ellington and then move on to ghs rather than north carolina finally parents want their students to attend ellington as of today we have 120 students on transfer who want to come to ellington that's 33 of our 33 percent of our population students who choose to leave their home school to come to our tk-8 school what happens at ellington is unique having students for 10 years at the same school allows the staff to get to know the students and their families to develop lasting relationships that enable us support to support students and their family the goal of keeping students appropriately young is evident every recess and lunch as students in middle school play basketball go on the swings or play soccer at recess since the sixth year existence of our middle school there has been only one fight can other middle schools say that our students and staff have created an interwoven sense of community a sense of belonging and a sense of acceptance to quote our new principal adrian acosta there is something special here at ellington you can just feel it when you step onto the camp our teachers are experienced work well together and provide a solid foundation for our students as you continue to discuss the future of ausd please consider keeping ellington tka a choice for parents and family thanks next we have mr ron tressel but i made it here on sound coming from basketball high school uh good evening board members superintendent and assistant superintendent and is ron tressel i'm a future class nice moscow coach for breakfast there are several concerns that i have that have come up in previous port the first concern is that it seems to me and not only to me but other teachers on our campus that our high school students have been given a poor reputation i know parents have been concerned about the school reorganization and about middle school students being placed on the same campus as high school there are concerns that their children who are in middle school might interact with those they're in the high school and that middle school students may be poorly influenced by high school students i feel as if high school students have been made out to be the boogie and this is shameful we should never put the kid in that position it's one thing for decisive teachers criticize administration criticized board member can't do it for a kid all right they've gone through way too much in the past two years for people to come down on them so please i would ask that this doc and the board would stop this as well i can say that from first-hand experience from working with high school students that they are great kids who want to learn and have goals of what they want to do and be after they graduate from high school instead of fearing the exposure to the high school setting we should be embracing the opportunities that students will have access to on a high school campus my second concern is what was stated by board member cruz at the last meeting he stated that parents are sick of the way our kids are educated this comment was unprofessional and board member crews should apologize for these comments our teachers have worked long hours because we want to give our students the best quality education that they deserve these two paths these past two years have been tough on everyone but even though kobe took us out of the classroom last year there are many success stories our teachers and our students have enjoyed being back on campus this school year yes there has been areas where we had bring our students up to speed but as teachers and students have shown if you have the resources and resolve anything can be achieved my next concern is that we take a deep look into the pros and cons of the iv program now i'm a father of a student who went to the eye program at south hills high school he got a lot out of it he enjoyed being in the program and he said that it prepared him rigorous apology on the other hand unlike ap classes he was not able to transfer over his iv credit because many colleges do not accept ib credit the ib program costs a lot of money with very little return and very low student enrollment for those for but for those students who are in the ib program it will improve their writing math thinking and communications i just want to make sure that you take an overall view of the ib program all right laughs i know the school board's decision about the reorganization process it's a tough thing all right i don't envy i really don't it's a tough position to be in okay and i know that you know it looks like your course may be going toward towards a one high school camp what i would hope is that you don't make glass stone into an art pattern i think if you're gonna pull the band-aid off hold it up keep all the students on one campus so that students have people access educational and sports thanks very much next we have mr bob uh polar on zoom can you hear me yes sir oh um good evening everybody um i am uh here tonight because uh i was asked by a colleague to come and say a couple words about the ib program um uh this is a tough time for us it's a very difficult time for the school board making these difficult decisions uh about what's gonna happen in the near future with our us with our schools as you're making those decisions uh and i think i've had a conversation with almost every one of you individually about the strengths and the rigors of the ib program i'd like for you to actually consider expanding it and as you're making these decisions about whether we're one high school two high schools nine to twelve or seven to twelve um i just want to share with you that if we could consider bringing in an nyp a middle years program and a pyp a primary years program um both of those programs would help uh in many ways i think one way would help make us more attractive on a personal note i think i've shared my personal story with several of you individually that my children were going to the elementary school at the end of my street and i approached that district and asked to bring a pyp program in they did not so i pulled my children out of that district and brought them to a different district so they could have the pyp program i watch the change in my children uh and watch them grow and develop and uh all that they learned and i would base a lot of that on the the pyp program that that school had if we had an nyp program it would better ready our students for the ib program the diploma program we have the high school and more so than even that the mip program is for the entire school it's not a school inside of a school where it would affect all of the students and would help prepare them for any track that they do whether it's an ib track whether it's a engineering pathways track a medical pathways track whatever their goals are the nyp would help them be ready for that so this is probably wasn't even the appropriate time for this you have a lot of other big things on your hand on your menu tonight um but i just wanted to bring this in and say these words and if you want more clarification on anything i'd be happy to present to the board at some point in the near future or the distance future thank you mr buckler seeing that there's no more cards or anyone on zoom raising their hand we'll go ahead and move to 7.1 comments reports and requests by the board of education we'll start with board member bo thank you uh no comments from me tonight board member uh bruce gonzalez thank you um i have no comments either thank you remember rodriguez pena hi good evening everyone and uh today is the dia de los muertos it's a celebration of life and death remembrance of friends and family members who have passed away um i was going to report that i went to blackstone high school the the um spot admission day where high school seniors were able to speak to counselors one-on-one from azusa pacific university grand canyon laverne and the california baptist university they had their transcripts with them so they're able to you know show the countries and let them know which high schools excuse me which colleges were they were able to attend and they signed them up right in the spot i was so proud to see one of our students from uh glaston high school uh this young man i'm sorry mr ortega i believe his name is or artiega um anyways he was a student from glaston he was actually from grand canyon university uh uh speaking to the students uh i guess he seemed like he worked there at grand canyon so i was very proud to meet him um doing doing that job i went to slaughter middle school to be a judge on say no to drugs door contest the celebration was the red ribbon week and all the classroom did a fantastic job all the students and staff they were very creative it was very hard to select the out of 16 we're only able to slip first and second place winners so i want to thank the principal miss walker and the asb president hunter for inviting me i am i wanted to think together lights on after dark at powell elementary and central middle school at pal we took a tour to the classrooms and we see what the students were doing um i think it was the third or fourth grade the students were making little chains on a little kick where mache saying what are five things that you like about yourself and i thought that was quite interesting so some kids well you know i'm a good reader or i'm i'm uh what do you say i'm a good cat header or something but it was just cute how they were able to use their creativity on what they do best and some you know i'm good at basketball and i think it's great but we also went to the um the tk the etk to first grade class and they were making puppets and that's another thing what do you want to be when you grow up this little boy had a little puppet bag that had like m and i said where do you want to be he goes well i want to work at mcdonald's so you know i i think it's really good that they're so young and we put this in their mindset so young to know what they want to be when they grow up and that's through the work towards um my granddaughter you know i say this all the time but she was in the camp program at murray fourth grade and she said i'm gonna be going to apu being in the champ program so my daughter and i are like oh okay okay veronica you know here you will well make a long story short she did get a scholarship for apu because she strived and she knew what she had to do to be there volunteer her time keep her grades up and now she's at usc so um also at central middle school i went to um their after school program and those students are painting pumpkins including myself i painted a pumpkin and they had canvas art chalk art and the boys are playing a three-on-three basketball i went to glaston high school the broadway beach it was a beautiful evening um outside the weather was perfect it was a it was a full house but um the students were singing from the district elementary chorus the bravo slauson chorus bloodstone vocal music and i always enjoy listening to the kids and seeing them um singing believe it they were all singing with masks on and they were outside and we heard him beautifully um so we have many talented students i wanted to thank director music director jade clabasil and mary turner and then i went to murray school and slosted middle school for the um following parade and it was quite interesting you know the students had a great time i didn't recognize this florist for a while after she was just so beautiful she started talking i'm like who is that because we're wearing our mask on top of our costume but the students had had a great time it was nice that we were able to do that for the students this year um there was no parents involved but there were students there and that's what we're here for to be sure that the students you know felt that they were celebrating and wearing their costumes it was really nice so um i went to the deal de los muertos today at central school and they had a really beautiful string there that had employees that passed away from missoula unified and i want to thank the parent maria morito for inviting me thank you very much good evening everyone i just want to uh the only comment i have i just wanted of thank you out to just the number of community members who have reached out in regards to the the school reorganization process just the just the perspectives just the insight opinions that have been shared it it helps us to make better and more informed decisions when we hear from from you all so as we're continuing to have these conversations i i want to encourage all of you out there to continue to keep the emails coming in the text messages the phone calls i'm grateful for for the uh just community participation from from everybody and know that um that we hear you that this is a weighty process but that we hear you all we're grateful for good evening i would like to thank our principals at the different school sites where you guys brought some you know some normalcy to our kids um i know my own kids were super excited about getting dressed and even though they didn't have a um a parade like they normally do they were so excited to go see what their with their friends were going to be dressing as like that's it that's halloween for them you know for my youngest daughter she didn't care about trick-or-treat he just wanted to see what other people were wearing and that just made her friday saturday and sunday just it was so excited and so i want to thank you guys you know for for doing that and and the kids you know lifted the kids spirit little things just you know now as they're moving into the holidays and i know that we're still here with kobet but being you know being able to provide that is is such a gift to these kids to our kids right with mental health our kids have been indoors for two years you know we we didn't go trick-or-treating this is the first time it's like how do you drink a tree or you know do we wear a mat and so we did you know with precaution and stuff but i i just want to thank you guys and for this the teachers wow thank you for having them all day with their costumes they're probably like picking at it taking it off i yeah and thank you for that and um and thank you for not giving them candy mine would love it but i said none at school thank you for that and welcome to november and here we are and yes we are we're having conversations um important conversations and important conversations that should be had and we are having them now and i don't know if you guys um heard last week we we have moved our decision on to december 21st that is on tuesday we will be having special meetings um to be discussing facilities programs and budget right and so i welcome you guys to come to all these special meetings we will start some of it tonight um but we will be having at three or four meetings um before we make our decision and again i i would like to echo the the sentiment of of your expression and and what we're doing um moving forward with this and you guys are right this is this is not an easy and easy task for anyone you know and whether you just moved into the district whether you just got hired by the district right or whether we've been here for 45 years right it's still not easy but thank you guys for your support we'll go ahead now and move to our comments and reports by our student board members we'll go ahead and start with miss annette camacho this is 8.1 i do not see annette on using iphone okay go ahead and move to miss hannah hamilton good evening award um our next class competition will be on tuesday november 9th all day at chick-fil-a in azusa who will win this time will the seniors take the lead again make sure to show your classifier to receive points each each class will earn funds and the class that earns the most will get bonus fund please tell your friends and family to support our classes on november 9th congratulations to melanie perez for being selected to speak represent azusa high at the city of azusa veterans day ceremony on november 11th your speech is going to be fanned as heck congratulations to ms kukulero for being selected at azusa high's classified employee of the year basically works out of the attendance office does a superb job of making sure attendance records are accurate and does an outstanding job of communicating with our aspect family we have a new thrift shop on campus our aztecs will have the opportunity to shop at the aztec thrift shop thank you to the many donors that provided clothes shoes backpacks and school supplies the look to our cross country and football teams as they prepare for league finals this week and the first round of cia go we are introducing a new online referral for community schools that is simply the simple and easy to fill out if we have a student that needs support with resources you click the link in an email to fill out a few questions and we will take care of the rest we offer linkage referrals tutoring healthcare mental health basic needs support immigration services employment opportunities and job support thank you thank you before we move on i also wanted to include our staff our csda staff for halloween i know that they got dressed up that there was teachers and so i wanted to include them too and give a big shout out um for all of our staff at the schools we'll go ahead and move to our cabinet yes good evening board of education staff and community i want to share that last week i participated in site visits of our school sites with a representative from the los angeles county department of public health last tuesday with a group of members from the district that included our superintendent um and we also had our district nurse um miss melissa lofton and uh gary uh real was also there we visited uh ellington who's represented here and they did a fantastic job paramount elementary school slauson middle school dalton elementary school and on wednesday we visited valley dale and um bastogne high school i'm happy to report that at each of this full site the principals and their staff did an outstanding exemplary job of showing off our compliance to the lacd protocols and the representatives from the los angeles county department of public health also commended us for our compliance with the requirements from lac dpa um i am aware and i wasn't able to participate in other school sites that were also visited um and i heard some of the remarks as well from those visits so uh is certainly on the map as far as our compliance to lacd ph protocols way to go good evening board and our fellow county members i would like to first start to announce that on october 21st um the district registered and successfully participated in the california great stakeout um we did this district wide we had our on-call system we had our um um district um disaster team out we actually did a site walk we looked for outsteady employees or not outstanding but maybe lost employees secured them sorry secured the building we had a communications team at the gate in case the news came up and we also did the same thing on our school sites then each school side was able to call in report out to say all clear and vice versa so i wanted to say um congratulations to all job well done it was successfully completed and i want to thank everyone for their support additionally i would like to take the opportunity to introduce to you all mr jesus jesse gutierrez um jesus is our new assistant director of nutrition services he comes to us with a bachelor's of science in kinesiology with a concentration and exercise science he also has a master's in public health and nutrition and diabetics he is he is in his second year of his doctorate program in business administration and additionally jesse is a licensed registered dietitian prior to coming to azusa jesse worked with the los angeles rams we won't judge him he worked at chapman university and palace verde he is born and raised in rancho cucamonga and jesse is ecstatic for the opportunity to be able to be a close proximity with his loved ones as well as to help serve the students in our community so the board of education i would like to officially introduce you in person mr jesus jesse as we call him gutierrez good evening superintendent community thank you all very much for this opportunity i've had a chance to meet a lot of the staff be able to visit the site we're very excited for all the exciting changes that we will be implementing um at each and every site and any questions ideas please contact me community um students teachers principals anyone facing for us being able to find new ways to become best of ours evening board members uh staff and community um i too uh like board member rodriguez pena i want to give a shout out to uh glaston high school and azusa high school for uh putting on uh on the spot admission days uh for our students uh what uh what a wonderful opportunity uh to be able to go into a room and walk out with an acceptance letter um i did ask just in case were they were they bound to that and uh they're not bound so they they take that and they can still go home and think about you know which university they want to end up at uh but thank you to the staffs of both high schools uh for allowing this uh opportunity uh to our students number two just wanted to uh communicate that last week uh we had our ad hoc uh committee uh meeting uh with the city uh just a a great way to keep communication lines open to share to dream to ideate things that we can do together and i'm just appreciative that we have this systematic vehicle if you will uh to ensure that um that that we're working together so just want to thank the city for uh for that uh and then lastly i want to uh build on uh uh mr ronkiel's comments about the lacd ph we have a total of 10 schools now that have been visited by the department of public health last week and this week jorge said it all i just want to add that another comment that the department of public health made to us has been making to us that they highlight our district is how systematic and how um everything is the same they come to this school and they go to the next school and they just appreciate how systematic and routine and um the same they are and so they just want to show a lot of appreciation that that i thought that has happened and so i like jorge thank you to all the staffs it takes a lot of work these are moving targets sometimes sometimes twice a week they move um and so to keep up with that and to stay on top of that i just want to show my appreciation to the staffs that have been navigating uh this with us together good evening we would like to welcome mr manuel sanchez to azusa unified school district as our new director of technology and management information systems manuel brings a wealth of deep knowledge and experience from the field and we are absolutely thrilled to welcome manuel to the ausd team at this time i would like to invite manuel sanchez to come to the podium to say a few words good evening report president giannis honourable members of the board superintendent ortega our distinguished cabinet members and those on site and online it is with much honor and great appreciation that i have been given the opportunity to stand before you as the new director of technology for the mis department i'm excited for a new journey among many other talented leaders who have made it their goal in life to assist the families of this community i come to you with 14 years experience in educational technology and a passion to support all learners regardless of age gender or economic disadvantage this 14-year journey began over 21 years ago when i made one of the best decisions of my life that decision was to marry a teacher it is my wife patti's passion for education and her ability to connect with her students that gives me the motivation to better the lives of those around me she showed me that we not only have a responsibility to educate our youth today but to prepare them for tomorrow and the rest of their life that is why i would like to thank my wife patty for helping me choose a career that can really make a difference and to mr antonio flores principal at paramount elementary and mr netflower as mrs janet flores principal of murray elementary thank you for showing me that it doesn't matter where you come from but where you stay lastly i would like to thank everyone involved in the hiring process for having the faith in me to take this role i hope to make you proud thank you we stole another balwan park people yay welcome both jesse and um manuel yes yes i know you're trying to sneak out of here sorry to put you on this um yes i just want to congratulate you guys and welcome to asusa um i i really hope you guys are ready to roll up your sleeves because that's all we expect now from people that we hire right and and to most important you know most important is it's about the kids how can we move this district forward for our children so with that have a great evening and welcome to asusa moving on to our general function families get a motion to open 9.1 public hearing the board of education will convene a public hearing to receive public testimony concerning proposed trustee voting area plans associated with the district's transition but by trustee area election i move to open the public hearing we have a first by board member rodriguez penas second by board member beau more president uh call the vote please and i'm calling the vote and do we have a vote by a board a student member yes and it passes 5-0 to open up this hearing will not convene a public hearing to receive public testimony concerning proposed trustee voting area plans associated with the district transitions by trustee area election system under california elections code section one zero zero one zero the board must hold at least two public hearings prior to holding a public hearing to adopt a final trustee voting area plan as part of this hearing members of the public may submit comments on the establishment of voting area boundaries for the new trustee voting areas that will be established as part of the district's transition from an out from an at large election system to a buy trustee area election speakers will be given three minutes make comments on this matter in this matter only have we received any card good evening members of the board i'm jonathan salt with f3 and i'm joined by the demographer and i think it might be helpful to first give a brief presentation and explain the process and the maps and then potentially field any additional public and board comment if that makes sense to you yes let's go ahead perfect good evening everybody again i'm jonathan salt joined by justin rich the demographer and tonight's a big night it's the first public hearing there are actual map options available that ultimately the board will select in the december board meeting a little bit the background why this is happening and what's going on here the california voting rights act or cvra is about 18 years old and it prohibits at-large elections if those elections impair the ability of members of protected classes from influencing the outcome of an election or electing candidates of choice district currently has an at-large system and around the state you may have seen that folks are being sued by potential plaintiffs claiming that their election system violates cvra and when that happens those plaintiffs are entitled to significant attorneys fees but if a school district or a city were to prevail they're not afforded that same right so what is a buy trustee area election system which is what the district is going to switch to for the next election besides being safe from cvra the district will be divided into five roughly equal population areas and a board member will be elected from each area only by the voters who reside in that same area now importantly and as you'll see on the maps um you've all been lawfully elected you'll all serve your full terms regardless of where you live right now but over time um there will end up being one trustee per area so we had the pre-map stage earlier in the fall where we feel the comments about how folks would like to see certain lines drawn potentially now we're in the map drawing phase and so i'll hand it off to the demographer to talk a little bit about the criteria for drawing the maps and walk through each of the options justin thank you for having me tonight um the the first and in primary consideration that goes into drawing maps is making sure that based on the 2020 census data that we balance populations amongst each of the areas our goal is to have a variance that's less than 10 percent between the the largest and the smallest area note that uh they won't be uh exactly equal but as as equal as is practical uh when we consider other uh things that that go into drawing those trusty areas as well we must comply with the u.s constitution like i said we we need to uh to achieve population balance as as much as we can and we must also comply with the federal voting rights act um the the federal voting rights act states that we shall not impair the ability of a protected class to elect the candidate of their choice uh you'll note that in the the demographic information that we've provided along with each of these scenarios i'll point to some of those aspects and how they relate to the federal voting rights act uh additionally the the voting districts should be geographically contiguous uh they should encompass communities of interests or neighborhoods uh and to the extent that we can and this can be challenging given uh varied population densities and also the topography and just general shape of the district boundaries try to keep them as compact as possible uh lastly they cannot favor or discriminate against an incumbent or political candidate or political party so uh just in terms of the the results of the 2020 census uh what it told us is that for for your district the total population is 69 uh the population that is 18 and over is 811.
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we've included a map on this just on the previous slide that shows the the jurisdiction served by the school district we've also included in our in our prior presentations as well this graduated color map and what it does is it takes each census block within the district and color codes it based on the concentration of the hispanic latino voting population based on citizen voting age population gathered by the american community survey i'll note that the largest protected class and largest group period is the hispanic latino population this is the the estimate that we use for eligible voters within the district so in the first scenario i'll just note a couple of things and starting in the southwestern portion of the district the area that's in yellow it may be a little hard to to distinguish just based on the slide but i think the maps posted on the district's website do a better job of this uh you'll see in yellow here is trustee area one and then working in a counter clock clockwise manner trustee area 2 is in green trustee area 3 is in red kind of a reddish color trusty area 4 is in blue and then in a light purple color is trusty area 5 in the northern portion of the district i'll note that the major dividing lines uh generally speaking follow either major free roads and freeways uh and and this map tries to to follow along those major dividing lines next slide just one quick thing i've also included election sequencing on the bottom right on this slide in addition to selecting a map option in december the board also has to select sequencing of elections um and fortunately looking at the three options so far the work is sort of done for you based on when your current terms expire and so on this map for example should this be the map um there would be an election in in area one in 2022 because that would be an open seat there with someone's term expiring um area two would be 2024.
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area three would be open but that would actually be 2022 so there'll potentially be a new member or at least somebody who doesn't live here yet area 4 is 2024 and then area 5 is 2022.
