Um there are, you know, it's it's a it's really a risk to our schools, it's a risk to our property values, it, you know, our ability to attract families to our communities. Um it's avoiding these overrides um and absorbing and the school absorbing these cuts, it really it just puts us in a much worse situation down the road. I mean, we're just kicking the can down the road, honestly. Um I think staying under the cap is sort of it's cutting, but it's not fiscal responsibility, it's avoiding fiscal responsibility. Um and I think every year we sort of continue to sort of accept the towns' numbers and sort of make it work, um we're really sending the message to the select board and the the finance committee that, you know, we have room to cut. Right? That that's the message that we're sending. Um the number that we submitted was some kind of starting position, and it wasn't our real need, and we all know that's not the truth, right?
But that's a project that'll be taken off the ground pretty soon. It'll stay on the track. That that's a big thing. I'm very glad um that that was going to be passed with the budget. That's going to really help out on a number of things. Um you know, having two teams practice at the same time across isn't going to have to chase the balls as much as they did today after miss shots. But that that safety aspect of things uh is really going to help kind of move us along in the right direction that we want to go to. U my warrior leadership council. This is going to be a lot of work for me to do. Um but I want to get our students more involved. Uh and with that bishop council I started this year we meet periodically but next year I want to make sure that it is a big focal point uh moving forward and that is really going to give opportunity for our student athletes uh to really get some experience with some leadership roles um in like states type of thing.
I mean, just the simple fact that I feel that the school has made so many improvements like when you're driving, right, and you see that there's paint, new paint. So, just in that, that speaks volume to the students. Wow. They're paying attention to us. So, I think even those little things have helped. I I thought personally, I thought that we were doing great. Um with respect to the survey when you compare it to the national and the state I think a lot of our trends are trending upwards. Yes, there's some that have fallen like in the prior years and it was like 1% 2% 3%. But that's that's going to happen. But I also think somebody brought up a good point. There's I think a 20% increase in the survey you said this compared to last year. So that that's going to change the data a little bit.
First again to Mr. Cantrell, congratulations for the hard work that you have done at Cooley. I think it is remarkable what you have done at Cooley in the three years of time that you have been there taking it from where it was before at the start of my time here on the board to an A+ and a Schools to Watch. As Mr. Lotzenhiser expressed, Sossaman won their Schools to Watch last year as well. I struggle with the idea that we wouldn't want to send our schools or we wouldn't celebrate this opportunity for multiple reasons. A, this is an Arizona Schools to Watch, so they are very familiar with what education curriculum that is set by our state is and what that looks like. Beyond that, we talk about overwhelmingly, like all schools throughout this state, we struggle with enrollment. One of the ways you get enrollment is to be the best.
So, it got a little complicated from then to now. One of the major changes that I want to share with you tonight is the second charter student that is enrolled at a charter school, which is also a sibling to the current charter student um in FY26. And so this information normally we get uh an estimate it comes out on the cherry sheet by the department or the DOR. And then we get pre-enrollment numbers based off of that cherry sheet that we could use to build the budget. I don't use those numbers because they're just estimates and one student has a major impact. And so normally I wait until January to find out the actual enrollment. That's when those numbers are normally out for the current year and that's what I would use for the projection of the following or the upcoming year. So those that information, like I said, is normally in January.
We need these things. Um we're telling them that, yeah, we can manage, we're you know, we can manage all the painful cuts that we're going to make. Um you know, and every time you you cut, you observe consequences. You know, teachers on the other side of the table, there's you're telling them that there's, you know, we're we're just going to make cuts cuz we're going to make it work for the towns. Um you know, so I think what I'm truly sort of asking you guys for a commitment is, you know, we need a concrete plan going into next year. Um I think both towns have admitted that we're going to be going to a prop two and a half. Um and that's a a real possibility. I think 50 towns went to prop two and a half last year and and half of them passed and I'm sure the rest of them are all going to go back on the, you know, the ballot this year.