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so that'll appear on each slide as well so just to note a couple of things on the prior slide it showed the variance is 9.2 percent and then when it comes to citizen voting age population um what what it tells us is that there are four majority protected class districts here in trustee areas one two three and five all of those are above the 50 percent mark and you'll you'll see in two of the scenarios we have four trusty areas that are majority uh hispanic latino based on citizen voting age population and and this is one of those next line in the scenario two map we've taken a little bit different uh approach to to go to the dividing lines you'll you'll see that the the area between trusty area one and two follow the 210 freeway excuse me areas one and five follow the 210 freeway we've also taken some some different uh ways to divide up trusty areas two three and four um again trying to focus on major dividing lines and and following the census blocks in those neighborhoods the major dividing lines are citrus avenue for instance the area around azusa high school which is pasadena avenue and i'll note here that the variance is slightly lower at 8.1 percent again that's the difference between the largest and the smallest areas in terms of the citizen voting age population in in this scenario we have four uh majority protected class districts for the hispanic latino voting population again this is based on citizen voting age population and in trustee areas one two four and five we have those majority districts again in in terms of the federal voting rights act that is a positive thing that we see here and a quick point of clarity the reason that not every one of the majority areas is highlighted in green is just because i highlighted the sections that are above the district average not necessarily that we're a majority so even though area four and five are majority hispanic latino by citizen voting age population they're not highlighted here but as justin said there are four majority hispanic areas on this scenario three i'll note that this is the scenario that has the smallest variance at 1.8 percent this does divide the uh the the trustee areas a little bit differently doesn't focus as much on the the major roads um but um it it does accomplish having a lower variance of 1.8 percent uh still the you know the trustee areas are oriented in in a similar manner uh i'll note that trustee area 5 on the area that is east of azusa avenue drops down further into our drops further south i should say and follows along generally where the promenade is those are the major differences in this particular scenario and also in this scenario i will note that um you'll you'll see the green circles there highlight the the areas that are that are above the average for the hispanic latino voting population however there are three out of the five areas are majority hispanic areas you'll note that still in trustee areas four and five those represent a plurality of voters so those are the major differences again as it rep as it uh relates to the demographics so again just as a reminder before we field comments from the community and the board um these maps do not change before anybody goes to school it doesn't change the district boundaries or even how the board's governed it only really changes how board members are elected and when still one district with common goals and challenges um tonight is the first map public hearing as we mentioned and as you may remember there were a few public hearings earlier in the fall two weeks from tonight would be the second map public hearing and then in mid-december there'll be one additional public hearing and then immediately after that presentation and public hearing the board will consider adopting one of these options to be its option that it presents to the county for approval um for those of you following along at home or want more information the district's website if you click on board of education and ultimately cvra there's a ton of information here about the maps the maps are linked there as well and i think there's some other information there as well that's helpful and so with that i will unshare my screen and we look forward to hearing any comments now we move on to our public comments uh from members of the public the speakers will be given three minutes to make comments on this matter in this matter only we have received cards see here of cards so we have someone online okay mrs amber food hello we can hear you now okay great um i had a question i was looking through the maps and i was trying to read over the information and i was slightly confused on how the board when we when we elect a trustee for a specific area if that trustee dedicated to the schools within their areas so um like for example i just happen to have a map three and i'm noticing that uh trustee area number one specifically shows that they have ellington school and slauson middle school within their trustee area so if parents or students from those specific schools had questions or concerns or needed to reach out to somebody are they only allowed to reach out to the to their specific trustee or can they reach out to additional board members and the reason i ask this is because with our school reorganization process these schools could change and we could end up in an area there could end up a trusty area that doesn't actually have schools associated with them or some might have more schools than others and i i was just looking for some clarification on how all that works out thank you amber i'm happy to answer that um if you don't want to use the rest of your time um but um two things one the physical location of any school site is irrelevant for this process i'm just important to note that um and even if through the reorganization there ends up not being a specific school in a certain trustee area there are still folks who live there who will attend schools that are ultimately board members are accountable to but i think most importantly um this does not change how the board is governed so if i'm a trustee and i live in area two and that serves you know x school or y school it doesn't make a difference i still represent the entire district and so board members would want you know everything to go well so that the school district would continue to function well um it's not as specific like it is in congress where this is my congress member and this is my senator and you know if you're not in my district it doesn't count that's how it works here this is just about how folks get elected to the board and when but the governance of the district is still exactly the same as it is now okay thank you do we have anybody in the audience that would like to make comments thank you to the public for your comments um would the board like to go ahead and do it during this hearing yeah did anybody else think she sounded confused as she read my name wait your mic's still on go ahead board member career so the the only comment i have i think the only comment that i have is in regards to these these three scenario maps and i i shared this to an extent with uh superintendent ortega it it makes me a little uncomfortable to see trustees on the map that i mean at all i think it's helpful to i i can see how it could be helpful for the community if the community is curious and wants to know where where questions are but it does make me uncomfortable to the extent that current trustees are where trustees live now is is taken into consideration for where the trustee maps are because we should be looking at what makes the most sense for our community regardless of who is currently sitting on on the board and so i just want to say that out loud because it presents a potential conflict of interest that that that makes me uncomfortable um and so as we are looking at these scenarios i just want to say i i i i would hope i would expect but as we look at these centers or any others that um we are not taking that into consideration with our with our decision um yeah i'll leave it at that it just makes me a little uncomfortable more than a little bit uncomfortable i'm sorry but i'm not understanding why you make students like because they don't you want to know where you live i mean like what is it i'm not understanding not at all that people know where where i live more more because we if if where current trustees live is taken into consideration as a factor for where uh maps are drawn and then we as a board are voting on what those areas are there there will there will you know we run the risk of you know there's the potential for for voting to preserve certain of us on the on the board because of where we where we're living but it's about you know what's best for our community not for or where any of us are currently um or any of us who are currently stationed on the board okay right now yeah we have mr jonathan stolt that's an excellent thought and i i'll i'll hand off to justin in a second but as you can see on all the maps there's pairings of trustees so there wasn't you know the the gerrymandering word i mean there's one map that has three trustees in the same area that's mainly there i think just so people see that there isn't anything officially going on and so that we can see how the sequencing of elections will work because obviously if you know if i live in an area and i'm my term expires in 2024 we can't put that area up for election in 2022 because i live there um and that would mean there'd be an open area somewhere else and so um i absolutely agree with with the thoughts there um just wanted to be clear and again justin you can take it from here but there are pairings of trustees so i think that shows that that wasn't done in a way to factor overly where everybody lived yeah and i'll just i'll just emphasize the point that we're required to have sequencing and and to present that as part of this and the only way we can know that is by knowing where trusty areas where trustees live within these areas uh and to be able to uh to ultimately game out how these how the seats are gonna come up for for the um you know for the upcoming election so so that's why it's included and i you know to to share the sentiment i do understand uh that that's uncomfortable this is that this is a requirement under the law though that we have to provide the election sequencing i have a question so one of the things that you guys shared was that eventually we would um all go to a one election so would that mean overlapping what does that look like and what is the time frame so what that means let me let me reshare my screen just to give an example okay can i see that i have the powerpoint up okay so let's just look at map2 just because that's where i am right now so what i meant is right now if you look at map two and you look at the northern portion here there are two trustees that live in area five um nobody is saying that when you adopt this map that everybody there could all be one of you in there what it means is is that during the 2022 election there will only be one candidate one trustee uh whether it's a current trustee or a candidate out in the community only one person will win this seat and then a new board member will probably win this seat uh who lives down here because that area area three has no trustee and they'll be open for election in 2022 that's what we talk about sequencing it stays on the same 3-2 cycle but it's where it's not just 3-2 at large it's three two based on each area so again if map two hypothetically is the map area one three and five will be open for election 2022 and areas two and four will be open for election in 2024 all for four-year terms each time but as of this exact moment there's not one trustee per area yet that will happen after the next election if that makes sense meaning that there will be one trustee in area five one trustee in area three there already is the trustee in area four there already is a trustee in area two and there will be a trustee in area one gotta thank you do we have any more questions so what if in a certain district we'll we'll say district three and um no one runs for a certain district just like just like any other board vacancy the board can appoint someone if nobody runs but the caveat is that starting in november you must have points from someone who lives in the area that's open we have to appoint someone lives in this particular area correct so if if the election happens or the sign up for the election happens candlestick happens for uh next fall and nobody runs for area three the board can then follow its vacancy filling process um i think there's a special section in there called failure to elect the board can't appoint someone to serve but they must live in that area the same way that you must appoint someone who lives in the district now now you must appoint based on specific trustee areas and then just my second question is on um scenario three how there's three stars on one area right so um it looks like one person runs in 2024 the other person's running in 2022. what happens yeah i'll pull that up that's an excellent question so it is this the map you're talking about yeah yes sir okay so um on this map as you can see currently there are three trustees that would live in area five should the board pick this map option and what that would mean is is that since there is nobody who lives in area four or area three the way the sequencing would shake out since you are on 3-2 cycles and there need to be three elections held in november is that the two trustees who live here whose term expire in 2022 wouldn't be able to run for that seat until it's open for election 2024 and instead there'll be an election in 2022 in area one three and four and so um come december 2022 there will still be one trustee per area but these two trustees in particular unless somebody moves wouldn't be allowed to run because that area wouldn't be open for election until 2024.
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again that's only the case on this map the other maps i think pair the two 2022 term trustees where in theory and i'm not sure who anybody is i just know where folks are on the map um you know either one of those trustees could could win the election or outside came they could win the election they would only end up being one trustee per area starting in december 2022. thank you we have one last comment by part number three it can you speak to you laid out a map process wise as we have these public hearings what is the purpose of i understand one of the purposes is just merely to have the public hearings but but procedurally what information or direction is is expected um throughout these next let's say two two three another excellent thought so um that's up to the board um you know right now this this is on here essentially as a public hearing it's for folks to comment for the board to comment and share their thoughts if the board say wanted to see something different or a different look you could give direction to the demographer to create a map option 2a or map option 4 if there were some very specific feedback hey you know i like this one but what if it looked like this is it possible to make it do that you can give that direction the demographer can make those adjustments some districts go about eliminating maps throughout the process i don't always recommend that i think you can just kind of let it play out see how you all feel about each option see how the community feels about each option and then at the way it works procedurally in the december meeting is you'll have a public hearing like this it'll close and then i'll have a script that you'll each have in front of you where anyone is eligible to make a motion to approve of the resolution with insert map number here so i move to approve uh the resolution with map option one as attachment a and then there could be a second discussion if it doesn't pass someone else can motion a different map until they catch the three boats so um you know the board is free to discuss as much or as little as it would like at these public hearings and at that final one um again a lot of it is your discretion uh generally boards tend to just talk about what they like or don't like so far and feel that community comment um you know as we move along here and unfortunately sometimes there's not a lot of community feedback sometimes there's a tie it just depends i just have one last question all right um so these maps that i'm saying here are they particularly um horizontal or vertical or it seems like they're going straight down and have you did one that goes like straight across by five districts if i understand the cr the question correctly the the trustee areas have been drawn more north to south as opposed to east to west is that right yes yeah and and i think the the way that we approach that is just looking at the major roads and and looking at at the freeways that it seemed logical to us and and as we started you know again this is you know balancing a number of things but most importantly balancing population so where it made sense where there were natural dividing lines again along a freeway or along a you know a major road it seemed to work better better more on a north to south but i'll note that you know the difference between scenario one and two is that when you look on uh you know the eastern part of the district we started to do um well i guess that's still a little north to south too but um you know we tried to take some different looks at dividing lines it's uh capturing where the population density is in making sure each area is roughly equal and trying not to split down uh minor roads that could be you know dividing up communities that would otherwise speak with a single voice so i think that was how we approached it but if you have suggestions on um how to to go you know more east to west i think that's that's helpful for us to know we don't live in the community uh we're looking at it from a data and um you know from you know again those those major dividing lines that seem obvious to us but uh you you certainly can add in additional color that uh will will help us to come up with better maps and so we can also change the line or does it depend on the population you know there's enough on mostly section you know district one two or three if we move the line and it doesn't have the the right population like the other one it has to kind of even out yeah you're you're correct pretty much yeah but but if you point to you know particular lines that you you think make logical uh boundaries uh then i think we can make those adjustments and then uh you know accordingly we'll make uh the the proper adjustments in the other areas uh as as needed and that's that's really helpful feedback for us and you got all these figures through the census or um did you look at map yeah all of this information is based on the 2020 census uh we we received that information just over a month ago and what we have is the total population for each one of the census blocks uh they they carve up the entire united states into small little blocks that generally represent you know small neighborhoods or uh similar zoning types and things like that so uh they they divide up the entire united states into these census blocks we aggregate those together and then we count up the total population for each one of their the areas based on that data okay thank you very much you're welcome seeing that there's no more i'm sorry it's one more question so what was the purpose of doing these three districting was there a reason why we had to do it at this time i just want the community to hear why this is being done so um the cbra and the wake courts have interpreted it is very very favorable to those filing claims against public entities um so much so that if you wait to receive a complaint um it could be pretty costly for a school district or a city even if you wave your arms and say fine we'll make the change and so proactively changing on your own allows you to have a little more control over the process a little more control over the timelines and and doesn't necessarily result in litigation or expensive costly um fees going to somebody who's trying to carve up the district because you know i have heard you know people will say well you know why are we doing this because you know we have a diversity on our board but i explained to them it's not necessarily the board it's the community why would you do this right it's a representation different part of the actual makeup of the board um surprisingly is irrelevant in cbra analysis it goes by the preference of um folks in the community protected class groups in the community um and so again the the racial or ethnic breakdown of the board isn't a factor it should their bc during litigation thank you great thank you for all your comments public hearing received public testimony concerning postcards reporting the voting area plans is now closed can i please get a motion i'm sorry let's not let me break crap it's an info item we'll go ahead and move on to 9.2 school reorganization you show your spring yes we're doing that in a second i hope if you can stop there you go um so just wanted to pick up where we left off uh last time the board had a healthy conversation about uh the models uh there were some questions there were some ideas um and then i suggested that if it was if it was helpful that we can try to capture right some of that sentiment so that you had something in front of you that you can then maybe uh spring forward from and so i just want to walk you through what what it is that that we did uh why we did um so that that you can begin your your conversation uh dana is there any way to make that uh larger just for the it's the next one the plus sign yep right there you go all right thank you okay so the first thing we did is we layered what what we thought we heard from the board of education on top of what the school reorganization team suggested or recommended or brought forward and so this what you see here is in no way shape or form saying you know the board was very clear that there was no decisions or discussions about school closures and naming schools this is just the same exact model that was brought forward by the school reorganization team and all we did was layer on top of it what we thought we heard so i'm going to walk you through through that so this one right here is called model 3 1 tk8 on the left hand side you will see the elementary schools again these are the elementary schools that came forward to you all by the school reorganization team what you'll notice here though is that in valley dale we added a parenthesis and we said this would be the dual immersion school uh wall-to-wall to wall this is the dual immersion school meaning if you do not like dual immersion or you're not interested in dual immersion then you cannot attend valley deal because valley dale only offers dual immersion it's a dual immersion uh school would hodge be removed in this particular one there would be no dual immersion at hajj that is correct and would it be mandarin and and spanish gonna get to oh gonna go oh valley deal no valley deal would be dual emergency spanish only and i'll get to we'll get to the to the mandarin uh in a second well you will notice also if you had the original um school reorganization model three uh what you would notice is that in the 2223 we're still on the left-hand side elementary schools that projected enrollment has increased because we're really shooting in the dark not really knowing how many students would actually matriculate or or desire or choose but we felt it was important to guesstimate project and so we actually brought some students over from the middle school brought them over to valleydale and that's why there's an increase here of projected enrollment for 22.23 that increase in projected enrollment then increases your capacity right on the right hand side again this is from the school reorganization team i want to walk you through here so here we've done a couple of things gladstone high school what we thought we heard the board of education glaston high school becomes a six eight i don't know we named the school didn't we we didn't i think we did no there were no naming schools and so i'm i'll aimed it right now yep because that's what the school reorganization team name right and so again we're not saying that that would be the one we're just layering on top of what the school reorganization team just like on the elementary schools the board never said we're going to close ellington or we're going to close lee right this is just for you to springboard a conversation so if we're layering on top what we're saying is that there would be a middle school at glaston high school there'd be six eight and that would be the myp the middle years program you heard during public comment a little bit about a little bit about this you will also notice that where it says glaston high school there's an asterisk um again just based on what we what we've been talking about we've been hearing uh this asterisk signifies that there would be a new middle school but on the glaston high school campus lastly the projected enrollment has gone down because we brought students over to valley dale tk8 at the high school level nothing happens at the high school level that stays as is except just being a little bit more clear that that the new high school is on the azusa high school campus in this hypothetical model in this hypothetical model that is correct that's layered on top of what the school reorganization team brought forward the next model again trying to to capture the essence of the conversation uh part of the conversation was well why don't we have two tka schools and so um again we took our our best attempt at what that would look like again trying to capture the essence of the conversation so if we start again on the right at the elementary schools again we haven't touched what schools stay open which we'll say is closed this is what was brought forward by the school reorganization team but what we've done here uh we we we think we heard conversations about um geographic location uh specifically north and south and so dale continues to be tk dual immersion spanish wall to wall but then we add a tk8 at the most northern school and that's hodge hodge becomes your pyp which is the primary years program and your myp which is your middle years program and that's where we can we can have and cultivate and grow uh mandarin the mandarin would be in conjunction with the primary years program and the middle years program but again this is wall to wall so that means if i am not interested in pyp myp uh mandarin then podge would not be a place for me to go because this would be wall to wall this would be the academy if you will right that would be that so again only going north and south uh just that's all just to give you a flavor now this model adds a tk8 so now we have taken more kids more students from the middle school and we have moved them over to here so if you notice on model one there's 3331 projected students but in model in the second one there's 3411.
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so again that increases our capacity here on the right side but it decreases your capacity uh on the on the right hand side in this particular again just a springboard this is all it is the middle school then does not become the myp the middle school is just regular comprehensive middle school and the nyp gets moved over to the tk the tk8 to have one school completely focused uh on that again nothing happens at the high school that would be that would be the the difference there yes oh uh board member bo yes mr ortega can you uh repeat what you said about the difference in capacity between model 3 1 tk and 2 tk8 because i i'm seeing on the one tk8 the projected enrollment for 2223 at 3331 and then in the model with two tk8s the projected enrollment for 2223 being 3411.
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so what part decreases or increases can you clarify that again a thousand percent thank you so on the right hand side if you will on the elementary school side if we move from the one tk8 compared to the tk8 the 2tk8 model increases the capacity and the projected enrollment because now we have more seventh and or sixth seventh and eighth graders going to a second tk8 so again we're projecting that we're going to take away from the middle school to to have those students come here obviously they're going to go because they're interested so then the capacity and the and the projected enrollment goes up for the elementary schools while the capacity and the projected enrollment for the middle school goes down and so if it's one tk8 it goes down to 1417 projected if it's 2 tk8 it goes down to 1337 again projected we don't know so that's so on the elementary side you go higher on the middle school side you go lower mr ortega i i'm hearing what you're saying and i when i'm looking at the page capacity doesn't change it's the projected enrollment that changes oh i'm sorry so if you look at below the projected enrollment uh on the on the one tk8 the capacity is 73.71 percent it's uh yes so at the middle school you go from 74.27 percent with one tka the capacity drops to 70.07 percent with the two tk8 and then conversely on the right hand side the capacity for 1t at the 1tk is 73.71 but if there's two tka it goes up to 75.48 again complete projections at this point in time okay thank you for clarifying yeah at that thousand percent thank you board member career similarly i know you touched on this uh superintendent looking at the model 3 1 tk8 and comparing it with model 3 option 3 which we would have gotten a couple of board meetings ago this it the the schools are similar the composition is similar in that there's one tka at valley dale in particular using that as a as the example but it it increases the capacity on this this week this this model and it drops the capacity in the middle school can you five by four four five percent can you explain that again a thousand percent so the one that you are referencing prior we did not move seventh and eighth graders or sixth seventh and eighth graders over to the valley dale tk8 because we were we just didn't know like are we doing 20 40 60 80 100 and so there was no student movement over and so when you're looking at the at the at the model that you're referencing prior that is strictly tk5 even though there is a tk8 and so here we said no we have to be a little bit more realistic let's move some students over to kind of show what the possibility is again really not knowing the attraction the want the desire of the community to to be at a tka oh um so also so if you're moving the sixth graders to the middle school so then that will change the elementary school's capacity and enrollment also correct that is correct so i'd like to take a look at what would that look like for school yeah okay so just some i'm clear just to clarify so we'll take valley dale dalton hodge magnolia murray paramount powell will show you you already know the capacity but what's missing from here is the enrollment the enrollment yes or the projected enrollment and then how does that fluctuate the capacity okay absolutely um okay and if we again just trying to capture the essence of the conversation of the board of education we also included uh two pages of possible cost considerations again these are uh projections and again these are a hundred percent based on what the school reorganization team recommended that this is not in no way shape or form saying that this is what the board wanted or this is what the staff wants is just just so you had something to to to chew on and to and to consider so uh building uh the valley dale dual immersion uh tka wall-to-wall um looking at about forty five thousand uh dollars and there's a breakdown there of that 45 000.
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there was a a question regarding the ib estimated cost uh at the high school so that's estimated uh just a little bit over uh 110 000 uh to do an myp so that's at one middle school so that's the one tk8 um we're looking at about 126 uh 400 if that was can i please go back to the why the myp absolutely so the 126 000 are we looking at oh one middle school thank you yes good we're looking at one classroom one program what is what what exactly are we are we talking about yeah so if we're looking at the model 31 tk8 and the 680 is an myp then the six eight would be again wall-to-wall uh an nyp school through all tool you mean all students will be in the myth program correct that is correct yeah that is correct if we looked at model 3 2 tk8 and instead the pyp and the myp were at a tk8 the cost is somewhere just over 92 000 two different ways and two different you know methods of approaching that uh transportation uh has also been uh a a um a request and a conversation uh so first i want to kind of talk to you about the approach that we took um again just to give you some some context so the approach we took was if we offered 17 routes right 17 different ways that buses would pick up and drop off kids uh drop off students in the morning and then redo it in the pm when they're going when they're going home uh that would run somewhere about 2.8 2.9 million dollars um per year we we do not think again projecting it it's hard to project this but we we do not think that that we would have 17 routes of interest from the community um we it's really hard to gauge what what that would be but we wanted to kind of give you based on our fleet there would have to be staffing that has to get increased but based on the fleet then we have the capacity to do 17 routes in the am and 17 routes in the pm we just don't think that we would even get close to that but again we could be off basically but you have to um buy more buses or you have to hire more employees hire more employees yes uh but buy more buses no how many buses do we have we have 17 operating uh buses uh but we actually have more than 17 on buses oh okay but you would increase their the bus driver's hours or hire more people hire more people just for clarity how many non-operational buses do we have i think it's over 20 yeah but i will give you the exact number and when we say not operating meeting it would take um special services to get them working but we have 17 in our yard currently right now that we are utilizing a different so we have i know this is on the high end 7 17 route we also utilize buses let's say to i wonder in this in this new model how relevant this would be but we use buses to transport students between schools let's say for sports things i guess or not even between schools even to other districts we lose our buses for that correct and that'd be athletics and so we can continue to utilize those but those are typically after so we would be able to run if we had 17 routes we could run all 17 routes and that would not interfere with the number of buses we have and the and the schedules i'm going to say that is only if we do not use all 17.
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so if we're using all 17 it could interfere depending on what time the games start and what time we have to leave and then if i can just add a little bit more context to that so let's pretend there's 17 routes 17 buses and they're going from again i'm just making this up right from 7 00 a.m to 8 15 a.m paramount elementary school wants to take a field trip to the long beach aquarium and they have to leave at 7 30.
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in that situation whether we have the fleet or not the fleet or the buses or not the buses because our our buses are on routes then at that point then we have to go a different direction and we either have to charter uh a bus for paramount to get them where they need to where they need to go and that that exists now with without without this that exists in in just normal uh day-to-day business if if you have to take a trip that interferes with our normally scheduled routes then then that has to be chartered out but also do we have um i i see this bus dirt hand buses and first buses they're not our they're they don't belong to ausd right or we we we contract right we contract for them too and those are are they mainly for students in special education are they mainly for yes ma'am and our high needs dude and those are those are provided uh via our i know what it is right board member bo thank you i have um i have four questions and i'll try to go in order of the presentation um in the the tk 8 model one or two schools um can you share with me the rationale for identifying valley dale as a k-8 rather than keeping our existing k-8 at ellington yes um so again the school reorganization team when they brought the model 3 forward valley dale was identified as the tk8 and so again we did we didn't touch it we didn't we didn't want to again make changes to it and so that's why valley dale is the tka and what was the rationale behind that to refresh our memory i would have to dig back uh to to unders to to to get that i i don't i don't know off the top of my head but there was a rationale and and the people who authored and did this or there was a reason i don't know if the team remembers why exactly it could have been and i'm just now unspeculating but it could have been just a sheer capacity like it's a bigger it's a bigger school but but again i could be i could be wrong okay so my comment around that is um as we're looking at these models around how many tk8 schools and which campuses would house a tk program um i'd like to see a scenario in which ellington remains the ka and what that would do in terms of capacity both in the k-8 side of the house as well as how it would impact the capacity at a unified middle school campus my second question is in looking at the program costs for ib um it looks like between the the pyp model i'm sorry the nyp for at one middle school and then the pyp nyp if it's at a k8 school um everything looks but it puts out you know the annual fee the coordinator training initial application um why wouldn't the pyp nyp k8 program not have an ib coordinator that are we missing a 20 000 cost on that got it so um one of the rationale on that one is that we do have uh staff that might be able to do that um in some of our plans we have uh identified instructional coaches and so we think that there would be a way to be able to do that the other the other thing is that in the in the secondary um the the teachers um have period right and so you can do you know a period off and not have a class but at the elementary level you can't really do that so you'd have to have a dedicated person so our elementaries are situated just a little bit differently so we think we might be able to do that with an existing staff and so with that are you saying that there would be no additional stipend for staff that would take on coordinator responsibilities they would have training but no compensation going forward no additional compensation going forward if it were a full-time position at the site then i'm not sure if there would be a stipend or not but there would be a coordinator because the program does require that but it might be somebody at this at the site who is a full-time position in that okay so their duties would shift from a classroom teacher to being a coordinator likely uh there's also we've again we have been talking about uh instructional coaches right and so in this situation we might have the coordinator who is also serving um you know facilitating the program but also as that instructional coach for that program as well i see i think um for the benefit of of the public and also for us to be able to keep track of this dr mitchell if you could footnote that on this on this document so next time we look at it we can remind ourselves um why we don't the expenses don't line up um my final two questions are around the transportation program um ms jamal am i reading this correctly that the um our estimated cost for drivers is 465 dollars per day for a five hour day and that's just staff time that's not is that just the hourly rate or is that grossed up with benefits as well as staff time um vehicle maintenance as well as um fuel close the total cost operate the bus for five hours so the reason i asked about that is because i i think in the previous document you sent us it was the 465 was above the line and that was staffing and then below the line you had additional costs for fuel and maintenance so is did i read that wrong um i believe so dr bill okay thank you um and then sorry my final question around transportation is um can we explore or you know what would be the the process to explore school to school routes versus home to school routes so in this example this can be either or so it's just the route so we um the number of routes is um we're saying we can do up to 17 in the morning enough 17 in the pm but it could be from home to school or school to school okay so that's like it's our capacity it's not the not necessarily the usage yes ma'am okay thank you so much you're welcome um so so again that was the kind of the approach on the transportation um and then we also put on here um again well we've heard uh right dreaming envisioning um imagining and so again in this model that was brought forward by the school reorganization team if if this is again there's lots of conversation to be had but if azusa high school was going to house the new high school and again we're in the in the dreaming and imagining um you have a small map here i know but there is a a section of azusa high school that has um really outdated portables um in this little red square and so again just considerations things to consider that could be replaced with uh two sets of ellingson style modules uh which these are the modulars that if you do not pay close attention uh looks like a regular building and that has an estimated cost of about 4.5 million dollars again what the school reorganization team brought forward it does close ellington another option if this is the way it went the ellington modulars can actually be relocated and so that's a little bit more um in terms of what you get as you're getting there you're getting nine rooms and a restroom and so that that cost is uh around three million dollars um again just just something to consider for that that particular area um right there and so one of the things as they're presenting right now the high portables right and you're explaining this i i don't see um as you said that um this is not a definite you know um where the bulls are going to be closing or where we're going to put it but what i would like to see which i don't see here is if boston was the main high school and astute was the middle school what would that look like right just like you're having here you know would you need some more modules um would be able to have the you know um that happened um along with the um we had heard a board member both asked you know to also see if ellington was not and what that would look like um and so again this was just meant right to to hopefully uh continue your conversation as as as you're trying to make decisions uh again hopefully it's helpful um as you're moving forward in in in that you have any more questions on this though there's a couple things that we've asked for yeah i wanna i really wanna go back to the beginning where you talk you made your assumptions about like for example where programs would be i mean i know we haven't really spoken about programs so like for example i i'm not sure we've made a decision that we want to have a wall-to-wall dia school right i mean there are benefits to having choice and having opportunities to be at a dice do dual immersion in an l and at one and like in belly dale and at hodge so that's that's number one that i wanted to bring up number two um and i apologize bye mrs so what happened i think the board had talked about trying to make the large comprehensive middle school the middle year program what what can you explain why you like are you not are you saying that's not feasible but why why a decision to try to try to put it on a k school instead uh yeah thank you um if i can just bird walk for for a second because i forgot to mention this um we've talked about stem we've talked about a school of the arts we've talked about and so again right these could be plugged in however that needs to be plugged in um so wouldn't the cost be different though i mean to board member chris gonzalez's point wouldn't it the cost be different if it was at one of the comprehensive uh middle schools i mean because there's more there's more students we and we've outlined that here so in in the model 3 1 tk8 the middle school is the myp right the comprehensive middle school is the myp um in the model 3 with two tk8s again because this is an opportunity to to again mix and match a thousand percent we can we can go back to the comprehensive middle school being the myp and then the other tk8 can be another specialty school or not um this approach uh again we just we just thought that it would be a continuous uh on one campus pyp myp um and so we just thought just because of that continuous kind of on one campus that that might be uh something of a benefit but again in no way shape or form are we married to any of this we're just trying to capture different looks and different and different views um but that's what it's meant for exactly for that so let's ixnay the the hodge move it here you know whatever and that's that's perfectly fine but that was the thinking the thinking was if we only have one tk8 um and it's a valley deal per the school reorganization team then that makes sense to be dual immersion uh and then have the myp at the middle school if we're gonna have a second tk8 then we thought you know what having a continuous program on one site uh we saw some potential benefits there a couple questions let me start with this this first one what what is helpful what is helpful for us to discuss and or land on so last last week we had a conversation to recognize that there are three major categories we have programs we have locations and we have budget those three major conversations to have so this is helpful because it it summarizes some of what the thinking was and put some numbers and details logistics around things we talked about last last week that's helpful that we that we now have this but as we look ahead how do how do we begin the next part of the conversation either around programs budget um or locations and i'd recommend programs and board member cruz gonzalez you kind of started starting some of that how can we how can we shift uh a program's conversation but shouldn't we start with the schools first and then go to programs and budget do we know what schools you're talking about what programs we're going to have our certain schools so i think we could there's there's probably because we're like all over the place i'm not comfortable with that right now so there i imagine that there could be an unlimited you know way to approach this i i would suggest that if we first think about if if we i might change my mind but if if we i reserve that right but if we start if we start looking at at programs and first ask ourselves what are the what are the types of programs that we want to have that might influence then where or looking at which campuses we have where we might put those programs and space some of those programs out what the size of the programs are what the the actual facilities themselves are are like so we could start with we could sever locations but we run the risk of starting with locations then after we talk about programs we realize that these programs won't fit at these locations or won't just but that's that's how we need to know what what locations you're talking about you know it's like that's why i talked about going in faces when i spoke about that last time right i mean like you know take it you know vote locations and then we'll know what's true we'll know what their capacity will know what the moves are going to be and then we'll know if the program fits in that too you're you're going the other way around i i would probably today at 8 51 p.m i i would suggest looking at programs before we look you know i'm gonna actually throw a third idea is that why don't we do it why don't we do that so i'm like thank you i must simultaneously simultaneously thank you basically yes why don't we do it like again because you're both right i i think that no i'm right [Laughter] right right because there's because it kind of goes hand in hand right it goes hand in hand i think it would just benefit you know our conversation to actually have that same conversation at the same time let's go first okay so it is i it is it is almost nine o'clock and we do have one on the agenda and i'm just wondering we're meeting next week on this again correct that is correct so i'm going to go ahead and suggest that we go ahead and this is a topic of conversation that is going to last more than an hour and so let's go ahead and um the meeting that we're going to have let's go ahead and have a conversation on that the direction is uh programs and schools um together you guys are okay with that yeah i'm good are you good i will submit to the wishes of the of my colleagues i'd be game to have some conversation now i also i also just want to say because because um you know i'm looking at this for today and digesting it today like i i'm not i'm not i i'm not asking for any changes or like updates to these i think this now gives us a week to look at this look at what what you put what the staff has put together and come back prepared to have a car like a i would say a better conversation about uh about what what about these options thank you board member bo yes um time to digest and focus solely on this next week i agree thank you thank you for that we'll go ahead and um since one of the things that our board member uh did fair it is almost nine o'clock if we have nothing um to add we'll go ahead and continue this conversation at this next um board meeting special board meeting we're moving on to 10.1 i'm sorry the consent calendar 10.1 through 10.7 can apples get a motion to move the consent calendar make a motion to approve item 10.2 to 10.7 we have a first by board member rodriguez pena we have a second by board member rear any discussion seeing that their stem will go onto our student preferential vote yeah and if we can please cast our votes and it passes five zero moving on to item 12.1 approval of modular classroom purchase from options for learning now please get it motion remove this item make a motion to approve 12.1 have board member rodriguez tanya send it members seconds any discussion in that there's no we'll move on to the student preferential vote yes you and it passes five zero moving on to a 13.0 curriculum and instruction go ahead and move 13.1 to open the public hearing to receive public input on the asus unified school district ausd educator effectiveness branded but expenditure plan make a motion to approve 13.1 a second we have board member rodriguez pena um first we have a second by board member beau do we have any discussion and we vote to open the public hearing board member i'm sorry student professional vote yes thank you and it passes 5-0 do we have anybody in the public that would like to go ahead and comment anybody on zoom we do not have any hands raised on zoom okay great thank you seeing that there's no comments the public hearing will now be closed is there going to be opportunity for the board to ask questions on this or will that come will that come when we actually approve the um the grant we can go ahead and do that right now yeah so i just have some questions about these expenditures particularly around the 1.6 million that we're planning to is it it looks like it's to sort of start a restart of itself program can you talk about that and that's it yeah so this is um it's not to start an induction or new teacher program what this would do would be in addition we have new teachers that do go through induction but this would be specifically to develop and implement our own support program for um teachers who are new to the district within the last three years there have been i believe um 49 teachers um who were hired and have been working in the zeus unified um and and that's likely to grow and continue and so um what we're very interested in doing is providing um support professional learning we would have a five-day summer institute for the teachers in the summer we would have uh twice a month after school we would be providing um professional learning for the teachers we'd also be providing uh in-class coaching support as well so um and there's a few things uh around what we're calling them um pillars of practice we we're looking to improve um educator practice for our beginning teachers we're also looking at improving teacher retention as well some of the professional learning would include effective implementation of content standards in our state framework effective instructional practices including how to differentiate for for all students culturally relevant and responsive practices our ausd success drivers uh we have a literacy plan that we've been working on and so we're very excited about that and providing support for that uh social emotional learning and well-being um uh classroom environment and community building and professional collaboration so those are really the pieces that we're one we want to put together for this professional learning plan and this funding um is it's a five-year plan so so these these total budget dollars are for over the over five years correct so for example for them so for special ed we're talking about hundred thousand dollars so that is going to be like 20 000 a year correct and we have special education teachers who are new would also be if they're new they'd be participating in in you know and getting some of the other uh dollars for this as well so i i mean i do have questions about i'm not saying that new teachers are not important but it looks like the bulk of the dollars are going towards that new teacher piece and i mean we do want to make sure that that our current teachers who've been with us and been committed to our district for a long time decades in many cases right that they're that they're that we're fully supporting their work um and i think about initiatives like seal that you're going to be that you're planning on implementing um a lot of the work you've done we're doing at the secondary level to try to increase the rigor and at that second secondary level um and so thinking about the balance of where you're planning to spend these dollars i appreciate the thoughtfulness of the different areas we're focusing on um but i also think as a board member what i i want to see um i what i really appreciated about the la about the esser funds is that you could tell we're very targeted we're really going deep with real a couple initiatives right and this kind of feels like it's um kind of there's there's a lot of things happening and a little bit a little bit of money put in a bunch of different little pots and so that i just i think um that i might be a little concerned about that i mean i i'm hoping to be convinced that that's the provided approach but but i but i do i just want to express that concern i appreciate that um one of the things also to think about in terms of beginning teachers or these are teachers that are at least in the first three years of their practice so this is not just for a first year teacher this is this would be used for teachers who are you know really in the beginning first three years so that's something to consider and we'd also be happy to reallocate some of the funding as well is that what the majority of the board would like yes i'm sorry i didn't hear what you said gabriella i was asking um the other board members their thought oh i i think sabrina's hanging out and like i said i'm actually that's not what i'm recommending i'm just saying convince me that the best the best use of these dollars is the is the is the new teacher the new supporting the new teachers that that's what i'm saying one of the things also to think about is that we we do have as you mentioned quite a bit of one-time funding that we have allocated significant uh you know uh dollar sport like such a steel for example in and really the thinking around um allocating this much money uh 1.6 million dollars to support new teachers is that supporting teachers in those first beginning years of their practice to be successful is really important especially as we are looking at potential shortages down the road we're looking at making sure that we provide a very healthy start to make sure that that our beginning teachers are successful not just in that first year but the second and the third year as well and to provide a systematic plan uh to really support their success that's important i think board ben robeaux has never broken hi um dr mitchell i in in looking at the the spread so the esser funds um go through june 2024 is that right there's the other there are different buckets of money but yes june 2024 yeah so the the kind of one-time money that the farthest we go out is is the 23-24 school year right um and then this um educator effectiveness grant goes out to 25-26 so we've got two years at the tail end um i think really understanding and looking at the the table understanding that these are buckets of money spent over five years i would i would like to see some reallocation toward um els and special education students the last two rows of the table knowing that those are some of our highest need populations and that all of our teachers teach els and all of our teachers you know support students with special needs including new teachers including veteran teachers so i am in favor of a little bit of reallocation and then also is it contemplated in this plan that the money is divided evenly over five years or is there a kind of a fill in with some of the things we're doing with s or money in years one through three and then this money could come in in years four and five to support those other language initiatives that are currently being funded by esser yes that's certainly one way to be able to look at that um because this money does uh extend a little bit longer um and so um we do have and when we look at um you know trying to allocate funding and taking a look at what our anticipated needs are we really do continue to look at our lcap and you know what our goals and metrics are for that as well this gives us just a little bit more money to um you know to be able to allocate for a little bit longer could we could i ask then in the next or in the regular board meeting where we'll be um approving the plan that we could see kind of a layered table where we can see some of our targeted funds our assert funds and these grant funds and how they support each of these learning buckets thank you i wanted to ask a question on the um coaching mentoring and professional learning for implement ethnic studies education we do not have an ethnic studies teacher at this time right we have a latino study but that's an extent so does that mean that we will be looking for an ethnic studies teacher or how are we going to use this that we don't even have a program at this time that's a it's a wonderful question thank you for asking that so we have um about of our english language arts and history social science teachers who have been participating in uh professional learning around ethnic studies and we've had several several days of this professional learning there are many ways to be able to implement an ethnic studies course one of the ways is to have a standalone course another of the ways is to be able to take our existing courses and redefine that course so there are lots of high schools in california who do just that so for example uh instead of a ninth grade english class just you know language arts it is a ninth grade ethnic studies language arts course and the focus is ethnic studies through literature so it's not necessarily um finding an ethnic studies teacher you're talking about training our own staff to become ethnic good that is one way to do it that's correct um and you can do it in history social science it can be done in language arts one of the other benefit is that um the teachers are also um learning how to incorporate uh ethnic studies into uh their existing courses and this could be done in world language it can be done and and many different courses where you can um you know have an ethnic studies lens in some of your units of instruction and are we at getting any help from our latino study teacher on any of these programs because she i know he knows both right he does um so i have actually had a conversation um with dr sanchez uh regarding uh what we're doing and our implementation um we have hired uh some consultants um that have been doing this work um and she actually knows the people that have been doing this this is what they um they do for other high schools and so we went ahead and um uh just i had made some phone calls and uh talked to some other high schools who have used this uh these particular consultants and really liked their approach um i also had these consultants go to uh speak with our diversity equity and inclusion uh committee team members and which had students involved as well um they all um really appreciated the approach and also recommended that uh that we go with the consultants that we have did they i know the muscle oh you do i do he was a board member moving on to 13.2 we have fall 2021 district diagnostic results presentation right i'm going to give dr mitchell a moment to pull up our slides and while she does that i just want to greet the board president arianes board member mr ortega and cabinet the board requested uh to hear results of our fall diagnostic assessments and so this evening i'm here to share and discuss uh those with you so we'll go ahead and using the slides talk about how this year we began a district-wide look at all of our students reading levels and math skills and this is in addition to our regular common formative assessments that our district give gives on an annual basis the purpose of a diagnostic assessment is really to provide teachers with actionable really valuable information about their students uh specific reading and math skills because those are two of the most critical skills used really in all content areas and it's an area that we want to make sure our students are we should make sure we know where our students are so that we can address those as they're returning to us from foreclosures and hybrid so teachers and principals over this this fall have been using uh this data to really plan effective first instruction for students and also to identify some of the added supports that our students may need in in the areas of reading and math so i want to start with looking at our high school students our 9th through 12th grade students uh used a reading inventory assessment which measures their lexile level and lexile is just a reading level that is well researched and accepted um it is based on on grade level uh expected reading levels for all grades and so um the graph that you're looking at shows you all of our 9th through 12th grade students and then it shows you by grade level where they how they performed on on the reading inventory the select file measure and um just just as a note the advanced and proficient reading levels are students who are reading at or above grade level and then basic and below basic indicate students who are reading below grade level for math um the next three slides are going to show you the result of our our high school math diagnostic high school math courses are um are content driven therefore one of the best tools to use as as kind of a beginning of the year diagnostic assessment is really to look at the students readiness for the course that they're enrolled in and so the cal state uc math diagnostic testing program we just kind of call it mdtp for short they provide um diagnostic tools that really support mathematics educators in um in preparing students in in california schools to be successful in their current courses and then to look at subsequent math readiness for the the following courses and like the reading inventory the lexile measures these are grounded and researched and created as i said by uh mathematicians at the the cal state's didn't use these so our mdtp results show what percent of students have mastered specific math domains uh needed for the course that they're enrolled in so on this slide you can see our integrated one and integrated to students where the percent of them mastering those domains that are necessary for success in those two courses the following slide shows you our integrated three and pre-calculus readiness assessment and then the final slide shows the result of our calculus readiness diagnostic and high school teachers in and actually in all content areas are able to access their students diagnostic data and use them to guide uh their instructional decisions for example it wouldn't just be your english teachers who would look at the reading levels because reading is such a core component of all content areas this will allow teachers in all content areas to really address the specific needs make sure they're scaffolding and differentiating to support student access to the content so and all of the diagnostics this year both the high school diagnostics as well as the elementary and middle school uh diagnostics are um online assessment so i'm going to transition now to looking at that middle school and elementary result before elementary and middle school we used an assessment called i ready diagnostic and they are designed i ready design these assessments really to provide teachers with again actionable data that points to their students specific needs their ability levels it identifies specific skills um that students you know have mastered and may need to learn in order to accelerate their growth and so um the diagnostic and i ready is for both reading and math and so what you're seeing on this screen are the results for the reading diagnostic and i ready and on this diagram you can see that students fall into one of three tiers overall tier one which is the blue tier on the diagram represents students who are performing on grade level and it says emerging because this is the beginning of the year so we're not expecting students to have mastered their grade level standards as it is is a diagnostic at the beginning of the year um and you can see that 46 of our students fell into tier one year two is our yellow tier and it reflects the percent of our students in elementary middle schools who scored one grade level below uh in reading and then finally tier three that orange here shows students who are reading two or more grade levels below and 31 of our students fell into this tier at the beginning of the school year looking at the same data we can break it down by grade level again the three tiers being reflected uh by this this graph and you can see uh all of the grade levels there and the years in which students as i mentioned uh iready also is where our students take their math assessment and similarly uh there are three tiers that students can fall into and in this case you know tier one forty-one percent of our students uh board in that range twenty-nine percent scored in tier two and then for tier three we have thirty-one percent of ours so in looking at math diagnostic by grade level you can see that break uh breakdown on on this next slide uh as well so you get a grade by grade snapshot of the overall performance in math and so teachers have been using this data individually they've been using it in their professional learning communities and in other collaborative conversations some of them with our team ptosis working to really get clarity first and foremost of where their students are with uh with math and reading and then to prepare to present and support students needs in in their classrooms as they're planning for instruction and the use of these diagnostic assessments has really helped us this year to create a more balanced system of assessments for our teachers uh so these are in addition to our are common formative assessments that we continue to give that are more performance task based um throughout the year so thank you so much for for the opportunity to share with you this evening and i can answer any questions you might have seen that there's none thank you so much oh i'm sorry no there's questions i did okay see the hands phase go ahead board member chris gonzalez i think sabrina had her hand up before i did though i just jumped in the photograph go ahead i'll wait yeah i was so i was really curious especially on the secondary level it feels i it you know it's helpful to see sort of the the once you broke apart the different um for the math diagnostic really seeing the different areas of math specific areas no not this not that already but the mdtp and i'm wondering do our that get this kind of rich data when it comes to the reading diagnostic because it looks it looks much more it doesn't look as i don't know how to say it like there's not as many components to me it looks like what you're presenting to us is just a single component about their reading their reading level proficiency yes and and for our high school students that is the first step in the diagnostic and then we do while we're not doing this district-wide that we do have other tools that we can use to diagnose diagnose the more specific reading needs of all students in all grades um and so we don't have district-wide results of that to share just the reading inventory results because we're not diagnosing in detail reading needs like for example students comprehension or ability to have phonemic awareness we're not doing that at a high school level with all students so then so tell me talk to me a little bit about about what happens in terms like say yes to on an individual what i'm hearing it's more individualized right is that what i'm hearing yes at the high school so maybe dana talk to me a little bit about what happens when a student let's say in ninth grade comes in and tests below basic on the reading diagnostic so for high