So I'm looking forward to that um program events as well. So, our sports teams, I want them to take on um some ideas uh of what they can do to kind of reach out to the community. So, we got some sporadic things that teams are doing. Obviously, like the pink night, some of that happens quite frequently, but I want to be able to get things out there a little bit more. Military appreciations, we ran that for the volleyball team. That was a really, really big success. I'm looking to do that again this uh this spring with a couple lacrosse teams doing that. Uh, another big thing is our emergency temporary certified coaches. I want to be able to move them on to their five-year certificates. Seems as though that there's a lot of turnover with temporary pass. Um, you really you're only allowed to have two from a district.
But I think overall um you know I think it's it's really listening. Does it mean making you know having more focus groups and maybe we have to do the same thing with the high school students because I did see that you know the high school students I think there was something about the engagement they didn't feel engaged. Uh so I think I think we're moving in the right direction. I think we just need to rethink our strategy with respect to you know what does engagement mean? Does it mean putting things on paper? Having more focus groups engaging with with the maybe more student to you know teacher to students having time to outside of study time maybe during that time saying hey guys let's spend 10 minutes on what do you what what do I need to hear from you? What do you need as a student?
That's how it works. And right now Cooley is one of the best middle schools for our state and the same is true for Sossaman when they earned theirs last year. As as Vice President Jerman also expressed, this isn't asking us to do something and to Ms. Van Hook's point, we are in control of how we choose to do these things here. I don't see why we would come in and start making changes when these changes are being successful and that's what's bringing us here. The benefit to things like Schools to Watch is other schools can come and other administrators from other schools can come and visit our schools to say, "Hey, what is your staff doing? How are they implementing these things? What makes Higley so great?" And it's because of things like this. I I recognize that there are trainings and then in this case we are going to a national place because there are states all across the country that have educators that do amazing things.
It was not posted in January. I reached out to the charter contact at DESE for this information. She was hopeful that it would be end of January. They changed their system from the DESE security portal to champ. I had to wait for that to roll out and she did add me as a test person, but I could not see all three districts. And so needless to say it just took a long time before I was able to see the actual enrollment for FY26 to know that there's a second person, which I did receive that information from the last meeting to now. And also they rolled out the pre-enrollment April 1st for FY27. So we do have two charter students that are attending charter for FY26. The first year that a student goes to charter, the tuition is 100% reimbursed. The second year it is only 60% reimbursed and the third year 40% and then after that you have to cover the full cost and there is no reimbursement.
So, I think there's a lot of preparation, honestly, that this board has to do with the select board and has to do with the fine finance committee very early on in the fiscal year. Um have that conversation, make a plan, work with the select board to sort of, you know, put these questions to the voters because it's going to be very important for them to understand, um you know, why we're going to prop two and a half, what's in that prop two and a half, like what are all these insurance costs, right? It's going to be a lot of effort that needs to go into that and it needs to be a really big year-long conversation. So, that when we come to to the vote and when we come to budget season, that that's already in place and people understand what the vote's about and why we're raising taxes, honestly.
I want to try to cut that down to like one. Um, just because I want the our our student athletes to have a coach that's in that position for like a long period of time, even if it's just an assistant coach or a volunteer. So, moving them through that five year. So that's going to be more so pulling coaches into the office saying, "Hey, is this something you really want to do? Because if it is, we need to start playing this out." And then that's going to help with that last thing. It's really retaining our coaches. And if we do, we need to kind of recruit a little bit. I did put something out to my coaches in my weekly email this week about um volunteers. So with a small district that we have, typically it's only the head coach, varsity coach, and JB coach.
Or maybe it's with the staff. That's kind of my thoughts on it. Thank you. So, thank you again for your engagement in this um study session and all of your thoughts, wonderings, questions, needs that you surfaced all help to inform how we take that and move it forward as we partner with the schools. You know when we talk about collaboration there's collaboration here with our team there's collaboration with the sites and then there's also this collaboration and all of the input that we are getting from the surveys be it students families staff what we have heard overwhelmingly from the participants is wanting to see the action to them taking the time to complete the survey and I think um the numbers speak to families seeing things happen, students seeing things happen in response to the time being taken in the survey. So, we appreciate your your thoughts and all of all of the conversations that we had at our stations help us to continue to move this work forward and respond.