school students with the with this assessment with the reading inventory it does it does not break it down like it does for uh you know the uh the i ready so when you have students at the high school level like you said ninth grade who are not reading at that um uh you know grade level uh proficiency yet um what are some of the things well that would be in classroom uh interventions right so our teachers on special assignment uh we have uh our english language arts mathematics history social science teachers on special assignments work in with the teachers in their plc's one of the things that we're doing is providing a secondary um kind of intensive reading course for our teachers to be able to provide specific strategies so this really does come down to strategies that they can use um every high school teacher is a teacher of literacy reading and writing right and so um we wanted to be able to provide uh continued professional learning on uh some specific strategies for teachers to be able to use as their planning instruction um and like i said a lot of this comes down to differentiating the instruction i think also an important point is that although a student might be below grade level what is extremely important is ensuring that all students have access to their grade level tech right and so there are lots of strategies for example reading the text out loud right um there are strategies that we can use to be able to support uh literacy for our older students so that's something that we know is a need and that's something that we are working on for professional learning with our teacher and special assignment and then my other question goes all the way to the end of the slide deck i'm looking at the math diagnostic and seeing the results of seeing that you know what what you see there in first grade right um and then see you know seeing the the later grades and so i mean my question is is this something that we've seen in previous years as as well that's my first question right so is this is this the trade does it have because i know we've been using these that have we've been using these diagnostics for multiple years no this is our first year okay wide okay applied all of the students using the diagnostic assessment using i ready yes and using a district by diagnostic okay but seeing seeing that i'm looking at first grade and second grade and seeing that big yeah i mean obviously there's other factors we know the pandemics had you know there's lots of factors but just wondering about when you see that where do we think in terms of how do we capitalize on knowing that these first graders or you know a good chunk of them are actually on emerging or on grade level and how are we going to maintain that momentum i think that's a dana question again too okay um so that's it it's very encouraging data one of the things that we're doing with our uh p3 cc work is coherence around mathematics instruction um it's something that the state's been working on as well right so we know that when you have a very strong early childhood education program um the you can the benefits can fall flat um when they uh you know after like third grade and beyond um if there's not a coherent system so what one of the things that we're doing in the p3 cc is really taking a look at our assessments that we currently have we've made an adjustment looking at specific data algebraic operations is one of the components when we really dig into data for our preschool through third grade um that is an area where we want to pay attention to that so we've changed assessment questions on our common form of assessments and we are using uh strategies around accounting collections for example to be able to see the extent that students are using uh strategies to be able to solve problems across the grade levels um it's been really fascinating work we've been supported by megan frankie out of ucla um the the team has been working really hard to really dig deeply into our data to determine just like you said like how are we going to ensure that and one of the ways to do that is through looking at student work specifically so um tied into all of this is the plan that we have uh now for kind of pivoting the way that we're doing professional learning um through this p3 cc and what i mean by that is that um our teachers on special assignments um the coaches that that we've hired um are going into the classrooms with teachers and really working with them around small group instruction around cognitively guided instruction using the um you know the um accounting collections methodology and we'll be collecting student data right to be able to see um to what extent uh how we're doing things are actually making a difference so that exact question that you asked that's exactly what we're doing to be able to look at that okay thank you and then my last question is or is really more about um sort of the what data we're looking at here i what i don't see here is any data around student groups right and so you know again looking maybe at the high school literacy right is that i mean are there trends for example do we have a lot of high school newcomers who are learning who are learning english or is that is that that big cohort that'll be low basic uh is that special ed students right who who are in these student groups if there are i mean obviously we want to we want to individualize any supports that students need but are there certain groups that we can look at and say okay we need to make sure that we're focusing on them that i feel i don't see that in this data so i can't you know i can't make any i don't have an understanding of what that what that would be for us um that and then my other just second my other comment would be around you know i hear i hear about interventions right and i think about back to nochella behind where we had a whole menus of interventions and you know we had this whole pyramid but it seemed like everything was focused on intervention and pull out and so really my wanting to understand especially as we start implementing more deeply mtss how are we ensuring that most of the kids are in that tier one where it's about first instruction right and not necessarily around like now we're gonna layer on intervention and i think that's those are the two things that are sort of in my mind still on the table where i i don't have clear clear grasp of how we're dealing with the with those situations so that was more commentary than just than a question any other questions board member bo hi thank you um i largely had the same observations um that board member cruz gonzalez had around the kind of the slide if you will when we get to upper elementary and into middle school in both reading and math um and so as we go through the year and look at our different funding sources and specialized programs i'd really like to kind of always bring it back to how we're tracking um the effectiveness of our inputs and and the impact of those inputs on the outputs um well these questions will these diagnostics be given three times a year fall winter and spring or are they only once a year diagnostics are given twice a year and that's in addition to our other common formative assessments uh that are district-wide teachers themselves also uh have assessments common assessments you know departments grade levels schools also have their their school-based but when we look at district-wide they'll be two of these diagnostic uh coupled with our ongoing common formative assessments so all of that data is what we use now diagnostics really the primary purpose is for teachers to use to address the specific instructional needs of all of their students to look at each one of them individually where they're falling what are the domain levels what are the specific needs and and in doing that they're looking at their el students they're looking at their students who have disabilities and they're looking at at where they fall in the different areas um but they can also we can also use these as we go on to to look at trends that uh might arise as as we go from year to year and all of that data is what we use together to to look at progress of our students but the primary purpose of diagnostics is for teacher use in a classroom to diagnose and then be able to provide students what they need in that that instruction in the classroom and are these results shared with students and parents um not necessarily i'm sure there are teachers that have i think students probably more so there was not a mandate to bear these results because again these are to support teachers in in driving instruction but i i would imagine that many teachers would would want to share and and help partner with parents in supporting the efforts for students to achieve we have parent conferences that are coming up so i'm sure that this would be you know part of uh you know the data set um what's other what's also really um i think great about the i ready system is that this is just one part of the assessment system there are many other components to that as well as you know as students are um you know working through uh using some of the pieces of the program so the teachers are also able to get some other data what is important i think in terms of the diagnostic it it does allow for um for teachers to be able to um provide um it gives them the data to be able to place the students in in small groups for small group instruction and this has been a big focus for us and so when we're thinking about you know kind of this layered approach of all the different things that we're doing we know that literacy is um is a focus for us and we have been working on a district-wide literacy plan that's uh that mirrors what the what the state has been developing so um when we're talking about um uh you know intervention um best first instruction is we know that that's the best instruction right but we also know that rather than you know pulling students out of this best first instruction but what we want to do is to be able to provide those just-in-time support right in all literacy and mathematics to be able to support students where they are to access the grade level standard that's what's critical especially coming out of this you know pandemic that all students are able to get those grade level uh standards and content regardless of where they are and we're giving them those just-in-time support thank you so much thank you for your presentation we'll move on to 13.3 approval of the contract between a susan unified school district a usc and bbk group and company can i get a motion to move 13.3 second we have a first by board member greer we have a second by board preferred biggest kenya student preferential vote yes any discussion seeing that there's none let's go ahead and cast our vote electronically and it passes five there item number thirteen point four can i please get a motion to approve the approval of the purchasing agreement between associate fight school district ausd and creative leadership solution ticket we have a board uh we have a first by board member greer we have a second by board member rodriguez pena confession and that there's none a student preferential vote yes can we cast our boats online i'm not able to i was just going to say something it looked like we already voted on that 13.4 yeah i don't think we voted on 13.3 i think we were ahead oh no i i did say the dbk group correct what's on what's on the screen now is the previous yeah for 13.3 voted now we're at 13.4 let's go ahead and do a roll call we have board member chris gonzalez oh wait it's back on do you guys have it yes okay okay and it passes 5-0 thank you for that moving on to human resources 14.1 approval of the 2021 2022 compensation package for substitute features can at least get a motion to move 14.1 make a motion to improve 14.1 okay we have a first by board member rodriguez kenya we have a second by board member grier we have any discussion or question yes i have a question regarding um the purpose of this kit for a competitive other district or is it the cost of living absolutely great question and i'm happy you asked uh the um the rate increase from 140 to 200 dollars per day out of 40 a little more than a 40 increase uh is to remain competitive uh to attract and retain our substitute they are in high demand and so um we um have experience and i thought um last time in my comments from cabinet uh about our challenges with uh building some of these substitutions so we see this as a way to continue to attract and retain our stuff did you um i'm sure you have hr friends from other districts but that you just correct right correct we uh we have a shared document so this is uh commensurate with um our neighboring guest great thank you thank you seeing that there's no more questions can i uh please get the student preferential vote yes thank you let's go ahead and cast our vote it passes five zero moving on to 14.2 approval of amended student teaching agreement between california state polytech university pomona cal poly pomona the associate unified school district ausd can at least get a motion to move 14.2 second that'd be first by board member greer we have a second by board member rodriguez pena any discussion or questions saying that there's none now please get the student preferential vote yes okay and let's go ahead and cast our vote online and it passes 5-0 moving on to policies and bylaws and this is info only from 5.1 to 5 i'm sorry 15.1 to 15.4 does anyone have questions on these this is gonna as you guys can see um it's become routine that we come and bring them just to update our bylaws and um to be able to use their board bylaws and um administration and regulations so seeing that there's no discussion we'll go ahead and move on to 16.1 unless anybody else anything right 16.1 a german cannabis get a motion to adjourn second we have a first by board member career a second by board member at rodriguez pena any discussion restaurant student preferential vote yes thank you let's go ahead and cast our vote it is five zero nine thirty nine you guys have a great evening thank you for joining us tonight we'll see you guys next week good night
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
good evening we're going to go ahead and call this meeting to order dr foley roll call president members of the board please let the record show that all members are present thank you we're going to go ahead and have a moment of silence followed by the pledge of allegiance thank you and i just want to offer our condolences to the family and students and and friends of the student that we lost last week at higley high school with that we're going to go on to the approval of the agenda i move that we approve the agenda as it's presented second any questions or comments regarding the agenda all those in favor aye aye aye that motion carries 5-0 dr foley we're going to go ahead and go on to the superintendent's report president reece members of the board we're going to start tonight with a quick update on the elections results if the they're going to pull up here a little snippet of what we received last night as you know we have had a very important bond election on our ballot um last night we received communication from the from our elections official that shared with us this little graphic right here one of the things they shared with us um in this email as well is being that this was a mail-in election they're updating uh the ballots a little bit differently than they do in larger years with larger ballot items one of the things they indicated is that tonight probably at five o'clock as we speak they were updating the results from this we see right here was an update from the ballot sit and receive before monday tonight they will update the results with what they received on monday and then on thursday what they received on tuesday we know from our election officials we were a ballot dropbox that there were hundreds of ballots in there although we are hopeful i think tonight at the after they finally post whatever is posted from from monday if we are still trending in and not passed we will be sending a communication to our community this evening or first thing tomorrow morning indicating that these preliminary results show that the bond failed and we will also discuss the fact that we will remain committed to supporting the challenges of a growing district and will continue to bring proposals and ideas forward and that will continue to stay prioritized on teaching learning and our students in this district so that is an update right now obviously we will stay tuned but again obviously we're disappointed with the initial results okay any questions okay moving on to more important conversations or celebrations tonight i'd like to invite mr darrell stengel up to the podium because we have state champions golf in the house [Applause] thank you okay so just before i introduce coach miles and he introduces the players i want to say a few words about uh about this group um at williams field we always strive for excellence in every endeavor um i get teased a lot because i use the word dominate a lot but the two go hand in hand okay and and this group is a group that has embodied that the the the seniors that are in this group have won three section championships have been state runners-up twice um and this year won the state championship in division two that is a model of consistency in the model of consistent improvement that we strive for each and every day um and try to instill in our young people at williams field as they can go out and and dominate the day so without further ado the uh the men of the hour i'm gonna introduce head coach rick miles uh who has been the head coach for all 14 years at williams field and allow him to introduce the the players that won the state championship [Applause] so good evening members of the board and dr foley and and uh mr lotzenheiser and daryl thank you uh as he said i've been a coach to coach for williamsfield since we opened up and um it's been my pride to build this program to where we are we've got daryl talked about the two state runner-ups that their senior class has we've actually had three in the last four years so at the end of last year we we finished again second place and uh the minute we walked off the golf course uh the conversation began for uh what what this year was going to bring and that the preparation for 2021 was going to happen um november 5th and it needed to start then and that no one was going to hand us the state championship we were going to have to work to get there and and um so i i credit all these young men for for their hard work in the offseason they played a lot of golf and a lot of tournaments to prepare for this and um you know we we the beginning of the season i put us in some very difficult tournaments with some very tough competition both here in the state as well as as the board knows we traveled to texas and played in the largest most prestigious high school golf tournament in the country and all of that prepared us excuse me for where we finished today as i told these young men before we started the state tournament we didn't win a single tournament this season we've had seasons where we've entered tournaments and won everything we've been in and and we've learned from that but as a coach i learned from that as well that that i'm not so sure that that always develops your players and gets them in the right frame of mind and so i wanted us to have a very difficult schedule so that that one they didn't get too full of themselves because they knew what was at hand and they knew that that they were the odds on favor to win the state championship and so we got a very tough schedule and and i really think that it paid dividends um we had a rough go of it in september we had a lot of golf fall break came right at the right time because when we came back from fall break uh we played our best golf of the season right at the right time and so i couldn't be more proud of these young men um and and i'm gonna introduce them uh to you here um so the the i think they're almost in order here about the five that played at the state term that you see up there um uh our senior rylan johnson uh he's a um in my opinion as a coach he's one once in a generation golfer he's going to be signing with oregon state here in about a week so yes thank you he is our he's our first division one golfer to go on and play at the division one level he told me on the 18th fairway he says coach i failed to get the job done and i looked at him and i said excuse me he was disappointed that he didn't win the state championship as an individual and and i can understand that he worked hard that was a goal that he had he finished runner-up for the second year in a row but i told him i said you got the job done we are not here in this position we're in as a team if it's not for you and so he more than got the job done and he has left his mark on this team on me as a coach hopefully on his teammates as well he's been my captain for the last two years i've never appointed a junior captain before i appointed him as a captain and the leadership that he is has gone on this team has just been phenomenal i cannot say enough about him so i'll stop um our next one is a sophomore ben carr finished in the top 10 at state so he's coming back be one of our leaders next year senior brett halliday brett came out and joined us this year um and and if i could tell you how many times i wish he had come out earlier than just his senior year i'd be a well retired by now but but a fine young man played number five for us for most of the year and and um and and i know that the game of golf is is better because he's in it eli salas who is our junior to be senior and to be captain next year so he knows he's got some big shoes to fill um literally and figuratively but um i'm fully uh know that he's capable of handling the material or handling the job next is tanner doonan a junior um came out to join us this year and i know that he's gonna be a big part of our team next year the next to him is trevor lizack he played number three or four for us most of the year again a senior who's been with the program for four years and and just rock solid for us as a team member next to him is cameron uh cameron's another senior that's been with us for four years just a great young man and and um also played number five for us at times throughout the year so um you look forward to to what the future holds for him braden is next to him is junior again returning um be a key part of where we're going for next year next to him is chase freshman in case you couldn't tell his brother is a couple couple doors down from him there almost twins but couple years apart but uh freshman again looking forward to him growing over the next couple years and conor is a sophomore again um i'm looking forward to seeing what these guys can do to to ours and next to them at the end there is my assistant coach mr trey cox some of you might know him he teaches at chandler gilbert community college he volunteers as an assistant coach and it's just it and it's been with me i coached his son at our program here and and has been my assistant coach about the last around five or six years now something like that and um it's just a great person to have around and so i couldn't be more proud of these young man it's it's it's it was a long season it was trying for us at times um but but we kept that goal in mind and and we knew what we needed to do to get it done so we're more than happy to be here um in case you couldn't see it our trophies up there on the front table coach was saying it needs to be more centered uh miss reese i'm sorry he was saying should be right in front of you i mean but anyway so nonetheless um you know we're proud to add that to our program but but we're certainly not done um we've got work to do we got more room in the trophy case that we got to fill up so this is just the beginning we're going to get more of those and hopefully be in front of you guys more in the future so thank you for letting us come [Applause] you ready great thank you as we continue with the superintendent's report tonight obviously one of our other favorite parts of our agenda is the celebration of our points of pride so tonight we're going to start with centennial elementary and i would love to yay so i would love to have miss mrs bradley and mr verville here to help us acknowledge those who you want to celebrate this evening yes um we're very excited to be here so good evening president ruiz governing board um we have quite the turnout as is um is the norm with our centennial family they're there we've got about 20 strong here right now so very excited for our um our family to be here to supporting one another it's awkward staying with my back to everybody so is it okay if i stand to the side or absolutely okay okay hello all right well you can start if you want to start with our students okay good evening everyone um we'd like to recognize and honor mr everett church our student winner [Applause] so just like to read what we have written about everett so when we speak of student growth and achievement we understand that many factors need to come into this for this to happen this is why we're so excited and proud to announce everett as our points of pride winner everett has shown an amazing transformation this year demonstrating the ability to have a growth mindset that comes from teacher straight from teacher where he now accepts his mistakes as opportunities to be a student and better person if it has shown amazing compassion and kindness towards others this year he's often the first to encourage them to do their best help them with their work or even resolve conflict or disagreements aside from his amazing development character and attitude towards school everett consistently improves academically he's constantly setting new goals in math he uses writing to show meaning and understanding and he has found a new pride and excitement in reading as he recognizes that he can do a lot and go far we are so proud of everett and appreciate all the hard work he has shown this year and look forward to so many more successes congratulations [Applause] we can do it [Music] individually like this [Applause] okay all right so for our teacher for our points of pride we want to recognize miss liz garcia you want to come on up so there's a lot we can say about ms garcia she is a true rock star she's taking on an unprecedented amount of responsibility this year in her program and she stepped up every single time to meet the challenge both with professionalism and optimism when liz is faced with some curves and get life's throwing her some curves she always has a smile on her face and has a can-do attitude she has the embodiment of grit there's nothing this woman cannot do she's truly amazing she's very kind and caring to everyone she interacts with she's patient patient and compassionate with all of her students and even with us as adults so we go in and help sometimes and you know she'll graciously tell us to make you know do it a different way and very patient with everybody so we appreciate it because she knows what's best for her kids um she where am i sorry to go off track a little bit she has a passion for helping her students grow not only with their academic goals but also to help students acquire new adaptive skills and to learn how to communicate their social social emotional needs this year liz has demonstrated the ability to manage an influx of new students teach and lead to student teachers in addition to planning for students across multiple grade levels and ability levels she facilitates and leads a large support staff that functions efficiently and effectively while maintaining the kindness and compassion that she has created in her classroom when we say she has a very large support staff like it's it's it's it probably rivals that of a high school at an elementary staff so she does amazing leading her team let's see liz also does an exceptional job of leading and supporting her crosscap peers to ensure they are compliant working collaboratively with their gen ed peers and supporting one another and the students needs we are so grateful and proud of liz and we are so so so lucky to have you so we just we love you and we appreciate you so thank you hmm [Applause] okay so our next i guess points of pride will go out to our classified staff mrs lisa verlada erlinson thank you for everything i also this is bradley and i wanted to give a shout out um miss lisa works in liz's class and her class or the the entire team that mrs bradley was talking about is pretty much here tonight they are an amazing staff they are amazing team they put everything aside for these kids um so for for just a huge thank you to all of you so but about you about you this this lady is one dedicated committed devoted paraprofessional teacher educator everything and we are just so grateful to have her um so there's that for those reasons and many more that we are excited to announce her as centennial's points a pride classified winner with seven years of service in uh higley unified lisa shows up every day to work as if it was her first she's positive focused willing to jump in and do whatever it is needed for these students lisa is a true team player she leads by example sets high standards for herself and is always there for her colleagues and other cross cat teachers when needed she's constantly building relationships with their students it's amazing like just come visit just come visit developing trust and routines so that these students can not only just succeed in class but really in life lisa is a true professional consistently developing her own practices as well as just being flexible and dependable whenever we need her we are so thankful to have you thank you [Applause] hmm [Applause] all right every so often we get a parent volunteer that comes in um fresh is a kindergarten parent and we are very grateful that we have roped you in and that you have committed to helping us out and she is very revolutionary with some of the practices she brings to our pto meetings which is really it's really great so i'm going to read a little bit about you um and about why we're so excited to honor you tonight for our points of pride so we are both grateful and excited to nominate mrs ac trump as our points of pride volunteer award recipient through her gracious work outside the classroom and ability to step up and take on significant role on our pto mrs trump is trailblazing the importance and positive impact our volunteer community has on our student staff and school culture her work on pto is both innovative and hospitable whether it's revitalizing processes and streamlining forms and documents to make them both more tech friendly and user friendly or by setting up delicious breakfast lunches and treats for our staff mrs trump is always there with a smile and a helping hand in addition to the support and work on our pto her work inside and outside the classroom is greatly appreciated she is creative generous and thoughtful as she has handmade decorations for celebrations coordinated class events and is always the first to contribute or donate materials or items for projects and other student needs we are so thankful for all of mrs trump's contribution contributions and so happy that she is part of our centennial family we are so grateful for you [Applause] junior [Applause] thank you centennial points of pride we are now excited to invite our administration mr mercado and mrs reeves up to celebrate our santan points of pride [Applause] good good evening president reece board members dr foley cabinet community members i am the proud principal at san tan elementary and i am excited for this opportunity that we get to be here and celebrate all the awesome things that are happening in our schools and at san tan want to celebrate i was told i have the mic it's not karaoke night so it needed to uh stay the script so here we go uh celebrating our student who is absolutely amazing mr joey zamora come up here so joey is an incredible student leader at san tan in fifth grade you can find him working hard following the eight habits not only the seven habits but the eight habits and being kind to his peers he takes pride in being a leader and exhibits leadership qualities on a daily basis he values his school and has been seen pulling weeds in front of the school to keep the school looking nice i love it [Applause] he truly does follow the eight habits in and out of school and is well deserving of this recognition awesome job sir [Applause] my nephew all right [Applause] next is our oh i can go further chicken dance uh our next is sarah ballard our certified staff member come up here sarah we had spirit week so talk about just a all consuming supportive educator practitioner advocate you see sarah ballard in every role in our campus she is the definition of a go-getter she's willing to help anyone with anything at any time she goes above and beyond for not only her students creating extra curriculum buying supplies making lessons fun quarterly parties class store but also her colleagues offering help every day creating systems to alleviate stress stress acts of kindness regular praise and so much more she is a leader on our campus running iep meetings she is the staff lighthouse coordinator she provides professional development opportunities with leader in me strategies and still goes above and beyond with smiles inside and outside of her classroom this statement from the teacher says i look forward to working with her every day and know i can count on her [Music] so i said i wasn't going to steal the mic from him because it is a lot of fun his favorite thing to do but i was just at the door before i left school and mrs ballard is standing out there talking to one of the seventh graders who just got off the bus and i was like mrs ballard come on we got to get ready and she's like thank you i was just about to cry and i was like what happened and he was telling her hey mrs ballard do you remember how i struggled so much and everything that was going on at home and you were like my mom you were always there for you you always made sure i had what i needed and you always made sure i was getting my work done and now i'm in middle school and i'm doing great because of you so that's just the kind of teacher that she is and i'm sure many students would say that about her oh [Applause] next is our classified staff michelle ryan come on [Applause] up it was about seven years ago this is my eighth year at san tan about seven years ago i asked michelle to come over from mesa because um she had some previous office experience in a previous role i had there as an administrator and so she had lots of questions and i had all the right answers and so to this day she's been just rock solid in our front office as an office manager and this is what the recognition says here michelle ryan is a team player and manages the front office at san tan in a professional manner manner michelle manages the front office and gets pulled to do duty in the morning afternoon lunch aid and health office michelle stepped in and filled in for the health aide after she quit unexpectedly she had to manage her job as well as the health office for an extended time to make sure the students were well cared for she was always smiling and helps everybody out no matter how busy she is with her duties and i can just say as an admin team you make that front office run extremely smooth we never have to worry if we're off campus or if we're in observations and so thank you for what you bring to the table to make santan such a smooth loving caring and welcoming area [Applause] um [Applause] and now i want to recognize our volunteer nikki cowberg come on up please we absolutely love nikki and what she brings what she brings to the table she has helped with book fairs at san tan for many years she was always one of the first to volunteer whenever we need help setting anything up running the register organizing or taking down the book fair even with her busy professional schedule and family she's willing to help us and we are so grateful for all she has done thank you for all of your support over the years to make our systems our library run efficient and always just having a smile when you're there supporting our kids and our staff so thank you so much either thank you for the opportunity to present tonight thank you santan we know that you've got a busy night so feel free if you do not want to stay you can you can leave now if you'd like i'll pull up our upcoming events and as we conclude tonight's superintendent's report the month of november is is already here and as you can see we have several several events this month we have some holidays we have some evening events we also have our superintendent visit to chaparral we will see the home of the sharks on the november 19th if you're able to join us but the month of november is already busy and this is going to go super fast so we've got lots coming up and that concludes the superintendent's report thank you nice to start points of pride again in our celebrations yes all right with that we'll go on to board comments president reece mrs wilson uh it was a busy two weeks after writing everything down i'm like wow was i home at all um cooley had a haunted hallway that was fantastic they had a great turnout from the community not just even their kiddos and i just want to give them a big shout out williamsfield with their trunk or treat was fantastic i've seen so many families there that it was just amazing to see i also went to both football games the head homecomings and both prevailed which was fantastic on 20th anniversary for higley high school celebration because we're calling it the celebration we also had a bonfire for williamsfield and a dance team event i don't know steve i'm probably not so great with that one whatever they called it extravaganza where we got to watch the dance team do their thing and that was fantastic as well so i just want to thank all those students all those families who put in that extra time all the teachers because all those events every night is just a lot and i appreciate all that time that they're putting into this thank you any other board comments um i also went to several of those events but i wanted to say the higley band for the 20s celebration was so cool like just the entire travel thing the travel um performance that they did i was just amazed by how how cool and exciting that was and the dancers at williamsfield were amazing as well all right any others okay it has been a busy couple weeks we're in the full swing of things for sure all right we're going to go on to request to speak we value input from our constituents this time has been set aside for anyone from the audience who wishes to address the board please remember this is not an appropriate venue to evaluate discuss or criticize district personnel policy keb provides a process for complaints about personnel speakers should be aware that fault statements about individuals may result in civil liability members of the board may not discuss items that are not specifically identified on the agenda therefore pursuant to ars 38-431.01h action taken as a result of public comment we'll be limited to directing staff to study the matter responding to any criticism or scheduling the matter for further consideration and a decision at a later date we ask that you please limit your remarks to three minutes we have debbie barron baron barcone i apologize um i had a statement written up but i'm going to just do my recommendations instead we had an altercation at williamsfield high school and i had some concerns and as i talked to other parents we kind of came up with some suggestions for policy changes if possible and one of them my grandson who i have legal guardianship of was severely beaten at williamsfield high school on september 23rd and that's why i'm here today i would like the board to look review and hopefully change some of the district policies which are not serving our students or the community that well number one when a parent drops their child off at school or he walks or rides a bus it should be a reasonable expectation that their child will be safe and will not return home in a traumatized condition number two nine days out of school for a high school student is a death sentence that's what suspension is when they are involved in something even if they are not the perpetrator if they're the ones who are the victim their punishment is the same as a perpetrator nine days out of school for a high school student is a death sentence for their grades and really just nine days of not having a schedule after coven i would think missing school that many days would have taught all of us a lesson that kids require consistency i would submit to you that in-house suspension is a more reasonable approach no participation in extracurricular activities separate lunch from peers except those also in suspension no daily social interaction with general population but required that they attend school on time complete schoolwork every day nine days off is not a disciplinary measure no cell phone access while at school those nine three or one day whatever the suspension period is that's what i would recommend and number three and most importantly adequate school security so any altercation doesn't last as long or severely as this one did security should be mandatory in all gathering places number four and just fair and just treatment needs to be executed to ready kids for the real world criminal and predatory behavior should not be tolerated ever it sends a message particularly to a predator predator that he is on equal footing with anyone he wants to assault that his behavior is acceptable and a victim is just as guilty as he is that's the wrong message to send our kids also this oh i won't say that that's kind of a personal thing that the kid did anyway i would like you to think about those suggestions thank you thank you for caring and we will follow up with dr foley for more information as well thank you do we have any other requests to speak all right we will go on to our consent agenda i mean that we approve our consent agenda as it is presented second questions or comments regarding our consent agenda president reece mrs kaler sorry i was just excited to read about 6.15 for our retention supplemental supplemental from our sr3 monies i think that's going to be a very welcomed addition to their paychecks so thank you for all those that stuck with us and um i'm i'm happy to vote yes on that for sure thank you and i also run to recognize the gifts and donations from lowe's mr zucker the black hawk band boosters for both the washington trip washington dc trip and for professional development i want to just make a quick note um on our agenda tonight we have been asked to approve both the higley high school and williamsfield high school marching bands travel to washington dc to do the memorial day parade there they will be traveling as a higley unified school district band so they will be participating in this parade collectively not as two high schools and from a district that only has two high schools i think that is amazing i love the fact that we can come together we can represent our district and um and be able to participate in something like this and we're seeing definitely more and more of these types of of events and participation happening where our two high schools are coming together and they are um they're working together so we can help support each other um our dance teams are traveling together and so it's it's exciting from my standpoint to see that we're we're so close and we're only so big but um i am excited to see that that trip um is happening so that we'll have a higley unified band out there so any other questions or comments on our consent agenda all right all those in favor aye motion carries five zero all right we're going to go on to our information items our sr3 and mr moore that's you good evening president reese members of the board i'm excited to present uh this the work of the sr-3 committee on the spending plan that we've um outlined here in this presentation what will be what will be we will be presenting excuse me um is the the spending plan for the final round of federal relief money this is the the final federal relief money that we have recognized so far and we don't foresee any any additional federal relief money coming from the government i want to acknowledge the entire essay committee as some are here in person to help assist in this presentation um but also to those who could not attend but contributed to this presentation so in no particular order uh miss felicia malloy the federal program's assistant director mr david lotzenheiser executive director of secondary ed miss sue borchetz interim executive director of elementary ed miss shawna miller the director of special education [Applause] mr dan fox the principal sauceman middle school [Applause] miss katie harris the principal of gateway elementary miss june blaine the teacher gateway elementary ms janelle taylor the parent at gateway elementary mr eric rogers teacher chaparral elementary [Applause] um our one student miss aubry de la rivera williamsfield high school student isabelle castillo a staff accountant with financial services mr jim pasek the director of technology mr rich dobson interim director of maintenance and in addition there have been several in numerous meetings of other um employee groups administrator groups that have contributed to this plan so it's um this is not something that has been one idea this has been a comprehensive plan that's included several individuals next slide please so what we have on the agenda is we're going to talk about what is this final round of esther we're going to go over the requirements we did issue a survey and we'll talk about those results and how those uh contributed to this plan we'll talk about our committee meetings and what those look like and then we'll go over our esther plan so we'll there's four categories in our extra spending plan those four categories include learning loss supporting and retaining employees which ms amy keller alluded to earlier school facility repairs improvements and additions technology to support instructional delivery innovation and operations and then we'll go over the next steps of the essay plan as it stretches all the way through 2024.
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education teachers who support our program the health eco school social worker and antonia macklick our school psychologist who will share more about our program and its benefits that it has on all of our students very healthy michelle i think you have a sharing screen right thank you everyone um we are super excited to talk to you about our social enrichment program here at huckleberry once again i'm kim garcia i'm the special ed teacher who teaches in the social emotional enrichment program at huckleberry the goal of the social emotional program is to guide students to be responsible for their own social emotional health and independently maintain appropriate conduct throughout their school day so the classroom itself is taught by myself a school social worker and kim garcia a special education teacher and the spanish received direct teaching of skills around social skills emotional regulation strategies um and these are students who have been identified as needing extra support in their social emotional learning and these students are provided with with the reinforcement schedule that we'll talk about a little later on and each one is individualized for them and then we also really hope to create a safe classroom for students to feel if they're having a tough times come and take a break or check in with miss varsity or myself with the students of the social emotional enrichment program students are taught to advocate for themselves and we increase their independence as much as we possibly can many of the students in the program have para support but we like to pull back on some of that support as much as we can to make them feel for part of their own learning and to utilize some of the skills that they're learning on their own without somebody coaching them how to do that there's frequent communication within the program between home and school and then anybody that works with the student our mission statement is to promote the social emotional wellness of all students through fostering self-management and interpersonal skills we have five paraprofessionals in the classroom as well as a bcba that supports students and consults with the team as needed we rotate paraprofessionals between students to make sure that students are generalizing their information and their skills between the staff members um so one complement component of our program is our check and checkout system so students in the program check in in the social emotional classroom every morning and they fill out a worksheet that you can see in the left-hand corner and the first thing we do is we ask them how they're feeling and if they happen to be struggling or feeling in blue or red we probably solve ways to get them into the green to start their school day and then we also problem solve any unresolved issues they may have had that morning at home or possibly the day before they also set a goal for the day that they like to work on and then we go over a plan on how they can achieve that goal and we review any tools or skills that we've taught them um to help them achieve that goal they then come back to the classroom at the end of the day and they review their points and they're able to um pick out a prize from a prize drawer and we'll talk about points in a little bit and we really the most important part is you praise them on any positive behavior um and we talk about what tomorrow might look like they're always they always know what's ahead um and then if they are able to choose from the prize box that means they are contracts to being able to participate in our fun friday activity so our points are stems in the classroom each student is on an individualized point system based on four specific expectations that we're looking from them these expectations often include goals and objectives from their iep as well as maybe just some behaviors we're kind of seeing pop up within the classroom setting or socially with peers that we want to just kind of target and work on so every half hour there's our little sheet up in the corner um students review with their para how they did with those four expectations that really helps hold them accountable and recognizes their accomplishments these um points connect to our checkout that michelle is just speaking about and they earn their prize box which they are super motivated by they love their like little tangible toys that they earn so these points um reflect their expectations and what they get to earn from prize box and then fun friday everybody loves fun friday so every friday students reflect on their entire week it's really a place for us to encourage that even if you had a rocky part to your day part to your week there's always times and opportunities to turn it around and we really encourage um turning it around so students earn fun friday and that can include you know something as simple as just earning some extra recess time the students also like to have special lunches with mr garciano sometimes a movie day last friday we made putty so if you take a look at those pictures you can tell that was a huge messy hit so we had our beloved stack cart this happens every friday and it's not only students who are in the social emotional um program it is also any student um in huckleberry it might be a student who might need some extra love that day or they show really positive behavior um by collaborating with classroom teachers were able to choose those students um and not only does this help work on their math skills because they go to each classroom and sells the teachers and school staff but they're really forming positive relationships with teachers and staff that they might not get to know otherwise it really helps to increase their self-esteem students are so proud to go to each classroom and kind of show off to other classmates what they get to do on that friday and then what's also really nice is a lot of our staff members will pay it forward um so the next step member gets to pick out a snack based on what they paid for them and it not only shows not only contributes to that positive school climate but it really just shows our students how kind we are to one another another component of the program are student mentors so often i will take an older student in the social emotional enrichment program and during a writing lesson we plan out an art project with very detailed step-by-step directions that the younger students can follow the older mentor student gets to work on this art activity with the younger guys and it's really a great experience to have that connection it promotes positive self-esteem encourages social skills and then positive interactions with peers our little guys really look up to their older peers and then when they see them in the hallway and they're like hey that's you know so-and-so who made this turkey hand with me um it makes them feel like really special really important so this is a great program so we also collaborate with classroom teachers to incorporate some social emotional lessons in the classroom as a whole this is throughout the whole school where we push into second third and fourth grade classes and we have whole group discussions about some social skills such as just to list a few problem solving skills some coping strategies that we can use in the classroom and outside of the classroom and some self-regulation skills like taking those breaks when we feel like we really need to get out of receipt for a little bit and just making those positive decision-making skills so just really reflecting back on some problems that we've had and what are the decisions that we've made in that moment as a smaller group we meet mrs fico and i we meet with social skill groups so those are called lunch bunches where we meet to play some interactive games and we read some stories and have fun activities like recently we did some arts and crafts for halloween they seem to really enjoy those and just have whole group discussions and reflect back on those some problems that we may have faced throughout the week and coming up with some solutions as a group we practiced coping strategies in this groups that were able to transfer those over into the classroom and also throughout this whole school day we practiced some conversational skills some play turn taking skills and um really identifying some the some problems and determining what the size of the problem is and how that should equal the reaction as well so some of the de-escalation strategies that we utilize we teach our students are listed here we teach many many different strategies what works for one will not work for another so each student has their own toolbox of strategies that work for them when they're feeling that they need to use a strategy so here are some of our little kiddos sharing some of their favorite strategies i'm not getting audio on them did she meet because she muted herself it's because she muted herself hey um whoever's sharing your screen is that michelle sharing your screen you're not sharing your um computer audio so you're only sharing the video can you just undo your share and redo it and check that box to share your audio while i figure out how to make sure it doesn't die i think if you just unmute yourself like that i know i just shared sound so let me know if it works okay here we go or do jumping jacks when i'm in the blue i like to use sorry you want me to play it okay i when i'm in the sad moment i like to play when i'm in the blue i like to draw and i tell mr mola when i'm in the group i like to read in the being that shirt when i'm in the blue i like to draw and i tell me i'm not let me go to the [Music] so we also collaborate with outside organizations such as family therapists and healthcare providers so that there's a homeschool collaboration and we can practice those strategies in school and also out outside of school so it's really carried over throughout environments we all we've been organizing thanksgiving drive at huckleberry to really help those families in need and we get the students involved by having them help us organize these baskets and collect items and sort out those donations that we have received from other families and students so we just want to give a big thank you for everyone's support um in helping our social enrichment program does anyone have any questions for us very nice any questions i just want to make a comment yeah i think i'm on i think i think it was it's just nice to obviously these are students who struggle with emotional regulation and i just like that the title is the social emotional enrichment program so we're not going from a deficit model um that this is enrichment to um to help them with probably the things that they struggle most and because of that enrichment they'll become more regulated and then more out to learn so the title got me i loved it i thought it was really really a great way to emphasize such a positive thing about kids who potentially really struggle and it's a way to keep kids in the schools too imagining if you're dysregulated you may have a difficult time functioning in a regular school and may have to seek uh ad placement so so that's very impressive thank you thanks for emphasizing that um jen that was something a number of years ago we started the program and uh was with all of your help so thank you for recognizing that thank you questions all right any questions thanks everyone great job huckleberry we'll see you tomorrow thank you thank you good night thank you bye-bye so our next item is our student representative report all right so to start off with some events that we had in the past just recently on saturday october 30th we had the homecoming dance so a number of students showed up from 9th through twelfth grade and we all had a lot of fun there um and then just before that we had uh the friday or the night really the day before at school we had a lot of students come and show up for halloween with their costumes on so a lot of people were dressed up during that day into some administration stuff we have basically for referencing back to last meeting when i was talking about the lunch process there's been a lot of improvements so both staff and students themselves a lot of students that may not necessarily have leadership roles in the school are now stepping up to like become bigger leaders and working to streamline that process so different procedures are being made we just got the like ropes put in place for people lining up in front of the lunchroom so that's helpful um and a lot of upperclassmen especially who are kind of taking the lead and saying like no no get in line don't cut stuff like that so um and also just trying to lighten the mood with obviously covid is still lingering around even though we don't want it to so a few things like we're trying to use different words so saying the dining hall instead of the cafeteria or reserve seating instead of like assigned seats little things like that well said but well said reserved seating i like that and then um a few benefits that we've seen from the reserve seating is that there's a lot more engagement now than in past years so like in the past or at least last year especially when the desks were literally separated apart and you looked like you're in rows and columns people are talking a lot more at the tables and having one-on-one conversations with their peers so that's good to see and then going away from lunch a bit just wanted to talk about individual learn individualized learning time ilt which is kind of a new period that was put in place this year so it's a 30 minute advisory period kind of in the middle of the day and every student at the high school has it at the same time so in the past we've had like flexes that are all at different times so this makes a little easier if students want to meet with teachers they know that that teacher is also going to have ilt with their students so they can meet make a set up an appointment and then kind of you're not interrupting class time or anything like that some other benefits clubs can meet during those times so if there's like the leaders of the officers of the club need to meet and plan for whether an event or a whole club meeting they can meet during that time since again they all have that block at the same time and then also just moving certain things like the loudspeaker announcements to that time rather than they used to be the beginning of second period so that way it's again not cutting into class time and misheidi now can talk over the loudspeaker during that time to make any announcements necessary moving on to clubs we have national honor society coming up on monday november 15th we're running a blood drive so we're planning to donate 35 units as we have in the past of blood to the connecticut blood banks and then also unicef club is currently partnering with a citizen from tanzania which they're working with to plan different developments and talk about locally owned homestay and tour company that this citizen is kind of in involved with and they're the students will create a website fundraise to support his purchase of the items for the tours and homestay as well as assist in social media advertising and they will develop environmentally friendly and conservation focused educational materials for the citizen and his clients and this was actually built off of a fund for teachers grant which was received by heather beyoncary the advisor for that club and she got it to investigate and support sustainable eco and ethnotourism in tanzania and rwanda so that is everything that i have right nice job ben any questions for ben i have one i'm just kind of going back to what you were saying about ilt time um how are students liking that time and how are they most utilizing it um definitely they enjoy the fact that it's all at the same time so that they can meet with the teacher if they need to going back to the social and emotional learning aspect um kind of like once a week as we call a mentor monday the teacher will check in with the students and especially those that may be struggling or their grades are kind of low they can check in and say like oh is there anything that i can do to help and stuff like that so they like that part um and then kind of just like some some do use it as a time to get their work done which is also helpful if they are called are all caught up and everything's fine and then others can meet with teachers to kind of have that one-on-one time while there's no classes going on and you like that better than the flex generally yeah yeah i think a lot of students definitely have appreciated it more because again going back to with flux it was like you'd have a flux when a teacher has a class or during lunch or whatever so it was hard to kind of coordinate with that but now since everything's at the same time it's a lot easier great any other questions for ben all right thank you thanks ben okay you've written correspondence okay jason master paolo wrote regarding facility use fees aaron scalera wrote regarding policies and procedures andy correa wrote regarding the cheer investigation process and an foi request and kim rachel wrote regarding public comment okay approval of board minutes i'll move that the board approve the minutes from the regular meeting on october 20th second okay all in favor aye okay that's unanimous uh the superintendent's update all right thanks rosa um so a couple of things earlier this week we put a school message out to families uh dr sullivan asked us or the health department asked us to send out a message from dr sullivan regarding the um five-year-old to 11 year old opportunity for teaming up with the new milford health department for vaccination clinics in addition to that uh this afternoon i sent out a another school message regarding our uh this part of our district communication plan which is our coherence of communication and really an opportunity to effectively and efficiently engage with our families through following the proper protocols in the chain of command to make sure we could adjudicate issues as quickly and efficiently as effectively as possible so we wanted to get that out to everybody and it's a series of flow charts that we find very helpful for for parents and for staff another thing that we talked about at facilities earlier tonight and there's not a facilities report for this meeting but the ces part of the roof that's over the nurse's office and near the pre-k area was completed on friday and saturday so that's great there was a lot of leaking going on there and we've rectified that issue so we're really really thrilled that that is complete now and then finally just uh two highlights from professional development yesterday it was just an extremely positive day in general i got to spend the morning with the pre-k to 5 team and i really need to thank mary rhodes and melissa and maureen and the rest of the team and jackie whiting for putting the day together very positive was able to share the news about our construction update that we'll talk about later with candlewood lake but bringing pre-k to five the certified faculty together it was really enjoyable to see everybody connecting and starting to team build and getting really excited about things and then the other piece was um under mr post and eric um and joan the team putting the kronos time and attendance project together and doing a lot of training yesterday there's a lot of training this week but in general we did a lot of training with our paraprofessionals and that's all that time and attendance and payroll work so that's something we've been working on for a couple of years and so that was another highlight um that's all i have for my superintendent report if there's any questions i'd be happy to answer i was gonna say i happen to see the email for the coherence of communication that was really um helpful and a good visual i thought something that to help improve that would be to put the names of the people in those roles in their email that would be helpful yeah that's something we can consider for sure joy um uh think about how we can do that i want to be careful because it's you know a principle at one school is different for another principal at another school so we'd have to almost do it by school but it's something we certainly can consider and i hope people find it helpful so thank you you know the visual i think yeah very helpful [Applause] any questions for john okay all right thanks everyone um subcommittee reports we have none so moving on to the consent agenda i'll move that the board approve the items on the consent agenda which are new hires and resignations second all in favor bye okay that's unanimous on to new business we have the class size report um so dr ruby i'd like to invite you up and um we'll receive that good evening i think you have all received the class size reports for this year looking at the center school report with the boe class size guidelines of between 17 and 20 per class all 18 of our classes at the school are within the boe guidelines and you can see on there the breakdown for preschool k and grade one we have two preschool classes with a total of 38 students the three-year-olds have 14 and that's a warning session and most of the students in that program attend uh three half days um students will attend different numbers of days based on whether they're regular ed students or special ed students and what their ieps dictate that they uh the services that they are to be receiving and how much time that takes there are 24 four-year-olds currently that's in the afternoon session and most of those students attend four half days the important thing to remind ourselves of when we look at these numbers is that they change from day to day sometimes throughout the year because as children are reached their third birthday they go out of birth to three and into three and five to three to five so if they're students who are receiving special education services and they reach their third birthday they then are eligible to come into the program based on their birth date the same would be true for four-year-olds who are identified after their third birthday so these numbers do fluctuate this is the october first census in kindergarten there's there are nine classes with a total of 177 students and three of those classes have 19 and six of them have 20 students and for grade one there are 167 total students in those nine classes and you can see that two have seventeen two have eighteen three have nineteen and two have twenty so it's pretty straightforward as is the huckleberry hill report um the total number of students at huckleberries five twelve and none of the classes are below the class size guidelines 22 out of the 25 general ed classes or 88 percent are within the class size guidelines of 19 to 21 students you'll see that when you get down to fourth grade where there are eight classes and 171 students three of the classes have 22 students and five have the 21 so those three classes in fourth grade are out of the range by one student and the other for the other two grades 180 students in second grade all the classes within the guidelines and 163 students all of the classes all eight classes are within the class size guidelines so i think we're doing pretty well in terms of our teacher-student ratio in in those grades but we will follow up with the recommendations from our earlier discussion on how to best serve those younger students and what models of best practice for paraprofessional use would be beneficial we still have gene renda here because his report is very complicated if you've had hopefully had time to look at it dean if you want to come up if you have i'm not going to read through this you can see it's quite involved because now we get into departmentalization and the students rotating through the unh specials and you can see where we're within the guidelines and where we're not in the guidelines and that's in bold on the first page of his report for his school grade five and grade six nineteen percent or of the class sections are over the class side guidelines and 30 in seventh grade there are large sections and 26 in grade 8.