And so you go to a place where you can share these ideas. And just as Maryland has their own state standards, we do here as well and the idea that we would only come home with what is appropriate here. I struggle to say that any organization, just because they have certain aspects of things that we don't like, we should stay away from. I also struggle if we sit up here and we talk about education matters and performance on academics matters and continue to do that when we know social emotional is part of that. We literally just talked about on the one previously that when a kid is disrupted, it's not just that kid's inability to learn, it's everybody else around there and it's like a ripple effect that impacts your classroom. I agree with you academics are important. I agree with you that it is important for our kids to achieve and continue to do better and continue to improve.
So for FY26, it ends up being a wash because we're getting 100% reimbursement. However, for FY27, we would only receive um, 60% reimbursement. So, with this information, um, knowing that there's a second student, I updated the other programs line within the budget to ensure that we're accounting for that moving forward. So, that's the change from what I presented last time to now. So, now I just want to walk through the different scenarios that are outlined here, um, and they get a little confusing. So, I'm going to start Oh. Can I just Shanna, is there a place where the charter reimbursement shows up on the budgets? No, because it goes directly to the town and it does not come to directly to the school. And so then the the town gets it and then they can allocate it the school. Can is the key word. We see the amounts of spending.
I think the the community deserves that. Um I think they deserve to understand why we're asking them to pay more taxes uh and there there is obviously a cost. Everyone in this room knows what it is. They look at the numbers all the time. Um but but what's the alternative if we don't do that, right? We're our class sizes are just going to get bigger. Uh we're going to lose really valued teachers. We're not going to be able to, you know, attract good educators. Um our whole system is just going to start to crumble. So, I think there's a lot of work going into next year and I appreciate this budget this year. I really do. Um and the cuts that you guys had to make. So, so that's my sort of feedback on prop two and a half. Um just something quick about the cuts for the adjustment counselor.
But if we want to be able to kind of move things forward a little bit, we could need some more hands- on deck. Some teams are a lot better at than others. Like our wrestling squad, lots of assistant coaches, uh lots of volunteer coaches, all certified. Um I've done kind of right away. I want some of my other teams to kind of like follow that just so we just have more capable people to help out our student athletes. >> Um participation numbers. So we are up. Uh so that's a good sign. So that's the breakdown there in front of me right there. Um these are all up to last year and even from the year before. >> So can I just can I stop on that slide for a minute? >> Um so I see the middle school 20 at the middle school and my my thought has always been if we're going to be a town of champions it has to start young and I know CBA does a great job but we don't seem to have as much offerings with the middle school.
>> I just like to ask one more question. I I thank you. Um, the way this was put, it was actually different. I didn't expect to go uh north, south,outheast, or west, but but it's great. It just made it easier to understand, but um I talked about the community circles. So, um we need to ask the honest questions. You know, some I I don't know where you get your questions from. I I don't you get them from Lego or you just make them. I don't know. But my question is that you know we need to um get some honest questions so people can really because there at the time in the community circles I do feel that including parents and students and staff they give honest answers you know people get personal right people start crying even you know parents they do and and I think it's good um but we need to ask honest questions so we can hear how can we fix that h how can we about him, how you know that's the we that's why we're here, right?
Part of that comes with the fact that we understand social emotional, allowing a kid giving the kid cool tools to self-regulate is what helps them learn better and perform. Much in the same way that we talked about saving programs like art and music etc. because we recognize that those things help student achievement. All of this, everything we do at Higley is for student achievement and again, our schools are doing phenomenally well. We had two A+ just today that brings I think three for our entire district. And I look forward to the other ones that I know are right behind because we are all A schools and that's remarkable here. President Wade, I just like to point out, you know, school is very competitive. We've got school choice and I really support school choice and I'm so grateful that um for this award. And I'm grateful for the efforts.
As as we go through, can you help us understand I I we can see the amounts of spending, so it seems really critical to know the amounts of reimbursement. So, I I'm going to ask that if we could walk through and then each one and if we could just write the questions down because I think that we'll end up I don't want to say end up through a rabbit hole and not and and not intentionally. But, when it comes to charter and funding, we might end up off in different areas. So, if we could write down all of our questions, get through the budget scenarios, and then come back, um, because the in terms of the charter reimbursement, that's a different form that DESE sends out. So, we can talk about that process, but I think we for the intent of right now to go through the budget scenarios, um, write down our questions, and then we can get back to them and and determine how we do it best.