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so next slide please so what is esser so we've talked about the first two esser packages that we received and this is much similar with some additional restrictions and requirements um sr-3 this is the final relief package from the federal government the esser funds may be used in response to the impact of kova 19 and you will see later in this presentation that we have addressed that with this plan uh the rescue plan the american rescue plan was approved on march 11 2021 which authorized this third round of funding the timeline for spending as i alluded to covers 2021 through 2024 so an extensive timeline as i mentioned this funding source is intended to address the impact of cover 19 on students educators and families some of the allowable uses include supporting the la leas which is the local education agency which is us ability to continue to provide educational resources address student social emotional mental health and academic needs and supporting staff as a component of recruitment and retention efforts next slide please so to illustrate this this federal funding source we have added some pictures um in an effort to visually represent what this funding is it is one-time funding from the federal government this is not funding that we have arbitrarily on an annual basis this is one time and there's several restrictions and requirements tied to it which we'll cover later next slide please so that funding is different than our annual school budget our annual school funds are are provided on an adm uh average student daily membership basis and those are intended to support our education and instruction of those students so these are two different funding sources so with that i'll let miss felicia talk about the sr3 requirements good evening felicia malloy i'm the assistant director for state and federal programs and i would just like to point out that there are four requirements under our esser plan that we have to write one is that all activities all expenditures of our money money must be related to preventing preparing for and or responding to the coven 19 pandemic the second requirement is that minimally we must allocate 20 percent of the award for learning loss however as you will see later in the presentation we are allocating more than the 20 percent our third requirement is that we must develop and make publicly available on our website our plan for the safe return to in-person instruction as well as our continuity of our services and the last requirement is that we will have meaningful consultation and again as you will hear in our presentation you will see what that meaningful consultation involved thank you next slide please good evening david lawsonizer executive director of secondary so one of the important things that we had to do was get a stakeholder input so we sent a survey out and these are the results of the survey so i'm going to take the next five slides and talk to you about uh what the survey results were and who took the survey so as you take a look at the graph right there you can see that we had 82 about 82 percent where parents are guardians of the 2784 responses and so we had a great representation when you think about that in terms of a number and we asked them multiple questions about different steps you'll notice the second largest group was our certified employees followed by our classified employees but we felt this was a wonderful way that we could get input was from the survey that we sent out next slide please so basically what we asked them said here's our different four different categories would you rank order them for us and so what you're seeing right there is the first priority and so as our respondents answered the survey this is what they put first which is a great indicator of what was most important to them because that's where they ranked it most and so you can see that learning loss is one of our categories was the highest followed by support and retain all of our employees then technology and then school facilities and repairs next slide please so within learning loss we know that's such a broad definition so we asked them more specific things would you rank these possible categories once again this is the priority they showed by making it the very first when they rank ordered the different categories and so you'll see that we have additional curriculum resources to enhance student learning followed closely by the free summer school and tutoring the other ones were very very similar in size in terms of the response we had too that definitely stood out next slide please and so when we asked the same thing about facility repairs we had three different categories that we looked at and we got to improve indoor air quality ventilation by upgrading the hvac hvac system was the top priority from the respondents and then you'll see a lot more detail about what that entails further in this presentation next slide please finally when we talked about technology we gave three different categories for them to rank order again uh different possibilities that we had coming from the district you'll see that additional student devices was the number one priority followed by connectivity and network enhancements and the nice part about the survey was that it gave us an overview of what a community and what our parents were looking for which then led to our conversations within our committee next slide please hi my name is aubrey and de la riva and i'm a senior at williamsfield high school so our sr3 committee consisted of 12 members in six different positions five administrators two principals two teachers one classified one parent and one student we had three committee meetings one on september 7th is where it was an introduction to the sr-3 committee and we've received surveys and then the next meeting we reviewed the surveys and the third meeting we finalized our spending plan thank you next slide please so as outlined earlier so we had seven point million for this uh money so our spending plan uh we maintained those four categories um that we've surveyed into our spending plan so the final final spending plan you'll see here the majority of the allocation uh is to support our employees at 3 million a lot of this money is coming with that consent agenda item that you approved earlier with a retention stipend to those employees returning we'll also talk a little bit about that in the next two slides the second category that was highest spent was the learning loss initiatives this is well above the 20 percent that we were required to set aside at 2.2 million 2.3 million excuse me the third category uh was the school facilities repairs that slice of pie is at 1.5 million and finally the technology to support instruction uh we finalize that plan at 994 000.
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um i don't want to bore you with just reading through i'm not going to read the charts obviously but based on your having looked at these were there any questions that you had that were specific to liskenier and we gave you um as always the comparison from year to year for the uh previous two years okay that's what i was gonna yeah that's if you look at the top of the um this is the format that we use every year that the chart that goes from page to page to page has the greater the course and then the sections for 1920 2021 and now the 2021 school year and we provide what dean provides the number and the percentage for the um sections with regard to the class size target [Music] and how are teachers finding the manageability of some of these larger classes well actually this is a pretty good report for class sizes yeah um i think you'll you could notice that in grades seven and eight there's larger class obviously two hundred four two hundred so you know at least ten fourteen maybe more the difference is in fifth and sixth grade we have nine homeroom teachers if you want to say and 10th um excuse me 10th 7th and 8th grade we have 10 but even with 10 at times you'll notice um that you know like if you i think what you're saying is i look at fifth grade on the chart now i'm on the chart yeah and uh we have seven classes so it's more than we had last year but um you know it's it's still only 19 which is actually not bad at all compared to two years ago um the sixth grade is up again because that number is nine teachers where last year we had 10 teachers so that's where that number seems skewed a little bit but last year we had 10 teachers in sixth grade with 204 kids uh where this year we have um nine teachers with the 190 kids so that's where i think the number so even last year with more teachers though we were over for sixth grade yeah yeah but we were only over four of the sections if you look at the 20 21 section that's what that means this is part of the magic of what they do at the middle school in high school because and it gets tricky it gets tricky with certifications because we have teachers that are certified k-6 and then we have the teachers that are certified 7-12 and dean and his team have to with the fluctuations in the in the demographics from great when we have a bubble year et cetera et cetera try to move all those people around so that we you know don't lose teachers do we can't put we can't put people in classes that they're not certified to teach and so it's it's so is that what happened here there was just like a moving around of teachers is that why we're down and teacher there in sex well it was really it's because of class sizes okay with numbers okay you know again we try to be strategic in in that aspect and because we were down uh students excuse me and actually that number was even lower we we had that was a sixth grade is usually a grade that we do get more students come in we have students from ais come in yeah and for some reason that's a an average i think i've done it over the years i think it's almost an average of nine to ten extra students a year between ais and other students that's probably our largest grade uh with differences in numbers but um and then sometimes with seventh and eighth grade you'll see some of the sections it depends on if it's a high you know advanced math class sometimes those are a little bit larger it depends on some of our world language because we have french and seventh and eighth grade but when we have a teacher that's teaching the french class that means we have to have there's uh less sections for spanish in there so that means that those numbers are they go up a little bit that's all that means sorry i'm pulling up the spreadsheet any other questions on those i mean you'll see we do have a lot of zero percents yeah yeah like for our specials now there's an example but you see zero percent for special and that's because we have ten at every um at every grade level yeah well i never get we have 10 special teachers so at every grade level you obviously have 10 10 teachers and one thing if you notice that i'm excited about is the uh um where is it somewhere in here with abandoned course numbers they have gone up dramatically um from the past years because obviously last year they were down a lot and i apologize i gotta find that for you oh if you look at i think it's the fourth page yeah of course we're back up to 99 so we were at 152 a couple years ago uh we went down to 23 last year we're back up to 99 and then banned uh we were at 195 a couple years ago now we're back up to 146.
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so in the next slides we will go into detail on each of these slices of pie good evening sue boris mcginner i'm executive director of elementary ed assessments and student information i've asked katie to come up and help present this first bullet we're talking about free summer school and tutoring and this is part of that learning loss initiative we estimated the cost per year of this to be approximately 400 000 i'd like katie to expand a little bit on the experience that we had this year with summer school and why are we recommending that we continue this experience for our students good evening thank you for having us so i'm going to speak to the elementary model that miss malloy spearheaded along with miss day and several other committee members there was an application process and then also an interview process and an increase of funds to pay for the teachers time and planning and with that increase in funding i will tell you we were able to get better quality teachers in regards to who was able to provide their time over the summer so i can tell you my literacy coaches my math specialist even our assistant director of special education provided their time over the summer to give the intensive instruction that these students needed so over my course of time here i will tell you that it increased tremendously what the students got and we were able to see a huge difference and a decrease in the gaps we thought that we would see from covid so that was amazing to see and that we can continue with that the middle school model and the high school model continued how they previously had and i think they did a wonderful job maintaining that and seeing obviously the results that they were anticipating so as a result of that and the um we've extended this recommendation over the next three years at an estimated cost of 400 000 we focus our our in the elementary at the bottom 25 are the students we initially invite to attend summer school and so we'd like to continue to do that for the next three years we know that based upon what we saw last year this will help mitigate any learning loss that we might see i'm also going to speak to the counselors shauna miller had to step out this evening but the second piece of the learning loss initiative was the recommendation of adding additional counselors we know that during this time students social excuse me their social and wellness um capacities have needed some support and so you know we hear all the time that that those things um that providing support for students um social emotional needs is one of the key things that we need to pay attention to and so we've proposed that we add three counselors to service the elementary schools now we know we have nine elementary schools and we would love to put one in each elementary school but we couldn't we didn't feel that that was sustainable remember over the long term so we'd like to recommend three elementary or three uh counselors for the nine elementary schools meaning that one council will service about three schools in addition to that we'd also like to recommend the addition of one district lead counselor and this district lead counselor would be able to support k-12 and provide a combined direction and mission and vision and they will also be able to streamline support and utilize resources from the state school counseling association as well as the national association to develop support for students and then finally one of the key components that we identified a need for was curriculum to support learning loss in our elementary schools specifically in our emergent readers and in order to do that we needed to entertain the idea of purchasing a systemic program supplemental program that could help support phonics instruction in our k schools at grades k through 3.
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okay so up another 20 so i think that's a that's a positive any other questions so i just uh this is it's a hard job to do all the scheduling and it takes a really long time and so we really appreciate the work that dean and his team do with this for the high school we had have a total this is the october first data of 904 students and you can see uh the way this is always laid out in this way by the uh content area class how many sections there are and then how many sections are above the class side guidelines which is 21 and you can see just right off the top with english 49 sections but 43 of them or 21 of those sections are above the class side guideline of 21 and the largest class has 29 students and so that's a fairly large class i don't know if you've since you got this on friday if you had any specific questions about any of the any of the sections and what you're seeing on there social studies has a larger class with 30 students i think there are music classes that have 49 students the pe classes the largest class is 29 students and the other interesting component we always get asked about how many students are in what language and that's provided here there are 557 spanish enrollments and 80 french enrollments and mark did prepare this but here if you have any specific questions regarding this report if we were to add teachers in order to address some of the class size issues at the high school do we have the physical capacity to schedule them in terms of rooms rooms and things like that it would be tricky i certainly think you know we're all going to suggestions and looking around and things but there's no empty spaces large empty places but certainly we could get creative yeah right now there's it's like a full hotel that's that's what i was thinking the answer was no more reservations no okay how many students are enrolled in american sign language this year i didn't hear that asl in asl how many students are enrolled in i do not have i don't want to make that number up i don't have it but we can get it because jules has her talking computer that is one of our world language classes and not mentioned right i was just wondering this might be a question for a different report but how did some of the new courses that we've offered over the last year or two phil and how did that impact class size at all we can get that information i'm sorry i missed the question i think it's 28 for asl 28 for asl the new the new classes that we've added that we added in the past year past two years um can we get information i don't want you to get it tonight tonight um information how did they feel and does that impact on class size so how are they doing overall the classes that were new yeah like the past couple years we've added a couple of new classes i know the research classes have technology been very um popular and if you ever have a chance to go to one of them you'll wish you were in the class really good okay any other information that we can get for you i don't want to put jules on the spot since she didn't do this report but we certainly can get you we can get the um this amended to have the asl numbers on it and we can find out about um your question jim yeah i think that's okay all right okay um don't go too far our next uh item is the el by grade report oh i'll do that so you have your el report and uh this year we have this is as of [Music] 104 students and you can see at center school there are six 16 students eight in each of the grade levels and the line we have four total languages at um center school when you get to huckleberry there are 43 students now this is significant and you're going to be hearing about this in our budget work this this year there were 43 students in grade 12 they're grade 2 there are 12 grade 320 and grade 411.
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so we did some research into different programs and discovered and found that the 95 phonics core classroom program was the one that met the needs of our district um in the most comprehensive way and uh this also met the needs of the malware or the move on with reading requirement that the arizona department of education requires in terms of making sure that students reach a mastery level of reading by the end of third grade the idea and the proposal in includes the purchasing of this program with training for teachers over the summer and at the beginning of our new school year and full implementation beginning in the fall next slide good evening june blaine teacher gateway point elementary and also serve as the higley education association president this was the second priority of the spending categories it's the to support and retain highly qualified employees with this we propose a one-time stipend of fifteen hundred dollars this is for all uh classified certified and administrative employees it is the fifteen hundred dollars is for a full-time position we will allocate or prorate the amount based off of their full-time equivalency or fte as you see there to qualify you needed to be employed and working in the district as of april 1st of this year so 2021 and must still be employed as of october 31st of this year the proposed payout would be a live check on november 16th [Music] in addition to that good evening sub technicians so we have a category of what we call sub employees a lot of them work irregular and not very often but when looking at value and letting them know that we appreciate the work that we did we set some criteria in which they have to work at least 20 hours a week and if that was the case and they worked regularly they would qualify so we've got about a half a dozen individuals that we call our sub technicians that work for the hp hcpa pardon me in which we're going to receive a partial payment for that and then the fifty thousand dollars we were proposing as well to help roll out this phonics program in regards to training the teachers and giving them the time they needed to understand that and fully implement it the second part as well as the counselors pd with the new k-12 and the three at the elementary level is to have the time and the pd there to make sure everybody's aligned in the same direction and providing what we need to our students and community and then best practices obviously just in general what the vision that we would like to move forward with so thank you as we look at the transportation incentive re stipend pardon me we're looking at it as a referral recruitment bonus so as you know nationwide we are not only short on short line pardon me on frontline workers but definitely in the transportation area so through conversations with josh crosby as well as what we've seen other districts do not only in the state but across the country we think this is good utilization to kind of help our employees who are currently with us in terms of fifteen hundred dollars but then also incentivizing individuals to refer individuals and hopefully they'll come on board and receive then a recruitment bonus as a result of that so we would look at five hundred dollars of that going to the employee and a thousand dollars of that going to um the employees referred and the employee who comes on board after six months of working with us so they would have to stay on board with us for a minimum six months to receive that dollar amount they would get the full one thousand dollars and then the employee who made the referral would get 250 at the time of referral and then another 250 after that six months that the employee sustained their position with us we're modeling off of some other programs that we've seen recently within the area also as you know back in august we came to the board to talk about our coveted leave and extending covet leave we initially had it sunset back in june and with the delta variant and other capacities and items that came aboard we felt it was necessary to extend it so looking at allocating a portion of the ester money to help support the leave that we had for employees during that time period lastly in this category we have an allocation for operational support costs or indirect costs these are costs for maintaining and operating the grant all the way through 23-24 fiscal year 23-24 next slide please mr moore could i ask a question real quick yeah um on i noticed that we're paying out these stipends soon when are we hiring the counselor is it for this year or is it going to be just for next school year only i think there's there's a little work to still be done on identifying a job description um these we would look to i think broaden or create a new job description but it would be as soon as as possible um the funding is allocated for this year so um we would look to um you know after tonight probably would start the work on on building that process so we've actually started looking at ada requirements also looking at cert components to what we currently um identify as our school guidance counselors so there's dynamics of that sir and ada had created a social worker cert a couple years ago too so looking at maybe a combination of certifications that would be applicable but really relying on what their experiences are to follow within this model versus just our guidance counselor model good evening rich dobson interim director for maintenance and facilities uh in this portion of the esser plan we were focusing on improving our air quality trying to bring fresh air in and stale air out of the buildings and we focused on the life expectancy of our old units when we should replace them and the efficiencies of them in that we are going to district-wide 780 thousand dollars that is 280 000 for a an upgraded ems system that is the brains of the the hvac system throughout the district and then also buying 50 new air conditioning units to be taken out and divided into some of the much needed areas chaparral will be getting 10 williamsfield 10 centennial 5 hta 10 gateway 5 and cortina 10 units each also at higley high school we will be replacing out one of the chillers and excuse me and two air conditioning units in the weight room for thirty thousand of that cortina will be getting four new ac units at 25 000 a piece the media the kitchen and the girls and boys locker rooms will be getting new units there saw someone we will be replacing out two chillers at 35 000 each for a total of 70 000 gateway will be getting a new compressor in their media area for 25 000 centennial we will be placing replacing two units on their gym for 50 000.
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so there are nine total languages represented at huckleberry but if you look at spanish there are 20. 20 is the magic number when you're talking about speakers of a single language in a school once you have 20 students in a school that speak the same same language you will require you're legislatively required to have a bilingual program in the next school year so next year we will be required to have a bilingual spanish program what does that mean it means that we need to advertise for a bilingual cert spanish bilingual certified teacher and we need to procure curriculum materials and offer bilingual services to those students so i'm not going to belabor that point right now because you're going to be hearing more about that when we get into budget uh wisconier has 29 students and there are seven total languages spoken there you can see that the highest number is in fifth grade with 15.
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power ranch we will be replacing a unit on the gym for 27 000 coronado we are going to replace um a the refrigeration unit on the walk-in cooler and the freezer unit for thirty thousand williams field we will be replacing three units on their gymnasium for forty five thousand hta we're going to also do um new coolers on their walk-in walk-in cooler and refrig freezer for 35 000 san tan we we will be replacing uh the walk-in cooler and freezer unit there for 30 000 and the district office will get two new units and two new air conditioning units for twenty thousand there [Music] can i ask a quick question while we're right here um mr moore why are we spending this kind of money at saseman it's a newer school they're in our lease they're supposed to be funds for large expenses this is not we want a new something these are mechanical why would we need to spend this kind of money at one of these schools that are newer correct yeah so we've identified the need um with with mr um rich dobson and his team um and we've allocated into uh the assessor plan until we we finish litigation and finishing um kind of conversations with jmf higley in terms of utilizing those capital repairs fees that are built into those leases for those schools um we were going to budget for it here he does have additional lists and additional atrocious units across the district where we can move that money from but right now we currently are having difficulty accessing those monies from the leases so we are budgeting in this plan initially would these not be under warranty i mean um are not most air conditioners like at least a 10-year warranty i mean we would have to do some research and come back to you with that because these like i said these schools are what seven years old eight years old so i i mean i think it's it's great that we have it kind of set aside that if we need it but i want to make sure that we're kind of covering all of our bases that most air conditioners have a longer warranty than that that these are newer if we i know like you said we have the litigation on spending those funds but i find that kind of money spent on on one of our newer schools i find that kind of concerning for that reason president reese members of the board one of the things that we can provide additional backup information but one of the things as you heard mentioned earlier there's restrictions in in ways you can use the funds so yes you can use them for basically you can't just use them for any capital project these would be improvement in these areas one of the things that we had done earlier is a condition condition index on where our triaging our greatest needs in these and trying to you can use these funds out of esther for this purpose freeing them up out of other capital funds so that that would allow you to use those for other projects so again where you'd like their the plan was to utilize where they had identified need and priority with the funding sources that are allowing to do that it also allows us to keep up with the maintenance and the condition of these that provide the quality of if air filtration and cooling that we were finding problematic and became a real priority when we talk about healthy environments and how important that is so this was one of the allowable categories and we happen to have information on exactly where is this state of the health and wellness of those systems one for maintenance but two for um improvements president reece dr foley um how long is it going to take to get these units i've heard there's a shortage of air conditioning units a whole problem maybe we'll say with a supply chain um so i didn't know is this a plan to put in this summer or are we trying to get it sooner wherever you'd like to direct the question feel free rich will happily answer this question very good question and right now ac units are running anywhere from 9 to 15 weeks so there's if we would like to get these done before summer we would probably need to get these uh ordered in the very near future thank you that very good question and that's and that's just not on ac units that's on everything sorry so dr foley are we already looking at our summer projects so we can order materials sorry i know that's a question that's not maybe in this that's maybe something that to think about president reese vice president wilson obviously one of the things that's a big priority is that the priority of what needs to get done and when we get it done and what funding you use to it some of those things obviously with these one-time funding you you have the ability to project ahead the others we build the budget but we've identified the needs and we've prioritized the funding obviously as we figure out what does or doesn't pass or what allocations we have or don't have as we revise the budget we then appropriately identify what will we'll fund this year the next year the following year based upon our priority list we've identified so i can share with you that rich and his team have done a very good job of being very comprehensive to figure out what needs to be done so we can be able to prioritize when and how we fund that and triage it we've talked an awful lot about that our district process for identifying a hierarchy of needs to help us determine when you have so much to do and only so much funding what do you do first and that's one of the things that they've done a great job at helping us to get our handle on and wrap our head around it's unusual to have one-time funding for this purpose and it's one of those things these are long-term investments that help us on the long-term maintenance and care of our equipment that may have been in great need of such for a long time thank you um president reese have a question so there's up to a 15-week delay or how critical are these upgrades you know so if it takes longer or whatever i mean is it going to be devastating it's not i mean upgrade versus a repair or replacement it's nothing that's devastating right now that's why it's critical that we do and when we do get this approved and we know that the money is coming available we need to get things ordered as quickly as we can we're probably lucky that it's the cooling or the cooler time of the year now we would want to make sure that we try to get as much done as we can before the before the warm season comes and we all know that arizona gets a little warm president ruiz members of the board it's important to remember that the state monitors how we're utilizing this so in other words they have the rules associated with it you say this is how we're going to do this you turn it in to the grant the compliance they make sure you're spending it appropriately then you you can fund it obviously um we then bring things to you like per our policy um based on the cost you will be approving them as purchased just like you did tonight with the the stipend so again you will prove part and piece we also have to work with the state to make sure that our plan is spent according to and in alignment with what is allowable by those rules as part of the compliance of that and hence one of the pieces why you do a lot of work on the front end i cannot tell you the amount of hours yes there were three committee meetings but your staff behind the scene were working hours and hours and hours to gather the information and documentation to help prioritize um what can and cannot be used with that funding that's allocated another question um obviously if this is you know monies given are we tied to a certain and one and only distributor when it comes to air conditioning units are we looking at a lot of different companies that can provide these air conditioners are we just looking at one specific no we are not just tied to one we will be looking at three or four different manufacturers i just got an air conditioner in less than a week so i know that they can be done it's just going out there and finding it so if anything we're to break down i think we need to make sure we're looking at all avenues and it came from kentucky so that was pretty fast a lot of these were maybe a residential maybe a five ton unit and stuff like that a lot of these worry we're looking at seven and a half ton 10 15 even up to 35 ton units so they're not just something that is just setting setting around so but i i do know that if we if we do if we do the job right we look around we will be able to get the best price and in the least amount of time president reese and member taylor yeah we'll still utilize our procurement we have several cooperative contracts several school district oriented vendors that will bid on a lot of these projects and there's multiple resources to procure a lot of these items that are in this plan there we go the next slide we'll introduce mr pacific thank you good evening um jim payceck director of i.t so uh my part of the plan or our part of the plan is a technology to support instructional delivery innovation and operations and we're going to focus on spending the dollars that we have over the course of the first two years rather than three in year one we're planning to purchase 950 spare student laptops this will allow us to distribute spares to all of our schools so that if a student has a broken laptop we can take their broken laptop away from them give them a new functioning laptop and get them back to work we can then take the broken laptop and turn it in for um warranty repair and send it away and and get it back as you might expect that's taking a little bit of time because everything uh takes a little more time now but uh we will be able to assign approximately spares to each high school 50 spares to each middle school and 25 spares to each elementary school with that purchase the second line is crowdstrike crowdstrike is a cybersecurity software that we pay for here in higley protects us from ransomware and variety of threats what we want to do the the cost there the 3373 allows us to put a small piece of software on each of those spare laptops so that they are secure and that crowdstrike can monitor anything that might be happening from a cyber threat point of view should that threat progress up upward into our more critical systems uh crowdstrike can stop that and offer us remediation but we don't we definitely want to protect our edge devices and so that's the money we're investing there the third line uh is a is a price difference we were just notified last week that higley public schools was granted approximately half a million dollars by the ecf which is the emergency connectivity fund it was a 7.1 billion dollar federal program given to the schools with the intent and purpose of providing devices that will go home with students that do not have adequate technology at home so last year higley public schools was able to gather data from our community and and identify a number of students in this case 1357 students that said that they didn't have a device that they had an inadequate device or that they had to share a device and so um the use act the the same organization that gives us our e-rate funding awarded us once again approximately half a million dollars to buy these devices but the price was capped by the federal government per device at four hundred dollars per device and say it with me everything's more expensive now so um the 115 000 will make up the difference in that purchase and allow us to purchase those devices to send home with our students we're expected to provide those devices as part of the grant to students for three years so they can be rearranged but they need to be in the hands of students for three years and i hope to move forward with that because i think that'll be a great thing for our students um if you look at at this year 20 fy fy22 and fy23 you'll see a line for adobe creative cloud adobe creative cloud is a software package approximately 20 pieces of software some of which are cloud-based some of which can be downloaded and installed on computers things like adobe spark allow students to create projects multimedia presentations just to kind of let their creativity run wild it also includes things like photoshop adobe acrobat adobe premiere a variety of software that the students can either use on their school device or if they have a more powerful computer at home they can download say photoshop and install that at home so we want to start in year one this year with enough of enough licenses to work with our teachers uh build capacity for with them and then if if that goes well and i think it will then in year two we'll we'll purchase enough licenses so that we can distribute it to all teachers all employees and all students uh to use those those projects so that's the top line in the second wrapping up the first year uh we would like to purchase document cameras for all of our teachers uh these will be new uh plug and play usb document cameras that will be consistent throughout the district everyone will have the same model we'll install the software um we will train them on on its uh on its use i'm going to work with dr treat and the academic coaches to develop a plan to train all the teachers on how to use their their cameras shouldn't be too complicated but we want to make sure that they start uh all on the right foot can i ask a question certainly um was there a need established for these document cameras i i've there's a yes okay because i've walked into rooms they've been in shelves like new classrooms i've been given one i put that one up on the shelf i know i don't know a lot of teachers that actually use them i've seen every teacher i didn't know if it's really that common oh sorry i'm just gonna come up and i can speak for gateway we have teachers that use them every day and mrs blaine will tell you when it breaks it disrupts her entire instruction and it's very hard to get new ones in so i personally have used tax credit to have some on hand and it takes upwards of usually two to three months to get them so they are used all the time i mean every minute of the day i think you can probably back me up on that so it is a key component to the effectiveness of their instruction thank you you're very welcome i just have a quick question since we just kind of took a little break um we see that we're going to buy all these cameras that's fantastic how are we going to refresh them in three years or five years when the money's not here we don't have extra funds anymore is there a plan dr foley or or maybe i'm concerned about like you know our teachers get used to this technology they love it and then oh mine's crap and it's broken and whatever how are we gonna refresh that yeah well um we're gonna just like everything right we have a lot of one-to-one devices uh teacher laptops all manner of technology that that uh needs to be refreshed on on a five-year cycle um if we look at a plan that that robert shrop created last year he created an excellent plan um it has basically 20 of the district every year being refreshed um so we're gonna have to take the money that we have and be strategic uh be creative about uh refreshing these things i i don't i don't have a i wish we had you know i think we all wish we had all the money but the good news is is the uh the i have every expectation that the camera will last the five year cycle so we'll be able to start off on a good foot right now and then five years from now we can think about it ongoing i would encourage us to think about it before five years as we've seen the copier incident a few years ago we bought all copiers and they started breaking and then it was like limping them along and i've become a master copier at some points of my life and i've read all the manuals so just to be able to fix it myself so i think it would be an encouragement to think about it well before that five year time frame comes up where how we're going to get that money and how if we're going to allocate it again and all of them refreshed all at once again or if we stage it in like we've done some other devices right just a recommendation president reece member wilson we we've updated or enhanced our capital planning process as you noted earlier in november we we've come to you with a comprehensive capital plan and what we're going to spend it on we would look to build this into itu's annual capital plan much like we've uh we'll look to build those counselor salaries into the annual budget this would be something we would like to sustain this plan does not the intention of this and the intention of the committee was not to put a bunch of money into this and not be able to sustain it we were very systemic about making sure this is something we can sustain um long term so members of the thank you one of the things i'd like to share with you is that there's sort of been a transformation happening in instruction in higley i think i want you to realize while it's taking a while for all of our you've been approving one-to-one devices for all of our elementary schools and sometimes you've approved things and several months later they come in but i will tell you well we were at cortina the other day and then we were walking through classes and a teacher came and said i am so happy about having these laptops available in my classroom all the time it changes the way i do instruction so when you hear about one-to-one instruction k-12 and the fact that all of our schools are working toward having devices how we're using our curriculum and how we're using our teachers and how teaching and tools and how we're using our cameras and other things looks different than it did for haley a long time ago because if you didn't have all the i mean we would buy curriculum and not have the one-to-one component for it i mean think about our ela adoption at the secondary level collections now our teachers are finally getting to use it the way it was meant to be driven with everyone having their own devices when you listen to his plan when he's talking about i will tell you jim wasn't even working in the district a couple hours and he was already on top of this grant that came out for ecf so i mean our secondary students take their devices home our elementary students the devices are in the classroom but we now would have a way for those families who don't have access to a device at home we could provide if you weren't a middle school or a high school student that has a one-to-one device to you we would if you don't have a device at home we have the ability now to make sure when you go home as an elementary student you have access to a device of school to do your homework to access your curriculum to connect into canvas to do the tools that we've added into our repertoire i guess as we have emerged lived through pandemic and are emerging better because of so i think it's important we've moved very quickly very fast um and and looking at how we do this looks different than we've done before but it's pretty exciting when we're talking about being one-to-one uh throughout our whole system looking at our curriculum and our learning management systems and our tools as a part of how we do instruction and higley better obviously and i think you've been reading a little bit about this as well that involves professional development how are we using that and that is something you heard him even say in working with mr working with dr treat and working with the instructional coaches this is an ongoing piece that we're going to continue to evolve we have these one-time resources that allow us to kind of get enough in this area in this category where we can use and hence this is the plan the committee used based upon the needs and the voices of what they're hearing to say here's how we could use this best now so year two yes so uh thank you i uh i've already addressed the first line which is the creative cloud which would be for everyone teachers employees and students but the the second line there wireless display modules for elementary classrooms um what what i would really like to encourage and i think teachers will appreciate is this idea of becoming untethered from their desk and so at our secondary schools we have um well all all of our teachers have laptops but our secondary schools they have a wireless module that allows them to connect their laptop to their display screen or their projector whatever the equipment happens to be wirelessly so they can walk around the classroom they can work with a group they can work from anywhere we do not have those modules at the elementary schools we would like to install them we would like to take advantage of this one-time funding to to put those in so that our elementary teachers can enjoy the same sort of flexibility in their classroom that our secondary teachers enjoy and once again the the document camera is also something that does not have to be plugged into the wall it just plugs into the laptop so that can also move around the room flexibly so that's everything thank you next slide please good evening dan fox principal sussman middle school the committee has put in a lot of time on this but as as dr foley mentioned as mr moore has mentioned even as aubry de la riva has mentioned here there's been a lot behind the scenes to put this together and we feel this is a very comprehensive plan we feel this is a very solid plan in utilizing these funds obviously with any plan especially as educators there needs to be some sort of progress monitoring so in the future the plan moving forward is to still have meetings to provide some oversight as to the use of these funds here review the expenditure expenditures and make sure that they still align to the original spending plan the original vision the original piece that this this committee has put together any adjustments any recommendations that we do receive we can propose those items to the spending plan if we see a need for those items and as we stated before one of the recommend or one of the requirements for the assessor funding is that the lea so higley would have to post this on our website in addition we would have to post any changes on our website to represent those changes and recommendations or adjustments that we do make so the plan after tonight moving forward is to continue to review the progress of all these items and as you guys know there's a lot of future planning that has to go into everything that we spend for so uh we feel this is a very comprehensive plan it'll meet the needs that are our community members told us that we're the most important to us and we feel that all these pieces will hit on everything that we are looking for with that if there's any questions i know you've already had an opportunity to ask them but if there's any more questions i have i have one more mr tyler it goes back to technology i'm sorry um over the years i've heard of but basically it's always been the higgly high problem of connectivity in certain buildings is that still an ongoing issue or have we really kind of taken care of that or is it still one of those issues it's just the way the school was created the brick walls i've heard lots of different things but there's some areas where it's like is it what couple i know higley was a big one i don't know if there was i don't know is there anything we can do to help well we will absolutely follow up and uh on on concerns that higley high might have with regard to their wireless if they need additional radios or we need to run some additional drops we can we can look into doing that for them i will take the opportunity to say that that it is on our plan for this year to upgrade the wireless at both middle schools that was something that was a project that was delayed by the pandemic and other circumstances but we have it's been approved um and we are if we haven't then i think we have already ordered the equipment we have ordered it so as soon as the equipment comes in we will be improving the the wireless connectivity in the network at both of our middle schools and that has been an area of concern so we'll loop back with higley high school and see if if there's uh dead spots or areas there but we're definitely working on the middle schools i think it would be good just to reach out to all principals and see if there's any other because i think sometimes if we don't ask they won't tell us um but just making sure that everywhere is really sorry mrs harris do you want to say something i was just gonna say we had an issue two years ago and the entire team came out and fixed it it did take some time because the problem was unknown they were walking around with their computers they even had someone from an outside vendor come in and we have not had any issues i asked june that as well because it was primarily in her building and knock on wood there has been nothing with our one-to-one as well so we appreciate their support and their urgency in fixing that yeah i just think it would be good to reach out and make sure that everybody sometimes just asking and saying hey is your wi-fi is it wi-fi that we're dealing with but okay like at some sort of connectivity is it okay on your campus and if not where are we struggling so we can get that addressed president reese vice president wilson that is one of the things we have a process for how when you have issues or concerns you you report them so that we address i know that that were for a while that there were some issues but a majority of those have been addressed and so if there are specific spots that are happening on campus and administration isn't aware we just need to help re remind them of that process that we have for how you reach out for support one of the things and again you've approved these on um you've been brand new about them actually in consent or you've been bringing your status and approved them and consent or as action items are some of the upgrades that were allocated through the technology budget as part of our capital there were areas um identified as as problematic most of them though were not at school sites they were at other locations like district office or other facilities but obviously the more we evolve with wireless and um connectivity which is one of the biggest pieces that we realized is we needed all over um and that has been something that we've been working on i will also add like the the connectivity was a a factor in the survey results there was a lot of um questions and input provided on lack of connectivity and even our student has commented on that but um what mr pacific forgot to mention is we are up for our five-year wan and land refresh so every five years we are required to upgrade or go about to bid for our internet and our wireless or wireless and local area network so um that will make a huge improvement five years of not of not upgrading or staying static um you know anybody in technology can realize that is gonna put us light years behind so this upgrade um which is why you don't see that in in the technology plan we feel and mr basic can allude to it we'll make a massive jump in terms of some of the areas where we've been lacking in that field yes we're we're working with the finance department to go out for rfp for the the wan and the internet connectivity so we look forward to getting responses back and making the best selection for higley public schools thank you i just know we've had in the past where azmerit comes along and everything's checked and everything's working great and then as soon as you get all the bodies in the room and all the device is going then everything quits and then they're locked out and then it's stressful and it's a z merit and all of that so i just would love to make sure that those things don't happen in our future and i know kovit i get it but i just always think of that moment in time that we could prevent and mrs keller that's a good point um we would hear from teachers in the past like you mentioned our english language arts curriculum they had devices in their classrooms and they're like you know what i'm not going to use them because half of the kids can't get connected and things like that so while i'm excited about going to these one-to-ones having more devices in the classroom it was a little concerning for me when we can't in the past we haven't been able to support that many devices all connecting at one time so you have teachers who are all these teachers are having these kids connected and and things like that that it slows it down or people can't get connected or they're getting kicked off and miss harris thanks for the update because i know i know gateway was always it's like i was there and then i got kicked off and and so thanks for the update i'm glad it's working now i'm glad they found out why because i know we spent a lot of time here so um yeah that was the first thing that popped into my head to mrs kaler was this is great what about our connectivity now i haven't heard anything for a while so obviously you guys have been working on it and and upgrading it and making it better um and i'm glad to hear that we're like you said five years you're way behind in the in the technology piece so we might as well be on dial-up at that point if we're that old you know i know they're like what's dialogue so thank you for addressing that and just keeping that in the back of your head as well with all these additional devices president reece board member kaler actually for until we were one-to-one when it came time first assessment we were moving we had moving they were moving carts and computers from one school to the x so if you had a set during testing time your your instruction changed because we were using we were moving devices around on a testing schedule because there weren't enough devices that should never ever be the problem here in higley again so thank you quick question just you said in five years do we have to wait five years is that by statute that we can only go the length of five years and typically um to get the best pricing five years is utilized we will probably recommend like an option to renew every year in this current bid so that gives us the flexibility to if there is no enhancements or if we feel comfortable with where we are we can just renew or if we feel like we need to address it and their issues to address we can then cancel then go out for another bid it just seems like such a long time like we've all said and so if we're spending all this money on technology and it can't be used then mrs kaler back um to azmerit talk i believe the state was also having issues with their servers back then and like i remember both there was a problem on our end and there was a problem at the state level too so that we can't control but if we can always make sure that our end is good that would be great but yeah i remember the state having issues with kiddos too when my kiddos were taking it and still are so vice president wilson i'm happy to report last year robert shrop can probably verify this the last time we went through testing we didn't have technology issues and they were ready they were on deck and ready to go so i think we're in a better place than i want to knock on wood when i say something but i think we're in a much better place i just want to give a shout out to our community or our committee thank you i know it's extra time in your day and you guys are already doing your own work and then it's taking extra time in in your day to participate in this but it's it's really appreciated and that way it's going not just meeting the requirement of the the funding but you guys are the accountability piece as well so i just want to thank you guys for putting your time and effort in and um and making sure that we're meeting our needs from what our survey said as well as the needs that you guys are familiar with so thank you for your time anything else all right well we'll go on um who's going to cover this one president race members of the board this is one of those quarterly updates that we do for special education she does that kind of explains it there if you have any questions she needed to leave this evening and if there are any questions we'll be happy to if we can't answer in the description there but this is one of those opportunities we have we provide for you as an update of where we're at um on our last meeting you had an opportunity to hear a little update about the program and her funding and how she does this and this is just a quarterly update and we talked about the day school as well a little bit during that time and and everything does anyone have any questions okay perfect then we will go on to 7.3 which is our certified evaluation update and miss martens i believe this one's yours yes good evening again president reese vice president wilson members of the board our higley colleagues as well as our community we're going to take an opportunity tonight to next go over the evaluation tool that we use for certified employees before i get started i have my fellow colleagues who have been instrumental in making sure this happens and collectively putting this together to lead this project along and they'll be participating in the presentation we have miss melissa garland who is our assistant principal at higley traditional academy we also have miss rachel bradley who's principal at centennial elementary and also ms karen bacon who's principal at higley traditional academy also next slide please so as we get started i just wanted to provide some background information i started with the district in fall of pardon me yeah fall of 2017 it's interesting now because it's almost been five years a long time but prior to my arrival i had heard a lot about the higley evaluation tool and how there were concerns about the tool right after i got here i had met with a number of individuals ms sherry richards one of them who was serving as executive director of elementary at the time about our evaluation tool and how it had been ineffective in terms of the process of going through the strategic plan these groups and organizations that were put together as strategic stakeholders to provide comments and feedback also talked about our evaluation tool and how that it did not provide specific and meaningful feedback to teachers so it was a struggle for teachers as well as for administrators who were issuing and doing the evaluation addition to that i heard a lot of feedback on our meet confer team too about how the scores in the evaluative factors didn't add up so there's a lot of confusion and a lot of unhappiness or dissatisfaction with the tool so i'm going to hand it over to miss bacon to continue that conversation good evening so in the spring of 2018 a small group of administrators went over to a neighboring district to take a look at their evaluation tool which is a hybrid version of the danielson model we began work to investigate the options that higley had available and those tools were evaluated based on the alignment with our strategic plan and our priorities the work was kind of slow so our director of human resources martin solicited the help of um some administrators to co-chair there's your team right here um so we co-chaired a larger group of people to get some input from the stakeholders that were both using the tool as an evaluator and being evaluated by it so at first the committee was established in the year 2018-19 and it was quite large and we found difficulty finding a time that all of us could meet because everybody had other commitments we were all in breakout groups developing different parts of the strategic plan so we decided to pair that group down to a smaller core group and the dis so those stakeholders move forward with the process and the committee was prepared last spring to make a recommendation and then we all know what happens so we had to focus on those other priorities and take a little break from that but we would like to recognize the larger team that participated in the process next slide um so that's the big group and then it was paired down to a group of about eight but we would like to thank each member of the community that willingly gave their time and contributed to the discussions in the process various stakeholders were determined across the district based on roles and recommendations and then not all of these individuals listed on this slide are still with the district because this was several years ago all right good evening so one of our initial meetings was to determine what the what our goal was for creating or coming up with or planning or just all the things for a new evaluation instrument we had a few goals that we really wanted to stick to it needed to be a really good instrument and good is very it's a very ambiguous word but we'll get into what that meant later on um ideally we wanted to still utilize the frontline platform which is also known as my learning plan which we're all familiar with it's a great tool and as the years have progressed we use it for more and more things such as attendance through aesop and again through through documenting all of our professional learning opportunities we also wanted to make sure that it was something that was relatively easy not only for the individual who was being evaluated but also for the individuals who were using the evaluation instrument one of the things that we liked about the particular model that we're going to present to you guys tonight is that it has the ability to run different data reports for an administrator so just like we expect our or any of our employees who are working with other groups to run data like student data or maybe data on different maintenance costs or things like that we want to be able to run our own data reports to determine if there are trends in teaching practices that we need to address as a building administer so administrators so there's other options for these reports that we found to be really nice and it would be a great add-on if we could use them so those were our three i guess look fors when determining which evaluation instrument to go with next slide please ultimately as you guys know we currently have and the strong instrument for evaluation we looked at a variety of other instruments that correlated with frontline because again that was one of our goals we ultimately decided we want to stick with the frontline platform and we had to look work with pla with frontline to determine which additional evaluation instruments were used there was a handful of them while not all of them were ideal for our situation that we have in higley some of them were very exclusive to the state that they were originally created for there was one in particular that was exclusive to new york the state of new york there was another one that at the time was very exclusive to higher education so again it wouldn't have been applicable to us another thing that we are really looking for is something that is true uh tried and true something that has a really great reputation which is ultimately why we decided on the danielson model so i will pass this on to melissa to continue the rest good evening president recent governing board so you've heard a little bit about the background and how we ended up comparing the two models that we continued with on the process so i'll take a few minutes to fill you in on our work for the committee so as we began looking at what we wanted from an evaluation instrument and the concerns that were brought to the table we started comparing the two models the strong instrument as well as the danielson model they they do look at the same components of instruction in a classroom they both have classroom management or classroom environment they will look at planning preparation professionalism all of those things are similar however what we found is that in comparing the two we found that the danielson model allowed us to give specific feedback an example of that is in the strong instrument there are seven standards but within those seven standards there's not specific things that you can give feedback on because as for those of us who have been here for a long time and received training from that organization on the instrument itself we were told they're not it's not a checklist so you just have guidelines to go and go from which is good in some ways but when teachers are wanting to improve their practice they want to know specifically what it is they can do so with the danielson model it allows us to do that so an example is within classroom environment there are five different components of that and with that you can have specific indicators so while a teacher can be exemplary in one area of classroom management there may be another area that they can improve upon but with that instrument you can tell them exactly what it is and how they can go about making that change in the classroom another thing that we did along the way as we compared those the danielson instrument does have very comprehensive evaluation instruments for our other classified i'm sorry certified groups like school psychologist occupational therapist physical therapist um and also like our coaches that we have so when the administrators that were in the group and as well as shauna miller who took part in that we really found that to be much better suited to what we wanted for our employees rather than what we were using currently one of the last things we did in the process before we made our decision i know miss broadly spoke to wanting to say with front line and one of the things that we know being in education things change and there's always something better well we've really grown attached to front line and it's easy to use and now that it is used for more than just evaluations um we wanted to stay with that because any time there is the potential for a change it's important to let people know what also is going to be the same and that would be something that would be familiar to everyone so we had a representative from frontline meet with us for a webinar where we were able to go through that instrument as looking through the eyes of a teacher and an administrator there are many components to the danielson instrument that we have the ability to use or not use their self-evaluation components there's also where they a teacher can create their own professional development plan as well so we do have the ability to use those or not next slide please so throughout the process these were our four considerations we made sure that along the way we had input from all committee members we also had buy-in we also had to consider the cost to the district which miss martens was very instrumental in helping us understand what the cost is for the district to use frontline and also doing research with the danielson model in terms of how much it would cost to train our administrative staff and also training our teachers on the new evaluation instrument should we go that way and we also considered a timeline for implementation although our committee has been working on this for quite some time we still felt it was important to see the process through be true to it and not rush just because it had taken us longer than we had anticipated due to other circumstances out of our control so with all of those considerations we came up with our conclusions next slide please so as a committee we decided that the danielson instrument was the best option for husd for the reasons that you see listed it is a very um it's a nationally recognized it ha it's a validated instrument that's used around the country it's it has evaluations for all certified groups and the feedback that it can provide teachers which really is what this process is about was was going to be more of what we thought our teachers would desire and what they needed to be the best they can be in the classroom and also just being able to continue with our online platform that made it a good choice as well and now miss martins will speak about next steps so from the exception of this committee and its work in identifying what we were going to do we knew that once we got to a point that we had to communicate out we needed to come back and communicate to the board the work that we've been doing and as my fellow colleagues mentioned you know it we had to refresh ourselves as our initial recommendation was to implement last school year and as we said you know the delays of covet and everything and we didn't want to add un do pardon me we didn't want to add additional pressure to our employees with the coming back to school remotely and then doing a change on top of that as well as all the other dynamics that were happening at the time so we're here to communicate this information to you we then want to make sure to communicate to all of our certified as well as our administrative groups to let them know the work of the committee what they've done and where we're going to go and then we're going to have to start training this spring of 2022 we're going to have to start training all of our qualified evaluators which are primarily our administrators and some select other groups of individuals so that way we know the tool we know it well we know how to utilize it for the fall implementation of 2223 and we'll make sure to also communicate it out to all of our certified employees in which this directly impacts them and you may or may not be aware every year before the start of the school year we always do employee meetings and at those employee meetings we always do an overview of our training tool pardon me of our evaluation tool and train all of our employees on it and the core concepts of it so we'll do that for them but instead of the strong it will be the danielson tool and move on from there one of the things that you might wonder in question is that it is a certification tool for our certified employees and they don't have something specific to administrators but as we've talked about in cabinet as well as the leadership team we know that at our retreat we talked about core values we know with our strategic plan we've aligned other dynamics of our goals and our vision we firmly believe that as we look at that as a whole from cabinet below we should be utilizing that for our administrators and we can certainly incorporate components of that and tie into the domains that are listed that ms garland mentioned earlier in relation to the danielson model but then that way as i've always said in the past or strategic plans really paves the pathway pardon me for everything that we do within the district next slide please we will entertain any questions that you might have dr foley i know you're a part of the superintendent's group from the valley do any other districts that you know of use this that are local so then it's an easier transition if we were to get an employee that they're already kind of knowing yes yes so president reese vice president wilson members of the board the danielson tool is one that is utilized by many school districts the mesa public schools district utilizes it and so does gilbert i will share with you i've had the experience of being trained in how to use both tools when i was here in higley we were using the strong and then when i transitioned to mesa public schools went through the extensive training in the danielson when i look at it from my own lens of which tool would i prefer to use in my toolbox i would use the danielson over and over and over again before i'd ever want to go back to utilizing the strong if i had a choice so when i came to higley and my very first year here mum was updating us of the work that was doing the plan was to move this along i was like this is great because this is a fabulous tool i was very familiar with this tool um then obviously that became not the priority and rolling the one of the most important parts and you heard the committee talk about it is the training the integrated reliability the understanding of how to use the tool this is a more meaningful useful tool that gives me i think more comprehensive feedback but the training is the most important part rolling out a new instrument online would have been a horrible idea no matter how good the training is this is that was not the time to do it so as we return to more normal uh this was not time to resurrect this and to to continue with the work here and and when visiting the work it is still the more preferred utilization tool it is truly more used to more recognized if we were to go to a national conference and say we're using the strong model they go what's that if you were to say you're using the danielson they go oh that's a wonderful tool miss richards actually brought up in one of our meetings as a reminder to us a few years back the ade arizona department of ed started doing qualitative paula qualified i was like what's the word qualified evaluator training and um there are districts all over the state that participated as well as charter schools and the two times that higley's been represented and i think we've had a third time but at the two other incidents when you had to line up where and what evaluation tool you used we were always the only ones that utilize strong so thank you mrs martens for all the hard work in the committee i know this was a long haul but even as a school board ourselves we were unhappy with our own evaluation tool and overhauled it recently and again just the self-evaluation part and just being able to really define some things is so important for that feedback for the teacher so we trust your judgment you are eating living breathing um evaluating so i'm i'm i'm in full support of what you guys think is best so thanks for your work yeah thank you thank you for putting in the time and effort and recognizing the need for this in pushing through despite a lot of the obstacles that you came and encountered i'm excited to see it um i hated it whenever i worked here i hate it in the district i'm in right now they're still with strong it sounds like it's a good tool to help teachers grow and i don't know any teachers that just don't need that feedback and want to get better and to have make it very clear of the expectations and be but beyond being better in the classroom i can also see it making relationships with administration better too because there's just always that hey in the classroom hey that's great i loved your lesson plan we go to read read or your implementation of the lesson we read our feedback well you could have done this better and that you're like what you just told me i did it well and it was all that subjective feedback in those standards so i love that we're going to have something better for these teachers and look forward to better teaching and better relationships in our district so just into your comment we appreciate your support i wanted to be like the me too i'm like needed as well but um one of the things we really liked about this instrument as well is that teachers get us or staff your certified staff has a score all along so you get this rating of where you stand for each of the domains whereas with the strong instrument everybody's caught by surprise at the end and so they get this great feedback that may or may not have a bias because it is very ambiguous at the end everybody's like what do you mean i'm just effective i thought i was like highly effective and then um so it's it's there's no longer the surprise at the end when we do their summative they know all along exactly where they stand which everybody wants to know where they stand they don't ever want to be caught up caught by surprise so it's another highlight of the danielson model thank you that's a great point when i would hear from teachers that that would honestly be the number one complaint that i hear from teachers and is that exactly that i got all this great feedback i was told how wonderful i am and then i get the score later and then what do i do there's how do i go about that and so that would be one of the biggest concerns that i would hear regarding teachers in their evaluation so i really appreciate that and that they they have the self-evaluation tool i think those are very important and very interesting so that you can come together because the lens of someone how they're doing and the lens of someone who's evaluating are very different and we know typically when you're required to do self-evaluation you're harder on yourself but it helps clear up misunderstandings and i was doing what i thought i was supposed to be doing and i thought i was doing it well and then that generates that conversation to help them improve and so i think that that's really important because that's where you find a lot of misunderstandings is when they're doing their own self-evaluation they're like oh i didn't i didn't know that so that then helps like mrs anderson say build that relationship with their administrator and not the animosity with their administrator so definitely appreciate that just want to take another moment before these ladies leave to just say um again how instrumental they were and how thankful i was that they were willing to jump on board and take this because it it was rough there was a lot of things that were going on between the end of the 17-18 year and then as we embarked on the 1819 and really ever since then um so really thankful for this group of women um who took the lead and chaired as well as all the committee members and their different roles as they played throughout the whole process so thank you yes thank you and i think you guys hold the record now for the longest committee before recommendation so yes thank you for sticking with it we we appreciate that all right then we're going to go ahead and go on to human resources pardon me so tonight i'm presenting to you the esi quarterly update we started this process last year in which the board approves in our po in expenditures overall the amount that we're going to pay for are sub-certified and classified as well as for other areas in which we might need educational services inc to provide us this is just our quarterly update thus far in terms of what we've spent and what has been what's remaining out of our total allocation that was approved from the board initially so you could see on there it's two 236 thousand eighteen dollars and eighty-six cents um we have one point two million that was approved and uh just under a million that's left so that should certainly cover us hopefully knock on wood things won't change for the rest of the school year thank you mrs martens has there been any conversation on i know we talk about when when another teacher covers a class for a four-sub job basically and we we are reimbursing them for their time that they sub their class what about like in our long-term subs cases where another teacher is coming alongside the long term sub and helping with entering grades and doing those kind of activities has there been any grumblings or talk in higley about doing any kind of compensation for those teachers that are doing that on top of they're not they're not the sub we have the sub for the class but the content the other teachers are coming alongside that sub and helping in areas of grading or things like that because it might not be their complete subject does that make sense am i making sense i'm sorry no you do make sense um so yes we do we have what we call our um in-house coverage essentially and that happens at the secondary level when a teacher oversees somebody else's class during their prep period and that gets paid out we've arranged it to work paying out more frequently before we paid it out just at the end and we did increase it's quite significantly going into the school year it had previously been 18 an hour for teacher coverage now it's or section that hour and now it's 25 so that's huge interestingly enough yes at the end of last school year i was at a site in which this incident did occur to where we had uh in a situation where we had what we called our rescue subs where they were covering a class and they'd been covering for a long period in one particular class and unfortunately the dynamics of what had happened there weren't curriculum planning left for that individual to the capacity of the level of which the teacher who was absent had to extend their time i've not heard any other specific rumblings since then you know you've heard in our superintendent's report that you've seen in discussion with some teachers departing because of things that they've said that personal they've no longer been able to to handle the classroom for a variety of reasons whether it's personal impacts to them and or just the nature of the stress in the classroom and so through that we've had some dialogue at the secondary level in terms of some curriculum planning and making sure that we're able to compensate if we have no curriculum but we can certainly dialogue a little bit more with ed services to see how much is happening and where we might go from there thank you i just think it's something to think about in those long-term sub-positions that may not have everything totally ready and then the the math department or the english department is coming alongside that sub which i love and so appreciate but if they're giving up their time to also take care of that class i would greatly appreciate thinking about some kind of compensation for them just food for thought if it happens especially if they're uploading like canvas materials and such i've heard some grumblings of canva like they're having depth degree update the other teacher's canvas to keep it fresh and going any other questions all right then we will thank you for that update we'll go on to 7.5 which is an information item on our policy revisions president reese members of the board if you'll recall we are on paul we're on policy patrol and what we're trying to do is make sure that in every legislative session there are components that are added and we have to make sure that our policies are up to date in our alignment with the law and as you know as a member of asba we receive policy updates where they make recommendations and we review them tonight we have four policies and these are pretty straightforward policies as you'll see that g c b g c f g c h and i h a all are just updating our policies to make sure that the most recent legislation that was put in place is reflected in our policies here um in most cases is there straight ad additions adoptions right from the recommendation so that our policies in these areas stay up to date and are in line with law at the law uh always know that if and ever we would ever modify a policy any change we make we then run through our legal counsel to make sure we didn't add or change something that would now make our policy illegal these are pretty much a direct reflection of asbas they would all be copyrighted with the exception of c a g c h which we changed the wording from self improvement opportunities to our title of our because they were referring to employee assistance resources we used our term for that we also added the handling of bodily fluids and bloodborne path engines because legislatively we're supposed to offer that every year anyhow and we do so again these are pretty these are pretty straightforward keeping our policies in line with the legislative updates and then you've seen any changes are marked in blue or red or struck out if there are any questions i'd be happy to address them no questions all right the policy committee is alive and well and meeting monthly as we dig dive into some of those that require a little bit more work as we work on our artifacts or exhibits that support those processes and procedures okay then we'll move on to 8.1 i move that we approve the policy revisions as they've been presented to us second since we just talked about this any other questions comments all right all those in favor aye aye aye that motion carries five 5-0 we'll go on to 8.2 i move that we approve mrs reach to give a yes vote to the asba proposal a to add a or to create a seat for the board of directors for the hispanic and native american interests can be represented simultaneously second okay any questions concerns comments regarding just a quick note through the asba there is one seat for the hispanic and native american caucus and they alternate so this will create an additional seat on the board of directors so that they can have a representative at the same time and so they will no longer alternate i think this one has been around for like 22 years where they alternated back and forth and now they finally want to do that they each get their own seat i think it's a great idea from my understanding of it long overdue i felt like it but i didn't know what everyone else's opinions kind of were but i thought it was great yes and so it it would change a bylaw within the asba so that um they do need to have um a a majority vote here so i believe maricopa gets two seats if i'm correct um when they talked about this that we get two seats since we're such a large district or county and then um they want two seats for these news these two new seats as well instead of just the single seat any other questions or comments all those in favor aye aye that motion carries five zero mrs reach if you'll submit our vote to change that by law thank you all right any other future agenda items um do we need to look at policy or i brought it up about the review of the safety procedures that needs to be done in such a time and so often to make sure that that or to consider that being a part of policy making sure that that gets implemented or yeah with mr walker um i don't know that we need to add it to our future agenda items that the safety plan would be at least reviewed once a year with the board of any changes um anything like that we we discussed that that was a requirement within our executive session and so we would like to just make sure similar mrs reach of what we do for many of our other items and and dr foley you've been calendaring certain things that we need to look at at certain times of the year that this just get added on there as well so annually it is reviewed with the board yes president reece president and remember remember anderson yes we are we are um there are annual things that we create a calendar for that we know that we annually have to bring and what we do sometimes is also pair appropriate presentations and things for that and one of the new things that we've implemented too is executive summaries at the end of every one of these that is even our own if you will outline for everything that we've done and when we've done it so we have a historical record from now on so we have a working calendar monthly topics some of them are legislatively driven like these policies expectations are and others are just requirements that we should be discussing or timely topics and then obviously these are other pieces that are upcoming that are embedded in there as well um so this is our annual it's it's on our annual calendar i just i just bring it up just because of oversight from previously and that it's pretty dang important it covers it encompasses a lot you have we have a document now of our annual topics and when they are historically addressed thank you and i just want to follow up if you can just give us a follow-up in our status report from our public speaker tonight obviously we don't get details on any student situation or anything like that but to ensure um that there's been contact made and then um any follow-up that would need to happen or recommendations to mr walker since he handles all of our safety plans that if we can just get an update in status that that's been addressed that would be great it will be there any other information just to verify um dr foley the course guide is coming to us as an information item only on november 17th correct correct and then the following one in december you approve so uh mr watson houser and his amazing team have been working eisenhower said it wrong today dr laxer and his amazing team have been working very hard on the course guide and and you will be reading a lot in status this week of some of the main changes curriculum alignment status updates mrs richards and i have had multiple meetings with him this week looking at those changes and that's coming so you're going to get a summary overview of the work from the committee that's happened and this committee has worked really hard and then in the december one you'll approve that course guide so that it's ready to rock and roll for registration i believe the course guide is pretty long correct is it already in board docs for the new members to start looking through because i remember the first year i was pretty shocked about how long it took for me to read through that uh just a reminder to maybe the new board members that that one's a long read this and the committee is finalizing some of those changes as soon as it's ready you'll also see what they'll upload is a tracked changes document so you'll be able to easily see additions and additions uh deletions but you'll also have update and status of kind of some of the themes and areas you're going to see more work than not um in one note in particular you'll be reading and learning about that hba obviously is one of the other course guides you'll be looking at and it's a little bit different now that we are implementing it and understand how it works and what we do and don't how we will and won't do things as we've built our true aoi so there will be a lot of work new work to look at there as well so you will have lots of information on course guides a middle school high school and and the virtual academy perfect thank you all right mr moore i know you have your work cut out for you now you gotta be creative and i have faith in you and your team and look forward to what you'll be bringing us so i appreciate all your work and effort in that and with that said i move that we adjourn bueller anyone a second all in favor hi hi motion carries 5-0 have a good evening it wasn't home you
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